The heights above the beach, the low dipping slopes and hills, though vulnerable over long periods of time, foot by foot and yard by yard, look unrelievedly intense and bold. They glisten under the open light, the open draws of the sky. There are miles of scrub oak, bayberry, and beach-plum thickets shining as if they were wet with light, or, in the winter months, purple, maroon, and diffused with blue like a mist. This is where the fox and song sparrows gather, and the myrtle warblers. There is a sound of leaf ticking and branches tapping together above the pouring of the surf. Sandy tracks made by beach buggies claw through wide patches of huckleberry, which have red or bronze leaves and conspicuous red tips to their branches in the fall, and in other areas the ground is held by beach grass and sometimes wide mats of shining bearberry, or hog cranberry, green and purple with bright-red berries under their leaves. Wide patches and hollows of blown sand are growing with Hudsonia, “beach heath” or “beach heather,” which is a soft gray green, and has golden yellow flowers, changing to darkening gold before they die, flowers, incidentally, which have a faint but sweet scent to them. Sometimes they are accompanied by “reindeer moss,” that seems to hold on tenuously, since its gray-green fronds crumble up and blow away, though in point of fact each of these fragments can lodge again in some other area. In the grayest of weather this lichen seems almost luminous, having a sea shine in the rain. Piny hollows circle behind this spare vegetation, the trees with burnt-orange leaders killed by salt spray, and oaks, often dead at the top, along with a great range of scrub; and until recently when building was curbed by the National Park, new clumps of cottages and half-finished roads appearing all the time in new areas.