The beach grass has had much deserved honor heaped upon it, in the proportion that it is able to live with the tons of sand that are also heaped upon it. It is perfectly adapted to being covered over by sand since it sends up stems which in turn root themselves, and then grows on, letting the old roots die. As a sand hill builds up, the beach grass is able to maintain itself in this fashion without being buried and to hold down the sand with a network of roots and stalks. It stabilizes such hills until the point where the wind may sweep so constantly around them as to expose them and cut away the sand, leaving the grass in splendid isolation with its outer roots hanging in mid-air. So beach grass and sand have a special collaboration which man does his best to encourage, especially after he has made rescue work necessary. The sand masses have great weight and volume and are stable in themselves but it is their surfaces that flow and shift with the wind, so that the whole region is remolded over periods of time. It is fascinating to sit in a valley between the dunes and reconstruct their curves, seeing how the sand has been swept down one side and blown up another, sent over a hill to make a new one on the other side, held for a long time and then broken loose to change its residence, motion, and stability joining to make those noble forms. The dunes may threaten man’s house, or road, or wood lot in immediate terms, but in themselves they are like distant monuments dedicated to natural force, perfect, calm, threatening or joining all that which lies ahead of them with equanimity. Time and its lapses seem immaterial, more so than the wind that shifts them. Now, or in years to come, a migrating dune will kill off a tree or a shrub and what does it matter? Can I care about what happens to one of a thousand scrub pines? I think not; but perhaps I can care about the event in the whole sequence of growth, change, and reshaping. Slow and statuesque, the dunes under the great air are another balance in process, like the beach beyond them. I think of some of the trees in the dunes and their struggle with the winds and the encroaching sands, and I am unable to shed tears over something that is unable to cry, but sometimes the word desperation comes to me, when I see evidence of their long efforts to hold on. You will see a dying cherry tree that has sent shoot after shoot, trunk after trunk, all over the side of a dune or sand hill that is being worn away, and they are full of the contortions of struggle--arrested, like the statue of Laocoön and his sons wrestling with the snakes, but real enough. Or another hummock or small dune, where a beach plum or bayberry may not have enough purchase left, has a mass of twisted branches and twigs strewn down its sides, the wreckage of a genuine defeat.