Morris Island’s sandy, wind-punished shores are full of dead oak and pine, the oak still standing in many places stripped of its bark, a slick stonelike gray, and the ground is covered with a tangle of thickets and beach-grass perimeters all leading to a rim of salt-marsh grasses that joins with sandbars and tidal flats beyond. Through spring and summer and during the early fall when the shore birds have not yet migrated, shoals and bars and flats are covered at low or half tide not only with shifting light over shallow waters but a silvery crying. Wind, foghorns, gulls screaming, shore birds piping, sometimes the faint or bell-like notes of inland birds, planes, perhaps an occasional ship’s bell heard or imagined, all sound through the seasons. During the winter the channels provide some shelter and feeding grounds for ducks and of course the gulls station themselves here and fly up at all times. This point where the tides turn a corner is a contrast in force and influence. There is the rolling and tossing of the open ocean not far away; local waters are agitated by the wind, colored by sun and sky, and always running in or out along the shore; there is a tidal rip in one area where currents meet; a great rushing tidal stream at one place, calm, easing waters in another. Within the framework of tides and storms water changes the shape and volume of the sand as it does along the Outer Shore. There is a holding, a circling as the Atlantic waters meet and turn. The earth seems to toss with all their rhythmic interplay. Flying or flying sounds are in the hands of oceanic light and surprise. There is a special tension in things that responds to a great order and sway. Whatever animals come here to subsist, or migrate through, have an alliance with this energy, a tidal intensity of their own, taking part in all the contrasts and conflicts of the environment. During the late spring for example, you walk from a relative silence on the Morris Island shore to wide breath and sound a hundred yards away. When the birds are nesting leafy tangles and trees collaborate with them in their concealment. Singing has died down. There are only occasional calls from small birds half-hidden in the leaves, flying from one protected spot to another, and now and then the nestlings make squeaky or rasping little cries in the demands of hunger, but just beyond them the sky is open and bright with action, and there is no need to hide.