The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod

by Cynthia Huntington

The Salt House is a beautifully observed and written memoir of a long summer's stay on the back shore of Cape Cod. Each chapter is like a prose poem, shedding increasing light on the challenge of finding "home" without the illusion of permanence, a quest based not on ownership but on affinity and familiarity with an area and its people. Cynthia Huntington expands her theme through images of the landscape, the shack, the new marriage. The shack, named "Euphoria," is built as a house set on stilts above the sand, to take the wind under it. Only a partial shelter, it is inhabited for only one season a year, yet it endures. The outer cape has the feel of a place for migrants and drifters -- for birds and other wildlife, and for people such as artists, fishermen, and coast guardsmen. A place where "year-round" often means several addresses. Similarly, her narrative describes improvised, fragile beginnings: a new marriage, learning to be at home in the world, becoming intimate with the natural world, without the necessity of settling down. The Salt House shares a world that is less natural history or memoir than it is neighborhood exploration -- the process of learning a place and becoming native to it.

Genres: Nature, Memoir, Nonfiction, Poetry, Summer

199 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

Cynthia Huntington is an American poet, memoirist and a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She has published several books of poetry, most recently The Radiant (Four Way Books, 2003). In 2004 she was named Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including TriQuarterly, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Cimarron Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, and Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Sribner, 2008) and Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury College Press, 2002).

Huntington has received grants from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Other awards include: the Robert Frost Prize from The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, the Jane Kenyon Award in Poetry, and the Emily Clark Balch Prize.

She was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and received her M.A. from The Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College.

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books require a person to slow down, connect to senses, to the inner world of knowing, and the outer world of touch. The Salt House is such a book. It revels in the senses, and Cynthia Huntington's descriptions are deeply poetic.

I had to wait to enter into it -- wait until my inner rhythm (of beeping cars, a move across the country, and fast-paced work), was slow enough to enter in -- like stepping into a hot bath -- before I could really enjoy this active meditation.

Cynthia Huntington, professor of poetry and English literature captures the world of living in a rackety old beach shack which is historic and continually altered by sea and wind. There's no running water, no electricity, great winds and cold, and she and her newlywed husband, Bert shack up (no pun intended) on bunk beds; she is a writer, he is an artist. They speak more in silence than in words, and move about each other with great comfort.

This book reflects a dream come true for an introvert, and especially an artistic one at that: independence and interdependence, shared space, spacious love. It is a bath in peacefulness, this book, and I longed for my own cabin by the sea with a Beloved, each of us immersed in our own projects, but coming back together at night, to share the glory and struggles of natural land.

Similar to Long, Quiet Highway, (for example), even glancing at this book evokes in me a feeling of immense peace, an intense wonder about the natural world, and a gratitude for all that is.

This is a glorious book, not for everyone (to be sure), but a book which will be loved forever by those who love it.

[Jackie Gately · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Salt House was not filled with plot or characters or conflict...rather long descriptive writing about the writer's observations and daily experiences while living simply with her artist husband in a Dune Shack named Euphoria. Heaven. She took time to notice and describe the smallest beauty in her beachy world and the nearby woods--from marsh hawks to sand tracks to ocean waves. It took a real effort for me to quiet my mind and focus on her words to envision what she was seeing, and as such, became the perfect winter escape.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

language, language, language. this book is gorgeous in that respect.

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so exquisitely written, the result of careful observation and precise description, that I was relieved to stumble upon a rare superfluous phrase. It comes halfway through the book, and the author records examining a tree “with close attention.“ Well, nothing up to that point reflected anything less, nor did the rest of the book. I felt that I was reading a long prose poem.
The Salt House of the title was one of the dune shacks on the Atlantic shore of Cape Cod, north of Provincetown. I don’t know if it’s still standing. It offered no more than rudimentary shelter: an 8x12-foot room on stilts, fresh water from a pump downhill, and an outhouse. The rain came through cracks, and fierce winds divided to pass under and over the house. For three years, Huntington and her newlywed husband moved in each spring and returned to town in the early fall.
This stripped-down life encouraged them to spend more time outside than in, attuned to tides, birds, and fish in a way that usually escapes me unless I stop and focus. One nearby shack dweller brought a generator and a television, but Huntington and her partner had the Milky Way to watch after dark.
The book’s underlying theme is the question of what we mean when we call someplace home. The author had no deed; the lease was a handshake. She makes it clear that there is no permanence in life, or even in the universe, for that matter. There are only different forms of transience.
But oh, how beautiful while it lasts.

[Fay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I made one decision after reading this book..... as much as I admire the grit of Cynthia and Bert, I will not be following their adventurous example. There are 10 dune shacks, so-called, that are within the National Seashore of Cape Cod at the very tip of the Cape that are available to lease for a summer. This is the third summer of doing it by the intrepid couple. Cynthia takes us along on the adventure where they seek quiet and inspiration for her writing and his artistic expression. The shack is minimally equipped with a pump for freshwater down the dune a bit from the structure. An outhouse is nearby. A propane tank services their one-burner cooking facility. The building measures 16x12, and that is it. The simplicity of their lives has some appeal as she shares with us the coming and going of migratory birds, the miles they walk each day just because they want to and/or can. Their lanterns provide light after the sun sets and their days end with them curling up in bunk beds, her on the top. I loved the descriptions of the winds, the waves coming and going, the simple meals, the grasses waving in the wind and the quiet and solitude. I am happy that the shacks survive the ocean storms for the most part, and continue to offer this experience to all the adventurous folks who undertake this life style. Bravo to them!

