Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown

by Michael Cunningham

  I was wrong. The whale-watching excursions are miraculous, and I urge anyone who feels reluctant for any reason to simply get on a boat and go. While I’ve tried to shy away from promoting any one local enterprise over another except when it seems absolutely necessary, I should tell you that the Dolphin fleet is the one operated by the Center for Coastal Studies, which uses the profits to fund its ongoing study of the migratory and other habits of whales.

  The trip takes about four hours, and much of that time involves churning your way across empty water to get to the places where the whales feed. Whales are migratory—they winter to the south and come north in summer. You are most likely to see humpbacks, which are barnacle-bearded creatures, snouted, with broad black-gray backs and pale gray bellies. Their mouths (like most whales, they eat plankton) are gigantic hinges set high in their heads, and their eyes, surprisingly small, are set far back and low, close to their mouths. You may also see pilot whales or schools of dolphin. I should warn you that from day to day and summer to summer the whales are capricious in their choices of feeding grounds. They are always out there, but some summers they are too far away for the boats to get to where they are and back within four hours, and some days they seem simply to have decided to be in a place where the boats are not. Whale watches are gambles. You might see no more than a distant breaching or two; you might return having witnessed nothing beyond a distant almond shape, expelling a miniature spray of water. I have been on a fruitless trip during which, after hours of sailing around and seeing nothing, a middle-aged woman stood at the prow of the boat, wearing a pantsuit and holding a straw clutch decorated with straw strawberries, and said, “Ooh, come on, you finky whales.” The leviathans did not respond.

  On a good day, however, you will see them come to within feet of the boat, and it is one of the more remarkable things that can happen to a human being. The whales don’t seem to mind the boats—if anything, they seem mildly curious about them, the way a land-living creature might wonder about a rock or a tree it could swear hadn’t been there yesterday. They are docile but not in any way bovine. They are, of course, immense, though you don’t comprehend that fully until you’ve seen one up close. They are benign, enormously powerful, and unconcerned with us. They are, at close range, utterly fleshly. Their slick backs are scarred and notched; the flesh of their underbellies is scored with pliant-looking ridges you could sink your whole hand into. Their heads and bodies are sometimes freckled and dappled like an Appaloosa’s hindquarters. Being mammals, they are not entirely hairless. Their eyes have short, bristly lashes. They snort and sigh and exhale; they expel jets of water through their blowholes, which form spangles of iridescent mist over their backs. They smell powerfully of fish and of themselves, a smell like that of fish but oilier, deeper, so potently rank, you suspect it may linger in your clothes and hair.

  If you’re very fortunate, you may see a whale jump straight up from the water, three-quarters of its length, and crash down again. A whale when it jumps is, momentarily, aloft, suspended: all that tonnage, all that blubber, though the word blubber is hard to apply to such sleek and muscular beings. If you see one jump, you will understand how perfectly built they are (you who were never really meant to walk upright), how much like living torpedoes. There is nothing about them that does not speak directly to their ability to swim. Their flukes are enormous, gracefully curved, broad and flat, covered with barnacles. Their mouths, meant to scoop up vast quantities of plankton, constitute almost a third of their bodies; their heads in profile are wedges that terminate in the broad hard-rubber rims of their mouths, which meet in an overlap, like the lid of a box.

  The whales don’t jump often, at least not for the benefit of whale-watching boats. They are more prone to breaching, their heads underwater, showing their scarred, glistening backs as they take in oxygen through their blowholes. After a minute or two they dive again. Their backs disappear underwater, and a moment later, as they angle themselves to dive, they flip their two-pronged black tails up from amid the chaos of churn and foam they’ve created.

  I once stood at the rail and watched a humpback swim under the boat, no more than twenty feet down, so we could see its whole body, so we could fully understand how buoyant it was and begin to understand that it truly occupied the water. The whale was deep green in the green-blue water, shadowy as an X-ray, netted with pallid light. The sight was stirring and somewhat frightening, not because the whale could or would damage the boat but because it was revealed, briefly, in its realm, the vastness that lay under us, with its schools of darting fish; its granular, sun-filtered green that would deepen by slow degrees to jade, lusterless emerald, and then pure black; its submerged cliffs and plains and valleys where, among the fissures, darker fish swam over a bare, porous landscape of rock without needing to see; where pinpoints of luminescence drifted and anemones waved their translucent petals.

