The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod, and: Heaven's Coast: A Memoir (review)

In my creative writing classes, I used to talk about setting as a way to enhance mood and character. And, I would use those exercises one creative writing teacher passes on to another: Write a brief description of a lake told in first person from the point of view of a man who has just murdered a child there. Don't refer to the murder or the child. Students love that one—the gorier the better.

Lately, though, in thinking about creative nonfiction, my own point of view has shifted. Couldn't setting, in fact, be a main character, rather than just a way to create tone or mood? Most of us, even the wanderers, search for a home in the world. Sometimes the memory of this home turns out to be as intense as the people who once lived there. In the books I will discuss, Cape Cod is such a place, one that plays a major role, rather than a supporting one, in the lives of many artists and writers.

The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod, by Cynthia Huntington. University Press of New England, 1999. 183 pages, paperback, $14.95.

For the first three summers of her marriage, Cynthia Huntington lived with her former husband, the artist Bert Yarborough, on the back shore of Cape Cod in a dune shack two hundred yards above the beach, on land owned by the National Park Service. Recalling "days of light and water, salt air, the salt white dunes, the bit of seawater on [her] skin" years later, she says she carries them in her body, "distilled in memory and circulated in the blood."

Living in dunes that have never been permanently occupied, have always been sand that is constantly moving, Huntington writes about change. "There is a strength to this place that cannot be owned, but only inhabited—as animals inhabit each place in its own time, in full confidence of belonging." Huntington not only belongs to this landscape, but she also sees it as a metaphor for humanity, "the salt house of our bodies." Observing the Outer Cape closely, along with her new marriage, she watches "sand blowing over, covering everything." This transience helps her to appreciate the beauty and importance of daily life.

Huntington's life in the dune shack takes place in a "single room of unfinished boards, about twelve by sixteen, with a narrow deck in front, facing east, a wall of windows looking north, and a weathervane on a knobby pole, that twirls like crazy in the constant winds. . . . Inside are three tables, one under each window, bunk beds, a gas stove for cooking, and a wood stove for heat." She and her husband both learn that life in small quarters depends on each of them spending time alone every day, and upon negotiation. Huntington becomes "a defender of small regions, guarding [her] work area under the back window—a tabletop measuring twenty-four by thirty inches—like sacred ground." Sometimes she wonders why she lives "with this hulking, hairy, stale-smelling, large and surly creature."Yet, side by side in the salt house, she and her husband become their unguarded selves, "discovering the natural distance between one mind and another."

To Huntington, the salt house is home: "The taste of salt is always on my tongue here, held in the air and on every surface, beading my skin. The air has a flavor, a bite; even the sun has edges, reflected and magnified by sand and water." Although Huntington's beach house is borrowed, she knows it is "no less borrowed than our bones. It holds our lives and we call it home, returning at night out of the wide, dark world."

Heaven's Coast, a memoir by Mark Doty. HarperCollins, 1996. 305 pages, cloth, $24.00.

Mark Doty and his former partner, Wally Roberts, chose Provincetown, Massachusetts...