Land's End Part 3

They rented the old houses that had once belonged to sea captains. They argued and drank at the A-House and the Old Colony Tap. Everybody slept with everybody. Some of the writers started writing plays, usually about their complicated love affairs, jealousies, and political disagreements. One night in 1915 the writers Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood produced two one-act plays for friends in their home. The first, Boyce's Constancy Constancy, about the romance between Mabel Dodge and John Reed, was staged on the veranda, with the audience watching from the living room, and the second, Suppressed Desires Suppressed Desires, a spoof of Freudianism by Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook, was put on in reverse, with the audience on the veranda and the play performed in the living room.

They named themselves the Provincetown Players and began staging more elaborate productions in a decrepit fishing shack on Lewis Wharf that had been bought by Mary Heaton Vorse, one of the first writers to settle in among the fishermen of Provincetown. What had been a lark soon took a more serious turn-the Players realized that work no one would produce in New York could be done in Provincetown for little or no money, by and among themselves. Jig Cook, the leader of the group, had visions of an American version of the Abbey Players in Dublin. In what has become locally known as the Great Summer of 1916, Susan Glaspell said, "We would lie on the beach and talk about plays-every one writing, or acting, or producing. Life was all of a piece, work not separated from play." It was during that summer that the Provincetown Players put on the first production of an O'Neill play, Bound East for Cardiff Bound East for Cardiff, which O'Neill directed.

EUGENE O'N O'NEILL, THEN twenty-eight years old, the son of a successful actor, had been sent by his father on a tramp steamer to Buenos Aires, in the hope that a long voyage would help cure him of his tendencies to drink too much and consort with pariahs and derelicts. Young O'Neill, however, found Buenos Aires more than sufficiently full of alcohol, pariahs, and derelicts, and when his money and health ran out, he worked his way back to the United States on a freighter and ended up in Provincetown. twenty-eight years old, the son of a successful actor, had been sent by his father on a tramp steamer to Buenos Aires, in the hope that a long voyage would help cure him of his tendencies to drink too much and consort with pariahs and derelicts. Young O'Neill, however, found Buenos Aires more than sufficiently full of alcohol, pariahs, and derelicts, and when his money and health ran out, he worked his way back to the United States on a freighter and ended up in Provincetown.

At twenty-eight he had already begun showing signs of wear; his face had already taken on some of the wounded stateliness he would wear into old age. He dressed as a sailor and did as much as he could to act like one-to eradicate the taint of privilege, to take up a life here in this new place as a rough stranger who'd washed up on the beach, who had never been pampered or cosseted, whose way had never been paid by a father or anyone else. He looked startled and sorrowful and aloof; he might have been a man in the very first stages of transfiguration into an elk. He was not large, but he looked bigger than he was, because he carried himself as if he were large and because he possessed that rare ability to occupy more s.p.a.ce than his flesh actually did. Except when drunk, he was taciturn and vaguely disapproving; people who knew him then tended to love and fear him to roughly equal extents, and many believed-or hoped-that he harbored for them some special affection that he was unable or unwilling to demonstrate by the conventional means. Women adored him.

Bound East for Cardiff, which concerns a dying seaman named Yank on a ship bound for North America from Argentina, was performed at Lewis Wharf on a foggy night in the summer of 1916, with the water of the incoming tide splashing audibly under the floorboards. It was revelatory. Those who attended the performance that night discovered what the larger world would learn soon enough: that even in his early efforts O'Neill was a transforming agent in American theater. He insisted on an American version of the grim, resolutely unflorid work of European playwrights like Strindberg and Ibsen, whom he admired; he was the first American to write about lower-cla.s.s life in lower-cla.s.s language, without condescension or cheap attempts at moral uplift.

