Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown

  Apart from the descendants of Portuguese fishermen, who have been there for generations but keep very much to themselves, almost everyone in Provincetown is a transplant. I have rarely met anyone who was born there, though I know many who consider it their true home and who treat their earlier lives either as extended mistakes finally made right by moving to Provincetown or as prolonged periods of incubation during which their genetic strands were gradually stitched into the fabric of character needed for them to be born as themselves, fully formed, right here. Provincetown is, in this regard, an anomaly—it is a village every bit as distinct and habit-bound as villages in Sicily or County Kerry but one that routinely accepts newcomers and grants them unequivocal rights of citizenship.

  Among its transplanted residents Provincetown tends to inspire the sort of patriotism associated with small struggling nations. Those who live there usually defend it ferociously to outsiders and complain about it only among themselves. It is cantankerously devoted to its quirks and traditions, and like many places in love with their own ways of doing and being, it has predicted its own downfall almost from the day it was founded. In the mid-1800s, when a wooden sidewalk was built along one side of the sand road that eventually became Commercial Street, it aroused such dismay over what it portended about the loss of Provincetown’s soul that a number of citizens refused to walk on it and trudged resolutely through the ankle-deep sand all their lives. In the twenty-plus years I’ve been going there, I have heard the town’s imminent demise predicted over and over again. It is dying because its waters are fished out. It is dying because it has no jobs. It is dying because artists no longer live there in sufficient numbers. It is dying because it is beginning to prosper but at the hands of the wrong sort of people—rich people who live in cities and want to use Provincetown only as a summer refuge. It is dying because its soul is exhausted, because its schools are no good, because so many have been taken by the AIDS epidemic, because no one can afford the rents.

  Some members of the P-town population (it is, by the way, perfectly all right to call it “P-town”) live according to a central simplicity as absolute as creed. They prefer earnestness to irony, the local to the immense. Provincetown lives at a bemused distance from the rest of the country. It does not quite consider itself American, and in this regard it is probably more right than wrong. Last summer I found a pair of quotation marks at the flea market in Wellfleet. They had come from a movie marquee. They were eight inches high, glossy black; they had a bulky, elderly symmetry. I gave them to Melanie, believing she’d know what to do with them. She was on her way to California then, and she took one pair of quotation marks with her, to leave behind in San Francisco. She keeps the other pair in Provincetown.

  ALTHOUGH IT’S BETTER known for its gayness than for its heterosexuality, Provincetown is home to a considerable quotient of straight people, and everyone lives pretty much in peace. Just as the Log Cabin Republican not only can’t ignore the existence of stone butches but buys his coffee from one every morning, straight people and gay people are all passengers on the same ship and couldn’t remain separate even if they’d like to. At its best Provincetown can feel like an improved version of the world at large, a version in which sexuality, though always important, is not much of a deciding factor. For several years, long ago, I played poker every Wednesday night at the home of Chris Magriel, a woman in her seventies who lived in a den of paisley shawls, embroidered pillows, and elderly stuffed animals. I was coming out then, unable to broach the subject with my family, and when I told Chris I thought I was gay, her milky blue eyes deepened in thought and she said, “Well, dear, if I was your age, I’d want to try it, too.” She didn’t embrace or console me. She simply treated it as the matter of small concern I’d hoped it might be. I told her about the man I was dating. She said, “He sounds very nice.” Then we started laying out food for the other poker players, who were due to arrive at any moment.

  In summer the straight tourists are generally as amused by the more flamboyant members of the population as they are meant to be. It’s common to see someone taking a picture of his mother, a champagne blonde in jeans and Reeboks, with her arm cheerfully around the shoulders of a man dressed as Cher. Last summer in the West End I passed a drag queen who was flyering for a show (flyering is a nonverb you hear frequently in Provincetown—it refers to the act of distributing flyers that advertise a show, often involving costumes to excite interest in same). The man in question, an extremely tall man wearing Minnie Mouse eyelashes and a blue beehive wig that made him just under eight feet high, stood before a raptly attentive boy about four years old. “All right,” the man in the wig said, “but this is the last time I’m doing it.” He lifted his wig off his head and showed the child the crew cut underneath. The child fell into paroxysms of laughter. The man replaced his wig and walked on.

  PROVINCETOWN’S LARGE, DISORDERLY party of transients, émigrés, tourists, summer homeowners, et cetera goes on at an almost total remove, in every sense but the geographical, from the generally more settled lives of the people who were born there and who are mostly the descendants of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. When the whaling industry was annihilated by the rise of petroleum oil in the mid-1800s, Provincetown became a fishing village, and the population came to be dominated by the Portuguese whose families had fished for centuries. They thrived there until recently, when the waters around Provincetown were almost entirely fished out; now many of the Portuguese American citizens live in several small enclaves on the far side of Bradford Street. The more prosperous among them run most of the operations that require year-round residence. They operate the gas and oil companies and own or staff the banks and markets and drugstores. When, in her 1942 book Time and the Town, the only book I know about Provincetown, Mary Heaton Vorse referred to them as “Dark faces on the streets, beautiful dark-eyed girls who love color and who make the streets gay with their bright dresses and their laughter,” I suspect she meant it as a compliment. These “colorful characters” are now the old guard, the town’s most respectable and conservative citizens. The same names, some of them Anglicized more than two hundred years ago, appear over and over again on the tombstones in the town cemetery: Atkins, Avellar, Cabral, Cook, Days, Enos, Rose, Tasha, Silva, Snow.

