The Outermost House by Henry Beston

I

During the winter the world of the dunes and the great beach was entirely my own, and I lived at the Fo'castle as undisturbed as Crusoe on his island. Man disappeared from the world of nature in which I lived almost as if he, too, were a kind of migratory bird. It is true that I could see the houses of Eastham village on the uplands across the marsh, and the passing ships and fishing boats, but these were the works of man rather than man himself. By the middle of February the sight of an unknown someone walking on the beach near the Fo'castle would have been a historical event. Should any ask how I endured this isolation in so wild a place and in the depth of winter, I can only answer that I enjoyed every moment to the full. To be able to see and study undisturbed the processes of nature -- I like better the old Biblical phrase "mighty works" -- is an opportunity for which any man might well feel reverent gratitude, and here at last, in this silence and isolation of winter, a whole region was mine whose innermost natural life might shape itself to its ancient courses without the hindrance and interferences of man. No one came to kill, no one came to explore, no one even came to see. Earth, ocean, and sky, the triune unity of this coast, pursued each one their vast and mingled purposes as untroubled by man as a planet on its course about the sun.