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Beaches Made In A Day

“The time must come,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, who knew Cape Cod well, “when this coast (of the Cape) will be a place of resort for those New Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside.”

At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway, or an ocean of mint julep, that the visitor is in search of, â€” if he thinks more of the wine than of the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport,—I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here.

But this shore will never be more attractive than it is now. Such beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting its sands… Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls… A man may stand here and put all America behind him.

So wrote Thoreau more than a century and a half ago.

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