When I began to visit Cape Cod back in 1996, my first order of business to indulge in as many great literary works on the peninsula’s outer reaches that I could find. Henry David Thoreau, John Hay, Henry Beston, Nan Turner Waldron … and, of course, Robert Finch, whose passing was announced today by WCAI-FM.
Beston and Waldron became favorites of mine, and the progression to Finch’s works was only natural. I found Finch’s 1986 collection of personal essays, “Outlands: Journeys to the Outer Edges of Cape Cod,” particularly intriguing, but “Common Ground,” “Death of a Hornet,” and more pulled me in as well.
“Over the years, in innumerable encounters with it, (the beach) has spoken eloquently and mysteriously to me,” Finch wrote. Like those who wrote so eloquently of this landscape before him, Finch’s craft was not so much “nature,” but the human spirit’s interaction with nature.
I first met Finch at the Brewster Book Store in the early 2000s. He was signing copies of “Death of a Hornet.” I told him of my fondness for both his books and Beston’s. I would get to meet him again about five years later, when I worked with the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History on an exhibit, “A Sense of Place: The Works of Beston, Hay, and Finch.”
The more I read of Finch’s works, the more I felt that I identified with his love of the Cape. When I had the opportunity to sit down with him in his Wellfleet home for an interview about Henry Beston and “The Outermost House” in 2014, we had plenty of notes to compare. I was beyond honored when he signed my copy of “Outlands” with the inscription: “For Don — With admiration for your good work. With all good wishes, Robert Finch.”
He had so many stories to tell, both that day in 2014 and through his writings: his attendance at the “Outermost House” National Literary Landmark dedication ceremony at Coast Guard Beach in 1964, his night in Harry Kemp’s dune shack after getting lost in a snowstorm in the dunes in 1962, and being on hand at Coast Guard Beach in 1978 when Beston’s house floated away in a storm for the ages while marveling at how the dunes and bathhouse were being destroyed by the incoming surf.
“There were hundreds of people there watching the waves smash up against the bathhouse. And with every wave, the crowds would just cheer,” recalled a smiling Finch during that 2014 interview as he pumped his fists skyward. “And I said, ‘Why is that? What are we cheering about?’ That stuck in my mind.”
Why was that? He was awed by the elements in an almost spiritual sense, as I have often been. Finch’s writings helped me tune in to those senses.
I always felt that a visit to the Outer Cape beaches and dunes often required an investment of at least several hours at a time for its magic to work. Finch felt the same way. He recalled an evening where his destination was the local movie theater, but he stopped off at the beach for a quick visit and found that the solitary sands have no use for quick sound bytes: “It will not hold counsel with us when we are already going someplace else as we arrive.”
But back to the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and the Beston / Hay / Finch exhibit for a moment. “All I could compare this to is what some young boys feel who worship and try to imitate Major League Baseball players when they’re growing up, and then one day, lo and behold, they find themselves in ‘the show’ — maybe even playing with or against some of those players that they idolized and were influenced by in their youth,” Finch said on the exhibit’s opening night. “In one way, it’s a dream come true, and in another way, it’s not quite real somehow.”
I used that comment in a review for his book, “The Outer Beach,” for the Cape Codder newspaper in 2017: "If the Outer Cape ever had a Hall of Fame for its great nature writers, three names would top the list: Thoreau, Beston, and Hay. Even though he's still on the 'playing field,' so to speak, you might want to line up Robert Finch for enshrinement as well.” He emailed me to thank me for my efforts. “I don’t know about the hall of fame,” he said, “but I’m just pleased to be mentioned in the same breath with those guys.”
To make the case for this saunterer of the solitary shoreline’s enshrinement in a Cape’s version of Cooperstown, an entry from his account of a visit to Long Nook Beach in Truro following a storm is submitted here: “How lucky are we who live in proximity to a landscape that has such easy powers to lift us out of our narrow lives and self-made blinders, and so seduce us into seeing who we really are.”
We’re lucky too, Bob — both to live here, and to have had you describe it so eloquently. Thank you.
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Photo of Don Wilding and Robert Finch by Christopher Seufert
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