  Epilogue

  KENNY AND I met in Provincetown over fifteen years ago. I was living in Brooklyn then and had gone up for the weekend with my friend Bob Applegarth (whose ashes we scattered several years later on the big dune at the end of Snail Road). Kenny, who lived in Manhattan, was in Provincetown for a week by himself, though he was not often by himself once he got there. We spoke to each other casually, as strangers do, in an art gallery, then ran into each other again, later that night in front of Spiritus, where we exchanged phone numbers. If we hadn’t happened onto each other that second time, I suspect we’d never have met again, and we’ve wondered over the years whether we were likely ever to have met, under any circumstances, in New York. It seems doubtful. We had little, outwardly, in common. But Provincetown is the kind of place where people who are not technically supposed to meet at all not only do so but see one another over and over again. Kenny and I have been together all of the last fifteen years, and we still go to Provincetown every chance we get. We imagine ourselves, only half jokingly, as old coots there, prone to a little more gold jewelry than is absolutely necessary, walking wire-haired dachshunds on leashes down Commercial Street. I can think of worse fates. Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pinkorange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of thei
r bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IF SPACE PERMITTED, it would be appropriate to thank everyone who lives in or loves Provincetown. I must, however, limit myself to the people who read this book in manuscript, and helped me with the prose and the facts. I extend my particular thanks to Mark Adams, Janet Biehl, Ken Corbett, Melanie Braverman, Mary DeAngelis, Dennis Dermody, John Dowd, Marie Howe, Anne Lord, Mark McCauslin, Molly Perdue, Sal Randolph, Marian Roth, Ellen Rousseau, and James Shannon.

  I also relied on the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum for information about Provincetown’s past, and am particularly grateful to Jeffory Morris, the curator there. I also referred to Provincetown as a Stage by Leona Rust Egan, Time and the Town by Mary Heaton Vorse, and Tony Vevers’s essays in the catalog of the Permanent Collection of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

  Doug Pepper, my editor, was a writer’s dream come true. And I am always indebted to Gail Hochman, Meg Giles, and Marianne Merola.

  CREDITS

  Excerpt from Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Norman Mailer. Copyright © 1984 by Norman Mailer. Reprinted with permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.

  “Long Point Light” from Atlantis by Mark Doty. Copyright © 1995 by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  “The Snakes of September” from The Collected Poems by Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 2000 by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  “From Nowhere” from The Good Thief by Marie Howe. Copyright © 1988 by Marie Howe. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc.

  “Proof of Gold” from 1990 by Michael Klein. Copyright © 1993 by Michael Klein. Reprinted by permission of Provicetown Arts Press.

  “The Want Bone” from The Want Bone by Robert Pinsky. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  “Land’s End” from Love’s Instruments by Melvin Dixon. Copyright © 1995 by Melvin Dixon. Used by permission of Tia Chucha Press.

  “Night Song for a Boy” from Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry by Alan Dugan. Copyright © 2001 by Alan Dugan. Used by permission of Seven Stories Press.

  “Now” from The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New by Denis Johnson. Copyright © 1969, 1976, 1982, 1987, 1995 by Denis Johnson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  Copyright © 2002 by Michael Cunningham

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Crown Journeys, an imprint of Crown Publishers, New York. Member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. www.randomhouse.com

  CROWN JOURNEYS and the Crown Journeys colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Illustration by John Dowd

  Map by Jackie Aher

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cunningham, Michael.

  Land’s end: a walk through Provincetown/by Michael Cunningham—

  1st ed.

  1. Provincetown (Mass.)—Description and travel. 2. Walking—

  Massachusetts—Provincetown. 3. Cunningham, Michael. I. Title.

  F74.P96 C86 2002

  917.44′92—dc21

  2002024710

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71801-3

  v3.0