The Cape Cod of 1620 was more or less the same in its general outline as it is now, although the original woodland has been cut down, or burned over, to be replaced by less varied trees, much of the topsoil has eroded and blown away, and the shore line altered in the course of natural change. Superficially at least, it has been tamed, and in most areas the primal, unknown wildness is hard to imagine. The last thing you would expect to find on pulling in to a parking lot above a Cape Cod beach would be desolate wilderness, though if there is one, wilderness being in short supply these days, it would be well worth the effort to discover; but the sea, from which we are separated both by its vastness and the difference between water and air, could answer the description, and also the sands that define its limits. Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, stretching for forty miles from the tip of the Cape at Provincetown to the end of Monomoy Island is not undiscovered country. Many men have walked it. Planes skim over it in no time at all, and the beach buggies bruise it with impunity. Still, the marks we make on it are all erased in time. The sea and sand insist on their own art. The beach is in a continuous state of remaking and invites discovery. It was first called “Great” so far as I know, by Henry David Thoreau. Otherwise it has been known for a long time as the Outer Beach, the Outer Shore, or in more familiar terms as the Back Side. Now it forms a major part of the new National Seashore Park--in the process of establishment--and is therefore not owned by individuals, or the towns in which they reside, but by the people of the United States. It is under national protection and possession at the same time, so how we approach and treat its future is a very great responsibility, which is appropriate enough. The beach, standing out against the sea, is a further limit to America before it shelves off into the Atlantic depths. For most travelers it means the end of a highway, a place of summer sands. It is in fact one end of a whole continent of roads, of communications, of the vast and intricate business of human passage. In a sense it used to be the other way around. With all the known parts of the civilized world behind them, the Pilgrims found in this beach not an end but a beginning, whatever it might entail, and that of course, is why they went there. This is an age in which we are able to ignore or bypass the “tedious and dreadful” highway of the sea--city dwellers, road, rocket, car, and plane makers that we are--to the extent that we too may find it again for the first time. The beach, lying by the sea and sea invested, is always ready for a new kind of attention in a new world. That is the nature of the place. Cape Cod itself, now and ultimately, is at the disposition of the sea rather than human enterprise.