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The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk on Cape Cod's Atlantic Shore
Those who have encountered Cape Cod—or merely dipped into an account of its rich history—know that it is a singular place. In The Outer Beach, beloved nature writer Robert Finch weaves together his collected writings from more than fifty years and more than a thousand miles of walking along Cape Cod's Atlantic coast to create a poignant, candid chronicle of an iconic American landscape.
Finch considers evidence of nature's fury: shipwrecks, beached whales, towering natural edifices, ferocious seaside blizzards. And he ponders everyday human interactions conducted in its environment with equal curiosity, wit, and insight: taking a weeks-old puppy for his first beach walk; engaging in a nocturnal dance with one of the Cape's fabled lighthouses; stumbling, unexpectedly, upon nude sunbathers; or even encountering out-of-towners hoping an Uber will fetch them from the other side of a remote dune field.
Throughout these essays, Finch pays tribute to the Outer Beach's impressive literary legacy, meditates on its often-tragic history, and explores the strange, mutable nature of time near the ocean. But lurking behind every experience and observation—both pivotal and quotidian—is the essential question that the beach beckons every one of its pilgrims to confront: How do we accept our brief existence here, caught between overwhelming beauty and merciless indifference?
Finch's affable voice, attentive eye, and stirring prose will be cherished by the Cape's staunch lifers and erstwhile visitors alike, and strike a resounding chord with anyone who has been left breathless by the majestic, unrelenting beauty of the shore.
Finch considers evidence of nature's fury: shipwrecks, beached whales, towering natural edifices, ferocious seaside blizzards. And he ponders everyday human interactions conducted in its environment with equal curiosity, wit, and insight: taking a weeks-old puppy for his first beach walk; engaging in a nocturnal dance with one of the Cape's fabled lighthouses; stumbling, unexpectedly, upon nude sunbathers; or even encountering out-of-towners hoping an Uber will fetch them from the other side of a remote dune field.
Throughout these essays, Finch pays tribute to the Outer Beach's impressive literary legacy, meditates on its often-tragic history, and explores the strange, mutable nature of time near the ocean. But lurking behind every experience and observation—both pivotal and quotidian—is the essential question that the beach beckons every one of its pilgrims to confront: How do we accept our brief existence here, caught between overwhelming beauty and merciless indifference?
Finch's affable voice, attentive eye, and stirring prose will be cherished by the Cape's staunch lifers and erstwhile visitors alike, and strike a resounding chord with anyone who has been left breathless by the majestic, unrelenting beauty of the shore.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
84 people are currently reading
789 people want to read
About the author
Robert Finch
76 books34 followersRobert 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
November 24, 2017
For all that it is a coastal city, Boston can feel awfully landlocked, at least it did to me, when I was new there - a homesick Californian who'd never lived more than 3 miles from a beach. One day I just started driving, found the wonder that is the Outer Cape, and decided I could, after all, maybe, be OK in Boston. Many summers later, the Cape is still one of my favorite places in the world, in all seasons, and this book was a pleasure from start to finish. Tons of interesting history about this fragile place, so beautifully written that even the nerdy pretentious bits are actually kind of endearing.
January 18, 2019
Oops, I checked this book out under a case of mistaken identity. I was in a hurry and misread “Outer Beach” as “Outer Banks,” and thought it was going to be about a walk up the Atlantic seaboard. That sounded interesting, and it wasn’t until I got home that I realized it is not about a single thousand mile walk, but thirty years of walks along the beaches of Cape Cod, which in aggregate might add up to a thousand or so miles. Okay, so it wasn’t what I was expecting, but nevertheless it is well written and informative. It does a fine job catching the sense of walking down the beach with the gulls and the plovers, watching the play of sunlight over the breaking waves, and stopping to examine the flotsam and jetsam cast up by the most recent tide.
From the sea the Cape came, and to the sea it will return. Every year the ocean eats away at the fragile sand banks and eventually it will all disappear. Already there is a wide channel where formerly there were dunes and beach. It may take a few hundred years for Cape Cod to vanish entirely, but with global warming and sea level rise, who can tell how long it will survive?
The Cape is home to rich ecosystems of fish, plants, birds, and critters, and the author introduces many of them, explaining how they live, how they are interrelated, and the impacts the modern world is having on them. The aftermath of a fierce winter storm, the appearance of a dead whale, an old shipwreck temporarily revealed again after a century under the sand, and the strange and unlikely things that wash up with the waves, all have their stories told with sympathy and insight.
