Walking with my dog on an East End beach one breezy, overcast afternoon, I encountered two young men engaged in a photo shoot, complete with props, just above the tide line. Absorbed as they were in their project, they were completely unaware of the drama unfolding just behind them. Hundreds of gulls and cormorants, shrieking and calling, dove repeatedly on what must have been a concentrated school of baitfish as they followed it along the shoreline. These two activities, one human and the other avian, viewed in a single frame, represent the everyday reality of Cape Cod.
And I thought of Bob Finch, who died on the last day of September.
No other writer since Thoreau has chronicled Cape Cod’s unique blend of human and natural history better than Robert Finch, who for well over 50 years wrote about the intricacies of Cape Cod life. I first read his columns long ago in the Provincetown Advocate and of course listened to him in recent years on WCAI’s “Cape Cod Notebook”; I have many of his volumes of collected essays. His work will stand the test of time along with that of his mentor John Hay and a person prominent in his pantheon, Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau had his world, and we have ours. Generations from now, people will learn from Bob about the joys and challenges of living on the Cape at this time. There have been so many changes on this “narrow land,” yet so much of the ineffable essence of the place has remained the same. This, to me, is the crux of his work, to incorporate this duality and find our place in it. He asks: “How are we to get here, once we have arrived?”
Read or listen to one of his essays and the essential intelligence immediately shines through and enhances the beauty of his perfectly crafted sentences. He not only expresses our overall wonderment and love for this special place, but he asks the right questions, somehow anticipating our own. The record of his life reveals a unique and personable fellow who is happy to bring us along on his walks and share his musings. Along with his intelligence, there is his passion for discovery, often for the very things we walk by every day.
For instance, he writes in an essay called “The Tactile Land”: “The traditional Cape Cod house, the dory, the catboat, the quahog rake, the cranberry scoop, and a hundred other structures and implements all possess a grace of shape and line, a fitness to purpose or task, which stems from an ingrained feeling for how they would fit into the wind, the tides, or the earth’s greening bogs.” There is a lot to learn in a Robert Finch essay because, much like John McPhee, he takes an interest in how things happen, how they are put together, whether it is the formation of barrier beaches or the construction of a bank swallow’s nest.
Bob Finch demonstrated the basic dignity of the writing life. His words reflect an integrity that was an essential part of who he was. His experiences were elegantly brought to life in his sentences, which never seem affected and always ring true. In this way, he has always been my mentor, even if he never knew it.
We take our lives so for granted, expecting against all evidence that everything will just remain the same. When someone leaves us we are momentarily shocked into the awareness that we are all temporary entities. We each have an expiration date. When we die, we leave a temporary space — the inverse of the pebble tossed onto the surface of the water. What is left of the world closes in over what we were. Our influences, of course, remain with those who loved us, and to a lesser extent with those who were aware of us, but this, too, passes with time.
I heard recently that everyone dies twice: first at the actual event and second when one’s name is last spoken. In this regard, Robert Finch, that gentle soul who chronicled Cape Cod for us all, will be around for a very long time.
