The Undiscovered Country!

Our book today is The Undiscovered Country, yet another splendid production of the late great soul of Cape Cod, John Hay. As I've written before, these end-of-summer days always remind me of the Cape for some reason, even though I've known that blessed little hook of land in all weathers and all seasons. End-of-summer in New England is the practicum of beauty under siege: heat and humidity still rule the days, but the wind that whispers the trees at night is no longer quite so lazy or aimless, and the reliefs it brings feel increasingly watchful in their mercies. In late August the days are still hot and the sky is still a burnished blue, but if you pause near the edge of a pond or listen to the bird-chatter in a hedge-row, you can hear shorter, sharper notes being sounded: a less forgiving season is approaching. Maybe that's why this stretch of days at the end of August and the beginning of September always call the shores and clapboard houses and salt marshes to mind: because the many beauties of the Cape are all so intense that they feel fleeting. You want each hazy afternoon, each foggy morning, each protracted, glorious sunset to last forever, and you know they won't. There's a quietly penetrating melancholy that suffuses every Cape Cod moment for those with the disposition to feel it.

Hay had that disposition, in abundance. All his books are rife (sometimes - in fact often - over-ripe) with it. For his entire adult life, he was a passionate observer of the Cape in all its moods and especially all its wildlife. And he was able to access an ecstatic wonder over all of it, which he conveys in his frequent Thoreauvian arias, like this one on a favorite subject, fish:

They have mastered the universe of water that covers the major part of the planet. I have met only a few of their twenty thousand species, but each of these has illuminated the place I found them in. They pout, wiggle, and dart. They hang in glassy eyes of water, or in a downstream current. We see them, in their scaly reflections of water and sunlight, shining past our capacity to see. There are silver-sided minnows sailing straight over the brilliant sands; marsh killifish making quick dashes across the bottom of salt-marsh ditches, to disappear in puffs of mud; and in the seas beyond, the mackerel with rippled patterns on their beautiful fusiform bodies, slipping and flashing through the waters.

He's self-deprecating always in his prose (less so in real life, to put it mildly), and he's immensely respectful of the personalities of all the wildlife he encounters. "Being constantly aggravated little creatures," he tells us about that homicidal minuscule speck, the shrew, "they will, I suspect, attack almost anything. I was once faced by a shrew that, as I walked by, slipped out of leaf cover to hold its ground, twittering angrily, and I was the one to withdraw."

All Hay's books are beautifully written, but it's at summer's end that I notice how often he himself seems to feel the melancholy I'm describing. His prose becomes sadder and a bit more brittle when he contemplates the turn of the season, especially this turn of the season:

Beyond the sands, the granite-gray surfaces of the waves line out, whipped by the wind, while the leaden stream of the outgoing creek reflects the last golden light. Gulls lift and dip down into its waters. While the land begins to hunker down and accommodate to the arctic, the offshore waters protect their passions, keep sending in their signs. I found a fishlike cluster of creamy eggs as I walked down the beach, a little glistening ball I could not identify, left by the tide. Life floats in to prove my ignorance, if that ever needed any proof. But out reaching is never finished. These flat lands are like broad wings, stretching toward the cold sky, beyond the grain of the immediate, worlds without end. What should I do, if there were any choice, but fly?

The Undiscovered Country was written in 1981 when the author was in the middle of a fairly frightening health scare. The worst didn't happen, and Hay went on to write half a dozen more wonderful books. But none is quite so beautifully elegiac as this one, and it's this one I nowadays take down from the shelf when bully August finally begins to weaken and September with its change of season is finally sniffing the night air. In all likelihood I won't get to the Cape this season, but Hay's books make it easy to go there at any time.

 

The House on Nauset Marsh!

Our book today is Wyman Richardson’s 1947 collection, The House on Nauset Marsh, and some of you will no doubt recall I’ve praised it here before. But I’ve also many times referred to Stevereads as the autobiography of my reading, and I do quite a bit of re-reading. I try to exercise some nominal control over that re-reading – there are so many new books to examine, after all, and not just hot-off-the-presses new: even after all these years of steady patronage, the Boston Public Library is still full of old books that are wonderfully and enticingly new to me (and that’s just the one library – I’m told there are libraries in many, many American cities, although none so fair as mine). Re-reading isn’t sinful – I don’t quite know what it is, despite how much of it I do, but it isn’t mere sloth except in its most extreme cases – but it does take time away from new reading, so it ought to be controlled.

