During a violent coastal storm, with winds up to seventy and eighty miles an hour, an exhausted harbor porpoise was cast up on a bay beach recently, and there it died. I confess I had never seen one out of water or even close to me before. For all the pictures I had seen, and all I had read, nothing prepared me for such perfection. Its round body, four to five feet long, was butt-ended at its head, in which there were small eyes, and small teeth in the jaws. It had just as much of the quality of flow as a raindrop, and at the same time was a solid packing of energy. Its skin graded down from the jet black of its back and upper sides through streaks of gray like rain along the sea down to a white belly, and without scales, it had a thick, smooth satiny polish like ebony or horn, perhaps reminiscent of synthetic rubber or plastic but of an organic texture which neither of those products could equal. The porpoise had a single fin on its back and a tail that could strike vertically for power and thrust. Its body was fairly heavy, weighing about a hundred pounds, but everything of speed and liquidity and dashing, leaping strength was reflected there. It lay on the upper part of the beach, conspicuous among the long piles of storm litter, the logs, pieces of broken dories, and thick seaweed, spectacular in its simplicity, a black and white that made me think of breaking waves in the night sea. I saw it curve over the surfaces of the water with consummate grace, slide away, and disappear. “Where did you ever see more of nothing?” I was once asked as I looked out over endless dry Texas plains billowing like waves. Nothing or everything. Who knows? Who knows what the emptiness leads to or contains? The beach lies open. Its sands and rattling stones lead back through ages of weathering and change and are at the same time part of the wide give and take of the present. The tiny spider crab, though isolated on the beach, was also a link with a teeming offshore existence, which hid in shadowy worlds of kelp and rockweed, or floated and roamed by with a free energy that was in complete denial of our tightening fall and winter world. Backed by a cliff, walking on sands shadowed and cold, faced by the churning waves, it is hard to believe in a life so rich. There are no rocky shores revealed at low tide and streaming with weed to prove the temperate fertility of the sea. The beach is a transition zone between one environment and another, but except in those areas where the cliffs are reduced to low sand hills, protecting a marsh or estuary behind them, the transition is a sharp one, the sands dipping from the inconstant sky to the constancy of salt water.