Even now the history of Cape Cod is a history of enduring weather, of the same exposures. Only our terms are not the same. Some years ago I stood on the high hills of North Truro late one afternoon, watching the suns red path shining and moving across the wide waters of the bay, thinking of sea surfaces moving over the round earth to its poles, and the poverty of the winter world around me, stripped to ultimates, everywhere exposed, and exposed to everything. The round hills were so bare that the little separate houses in the distance, down in hollows or perched on the long slopes, seemed to shiver. They glittered like so many frost flakes in the air. I had just come from Provincetown and seen a dragger unloading its fish, and the fishermen cutting them up with red, raw-meat hands. The wind was shipping up the water. The gulls were crying over the racing, lathered shore. It came to me that what had brought me here had not so much to do with a feeling for the old Cape, with its churches in their simple New England grace, or clam-digging, beach-combing, old wrecks, driftwood, or fish weirs, real as it was in me, but a great new outwardness, a universal human event. Each man undergoes a series of changes during his lifetime in a sequence of experience that corresponds to that of the world. He has in him the revolutions, the escapes from holocaust, the interspaces of peace, the fact of war, the anxieties, the cry that his being be fulfilled, the never-ending human examination and measuring of things. So I found myself to be “way out,” a Cape Cod term anteceding the Beat Generation, and meaning far from your home base, with very few old promises behind to sustain me. I had to come to terms with an age without age, a locality without location, perhaps a divinity in fires of no precedent or name. Above all I was required to change, to face in new directions. * * * * * The gulls floated in the cold air with customary ease. On my way home I saw a great blue heron flying over a marsh and inlet, its broad wings spread out like a cloak, long legs stretched straight behind it, with feet curled up stiffly, head and neck crooked back. Then it landed in shallow water. Its wings folded and it stood straight up, with a surprising, statuesque height and gaze, the long neck and head above a flock of ducks that were swimming and feeding near by, assuming the kind of composure special to a race of herons that would serve indefinitely. The wind ruffled the water, swept over reeds and curving grasses, sending the last light of day roving in splendid colors over the entire marsh.