Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown

by Michael Cunningham

  THE FAR EAST END

  As you walk past the stores and galleries of the East End, your most dicey aesthetic interlude will occur as you pass a four-story hotel that spans both sides of Commercial Street, a minor monument to ordinariness, with its sad little swimming pool surrounded by a cyclone fence. This place is known, locally, as the green monster, though it is no longer green. Directions are often given in terms of whether the place in question stands before (east) or after (west) the green monster. When it went up over thirty years ago, the selectmen quickly passed legislation forbidding any further structures more than two stories tall.

  East of the green monster you are on solid sightseeing ground. You will walk for about another half-mile past the houses that line the bay, the best of which are dreams. They are old and slightly precarious, as houses on water often are. In calamitous weather, they would be the first to go. They are not generally much ornamented; they are sensible New England houses, content with their salt-weathered shingles, their shutters and porches and dormers. They eschew fancy moldings and woodwork. There is not a cupola among them. Wooden houses (only one, Norman Mailer’s, is made of brick) subjected to this much weather are built like boats, with a bit of sway—the fact that they move slightly in strong winds is part of what keeps them standing. You can see through some of them; that is, you can look into a streetside window and see the bay through a rear window, like a living painting the owners have hung, one in which clouds shift and gulls glide by. The houses on the water in the East End, standing as they do on their sandy strip between asphalt and salt water, are not only dreams but are dreaming. With the exception of an occasional newcomer stuck in among them, they have been here long. Some of the children who played in summers on these porches eventually died of old age in one of the upstairs bedrooms. The houses here are not just unusually vulnerable to weather and tides. They are prone to an extra degree of ephemerality, as if one or two of them might, after all this time, forget that it was a house at all and simply dissolve into the bay.

  HELLO HELLO HELLO

  Several summers ago my friends Marie Howe and James Shannon lived in a cottage on the East End. At the end of their block, two weather-beaten houses faced each other across the street. A pair of elderly women lived in one of the houses. They were always inside, always watching television, wrapped in blankets. They ate their meals from trays in front of the TV

  Two old men lived in the opposite house. We could see, through their windows, that their house was full of what I would call junk but what they, surely, considered their holdings. Their living room was full of old radios and television sets, among other things, none of which appeared to work. One of the men, who might have been eighty, sat every day in the scrap of yard before his house on a dirty white plastic chair that had conformed itself to the shape of his body. He did not hear very well, or at all—it was difficult to determine. Every time anyone passed his house, he would smile, nod, and shout, “Hello hello hello,” in a cracked but resonant voice. James, Marie, and I agreed that when we grew old and infirm, if we were lucky enough to live that long, we would not be the sort of old people who huddled all day in front of a television set. We would be the sort of old people who set up chairs outside and yelled “Hello hello hello” to everyone who passed.

  THE END OF THE EAST END

  Eventually you’ll reach the forked intersection of Commercial and Bradford streets. The town line is a short distance away. Ahead of you is the long, languid stretch of Beach Point, with its gaggle of waterfront motels and cottages. Beach Point is lovely, in its corrupted way. Most of the motels date back to the forties and fifties, long one-story wooden buildings that tend to sport modest neon signs involving seagulls and to offer each guest a pair of metal lawn chairs, rusty at their edges, their backs molded in the shape of scallop shells. At the far eastern end, well beyond your range of vision here, across the Provincetown line, there’s a line of beach cabins, twenty or more, white, perfectly identical, with the precise shape and pro portions of the houses in the Monopoly game. A sign on each of them proclaims that it is named after a particular flower: rose, daisy, zinnia, marigold, hollyhock.

  We, however, will stop here. Stand for a minute or two just east of the last waterfront house, where the bay splashes right up to the foot of the road. To the east, ahead, is a small harbor within the harbor, formed by the jut of Beach Point. If it’s high tide, you’ll see a body of calm water giving back the sky. If it’s low tide, you’ll see an expanse of wet sand, still bearing the ridges made by the subsided water. The sand will be modestly hillocked, shaped as it is by currents, so that in the lower parts oblongs and parabolas of clear salt water shine. If the weather’s warm, the sand will be full of the people staying at the motels on Beach Point, and a good number of them will be children. The elderly may sit in folding chairs they’ve brought out with them. The younger adults, parents of the children, will be watching their children and looking out at the water, one hand raised to shield their eyes. The children will be running around, digging in the sand or kicking at it, splashing in the pools, heeding or ignoring their parents’ admonishments not to go too far, not to abuse their brothers or sisters, not to make quite so much noise. People have been doing exactly this, in just this way, for the last two hundred years.

  NOW

  Whatever the foghorns are

  the voices of feels terrible

  tonight, just terrible, and here

  by the window that looks out

  on the waters but is blind, I

  have been sleeping,

  but I am awake now.

