“Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life.’’

— Henry Beston (1888-1968), American writer and naturalist, in The Outermost House, the classic story of the time he spent living alone in a shack on Cape Cod’s Nauset Beach.