The Outermost House

“Outermost cliff and solitary dune…this is Eastham; this is the Outer Cape…Having known and loved this land for many years, it came about that I found myself free to visit there, and so I built myself a house upon the beach.”              Recently I finished reading Henry Beston’s “Cape Cod: how the outermost house inspired a National Seashore” (2013) by Don Wilding.  I’ve read Beston in the past and meant to bring him along this year but forgot.  Wilding is interesting.  It’s short but has a lot of detail about Beston and Eastham.  He leased some land a few miles from the Life Guard station and hired local carpenters to build his dune house.  It was an escape, a retreat.  He had served in WW I and lived in Quincy, MA.  Now he could get away from everything human.  Live fullest in the natural world, ocean, beach, sand, wind, rain, birds.              Sometimes he stayed in the Overbrook Inn (near the current National Seashore Visitor’s Center). Today it’s known as The Inn of the Oaks. There are other local references. He once stays at a house on Hemenway Road. There are references to the Whalewalk Inn on Bridge Street. It’s still an Eastham classic. The Nauset Inn in Orleans is mentioned. Henry talks with students in the old schoolhouse (it’s now a small museum across from the Visitor’s Center). We visited last year and bought a painting at an outdoor show.                 Henry wrote other books but none as known as well as “The Outermost House.” His prose is lyrical, poetic, a bit of shore magic. Readers go back to it again and again. I will probably read read in the coming month. Initially Henry lived in the house, he called it the fo’castle, for several years in the late 1920s although he condensed his stay into a literary year. He returned to Quincy, marries, has two daughters, buys a house in Maine. Sometimes he returned to his Eastham dune house. Eventually he donates it to the Audubon Society.             Henry’s fo’castle is crowned a National Literary Landmark in 1974. It had been an inspiration for local and national politicians who established the national seashore in 1961. I was intrigued that for years it was rented like some of the Provincetown dune shacks. It surrendered to ocean wind and rain during a blizzard in 1978. It was decided not to rebuild.             “My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and 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 world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”         “The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.”   ― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod