A poignant chronicle of a beloved nature writer’s fifty-year relationship with an iconic American landscape. Cape Cod is, in Robert Finch’s poetic phrase, “a cherished face deteriorating in the rain of time.” Nowhere is this truth more vivid and dramatic than along its forty miles of Atlantic coast, which Finch has always known as “the Outer Beach.” The stories here are the rich harvest of over fifty years and a thousand miles walking along it. They include encounters with shipwrecks and beached whales, two nights trapped by a blizzard in a sand-dune shack, and a simple evening with friends around a bonfire. Finch pays tribute to the Outer Beach’s impressive literary legacy, meditates on its often tragic history, and explores the curious, mutable nature of time near the sea. Above all, Finch presents the beach—with thoughtfulness, humor, and humility—as a powerful symbol of mortality that begs us to consider: how do we accept our situation here, caught between gratuitous beauty and merciless indifference?