In Dwight’s “Travels in New England” it is stated that the inhabitants of Truro were formerly regularly warned under the authority of law in the month of April yearly, to plant beach- grass, as elsewhere they are warned to repair the highways.... In this way, for instance, they built up again that part of the Cape between Truro and Provincetown where the sea broke over in the last century.... Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a total wreck, and ere long go to the bottom.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
The world, an entity out of everything, was created by neither gods nor men, but was, is and will be eternally living fire, regularly becoming ignited and regularly becoming extinguished.
—Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 B.C.)
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition—the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth—that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore.... If the name was not derived from that of some English locality,—Saffron Walden, for instance,—one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in Pond.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)