The book moves from south to north, eventually adding humankind to the mix of flora and fauna, with lighthouses, an abandoned military base, and at the far end, Provincetown. The Cape has attracted artists and writers, many with interesting stories of their own, especially the ones who basically homesteaded on what was then a remote place with few amenities other than the scenery.
Some books about the natural world become just catalogs of places and encounters with plants and animals, and some, like this one, make you want to lace up your hiking boots and head out to where the wild things are. Outer Beach reminded me of two of my favorite natural history books, Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey, and Edwin Way Teale’s Journey Into Summer. I would recommend it for anyone with an interest in sand, surf, and sky.
From the sea the Cape came, and to the sea it will return. Every year the ocean eats away at the fragile sand banks and eventually it will all disappear. Already there is a wide channel where formerly there were dunes and beach. It may take a few hundred years for Cape Cod to vanish entirely, but with global warming and sea level rise, who can tell how long it will survive?
The Cape is home to rich ecosystems of fish, plants, birds, and critters, and the author introduces many of them, explaining how they live, how they are interrelated, and the impacts the modern world is having on them. The aftermath of a fierce winter storm, the appearance of a dead whale, an old shipwreck temporarily revealed again after a century under the sand, and the strange and unlikely things that wash up with the waves, all have their stories told with sympathy and insight.
The book moves from south to north, eventually adding humankind to the mix of flora and fauna, with lighthouses, an abandoned military base, and at the far end, Provincetown. The Cape has attracted artists and writers, many with interesting stories of their own, especially the ones who basically homesteaded on what was then a remote place with few amenities other than the scenery.
Some books about the natural world become just catalogs of places and encounters with plants and animals, and some, like this one, make you want to lace up your hiking boots and head out to where the wild things are. Outer Beach reminded me of two of my favorite natural history books, Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey, and Edwin Way Teale’s Journey Into Summer. I would recommend it for anyone with an interest in sand, surf, and sky.
April 5, 2017
I received a copy of this book free, through Goodreads Giveaways.
We all have a home-place—a spot in the world that is just right, where the landscape not only makes sense—it both defines and fulfills us.
It’s clear that Robert Finch’s home-place is Cape Cod and this series of collected essays explore and characterize the Cape’s Atlantic shore with both broad strokes and with an attention to detail. It is clear that he loves this place, its geography and its ecology.
The essays cover some 40 years of observations; they are easy to read, and engaging, if sometimes a tad bombastic in descriptions.
Cape Cod isn’t my home-place, but after reading this collection I’ve grown more fond of it.
Recomended
October 31, 2018
Love this! A series of essays written at different times....wonderful glimpses of many days at the beach, with local color, history, ecology intertwined. The next best thing to one's own walk on the beach!
Read
May 14, 2017Great!
Like a walk on the beach.
Like a walk on the beach.
September 10, 2025
wanted not to like this bc the author is not from the cape (yes he has lived there longer than me bc he's old but I was BORN there sorry) but how can I not love something so tender and loving to my own home? also provides a great history of certain parts especially ptown
November 13, 2019
In my continuing attempt to learn as much about New England as I possibly can since moving here, I came across this delightful and very informative book.
The author for fifty years has been walking along the beaches of Cape Cod and writing about his experiences while doing so. Finch is not only an excellent journalist with superior writing skills but also a naturalist whose keen eye for detail brings to life the activity of nature that exists on the beaches but also the challenges facing the continuing these beaches from the onslaught of erosion, storms and injurious human activity.
The first thing he does is provide a description of his walks and purpose in doing so.
“The walks were not regular, and certainly not purposeful.” (XV)
He describes what the intent was of protections awarded such places as the beaches of Cape Cod.
“The felicities of political language, which flowered in the early days of the Republic in the noble phrases of declarations, constitutions, and judicial decisions, seem in our time to survive, when they do so at all, largely in legislation relating to the preservation of natural areas. Public Law 88-577, better known as the Wilderness Act of 1964, provides one on the few contemporary examples. It contains the terms under which Monomoy Island was established as a Wilderness Area: ‘an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’” (19-20)
His descriptions of natural life on the beaches is poignant and intensely well-written.
