Around these ponds were crows, evidence of owls, wintergreen leaves to taste, and wind whisking through the pines, or oaks still carrying dead leaves. I heard the odd little hornlike note of a nuthatch as it was rounding the scaly plated trunk of a pitch pine. Pale light moved through the woods and across the hollows. Silvery trees bordered gentle mossy roads, their tracks loaded with fallen leaves. It was all in a special Cape proportion, colored silver and gray, like the Atlantic, or the herring gulls, the clouds and the sky, or an old house that suddenly showed up in true style and balance, not to be imitated by any century but its own. Then I walked out to see the great green breakers roaming in, and to hear their thunderous bone and gut fall across the length of the beach. The sound held and it took away, a monumental assurance of power past all the roughness and directness of the old life, its quiet suspension in the present, and the wrenching of the not-yet born. What you have to face after all, in this low wooded land, in the continual dip and rise of its contours, is consummate change, the way the beach itself, or the dunes are changing, keeping a general state for a minute, or even a lifetime, but quite beyond catching. Its history is water. Water created it in the first place. When the last enormous glacier melted back leaving its indiscriminate load of rubble out in the sea, it had also created a profusion of holes, basins, gullies, the “kettles” which are now dry or semidry hollows, bogs, or still holding water as ponds and lakes, and valleys, broad and narrow runs with outlets to the sea. At one time Cape Cod must have been streaming with water like a whale’s back when it rises to the surface. Now many of the original streams, rivers, and ponds are wholly or in part dried out, but without too much imagination you can fill the landscape with water all over again. Scientific exactitude, geologic reconstruction, make it possible to confirm your sense of the place as full of remnant and abiding fluidity. There is hardly a piece of land on the entire peninsula that does not suggest this. It is water thousands of years behind, water inseparable from the motions of the future, a power roaring in and destroying, pushing, grinding, ebbing back. It is water in the rain; water in the deep, still ponds; water in the underground darkness; in the gentle seaward running streams; in the tidal estuaries and marshes lowering or flooding over; as sleet; or snow; in icy gales full of the howling emptiness of the winter sea, when the cold metal of the wind pounds on your back and cuts at your face, as it sweeps down the semifrozen sands of the beach where the green and white surf fumes in, rolling and churning with impersonal passion.