I don’t do a very good job controlling it, I admit. For instance, there are long trips of any kind; the horror that other people reserve for being trapped in the company of a boring person I feel for being trapped with a boring book. So if I’m facing a twenty-hour train ride to Iowa, or a four-hour bus ride to New York, or even a twenty-minute subway ride, I’m usually tempted to bring along a re-reading book, something whose pleasures I already know, something I know won’t disappoint. The dangers of taking along a new history of the Wilson administration or a new novel by the latest promising young thing are manifest, and they usually forestall me. And sometimes even in my sanctum sanctorum, propped up in bed, nestled snugly with dogs, nightstand piled with a dozen books, I’ll still opt for a re-read – sometimes nothing hits the spot like Boswell, or Vasari, or my dear Livy.

And sometimes nothing hits the spot like Cape Cod books done right. The hunger can be triggered by almost anything: the sight of a big pelagic sea gull wheeling over city rooftops, or the smell of the harbor sneaking up dockside streets, or even the turn of the season, since all my fondest memories of the Cape are inextricably bound up with its natural world.



Whatever triggers that hunger, when it happens, Richardson’s book is the best thing to satisfy it. This is a collection of sometimes whimsical, sometimes whimsically earnest little atmosphere-pieces he wrote (during quiet intervals from an active professional medical life, most of which took place in Boston and Cambridge) about the Farm House, his age-old Cape Cod getaway set on Nauset Marsh just over the land-ridge from the ocean. Richardson published these pieces intermittently in The Atlantic over the course of a few years, and each one would invariably generate sacks of mail – for one key reason: Richardson lightly, deftly mythologizes as he goes. By the time you’re fifty pages into The House on Nauset Marsh, you’re deep in the Hundred Acre Wood, transported to a Cape that’s far more serene and wild than it is today or has been for decades.

I have four different sets of great memories of the Cape, from four different times I came to know it. And the wonder of Richardson’s book is that it feels almost like an auxiliary set of such memories, even though I’ve never been to the Farm House (two of my Cape houses went by different names; the other two had no names at all) and have only explored Nauset Marsh briefly, not with the consummate long-time knowledge of Richardson and his family. It doesn’t matter: he’s so adept at evoking the peculiar magic of the place that you instantly feel it. When he describes a “jumble of waves,” for instance, can he be talking about anyplace in America other than Cape Cod’s Great Beach when an onshore wind is upon it, and sunlight is fracturing through a hundred clotted clouds:

And there before us is the great ocean. Today its color is a deep blue, except alongshore, where the shallow, sandy bottom gives it a greenish cast. The stiff northeast wind has caused a jumble of waves and plenty of white water. The horizon is sharp, except for the lumpiness of the sea, and, off to the southwest, a freighter, hull down, can just be made out. The breeze is cool, almost cold, and feels delightfully refreshing after our almost too warm walk through the woods. It carries with it a distinct aroma; it has body, and a tangy taste that reminds me of the quality of certain wines. Physical fatigue is dissipated, mental strain and stress retreat into the far background, and a sense of proportion and balance returns. Those affairs that you, and only you, could have dealt with do not now seem so important; perhaps, after all, someone else will do them better. It is a joy to be alive and, for the moment, this is all that matters.

And then there’s the getting there – you an either walk the Great Beach straight up along its bare sea-face, or you can trace its length along the marsh-side, with its innumerable pools and sloping dune-faces … an entirely different natural world, it feels like, and yet right over those dunes is the brawling ocean. I’ve done both many times, with friends and alone (and once, weirdly, both with the same person), and I couldn’t tell you which I prefer – unlike Richardson, who has a favorite way:

It is best to go down to the beach on the inside – that is, on the marsh side – just why I do not know. You may see various kinds of fowl on the way down, and surely many black ducks. Horned larks will fly past in loose flocks, uttering their curious thin little note (“Pippy birds,” we used to call them.) If you are lucky, you will see, on the top of a Coast Guard telephone pole, a snowy owl. As you approach fairly close, his neckless head appears to turn around and around, while his baleful brassy eye glares menacingly at you.

When you get to the Inlet Run, a deep pool that comes up to a sandy beach will tempt you, and you may take a swim – or more accurately, a dip – and dry off in the lee of a high dune, where the wind has undercut a “hen bank.”

The recurrent ‘you’ in all these descriptions is one of the keys to the magic of The House on Nauset Marsh: it includes you. This way you become part of its wonder – and also, ironically, part of its melancholy, since the Cape Cod world it so marvelously depicts – a world of uninterrupted woods, plentiful wildlife, ‘working’ cottages with wells and pumps and kerosene lanterns against the threat of storms, and most of all, the possibility of isolation – is as lost to the past as the great days of Coney Island. Houses like the Farm House are now called “unweatherized,” and if they’re allowed to remain in that deplorable condition, they’re kept by the wealthy as boutique curiosities, opened only for a few weeks during the summer, abandoned the rest of the time, and in any case as crowded around by other cottages as any street in Brooklyn.

