Cape Cod looks like the silhouette of a shoe as long as the shoe belongs to one of Santa’s elves’, although an elf with a sense of humor about his toe cap and well which curve off like a scimitar blade to the north and east. It is only 18,000 years old, a puff of air in geologic time, a creation of the last great ice age and once wholly covered by a glacier. Its surface of sand and gravel flowed off hundreds of streams collapsing from the face of the retreating ice sheet. The National Seashore, beaches freed from development in perpetuity, makes up over 43,000 acres spread in a thin line for almost 40 miles.
I have spent time in the Appalachians, the Adirondacks, the high desert of New Mexico, deep in wilderness in the Rockies in three states, along the Atlantic shore of Jersey and Maine, but I have never seen a landscape that so held me in such sustained wonder. No hotels. No boardwalk. Cast your eye north or south and everything you see can be described in single words: light, sky, clouds, sea, sand, animals, storm.
Do not believe my camera. It flattens every shot. It cannot capture the vast space of these beaches and sky, or this light. I could live inside this light, a happy resident of Cape photons and waves, of its particle grace.
We walked the beaches every day. Some days, no one else appeared near us but gray seals, singly, always curious, only 7 or 8 feet off shore, but on one afternoon, two pods, one of 25 or so, the other close to 40. They followed us as we walked, their heads above the waves facing us, bobbing, briefly submerging, appearing again. They remind you of 600 pound soaking wet Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, the fur slicked down, the big mammalian eyes seeming to wait for us to give some signal. They did not like Luna’s barking or big arm movements, but on a slow approach to them without the dogs, I could begin to make out specific faces. Through binoculars, they come into intense individual life.
On that same day, scanning farther out, about 100 yards, we both saw the dorsal fin (very much like the photo here). For a space of 1 to 2 minutes, we watched it move methodically from north to south. I began to shout, “Holy shit! Holy shit!” The dignity of age matters not a whit when you see what appears to be a Great White. 
At Marconi Beach on the first morning, we crested a dune and saw the North Atlantic in full, glorious fury, sea glass green waves the height of doubledecker buses bashing into the shore, froth flying above the turbulence, mist and fog and water making the air itself a liquid element. Look anywhere in it for 180 full degrees and the planet seems to have given up on land. It is all change. It is all flux and tumult and utterly undevised power. I could not, I cannot grow tired of watching it.
