I wonder, in that light which changes for us every hour, every minute of the day, through the wild wastes of the sky, through the countless years of earthly inheritance and change, how we became so overmastering in our numbers and needs, so divorced from the exactions of nature? Shall we meet up only with ourselves? Perhaps all hunters, those who know their deer, their mountains, and their forests, with an ancient admiration, and even those who abuse a hunter’s “right,” knowing nothing but confusion, are trying to keep in contact with a natural mortality which our world denies. Perhaps we need help from other animals besides the human one. Everything in this landscape, from gulls and ducks to driftwood, marsh grasses, and deer, had a vital distinction. The beach with its perpetual reshaping and scouring worked on each stone and lifted each grain of sand, so long as there was stone and sand. The gulls hung overhead, colors fitting the shore and sky. Even the boat had a fittingness, a sea size of its own, and so with feathers, logs, or purple stones, all in solitary nobility, but swept and washed into a mutual keeping by the air and the tidal presence of the sea. I asked it to show us light and life which was our undiscovered own to help us through our mutual violence and upheavals, our narrow days. XI Impermanence Takes Its Stand Just as the sand bars offshore change shape continually, and the beach loses and gains in volume and elevation, so the plants and trees work so hard to hold on in their shifting ground that they never reach a climax state. They are pioneers. Such a place is open, as all earth’s shores must be, to drifters, like the black stork. The driftwood that lands on the beach and sometimes piles up in great numbers and bulk on the upper tide level after a storm, could come in from almost anywhere: Africa, Brazil, Massachusetts, Maine, or Nova Scotia, depending on how it was transported, by ships or by the sea itself. Years ago, sailing ships traveling along the Outer Cape with cargoes of lumber chained to their decks might encounter heavy seas and be in serious danger of grounding on the shoals, in which case they would occasionally jettison the cargo, which would land up and down the beaches, to be picked up by those famous human scavengers, the “moon-cussers.” Since such lumber was often in the form of planks or studding, it supplied many a family with material for their houses. I can think of at least one house which is largely constructed of it.