“And far inland, across the broad rippling expanse of the marsh grass, I heard the muted cacophony of the vast gull colony, one hundred thousand strong. Occasionally large rafts of shorebirds lifted in a rush of wings and silvery crying, making dark clouds against the lighter real ones gathering from the south. I sat, it seemed, in an element of birds, surrounded as though by rain, wind, and fog, a living fullness that tantalized the mind with visions of an abundance that once rendered waste and decimation so innocent to the minds of men. They formed an electric band of life, so intense, so intent on their probing, running, stalking, dipping, diving, and flitting that I was only minimally regarded as a wreck or some rock might have been.” (24)
“Skimmers were nesting on the Cape when Samuel de Champlain sailed into Nauset Harbor in 1605, but were rapidly extirpated along the New England coast in colonial times by egg hunters. During the past twenty years, after an absence of more than two centuries, they have begun nesting on Monomoy again.” (25)
“It is this, probably more than anything, that defines this time of day: that the soft pulse of the surf has once again become the dominant sound and presence on the beach, the metronome to which everything, including us, sets its tempo. Terns sail like silvery origami sculptures offshore and suddenly plunge into the dark-green bulges of the sea for sand eels. Gulls rock indolently in small rafts offshore like sea ducks, or plant themselves in front of us, arrogantly demanding chicken bones, which I dutifully throw them, just to watch their naked greed and aggression. Flocks of shorebirds now reappear, reinhabit this stretch of beach, from which they had been exiled all day by the press of human presence. A few dogs are allowed to run free, despite the regulations we all know, and no one complains. There is room for all of us now.
And what of the futile efforts of humans to construct a natural world to its own liking?
So humans make cosmetic changes on the shoreline, building dikes and sea walls, filling in swamps and marshes, dredging harbors and rechanneling streams. But the old, deeper currents continue to run in the daily tides, like the schools of alewives that are said to swarm and beat each spring against the entrances to ancestral spawning grounds that we have blocked off for generations. These currents carry a deep, insistent earth memory that sometimes breaks out during major storms into sudden consciousness. And when the waters finally recede we are left staring across an unfamiliar landscape to redefine our human world as best we might.” (131-136)
“And that’s about it. Beyond these geological macrofeatures, little endures on the beach long enough to be officially labeled. Sand castles, messages in the sand, little stick figures, the charred remains of beach parties, last only until the next tide. Whales beach and, if not removed, are usually reclaimed by the sea within days of weeks. Their bones do not remain exposed for decades as they do on rockier or more protected shores. Farther up the time scale, summer beach sculptures and edifices made from driftwood and other found material may last a season or more. Beach cottages, if they’re luck, may remain for decades, but not much longer. Oddly, the well pipes of these vanished cottages often do last much longer, protruding from the cliff faces and dunes, sucking air now instead of water. Lighthouses last, but only by being relocated farther inland from time to time.” (142)
“Every year some fifty-five acres, or 880,000 cubic yards of precious Cape Cod earth, slide into the sea, and what do we do about it? Where is our communal outrage? After the break in Chatham’s North Beach occurred in 1987, a dozen houses on the mainland fell into the sea and owners sued town officials for not letting them build seawalls.” (326)
His experiences of fifty years walking the beaches leads him into reflection about our own lives and how like they are to the rhythms that wear at the sands and cliffs of Cape Cod.
“We think of ourselves as rushing through life, in the fullness of health, toward the precipice of death, like leaves being carried with increasing velocity toward the universal cataract, but this scene suggested the opposite: that we are the stationary figures, rooted in our lives, cultivating the illusion of permanence, as our mortality rushes toward us, a reverse cataract, rushing up out of the seabed, harvesting the generations in front of us, undercutting our own foundations, and taking us at last, like Everyman, unready and unawares.” (236)
“This would be the perfect time and place to meditate, if I practiced meditation. But I don’t want to empty my mind. Rather, I want to fill it more deeply with what is there. I don’t wish to detach myself from this solid, perishable world, but to feel it closer, to pay it the attention it deserves. The shadows of the low cliffs have already crept out over most of the beach, but the low sun still highlights the breaking brows of each wave. Randomly choosing a natural clock, I decide to stay here until the breaking waves are no longer hit by the sun. And so I do, content merely to notice how slowly, steadily, and unhurriedly the sun sinks behind me, casting its ever-venturing light farther and farther out over the purple sea, until at last it blinks out and there is no holding back the night.” (241)
This was an excellent piece of work which not only taught me a great deal about life in New England but also strongly engaged my aesthetic urges.
