I’ve walked the spit in 95-degree heat in July, minus 40-degree wind chill in January and in a driving, wind-swept October rainstorm. Each seem very much alive while walking on the sands of Coast Guard Beacheven if you only happen to be there for a few hours. As Nan Turner Waldron, author of Journey to Outermost House, puts it, Henry’s experience on Coast Guard Beach “inspires a quest, perhaps inherent in man, to understand human nature.”īeston takes on the wind blowing through the dune grass, thousands of monarch butterflies hovering over Nauset during their migrations in autumn, and the power of a winter nor’easter or the roar of the surf.

The beach of Beston’s day is no more, but coming to Coast Guard Beach, Nauset Marsh and the Spit still enables one to get close to nature. As a journalist who had dedicated his life to being a “writer-naturalist,” he merely wanted to experience what this small corner of the world had to offer. While staying there, he had the opportunity to witness bird migrations, shipwrecks, severe weather conditions, or just take in the roar of the sea outside his door. Today, the “spit,” as it’s referred to, is less than a mile long and has been flattened out, leaving only a thin barrier beach to protect the fragile Nauset Marsh.īeston, who died in 1968, spent an entire year (1927-28) at the House, retreating occasionally to the Overlook Inn in Eastham when the elements turned harsh. government in 1964, but the House and the rolling duneland, which stretched for nearly three miles south of the Eastham Coast Guard station, was obliterated by the abnormal high tides caused by the Great Blizzard of February 6-7, 1978. The House was designated a literary landmark by the U.S. At this two-room bungalow, he scribbled notes for his book at the kitchen table.

Having never seen the house (named “The Fo’castle” by Beston), I found it easier to understand what Beston was seeking after taking the long drive out on Route 6 to the Outer Cape and visiting Coast Guard Beach several times myself (in all kinds of weather) over the last few years.īeston built the House on the Eastham dunes in 1925 and stayed there (more or less) for a year. It was on this beach over 70 years ago that Henry Beston, a burned out magazine editor, tried to hash out the relation of nature to the human spirit when he gathered the material here for his literary nature classic, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod.

When taking the initial walk down the path to Coast Guard Beach in Eastham, MA, one might not have the notion that a deeper understanding of the great cosmic picture could be right here among the surf, sand and stretches of beach and marsh.

The outermost house by henry beston