O'Neill lived in Provincetown for eight years in various places, among them a room over the A-House. He wandered the streets in seaman's clothes, in a riot of melancholy drunkenness. He had a tortured affair with Louise Bryant. He made Abbie Putnam, the strict and rather terrifying local librarian, into a character who murders her child in Desire Under the Elms Desire Under the Elms. Eventually he married a woman named Agnes Boulton and settled with her in the Peaked Hill Life-Saving Station, a grand old barn of a building on the edge of the Atlantic that could be reached only by a half-mile hike through the dunes. (It has since collapsed into the ocean.) It had been renovated by Mabel Dodge, who painted the walls white and the floors blue and furnished it with antiques brought back from Europe. O'Neill wrote nineteen short plays and seven long ones in Provincetown, most of them while he lived in the house at Peaked Hill. He taught himself how to write during that time and had at his disposal a body of amateur actors and set designers who would mount everything he wrote. He became a great artist there, in what he called "a solitude where I lived with myself." He was at home at Peaked Hill when he learned, from a neighbor, that he had won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize, the first of his four Pulitzers. He celebrated quietly, with his wife, in their capacious and remote house, with its blue floors and its two couches that had been bought by Mabel Dodge from the estate of Isadora Duncan.

FURTHER A ART, OTHER A ART.

After World War I ended, after the preeminence of European painting and sculpture was toppled by the work of American artists, Provincetown's remoteness turned fairly abruptly from its central virtue to its most prominent liability. Who wanted to live so far from New York City, when New York had become the center of the world? A few artists spent their summers there, Robert Motherwell prominent among them, but Provincetown had become a backwater, a retreat, and many of the famous names connected with the town-people like Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner-were there only a summer or two. Still, a body of serious painters and sculptors like Paul Bowen, Fritz Bultman, Nanno de Groot, Chaim Gross, Peter Hutchinson, Karl Knaths, Leo Manso, Jack Tworkov, and Tony Vevers all lived there during the second half of the twentieth century, and some of them live there still.

Since the 1940s progressive little galleries have opened, thrived, and ultimately closed: Forum 49 and Gallery 256 and HCE (for "Here Comes Everybody," from Joyce's Finnegans Wake); Finnegans Wake); the Sun Gallery, which in 1959 showed Red Grooms's the Sun Gallery, which in 1959 showed Red Grooms's Walking Man Walking Man, possibly the first installation (known at the time as a "happening") to involve live actors; and the Chrysler Museum, where Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground put on Exploding Plastic Inevitable Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

By the late 1960s, however, Provincetown had devolved into a straightforward tourist town, albeit one with a slightly higher incidence of foment and creation than most other places whose main occupation was being visited. All the edgy little galleries had gone out of business, and the people who emigrated there were likelier to be seeking peace and quiet than inspiration, agitation, or argument. Those who went to the A-House and the Old Colony Tap went only to drink.

In 1969 Stanley Kunitz, Robert Motherwell, and other artists and writers who were upset about Provincetown's decline set out, essentially, to restock the town with younger artists and writers the way a forest service restocks a lake with fingerling trout. They raised a modest sum of money and bought Days Lumber, a defunct lumberyard on the East End. They converted it into studios, which they offered to artists and writers, along with a small but livable monthly allowance, and called it the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. It is still there.

The buildings of the Work Center, on Pearl Street, are agreeably disorderly. They include the long flat-roofed buildings that were once Days Lumber, a shingled barn that has been made over into studios, and two cottages fading among the weeds. Among the writers, painters, and sculptors who have received fellowships early in their careers, lived for a while in Provincetown, and gone on to more visible careers are Richard Baker, Maria Flook, Nick Flynn, Ellen Gallagher, Louise Gluck, Marie Howe, Denis Johnson, Tama Janowitz, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jenny Livingston, Elizabeth McCracken, Sam Messer, Ann Patchett, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jack Pierson, Louise Rafkin, Kate Wheeler, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lisa Yuskavage.

Due partly to the Fine Arts Work Center, and partly to the increasingly imponderable cost of living in New York City, Provincetown has to a certain extent been revived as an art colony. Still, it is not what it once was. Provincetown today is something like an elderly bohemian who once knew people of great influence, who still dresses eccentrically, still lives in defiant poverty, still paints or sculpts with heroic optimism, and flirts only on bad days with bitterness about having been gifted and dedicated and having been left behind.

