Perhaps there was a law to be learned for _me_. If nature is more than just a background for human thought and endeavor, then it requires a special commitment, a stepping down, a silent, respectful approach. Otherwise we are liable to hear ourselves first, and be put off. I have been given an entry, but not on my own terms. _Other Lands within the “Narrow Land”_ To answer the question “Where am I?” seems not to be an easy thing. “Obviously” this is the vacation land of Cape Cod where the sun sends the bathers to the beaches and the rain drives them back inland to buy souvenirs, where the harbors are crowded with pleasure craft and the highways with cars--an area whose purpose it is to attend to human distraction. Yet right in the middle of it the action of a small bird reveals a land of its own; and how many others are there still unmet? It is very strange to me that I have known so little about what was around me, and that I took so long merely to make some inquiries ... about a few names, a few alliances between living things, just enough to give me a hint or two about the growing we are never finished with. We live in a common realm about which we are still half ignorant and half afraid. A little girl at the beach comes running through the shallow waters crying: “Something touched me, and it wasn’t Daddy!” Later on, her mother wonders aloud if crabs bite. She picks one up and when she gets her answer, screams with pain and anger at all the “unnatural” and the unknown. Just the other side of us is not only a bewildering variety but a space, which we have still to find, filled with an unfamiliar silence, or random sounds, seemingly disconnected motions, sudden flights that we witness out of the corner of an eye. When we only assign the word “purpose” to ourselves, it is hard to understand just what credit to give that which only stands and waits, or moves from one place to another. I sit on the beach, moving a little away from a portable radio that a man has brought to assure himself of his continuous hold on human affairs, and look out over the hazy surface of the water, past a long border of waves that lollop on the sand. There is a large bird standing on a rock not far offshore. I know it as a great black-backed gull, a scavenger, a predator, which sometimes eats the eggs and kills the young of other species of gulls whose nesting islands it shares, and robs other birds of their food ... and that is about all I know, aside from having watched its splendid, easy flight. So it stands, and may stand, for an hour or more at a time, sea-surrounded, glaring out with expressionless yellow eyes. Is it digesting a heavy meal? Is it waiting for low tide so that its feeding grounds will be uncovered? Is it greedy, savage, lazy, and bold? All such questions are tentative. The subject is aloof.