Provincetown, 1990. The universe, God, the essence of benevolence gives us the unmatchable autumn of our lives: brilliant days brimming with warm October light that seem never to end. Our little rented cottage on the edge of what Melville called “the great unbounded” feels itself boundless; our attention’s turned outward from the tiny bayside rooms to the huge horizontals around us, an expanse of harbor and horizon wide as the world. We swim in the bay late into October, and walk the huge pewtery gleam of the tideflats barefoot into November. It seems a long time since either of us has felt this free or this happy. Illness seems far away, living easy. How did we get here?
It seemed effortless, or at least as if our efforts were richly, invisibly assisted; everything conspired to bring us to a brighter, less freighted life. Lynda and David, spending a sabbatical year on the Cape, invited us down for a visit, in February, the off-est of the off-season, a time of the year I’d never seen Provincetown. Weary of the deep snow of Vermont, as well as its icy emotional weather, we found ourselves smitten with the coastal clutter of boarded shops and clapboard houses along the curve of the bay. Our friends had rented a big old drafty place across the street from the water, a former rooming house stocked with more beds than you could count. When it began to snow and snow, keeping us in town another day, we couldn’t have been happier. We ate kale soup just behind the steamed windows of one of the two open cafés. Our angelic waiter (a painter I still know, who’d later come to be a friend) welcomed us, a sort of everyday angel whose task it seemed to bless our meal, our visit, our days in a place that offered a sense of respite. After our dark northern days of adjustment and strength-seeking, this town was like balm.
And so a process of realignment began, so subtle that we almost didn’t know it was happening. One day one of us suggested a trip back to Provincetown for spring break, and April found us in a rambling waterfront apartment in the West End. It was a week of brash new sun, crocus unfurling while the whole town emerged to wash windows, sweep walks, and take in the new light. As we did, walking with Lynda at the cranberry bog on the North Pamet Road, way up into the high, heathered dunes over the beach near Head of the Meadow. I remember one day especially, taking Arden to the beach at Race Point, and curling up together with a thermos of coffee in the shoulder of a dune, ignoring the books and paper we’d brought, dreaming there in that early sun which the skin receives with such gratitude that it seems better than all the rays of summer. The social climate of the town—its ready acceptance of us as a couple, its affirmation of our ordinariness—felt also like a drink of sunlight; dealing with HIV had underlined our sense of isolation, underscored the sense of difference northern New England’s homogeneous culture kept reminding us of anyway.
During the vacation, I had to leave town for a day, on some literary business. It was almost dark when I returned. At the point where the only road into town is suddenly a band of asphalt between two sand dunes, a thought leapt into my head: I’m home now. Home? Where did that come from? Home was three hundred miles away, and we’d be there in a few days. But I couldn’t escape this new sense of an arrival, a door in my life opening.
Driving back to Vermont, under ragged patches of cloud raining and hurrying across a sky scrubbed a clean April blue, we drove past the tail end of a rainbow whose ending place was plainly visible; you could actually look through the end of the rainbow into the wet grass. Home again, we almost didn’t even need to say it out loud: what were we doing here? I’d stayed five years in a job I was wearying of, and neither school nor the display business which Wally had built were priorities to him. We loved our house, I loved my garden, but these didn’t seem enough; now we needed community, like-minded company. We needed both support and a place that would leave us alone to work on what was essential, which was trying to understand what was happening to us, feeling our way, finding how to live well. Who knew how much time we’d have? Nothing, nothing erodes one’s patience like that question.
Solutions materialized as easily as our rainbow, emblem of promise and futurity. A friend called from Sarah Lawrence College, in New York, and offered me a job as her replacement during a year’s leave. Sarah Lawrence is a long way from Provincetown, but because the job involved teaching only on Mondays and Tuesdays, it was perfectly possible to drive down to the college, stay over and teach, then have the rest of the week on the Cape. Though the house was sold in fifteen minutes, there were endless things to do: cleaning out the accumulations of two men absurdly fond of barn sales and auctions and flea markets, deciding what was essential, letting go of one life and reaching uncertainly toward another. But a kind of ease prevailed, a sense that the rightness of what we were doing made a complex set of exchanges and arrangements possible. We seemed to be offered a series of gifts.