The author for fifty years has been walking along the beaches of Cape Cod and writing about his experiences while doing so. Finch is not only an excellent journalist with superior writing skills but also a naturalist whose keen eye for detail brings to life the activity of nature that exists on the beaches but also the challenges facing the continuing these beaches from the onslaught of erosion, storms and injurious human activity.
The first thing he does is provide a description of his walks and purpose in doing so.
“The walks were not regular, and certainly not purposeful.” (XV)
He describes what the intent was of protections awarded such places as the beaches of Cape Cod.
“The felicities of political language, which flowered in the early days of the Republic in the noble phrases of declarations, constitutions, and judicial decisions, seem in our time to survive, when they do so at all, largely in legislation relating to the preservation of natural areas. Public Law 88-577, better known as the Wilderness Act of 1964, provides one on the few contemporary examples. It contains the terms under which Monomoy Island was established as a Wilderness Area: ‘an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’” (19-20)
His descriptions of natural life on the beaches is poignant and intensely well-written.
“And far inland, across the broad rippling expanse of the marsh grass, I heard the muted cacophony of the vast gull colony, one hundred thousand strong. Occasionally large rafts of shorebirds lifted in a rush of wings and silvery crying, making dark clouds against the lighter real ones gathering from the south. I sat, it seemed, in an element of birds, surrounded as though by rain, wind, and fog, a living fullness that tantalized the mind with visions of an abundance that once rendered waste and decimation so innocent to the minds of men. They formed an electric band of life, so intense, so intent on their probing, running, stalking, dipping, diving, and flitting that I was only minimally regarded as a wreck or some rock might have been.” (24)
“Skimmers were nesting on the Cape when Samuel de Champlain sailed into Nauset Harbor in 1605, but were rapidly extirpated along the New England coast in colonial times by egg hunters. During the past twenty years, after an absence of more than two centuries, they have begun nesting on Monomoy again.” (25)
“It is this, probably more than anything, that defines this time of day: that the soft pulse of the surf has once again become the dominant sound and presence on the beach, the metronome to which everything, including us, sets its tempo. Terns sail like silvery origami sculptures offshore and suddenly plunge into the dark-green bulges of the sea for sand eels. Gulls rock indolently in small rafts offshore like sea ducks, or plant themselves in front of us, arrogantly demanding chicken bones, which I dutifully throw them, just to watch their naked greed and aggression. Flocks of shorebirds now reappear, reinhabit this stretch of beach, from which they had been exiled all day by the press of human presence. A few dogs are allowed to run free, despite the regulations we all know, and no one complains. There is room for all of us now.
And what of the futile efforts of humans to construct a natural world to its own liking?
So humans make cosmetic changes on the shoreline, building dikes and sea walls, filling in swamps and marshes, dredging harbors and rechanneling streams. But the old, deeper currents continue to run in the daily tides, like the schools of alewives that are said to swarm and beat each spring against the entrances to ancestral spawning grounds that we have blocked off for generations. These currents carry a deep, insistent earth memory that sometimes breaks out during major storms into sudden consciousness. And when the waters finally recede we are left staring across an unfamiliar landscape to redefine our human world as best we might.” (131-136)
“And that’s about it. Beyond these geological macrofeatures, little endures on the beach long enough to be officially labeled. Sand castles, messages in the sand, little stick figures, the charred remains of beach parties, last only until the next tide. Whales beach and, if not removed, are usually reclaimed by the sea within days of weeks. Their bones do not remain exposed for decades as they do on rockier or more protected shores. Farther up the time scale, summer beach sculptures and edifices made from driftwood and other found material may last a season or more. Beach cottages, if they’re luck, may remain for decades, but not much longer. Oddly, the well pipes of these vanished cottages often do last much longer, protruding from the cliff faces and dunes, sucking air now instead of water. Lighthouses last, but only by being relocated farther inland from time to time.” (142)
“Every year some fifty-five acres, or 880,000 cubic yards of precious Cape Cod earth, slide into the sea, and what do we do about it? Where is our communal outrage? After the break in Chatham’s North Beach occurred in 1987, a dozen houses on the mainland fell into the sea and owners sued town officials for not letting them build seawalls.” (326)
His experiences of fifty years walking the beaches leads him into reflection about our own lives and how like they are to the rhythms that wear at the sands and cliffs of Cape Cod.
