Still, the dominant image of Cape Cod for most Americans today is probably that of one of the Nation’s most popular summer playgrounds. For two centuries countless visitors and vacationers have escaped the burdens and the routines of daily life for a day, a week, or a season of liberation, exploration, relaxation, and recreation along the Cape’s unsurpassed beaches, ponds, marshes, bays, pine barrens, inlets, and dunes. Originally a summer resort for Bostonians and other New Englanders, the Cape now receives visitors from everywhere, at all seasons of the year. One of the favorite summer games for Cape children is to see how many different state license plates they can spot. Not infrequently they can get them all, including Alaska and Hawaii—as well as the Canadian provinces, Mexico, and several European countries. Where Cape Cod once produced seamen who sailed around the globe to bring home wealth and exotic treasures, the Cape has in turn become host to much of the world, providing the setting for countless beach parties, clambakes, family outings, sailing and fishing trips, summer romances, and increasingly, an appreciation and enjoyment of its rich environment, history, and natural resources. [Illustration: _Gulls seem to be everywhere, but the variety of birds makes Cape Cod a birdwatcher’s paradise throughout the year. Along shorelines, tides rhythmically polish shells and cobbles._] What constitutes the enduring allure of a place like Cape Cod? What makes more people than ever cross the Cape Cod Canal bridges at all seasons in search of something they believe lies in promise for them here despite ever-increasing traffic jams, crowded beaches, the continuing proliferation of honky-tonk tourist traps, and the ongoing fragmentation of woodlands and waterfronts by commercial and residential development? Over the centuries the universal and nearly perfect image of Cape Cod as a flexed human arm has provided an ambivalent symbol for what its settlers and visitors have hoped to find here. For the fearful yet hopeful Pilgrim passengers on the _Mayflower_ it both beckoned and threatened, offering religious liberty and land for settlement, yet at the same time presenting, in William Bradford’s words, “a wild and savage hue,” a “hideous and desolate wilderness” that many of them would not survive. To their maritime descendants the Cape offered seemingly endless abundance from the sea and a springboard to personal fortune; yet at the same time it proved to be a treacherous barrier to sea traffic, a graveyard for hundreds of ships that fell victim to the Cape’s treacherous rips and shoals, or to fierce northeast storms and gales. It was not by chance, or merely to escape the wind, that most old Cape houses are built well back from the shore. As Rowena Myers, an 88-year-old lifetime resident of Orleans once explained to me, “The old people didn’t like to look at the sea once they were ashore. It held too much pain for them.”