The flat necessity of it makes sailing its own satisfaction. It becomes physical. We fly, we feel, we calculate, by sinew, flesh, and bones, and through the salty blood in our veins. We may be a degree closer to the black-backed gull. There on arrival are great white sheets of sand curving up into a barrier of dunes back of a pebbly beach, where a beach buggy rolls along scaring up clouds and crowds of terns, and sanderlings in spinning flight. The jeep stops and teen-agers jump down and out, crying stridently. We anchor the boat just off the beach. The water is clear and cold. The dunes are sun reflectors, clean and warm, and we find whitish-gray grasshoppers on them, flecked like the sand. Sailing back again in late afternoon, the boat goes fast and free before the wind over the water now turned green, a blend of sky blue and the yellow of a falling sun. The bay lies out like an enormous garden, patched with color and motion, the salt waters full of latent power, ready with every kind of mood, flowing by and over, interwrought, crossing time and circumstance. We pass a clanging bell buoy. Evening comes on. Gold icicles on the water are turning and softening to shades of pink and purple. It is like striding over a wide land of peace and plenty, before we tack into the harbor. _August_ _A Wild Home Land_ What I wanted to do was follow the year around, recognizing that hours, days, months, or years are as elusive as unseen atoms (even though, universal law being consistent, we deduce their behavior with some success). I am not sure where July left off and August began. Summer flies away from me, like an unknown bird. Out into August then, while there is time. When I step into it as if into something new, I sense thousands and thousands of roving lives, taking their opportunities where and when they can. The day is hot and shining. The oak leaves, no longer fresh and young, but spotted with growths, chewed by insects, frayed and scarred, are still tough, deeply green, harnessing the sun, under a stir and slide of air. Two big red-tailed hawks sail high overhead, screaming constantly. A blue jay screams, in a fair likeness. The hawks wheel lower down along the trees, inside the horizon. Then two little tree sparrows flit by. Insects drone, stir, and buzz. There is a dragging, rattling sound of leaves as a box turtle moves slowly along. A cicada chorus rises like a sudden breeze from the southeast and then subsides. Two black and white warblers go through the cover of the woods in a quick butterfly flight together. The “Tock! Tock!” of a chipmunk sounds behind a brush pile, almost like the end notes of a whippoorwill’s song.