  In the night I watch

  how the little lights

  of boats come out

  to us and are lost again

  in the fog wallowing on the sea:

  it is as if in that absence not many

  but a single light gestures

  and diminishes like meaning

  through speech, negligently

  adance to the calling

  of the foghorns like the one

  note they lend from voice

  to voice. And so does my life tremble,

  and when I turn from the window

  and from the sea’s grief, the room

  fills with a dark lushness and foliage nobody

  will ever be plucked from,

  and the feelings I have

  must never be given speech.

  Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,

  and I am almost ready to

  confess it is not some awful

  misunderstanding that has carried

  me here, my arms full of the ghosts

  of flowers, to kneel at your feet;

  almost ready to see

  how at each turning I chose

  this way, this place and this verging

  of ocean on earth with the horns claiming

  I can keep on if only I step

  where I cannot breathe. My coat

  is leprosy and my dagger

  is a lie, must I

  shed them? Do I have

  to end my life in order

  to begin? Music, you are light.

  Agony, you are only what tips

  me from moment to moment, light

  to light and word to word,

  and I am here at the waters

  because in this space between spaces

  where nothing speaks,

  I am what it says.

  DENIS JOHNSON

  The Water

  IF YOU GO to Provincetown and spend all your time there on land, you cannot properly claim to have seen the place, any more than you could claim to have seen New Mexico if you went to Santa Fe and didn’t stray beyond the city limits. In Provincetown it is possible to imagine the Atlantic as a backdrop, there to provide shimmer and wind as a foil for all this commerce. Once you are a half-mile or less from shore, however, you understand that Provincetown and everything in it is actually a minor, if obstreperous and brightly lit, interruption in the ocean
’s immense, inscrutable life.

  MACMILLAN WHARF

  In the exact middle of town is the entrance to MacMillan Wharf. This is where train tracks once ran right out onto the end of the wharf; where trains arrived empty and left loaded with whale oil, whalebone, and baleen. It is one of the half-dozen surviving wharves—there were once about sixty—and it still functions as it was meant to, though it’s nothing like what it was in its prime. Fishing boats still dock there, and some of what the fishermen are able to pull from the depleted waters is processed on the wharf.

  The wharf is immense, by local standards. Underneath, amid the brown trunks of its pilings, which are covered with mussels and scraps of seaweed, it nurtures a swatch of permanent shade. On top it is, essentially, a wide asphalt road that extends well out into the water. Cars and trucks come and go at all hours. The wharf smells of fish, as you would expect it to, but its fish smell is layered. The fresh and briny covers something fetid, not just dead fish but old oil and machinery that has been overheated again and again and again. From the side of the wharf, you can see fish swimming in water that is the color of deep, cloudy jade—just minnows usually, though you might see a bass or a bluefish dart by. The Hindu docks there, an eighty-year-old schooner that takes tourists on two-hour sails. The whale-watching boats dock there, too.

  Fishing is among the most dangerous of professions—the mortality rate among fishermen is almost ten times that among firefighters and policemen. This may account for the somber aspect that attaches to MacMillan Wharf, for all its tourist enticements. The wharf is subtly but discernibly haunted, a midway zone between the gaudy comforts of town and the shimmering immensity beyond. At the far end is a small village of trailers for processing fish, the harbormaster’s bungalow, and the Pirate Ship Whydah Museum, devoted to the treasure-laden ship of Captain Kidd, which sank in the waters off Wellfleet. All around them are the masts and lines of the small, privately owned fishing boats, the names of which tend to be either affectionate or wistful: the Chico Jess, the Joan Tom, the Second Effort, and the Blue Skies.

  The fishing boats, when you see them up close from the wharf, are battered and faded, thoroughly marked by their rough use. Scallop boats go out for weeks at a time, in all weathers. Their decks are usually littered with plastic buckets, cork floats, and disorderly piles of rope and net, most of which have aged to a smoky chestnut color. It’s clear that the ocean and its weather turn that which was once white to gray or yellow, that which was once bright to chalk, and that which was once dark to brownish-black. What there is of color usually resides in a fisherman’s pair of new orange waders, or a shroud of new fishnet, white or green, that has not yet begun to blacken.

  Walk out to the end of the wharf. Scavenging gulls will be making their usual racket. Men who have been darkened by the ocean will be working on the boats or standing in small groups, talking and drinking coffee from paper cups. From the end of the wharf you can get a closer look at the breakwater where the foghorn blows at night; you can see that all along its top it is a pearly, variegated white from seagull shit, which in that quantity is slightly phosphorescent. You can look farther out to Long Point, past the pleasure boats anchored in the bay. You can look back and see the long parabolic curve of the town and the ocean. It is the best way, while still on land, to understand how graceful and small the town must look, how touchingly inconsequential, to whales as they breach, farther out.

