Robert Finch
The late Robert Finch was a nature writer who made his home in Wellfleet, and wrote about Cape Cod for more than forty years. He was the author of nine books of essays. A Cape Cod Notebook airs weekly on WCAI, the NPR station for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and the South Coast. In both 2006 and 2013, the series won the New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.
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I stopped by the other day to see my old friend Annie. Annie lives in a modest beach cottage which is fetchingly named “Off Plumb." I don’t know how old the cottage is, but its flooring is made of sections of an old bowling alley. -
This week Robert Finch tells us why there is nothing more soothing than the sound of rain. -
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One of the most beautiful spots in Wellfleet, or for that matter, on the entire Lower Cape, is Old Wharf Road. It is one of those headlands that, along with Indian Neck and Lieutenant’s Island, thrust out into greater Wellfleet Harbor. -
Stories in the natural world have no true beginnings or endings. In writing about them, we choose a place to start and a place to end, knowing that nature continues to write the story long after we have abandoned it. -
My chum, who these days walks the Outer Beach more often than I do, commented that “high tides are reaching further up the beach than they used to.” -
I spent my teenage years in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a small city on the banks of the Ohio River. There’s not much about the town that would strike a visitor – or a resident, for that matter – as noteworthy. -
About six o’clock one evening, as we were about to sit down to dinner, there came from the other end of the house a loud thunk, as though something had hit a window. I stepped outside to see what the noise was. -
During the third week of May, when the oak leaves are still just pink flickers in the forest canopy, and the pitch pines had not yet begun painting the landscape with their dry yellow swaths of pollen, then the lowly huckleberry spreads its emerald scarves far and wide throughout the forest floor. -
This is about crows. Or rather, this is about a crow. I stress the singular, because if there’s any lesson in the incident I’m about to relate, it’s to caution us against generalizing about other animal species. We’re all too quick to talk or write about “owls” or “woodcocks” or “whales,” as though each one we encounter is totally representative of all owls, woodcocks and whales, and that individuality is purely a human trait.
