In this behavior I see the play of learning, the many repetitions that precede a balanced natural art. Other adults swing in with sand eels or fish in their bills and hover, or circle back, avoiding rivals, then drop down next to a twittering, beak-gaping child, giving it the whole fish, or holding on to it and flying away, which has the effect of teasing the young one to follow after. In this way the fledgling terns, some still crouching down in a submissive manner as they did in their nests, learn to fly up, to chase, dive, and dodge, to breast the air, and beat their wings for all the long voyages their lives may hold. In a few weeks most of them will suddenly flock away and migrate. In the meantime they practice the instinctive measures of growth, training in the insistent, excitable ways of a tern, for air and open waters over half the earth. _September_ _Youth on the Move_ The tourists and the summer residents begin to leave the Cape. This is a visible exodus, with many more cars going out than coming in. The people in charge of commerce count our summer gains and our losses. Those of us who are year-round residents can admit it in public, now that the representatives of the humming, spreading urban world have departed. Here now is a half-populated place, temporarily, perhaps shamefully, consigned to a dull future. And yet, according to the practice I have begun to learn by years of residence, I can now look around, with room to spare. What fills this emptiness? What will I see when I take off my dark glasses? I notice, by the way, that some of us are now predicting the local future with more assurance. I hear a real Cape Codder (meaning someone born here, preferably before 1900) pronouncing that there will be a frost around the sixteenth, and that “We’ll have a blow pretty soon.” The night heaves with heat. A half-clouded, half-misted sky shows occasional stars. Then an onshore wind begins to blow and the land stirs and frets in the darkness. I feel that new revolutions are in order, earth-honored, momentous changes. In the morning the weather vane stands to the north. The sea is kicked up, the trees are swaying, and the temperature has dropped into the fifties. A new wind is getting in its licks, rolling and lunging against us. The air above the sea meets the great air masses from the land. Warm and cold, water and air, west and south, north and east, join in a game of strength. The whole day is a trial for the future, with the running clouds as its pawns. A child asks her father: “Can the day blow away?” When the wind dies down and the clouds clear off, the air has changed from a hazy warmth to clarity. The sea turns dark blue, groined with white caps. The land seems strict and clean, lifted into pure new skies and a new silence, although at night the musical pulsing of the snowy tree crickets is still as shrill and loud as spring peepers.