That’s a sad development, but The House on Nauset Marsh is immune to it, in the spellbinding way that all great books are immune to change. Here, you can always return to the serenity of old Cape Cod, and as Richardson promises right at the start of his book, you’ll always be welcome:

You can go to Eastham, on outer Cape Cod, and live in the little old Farm House at the drop of a hat. The pump, the kerosene lamps, and the open fire are always ready without fear of frost or storm. You can drive up the lane, stop the car by the kitchen door, and unload your gear. You can look out the south windows over the nearby grassy hills, over the bright blue water of Nauset Marsh to the darker blue glimpses of the sea beyond the dunes, and draw a deep breath.

the Cape at summer's end

Travelers in Venice have been known to comment that the fragile, surrounding wonder of the place makes them feel like they're walking around inside a dream. The northeastern shore of America has a place that elicits the exact same feeling - a place William Sargent succinctly describes at the beginning of his book Shallow Waters:

On the East Coast of North America the flexed arm of New England juts far out into the open Atlantic Ocean. This is Cape Cod, famous for its beaches, its history, its seafaring way of life.

Despite the impression given by the crushing crowds of summer tourists, most Americans (to say nothing of most people on Earth) never get to see Cape Cod, and most of those who do visit (usually in the canned, overpriced chunk of Hell known as the week-long family vacation) never really get to know the place. Cape people are protective about their hugely-visited twist of land, so they'd probably have it no other way - but the place itself is yielding of its marvels, to the patient, to the observant, and to the lucky.

I've been lucky with the Cape: I've known it for years and years, from Sandwich to Orleans, from Falmouth to Truro, from the inlets of Buzzards Bay to the sedate streets of Harwich, and from the Great Beach to Provincetown. I've known it in all seasons, in all weathers, in all frames of mind, and - greatest luck of all - in some of the best company. I've prowled its used bookstores, stalked its tidal pools, sailed its coastlines, napped in some of its pretty little houses, rowed its marshes, and drank in its sunsets, and yet every time I've ever spent any time there, I've encountered as many new things as known things, because nobody can ever completely know Cape Cod. That's another part of its endless charm.



Those used bookstores are, naturally, jam-packed with books about the Cape - a year of Stevereads entries would only scratch the surface of that cottage industry - and it's this time of year that, wherever I am, I start taking them down from the shelf and re-reading them. Because there's a secret to the Cape that those thundering hordes of summer tourists don't know: the place is at its most glorious in the fortnight after Labor Day.

All its seasons have their splendors, of course: summer is gloriously sybaritic, spring is a patchwork of subtlety, winter (my own personal favorite) is full of sharp beauty ... but it's this time of year, the last lingering days of summer, that most accentuates the magic of the Cape. The crowds have mostly gone, and the natural world of the Cape briefly reasserts itself before the cramp of winter shuts things down. The days are still warm and bright, but the evenings have that first sweet foretaste of bite in them.


Almost all Cape Cod books tacitly acknowledge the fact that you have to know all the seasons to really appreciate the place; almost all of them dutifully take in all four seasons as they spin their stories and anecdotes. Probably the single best-known Cape Cod book is Henry Beston's The Outermost House, but I have three others in mind today, starting with the aforementioned William Sargent's fact-filled love letter to Pleasant Bay (which I once got to know quite well while based in a cozy little house full of nautical nick-knacks in Orleans), where he spent an endless stream of summers and blustery autumns. Sargent's book is the most scientific of our trio today, full of pleasantly-presented facts and figures about the Bay's natural world that our author knew so well. He straps on wetsuit and gear and glides in amongst it, often with fascinating results:

Stopping to rest on a sandspit that juts into the main channel, I stir up sediments to attract minnows out of the green depths. Now I am surrounded by a cloud of silversides and confronted by a friendly puffer fish (Spaeroides maculatus). As I reach out to scratch his belly, which will make him puff up and rise to the surface, I start to laugh at the ludicrous sight.

Suddenly, I have the distinct feeling that my foolish antics are being watched. I look up. Only inches from my faceplate is the snaggle-toothed grin of a shark. Granted, it is only a three-foot dogfish, but I beat a hasty retreat back to the shallow eelgrass beds.