Walking Arden one morning by the rotary at the end of our town’s arterial street, where civilization ends and the road gives way to a wide, luminous salt marsh, I stopped to read what I’d been walking past for weeks, a neglected historical marker hidden in a bushy clump of junipers. Its verdigrised lettering noted that somewhere near the site, in November of 1620, the Pilgrims made their first landing before going on to Plymouth. This was a considerable shock to me, for one reason: my ancestor, Edward Dotey, was a passenger on that overcrowded, brightly painted boat.
This ancestry is no conventional source of pride. My family has been for generations a ragtag batch of poor Southerners; my mother’s father was a subsistence farmer in East Tennessee, lugging what millet he could to the mill every summer and living off the meager income it provided. My father’s father was a carpenter who, during the Depression, served time in prison for shooting one of his creditors. Southern to the bone, intermarried with dirt-poor Irish escapees of the potato famine, we found the idea of a noble Yankee ancestor oddly distant; I can understand now why my mother laughed, in the late fifties, when she was invited to join the Memphis chapter of the DAR.
And Edward Dotey himself is a bit of a problem, as near a figure to the archetypal American scoundrel as the first citizens of Plymouth can provide. The facts of his early life are scant, but it appears that the young man from London sold himself into indentured servitude to escape some fate worse than seven years without liberty in a relatively unknown and certainly inhospitable country. Perhaps he was avoiding debtor’s prison. Whatever his motivation, the hot-tempered Edward probably was a central figure in the Mayflower mutiny, in which the declaration of a group of young men that “when they came ashore, they would use their owne libertie” led to the signing of the Mayflower Compact.
Once settled in Plymouth, he distinguished himself by fighting the first duel on American soil, with one Edward Leister. He went to court and was convicted for “dealing fraudulentlie about a flitch of bacon.” Free of his servitude, he proceeded to amass a considerable amount of worldly goods, doubtless by less than admirable means. He filed America’s first lawsuit. He seems to have been more or less run out of the colony, ultimately, and died on Cape Cod, in 1655, having fathered nine children. He left behind a wealth of copper pots and iron implements, and a nasty reputation.
In November, our town weekly announced that a reenactment of the first landing, with local people in the role of the heroic voyagers, would take place on the beach where the actual landing seems to have occurred—somewhere, the article read, between the Red Inn and the Provincetown Inn. Without realizing it, I had rented a house in precisely the spot where my ancestor, 370 years before, had probably been among the sixteen armed men who first rode a longboat into shore from the Mayflower, carrying their muskets and a bottle of Holland gin, since they lacked fresh water. Over the next few gin-primed days, they reconnoitered, discovered a spring and a plentiful supply of quahogs and mussels, and raided a store of Wampanoag corn in what would later become Truro. The women came ashore, in order to allow the children to run on the beach, under close scrutiny—how exhilarating open space must have been, after their matchbox quarters—and to do laundry, for, as William Bradford informs us, “they had great need.” (Provincetown’s historical museum offers today a mural of the Pilgrim women boiling and wringing out those severe clothes.)
For months, then, I had been filling my eyes with a landscape that was part of my primogeniture, though I did not know it and though that landscape was now, of course, wildly changed. The Pilgrims encountered a Cape much more heavily wooded than it is today, since house- and boat-building would decimate virgin growth and produce a more barren, sandy landscape. As Provincetown transformed itself from an eighteenth-century fishing village to a nineteenth-century whaling town, and then to a Bohemian resort, property would become increasingly valuable. By late in this century the West End—once a less prestigious, Portuguese neighborhood—would contain the town’s priciest waterfront property, and every available bit of developable land would hold a welter of cottages and condos skewed at odd angles, a Cubist jigsaw rising up from the pristine beach where the First Laundry was hung to dry.