  FROM NOWHERE

  I think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling

  no matter the weather, when our lives are rather lakes

  unlocking in a constant and bewildering spring. Listen,

  a day comes, when you say what all winter

  I’ve been meaning to ask, and a crack booms and echoes

  where ice had seemed solid, scattering ducks

  and scaring us half to death. In Vermont, you dreamed

  from the crown of a hill and across a ravine

  you saw lights so familiar they might have been ours

  shining back from the future.

  And waking, you walked there, to the real place,

  and when you saw only trees, came back bleak

  with a foreknowledge we have both come to believe in.

  But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,

  and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds with the wooden spoon, I remembered, this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture

  after gesture, what else can we know of safety

  or of fruitfulness? We walk with mincing steps within

  a thaw as slow as February, wading through currents

  that surprise us with their sudden warmth. Remember,

  last week you woke still whistling for a bird

  that had miraculously escaped its cage, and look, today,

  a swallow has come to settle behind this rented rain gutter,

  gripping a twig twice his size in his beak, staggering

  under its weight, so delicately, so precariously, it seems

  from here, holding all he knows in his mouth.

  MARIE HOWE

  Anima
ls

  IN ADDITION TO its human population, Provincetown is home to a number of thriving animal contingents. It is a big dog town, the sort of place where local dogs (a standard poodle named Dorothy, a black Labrador mix known as Lucy, the long-haired dachshund of the portly man who walks the streets in caftans) are as thoroughly known in their idiosyncrasies of being as the residents and are just as likely to be greeted by name if they saunter into a shop or café.

  Provincetown also boasts a considerable cohort of stately cats, more often than not white with bold black markings, like living Franz Kline paintings, descendants of a long-gone ur-cat. The cats possess, in toto, whatever remains of the placid, burgherish entitlement of the old whaling captains. Dogs, though abundant in Provincetown, do not rule, at least in part because strictly enforced leash laws, which apply even on the beaches, keep them forever relegated to the status of pet. They are named and numbered—they are always at least slightly humiliated. The cats, being freer and more ubiquitous, are not visibly owned at all, and they travel the streets and beaches with aristocratic certainty. They are beauties, these cats. There is, in Provincetown, almost no visible evidence of the scrawnier, more ferretlike and skittish specimens—I can only imagine that those nervous, bony types are relegated to alleys and backyards by their more prosperous brothers and sisters, the great glossy fifteen-pounders with royal heads and heavy, voluptuous tails who are never spooked by dogs or pedestrians; who are prone, on occasion, to nap in the middle of a sun-warmed street.

  As for wild animals, Provincetown is most prominently host to a thriving population of skunks. Skunks are everywhere there. Since they are nocturnal, you won’t ever encounter a skunk in daylight, but if you walk around late at night, after eleven or so, when the streets have begun to empty, you can hardly avoid seeing one or two or more. Though they fully possess their own animal dignity and sport those white stripes that go incandescent in the streetlight, they are not the most imposing of creatures. They are among nature’s pedestrians and trash-pickers. They waddle brazenly back and forth across Commercial Street, right in the middle of town, scavenging. If you leave them alone and go about your business, they will do the same.

  The residents dogs know better, but visiting dogs, being uninformed about the consequences, often chase skunks, and of course, just when they’ve got one cornered, as they are congratulating themselves on their courage and skill, the worst happens. One summer Kenny and I were having dinner with friends when our host’s Scottie was sprayed by a skunk. Since the dog’s owner was too drunk and stoned at the time to do much beyond register his dismay, Kenny and I took care of it as best we could. We had heard tomato juice was the only remedy, and so we rounded up all the tomato juice we could get from the neighbors, though we had to fall back on ketchup, tomato puree, and tomato soup, since actual tomato juice was not available in the required amounts. We put the dog in a tin basin and poured all the tomato products over her. It worked, more or less, but I can tell you that a skunk’s spray, close up, has a quality entirely different from those zones of reek you may have passed through on highways. It is worse than foul. It is the smell of annihilation. It has no parallel I can think of. It isn’t rot, it isn’t sulphur or ammonia; it is just indescribably bad, in a category of its own. You taste it when you breathe. You feel it infiltrating your nose and lungs. It was, in its way, a remarkable experience, though I wouldn’t care to repeat it. It was a reminder, the most potent one imaginable, that nature is very good at what it does; that that which survives is so clearly meant to do so.

  If skunks and cats are the petite bourgeoisie of Provincetown, its most stolid and crankily respectable nonhuman citizens, other animals live there at a more ephemeral but insistent remove. On the remoter edges you may see a fox every now and then, bright russet, usually standing so still (it will have heard you coming as if you were a freight train) that you may not be sure, at first, that it’s a living thing at all—it is the very embodiment of the word attention. I have seen deer out in the dunes and, once, a doe and fawn browsing among the grass in the cemetery.

