Fording one more breakthrough I found myself at Nauset Inlet where the sea crashed toward the Mainland without hindrance and the rip tides had a special fury of their own. For nearly an hour I perched upon a steep-sided dune and watched the waves reaching for the land. Behind me a ton of sand slid into the sea with a long sigh that emphasized the instability of my position. Suddenly, however, the sun, in its full brilliance, broke through the overcast with finality. Then the wind seemed milder, and, as the tide receded, the waves became less threatening. The whitecaps, now shining in the sunlight, took on such beauty as to quite belie their destructive powers. Out over the breakers a flock of seagulls appeared, flying parallel to the shore and screaming defiance as they flew in and out of the troughs of the waves. They seemed to have confidence that the storm was over. A few feet down the beach a red fox emerged from the protection of a clump of beach grass and walked cautiously toward the water’s edge. He sniffed inquiringly at the sea air and then, with more assurance, trotted off in search of breakfast. Gradually the great wide beach emerged from the ebbing tide. It was flat and wet and covered with the debris of the storm but the oceanside world was returning to normal. The storm had left some marks that might never be erased. And it left with me a memory of a day at the Outer Beach that I could never forget. A DRIVE DOWN CAPE “Yes, I’ve been to Cape Cod. Drove all the way to Provincetown and back. There’s absolutely nothing to it, you know. Nothing but sand and scrub pine. How anyone could live there, or how anyone could choose to go there even for a visit is more than I can figure out!” Every Cape Codder has probably been subjected to some such remark as the above from some “authority” who has taken all of a half day to rush down one side of the Cape and up the other, expecting who knows what miracles and side-shows, but seeing nothing anyway. It is a time to grit the teeth and be glad, at least, that they won’t be back. And yet you wish for a minute that you could show them, show them where the little lane they just passed so quickly led to a view that would be breath-taking in beauty and good for their souls, show them any of a thousand things that are waiting for those who would see. For where under the sun, if not on Cape Cod, could anyone find such infinite variety of landscape and seascape crowded into so small an area? Some of the new highways will be uninteresting, it is true, but so they are anywhere else for they are built for the age of speed when it is essential to go somewhere in a hurry and there is no time for looking around. But the new highways were designed by gentlemen with slide rules far away and they have nothing to do with the old roads that are still there to give pleasure.