Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown

by Michael Cunningham

  No one I know thought it was a good idea for John to buy this place, even though the price was low (as, we all felt, it well should have been). Everyone I know is astonished at the house John was able to find under all that aluminum and asphalt, that general air of quiet hopelessness. It turns out that aluminum siding peels off, as John put it, “like foil off a baked potato,” and in this case had actually helped preserve the old wood siding beneath. He replaced the aluminum-frame windows, the sort you find in cheap condos, with six-over-sixes he scavenged from flea markets and demolitions and managed to fill them with panes of the imperfect, slightly wavy glass they would have held when they were new. He put up shutters (also old scavenged ones, from the period when the house was built), replaced the roof, and added a back porch.

  As a renovator, John’s true gift lies in his respect for the process of decay. Provincetown is full of “restored” houses that, with every good intention on the part of their owners, have been rendered so pristine, they might be part of a Cape Cod village section in Epcot Center. John’s aesthetic runs more toward the Miss Havisham, and his house is not only lovely but looks as if it has been standing there, more or less unaltered, for at least a hundred years.

  Usually in summer someone is staying there, in one of the upstairs bedrooms with an old brass bed and a dormer window. Often more than one or two people are staying there. It is a bit like I imagine English country houses to have been during the days of Jane Austen—a sort of ongoing semiparty with guests who come and go, read books in the garden or cook some dish they’re renowned for, gather at dinnertime, and then disperse again. One guest, an erudite man and a considerable cook, somehow extended his visit to just under four years.

  The house has a well-used music room with a player piano and a big closet devoted entirely to costumes. It is possible, at John’s house, to arrive in your street clothes and emerge as a sultan, a Confederate soldier, or a ballerina with feathered wings. The archway that leads from his reading room to the living room has been fitted out with heavy velvet curtains that facilitate the occasional parlor game, play, or evening of tableaux vivants.

  If you happen to be in Provincetown on the Fourth of July, you will find a group of us installed on John’s front porch, under the enormous, tattered American flag he hangs every July over his front door, with only forty-five stars on it. It is one of our traditions. We have a grill and a good supply of hot dogs—anyone who wants one is welcome to a hot dog and a glass of whatever we’re serving, if you eat such things and care to linger awhile. We play instruments, very badly, and only until the irritable man three doors down calls the police and makes us stop, though if you arrive before the police do, we’d love for you to take a turn on the drum, saxophone, tambourine, or kazoo. It doesn’t matter if you can’t play. None of us can.

  In one of the upstairs windows, the one that looks right up Commercial Street, John has placed a chalky old marble bust of Shakespeare, looking out. You can see it especially well late at night, when everyone has finally gone to bed and Shakespeare shines palely in the dark window, like a little moon.

  Downtown

  IF YOU START on the West End and walk east on Commercial Street, you’ll find that shops and galleries begin to appear among the houses. By the time you reach the intersection of Commercial and Winslow streets, you are in the full-blown commercial district. If you are there during the tourist season, you will find yourself among thicker and thicker crowds until, by the time you reach Town Hall, it will be impossible to walk in any reasonably efficient straight line for more than three or four paces.

  For decades there has been an ongoing battle waged by some citizens to have Commercial Street closed to vehicular traffic, but as far as I can see, that will never happen. Commercial is a one-way street—traffic moves from east to west—that has not been widened since it was laid out 150 years ago, well before the birth of the Jeep Cherokee. There is a sidewalk on only one side, and it barely accommodates two average-sized adults walking side by side. Commercial Street faces a considerable challenge as a main thoroughfare for multitudes of strolling pedestrians, families with strollers, bicyclists, delivery trucks, and needlessly large American cars.

  The crowds on Commercial Street are extremely difficult to negotiate if you’re trying to arrive at any sort of actual destination with anything resembling alacrity. The people walking along the street are, naturally, almost all browsers and sightseers. They make frequent unscheduled stops. They don’t understand that Commercial Street is, in fact, a street (who can blame them?), and so they wander from side to side—riding through on a bicycle (the preferred and most practical mode of transportation in Provincetown) is like flying a spaceship through a field of sluggish but erratically moving asteroids.

  Although the town welcomes these people, needs them for its very livelihood, residents tend to become irritable about the crowds, especially as summer wears on, when the street on which they conduct their necessary business is all but impassable, and the purchase of any rudimentary grocery item may involve waiting in line for half an hour or longer. A visitor strolling on Commercial Street on a summer day should not feel unduly offended if a citizen scowls or mutters as he or she attempts to negotiate the street in order to buy a newspaper or a carton of milk or go to the post office. It isn’t personal; not exactly personal. As a tourist, you are part of the stormy weather that blows through every year, and residents feel as free as anyone anywhere to complain about the weather, knowing, as everyone does everywhere, that their feelings won’t make one bit of difference to the elements at large.

  A BLESSING FROM THE POST OFFICE

  The Provincetown post office is in the western half of town. For many years one of the women who worked there (I’m sorry to say she has retired) wrote poetry and loved anyone else who wrote poetry, whether they were any good at it or not. If you were sending your poems out in hopes of publication or a grant, and you told her that that was what you were doing, she’d take your envelope into the back of the post office and press it to her bare breast for luck before sending it on.

