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THE GREAT BEACH by John Hay

THE GREAT BEACH

By

Publisher: Doubleday

n much the same manner as in Nature's Year, and with the same shortcomings, John Hay once again describes the Cape Cod he dwells in and upon with love. There are few facts as to the Cape's origin some 20,000 years ago, as to its population -- 80,000 year-rounders, 300,000 summer visitors. There are a multitude of reflections on nature: on the sea as a ""positive mystery"", a realm of being; on the nature of cliff life, storms, the marshes; on making a twenty-five mile walk from Race Point in Provincetown to Nauset Light in Eastham and feeling that its emptiness, the great tidal range beyond it and through it, the raw heartbeat of the waves, the implacable sun, established the kind of isolation and helplessness in me which the commerce and community of our lives tries so hard to disguise"". There is intermittent attention given to creatures--alewives, jellyfish, deer, birds, but the whole gives a sense of the wanderer in search of meaning not sufficiently grounded in the facts of nature to give a certainty to the material.