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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

Revisiting Thoreau's Outer Beach: a Wild Rank Place of Naked Nature

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It was 166 years ago this month that Henry David Thoreau took his first walk along the Outer Beach of Cape Cod, traversing its length from Eastham to Provincetown in four days. Only four days, yet he saw more than most people see in a lifetime.

Every year I try to take at least one walk on the beach during this month to commemorate Thoreau’s. This year I picked a wet afternoon. The rain was light and straight, with only a slight southeast breeze, and the surf was low and smooth, almost flat. The lacings of the wrack line were threaded with small, clear, firm gelatinous spheres, roughly ¼”-1/3” long, like clear plastic beads. These were “sea gooseberries,” or comb jellies, distant relatives of jelly fish. Despite their fragile appearance, they are described as “voracious predators” of fish eggs and larvae. The marine biologist Henry Bigelow said of them: “Wherever these [comb jellies] swarm they sweep the water so clean that …hardly any smaller creatures can coexist with them.”

There were also a number of dogfish thrown up at the base of the shelf, their torsos twisted and constricted in places as if they had been wrung out by something. A few had been partially eaten but most were whole. So it appears that these fish, which, when caught, seem not to know how to die, had finally learned to do so on the beach.

Finally, I came upon a small young harbor seal, perhaps three feet long, that had crawled up onto the beach on the last receding tide, its drag marks still clearly visible in the sand. He had no apparent injuries, but lay fairly motionless, giving convulsive heaves every now and then. He showed no fear of me, and I stood for a while talking to him calmly telling him I could not, would not help him, knowing he did not want me to help him.

Yet when I began to leave he looked at me with such soulful eyes, lifting one webbed arm and shaking it as if reaching out to me in supplication, that I returned and approached him directly, not knowing exactly what I would do, but willing to do whatever I could. But he disabused me of his seeming call for help by baring his teeth and warning me off with a sharp growl, giving me leave to depart. But the gulls, the damn gulls, immature and ancient, paraded around him at a distance, regarding him with circumspection and intent, so that I was loath to leave him to their mercies. Yet only minutes before I had felt sympathy for flock of gulls offshore that was being buzzed by a group of sports fishermen in a speedboat.

“A vast morgue,” Thoreau called it, the beach. “A wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it…There is naked Nature,” he said, “inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.” 

Only four days on the beach, and he nailed it. 

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.