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| Photo by My Father |
Henry Beston spent the rest of his life on his farm in Nobleboro, writing about that as well in Northern Farm. His legacy is perpetuated today in The Henry Beston Society.
Beston called his house The Fo'castle, and his descriptions of it included this passage:
I wanted a place to come to in the summer, one cosy enough to be visited in the winter could I manage to get down... It consisted of two rooms, a bed-room and a kitchen-living room, and its dimensions overall were but twenty by sixteen. A brick fireplace with its back to the wall between rooms heated the larger space and took the chill off the bedroom.
When I was a child, my father took me on many treks to visit Henry Beston's Outermost House, including this one in February of 1973. (We also visited his farm in Nobleboro, Maine.) The Outermost House was a favorite of his, so of course our house had at least five copies of it floating around. This is how books were rated before Amazon.
On this visit, the weather turned nasty. It would recall, if not match, this Beston passage:
I woke in the morning to the dry rattle of sleet on my eastern windows and the howling of wind. A northeaster laden with sleet was bearing down on the Cape from off a furious ocean, an ebbing sea fought with a gale blowing directly on the coast; the lonely desolation of the beach was a thousand times more desolate in that white storm pouring down from a dark sky. The sleet fell as a heavy rain falls when it is blown about by the wind. I built up my fire, dressed, and went out, shielding my face from the sleet by pulling my head down into the collar of my coat. I brought in basket after basket of firewood, till the corner of the room resembled a woodshed. Then I folded up the bedclothes, threw my New Mexican blanket over the couch, lighted the oil stove, and prepared breakfast. An apple, oatmeal porridge, toast made at the fireplace, a boiled egg, and coffee.
Sleet and more of it, rushes of it, attacks of it, screaming descents of it; I heard it on the roof, on the sides of the house, on the windowpanes...
A scene of incredible desolation and cold. All day long I kept to my house, building up the fire and keeping watch from the windows...
For a mile or so offshore the North Atlantic was a convulsion of elemental fury whipped by the sleety wind, the great parallels of the breakers tumbling all together and mingling in one seething and immense confusion, the sound of this mile of surf being an endless booming roar, a seethe, and a dread grinding, all intertwined with the high scream of the wind. The rush of the inmost breakers up the beach was a thing of violence and blind will. Darkness coming early, I closed my shutters on the uproar of the outer world, all save one shutter on the landward side.
With the coming of night the storm increased; the wind reaching a velocity of seventy to eighty miles an hour. It was at this time, I am told, that friends on the mainland began to be worried about me...
The house was moved back from the water a couple of times, and finally washed away in the Blizzard of 1978.
