Henry Beston (1888–1968)

I'm not sure how—being a naturalist of sorts who has spent a significant amount of time in coastal Massachusetts—that it is just now that I've become aware of this book. I came across it on the shelf at Everyone's Books in Brattleboro.

The premise: Beston, in his late thirties at the time, built a two-room cottage, two miles from the closest neighbor (the National Coast Guard), on the dunes of Eastham Beach on the Eastern outer banks of Cape Cod. This was in the 1920s. In September of show more 1926, Beston went out to the cottage, meaning to spend two weeks in retreat. Caught by the charm and magic of the place, he found he couldn't leave until a year had passed. His fiancé, Elizabeth Coatsworth, told him, "no book, no marriage." So over that winter he prepared his notes into a manuscript, and the book was published the following fall.

It is a tranquil book, short. The pages are split between Beston's time with the birds throughout the shifting seasons, and the Coast Guard—his human interlocutors throughout the year. When we first think of coastal wilderness, we think of the crash of the surf and the isolation. And then we remember—New England has incredible busy shipping and fishing routes. I recall a few days I spent sea kayaking Down East Maine; even as we were camping on various remote uninhabited islands, we'd awake each morning to the smell of diesel exhaust and the yell of of lobster fisherman checking their traps. Beston had a similar experience; half a dozen wrecks throughout his winter there, and numerous jaunts with members of the Coast Guard.

This book is credited with helping to inspire the conservation of the Cape Cod National Seashore.

The book has a very narrow scope, and is by no means a memoir, not speaking to any of Beston's interior. Apparently Beston saw the place as a psychological refuge to help his recovery from his service in World War I. What demons did he face in his cottage by the surf? This book does not say. Additionally, not once does he mention going for a swim down in the water, or speak about the books he was reading (I assume he was doing a lot of reading that year). So it does serve as a journal of his time there, but a very focused journal, which omits more than it includes. On the other hand, maybe this narrative focus contributed to the book's success.

If you thought a century back, the Cape was a pristine untouched wilderness, this book will set you straight! Although there wasn't nearly as much terrestrial development, apparently it was common practice to dump the sludge remaining from oil refining off the coast. Beston would collect oil-drenched sea birds, and attempt to nurse them back to health in his cottage. That said, there is no mention of ticks nor poison ivy, which I think are arrivals of the past century.

I also happen to be reading Iain McGilchrist's "The Matter With Things," about the differing worldviews of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The right hemisphere allows us to interact with depth and with change. In this book, Beston beautifully articulates something essential about the costal landscape. This essence is intertwined with its constantly shifting sands, tides, winds, weather, and wildlife. Each day Beston spent at his cottage was a new world—a new slope to the beach, a different sky, new wildlife passing through. This is the world as only the right hemisphere is able to experience it. show less

In this gem of a book, Beston calls for a return to nature, an escape from a world “sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things.” After experiencing civilization at its worst as an ambulance driver in World War One, he returns to Massachusetts and buys property on the eastern shore of Cape Cod, the upper arm bent at the elbow, bravely flexed to face the Atlantic Ocean. He has a two-room house built intended for vacation use. Then, when it is finished, he decides to experience all show more four seasons. This is a record of that year.

Like his spiritual precursor, Thoreau, Beston carefully observes nature. He names plants, insects, fish, and other aquatic life. He is particularly attentive to birds, noting their comings and goings. There are summer and winter species. Some hover close to shore, and others venture far out to sea.

His closest human companions are those who man the Coast Guard station at the Nauset light. He details their night watches and efforts to save storm-wrecked ship crews.

One of my favorite passages begins the next-to-last chapter of the book, in which Beston laments our neglect of the sense of smell and describes the fragrances of sand and surf in the changing seasons and weather.

Nearly a century on, the world Beston describes has continued to change. Much of what he lived among is now endangered; his call for “another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals” has gone unheeded, except for by the few. The house, named a national literary landmark, only stood for a half-century before being rent asunder in a fierce winter storm. But that loss, of a mark of civilization, is minor compared to that of the wildlife he lovingly observes. Seeing this passing world through Beston’s eyes, whether through the ten windows of his Fo’castle (as he named his house) or outdoors at all hours of the day and night, whether on the beach, dune, or at the salt marsh, tinged the pleasure of my reading with an elegiac sadness. show less

One hundred years ago Cape Cod was a very different place than the busy area it is today. In 1924, when Henry Beston first saw the ocean side of the peninsula wrapping Cape Cod Bay, it was a wild and uninhabited place. As Beston described it For twenty miles this last and outer earth faces the ever hostile ocean in the form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet above the tides. Worn by the breakers show more and the waves, it still stands bold."

The immediate attraction and pull of the shoreline was such that the next year he bought fifty acres of dunes, and built himself the Fo'castle, a 20' x 16' two room cottage. There was no road in, only a trail. The closest neighbours were the coast guards at the Nauset station two miles away. In September 1926, Beston went to his cottage for a couple of weeks. Somehow, without any real plan, the two weeks lengthened into a year. As Beston put it, "... as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go ... The flux and reflux of ocean, the incomings of waves, the gatherings of birds, the pilgrimages of the peoples of the sea, winter and storm, the splendour of autumn and the holiness of the spring - all these were part of the great beach. The longer I stayed the more eager I was to know this coast and to share its mysterious and elemental life."

So began a remarkable immersion year in the natural world. Beston's observations and writing are such that the reader hears the sea, smells the salt, feels the wind the sun and the rain. Bird populations change with the season, so prevalent in spring and fall, almost absent in winter apart from the eternal gulls. Beaton is able to put all these natural phenomena into words. Speaking of the ocean, he said "The sea has many voices. Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp, rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the voices of people in the sea. And not only is the great sound varied in the manner of its making, it is also constantly changing its tempo, its pitch, its accent and its rhythm, being now loud and thundering, now almost placid, now furious, now grave and solemn-slow, now a simple measure, now a rhythm monstrous and with a sense of elemental will. "

This will is dangerous at times. Fishing schooners wash ashore. That winter even a Coast Guard vessel was destroyed. Wreckage from previous disasters lies entombed in the constantly shifting sand. "Eighteenth century pirates, stately British merchantmen of the mid-Victorian years, whaling brigs, Salem East India traders, Gloucester fishermen, and a whole host of forgotten Nineteenth Century schooners -- all these have strewn this beach with broken spars and dead. "
Although this book covers only the one year, there is a remarkable sense of the eternal cycle of the seasons, of the paradox of repeating patterns coupled with constant change. There is a reassurance in these rituals, something that those who live by the ocean recognize, if only subconsciously, something that keeps bringing them back.

Beston's writing is still as fresh today as when his book was first published in 1928. This edition was a 75th anniversary publication. As for the Fo'castle, Beston donated it to the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1960. It was swept out to sea in February 1978 in a huge storm. Beston's dunes survive, however, in the Cape Cod National Seashore, the creation of which was partly inspired by his writing. show less

Henry Beston went to Cape Cod and meant to stay in the house he had built for two weeks. He ended up staying for a year, and the journals he kept while he was there were the basis for this classic published in 1928.

Beston describes the natural world with poetry, writing about its beauty and its raw power, and ruminating on how mankind has separated from really participating in the natural world. Reading it so soon after Walden, it was hard not to compare the two books in my head and be show more lulled by the quietness of this one into almost monotony. Beston gives a different sort of wake up call, and though I didn't have the connection to Cape Cod, I did find a few gems of quotes in it. Mostly the monotony came from reading too many nature books in close quarters and having to finish it on a specific date for book club. show less