  PLACES TO PEE

  There are, as far as I know, only two places where the public is officially permitted to pee without buying anything. You can use the bathrooms in Town Hall, though it closes to the public if a meeting, show, or fund-raising auction is going on inside. There are, more reliably, public bathrooms on the bay side of Town Hall, right by the parking lot next to MacMillan Wharf.

  GOSSIP

  Provincetown is, among its many attributes, one of the more impressive rumor mills in the Western world. Nathaniel Parker Willis, a popular nineteenth-century journalist, said over a hundred years ago that it was a place with “no secrets, where there is but one accountable path in the whole neighborhood. Everybody at Provincetown knows every time everybody goes out, and every time anybody comes in.” That is still true. Any small town engenders a good deal of gossip, but in this regard Provincetown is to other towns what McDonald’s is to mom-and-pop diners. Most citizens of most small towns must content themselves with a handful of extramarital affairs and a few wayward sons and daughters; they must chew and chew this limited fare. In Provincetown the denizens tend to lead more dramatic lives, and some citizens maintain a more than usually creative relationship to reality. Thus, the offerings are almost embarrassingly rich and varied.

  The nerve center of Provincetown’s gossip network is the steps in front of the post office. They were, however, better suited to leisurely tale-telling before post office officials, in an act I can only interpret as conspicuous malice, became concerned that loiterers were interfering with the public’s ability to come and go and so cut the steps in half by installing a wholly unnecessary brick flower box. In response, satellite gossip stations have been established—the bricked yard in front of Joe’s coffee house (the one in the West End, not its sister to the east) and the wooden bench in front of a store called Map are especially fertile.

  The gossip season extends from early fall to
late spring. In summer, during the tourist assault, everyone is too busy to pay more than glancing attention to questions about who’s doing what to whom and why. By mid-September, however, the feast begins, and it goes on well into June. In a month of average fecundity, someone will have left a lover for that person’s former lover, someone will have gotten drunk and trashed the apartment of an ex, someone will have gotten fired under suspicious circumstances rumored to involve sex or drugs or both, and the members of a newly formed theatrical troupe will have had a screaming fight, disbanded, and then re-formed minus the member considered to be the source of the trouble. The meetings of various twelve-step programs around town have a problem with people who are not really addicts at all but say they are so they can come to meetings and find out what’s going on. During the time it took me to write this chapter on gossip, I received a number of e-mails from several friends in Provincetown who feel particularly obliged to keep me informed. One concerned a young man who stole a car on Commercial Street, crashed it into a van carrying deaf tourists, and ran out into the bay, believing that would throw dogs off his scent. The second involved two local men who took a taxi to one of the banks, put on ski masks, and held up the tellers at gunpoint. The men forced the tellers to fill several garbage bags with currency, then got on two getaway bicycles they had left nearby, rode home with the loot, where they were quickly apprehended. Both those stories are true. I checked.

  Among the more notable rumors I’ve heard over the years, I offer the following:

  Barbra Streisand is buying a house, under an assumed name, in North Truro.

  Elton John is trying to buy a house in Provincetown but can’t find one he likes.

  Provincetown is one of the designated areas for the federal Witness Protection Program, and many of its innocous-seeming citizens (to whatever extent anyone in Provincetown can be called innocuous) have informed on members of crime syndicates and been resettled in Provincetown with new identities.

  Jackie Onassis once showed up at the A-House with Gore Vidal and a phalanx of bodyguards.

  It should also be noted that there is always a celebrity who has been seen with absolute certainty somewhere in town. These sightings have ranged, over the years, from Kevin Spacey to Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn (with and without Kurt Russell), and, perennially, Barbra Streisand. The only celebrity I have ever seen there is Gene Rayburn, former host of The Match Game, gliding down Commercial Street on Rollerblades.

  Conversation in general, which includes but is not limited to gossip, is both valued and widely practiced in Provincetown. Its citizens are a loquacious people, fond of stories of all kinds. It is common for a Provincetownian driving along Commercial Street to see a friend passing on foot or on a bicycle and stop to talk to that person at medium length. If you are in a car behind one of these impromptu klatsches, please do not honk your horn, unless the conversation goes on for a truly unconscionable period or you have mistakenly taken poison and are on your way to procure the antidote. It is impolite. Provincetown is an ecosystem, and these street sessions are among its inhabitants’ innate characteristics. Displays of impatience or aggressiveness are not considered the badges of personal importance they are in some other places. Anyone in a great hurry is generally perceived not as a mover and shaker but simply as an intruder from a noisier, less interesting world and is likely to be ignored.