“We think of ourselves as rushing through life, in the fullness of health, toward the precipice of death, like leaves being carried with increasing velocity toward the universal cataract, but this scene suggested the opposite: that we are the stationary figures, rooted in our lives, cultivating the illusion of permanence, as our mortality rushes toward us, a reverse cataract, rushing up out of the seabed, harvesting the generations in front of us, undercutting our own foundations, and taking us at last, like Everyman, unready and unawares.” (236)
“This would be the perfect time and place to meditate, if I practiced meditation. But I don’t want to empty my mind. Rather, I want to fill it more deeply with what is there. I don’t wish to detach myself from this solid, perishable world, but to feel it closer, to pay it the attention it deserves. The shadows of the low cliffs have already crept out over most of the beach, but the low sun still highlights the breaking brows of each wave. Randomly choosing a natural clock, I decide to stay here until the breaking waves are no longer hit by the sun. And so I do, content merely to notice how slowly, steadily, and unhurriedly the sun sinks behind me, casting its ever-venturing light farther and farther out over the purple sea, until at last it blinks out and there is no holding back the night.” (241)
This was an excellent piece of work which not only taught me a great deal about life in New England but also strongly engaged my aesthetic urges.
January 22, 2018
Being a beach lover I'm all about any book that is in essence somewhat of a love letter to the beach. This book reminded me a good deal of 'A Sand County Almanac' by Aldo Leopold as far as his accounts of wandering the beach at different times of the year. Finch must also be an environmentalist or in the DNR field. At times his descriptions were lost on me as I wasn't aware of the species of plants and birds he was referring to. Pictures within the book would've been a great boon to see some of what he saw. Some of his accounts were very interesting about the people that lived on Cape Cod's Atlantic shore. All in all an interesting read and a great tribute to the beach.
October 20, 2018
If you enjoy reading nature-inspired essays or are devoted to Cape Cod, you will like Finch's latest collection of journal-like musings centered on his walks along the Atlantic coastline of Cape Cod from Monomy Island in the south all the way north to Provincetown. I found some of his philosophical musings to be a bit much at times, but his descriptions of the environment of the Cape are wonderful. Any fan of Henry Beston's classic "The Outermost House" will find this a must-read. And I think once you finish, you'll definitely want to take your own walk.
July 5, 2017
The latest book by one of America's finest nature writers. You can't find a better way to see and to appreciate Cape Cod's outer beach than through Robert Finch's eyes.
September 9, 2017
A superb collections of essays on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, by one of America's best essayists and nature writers. Highly recommended, particularly if you love Cape Cod and the northeastern coast.
September 8, 2022
First, I want to say that for people who don't know, the title is a little misleading. Cape Code is 70 miles long and has about 550 miles of coast line. The author, Robert Finch, estimated that if he walked a mile on the Outer Beach every two weeks, he would walk 25 miles a year. By his calculations, if he did that for 40 years, it would be 1000 miles. He started walking the beach and writing about Cape Cod in 1962 and he was still walking and writing in 2016, so it looks like he is on his way to 1,500 miles. But, I digress.
This book is an honest look at the power of the ocean to built up and take away. After every storm, Mr. Finch was out there on the beach, the sole car in the parking lot sometimes, going out to see what he could. He explored the beaches in the middle of winter, in blowing wind and rain, even after after a nor'easter. He wrote of the color and majesty of both the ocean and the every shifting sands. He did a great job describing what he saw before him.
I admit that I had to cheat and look at some pictures to see if my imagination was close. The National Park Service web site has a few photos for people who want to see what's out there. Try: https://www.nps.gov/caco/learn/photos...
But what Robert Finch described was the not the sunny-day-in-the-middle-of-July photos. He described the sh0re from the perspective of someone who lives there, knows and respects the community, and can drop the name of every bird and plant he passes by. I have to say Robert Finch has the perfect last name for birder.
He has written multiple books on Cape Code. This book is a compilation of his writing over the years. I recommend this book to anyone who appreciates the beauty and power of the ocean.
