The Outermost House

Part 1

THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

BOOKS BY HENRY BESTON

FIRELIGHT FAIRY BOOK FULL SPEED AHEAD STARLIGHT WONDER BOOK THE BOOK OF GALLANT VAGABONDS THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

A YEAR OF LIFE ON THE GREAT BEACH OF CAPE COD

BY HENRY BESTON

Illustrated with Photographs by WILLIAM A. BRADFORD AND OTHERS

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, DORAN AND COMPANY, INC. 1929

COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

TO MISS MABEL DAVISON AND MISS MARY CABOT WHEELWRIGHT

FOREWORD

Only a solitary knows how social and kindly life can be. While living on the beach, I was helped by so many friends and Cape Cod neighbours that I should be writing a chapter were I to try to list them all. There are a few, however, to whom I owe more than neighbourly gratitude. To my friends Prince and Edna Nickerson Hurd of Eastham, to Mrs. Mercy A. Mines, and to Mr. John Nickerson I owe both my right to build on the dune-land and a world of kindest aid. For my chance to live this book and write it, I would here thank them first of all. I owe another real debt to Harvey Moore for building me so strong and snug a little house, another to George and Mary Smith for their hospitality, good counsel, and encouragement, another to Nate and Helen Clark. And I should like to thank Captain George Nickerson of Nauset Station, Bosun’s Mate Charles Ellis, the present No. 1, and the rest of the Nauset crew for the thousand kind and friendly things they did to help me.

The majority of my illustrations I owe to the courtesy of my Quincy friend and neighbour, the Hon. William A. Bradford. Mr. Bradford made several special trips to the Cape to get the pictures, and spared no time or effort in preparing them for the book. I would here most gratefully acknowledge this kindness.

I wish to return thanks to Mr. Alva Morrison for his fine studies of the winter beach and for his notes on birds, to Mr. Arthur Cleveland Bent for the use of the two rare photographs from his collection, to Dr. A. B. Klugh for the sandpiper illustration, to Commander Donald MacMillan, and the American Museum of Natural History for the dovekies, to Dr. John E. Fish for his photograph of the summer stranding, to Mr. George A. Whiting of Eastham for his distinguished studies of the beach and the Montclair, and to Mr. Robert Whiting for his striking photograph of the fishing schooner in the surf at Pamet. And I wish to thank Mr. John Farrar with all my heart for the patience and good will with which he has dealt with so inaccessible an observer as myself.

I have made several references to Mr. E. H. Forbush’s Birds of Massachusetts and Surrounding States. This compendium is a favourite of mine for it is the work of one who is both a literary artist as well as a distinguished ornithologist. I wish to record as well an obligation to the staffs of the various state and federal bureaus which I have consulted, and I would thank the Hon. A. Piatt Andrew of the 6th Massachusetts for the unfailing courtesy and good will with which he responded to my frequent requests for scientific studies published at Washington.

My narrative concerns itself with the events of a twelvemonth, though I spent, on and off, a somewhat longer time upon the beach. There was a season in the spring when I had to leave the house a while.

I would close with the acknowledgment of a special and very great obligation, my debt to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Kelley of the Overlook Inn in Eastham. Without their constant and ever-thoughtful aid, without their hospitable roof to turn to on occasion, without their friendly care for my interests ashore, it would have been perhaps impossible to remain upon the beach. With heartfelt gratitude do I thank them here. Long may their hospitable doors stand open on Cape Cod! H. B. QUINCY, MASSACHUSETTS.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

CHAPTER PAGE I. THE BEACH 1

II. AUTUMN, OCEAN, AND BIRDS 19

III. THE HEADLONG WAVE 41

IV. MIDWINTER 59

V. WINTER VISITORS 91

VI. LANTERNS ON THE BEACH 118

VII. AN INLAND STROLL IN SPRING 143

VIII. NIGHT ON THE GREAT BEACH 168

IX. THE YEAR AT HIGH TIDE 189

Part 2

X. ORION RISES ON THE DUNES 218

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A WINTER WRECK AT PAMET Frontispiece Photo by R. Whiting

