The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Salt House is a memoir of a long summer's stay on the back shore of Cape Cod. Each chapter is like a prose poem, shedding increasing light on the challenge of finding "home" without the illusion of permanence, a quest based not on ownership but on affinity and familiarity with an area and its people. Cynthia Huntington expands her theme through images of the landscape, the shack, the new marriage.. "The shack, named "Euphoria," is built as a house set on stilts above the sand, to take the wind under it. Only a partial shelter, it is inhabited for only one season a year, yet it endures. The outer cape has the feel of a place for migrants and drifters - for birds and other wildlife, and for people such as artists, fishermen, and coast guardsmen. Similarly, her narrative describes improvised, fragile beginnings: a new marriage, learning to be at home in the world, becoming intimate with the natural world, without the necessity of settling down.
SYNOPSIS
A woman writer's lyrical memoir of a summer with her artist husband in a remote Cape Cod dune shack.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Like a treasure from the sea, this memoir is polished, luminous and elemental. Poet Huntington and her artist husband, Bert Yarborough, spent three seasons in a single-room "dune shack" on a remote Provincetown beach she describes as "a place of such wild austere beauty that at first I had no word for its spaces, its dusty heat, the thrilling clarity of its air." Her exquisitely written journal recounts the just-married couple's adjustment to each other as lovers and artists, living in isolation and sensitive to the seasonal changes from May to September. Their solitude is broken by occasional guests, trips to town and visits with other summer migrants, who populate the shacks--originally built by squatters on the tip of Cape Cod--slowly being reclaimed by the National Park Service as their owners die off. Called "Euphoria," for the wind, their wooden shack measures 12 by 16 feet, has no electricity, and is 40-minutes down the beach from the nearest town. By no means a tale of privation, Huntington's memoir is full of rich observations of the stars, birds, sea, vegetation, dunes, of time itself and of the author and her mate. Her words resonate with a poet's sensibility: she describes fish as "vital, immaculate bodies of streaming light, each one shining fire." Despite the unromantic jacket photograph and awkward end-of-summer publication date, those who admire this sort of quiet, pleasurable style or are in thrall to beach life will find this slim volume a great companion. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Where else but at the beach do people lie down right on the earth? This is just one of poet Huntington's insights in a nature journal that explores the three summers she and her husband spent some ten years ago in Euphoria, a 12' by 16' dune shack on stilts in a remote area of Cape Cod. Their days were orchestrated by the sun and the weather. Living without electricity, heating water with sunlight, and walking three miles to the local grocery store were conditions Huntington accepted without regret--she believes these were the richest days of her life, when she fulfilled her greatest adventure of finding a home in the world. Huntington is a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth and also teaches in the MFA writing program at Vermont College. Her writing, reminiscent of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek, is perfect all-season reading for nature enthusiasts and writers and especially warm reading for cold winter nights by the fire.--Joyce Sparrow, Oldsmar Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A very fine account, airy and elemental as epigrammatic poetry, of a season on outer Cape Cod that spawns irresistible daydreams, from Huntington (English and Creative Writing/Dartmouth; We Have Gone to the Beach, not reviewed, etc.). Three summers, distilled here into one, Hutchinson spent with her husband in a little dune shack set along the ridge that runs from Provincetown to North Truro: a foothold of sand, dune country, and the tip of the cape. The shack is a relict of a certain generation of beach cottage�only a dozen remain, and they are on public land soon to revert to the Park Service�built by Coast Guardsmen years back. Raw, wobbly, eccentric structures, Hutchinson's is a typical mere 12-by-16 feet, with the pump down a footpath that slips between rose bushes. The observations she tenders are sharp and deeply evocative, capturing the wild and austere light and space, the pale line of the horizon, the grass luffing in a drying breeze, the drape of the night sky, the glow of an oil lamp thinning the dark. It�s a place of woods "poor, bent and twisted inward as if they would consume themselves," and an ocean "that mutters like a restless dreamer" when it isn�t rambunctious. She is attentive to the citizens of the dunes, the fishermen and the few in-dwellers, but she is more taken with (and works her writing better upon) other contentious tribes, of kittiwakes and plovers and sanderlings, glorious and exorbitant in their angry territoriality. She walks (and walks and walks) among the bayberry and beach plums that stabilize the duneland. And there is the tug and press of domestic life in a tiny space, with her new husband, Bert, an amiable sculptor who is known to invadeher work space (how could he not?), disturbing "the holograph of a half-realized thought." Lucky Huntington to have lived in such a place, enviable Huntington to have applied so keenly the exigent art of seeing. (1 map)
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