Sargent's book was published in 1981. Twenty years earlier, that Cape Cod institution John Hay (whose books are all well worth hunting down at your local library) wrote his own year-long account of life on the Cape, Nature's Year, and although it's got a few too many windy-philosophizing sections for my tastes (as does The Outermost House, come to think of it), it's also got lots of careful, loving detail:

The U.S. Wildlife Refuge at Monomoy is on a long spit of barrier beach and marsh extending south from the town of Chatham ten miles into Nantucket Sound. It is wild, unadorned with tourist cabins, and so an undisturbed refuge and resting place for migratory birds. At first you find warblers, gnat-catchers, orioles, vireos, and other land birds, working silently through low oaks, pines, and stunted, salt-sprayed shrubbery. Then the marshland sweeps ahead with open ground, and curving inlets behind a long beach where the surf pounds endlessly, the sands inlaid with the debris of the sea - whelks, surf clams, or scallops.

But the single best book on Cape Cod was written before Hay. Readers of The Atlantic Monthly i the 1940s were regularly treated to colloquial, winsomely inviting essays written by Wyman Richardson about his cozy little Farm House on Nauset Marsh and the homely adventures he and his kith and kin had there over the course of many seasons. In 1947 those essays were collected into a book called The House at Nauset Marsh, and that book, too, is eminently worth your time to search out, especially if you yourself have never been lucky enough to get to know the Cape. It perfectly captures the tone and feel of a more hands-on less developed Cape that's now almost entirely faded under the pressure of modernization, and the spell it casts starts on the first page:

You can got to Eastham, on outer Cape Cod, and live in the little old Farm House at the drop of a hat. The pump, the kerosene lamps, and the open fire are always ready without fear of frost or storm. You can drive up the land, stop the car by the kitchen door, and unload your gear. You can look out the south windows over the nearby grassy hills, over the bright blue waters of Nauset Marsh to the darker blue glimpses of the sea beyond the dunes, and draw a deep breath.

Through natural history observations, family outings and mishaps, and even a little philosophizing (but always done with a refreshingly flinty Yankee sensibility), The House at Nauset Marsh draws you in and encourages you to take many of those deep breaths. Reading this book is the closest you can come to imbibing the salt-air relaxation of Cape Cod without actually being there. In fact, so deeply does the book work on you that its tired, happy ending will make you homesick for a place you've never been:

First one person and then another yawns, stretches, and departs for bed, until at last only the Old Man himself is left. Finally even he gets up from his chair, takes his last weather observation, checks up on the kitchen stove, and puts out the lamps. Being the last to go, he can enjoy the luxury of leisurely undressing before the warmth of the dying fire. By slowly turning around and around, he thoroughly toasts himself. At last, however, he can procrastinate no longer. He puts up the fire screens, dashes rapidly into his bedroom, and takes the desperate plunge between the ice-cold sheets.

Through the open living-room door, he can see the dancing lights and shadows and hear quiet sounds as the fire burns down. From the pantry comes a barely audible scratching, indicating that the pantry mouse is busily engaged in finding himself some supper. Outside, there is a slight rustling as the breeze stirs the cedars, while the sudden barking of a dog suggests that Mr. Fox is bothering someone's chickens.

Rest now, little Farm House. Your flock is safely in bed and sound asleep. Thank you for the wonderfully good times you have given us.

Good night.

The nights are already arriving earlier, and soon the Cape will be almost empty of tourists. The waves will pound a little harder on the shores of Nauset Beach, and the humble creatures of Quanset Pond will dig deep into earth or lair and sleep the worst of the winter away, hoping for spring. I've walked the beaches around Provincetown and Longnook Beach and Megansett Harbor in the cold pit of winter, dogs going before and after me, the rime of salt ice on my face, and I've loved it. But still, there's a magic to this time right here - the Cape at summer's end - that no other season quite affords. A part of my heart goes there these days, no matter where I happen to be - and good books like these help with the rest.

The Outer Lands

Our book today is ‘The Outer Lands’ by Dorothy Serling, copiously illustrated by Winifred Lubell. It’s a natural history of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Long Island. But oh! such a description falls well short of doing the book - or the subject - justice.

We here at Stevereads have traveled the length and breadth of this beautiful world, and we’ve seen enough of it to know that although a great many stretches of it are lovely, we can attest to a fact long attested to by countless other travelers throughout history: a precious few places are imbued with a kind of magic, a place-grace that seems to spring from the physical contours of the place itself. The gardens of Cyprus are one such place; the jungles of Kauai, the beautiful Aran Islands, the wonders of Donegal Bay, the lures of eastern Iowa along the path of the Mississippi, the islands of Venice.