As far as literature is concerned, O'Neill remains the town's great-grandfather, its most venerable ghost. Tennessee Williams summered there in the forties-he stayed at Captain Jack's Wharf, on the West End-but as far as I can tell, none of the more hopeful rumors about his relationship to Provincetown are true. He did not write The Gla.s.s Menagerie The Gla.s.s Menagerie or anything else there; he did not seduce the young Marlon Brando there, as a condition for getting him the lead in or anything else there; he did not seduce the young Marlon Brando there, as a condition for getting him the lead in Streetcar Streetcar. He came, it seems, for the same reasons so many have-for the sun, the quiet, and the boys.

The poets Mark Doty and Mary Oliver live in Provincetown today, and Stanley Kunitz spends each spring and summer in his house on the West End. Norman Mailer lives year-round in a big brick fortress of a house on the East End. Alan Dugan lives just over the line, in North Truro.

ALTHOUGH FEW OF the visual artists living and working in Provincetown are internationally known, some of them are in fact very, very good. On the one hand, Provincetown offers every form of artistic travesty, from landscapes and seascapes painted on a.s.sembly lines in Korea to dreadfully earnest Impressionist-style paintings of sunlit gardens and village streets. But on the other, it shows and sells work that is much edgier, work that engages the world in more complicated ways, that takes in not only the beauty of the skin but the existence of the skull beneath. I am looking, right now, at a shadowy charcoal drawing of a nocturnal Provincetown street by John Dowd, which I keep close by for inspiration when I write, along with a miniature lamp sewn into a square of white silk organza by Melanie Braverman; a series of mysteriously compelling random snapshots by Sal Randolph; a great cartoonish painting of an empty stage by Polly Burnell; a haunting photograph of a cottage by Marian Roth; and two little ceramic houses by Pasquale Natale that speak to equal extents of comfort and menace. the visual artists living and working in Provincetown are internationally known, some of them are in fact very, very good. On the one hand, Provincetown offers every form of artistic travesty, from landscapes and seascapes painted on a.s.sembly lines in Korea to dreadfully earnest Impressionist-style paintings of sunlit gardens and village streets. But on the other, it shows and sells work that is much edgier, work that engages the world in more complicated ways, that takes in not only the beauty of the skin but the existence of the skull beneath. I am looking, right now, at a shadowy charcoal drawing of a nocturnal Provincetown street by John Dowd, which I keep close by for inspiration when I write, along with a miniature lamp sewn into a square of white silk organza by Melanie Braverman; a series of mysteriously compelling random snapshots by Sal Randolph; a great cartoonish painting of an empty stage by Polly Burnell; a haunting photograph of a cottage by Marian Roth; and two little ceramic houses by Pasquale Natale that speak to equal extents of comfort and menace.

The painters, photographers, and sculptors of Provincetown need to sell their work as urgently as any artists do, but because the scale is so much smaller and the market so much broader, they are free to do whatever they feel moved to do, without the obligation to Be Important or to Move Art Along. Beauty as a subject in itself doesn't sell very well in the larger world these days-you'd be hard pressed to find a serious gallery in New York or Los Angeles or another big city showing many newer artists whose work isn't ironic, defiantly ugly (if defiant defiant is the right word for such relative unanimity), and intended as commentary on the state of the culture at large. These are lean years for young still-life and portrait painters. A frank love of the visible world and a determination to pay tribute to it won't get you very far just now. But you can do fine in Provincetown. is the right word for such relative unanimity), and intended as commentary on the state of the culture at large. These are lean years for young still-life and portrait painters. A frank love of the visible world and a determination to pay tribute to it won't get you very far just now. But you can do fine in Provincetown.

What pa.s.ses for a dowager on the Provincetown art scene is the Provincetown Art a.s.sociation, a gracious, rambling old white building in the East End with a trove of work by the luminaries and semiluminaries of Provincetown past and present. The galleries of Provincetown are not averse to showing work that aspires unashamedly to the rendering of the visible world, but at the same time some of them also show the work of artists who might be a little too far out there for most galleries in New York. Provincetown is where Kathe Izzo can get permission to live for several days in a gallery and arrange herself as a living tableau. It is where Mich.e.l.le Weinberg could make a gown in the shape of a giant pink While You Were Out slip for opera singer Debbie Karpel, who wore it and stood in the window of a gallery on Halloween night, singing arias. It is where Sal Randolph could, last October, curate a show of free art, in which dozens of artists from town partic.i.p.ated and at which you could take anything you wanted, as much as you wanted, for free.