  A hardy population of racoons and opossums and the occasional coyote moves more furtively than the skunks but with similar determination among the scraps and leftovers of late-night Provincetown. Late one night last summer, when my friend James and I had gone to retrieve our bicycles from where we’d left them, on the lawn in front of the Universalist church, an opossum came out of the bushes and stood directly in front of me. It was young, not by any means a baby but far from fully grown; it was an adolescent. It stood less than two feet before me, looking at me with an expression neither friendly nor fearful. It seemed merely curious. It was pale gray, almost white, with a shovel-shaped head, a nose the color of a pencil eraser, and eyes that were perfect black beads. We made eye contact. This has never happened to me with a wild animal. Automatically, without thinking, I reached over and touched it, gently, on the top of its head. I wasn’t petting it. I was trying to acknowledge it, to be polite, the way you might try to communicate not just your friendliness but your beingness to an extraterrestrial. It was foolish; I did it without thinking. The opossum’s pelt was rough but not unpleasantly so, like the bristles of a paintbrush. It didn’t bite me, but it did not like being touched; touching it had clearly not been the correct gesture. Still, it did not bolt away in terror. It simply slipped back into the bushes, and I went on to catch up with James.

  The West End

  ALTHOUGH IT IS now a semiorderly concentration of shops and houses, Provincetown was once so thoroughly devoted to the sea and what it yields as to seem as much a manifestation of the water as a human settlement. During its first hundred years, until the early 1800s, it was not really divided up into streets per se; it was simply a gathering of houses and shops, built on whatever patch of sand their builders selected. Gutted cod for salt cod, one of Provincetown’s most profitable early exports, lay drying on the sand before most of the houses, and cod hung drying from the trees as well. By way of ornamentation, most of the houses offered whale ribs and vertebrae in the stretches of sand where their gardens would have been.

  Soil came to Provincetown by way of ships that sailed there from Europe and South America, to load up on salt cod. They carried earth in their holds for ballast, which local citizens were glad to purchase, to spread around their houses for gardens. The ships’ crews refilled their holds with rocks for their return trips. This practice was outlawed as Provincetown became so denuded of rocks that the tides began to encroach upon the houses, but by then the selling of dirt had become a profitable sideline among the crews of the foreign ships. They continued selling earth to the people of Provincetown and stole rocks from the beaches at night.

  Provincetown has always divided itself into West End and East End. On this walk start at the West End and work your way east. The West End was traditionally, literally, the wrong side of the tracks. When Provincetown had become a significant whaling port, in the mid-and late 1800s, the most prosperous town in the state of Massachusetts, railroad tracks ran along the Cape right out onto MacMillan Wharf, in the middle of town, so trains could load whale oil, bone, and baleen directly into boxcars. (The trains are by now long gone.) The whaling crews and fishermen, the laborers and clerks and servants, many of them Portuguese, all lived west of the railroad tracks. The wealthy—the whaling captains and merchants, the summer people from Boston and New York—all lived to the east. Most of the gentry never went west of the tracks. It was considered dangerous, and an upstanding member of society seen venturing in that direction could only be after something unseemly.

  A version of the old division—reputable versus disreputable—remains, though it no longer has as much to do with economics. Compared to the East End, the West End is younger, sexier, and a bit more prone to noise at night though not, by any urban standards, very noisy at all. It is more gay. The beach where men go to have sex after the bars close is on the West End.

  The West End, though every bit as densely inhabited as
the East End, is slightly rougher and more random. The houses are more various, since the neighborhood’s history is not as genteel or orderly. You could say that the West End is more American, for better and for worse; it is a bit like West Egg in The Great Gatsby, where Jay Gatsby lived; where the newly rich and the newly arrived squeeze their private, personal monuments in among the prim cottages that came over from Long Point 150 years ago. The East End, like East Egg, where Daisy Buchanan lived, is more Cape Cod, more in love with tradition, more likely to house people whose families have owned their shingled, dormered residences for fifty or a hundred years.

  JOHN’S HOUSE

  On the West End of Commercial Street is my favorite Provincetown house, the home of my friend John Dowd. John’s house stands at the bend in Commercial Street that resulted when, in the mid-1800s, a particularly stubborn citizen refused to move his salt works to accommodate the laying out of the street (which was then called Front Street, as Bradford was sensibly called Back Street).

  John is a landscape painter. When he bought his house ten years ago, it was one of the eyesores of town, though the term eyesore probably implies a grander awfulness than this house actually possessed. It was simply as devoid of character or charm as a house can be: an old rambling building wrapped in aluminum siding, with a faded asphalt roof. If it were a person, it would have been a server in a high school cafeteria or an attendant at the sort of nursing home you hope never to have to go to; someone stolid and blank, of questionable competence, whose uniform is not quite clean and whose manner suggests a state of exhausted boredom so extreme that an emotion as deep as despair would be a relief.