In Search of the Great Beach of Cape Cod in Massachusetts

In a massive winter storm on Cape Cod in February 1978 a piece of history perished.

The Fo´castle was a small two room cottage Henry Beston had built on the barrier beach in Eastham. In 1926 Beston left his home to spend a two week vacation at his retreat. He ended up staying a full year and writing "the Outermost House", one of the most beloved nature books in American literature.

Beston was following in the footsteps of another literary figure – Henry David Thoreau. In 1849 Thoreau made his first excursion to Cape Cod. This was a wild and desolate cape and not at all like the one familiar to summer vacationers today. Travel to the outer cape region was an adventure and Thoreau and his walking partners explored the great outer beaches of the cape experiencing both the beauty and harshness of this most easterly peninsular of the United States.

Most credit Thoreau with coining the term the Great Beach for the unbroken stretch of Outer beaches from Eastham to Provincetown – over 20 miles of striking cliffs and dunes deposited by the last glaciers some 20,000 years ago.

Today this section of New England is protected as part of the Cape Cod National Seashore Park. But the word "protected" is symbolic, and the forces of nature pay no heed to human rules, and the relentless winds and ocean are eroding the Outer Cape barrier and encroaching on the precarious settlements on the bay side.

A few years ago I lived in Orleans close to the Great Beach, and on weekends over a two-year stretch spent much time exploring the area in an attempt to discover for myself the beauty and isolation experienced by Thoreau and Beston.

In making the trek up the outer cape beaches I realized quickly the original land of Thoreau´s and Beston´s Great Beach was no longer there. The ocean had long reclaimed the sand they had trodden on, and it would require scuba equipment to repeat their journeys.

But in another sense Thoreau's Great Beach is still there... it has just relocated. It spreads itself out a few hundred yards inland from where Beeston walked on it. The landscape may have changed… yet nothing has really changed. It remains a spot unique and where "A man may stand there and put all America behind him" as Thoreau wrote in his 1890 book "Cape Cod."

Winter was my best time to explore. For miles I could walk on hard crunchy sand and barely see another soul, but time to think and wonder as Beston had done 60-years before. Sometimes I would go down to Nauset Beach in Orleans after a brutal winter storm and hardly recognize it. Its sand and cliffs stolen by the thief ocean to make a barrier somewhere else - the water cold and gray, and the waves still of a busy and roaring tempest.

Yet other times the sound was quiet on the beach and these were the days when you could visit with the sea and the birds and spy an occasional seal. And walk back to where you began to find your own footsteps in the sand… and none other.

I traveled and explored all the outer beaches that make up the Great Beach. From where it traditionally begins at Coastguard in Eastham, along Nauset Light, Marconi Station in Wellfleet, Head of the Meadow in Truro and the final isolated dunes of Provincetown.

Though these are just a few of the many named beaches along the Outer Cape, in the end it is all one living organism, ebbing and flowing and sustaining life, and giving up its land to create life elsewhere.

Along this beach structures are regularly relocated inland to forestall being a victim of the sea.

Beston´s Fo´castle had been moved back a few times before the February storm of 1978. But such a fierce storm changed the outer cape´s landscape forever, and when it subsided all that remained of Beston's cottage was the Great Beach.

At the end of my journey, before like Beston I returned from where I came, I found myself on a spot feeling there is truly nothing of importance behind me and a nothingness ahead – just the Great Beach beneath, where it has been for the last 20,000 years, and where it will be – at least for me – all my tomorrows.

And if the wind blows you to Coastguard Beach in Eastham take a walk along its seashore and know you´re in a unique and historical place, and just a few yards from where the Fo´castle's spirit rests... and on the Great Beach of Cape Cod.