The Outer Beach ─ A Thousand-Mile Walk on Cape Cod's Atlantic Shore

Cape Cod is, in Robert Finch’s poetic phrase, “a cherished face deterioratingin the rain of time.” Nowhere is this truth more vivid and dramatic thanalong its forty miles of Atlantic coast, which Finch has always known as “theOuter Beach.” The stories here are the rich harvest of over fifty years and athousand miles walking along it. They include encounters with shipwrecks andbeached whales, two nights trapped by a blizzard in a sand-dune shack, and asimple evening with friends around a bonfire. Finch pays tribute to the OuterBeach’s impressive literary legacy, meditates on its often tragic history, andexplores the curious, mutable nature of time near the sea. Above all, Finchpresents the beach—with thoughtfulness, humor, and humility—as a powerfulsymbol of mortality that begs us to consider: how do we accept our situationhere, caught between gratuitous beauty and merciless indifference?