This is a voyage of discovery, a personal odyssey into the nature of a single Cape Cod neighborhood. It is a rich portrait, beautifully drawn, of a landscape and a community whose essential character lies in their penetrating interface with the sea. But it is also an individual quest, a journey of the heart and mind in which the author seeks "entrance, or rather re-entrance" into "that vast living maze stretching out beyond my lines of sight."
Robert Finch has lived on and written about Cape Cod for forty years. He is the author of six collections of essays and co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing.
In the midst of a series of quite boring meditations on his surroundings, Robert Finch graphically describes how he beat a woodchuck to death with a baseball bat for eating his lettuce. And he calls himself a naturalist. No Henry Beston here. The Primal Place now lies in the garbage awaiting pickup. Primal place indeed.