Aside from mice, rabbits, skunks, toads, insects, and the indigenous plants, this seems a place for nomads, and the birds that are free to forage, like a dark pigeon hawk that swoops across on its hunt for prey, or an occasional marsh hawk, breast feathers gleaming in the sunlight, its shadow passing across a dune wall. Little flocks of birds burst here and there through the thickets, like chickadees, myrtle warblers, or juncos that move around on the ground pecking for seed. In their fall migration many of the juncos, or “snowbirds,” reach Cape Cod by a long, over-the-water route, and flocks that arrive on the Outer Beach begin to move up into the dunes in a search for fresh water, perennial pilgrims. I sat on the top of a high dune one afternoon and watched a beach buggy swaying and swinging up in my direction along a track that led from the shore. It droned up and careened by me, plowing and slipping through the sands, and away down a long slope it went on the dunes’ free forms, cutting across the shadows that were spearheading toward the sea. Then I heard children’s voices in the distance coming over quite clear and shrill, falling off at intervals before the wind. The slopes and valleys stretched with pure travel in between. It was the kind of place where all views and associations keep on, across a shifting range. It lacked fixed ways, decided roads. Only packed in by the open ocean and the long reaches of time, the roving dunes made a continually majestic statement which no amount of cans, broken glass, or human footprints could erase. Off on the end, the edge, past the cities and the suburbs, the fixed house lots, the fields, and plains that make a patchwork of an entire nation, here is a country let go, barren, down to an essential minimum, but tossing and flowing with its own momentum in an envious proximity to the sea. It is the first and last land in America. VI A Change in History The history of Cape Cod is fairly well known. I say fairly well because I do not see how it is possible to recapture the deep complexities of what was present and now is past, although there is enough past left in us to provide great confusion about the times we have to face. Many tourists run after “charm” or what is “quaint,” terms which are slight enough to admit that they have very little to do with the dark realities of three centuries. Now we come and go in great bounds, from great distances. Motion and change make our constancies. We are in no need of staying put. We are attracted by the starlight in the heavens we have created for ourselves. We look on the earth’s great flowing beauties with an inclined eye. For all its “conquest of nature,” perhaps because of it, our civilization has a tenuous hold on the waters and lands it occupies. We are in danger of being overlords, not obligated to what we rule.