Two Henrys: Thoreau and Beston
Henry David Thoreau Henry Beston
Cape Cod has attracted a number of authors who have written countless stories and books about the place. Two books that have become classics were written by Henry David Thoreau and by Henry Beston. Thoreau’s Cape Cod was published posthumously in 1865 and tells of visits totaling 3 weeks that he made to the Cape in 1849, 1850, and 1855. He walked to Provincetown from Eastham absorbing its geologic and natural history and observing the solitary life of its people, especially the lighthouse keepers and shipwreck scavengers, known as “wreckers.” Thoreau may have been the first in print to liken the Cape to a “bared and bended arm of Massachusetts.” He was especially fascinated with the beach from Nauset Harbor to Race Point and with the bluff abruptly rising to its west. “This sandbank—the backbone of the Cape—rose directly from the beach to the height of a hundred feet or more above the ocean. It was with singular emotions that we first stood upon it and discovered what a place we had chosen to walk on ... a perfect desert of shining sand....” In his day more of the Cape was barren than today, but efforts to plant grasses were already underway. Henry Beston spent more time on the Cape than Thoreau, and he stayed mostly in one place. His book, The Outermost House, tells of a year, in 1927-28, he spent among the elements at a 2-room, 10-windowed cottage in the dunes on Nauset Beach opposite Fort Hill in Eastham (background photo). As Thoreau had done at Walden Pond, Beston chronicled nature’s seasonal sights, sounds, and smells on this narrow spit of sand, a place of “outermost” exposure. “Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears,” Beston wrote, “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 half-heard talk of people in the sea.” Beston’s cottage became a National Literary Landmark in 1964, but in 1978 it was washed away in a storm. No doubt he would have assented to what the elements had done.