“This country,” said he, “is waste,” as he talked about war, small business, rough competition, lumbering, and all the size and circumstances of the men and societies he had met and fought and endured. Through a life-long experience of waste--or waste space--and all his tired compliance with authority and anger against it, he had saved room in him for voyages. He told me that he had come to live near the sea so that he could walk along the cliffs and the beach whenever he wanted to, and to look out, I guess, when he wanted to with a relatively free command view of destiny. After I left him I met another reminder of war, spread out for several miles along the tops of the cliffs. It is now within the boundaries of the National Seashore Park, and one day, when the beach grass takes hold of its denuded areas, it will no longer be recognizable as a military reservation, but when I first walked through it Camp Wellfleet had just been formally disbanded. Although it was completely deserted, its buildings and some of its installations were still intact. It had been an antiaircraft post, and not of primary importance to a coast which was not likely to be attacked, but I have heard local residents speak of the constant, annoying sound of practice firing, which made the walls tremble and the dishes fall off the shelves, and for several years after the war ended fishermen used to protest that their boats were in the line of fire. The camp was in what geologists call the Wellfleet Plain. It was on these bare levels above the beach that Guglielmo Marconi built his wireless station and sent out the first transatlantic message in January of 1903. The year before, he had built an elaborate structure with twenty masts, and this had blown down in a heavy onshore wind. The successful message, which took the form of an exchange between Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII of Great Britain, was sent from only four masts, which had more stability in Cape Cod weather. It is typical of the Outer Beach that although Marconi transmitted waves that crossed the world, the sea has had the last word. On the day I walked through nearly sixty years later there was nothing left of what he had constructed but a few fallen bricks on the face of the cliff. Marconi’s towers were long gone, but the Camp Wellfleet lookout towers and firing range were still more or less intact, and the place only lacked occupation to make it come alive again. The public had been kept out of the area for many years, but now I could walk in on a winter’s afternoon and not meet a soul. I passed a sign saying: MILITARY RESERVATION NO TRESPASSING, not without vague qualms, and memories of my own months in an Army camp, half-expecting the sound of “Halt!” to ring out. “Yessir. Yessir.” I said to myself, starting to prepare my excuses to some ghost of past authority.