I spent my second night on the beach a few miles from Nauset Light where I left it the following morning. It was in the South Wellfleet area, and as I started to sleep on the sand a little above the high-tide line, I remembered that this was about the same place where a fishing boat had been wrecked two years before and two men drowned. I had seen the boat, with its cargo of fish, and some of the men’s clothing strewn along the shore, and I had heard a little about the depths of their ordeal. Their story haunted me; and then I began to feel that I might be caught by the tide while I was asleep. There were only about twelve feet between the bottom of a steep cliff and the high-tide line. I would soon be lying on a narrow shelf at the sea’s edge. So as the vague thought of being engulfed began to invade me, I took up my pack and sleeping bag again, retraced my steps down the beach, and found a way to the top of the cliff, where I spent the night in another hollow. The light of dawn, lifting quickly out of the sea, flooding into the range of low-lying land, woke me up again, and it signaled to the birds, who started singing in all the thickets and heath around me with a sweet, high, shrill intensity, a kind of automatic worship; and after a while they quieted down again. Little dirt roads dropped back from headlands through green slopes covered with bearberry and patches of yellow-flowered Hudsonia, or “poverty grass,” and there were hollows dipping back inland, and woods of stunted pitch pine. From the top of the cliff I watched the sun starting to send light running across the blue table of the sea, making it glitter and move. The intensity of light and heat began to grow steadily as I walked down the beach again for the last stretch toward Nauset. The beach is not so very far from where I live, or for that matter where anyone lives on the Cape. It is a few miles down the road, beyond the trees; and yet when I came back from my walk I felt as if I had been at enormous remove from my surroundings, caught out where I might have feared to be. The long line of sand and surf, the intensity of the sun, the cover of stars had come close enough to put me in council with that which had no answers. I was in awe of nature; and I understood that the sun and sea could be our implacable enemies. It was in this context that I saw our human world as subject to a stature that it never made. III The Resources of the Sea Sit inland on the ground on a sunny day, and color, shadows, sound, substance, novelty in great detail, invade the smallest areas. One flower may attract many species of insects, brilliantly patterned and colored, flicking around, crawling, eating, gathering pollen, in any number of arresting ways, and the growth of plants around you, the shape of leaves, the general stir of things comes running like a carnival.