The air was full of salt, new-washed, crisp and exhilarating, and the call of the beach itself was irresistible. Making cautious and slow headway, I headed south along it with the sea nipping at my heels and the salt spray in my face. This was the beach that Thoreau had known so well and that Henry Beston so lovingly described in his “The Outermost House”; but even Beston, who knew the beach in all seasons and in all weathers, might not have recognized it that day. It was hardly there at all, for nearly all of its white wideness was covered with the gaping jaws of the waves that threatened it. Westward of the beach the salt marshes were completely awash and all the way to Route 28 you looked across a whole sea that was leaden and riled and made the whole landscape unfamiliar and strange. All along the beach the breakers tore and crashed against the high sand dunes. Walking became a tricky, perilous business with the sea acting as if it were possessed of some malicious wit of its own with which it could set a trap for the unalert. So great were the breakers that, when they would recede, a hundred feet of beach would stand bare and revealed only to be covered up in the very next instant while the water reached for your feet and sent you scrambling up the sand dunes to safety. The air was filled with the continuous roar and swish of the sea but after walking a bit you could anticipate its next attack by the crash of the comber and the intensity of the swish as it swept over the sand. The wind had played tricks with the dunes, changing not only their shapes but their entire position. In one place a ship’s spar, remnant of an ancient shipwreck, had resisted the wind which then carved a huge vertical funnel around it. Erosion and the wind had left huge pillars of sand teetering under their own weight. The whole beaten strip of beach had the look of a miniature, tortured Grand Canyon. Even the usually indestructible beach grass had suffered. Its roots were exposed, its head bowed, and in the tracings on the sand one could detect the wild gyrations it had been forced to perform at the will of the wind. In seven distinct places the sea had crashed all the way through the barrier beach, surging over the marsh toward the main highway. Three of them were knee-deep and as you waded through them the water swirled about your legs with tremendous force. Walking became a real effort. At last the Outermost House was in sight and it was miraculously unaffected by the storm. Henry Beston would have been proud of the look of it as it nestled in the dunes unconcerned by the changing and chaotic world around it.