They faced the ocean and yet they were not far from the bay. Only some three or four miles of land separated them on the east from the Atlantic and on the west from the bay. Those bodies of inexorable water, just a few miles apart, exerted a strange feeling of precariousness. And yet all of it was wondrous in that gentle fall—the marshes and meadows and ponds of Eastham just beginning to burnish with the quick touches of color, the drive through long strands of pine, the fragrance of grapes and plums, and the busy call of birds and waterfowl. And implicit in everything was the sound of the end: the roar of the water on the beach, which would, with time, wash everything away.

It was there, stated, in the signs put up at the Marconi Station, which pointed out where the first wireless towers had stood on the beach until endangered by encroaching water; now they had been completely removed, and scrub and beach grass were planted over the dunes to hold down erosion.

“Jason, it’s scary,” said Tina, as she looked, fascinated, out to sea. “Do you think someday the ocean will be here where we’re standing?”

“Yes, surely. The only thing certain about this place is its constant changing and shifting. I can remember houses on the dunes that aren’t there anymore. The sea cliffs crumble here and are washed away and are built up in spits on the bay side. Then inlets are plugged up by sandbars and marshes are formed. It’s continuous change, and no matter what we do, the sea is in charge.”

“It’s terrible to think that someday this place where we’re standing, or even your family home, won’t be here.”

“Oh, God, Tina, that won’t come in our lifetime or in any lifetimes that we can conceive. It will come, but so far from now that it’s as remote from us as the Ice Age was, and the glaciers that made the Cape in the first place.”

“I know, I know. But it will come, and we know it—all we have to do is look out there at those waves and feel the wind. And then look about us and see how much was eaten away from the Marconi Station in not even a century.”

“Come on, Tina, you don’t have to get morbid about it,” he laughed, and he held her against him in a tight hug.