Foremost among such blessed places is the narrow strip of Massachusetts coastal land called Cape Cod and the Cape’s two distant moons, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

If you’re lucky, the time you spend there is measured in bands of gold. We here at Stevereads spent 32 summers returning to the same snug, cluttered, beautiful little saltbox house just off the dunes at Falmouth, at which we slept the deepest sleep of our lives and from which we explored every last inch and cranny of the whole of the Cape. Then a time passed, and after that, we spent a idyllic year on the distant and perfect little island of Nantucket, experiencing the seasons in a way that has vanished with the advent of year-round ferries and super-mansions and the Internet (we also experienced the buoyant affections of a group of long-haired good-for-nothing kids and the stiff, malachite affections of two enormous Irish wolfhounds, but that’s a homily for another time), and after that we spent a series of perilously ill weekends in a frightfully beautiful house in Sandwich, eager for the experience but too sick to move much beyond the driveway. After that, there were ten exquisitely weeks in yet another gorgeous little saltbox cabin - this one smack-dab on the dunes - at Truro, in the company of a smart, troubled young man striving to find his art.

Then years passed, as is the way with wonderlands. The young man became a lauded writer, the tides rose and fell, but we never doubted the Cape would bring us back - such is the way with magical places. And it did indeed happen, just mere months ago, when a high-spirited young friend invited us for a weekend at yet another quaint old saltbox house, this one located at what used to be called Harwich Port. Our young host, technically ignorant of the Cape’s hospitality traditions (or perhaps not so, perhaps imbibing them all unconsciously from the dunes all around, or from the past), nevertheless provided the quintessential Cape extended weekend: leisurely planning, improvised scrambled-egg breakfasts, endless walks along the Great Beach, and enchanted talks in screened porches late at night over wine, talks punctuated by the curling crush of the tide, crashing out there in the dark, yards away.

That was the last, but not the last: the magic places of the world, OUR magic places, have a way of calling us back again and again. We here at Stevereads have no doubt it will happen again, quite without the sweat of tickets, travel, and travel agents. Once upon a time, we lived up the Cape lane from a gleefully, deceptively curmudgeonly old physician who was not so secretly writing about the Cape experience, trying to capture it in print. There were storms in it, and fogs, and stooping hawks, and darting sand pipers, and he ended up capturing it as well as anybody, but it was all shadowplay in the end. Nobody has ever completely captured the experience of living on the Cape, although many have tried.

Perhaps nobody can, and our book today doesn’t propose to. It’s goal is far more humble: it wants only to tell us all about the nature that still remains in the area when the book was last updated, in 1978. Fortunately, the areas in question are peripheries, containing neither ‘apex’ predators nor what loathesome analysts refer to as ‘exploitable bio-resources.’ So the wildlife is both a miniaturist’s dream come true and largely unchanged from that day to this.

In short, there are still jellyfish, still hawks and foraging raccoons, still unpalatable saltwort, and still darting sand-pipers. Only dedicated fishermen would be able to testify to near-catastrophic stock depletions; the rest of us get to pretend nothing’s changed in thirty years.

Miss Lubell’s profuse illustrations are charming, and so is Sterling’s steadfast, kindly attention to every living thing she encounters. There’s a great deal of information in this charming book, but it’s couched always in graceful, lightly playful prose. Here’s our author describing the lowly Sanderling, that signature shorebird:

“Seldom alone as they trot across the sand, they walk and run, wheel and fly in unison, like the members of a well-trained ballet corps. Hunting from dawn until sunset, the Sanderlings take catnaps on the beach during the day. Some squat on the damp sand while others balance on one leg, swinging around like weather vanes as the wind blows.”

Or this, on baby crabs:

“Although all marine young are odd-looking, the oddest are probably the crabs. Bright-eyed, long-tailed, with curved spikes growing from their heads, they resemble miniatures of the men from Mars in the pages of science fiction. The young crabs reach adult size in a year or a little longer. Some live to be two years old, but only a few reach the ripe old age of three.”

It’s true, “The Outer Lands” is not technically a perfect book, seeing as how it includes in its scope not just the Elysium of the Cape and the islands but also Long Island, which, as every intelligent Bostonian will tell you, is littered with dead gulls and used crack needles. But readers can simply skip those pages, like they would step gingerly over a mob-hit washed up on Coney Island, bearing in mind that New Yorkers really deserve our pity more than our contempt.

“The Outer Lands” is out of print and shouldn’t be, but for those of you planning a trip to the Cape - or only dreaming of it - the search for it will well be worth the time.