It is not the place I came to, out of the city, though its shape, like a giant curved arm, or fish hook lying out in the Atlantic, is the same. Its oak trees have grown, even in the comparatively few years I have lived here. The old, gray-shingled houses are still in evidence, but there are many more new ones, seemingly temporary as this age goes. The shores are crowded, beginning toward the end of June. We are scrambling to take advantage of our summer economy while it lasts, although the buzz saw sounds the year through, as well as the chickadees, building motels, summer cottages, gas stations, houses for the retired. Cape Cod still has a certain itinerant quality, which may ally it to its more seagoing past. In my own terms the Cape is not the same. I have outlived my dependence on its past. I go by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gravestones with less interest. The “old characters” are not around to talk to any more. I am not quite so fascinated by grown-over wagon tracks as I used to be. Something pleasant is lost--even a blessed continuity. Still, I have learned to look for another, which has no particular choice as to place, joining them all. This is not just “natural history” I have found, unless you are also willing to call it “natural mystery.” This is life, or death-in-life, as well as “nature.” In any case it is bountiful, or niggardly, relentless, terrible, but always at hand. Only walk out and see. Cape Cod is rife with unknown lives (and what I know about its ocean waters is not worth mentioning). Where do we begin? With a first question perhaps. To make it is to recover from being afraid of getting or giving the wrong answer, a step toward knowledge. I have not learned much about cell structure, or the delicate co-ordination of organisms in their environment, or some of those remarkable mechanisms that trigger action in certain plants or animals of land and sea; but I have made that first step. I stand by some pond, wondering how deep it is. Everything around me says, in comparative silence: “As deep as you make it,” and I have no need to think my questions will delay the source that leads them on. The rolling energies of nature remind us of our own potentialities. In a small country field is all existence and its hazards. Ponderous storms, killing balances of cold and heat, great rains or droughts, hang over the needs of its competitive inhabitants. A natural, unimpeachable violence wipes out untold numbers, or holds them to its order. And yet the plants and animals themselves that endure, survive, and die prove an essential vigor in the process. It is not only a matter of “food gathering” and “competition” for them. They fight the winds, in rhythmic unity. They are made to face the universe, with the universe inside them. Their motions, their changing adaptation to circumstance, are also their great self-expenditure. Live and be finished off, but above all live!