Finch Robert - The outer lands: a natural history guide to Cape Cod, Marthas Vineyard, Nantucket, Block Island, and Long Island

THE OUTER
LANDS Revised Edition

A Natural History Guide to Cape Cod,

Marthas Vineyard, Nantucket,

Block Island, and Long Island

DOROTHY STERLING

ILLUSTRATED BY WINIFRED LUBELL

Foreword to the revised edition
by Robert Finch

W W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York London

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

Copyright 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Text Copyright 1967 by Dorothy Sterling

Illustrations Copyright 1967 by Winifred Lubell

All Rights Reserved

Revised Edition

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Sterling, Dorothy

The outer lands.

1. Seashore biology-Massachusetts-Cape Cod

region. 2. Seashore biology-New York (State)

Long Island. 3. Natural history-Massachusetts-Cape

Cod region. 4. Natural history-New York (State)

Long Island. I. Lubell, Winifred. II. Title.

QH105.M4S73 1978 574.97449 78-2339

ISBN 0-393-06438-7

ISBN 0-393-06441-7 pbk.

ISBN 978-0-393-24720-6 (e-book)

One day last summer I overheard a family of tourists as they viewed the exhibits in the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, where I work. The two young boys raced omnivorously from one display to another, gawking at the strange goose-necked barnacles in the salt-water aquarium, handling the necklace-like whelk egg cases, mugging at the frogs and turtles in the aquatics building. Their mother, whose primary concern seemed. to be to keep the boys from getting very near anything, turned at one point to her husband and remarked: I dont see whats so special about this place. We can see these things down on the beach!

Exactly. We live in an age that devalues the familiar and the near at hand, that has taught us to seek novelty rather than reality. Conditioned by electronic media to instant and effortless gratification, we are impatient with a nature that demands deliberate and active response from our mind and senses. We would rather pay for fictional Close Encounters with celluloid aliens than seek actual encounters with a jellyfish or a mole crab, though I think the latter type more genuinely stretches our imaginations.

In an age of global travel, our need for local identification has never been greater. Todays expressways have given us increased speed but less perception, enabling larger numbers of us to go more and more places to see less and less. The glacial outlands described in this book represent some of the oldest settled portions of our country. They front the northeast Megalopolis and are within a days drive to over seventy million people. Each summer countless feet mark their beaches, and new cottages, motels, and year-round houses continue to spring up at a rapid rate.

Yet for all their human traffic, they remain largely an undiscovered country. We have lost that recognition of the familiar that was the common birthright of the old Cape Codders and Islanders, a recognition that came from their intimate and daily interaction with the tides, shores, and marshes that gave them a living. We, on the other hand, having tricked ourselves for so long into believing that we are independent of the life around us, use such places narrowly, oversimplifying them, and so failing to see their diversity and complexity.

This is what makes a book like The Outer Lands so valuable. By making us aware of other worlds of equal stature, complexity, beauty, and wonder that share our own territory, it can help to rescue us from that terrible, isolating human provincialism that our modern mobility has, ironically, bred. It is a guide in the best sense, for it not only informs but heightens our expectations about what we might see. Its pages communicate the authors and the artists own affection and delight, born of long acquaintance, stimulating in us an appetite for rediscovery and providing us with a rich sense of unexplored possibilities in an all-too-familiar landscape.

It is, after all, our own expectations that primarily determine what we find or do not find in the natural world. If these are cheap and easy, then we can count on being disappointed and will no doubt drift gratefully back to our television sets with a new gratitude and appreciation for the gifts of civilization.

But if, using such guides as this, we can acquaint ourselves with a place without thinking that we know it; if we can learn enough facts to gain entrance, but not so much as to draw a curtain of certainty over what we might encounter there; if we have cocked our ears, but do not require what we hear to have a human sound; and, finally, if we seek confrontation rather than confirmation, so that even our chance meeting with a kingfisher or a patch of sea lavender risks our most cherished conceptions of the worldthen we might see something.

Dorothy Sterling talks of these wind-swept, sea-girt, sandy shores as the remnants of an ancient coastline. They are that, old lands that can give us a new appreciation of the depth of our geologic history. But they are also forever new, forever changing places where the ongoing creation of this planet, in all its marvelous diversity, is somehow peculiarly evident, immediate, and accessible on a human scale. New worlds are ours for the asking here; The Outer Lands, with beautiful illustrations by Winifred Lubell, offers its readers an eloquent invitation to discovery.

Robert Finch

No continent is entire of itself. Between the Atlantic Ocean and the rocky rim of New England lies a chain of islands and a peninsula. Long Island points northeast across open stretches of water to Block Island, Marthas Vineyard, Nantucket and the flexed arm of Cape Cod. Isolated by the awesome processes of the earths evolution, these sandy, windswept outlands are the remnants of an ancient coastline. Although they have a shared geology and a common natural history, man, with little concern for this kinship, has parceled them out to three states. Their residents vote for different congressmen, pay different taxes, obey different traffic laws. Even their diet and speech are different. Cape Cods famous clam chowder is made from quahogs and milk, gently boiled; while Long Islanders prepare their chowder with hard-shell clams and stewed tomatoes.

Yet anyone who has walked along the Cape and island beaches, collected shells, dug for clams, fished for stripers, knows that their man-designated differences are less important than their natural similarities. Waves and wind, sun and fog have shaped the sandy substance left behind by Ice Age glaciers to create a landscape strikingly different from that of the mainland, while the lands proximity to the sea has given them a unique plant and animal life. There are broad beaches of white sand, shimmering dunes and green salt meadows. There are quiet ponds, rolling moors and twisted pines. Even the quahog of Cape Cod and Long Islands hard-shell clam are the same organismand only the argument between milk and tomatoes remains to be settled.