  Eating and Drinking

  PROVINCETOWN IS, OF course, part of New England, a region of hard-knobbed hills and low mountains rising up from a cold ocean amenable only to crustaceans, squid, and some of the hardier, less glamorous finned fish: cods and blues, flounder and bass; fish that tend toward practical shapes, the torpedo or the platter; fish with powerful jaws and blunt, businesslike heads and sleek strong bodies of gunmetal, pewter, or muddy brown. The soil around there produces almost nothing delicate—no fragile or thin-skinned fruits, no tentative greens that would expire in a cold snap, hardly anything that can reasonably be eaten raw. Cranberries and pumpkins do well; bivalves flourish in the chill waters. It is most agreeable to that which has developed thick rinds or shells. If New England has been, from its inception, home to preternaturally determined human settlers, to those who equate hardship with virtue, its Puritan and Calvinist roots are apparent in its diet, which runs not only, of necessity, to that which must have the toughness boiled out of it before it can be served but which tends to eschew, by choice, any spices more flamboyant than salt and pepper. When a friend of mine moved from New Orleans to Boston, she said one night in exasperation, after another bland and sensible meal, “You notice they didn’t call it New France. You notice they didn’t call it New Italy”

  Fresh fish is Provincetown’s most prominent glory, and most fabulous among its fish, to me, are the clams and oysters that come from the tidal flats of Wellfleet, two towns away. A Wellfleet oyster, especially in the colder months, is supernal: firm and immaculately saline, a little mouthful of the Atlantic itself. One autumn several years ago when I was staying for a few days with a friend, she came home in the afternoon with a bucket each of clams and oysters she had dug from the flats in Wellfleet, bearded with bright brown seaweed, and a huge bouquet of wild irises, dark as bruises, with tight, cogent little blossoms so unlike the paler, more ephemeral irises sold in flower shops it was hard to believe they were the same flower at all. It is possible to stride out into the landscape and return not only with dinner but with flowers for the table as well.

  Fresh local fish is not, however, as abundant in the restaurants of Provincetown as you might expect it to be. A century or more of excess has depleted the surrounding ocean, and much of what can still be coaxed from the water is bedded in ice and shipped elsewhere. There are only two or three raw bars in town, where you can actually procure shellfish forked out of the sand nearby. Fried clams are easier to find, and while a proper clam roll—crisply fried clams with briny, gelatinous bellies served on a grilled hot dog bun—is a marvelous thing, the precise origins and even the pristine freshness of the clams in question are not matters of great concern. Squid and scallops, among the less endangered inhabitants of these waters, are mysteriously hard to find in restaurants in town, and you’re at least as likely to be offered fresh cod in New York or Philadelphia as you are in Provincetown.

  To whatever extent a discernible local cuisine exists, it is Portuguese. The Portuguese food most common in New England runs to soups and stews, whatever can be simmered until its fibrousness or bitterness begins to yield. Kale soup studded with circles of linguiça, a Portuguese sausage, is a staple, as are dark, tomato-based squid stews and salt cod in various forms. Some of the local Portuguese families still dry cod in their yards, either laid out flat on the ground or hung from the limbs of trees. But Portuguese food, too, is increasingly hard to find, at least in part because the restaurants of Provincetown have, for some time now, aspired to a certain pan-American sophistication that tends to involve the same pasta and chicken, the same tuna and salmon and beef, that you can get just about anywhere. Generally speaking, you are best advised while in Provincetown to forget any protracted search for indigenous foods and just eat and drink whatever most appeals to you. You need not seek out the rare or quintessential; no one back home will be disappointed if you’ve failed to taste something famous that’s made in a seaside cavern and aged ten years in kelp, or that’s been retrieved by specially trained ferrets from the upper branches of particular trees, or that secretes a deadly venom unless harvested at the apogee of the full moon. You are free.

  PROOF OF GOLD

  You think, living in this town, no one’s at war

  because of how we all respect savage flowerings

  for instance, or the queer biker who walks a stranger

  to the curb because the wind is lit up from some strange

  cellar to make us late. We think we belong

  where we are better known.

  I ride my bike. I ride my bike through speeds

  like flavors, unzip th
e mile-long zipper that cinches

  the street and sad bay together.

  Fletcher named it the Bay of Take What’s Left.

  But I have seen mornings when all the bay could do

  was give nothing but proof of gold

  waving. Gold, going on without us.

  MICHAEL KLEIN

  Acquisitions

  WHEN YOU REACH the middle of town, you will see, if it is not the dead of winter, that there is a lot for sale. Like any tourist town, Provincetown needs you to buy things, many things, so it can live. The human impulse to shop is, of course, eternal and universal, one of our identifying characteristics as a species, and I confess to a queasy but ardent devotion to the search for magical objects among the gross output of the civilized world. I’ve never entirely shed my sense of shame about material-ism—if I were a true and poetic spirit, if I were the hero of the story I’d most like to tell about myself, wouldn’t I go to art museums with no thought of the gift shop?—but have long abandoned hope of transcending my own urge to search out and acquire. It’s hard to know what to do or say about this endless desire, our collective urge to feather and refeather our nests, to return bearing the golden fleece. Here we are (we who are lucky enough), in our houses, among our things, and for most of us there is always the tantalizing possibility of something else out there—the shell, the goblet, the golden slipper. Here we are standing before the relics of a saint or the fossilized bones of a mythical monster, moved by the sight and wondering, at the same time, if there may be a postcard or tote bag or snow globe waiting, an addition to our ongoing collection of memento mori; something for us to have.