The town of Provincetown would like America to know that the Pilgrims landed here first (the Vikings were here, too, leaving a fragment of stone wall beneath what’s now a guest house a little nearer to the center of town). But travelers to this far outpost are, in general, drawn here by more recent traditions which have, since sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, made Provincetown first an arts colony and then—consequently?—a zone of tolerance and permission. Interest in uncovering and preserving the historical traditions of gay men and lesbians is recent, so it’s difficult to know when Provincetown first became a haven for the “Bohemian” expatriates of Eastern cities. Artists were drawn here by the beauty of the place and by cheap rents, and the influx of new citizenry found congenial hosts among the Portuguese fishing community which had arrived with the growth of whaling. Greenwich Village summered here in the teens and twenties, when a boat from one of the downtown piers traveled directly to this little tendril of land sixty miles out into the Atlantic. By the forties—when Tennessee Williams was finishing The Glass Menagerie in a rented shack, posing à la Grecque with a mock javelin for a nude photo in the dunes, and frequenting the bar at the Atlantic House, where (among others) Gene Krupa and Billie Holiday performed, Provincetown had established a social milieu so different from that of mainstream New England as to make it feel more like an island than the tip of a peninsula. Until the fifties, it was much easier to get here by boat than to risk a road frequently buried under sand, so perhaps the very isolation of the place allowed it to evolve in its own direction, like those exotic islands where very particular sorts of species flourish. Poets and painters from New York built a community of value here, a culture where work was central and the tensions and competition of the city were held at bay. They generated a heady atmosphere of possibility; “We have been nervy,” said my friend Elise Asher, a painter in her seventies, “with freedom and imagination.”
In such a climate, of course, queer people have felt at home. How kind this atmosphere seemed to us, and how deeply gratifying to be able to do many of the things that heterosexual couples do without reservation every day: to touch one’s lover on the street, for instance, without considering consequences. To shop together for groceries or talk intimately in a café without self-consciousness. I didn’t realize, until time in Provincetown allowed me to begin to set such self-awareness aside, how watched I’d felt those five years in Vermont, how singled out, not allowed to forget my difference. I was perfectly willing to be out, in that little Northern town, and a part of me enjoyed being a crusader. But no one wants to live like that constantly; it takes an enormous amount of energy to watch oneself, to be watched all the time. Provincetown allowed us alternately to celebrate our difference and to forget it, and both opportunities were welcome.
One day, walking home on the beach from the center of town, we heard sudden footsteps behind us. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that two men were approaching us very quickly, walking with a kind of deliberation that didn’t suggest strolling. I felt myself tighten, tension stiffening my neck and shoulders, my body bracing itself as the speeding footsteps came right up behind us. I turned around swiftly, and there were the two men who’d been bearing down on us, just a few feet away—holding hands. First I laughed. And then I realized how much fear I carried, how much learned apprehension was held in my body, a guardedness my environment no longer warranted. How much of their emotional, intellectual, physical energies are gay people required to sink into such cautions? How much of ourselves do we lose, in our necessary defensiveness?
So I’d returned, an unknowing family envoy after nearly four hundred years, to a point of origin. I read histories of the Plymouth Colony. Wally and I spent Thanksgiving wandering through the replica of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor; strangely bright in its colors, staffed by actors imitating Puritans and sailors, it remained a replica. We even visited Plymouth Plantation, a sort of “living history” park where the staff spend their days in character in seventeenth-century costume, discussing seventeenth-century matters in their reproduction village and producing, at least in us, a weirdly discomforting effect. Most disquieting of all was the “Indian village” beyond the fences of the Pilgrim settlement, where the descendants of native peoples cooked over open fires and played with a deerskin ball, enduring questions and flashbulbs and looking irremediably sad. I felt no closer to my distant ancestor, gained no firmer sense of who he might have been. I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor from the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind there, a wind that had picked up speed and vigor and the scent of salt and freedom from its Atlantic crossing. Until it was too cold and raw to stay out any longer, I’d study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the Milky Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they’d been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation’s slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November’s chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called “unfettered leewardings,” here at the end of the world.
Time had bent back, doubled upon itself; my search for refuge mirrored the voyage of my ancestor, who sought at least an economic refuge if not the spiritual one of his fellow passengers. This doubling came to stand, for me, for the kind of duality which is this town’s particular character.
There is first the sheer matter of elements. The narrowness of the Cape at its last dwindling spur means that we are almost completely surrounded by water; the sun comes up over the bay, and sets over the open sea. Provincetown feels like an island, but we are part of the mainland, albeit tenuously. Any shore is a meeting place of continuous activity, of constant negotiation between earth and water, relations shifting by the hour and season. What is land at noon may be sea at three.