FACING PAGE THE BEACH 5 Photo by Morrison

THE EASTHAM DUNES FROM THE INLET 12 Photo by Bradford

THE SIERRAS OF SAND AND SNOW 17 Photo by Bradford

HERRING GULLS 32 Photo by Bradford

SEMIPALMATED SANDPIPERS 37 Photo by Dr. A. B. Klugh

THE EDGE OF FOAM 44 Photo by Bradford

SLIDE AND SEETHE 49 Photo by Bradford

SUMMER BREAKERS 53 Photo by G. A. Whiting

THE BURST OF A WAVE 60 Photo by Bradford

THE WINTER BEACH 64 Photo by Morrison

THE BANK AFTER THE STORM 85 Photo by G. A. Whiting

DOVEKIES OR LITTLE AUKS 92 Photo by Donald B. MacMillan. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

THE RAZOR-BILLED AUK 104 Photo by A. C. Bent

BRÜNNICH’S MURRES AT NEST IN THE SUMMER NORTH 113 Photo by A. C. Bent

THE WRECK OF THE “MONTCLAIR” 120 Photo by G. A. Whiting

NAUSET STATION 128 Photo by Bradford

A SURFMAN OF THE CAPE 136 Photo by Bradford

THE BAY SIDE 145 Photo by Bradford

FIRE IN THE PITCH PINES 160 Photo by Bradford

THE EASTHAM MOORS 165 Photo by Bradford

THE HIGHLAND LIGHT 172 Photo by Bradford

THE SEQUEL OF A FOG ON A SUMMER NIGHT 181 Photo by Fish

PIPING PLOVER AT NEST 188 Photo by Bradford

NESTING TERN 193 Photo by Bradford

TERN COMING TO FULL STOP HEAD-ON INTO THE WIND 200 Photo by Bradford

Part 3

THE TERN CHICK 208 Photo by Bradford

A CAPE COD 213 Photo by Bradford

LATE SUMMER ON THE DUNES 215 Photo by Bradford

THE FO’CASTLE 218 Photo by Bradford

SUNRISE FROM CAPE COD 220 Photo by Bradford

THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

THE OUTERMOST HOUSE

Chapter I

THE BEACH

East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. 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 and the rains, disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold. Many earths compose it, and many gravels and sands stratified and intermingled. It has many colours: old ivory here, peat here, and here old ivory darkened and enriched with rust. At twilight, its rim lifted to the splendour in the west, the face of the wall becomes a substance of shadow and dark descending to the eternal unquiet of the sea; at dawn the sun rising out of ocean gilds it with a level silence of light which thins and rises and vanishes into day.

At the foot of this cliff a great ocean beach runs north and south unbroken, mile lengthening into mile. Solitary and elemental, unsullied and remote, visited and possessed by the outer sea, these sands might be the end or the beginning of a world. Age by age, the sea here gives battle to the land; age by age, the earth struggles for her own, calling to her defence her energies and her creations, bidding her plants steal down upon the beach, and holding the frontier sands in a net of grass and roots which the storms wash free. The great rhythms of nature, to-day so dully disregarded, wounded even, have here their spacious and primeval liberty; cloud and shadow of cloud, wind and tide, tremor of night and day. Journeying birds alight here and fly away again all unseen, schools of great fish move beneath the waves, the surf flings its spray against the sun.

Often spoken of as being entirely glacial, this bulwark is really an old land surfaced with a new. The seas broke upon these same ancient bounds long before the ice had gathered or the sun had fogged and cooled. There was once, so it would seem, a Northern coastal plain. This crumbled at its rim, time and catastrophe changed its level and its form, and the sea came inland over it through the years. Its last enduring frontier roughly corresponds to the wasted dyke of the cliff. Moving down into the sea, later glaciations passed over the old beaches and the fragments of the plain, and, stumbling over them, heaped upon these sills their accumulated drift of gravels, sand, and stones. The warmer sea and time prevailing, the ice cliff retreated westward through its fogs, and presently the waves coursed on to a new, a transformed and lifeless, land.

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