The volume of this sand is immense. It shelves down steeply toward the water where it becomes part of the beach; and where the channel of the inlet curves in, the ends of the beach on both sides keep changing their lengths and relative position. The sea builds high shoals off and around the incoming tidal channel during one season and it may level at least parts of them off in another. During the summer of 1962 the ribs and bottom of a boat at least thirty feet long was revealed on one bank of the inlet at its mouth, and could be seen for months; but by the winter of 1962-63 it had completely disappeared. A sandbank lay over it which was at least five or six feet higher than sea level. Aerial photographs taken when the spit broke up in 1957, and afterwards in 1958, show a very elaborate and confusing pattern. Shoals and separate spits began to drift, to join and separate, shift and intermingle in curling, curving folds, an interwaving and repositioning of sand materials that would seem to have no parallel in nature. The Nauset Inlet is being driven into the marsh behind it at an average rate of about 2.8 feet a year, except in years of extreme erosion. This figure is about the same as that of the cliffs, and on the whole it is probably somewhat less here than there, although the marsh area is being very gradually diminished in extent. Its wide channels and bays, its marshy edges, islands, and flats, are held in the balance of great forces sweeping along the shore, or occasionally breaking through in violence. Although it absorbs and releases the tidal waters with ancient calm, it seems wide out, subject to the sea and a part of the complex, barely understood forces that build and break along the shore. The marsh is a refuge for ducks and geese, and gunners for centuries have waited there for the “whistlers,” or goldeneyes, and the black ducks to whir, swing in, and careen overhead under the wide light of dawn while the cold wind ruffled the open water and stirred the matted grass. Like the tides that flood in and fall, like the marsh grasses that grow and wave, then die down and take on their matted winter look, or the marine animals that swim in through the tidal channel and go out again to sea, it is a place of flight and motion. The local animals, crabs, clams, mussels, snails, the salt-water minnows in the ditches, the marsh snails, and numerous others, must go through their cycles of growth and death and decay here, the building of interlife relationships, but the over-all feeling that I have had about the marsh is a certain bare economy, as though it was more obligated to migrant forces, to flooding in and flooding out, then to any enclosed stability of its own. In a way it has the wide, flat isolated look of the more sheltered and extensive marshes on the Bay shore, but it is an isolation bound to the open waters of the sea which run through it and sometimes threaten its borders.