Marconi Station Site...

Larisa gave me a book, In the Footsteps of Thoreau: 25 Historic & Nature Walks on Cape Cod, which I took along with me on our getaway to the Cape last weekend.  We spent a little time at the Marconi Station Site, a part of Cape Cod National Seashore in Wellfleet.  We've been going there our whole lives, but the views still inspire awe.  Being on the Cape's outer beach gently reminds me that nothing lasts forever, and to treasure each moment I'm given on this ever-shifting seashore.  Here I've often felt time stand still and a powerful unity with the earth and the universe...

Cape Cod is the world's largest glacial peninsula.  The glacial bluffs of the outer beach are eroding and will eventually be swallowed up by the sea.  Maybe sooner then previously thought if global warming continues to speed up.  Not too far offshore are hundreds of shipwrecks caused by the Cape's rips, shoals and storms.  A pirate ship lies on the bottom out from this part of the beach, and when weather permits, Expedition Whydah continues to dig up more artifacts which can be seen at the museum in Provincetown.

It's as if Mother Nature is saying, "Here is one place you will not build."  No one can claim these beautiful views for himself.  We cannot follow all of Thoreau's footsteps today because many of them are already buried by the sea.  Thoreau had this to say of Cape Cod's outer beach, about 150 years ago:

"They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, or those which have a humane house alone.  But I wished to see that sea-shore where man's works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is only invalid or at best but dry land, and that is all you can say of it."
~ Henry David Thoreau (In the Footsteps of Thoreau: 25 Historic & Nature Walks on Cape Cod)

And even the Marconi Station, built only about 100 years ago, has been claimed by the sea.  A little bit of history:
"Marconi Station, on the Atlantic side of the Cape's forearm, is the site of the first transatlantic wireless station erected on the U.S. mainland.  Italian radio and wireless-telegraphy pioneer Guglielmo Marconi sent the first American wireless message from here to Europe - 'most cordial greetings and good wishes' from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII of England - on January 18, 1903.  The station broadcasted news for 15 years.  An outdoor shelter contains a model of the original station, of which only fragments remain as a result of cliff erosion; parts of the tower bases are sometimes visible on the beach below, where they fell."
~ Fodor's