And the great beach received what came to it, retaining its primal right to a deeper breath and regularity, a harsh “poverty-stricken” environment where man has no lease worth the paper. It did seem utterly deserted, although the herring gulls and blackbacks flew up steeply over the wind-buffeted waves, then banked and glided away, and draggers occasionally moved parallel to the beach bucking the choppy seas, their lines out astern. The wind threw stinging clouds of sand ahead of it. Except for the fishermen and the gulls, it was an abandoned world, glistening wide and cold, lost to importance and sense so far as human society was concerned. For man there is no force quite so inclusive as his own. Since the beach is comparatively empty and isolated during fall and winter, the sight of life on its sands may seem as rare as a rider approaching you across the desert. I remember what an extraordinary thing it seemed one afternoon to see a tiny red crab moving very slowly along, high-legged over the bare slopes of the beach. I identified it later as a species of spider crab. Green crabs, rock crabs, calico crabs, and others are common along the protected shores of the Cape, but out on this stretch of beach they are rarities. This baby, with its beak, antennae, and eyes backed and covered by a knobbed and spiky shell, seemed like an exotic from another world, which in fact it was, having been flung in by the surf from rocks and seaweed forests in the waters beyond it. It not only added to the beach, but to me, since it made me realize that these sands were only shelving off into further dimensions. The beach is a repository of freight, wreckage, and lives from foreign lands. This also happens occasionally on land. We all know that the sea is out there, that the wind swirls over us, and the storms carry more traffic than planes, but strangers sometimes appear as if to prove that no place is what it seems to be. One spring a vermillion flycatcher suddenly appeared in the neighborhood. I saw it in its exciting tropical gaiety as it flew down next to a shining patch of spring rain on an asphalt road. It is a native of Texas and New Mexico. Black or turkey buzzards ride the great airs of spring and sometimes fly northward, wheeling unexpectedly overhead. In November of 1962 I saw a black stork, _Ciconia nigra_, which had somehow managed to make it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps managing to stop for rests in such areas as Greenland and Newfoundland. It landed near the Coast Guard Station, now National Seashore Park headquarters, at Eastham, in an exhausted state, to be picked up by the Audubon Society and later transported to the warmer climate of Florida.