The House on Nauset Marsh

This is an important book because it, like Thoreau's journals, is a record of a particular place at a particular time. What did it look like then? What plants, birds, fish came and went? How did people think about the place? These questions are answered in writing that transports you back in time to an apparently quieter and more leisurely world. Yes, there's a bit too much on fishing and hunting for my taste, but I find that I just skip those chapters when I go back to this book, as I do every couple of years. A must for anyone trying to get a handle on Cape Cod.

Set in a small farm house on a Cape Cod marsh in a the 1940s and early 50s, it portrays the Cape in a time before masses of visitors changed it from an isolated backwater to an overrun tourist destination (a change that seems to have taken over so many parts of our country). I spent summers on the Cape as a young boy in the late 50s and early sixties, and Richardson's writing brings back that sense of wild emptiness and special light that used to make Cape Cod so special. The writing and lovely illustrations recall a time when you could have a hand in the gathering of your own food and take joy in the beauty of the process. We have gained much smugness and lost so much else since then; the House on Nauset Marsh brings back a sense of how lives connected to nature used to be.

Wyman Richardson's account of life on Cape Cod, first published in 1947, is a delight to read even tho' much has changed on the Cape since then. This is a book to treasure in the dead of winter when one longs to 'feel the whims of the sea'or 'hear the slow low pitch of a cricket's song.' Richardson, besides being a physician, is a first rate nature writer. His 'other' life comes alive as he describes morning in the old farmhouse where 'you can look out the south windows over the ...grassy hills...over the blue water of Nauset Marsh' and in the early morning 'an orange moon slipping behind the western horizon.' Richardson paints pictures with words that draw the reader, however briefly, into the pages of his book. First rate. I loved it.