Shore Lore: Sanctuary at Lighthouse Beach
For many years, this columnist has tracked down and chronicled all things related to Henry Beston’s classic book, “The Outermost House,” which was written during the scribe’s seclusion in a seaside cottage in Eastham during the mid-1920s.
The house, which Beston referred to as “The Fo’castle,” became a shrine of sorts to those who took his message to heart, even after it was destroyed by the great storm of Feb. 6-7, 1978.
Today, that message still shines through at places such as the dune shacks of Provincetown, the beach camps of Nauset Beach and Sandy Neck, and, yes, a tiny little shanty on Chatham’s Lighthouse Beach known as “Occupy Chatham South Beach” shack, which celebrated its sixth anniversary this month.
“Today marked six years since The Shack first emerged from the sand,” read a Feb. 2 post on the shack’s Facebook page. “The structure has endured dozens of powerful ocean storms, defiant of the forces of nature swirling around it!”
Another post on that page then connected the Chatham shack to its seaside predecessors before it.
“It is … a sanctuary from all the noise and stress swirling around us,” the post read. “For some, it is a temple, or a place to sit and contemplate the world around us, or a chance to take in the beauty and fresh salty air of lower Pleasant Bay. For others, it is a unique and whimsical sculpture clinging to the unforgiving shores of the Atlantic Ocean, waiting to be discovered by passersby.”
The temple portion of that message triggered memories of the late Nan Turner Waldron, who was this columnist’s “Outermost House guru.” Waldron, who died in 2000, often stayed at Beston’s house during the 1960s and 70s, and wrote a book called “Journey to Outermost House.”
“There is a shrine in Japan, Shinto Spirit Home of Yoshida, which I have read shines with white light,” Waldron wrote. “There is no altar, no image of worship, just a space in which to feel. Not entirely unlike the Fo’castle. A quiet place for what Victor Frankl called ‘creative loneliness,’ where anyone may learn the skill of seeing with the inner eye.”
As was noted in this space back in January 2017, “When one seeks the solitude and seclusion of a shack on Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, the journey almost always involves a lengthy walk or four-wheel drive ride through miles of shore and sand, not to mention the arrangements that might need to be made weeks or even months in advance. It’s not always a world that you can just reach out and touch.”
The Occupy folks, all low-profile volunteers from the community, have referred to their shack as a totem, which is defined as “a natural object … that is believed by a particular society to have spiritual significance and that is adopted by it as an emblem.”
Originally, the shack took shape in 2015. “It was cobbled together from storm debris (which included a driftwood birdhouse and a tree) that washed up on South Beach,” according to the Facebook page.
Tom Birch, the shack’s “keeper of the flag,” has managed to maintain a stars and stripes presence flying on the roof. Christmas decorations somehow continue to shine during the holiday season. The shack was also “on a whale as part of the ‘Art in the Park’ exhibit at Kate Gould Park in Chatham” last summer, and has its own shark warning flag, installed in October 2019.
“The structure has already become an iconic image of the local community,” the group raved back in 2017. It still is, especially since it’s an ideal place for anyone to visit during a pandemic.
“The Shack is a great place for social distancing,” one Facebook post read. “Happy Sixth Anniversary to our beloved Shack, which has become a local icon and tourist destination.”
Don Wilding, a writer, tour guide, and public speaker on Cape Cod lore, can be reached via email at donwilding@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter at @WildingsCapeCod and on Facebook at @donwildingscapecod. Shore Lore appears weekly.