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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

[Illustration: _A Winter Wreck at Pamet_]

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

[Illustration: [Publisher’s logo]]

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

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

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_

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

[Illustration: [Map of Cape Cod]]

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.

So runs, as far as it is possible to reconstruct it in general terms, the geological history of Cape Cod. The east and west arm of the peninsula is a buried area of the ancient plain, the forearm, the glaciated fragment of a coast. The peninsula stands farther out to sea than any other portion of the Atlantic coast of the United States; it is the outermost of outer shores. Thundering in against the cliff, the ocean here encounters the last defiant bulwark of two worlds.

The cliff I write of and the bordering beach face the Atlantic on the forearm of the Cape. This outer earth is now scarce more than a great dyke or wall some twenty-five miles long and only three and four miles wide. At Provincetown it rises from the sea, beginning there in a desert of dunes and sand plains of the ocean’s making. These sands curve inland toward the continent, bending toward Plymouth even as a hand may be bent down at the wrist, and Provincetown harbour lies in the curve of palm and fingers. At Truro, the wrist of the Cape--the forearm simile being both exact and inescapable--the land curve falls from the east and west down through an arc to the north and south, and the earth cliff begins and rises rather suddenly to its greatest elevation. South by east from the Highland Light to Eastham and Nauset Coast Guard Station, the rampart fronts the sea, its sky line being now a progress of long undulations, now a level as military as a battlement, hollows and mounded hills here and there revealing the barren moorland character of the country just above. At Nauset, the cliff ends, the sea invades the narrowing land, and one enters the kingdom of the dunes.

[Illustration: _The Beach_]

The cliff ends, and a wall of ocean dunes carries on the beach. Five miles long, this wall ends at a channel over whose entrance shoals the ocean sweeps daily into a great inlet or lagoon back of the dunes, an inlet spaced with the floors of tidal islands and traced with winding creeks--the inlet of Eastham and Orleans. Very high tides, covering the islands, sometimes turn this space into bay. Westward over the channels and the marshland one looks to the uplands of the Cape, here scarce a good two miles wide. At Eastham, the land is an open, rolling moor. West over this lies Cape Cod Bay. A powerful tribe of Indians, the Nausets, once inhabited this earth between the seas.

Outermost cliff and solitary dune, the plain of ocean and the far, bright rims of the world, meadow land and marsh and ancient moor: this is Eastham; this the outer Cape. Sun and moon rise here from the sea, the arched sky has an ocean vastness, the clouds are now of ocean, now of earth. 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.

My house stood by itself atop a dune, a little less than halfway south on Eastham bar. I drew the home-made plans for it myself and it was built for me by a neighbour and his carpenters. When I began to build, I had no notion whatever of using the house as a dwelling place. I simply wanted a place to come to in the summer, one cosy enough to be visited in winter could I manage to get down. I called it the Fo’castle. It consisted of two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen-living room, and its dimensions over all were but twenty by sixteen. A brick fireplace with its back to the wall between rooms heated the larger space and took the chill off the bedroom, and I used a two-burner oil stove when cooking.

My neighbour built well. The house, even as I hoped, proved compact and strong, and it was easy to run and easy to heat. The larger room was sheathed, and I painted the wainscoting and the window frames a kind of buff-fawn--a good fo’castle colour. The house showed, perhaps, a somewhat amateur enthusiasm for windows. I had ten. In my larger room I had seven; a pair to the east opening on the sea, a pair to the west commanding the marshes, a pair to the south, and a small “look-see” in the door. Seven windows in one room perched on a hill of sand under an ocean sun--the words suggest cross-lights and a glare; a fair misgiving, and one I countered by the use of wooden shutters originally meant for winter service but found necessary through the year. By arranging these I found I could have either the most sheltered and darkened of rooms or something rather like an inside out-of-doors. In my bedroom I had three windows--one east, one west, and one north to Nauset light.

To get drinking water, I drove a well pipe directly down into the dune. Though the sea and the beach are alongside, and the marsh channels course daily to the west, there is fresh water here under the salty sand. This water varies in quality, some of it being brackish, some of it sweet and clear. To my great delight, I chanced upon a source which seems to me as good water as one may find here anywhere. Beneath the floor, the pipe descended into a bricked-up and covered pit housing a pet-cock through which I drained the water from the pump in freezing weather (On bitter days I simply pumped a few pails full and stood them in the sink, and drained the pump immediately.). I had two oil lamps and various bottle candlesticks to read by, and a fireplace crammed maw-full of driftwood to keep me warm. I have no doubt that the fireplace heating arrangement sounds demented, but it worked, and my fire was more than a source of heat--it was an elemental presence, a household god, and a friend.

In my larger room, I had a chest of drawers painted an honest carriage blue, a table, a wall bookcase, a couch, two chairs, and a rocker. My kitchen, built yacht fashion all in a line, stood at my southern wall. First came a dish and crockery cupboard, then a space for the oil stove--I kept this boxed in when not in use--then a shelf, a porcelain sink, and the corner pump. Blessed pump! It never failed me or indulged in nerves.

