The tides of the North Atlantic are the world's highest, and they reveal a world of amazing seashore life--from jellies and sea anemones, to clams and crabs, to seaweeds and lichens. With some 300 crisp, vibrant color photographs and brief, precise descriptions, this field guide makes it easier than ever to identify Atlantic seashore life from Canada to Cape Cod. Duane Sept covers more than 225 common intertidal species found on rocky shores, sandy shores, mud beaches, and floating docks, and explains the natural history of these specialized organisms. He also describes tidal habitats, tells how to explore the seashore in a safe and environmentally responsible way, and provides extensive information on some of the best places in the North Atlantic to view seashore life. Both casual and dedicated beachcombers will find this a handy, enjoyable, and reliable guide. The first full-color photographic guide to North Atlantic seashore life Includes some 300 color photographs and illustrations Makes species identification quick and easy Covers more than 225 common intertidal species found from Canada to Cape Cod Covers rocky shores, sandy shores, mud beaches, and floating docks Tells how to explore safely and in an environmentally responsible way Provides extensive information on some of the best places to visit in the Atlantic Northeast

The classic nature memoir of Cape Cod in the early twentieth century, “written with simplicity, sympathy, and beauty” (New York Herald Tribune). When Henry Beston returned home from World War I, he sought refuge and healing at a house on the outer beach of Cape Cod. He was so taken by the natural beauty of his surroundings that his two-week stay extended into a yearlong solitary adventure. He spent his time trying to capture in words the wonders of the magical landscape he found himself in thrall to. In The Outermost House, Beston chronicles his experiences observing the migrations of seabirds, the rhythms of the tide, the windblown dunes, and the scatter of stars in the changing summer sky. Beston argued: “The world today is sick to its thin blood for the lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.” Nearly a century after publication, Beston’s words are more true than ever.

When Pres. John F. Kennedy established the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961, it was acclaimed as the "finest victory ever recorded for the cause of conservation in New England." When erosion and overdevelopment threatened the Cape, the idea of a national seashore took hold, forever protecting this treasured place. The park preserves 44,000 acres of forest, marsh, bog, and ponds, and a 40-mile stretch from Provincetown to Chatham, which Henry David Thoreau called the "Great Beach." Unlike other national parks at the time, the Cape Cod National Seashore was created from a combination of private, town, state, and federal lands. Cape Cod National Seashore: The First 50 Years captures the political drama of the creation of this extraordinary seashore. Images detail an early Native American presence and the romance of whaling, shipwrecks, lighthouses, windmills, and dune shacks.

East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. For twenty miles this last and outer earth faces the ever hostile ocean in the form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold. Many earths compose it, and many gravels and sands stratified and intermingled. It has many colours: old ivory here, peat here, and here old ivory darkened and enriched with rust. At twilight, its rim lifted to the splendour in the west, the face of the wall becomes a substance of shadow and dark descending to the eternal unquiet of the sea; at dawn the sun rising out of ocean gilds it with a level silence of light which thins and rises and vanishes into day. At the foot of this cliff a great ocean beach runs north and south unbroken, mile lengthening into mile. Solitary and elemental, unsullied and remote, visited and possessed by the outer sea, these sands might be the end or the beginning of a world. Age by age, the sea here gives battle to the land; age by age, the earth struggles for her own, calling to her defence her energies and her creations, bidding her plants steal down upon the beach, and holding the frontier sands in a net of grass and roots which the storms wash free. The great rhythms of nature, to-day so dully disregarded, wounded even, have here their spacious and primeval liberty; cloud and shadow of cloud, wind and tide, tremor of night and day. Journeying birds alight here and fly away again all unseen, schools of great fish move beneath the waves, the surf flings its spray against the sun. Often spoken of as being entirely glacial, this bulwark is really an old land surfaced with a new. The seas broke upon these same ancient bounds long before the ice had gathered or the sun had fogged and cooled. There was once, so it would seem, a Northern coastal plain. This crumbled at its rim, time and catastrophe changed its level and its form, and the sea came inland over it through the years. Its last enduring frontier roughly corresponds to the wasted dyke of the cliff. Moving down into the sea, later glaciations passed over the old beaches and the fragments of the plain, and, stumbling over them, heaped upon these sills their accumulated drift of gravels, sand, and stones. The warmer sea and time prevailing, the ice cliff retreated westward through its fogs, and presently the waves coursed on to a new, a transformed and lifeless, land. So runs, as far as it is possible to reconstruct it in general terms, the geological history of Cape Cod. The east and west arm of the peninsula is a buried area of the ancient plain, the forearm, the glaciated fragment of a coast. The peninsula stands farther out to sea than any other portion of the Atlantic coast of the United States; it is the outermost of outer shores. Thundering in against the cliff, the ocean here encounters the last defiant bulwark of two worlds.

Long recognized as a classic of American nature writing. This chronicle of a solitary year spent on a Cape Cod beach was written in longhand at the kitchen table, in a little room overlooking the North Atlantic and the dunes. In 1964, the Cape Cod house was officially proclaimed a National Literary Landmark. In 1978, a massive winter storm swept it off its foundation and out to sea.