Discovering the Real Cape Cod (Guides That Don't Talk Back To You)

The other day when Papa and I were at the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, I spent some time in the book section of the Visitor's Center. There was a large selection of books about Cape Cod.  I saw some of my own favorites, books I have bought over the years to page through and mark with stickies those places and trails I might find intriguing to explore on foot.

There was the comprehensive guide,   The Nature of Cape Cod by fellow Falmouth Academy parent, Beth Schwarzman.  The author is a seasoned geologist/naturalist and has crafted a most informative guide to aid Cape Cod dwellers as well as off-Cape wanderers like myself.  She gives a brief history of how the Cape was formed as the Ice Age came to an end.  Then she discusses the geologic structure of the Cape as well as details about the natural plant life that thrives on the Cape.  I have used the guide often to identify plants, trees, flora and fauna because she has clear illustations.  This treasure of a book also provides 50 sites and detailed maps that represent the natural environments of the Cape. 

A study of the Cape's natural environment would not be complete if it didn't include Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod.  This was my first introduction to the mysteries of an enchanted place I would return to every summer looking for those special places he wrote about so long ago.

I discovered Henry Beston's the outermost House ten years ago when I was invited to spend some time in Wellfleet with a group of women, mothers of friends of my son Aaron who had passed away that July.  I found comfort in Beston's chronicle of his year spent in a tiny house on Cape Cod's great beach.  While reading his book I discovered the cyclical nature of life itself.  Beston had no intent other then to observe and record all that happened that year around the House on the dunes and so with great detail he describes the cycles and rituals of the seasons, day and night, life and death, migration and hibernation and his own human cycle of preparation for the year.  At times he rambles, but at other times, he actually sings, as when he says of the animals, "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."

By the time Beston had written "the outermost House" in 1925, the cycle of day and night had been lost to most because of the invention of electricity.  But Beston, alone on the dunes without benefit of electricity, can experience the "poetry of night" - beach -combing skunks, frolicking deer, stranded skates and dogfish, and great tempests and storms that ground boats and ships.

After reading Beston's book one summer, I chanced to find Wyman Richardson's memoir, The House at Nauset Marsh.  This is a very thoughtful book by a distinguished Boston physcian of his "other" life living in a humble farmhouse on a marsh.  His observations of the animals and the birds as well as the wind and the weather of a Cape Cod existence ring true with my own experiences on the Cape.  

Then, of course there is Robert Finch's Common Ground:  A Naturalist's Cape Cod.  I love his writing...he has a real gift for language.  Describing the night cries of loons, Finch writes:  "wild, wondrous canticles plucked from the lake's bottom on their long, deep dives, balanced a moment in their throats, then flung up toward the stars, the moon-aged clouds, and the dark, brooding shapes of the mountains sliding away, one behind the other, into the steep night.  What a noise there must have been when the owls sang in the tall virgin pines, when lynx screeched out their passion, and wolves added their howls to the loons' weird wailings!"                                                   But what I really enjoy in Finch's writing is his willingness and his ability to project himself into his essays...they become  anecdotal...and  quite hilarious as when he gets himself caught in a beachfront shack during a violent snowstorm with nothing to eat but anchovies as he observes the fate of ants "trapped with no negotiable way out" in firewood that the author is burning in his fireplace. 

It's one thing reading about Cape Cod...but quite another if you really want to "experience" the Cape  and so the last book that is on my bookshelf is Adam Gamble's In The Footsteps of Thoreau: 25 Historic and Nature Walks on Cape Cod.  Through the years, Papa, Nick, my friend from college and myself have done all twenty-five...and then some again!  Whether walking from Coastguard Beach to Nauset  or out on Great Island in Wellfleet....or constructing sea sculptures on Marconi Beach, this has been our bible.  It's a comprehensive guide and gives you a complete description of the route, driving directions to the trailhead, and a detailed, easy-to-read map.  It also gives you essential information such as distance, difficulty, time to walk, trail surface and more.  It's a great book to carry with you as you explore Cape Cod.