[Barbara Osten · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod by Cynthia Huntington is a fantastic book, full of flow in a way only a poet could write. Huntington and her artist husband spend summers in a tiny shack on the dunes of Cape Cod. As she writes her poetry, she also observes the nature around her. A most enjoyable book to read, very calming and peaceful.

[Liv · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book about a summer spent directly on the dunes of Cape Cod in a tiny shack is beautifully atmospheric. It reads like long form poetry and is best digested in small chunks so that the chapters don’t run together.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dreamy, lyrical summer read. I found myself lost in her words, wishing I was on the Cape and forgetting for a time where I actually was. I could feel myself slowing down and savored the author’s descriptions of nature and the elements of everyday life.

[Cyndi D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved reading this on the beach.

[Deb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of prose that reads like poetry. I can feel the sand and salt in the air and am transported to this small house on the dunes with the author. A favorite of mine.

[Frederick Thurber]

Amazing, wonderful, transportive book. I felt I was living in the dunes while reading this thoughful book

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully written. The sentences flow like poetry. Full of images.

[Linda Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slow, restful read.

[Berniedebias · Rating 1 out of 5]

Shelved in by 60 pages. Great descriptive writing but no plot

[Kari LaCamera Roads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very descriptive. You feel like you were right there by dunes

[Tim Nason · Rating 5 out of 5]

In concise themed chapters, Cynthia Huntington deftly and lovingly combines nature observations of the Cape Cod dunes with equally close observations of her daily routine at the dune shack, of her marriage, of social encounters, and of her own emotions, her own body. Reading the book brings you completely into her life and into the dunes, onto the beach, into the house, giving the reader the effect of a lived-experience in a landscape that is wonderfully unique, beautiful, and in many ways inhospitable.

[Sue Bridehead (A Pseudonym) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful and ultimately romantic book, in all senses of the word "romantic." Who wouldn't want to spend 4 months in a rustic Cape Cod cabin with their loved one; no TV, no internet, no distractions?

I must admit, I'm a sucker for these seasonal nature memoirs. This is very similar to Ted Kooser's book about 4 seasons in the Bohemian Alps. Kooser's style is a bit homier. Huntington's writing has a morose and apocalyptic undercurrent here and there. It's a bit sexier. But these books are like flip sides of the same coin, and I love both of them. This is the kind of book I'd love to write--a simple, meandering collection of prose that observes life on a micro-basis--but that's tough to do living in a condo in a big a city like L.A. Maybe it's doable if I move into a tent in Griffith Park.

[Ulla · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, very poetic account of 3 summers spent in one of the dune shacks on Cape Cod, and simultaneously a story of a budding relationship, about finding your place in the universe and connecting with the world around you and nature in particular. It reminds me of summers spent in Hirtshals, Denmark in my grandparents summer home on the front row dunes of the Ingeborg Klitten. I absolutely LOVE this book! There are so many beautiful passages throughout, and I know I'll have to read it again and again.

[Raquel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a lovely reflection on one of the three summers Cynthia Huntington and her husband spent living in a dune shack on Race Point Beach in Provincetown. Poetic, gentle, observant of nature and presenting little gems of wisdom about the artistic life and life itself, I greatly enjoyed being gently rocked by the waves of the prose in this one. Cynthia was able to adequately capture the stark beauty of the Outer Cape, which is difficult to capture but it's worth trying to. It's the next best thing to spending the summer in a beach side cabin. A lovely and soul-soothing book.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

ever since I read this book many years ago, it's stayed in my mind. The life Huntington lived the summer of this memoir...in a dune shack with the ocean at her feet, has become one of my most wished for fantasy lives.

The mark of a good book is that it stays in your mind long after. This is a good book!

[Karyl · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautifully written memoir of a summer lived in a shack on Cape Cod, right on the beach. The book reads almost like a poem, with hauntingly rendered imagery. My only issue is I couldn't really get stuck into it well enough, not with the sounds of the city around me and my children clambering for attention. I would like to try again during a more quiet time in my life.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this while inhabiting a small cabin in North Truro, at the tail end of a windy and cold April, and set out to explore the vast sand dunes of Provinceland, all in my own, as if on a pilgrimage.

Taking a turn up and over a rutted road in the dunes, I cane upon The Salt House, and was astonished by the magic and humbleness of it all.

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written account of a writer and artist who spent three summers in a P-town dune shack. However, if reading several pages about the daily habits of the piping plovers sounds dull, then this is not for you. It reminded me of "Walden". Lots of observations on nature.

[Jessica Fuss · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to live this life! i'd love to spend a summer in one of these cottages, isolated from people, mayhem, life in general. Her words are poetic and beautiful.

[Karen Floyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautiful read and I know I'll go back to it again and again.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for any book that talks about living on Cape Cod or the Islands.

[Deb · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author describes in simple and eloquent prose her experiences, moment by moment at a Dune Shack. I have been there; I thank the author for letting me relive my precious moments on the beach.

[Marylouise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her prose is more like poetry for me. A lovely, lovely book about the place I love most in the world.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that lulls you into the slow pace of beach days. There are observations and histories, but all presented in a soothing narration.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though the setting of this book is one of my favorite places, the book was not all that I had hoped. There were, however, moments of stunningly beautiful writing.