I was surprised at how little there was about land animals other than brief mention of a deer trapped in an ice pond, muskrats and mice. The birds and fish, the seasonal changes, a walk inland, the beach at night, the beach during a great storm – a nor’easter, and so on. We’re probably all read nature books and the chapters are what you would expect. The year he was there, there were three wrecks on the coast and one coast guardsman found his own father’s body washed up on the shore from a fishing vessel. They did not have twelve lighthouses, so the men patrolled the beach daily and during storms, carried and shot off flares to warn ships off the beach. In those days there were twelve coast guard stations along the 35-miles of Atlantic frontage along the eastern Cape. He had friends visit and bring food and supplies, but mainly it was the coast guard men who gave him company. He spent most of his time alone but the was not isolated. He decided to stay a year and write a book about his experience.
There was no road in, so his food and supplies had to be brought in by backpack. It’s about 20 miles and a half-hour south of Provincetown. The house was near Eastham, kind of near the ‘wrist’ if you think of a map of Cape Cod as shaped like a flexed arm. So the author, an aspiring writer, bought 50 acres of land in the dunes of the Cape and built a two-room summer home. In the 1960’s this book was instrumental in getting the Cape Cod National Seashore established. The introduction tells us that Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) said that it was the only book that influenced her writing.
This book, a follow-up in a sense to Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod (1865), was written in 1928 and it is an early naturalist/environmental work. Now via Interstate that trip takes a half-hour. I have fond memories of fishing with my father off the rocks of the canal. I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, about an hour’s drive in those days from the Cape Cod Canal.
0 kommentar(er)