THE F FAR E EAST E END.

As you walk past the stores and galleries of the East End, your most dicey aesthetic interlude will occur as you pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 p.r.o.ne 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.

h.e.l.lO H h.e.l.lO H h.e.l.lO.

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 sc.r.a.p 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 pa.s.sed his house, he would smile, nod, and shout, "h.e.l.lo h.e.l.lo h.e.l.lo," 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 "h.e.l.lo h.e.l.lo h.e.l.lo" to everyone who pa.s.sed.

THE E END OF THE E EAST E 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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.

NOWWhatever 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 n.o.body lushness and foliage n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ce between s.p.a.ces where nothing speaks, I am what it says.DENIS J 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 sh.o.r.e, 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. 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 W 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 ba.s.s or a bluefish dart by. The Hindu Hindu docks there, an eighty-year-old schooner that takes tourists on two-hour sails. The whale-watching boats dock there, too. 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 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 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 Chico Jess, the Joan Tom Joan Tom, the Second Effort Second Effort, and the Blue Skies 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 s.h.i.t, which in that quant.i.ty is slightly phosph.o.r.escent. You can look farther out to Long Point, past the pleasure boats anch.o.r.ed 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 j.a.panese companies install themselves at MacMillan Wharf, ready to buy the choicest parts of the best tuna and overnight it to j.a.pan. 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 sh.o.r.e. This happens rarely.

For all intents and purposes, only a few fish worth noticing remain close to the sh.o.r.es 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 ba.s.s 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 n.o.body 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.

Ba.s.s are another matter entirely. Ba.s.s 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 ba.s.s you have to know what you're doing. A ba.s.s 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 ba.s.s will swim away, barely traumatized. When a ba.s.s 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.

Ba.s.s 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 ba.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 sh.o.r.e, whalers jumped into their boats and herded them onto the beach. Shebnah Rich wrote of one such melee in his book, History of Truro: History of Truro: The vast school of sea monsters, maddened by frantic shouts and splashing oars, rushed wildly on the sh.o.r.e, throwing themselves clean onto the beach; others pursuing, piled their ma.s.sive, slippery carca.s.ses on the first, like cakes of ice pushed up by the tide, till the sh.o.r.e presented a living causeway of over six hundred shining mammals, the largest number at that time ever driven on sh.o.r.e 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.

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 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 quant.i.ties of plankton, const.i.tute 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. 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 quant.i.ties of plankton, const.i.tute 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 p.r.o.ne 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-p.r.o.nged 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, l.u.s.terless 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 circ.u.mstances, 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, p.r.o.ne 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 appet.i.te for the full range of human pa.s.sions. 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 ba.s.s, 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 offsh.o.r.e 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 their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the sc.r.a.ps of wood, sh.e.l.l, and rope I've used for Billy's various memorials. After dark the racc.o.o.ns 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 pa.s.sing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished G.o.ddesses; 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. 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 circ.u.mstances, 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, p.r.o.ne 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 appet.i.te for the full range of human pa.s.sions. 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 ba.s.s, 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 offsh.o.r.e 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 their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the sc.r.a.ps of wood, sh.e.l.l, and rope I've used for Billy's various memorials. After dark the racc.o.o.ns 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 pa.s.sing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished G.o.ddesses; 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 s.p.a.cE 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 Provincetown as a Stage by Leona Rust Egan, by Leona Rust Egan, Time and the Town Time and the Town by Mary Heaton Vorse, and Tony Vevers's essays in the catalog of the Permanent Collection of the Provincetown Art a.s.sociation and Museum. by Mary Heaton Vorse, and Tony Vevers's essays in the catalog of the Permanent Collection of the Provincetown Art a.s.sociation 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.