Lichens

One thing that struck Jessa and me about Cape Cod is how different it is from the coastal regions where we grew up. We have noted many similarities between southern Louisiana and the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, and one of the most fundamental is that they are both on the coastal plain. Not so Cape Cod: it is essentially a terminal moraine, deposited by a glacier only sixteen to twenty thousand years ago, and not nearly so flat as our more familiar coasts.

The last ice age left behind plenty of granite, and lichens grow seemingly everywhere; even the dunes and marshes are littered with reindeer lichen. A sampling...