Clouds suggest seaweed, grasses, wings. Occasionally they remind me of ferns, and of the fernlike patterns that the frost makes on a window, or they resemble some basic structure of a living thing. As plants and animals are united in fundamental physical laws and in their chemical composition, so clouds, for all their evanescence, cannot be separated from the world of life. Clouds are announcements of progress and decline. They show the sky’s adventures. There is more to them than my fancy. The light, the wind, the altitude, temperature, time of day or year commit them to a definite size, shape, and existence. They are images of substance, in a motion which casts everything into its weather, including that human sign on the sky, the jet’s trail, imposing an abstract scar ten miles across. _The Inconstant Land_ When the clouds cover the sky like gun smoke and the air feels cold and restricting, I am reminded that the character of Cape Cod has nothing to offer an uncertain world except uncertainty. Its trees are not of a size to hang on to, and its dunes shift like the waves. It is a land that men have ravaged with fire, not excluding the Indians who preceded us, and abused without compunction. It is said there used to be great stands of trees on the Cape, hardwoods, hemlocks and pine. The remnants of submerged Atlantic white cedar forests have been found as far as three miles out in Cape Cod Bay, and bog borings have revealed the evidence of timber in some areas where trees now have only a bare subsistence. But during the nineteenth century, judging by photographs and local account, this peninsula was much poorer in trees than it is now, even though our local woods cannot be given credit for much height and dignity. A man from New Hampshire visited me briefly a few years ago and said: “What in the world are you living here for? There aren’t any trees!” I pointed out to him that we had the sea, but the place seemed poor and flat to him, and he headed back to the mountains and tall timber as fast as he could, though he first chose to have a lunch of seafood, on his way out.