Few things remain in place on the edge of the cliffs or on the dunes. They either move or disappear. Cape Cod Light, first built in 1796, has been replaced twice; the current tower sits some 600 feet back from the site of the original one, though only a little more than 100 feet from the present cliff edge. The present Eastham Coast Guard Station, built in 1936, is a successor to the first one, which succumbed to beach erosion. When the Seashore was established in 1961, more than 80 cottages existed on its barrier beaches. Today, as a result of subsequent storms, less than one quarter of them remain. Logs and other objects, including the remains of old shipwrecks, are frequently uncovered by eroding dunes and beaches. During a dramatic storm, while he was staying in the Outermost House in the 1920s, Henry Beston described how the blackened skeleton of an ancient ship that had been buried in a dune for more than a century “floated and lifted itself free ... thus stirring from its grave and yielding its bones again to the fury of the gale.” [Illustration: _Fall and winter storms often develop quickly and tear away at the shorelines, removing sands from one place and depositing them elsewhere._] One survivor of this coastal erosion is the Old Harbor Life Saving Station. Now a maritime museum at Race Point Beach in Provincetown, it began life in 1897 twenty miles to the south on Chatham’s North Beach. In 1977, in the face of imminent destruction, the station was cut in half and floated on two barges to its present site. During the summer, the beaches of the Outer Cape present a generally peaceful and benign aspect. A wide, gently sloping shelf of sand lies between the base of the sea cliffs and a rhythmic, moderate surf. The summer shoreline’s peaceful countenance encourages the illusion that all this change and rearrangement of shoreline lies in the settled past. There is little indication to the summer visitor of the ferocity, violence, and transformation that visit this coast in the “off-season.” But if one returns in late autumn, when the prevailing winds shift to the north and the east, when the first northeasters of the season begin to chew away at the wide summer beach, replacing it with a short, steep winter berm, one begins to have a sense that this is still a land in the making, that, as Henry Beston observed, “Creation is here and now.”