The Great Beach

“The Cape will probably never have a better celebrant than Hay, and it will probably never again serve as such a perfect metaphor for our present exquisite tension between the guaranteed traditional warmths of the hearth and the cold outer reaches of science.” —New York Review of Books

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Cape Cod’s vast outer coast, named The Great Beach by Henry David Thoreau, is little changed since the Pilgrim’s first landfall almost 350 years ago. Today a plane can skim its fifty miles in a matter of seconds, and in the summer bathing areas are so crowded with cars and people they take on a continental flavor. But the long, desolate, windswept stretches can still be found, and the National Park Service has been taking steps to preserve the original character of the beach and its rolling dunes back from the water, designating it a National Seashore.