We do not “visit” in the old sense of the word, stopping in for fish chowder, or rum or a cup of tea, nor are we customarily invited in because we are tired and out of our way. There is no time for that, and besides there are too many of us. The new human plantings do not fit the old outlines. Cape Cod is now subject to a population spreading out as a result of the tremendous growth of cities and towns. It is predicted that the number of winter residents will increase by forty or fifty thousand in the next twenty years, and the summer visitors to the Great Beach may pass all bounds eventually. As the speed of transition has been increased between one era and another so has our individual speed, in arriving and departing. When you buy a piece of land on the Cape you do it as an investment, as a kind of fluid security, not for its own sake or something too priceless to let go. There are always other places to move to. Each man used to be his own nomad, now nomadism is supplied to all of us by the mechanics and riches of society. During the tourist season the average length of visit per person has been estimated at three days, enough time to sense the breadth of things if not the circumstances. If we are all to be itinerants, wasting and leaving, or suburbanites, Cape Cod will have a hard time keeping what open beauties it still displays, even with the National Park, which has saved a great deal of it from the seemingly unalterable army of bulldozers in the nick of time. The record, written all over the Cape in the form of cut-over woodland and wasted topsoil, does not say much for human foresight at any time, with or without the bulldozers. In that respect we have not changed, though we are not as dependent on the locality we live in as we used to be. Food and resources come from afar. Still, all places, regardless of the human adventure, have their underlying tides, their own measured and perhaps measureless pace, and they shade their inhabitants in subtle ways. We continue to be affected by what we can neither transform nor avoid. No amount of dry ice stops the hurricane. We have no barriers to keep off the arctic air. So those of us who live here still complain helplessly about each other or the weather, while ghosts of penury and puritanism still haunt the local houses.