I passed what was left of two shipwrecks during the day, a reminder of the dangers that still face ships along this coast with its fogs, its shifting winds, its storms, the hidden, treacherous offshore bars. The sands often reveal the timbers of old ships. One day their ribs, sodden and dark, barnacle encrusted, may reach up out of oblivion, and not long after that the water buries them under tons of sand. From them a local history calls out for recognition. Thousands of ships over three centuries wrecked on shoals, engulfed by violent seas, men with the dark of doom in them, to drown or to survive, and only a few timbers left to declare the ultimate dangers and their terror. I was not in Death Valley, or on a raft at sea. My walk was not unusually long, and I could leave the beach if I had to, but the enormity of the area filled me more and more. It had so much in it that was without recourse. Its emptiness, the great tidal range beyond it and through it, the raw heartbeat of the waves, the implacable sun, established the kind of isolation and helplessness in me which the commerce and community of our lives tries so hard to disguise. Even the birds, I began to think, were more secure than I. They had their strong bright threads of cognizance to the areas they came to, the water, the sands, the marsh. They were fixed in entity and grace, eating what was theirs by evolution to be eaten, using land and air in the ways that had come to them, knowing this place and all places like it in terms of its bounds and boundlessness, meeting its naked eye in the ways they had been sent to do. I started off in the morning admiring the brilliance of the sun, the small shadows from the dunes and across the beach, through driftwood, isolated beach plants and tidal wrack, with the wide flooding of light ahead and the variation in reflected light across the sea. I felt the sea moving quietly beside me. The waves heaved and sighed and spray was tossed lightly above the sand. Everything was continuous, untroubled, and deliberate; but as the day wore on the sun became my enemy, and I had very little rage or resource in me to fight it with. I was not fitted to environmental stability, like a bird, or fox or fish. I found myself in an area of whose reaches I had never been wholly aware, and in me there was no mastery. The sun was not only hostile. It was an ultimate, an impossibility; and the waters beside me began to deepen from their pleasant daytime sparkle and freshness into an incalculable realm which I had hardly entered. I was touching on an unimagined frontier.