  I’m especially fond of walking to the end of MacMillan Wharf late at night, when it’s nearly empty. If you go there then, you will hear the boats creaking against the pilings. You will see the hard white light of the harbormaster’s office. The water will be full of gulls, calmer now that the fish are stored away, white as beacons as they swim along over the dim watery gray of their paddling feet. At the end of the wharf a brilliant blue Pepsi vending machine will shine against the black water and the starry black sky.

  FISH

  Most of the commercial fishing around Provincetown is done now by enormous corporate-owned boats, with auditorium-sized refrigerators, that can go far out into less-depleted waters and stay there until they’ve caught their limit. There are still tuna out there, in deep water, though they too are largely the quarry of big-money fishermen with expensive gear. A large tuna—they grow to eight feet and can weigh twelve hundred pounds—might bring as much as twenty thousand dollars; in summer several representatives of Japanese companies install themselves at MacMillan Wharf, ready to buy the choicest parts of the best tuna and overnight it to Japan. Every now and then a local hero takes one from a small boat, but it’s a job of Hemingway-esque proportions. A full-grown tuna is likely to be bigger than your boat. Once you’ve hooked it, you have to shoot it in the head, the way they shoot cattle in slaughterhouses, then lash it to the side of your boat and head back for shore. This happens rarely.

  For all intents and purposes, only a few fish worth noticing remain close to the shores of Provincetown. There are, as I’ve said, scallops and squid and lobsters. There are flounders and what are known as trash fish—goosefish and dogfish and wolffish. And there are game fish.

  The waters around Provincetown are full of bass and bluefish, which you can catch from the beach or a small boat. Blues are the criminals of the ocean. They are, essentially, sets of teeth that swim. When they’re running, in late August and early September, you can stand on the beach and see patches of roiling water, as close as twenty feet out, which occasionally manifest a flash of silver. This is a school of bluefish devouring a school of minnows. Catching blues involves a slightly perverse devotion to battle. Pulling one into your boat is something like being in a small room with an angry pit bull, and if you do win the fight, what you’ve got is a dark-fleshed, oily fish suitable only for grilling or smoking. Grilled bluefish can be a fine thing, but nobody prizes bluefish, no one hungers for it, no restaurant offers it as a signature dish.

  Bluefish will eat anything. They will strike at a length of broom handle, painted white, with a hook at its end. James told me he once pulled a blue into his boat and fought so hard with it that one of its eyes was gouged out before the fish struggled back into the ocean, half blind. James, ever practical, used the disembodied eye as bait and almost immediately caught the same fish again, which had struck at its own eye on a hook.

  Bass are another matter entirely. Bass are regal and lithe, calm the way athletes are calm, with athletes’ coiled, slumbering ferocity. Almost anyone can hook a bluefish (though not just anyone can land one); to hook bass you have to know what you’re doing. A bass is, essentially, a tunnel with a mouth at one end. They suck their food straight in without swallowing, so that if one takes your bait and you pull too soon, the bait and hook will just pop back out and the bass will swim away, barely traumatized. When a bass strikes, you’ve got to wait until the right moment and jerk the line in just the right way, so your hook buries itself in the fish’s stomach. Then the fight begins.

  Bass are present but not plentiful, so the taking of them is strictly regulated. Fishermen are allowed one per day, and it must be at least thirty inches long. No fisherman with any conscience would think of violating those rules. James often hooks a bass that proves to be too small, or he keeps catching them after he’s caught his limit, just for the love of it, though he always throws those fish back. Once the fish is in the boat, however, before throwing it back, he does something he tells me is customary among people who love to fish. He kisses it.

  WHALES

  A hundred and fifty years ago the waters around Provincetown were so full of whales, it was possible to harpoon them from shore. The front yards of most houses sported, as lawn ornaments, whale jaws and whale ribs, often bedecked with morning glories. If a pod of whales ventured close to shore, whalers jumped into their boats and herded them onto the beach. Shebnah Rich wrote of one such melee in his book, History of Truro:

  The vast school of sea monsters, maddened by frantic shouts and splashing oars, rushed wildly on the shore, throwing themselve
s clean onto the beach; others pursuing, piled their massive, slippery carcasses on the first, like cakes of ice pushed up by the tide, till the shore presented a living causeway of over six hundred shining mammals, the largest number at that time ever driven on shore in one school. They landed at Great Hollow. The news reached the church just at the close of the morning service. During the next few days while the stripping was going on, thousands came to the circus. Some who had never seen such an aquatic display were wild with delight, jumping from fish to fish and falling among them as among little mountains of India rubber.

  The surviving whales now live, largely unmolested, some distance out to sea. We who once killed them as recklessly and rampantly as pioneers killed off the buffalo of the prairies can pay to get on boats that will take us out to see them.

  For years I resisted going out on the whale-watching boats. It felt unseemly, even grotesque, an intrusion on the privacy of creatures who ought better to be left alone. I could not imagine standing on the deck of a whale-watching boat without feeling like someone Diane Arbus would have been all too glad to photograph.