[Illustration: _Winds and tides constantly move the sands, tearing down dunes and creating new ones._] Today Cape Cod beckons as never before to a Nation increasingly starved, in Henry Beston’s words, “for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.” Seventy-five million of us live within a day’s drive of Barnstable County. During the past 30 years the Cape’s permanent population has risen from 70,000 to 190,000, a figure that nearly triples during the peak summer season. Some come to walk the spacious curved length of the Great Beach of Cape Cod, which Thoreau claimed was a place where “a man may stand and put all America behind him” (though at many public beaches in July and August it may seem as if one has most of America in front of him!). Others seek quieter places like the soft pine barrens of the interior woodlands, or one of the Cape’s hundreds of clear kettle-hole ponds, or the dune country of the Province Lands with its eccentric and colorful community of dune shacks—an ever-shifting landscape of mirages and stark, unexpected beauty. Still others find, along the Cape’s many well-preserved village streets, in its old farmhouses and meandering stone walls of glacial boulders, its lighthouses, fishing shacks, and aging fleets of sea-beaten draggers and lobster boats, a deep sense of that earnest, abiding, communal history that flourished here for so long and which we seek to borrow to help anchor our more modern, shifting lives. Many are attracted to the energetic and often outrageous bohemian diversity of a place like Provincetown, or to the Cape’s many art galleries, theaters, concerts, and museums. Some may hope for a glimpse of the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport or a movie star on the bench in front of a local general store. Others look forward to a Cape Cod lobster and clam dinner (which may, in fact, have come from the waters off Maine or Alaska) at a waterfront restaurant, or the seemingly endless array of gift shops, night spots, and tourist diversions (including increasingly elaborate miniature golf courses with waterfalls and “historic reproductions”)—much of which have little or no indigenous connection with Cape Cod and can be had elsewhere, but which somehow seem to mean more when experienced here. One element that seems to embrace and permeate all of the Cape’s attractions is natural change. Change, of course, takes place in any environment, but here on the Cape it seems peculiarly pervasive, visible, and dramatic, particularly along the ocean shore. I like to point out to people who want to retrace Thoreau’s famous walk along the Outer Beach that they are likely to get pretty wet if they try it, since Thoreau’s original path now lies several hundred feet offshore! [Illustration: _In stark contrast with the sandy shorelines, the upper Herring River in Wellfleet is rich in vegetation._]