In this distance, near to far, there is force, and its limits, a counterbalancing as well as intermingling in the land, weather, and tides, and in almost hidden terms the concurrent response of countless inhabitants: the seed makers and dispensers, the hole diggers, the fliers, scuttlers, and divers, those that swim, crawl, or walk. They take part in range after range of consumption and growth, of trials and failures, with endless patience, sudden quickness, flows of energy, going through death and the travel-round of reproduction. They are dancers in a realm that knows where all its leadings are. There are dynamic secrets underfoot. Lives dawn of which we are entirely unaware. Can we bring ourselves down to their great participation, waiting through dawns, attending the sun, hiding under the reality of wind and storm, where obedience means praise? Here is that universal guarantee of novelty and increase which we try so narrowly to imitate, substituting our simplicity for its complexity, our distressed communality for its balanced crowds, our greed and invention for its terrible provenance. Lord have mercy on us! IX Who Owns the Beach? In the “off” and empty season, after the tides had erased all signs of a hundred thousand human feet, it was hard to believe that the beach could be owned or claimed by any one. It took on the air’s cold or warmth, receiving, passing things on, from one day and seasonal mood to another, not as on the land with its plant and animal reactions and obstructions, the hiding; shadowing; coming forth intermittently; but in bold and naked sight, reducing weather to its single qualities. One day the Cape would be sunny and comparatively warm, and on the next in would come the authentic northern wind, the polar air, roaring and sweeping around with fierce abandon, riotously hard and cold, freezing the ground, cutting at a man, diving on him with an icy weight. The winter wind is so definite when it comes, overwhelming a fairly moderate climate, where roses often bloom late into the fall and hollies grow, as to make you think of icebergs, sliding down from the north unexpectedly to stand hundreds of feet overhead. The sky, threatening snow, writhes and purls up with gray clouds spreading fanwise like auroras, and in the evening the sun goes down with a coppery band on the horizon overhung by a bank of steely-blue clouds as menacing as a shark.