Abstracted, in the summer months especially, to the terms of the contemporary world, some of Cape Cod’s more crowded areas have a familiar, continental look. They are covered with asphalt, cars, motels, cheap housing, shops full of grotesque souvenirs with no relation to the place they serve, and they amount, when you come right down to it, to receiving grounds for power, made by a conquering civilization. Will it be the same on the moon? The great scale is in us, the effort and the risk of desolation. The beach’s openness is nearly filled with bodies, lying everywhere, or sitting, talking, absorbing the sun, or dashing suddenly into the relatively cold water, shouting, jumping, and splashing there, and then returning, flesh in warmth and radiance, performing the blessed ritual of doing nothing. This hot surface, this wide open brilliance of sand, water, and sky is a summertime release for those in want. We claim it, and fill it with human demands; and yet it keeps its distance, resisting our bland assumption of authority. Clouds like heaps of spun silk float up across the sky. The low waves splash along the sands, very lightly to the ear. Surfcasting rods are lodged in the sand, leaning out toward the water. Offshore, a white tern rises fluttering after a dive into the water, and a herring gull, large and deliberate by contrast, beats low over the surface. Behind all the crowd and the voices, hanging over like the intense and heavy sun, is a stillness, a suspension. Perhaps it is the soul of summer, that gives a provision of relief for those in want; and if we wait and watch there might be more to this beach and sea than what we came for. Waiting, in fact, seems to be its essence, since it gives no answer to what it is, being a wide, surface brightness, a tidal beat, a sounding whose monumental depths are concealed, suggesting too, that we might wait for it forever and know nothing. II An Unimagined Frontier One afternoon in the middle of June I set off from Race Point at Provincetown, carrying a pack and sleeping bag, with Nauset Light Beach in Eastham, twenty-five miles away, as my destination, and my purpose simply to be on the beach, to see it and feel it for whatever it turned out to be, since most of my previous visits had been of the sporadic hop, skip, and jump kind to which our automotivated lives seem to lead us.