He bears witness to the comings and goings of constellations and tides, the nightly patrols of the coast guardsmen who walk the beach he ponders the dark imperatives that lie behind the migrations of birds and fish, the mysterious 'peoples of the sea.' Into the vast bright days of autumn he goes, and we go with him, gathering driftwood against the winter nights in spring we walk inland over the greening moorland, off to meet the alewife run in summer we kindle our cooking fire on the beach, and sleep between sand-dunes as the constellations wheel above us. He listens to the myriad voices of the surf, and attempts, in words, a faithful notation of the music he has heard. He watches on winter nights as fishing schooners, last vestiges of the age of sail, move slowly beyond the bar, or come to frozen grief upon it. Here, to a tiny house set alone on a dune above the sea, a man has come in solitude to watch, and listen, and bear witness.

Dominated by ocean and weather, this landscape has been long inhabited but never domesticated. The time and place, Cape Cod in the mid-1920's: a wild, windswept outpost of the land. The Outermost House presents us with a time, a place, and a man. This subjective quality distinguishes nature-writing from natural history, and keeps it fresh: the source is inexhaustible, and each inquiry unique as the personality which makes it. Henry Beston produced a masterpiece on Cape Cod, but he did not say the last word treading the same sacred ground today, John Hay and Robert Finch point to signs that only they have noticed. With nature-writers, the lens is personality - and that makes all the difference. The American Southwest of Edward Abbey is one place and although the geographical territory may be the same in the writings of Wallace Stegner or Terry Tempest Williams, our sense of it - the things we notice and choose to look at, the way we look at them and the questions we ask - is different. When we think of Henry Beston's Cape Cod, Annie Dillard's Blue Ridge, Rachel Carson's Maine coast or Florida Keys, we imagine not a clinical, purely objective landscape but a personal one, a place colored by the particular sensibility, the individual filter, through which it passed.

The best nature-writing, it seems to us, brings together a place, a time, and a personality in such a way that, after we've read the book, the writer's experience, and something of his or her personality, seems to be our own.

The outermost house