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up their trunks, still alive but beginning to die. Then you will be among the living trees. The sand-glacier in the beech forest has been more or less halted by conservationists, but the dunes north of the forest remain in motion. On old maps you can locate buried forests, and walk across pristine dunes with deceased forests inside them.
    The beech forest in summer is shady and slightly dank; it is full of a greened, deepened light. The smell changes from dusty pine to a fermented odor of pine tar, decomposing leaves, and an indefinable, organic rankness that resembles, at its most potent, the smell of a wet dog. You will pass a shallow pond that freezes over in winter and that wears, in summer, a skin of pale green lily pads with trumpet-shaped flowers—yellow at the edges of the pond, white in the slightly deeper water toward the middle. You can stay on the narrow asphalt bike trail, or you can leave your bike and wander into the woods along any of the sandy paths that meander off among the trees. If you do that, you’ll quickly find yourself walking among tupelo and inkberry, white oaks and red maples, as well as the eponymous beech trees, all of which form surprisingly orderly hallways and small, roomlike clearings, with lush carpets of fallen leaves and canopies of branches thick enough to shelter you in a rainstorm. It would not be entirely surprising to find chairs and lamps out there, and a table set for tea. People sometimes get married in these clearings, and local children go there for all the childish purposes that require concealment. The trunks of the trees are covered with carvings: initials and obscenities; various assertions that so-and-so was here, in 1990 or 1975 or 1969; declarations of eternal love to vanished objects named Jim, Carol, Drew, Calla, Tom, Ken, and Lindy, among others. The old ones, from the fifties and sixties, have all but faded into the bark—they look like name-shaped scars manifested by the trees themselves. The newer ones are various shades of gray, depending on their age. Only the very recent names are raw and white, though they too, of course, will fade.
    S NAIL R OAD
    The last wild place on land I want to tell you about is the dune at the end of Snail Road. Snail Road is actually a dirt path, though wide enough to accommodate a car, and you can in fact park your car there if you need to. It is on the East End of town, on the far side of the highway. The path is arcaded by the branches of trees. At its far end stands the dune known as Mt. Ararat, a single, titanic rise of sand, utterly barren. It could be a dune in the Sahara.
    This is another of those strangely potent places. Everyone I know who has spent any time on the dune agrees that there’s, well, something there, though outwardly it is neither more nor less than an enormous arc of sand cutting across the sky. Climb to the top of it. On one side you’ll see the treetops and rooftops of town; on the other you’ll look across a span of lesser dunes to the Atlantic. To the east, in the direction of Truro, is Pilgrim Lake, though you can’t quite see it from atop Mt. Ararat. Pilgrim Lake was once East Harbor but is now, essentially, an enormous puddle. About 150 years ago, the town fathers realized that windblown sand was accumulating in East Harbor in such quantities that it threatened not only to render the harbor too shallow for boats but might extend out along the coast and spoil all of Provincetown’s harbor. So they diked off East Harbor and laid railroad tracks on the new embankment that separated it from the open water. The only road into Provincetown still runs along that embankment, parallel to the long-vanished train tracks.
    Being stilled and sourceless, Pilgrim Lake feels vaguely sinister. It is Provincetown’s Dead Sea. Although it is every bit as bright in sunlight as the ocean from which it has been separated, it shimmers differently. It is steelier, more opaque. From the dune at the end of Snail Road, you