This book is an honest look at the power of the ocean to built up and take away. After every storm, Mr. Finch was out there on the beach, the sole car in the parking lot sometimes, going out to see what he could. He explored the beaches in the middle of winter, in blowing wind and rain, even after after a nor'easter. He wrote of the color and majesty of both the ocean and the every shifting sands. He did a great job describing what he saw before him.
I admit that I had to cheat and look at some pictures to see if my imagination was close. The National Park Service web site has a few photos for people who want to see what's out there. Try: https://www.nps.gov/caco/learn/photos...
But what Robert Finch described was the not the sunny-day-in-the-middle-of-July photos. He described the sh0re from the perspective of someone who lives there, knows and respects the community, and can drop the name of every bird and plant he passes by. I have to say Robert Finch has the perfect last name for birder.
He has written multiple books on Cape Code. This book is a compilation of his writing over the years. I recommend this book to anyone who appreciates the beauty and power of the ocean.
August 4, 2022
I had my eye on this as a Cape read for a little while...I had never read any Cape books, mostly because I had never been to the Cape. But then a friend of mine discovered this amazing campground right near the Cape Cod National Seashore, and my family started to make quick trips down there a new family tradition. So we kicked off the summer with a couple days in P-town and Truro, and I decided to read a Cape book.
On the downside, this is very repetitive. It's understandable though, because this is really a collection of dozens of essays that Finch wrote over like 40 years, about what is essentially one big beach. So one essay about beach erosion and plovers and terns is not all the different from the last one about erosion and plovers and terns. On the plus side, Finch has a nice relaxed style, and there are some variations on the theme. The Provincetown chapters towards the end were a nice change of pace. I liked his random musings about odd junk he brought home from the beach. He did seem to bring home a lot of random dead things though. He must have a big yard. Or a barn? Why is he bringing home so many dead birds?
There's a lot of "as the beach is transient so are we all...sands of time...we're all gonna die...nothing gold can stay" stuff in here. It will make you think about mortality a lot. So that was sometimes fine. But it got to me a bit after a while. I mean, the Cape has a couple good centuries left, right? Maybe more? My experience of the outer beach is playing velcro catch and flying kites with my kids, not just sitting there thinking about mortality.
On the downside, this is very repetitive. It's understandable though, because this is really a collection of dozens of essays that Finch wrote over like 40 years, about what is essentially one big beach. So one essay about beach erosion and plovers and terns is not all the different from the last one about erosion and plovers and terns. On the plus side, Finch has a nice relaxed style, and there are some variations on the theme. The Provincetown chapters towards the end were a nice change of pace. I liked his random musings about odd junk he brought home from the beach. He did seem to bring home a lot of random dead things though. He must have a big yard. Or a barn? Why is he bringing home so many dead birds?
There's a lot of "as the beach is transient so are we all...sands of time...we're all gonna die...nothing gold can stay" stuff in here. It will make you think about mortality a lot. So that was sometimes fine. But it got to me a bit after a while. I mean, the Cape has a couple good centuries left, right? Maybe more? My experience of the outer beach is playing velcro catch and flying kites with my kids, not just sitting there thinking about mortality.
January 4, 2020
I liked it but . . . The book is a series of notes written by the author after numerous walks, overnight stays, etc. on the Outer Beach from Monomoy Island on the south to Long Point on the north, the generally east facing Atlantic Coast of Cape Cod from south of Chatham to Provincetown. The book's chapters are organized geographically from south to north and chronologically within each chapter. It's primarily a naturalist's observations, with some history included. There are lots of descriptions of coastal geology, wildlife, storms, the sea and some of the people who lived and worked in this area of the Cape.
The but is that notwithstanding the author's pleasant style, it is a redundant, slow read. If I was tired, I had to put the book down and not read more than 5-10 pages. Otherwise it would put me to sleep. Because Finch's notes were just that, they cover topics repeatedly even if the geographic location varies. There's lots of armchair philosophy and poetic observations embedded in the author's recollections. Some of it works, some of it sounds trite or overly obvious. I stuck with it and am glad I finished it, but I would not recommend it to anyone not very interested in the sometimes rambling recollections of a long time resident of the towns near the Outer Beach, with a focus on the natural systems and wildlife of the area.
