January seems grim and contained. This is not the time to expect life to declare itself. Even local human circumstances are such as to prove a kind of gray waiting. While the rest of the world retires in Florida, counts change in New York, or struggles with vast new shifts and divided aims, Cape Cod stays down, and holds on. The population is five times less than that of the summer. It is the barren, exposed peninsula it used to be, with the exception of the new woodlands and all the cottages. We are linked by highway and modern communicatory apparatus with the rest of the continent, but in this season there is a feeling of diminished wants. The human pulse begins to rise in April or May, when people paint and refurbish their motels and cottages in preparation for the great migration of vacationists. Now the economy subsists more on expectation than fulfillment. The human squirrels have stored away their acorns. The forage is thin in January for all inhabitants. The weather roams still, with our surrounding waters. Why live here but for the reason that there is always an element of sufficient grandeur? Although the sea might not be visible for the motels and trailers before your eyes, a few miles, or a few yards, brings its untouched enormity into view. The sky is wide, and the ocean waters are still breathing loud or low with fruitful magnitude. They are at the end of every road. And when the foghorn bawls from Chatham like a lost cow, we know that there are still headlands and ships, the uncalculated and the unknown. On the Cape’s south side, facing the heavy Atlantic swells and breakers, the high cliffs are often covered with miniature scrub oak forests, or thickets--they are scarcely more than two feet high, as well as stunted pitch pine with a mustard tinge to their needles. Dark clumps of hudsonia, a heath, resembling heather, cover the hollows and slopes, the billowing mounds on cliff tops above the beach. The vegetation lies low against wind and salt spray. It looks rusty and tormented. On the steep slopes to the beach there are milky films of snow, and then patches of white foam at the bottom. The surf roars in, sidling with great licks and washes along the sands.