In the face of what it offers, I have said very little about the great beach. In some respects it is indefinable even as a geographical entity, in spite of the fact that it represents a range of sandy shore line that extends for thousands of miles to the south of it. It fluctuates so, and it is so closely associated with the sea in that respect, that the term “transition zone,” while generally appropriate, seems a little misleading. It is made of land materials but it is not exactly a land boundary. Cape Cod, whose Outer Shore it defines, is as narrow and exposed as a spit or shoal by comparison with the continent behind it. In any case, the beach in its grand exposure, its instability, seems closer to the sea than land, and that may be the reason why many visitors, bound to the inland world of human claims, have often expressed the feeling that it looks untouched. Small white waves on the sea surfaces beyond the beach may scud like birds while surf and sand are resplendent in green and silver; or an evening wind from the north blows over sandbanks and beach grasses, coming on in hesitant rushes, the gray waters conflicting over shark-gray shoals, and clouds standing off over the sea. Sometimes the surf strikes and hisses like snakes curling along the sand. Sometimes it rises up with green-marbled surfaces, roaring and falling with ponderous formality. Beach and sea are always involved in mutual storms and plays of light, mutual readjustments beyond our control. The beach is naked, malleable, ready to move and be moved. It is invested with the vast balance of the oceanic tides. It is part of the systems of wind and weather. It is a receiving ground for light. For these and countless other reasons it is a power, with an expression made up of all its communicant and communicating energies, their substance, and formality. It sweeps on in a long curving line that is a definition not only of a bound but a horizon, a sea, and a sky. It expresses growth and the stunting of growth, destruction and its holding back, the violent storm, the offshore summer swell, the heat and cold. Many languages, heard or unheard by human ears are in it, and much that is unknown to us. Its long roving ways invite a man to the space in which life is shaped and perpetuated, invite him, in a sense, to where he is unable to go, where nothing is promised; but it is human perception and realization that it brings out, not security, a man’s coming at the size of the natural realm with its unceasing winds, where the birds fly in with a grace and concordance that he will find he knows, by virtue of a primal inheritance.