Using a knapsack, I carried my supplies on my own shoulders. There is no road through the dunes, and, even if there were, no one would have made deliveries. West of the dunes, it is true, there exists a kind of trail on which Fords may venture, but even the most experienced of the villagers are wary of it and tell of being mired there or stuck in the sand. Nevertheless, my lumber came by this trail, and now and then I could get my oil cans carried down by a neighbour who had a horse and cart. These helps, however, were but occasional, and I counted myself fortunate to have had them at all. My knapsack remained the only ever-ready wagon of the dunes. Twice a week, by arrangement, a friend met me at Nauset Station with a car, took me shopping to Eastham or Orleans, and brought me back again to Nauset. And there I would pack my milk and eggs and butter and rolls--being very careful as to which was sitting on which--and strike off down the beach along the breakers.

The top of the mound I built on stands scarce twenty feet above high-water mark, and only thirty in from the great beach. The coast guards at Nauset, a scant two miles away, were my only neighbours. South lay the farther dunes and a few far-away and lonely gunning camps; the floor of marsh and tide parted me on the west from the village and its distant cottages; the ocean besieged my door. North, and north alone, had I touch with human things. On its solitary dune my house faced the four walls of the world.

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 dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. 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 spring--all these were part of the great beach. The longer I stayed, the more eager was I to know this coast and to share its mysterious and elemental life; I found myself free to do so, I had no fear of being alone, I had something of a field naturalist’s inclination; presently I made up my mind to remain and try living for a year on Eastham Beach.

III

The sand bar of Eastham is the sea wall of the inlet. Its crest overhangs the beach, and from the high, wind-trampled rim, a long slope well overgrown with dune grass descends to the meadows on the west. Seen from the tower at Nauset, the land has an air of geographical simplicity; as a matter of fact, it is full of hollows, blind passages, and amphitheatres in which the roaring of the sea changes into the far roar of a cataract. I often wander into these curious pits. On their floors of sand, on their slopes, I find patterns made by the feet of visiting birds. Here, in a little disturbed and claw-marked space of sand, a flock of larks has alighted; here one of the birds has wandered off by himself; here are the deeper tracks of hungry crows; here the webbed impressions of a gull. There is always something poetic and mysterious to me about these tracks in the pits of the dunes; they begin at nowhere, sometimes with the faint impression of an alighting wing, and vanish as suddenly into the trackless nowhere of the sky.

Below the eastern rim the dunes fall in steeps of sand to the beach. Walking the beach close in along these steeps, one walks in the afternoon shade of a kind of sand escarpment, now seven or eight feet high and reasonably level, now fifteen or twenty feet high to the top of a dome or mound. In four or five places storms have washed gullies or “cuts” clean through the wall. Dune plants grow in these dry beds, rooting themselves in under old, half-buried wreckage, clumps of dusty miller, _Artemisia stelleriana_, being the most familiar green. The plant flourishes in the most exposed situations, it jumps from the dune rim to the naked slopes, it even tries to find a permanent station on the beach. Silvery gray-green all summer long, in autumn it puts on gold and russet-golden colourings of singular delicacy and beauty.

The grass grows thickest on the slopes and shoulders of the mounds, its tall leaves inclosing intrusive heads and clumps of the thick-fleshed dune goldenrod. Still lower down the slope, where the sands open and the spears rise thin, the beach pea catches the eye with its familiar leaf and faded topmost bloom; lower still, on desert-like floors, are tussock mats of poverty grass and the flat green stars of innumerable spurges. The only real bushes of the region are beach plum thickets, and these are few and far between.

[Illustration: _The Eastham Dunes from the Inlet_]

All these plants have enormously long taproots which bury themselves deep in the moist core of the sands.

The greater part of the year I have two beaches, one above, one below. The lower or tidal beach begins at mean low water and climbs a clean slope to the high-water mark of the average low-course tide; the upper beach, more of a plateau in form, occupies the space between high water and the dunes. The width of these beaches changes with every storm and every tide, but I shall not be far out if I call them both an average seventy-five feet wide. Unseasonable storm tides and high-course tides make of the beach one vast new floor. Winter tides narrow the winter’s upper beach and often sweep across it to the dunes. The whole beach builds up in summer as if each tide pushed more and more sand against it out of the sea. Perhaps currents wash in sand from the outer bars.

It is no easy task to find a name or a phrase for the colour of Eastham sand. Its tone, moreover, varies with the hour and the seasons. One friend says yellow on its way to brown, another speaks of the colour of raw silk. Whatever colour images these hints may offer to a reader’s mind, the colour of the sand here on a June day is as warm and rich a tone as one may find. Late in the afternoon, there descends upon the beach and the bordering sea a delicate overtone of faintest violet. There is no harshness here in the landscape line, no hard Northern brightness or brusque revelation; there is always reserve and mystery, always something beyond, on earth and sea something which nature, honouring, conceals.