The but is that notwithstanding the author's pleasant style, it is a redundant, slow read. If I was tired, I had to put the book down and not read more than 5-10 pages. Otherwise it would put me to sleep. Because Finch's notes were just that, they cover topics repeatedly even if the geographic location varies. There's lots of armchair philosophy and poetic observations embedded in the author's recollections. Some of it works, some of it sounds trite or overly obvious. I stuck with it and am glad I finished it, but I would not recommend it to anyone not very interested in the sometimes rambling recollections of a long time resident of the towns near the Outer Beach, with a focus on the natural systems and wildlife of the area.
December 3, 2020
Beautiful writing and enthralling storytelling. Finch is at his best telling the old time history of the Cape - the land, the birds, the characters. And there is always an elegiac feel to it...Peg Watson and her last night on the dunes, piping plovers confined to protective enclosures, dead whales on the beach. In his last essay of the book, Finch reminds us that the Atlantic will finally reclaim the Cape in six thousand years. This droll knowledge shades but does not diminish our pleasure in exploring this unique place.
January 21, 2024
Robert Finch chronicles his many years of walking the Outer Shore from Monomoy Point to Long Point. He examines the ever changing landscape and encourages us to take in the beauty of the Cape, from the dead whale that is stranded on the beach to the storms during the winter season. Through experiencing all factions of life on this peninsula, we can learn how to appreciate our own life and gain a new perspective on the importance and beauty of nature.
December 5, 2024
The early chapters did not hold my interest, but this is an obvious love letter to the Cape and a remarkable document that describes decades worth of exploring the natural beauty of the National Seashore. The best chapters are the Provincelands and dunes chapters, hands down. And can confirm the accuracy and care with which Finch describes that unique landscape, as I was just on the dunes last week ;)
October 20, 2017
A pleasant book; you could dip into it at odd moments. I like his writings, but they did seem a bit repetitious (birds, dunes, more birds!) Some of the little "tales" like those featuring the beach cottages in Provincetown, were fun. Lived on the north side of the Cape one year, and vacationed there many summers, so a nice summary of some good times there.
July 29, 2018
People will often say to me, “why do you want to live on the Cape? It is so crowded!” While this might be true part of the year, knowing where to go and when to go makes all the difference. Reading Robert Finches stories of his walks along the shore, I can relate to many of the same experiences. You can feel utterly alone out there, minuscule compared to vastness of it all. It rights ones soul.
March 3, 2021
If you can only read one book about Cape Cod, read Henry Beston's The Outermost House. If you have the time and interest in reading another book about Cape Cod, this one is good, but not a first choice. It is possible that Robert Finch might even agree with me. He quoted Beston in his own book and wrote a glowing introduction for the 75th anniversary edition of The Outermost House.
August 27, 2017
Finch did not move me through his essays of this beautiful part of the states. I love the beach and am drawn to memoirs/nature writing about coastal places and experiences. I just didn't find these very entertaining...rather ponderous.
February 19, 2018
Fair. Same as other comments
Repeats often sometimes even the same sentence tries to be too poetic at the end of every story
On the bright side easy to read and taught me many things I did no know about the Cape
Repeats often sometimes even the same sentence tries to be too poetic at the end of every story
On the bright side easy to read and taught me many things I did no know about the Cape
August 6, 2019
I wanted to learn what it means to walk Cape Cod's shoreline and this book provided that and more. I also gained some historical and cultural knowledge. I enjoyed reading this but at times grew weary of one more story about that day's tide or the colored clay soil.
March 15, 2021
I was looking for a calm read during this year (2020) of chaos and I found it. Thoughtful, calming and fun essays about life and walks and boating in and around the outer beaches of Cape Cod. Just so you know... it helps to have a deep familiarity with said beaches.
June 19, 2017
Relaxing and repetitive.
June 27, 2017
A terrific book for a bedside table, tote bag or comfortable chair. This is more of a pick up and open to any page book than a linear read. Whichever story I opened to I enjoyed.
September 4, 2018
Wonderful reflections on Cape Cod's Atlantic shore.
May 9, 2019
Well done, interesting. Essays about walking Cape Cod beaches over 40+ years. A book you can pick up, read some and put down for awhile.
October 23, 2019
I loved walking the shores of Cape Cod through Mr. Finch's words. I'd love to join him on a hike!
December 19, 2021
Read in anticipation of a visit to Cape Cod. Finch was an entertaining and knowledgeable guide and companion.
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