The salt house : a summer on the dunes of Cape Cod

A woman writer's lyrical memoir of a summer with her artist husband in a remote Cape Cod dune shack. 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. The Salt House is a beautifully observed and written 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. A place where "year-round" often means several addresses. 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. The Salt House shares a world that is less natural history or memoir than it is neighborhood exploration -- the process of learning a place and becoming native to it.

"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."--BOOK JACKET. "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."--BOOK JACKET. The Salt House is a beautifully written memoir of a long summer's stay of the back shore of Cape Cod. The book shares a world that is less natural history or memoir than it is neighborhood exploration-the process of learning a place and becoming native to it We live on the inside curve of a spiral, where the peninsula turns around on itself and curls backward.