The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk on Cape Cod's Atlantic Shore PDF Download
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Author: Robert Finch Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 132400052X Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
A poignant, candid chronicle of a beloved nature writer’s fifty-year relationship with an iconic American landscape. Those who have encountered Cape Cod—or merely dipped into an account of its rich history—know that it is a singular place. Robert Finch writes of its beaches: “No other place I know sears the heart with such a constant juxtaposition of pleasure and pain, of beauty being born and destroyed in the same moment.” And nowhere within its borders is this truth more vivid and dramatic than along the forty miles of Atlantic coast—what Finch has always known as the Outer Beach. The essays here represent nearly fifty years and a cumulative thousand miles of walking along the storied edge of the Cape’s legendary arm. Finch considers evidence of nature’s fury: shipwrecks, beached whales, towering natural edifices, ferocious seaside blizzards. And he ponders everyday human interactions conducted in its environment with equal curiosity, wit, and insight: taking a weeks-old puppy for his first beach walk; engaging in a nocturnal dance with one of the Cape’s fabled lighthouses; stumbling, unexpectedly, upon nude sunbathers; or even encountering out-of-towners hoping an Uber will fetch them from the other side of a remote dune field. Throughout these essays, Finch pays tribute to the Outer Beach’s impressive literary legacy, meditates on its often-tragic history, and explores the strange, mutable nature of time near the ocean. But lurking behind every experience and observation—both pivotal and quotidian—is the essential question that the beach beckons every one of its pilgrims to confront: How do we accept our brief existence here, caught between overwhelming beauty and merciless indifference? Finch’s affable voice, attentive eye, and stirring prose will be cherished by the Cape’s staunch lifers and erstwhile visitors alike, and strike a resounding chord with anyone who has been left breathless by the majestic, unrelenting beauty of the shore.
Author: Elliott Carr Publisher: ISBN: 9780965328326 Category : Cape Cod (Mass.) Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Walking the Shores of Cape Cod is one of the best collections of essays and observations about one of the world's premier natural places, Cape Cod.
Author: Robert Finch Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 132400052X Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
A poignant, candid chronicle of a beloved nature writer’s fifty-year relationship with an iconic American landscape. Those who have encountered Cape Cod—or merely dipped into an account of its rich history—know that it is a singular place. Robert Finch writes of its beaches: “No other place I know sears the heart with such a constant juxtaposition of pleasure and pain, of beauty being born and destroyed in the same moment.” And nowhere within its borders is this truth more vivid and dramatic than along the forty miles of Atlantic coast—what Finch has always known as the Outer Beach. The essays here represent nearly fifty years and a cumulative thousand miles of walking along the storied edge of the Cape’s legendary arm. Finch considers evidence of nature’s fury: shipwrecks, beached whales, towering natural edifices, ferocious seaside blizzards. And he ponders everyday human interactions conducted in its environment with equal curiosity, wit, and insight: taking a weeks-old puppy for his first beach walk; engaging in a nocturnal dance with one of the Cape’s fabled lighthouses; stumbling, unexpectedly, upon nude sunbathers; or even encountering out-of-towners hoping an Uber will fetch them from the other side of a remote dune field. Throughout these essays, Finch pays tribute to the Outer Beach’s impressive literary legacy, meditates on its often-tragic history, and explores the strange, mutable nature of time near the ocean. But lurking behind every experience and observation—both pivotal and quotidian—is the essential question that the beach beckons every one of its pilgrims to confront: How do we accept our brief existence here, caught between overwhelming beauty and merciless indifference? Finch’s affable voice, attentive eye, and stirring prose will be cherished by the Cape’s staunch lifers and erstwhile visitors alike, and strike a resounding chord with anyone who has been left breathless by the majestic, unrelenting beauty of the shore.
Author: Henry Beston Publisher: Library of Alexandria ISBN: 1465543465 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
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.
Author: Henry Beston Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1504081714 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 141
Book Description
The classic nature memoir of Cape Cod in the early twentieth century, “written with simplicity, sympathy, and beauty” (New York Herald Tribune). When Henry Beston returned home from World War I, he sought refuge and healing at a house on the outer beach of Cape Cod. He was so taken by the natural beauty of his surroundings that his two-week stay extended into a yearlong solitary adventure. He spent his time trying to capture in words the wonders of the magical landscape he found himself in thrall to. In The Outermost House, Beston chronicles his experiences observing the migrations of seabirds, the rhythms of the tide, the windblown dunes, and the scatter of stars in the changing summer sky. Beston argued: “The world today is sick to its thin blood for the lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.” Nearly a century after publication, Beston’s words are more true than ever.
Author: Adam Gamble Publisher: ISBN: 9780965328302 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
This classic regional title is a practical hiking guide to one of America's most popular vacation destinations, a historical guide to 19th-century Cape Cod, and a literary guide to one of the world's most beloved writers and philosophers all in one. It includes walking routes—ranging from a quarter-mile to 14 miles, fascinating entries on many of the Cape's most famous historic cites, detailed hiking maps, illustrations of subjects Henry David Thoreau saw and wrote about while on Cape Cod, dozens of inspiring quotes from Thoreau on the "Art of Walking," and informative essays on Thoreau and 19th-century Cape Cod.
Author: David Weintraub Publisher: Menasha Ridge Press ISBN: 163404035X Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 569
Book Description
The best walking and hiking trails in the beloved Massachusetts region Pine forests, windswept dunes, freshwater ponds, salt marshes, and wave-washed beaches, enjoy it all as you stroll along the beautiful trails of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. Walking the Cape and Islands is the only comprehensive guide to this incredible area. Experience scenic Cape Cod National Seashore, Nickerson State Park, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket land bank and conservation areas, Massachusetts Audubon properties, and many other parks and open spaces. Suitable for all abilities, the book’s 72 walks and hikes range in length from less than a mile to just under 11 miles. Families with children will especially enjoy many of the shorter, easier walks. Each entry includes a Walk Summary, which provides a helpful snapshot of the route. Plus, the book describes the area’s rich human and natural history, climate, geology, and more. At-a-Glance Info offers details such as distance, difficulty, walk time, trail surface, facilities available, and whether bicycles, dogs, or hunting area allowed. Now in full color, the new edition offers photographs and professionally drawn maps, paired with descriptions that take you step by step along the route. So whether you are a visitor or resident, let author David Weintraub guide you to some of the best walking and hiking trails in coastal New England.
Author: Robert Finch
Author: Elliott Carr
Author: Elliott Carr
Author: Robert Finch
Author: Henry David Thoreau
Author: Henry Beston
Author: Henry David Thoreau
Author: Henry Beston
Author: Adam Gamble
Author: David Weintraub
Author: Pamela Van Drimlen