Hiking With Henry

November beach walks go best with a warm coat, a good book, and the right (even if imagined) companion

Each year, around this time, I find myself perusing the bookshelves for old friends - worn, dog-eared books, read and re-read so often their spines crinkle and crack when they are re-opened as they are most often in early winter. Wintering by Diana Kappel-Smith, Home by Beth Powning, John Burroughs and his Harvest of a Quiet Eye. There are just some books with November in them, thoughtful and quiet. November is not a time for True Crime mysteries or high adventure tales. It is a time for deep thoughts, contemplation, and hot apple cider to warm wind-chilled fingers after you’ve turned a few pages. It is for beach walks before the snow comes. A few hours on the shore with a warm coat, the right book, and good company, and there is no better company on a November beach walk than a wind-ruffled, wave-splattered copy of The Outermost House by Henry Beston.

Set on a dune top in what is now Cape Cod National Seashore, the beach cabin that would become the “Outermost House” was to Henry Beston, the “Fo’castle.” The simple, unadorned, 20x16 foot ten-windowed structure was meant for weekend retreats, a get-away for short stays. But on one trip, scheduled for only a month or so in autumn, the dunes and trackless shore proved a stronger draw than the author could pull himself away from: “the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me,” he wrote, “that I could not go."

And so he didn’t. Beston stayed, walking the beach all through autumn and winter, into spring and summer, listening to the wind and sea birds, filling his soul with horizons and writing it all out long-hand at the kitchen table in prose that would become The Outermost House.

First published in 1928, The Outermost House is a book with beach sands in the margins and pages meant to be ruffled by sea breezes. It became an instant classic standing among such works as Walden and A Sand County Almanac. Like many, I have read and re-read my tiny paperback copy until its pages have become nearly as fragile as autumn leaves.

So one day this week, I pulled it from the bookshelf, shoved my cherished copy into my back pocket, and went for a walk on the beach, with Henry Beston.

The first thing we noticed, Henry and I both, was the sound of the waves.

“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.”

It is Lake Superior, not the ocean, Henry, I began to say to my imagined companion, but then I realized that there is a kinship in the sounds of the waves. All three of those “elemental sounds” — the wind in the beach pine, the rain on the water, and the slow, repeating verse of the surf — are as much a part of the Apostles as they are of the Cape Cod seashore. And so, they bind us, like lines to a cleat. I didn't finish the thought and instead asked Henry what he learned from a year spent living in the sound of those waves.

“...some have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year? I would answer that one's first appreciation is a sense that creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active to-day as they have ever been, and that to-morrow's morning will be as heroic as any of the world. Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time.”

Just then a gull flew low along the beach, circled back, landing on the water nearby as if to listen in. I thought of all the gulls, the flutter of wings and chatter, Henry Beston heard on his year on the beach.

“Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the solemn unrest of ocean—their passing was more than music, and from their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms and heals.”

Some look at gulls, I reminded him, and see only the common, hardly taking a second look. What are we missing when we look at other creatures as lesser?

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals … We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

How can we ever get back to that, Henry? How do we regain that sense of connection with the “other nations” of the world around us?

“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 … Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth.”

What was it like living on the dunes alone? I asked him. Were you lonely?

“It is not easy to live alone, for man is a gregarious creature and in utter solitude odd things may happen to the mind. I lived as a solitary, yes, but I made no pretense of acting the conventional hermit of the pious tract and the Eighteenth Century romance. With my weekly trips to buy fresh bread and butter, my frequent visits to the Overlook, and my conversations with the men on night patrol, a mediaeval anchorite would have probably regarded me as a dweller in the market place.

It was not this touch with my fellows, however, which alone sustained me. Dwelling thus upon the dunes, I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy.”

Soon, in the short sweep of November days, it was getting dark, the growing darkness reminded me that Beston had devoted an entire chapter of the book to “Night on the Great Beach.” I asked Henry what those nights were like and why they were so important to him.

“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?”

Are you asking me, Henry? I joked with him. I thought I was the one asking the questions here.

I felt his smile, half hidden in the growing November darkness, and we walked along the rest of the way in silence, two humans separated by miles and years but bound together by a shared love of the written word, the universal beauty found in the sand, the sky, and the sound of the waves at our feet.

Beston’s “Fo’castle” the setting for his book The Outermost House was reclaimed by the sea in a February storm in 1978. Beston himself died ten years earlier in 1968 but his work lives on in the hearts and minds of all who love a wild shore. The site where the Outermost House once stood has now been dedicated as a National Literary Landmark.

What a joy it would be to walk the Great Beach of Cape Cod with that book in your back pocket. But if you can’t read The Outermost House on the dunes of Cape Cod, a November beach here in the Apostle Islands, is the next best thing. It is a book best read in the company of gulls, awash in the sound of the waves, and with a companion who loves the shore as much as you do, just like Henry.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)

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