Add to this irresolvable dialogue the enormous expanse of sky, whose business is always and everywhere more visible here, where there is so much more of it than in inland landscapes, and the result is a constant, alchemical process of change. This shape-shifting makes the forms and aspects of things mercurial, inconstant—as if this conjunction of elements, life on the boundary, made things themselves restless. We are a border town between worlds, and one of them is perhaps our last wilderness, that sun-hammered, fog-claimed expanse which remains—at least from here on the shore—unknowable, impenetrable.
We are a sort of border town, too, an Alexandria, in that here a mélange of cultures mingle, interlock, and remain separate at once: straight and gay year-rounders, summer people, tourists mixing in a fascinating spectrum of relationships between gender, orientation and identity, a range of possibilities that makes the world seem a broader place. In this zone what is expected is difference, surprise.
A sole example, of the endless ones possible: one warm autumn morning, a group of women gathered at the sidewalk café for brunch, then walked through town with a banner reading “DRAG DYKES.” They were lesbians dressed “as women,” complete with lipstick and wigs, faux leopard miniskirts and veiled hats. What seemed extraordinary to me were the tourists who were taking their pictures, a group of older visitors fresh off the fall foliage tour bus. The peculiarity of photographing women dressed as women seemed lost on them; one of the “cross-dressers” was patiently explaining to an elderly woman just who they were and what they were up to, though she didn’t seem to be getting very far. The ironies of the situation made me say—as I have so many times, even after five years in Provincetown—“Where else?” It’s something many of us here ask, affectionately, when the town yet again demonstrates its ability to surprise us.
What would my Pilgrim forefather make of all this? It’s too easy to suppose that he would find in the town which has evolved upon his wooded shore a kind of Babylon. He was himself an outsider, an opportunist who found in the Puritans’ voyage an opportunity to construct a life with larger boundaries than London must have offered a young man of no means or social standing. Provincetown’s pleasure-based economy—we live on the sale of consumables, from silk shirts to grilled tuna to soft ice cream—may well have appalled the Puritans, but then they were highly interested in selling the bounty of the New World to an eager market back home. Most of us were reacquainted, each Thanksgiving, with imagery of a sober piety, but it’s a quaint historical fiction to suppose them a united group with a certain faith in a particular ideology. They were, in fact, contentious and embattled, both in a threatening England and an even more uncertain America. We have more in common with their tremendous doubts, with their fear in the face of an unknown future, than with whatever certainties they may have claimed.
Storms, on the North Atlantic coast, are Shakespearean.
They move in like vast states of mind, and seem allied with moral forces, conjured by enchanters whose aim is to confound and instruct. One autumn Nor’easter of Hollywood magnitude filled the air with so much wind-blown water that it hardly seemed air at all, but rather as if the atmosphere had become a new sort of medium, making those of us unlucky enough to be out in it quite like fish out of water. In the morning, a wrecked houseboat lay on its side on the beach like a stranded whale.
The houseboat had been the only craft of its sort in the harbor, and for good reason; a simple room constructed atop a boat, square and unhappy on the water, it did not seem a seaworthy craft. Unballasted, its boxy shape made it a plaything for any wind, turning and turning in the slightest breeze. I couldn’t imagine anyone living aboard.
Cast up, it was ungainly, elephantine, its green bottom painted with big red lines which resembled ideograms, oddly serene, like a huge Buddhist billboard. The storm tore away part of one wall, as if determined to crack open the unwelcome and unwieldy house.
Just down the shore, a dinghy which belonged to our neighbor, the Italian restaurateur, had also been beached, its cheery red and white centered in a bed of blackened seaweed as if it were the centerpiece of an antipasto. Its green interior (Franco had painted it in imitation of the flag of his mother country) was filled with water, and seemed a sort of marvelous aquarium: above a drift of sand sculpted by ripples, a clutch of sea lettuce floated. Dozens of minnows darted, confused by their sudden containment in this smaller, watery globe. Their world was suddenly green and diminished; they could circumnavigate their entire sea in seconds.
The storm cracked open and upended the containing house, and constructed a new house a hundred yards away, one that contained life more gracefully than the houseboat ever did. House became boat became wreckage, open to tides and fish; boat became the fishes’ temporary house. So the world’s order is constantly open to revision. The day’s lesson was delivered with wit and surprise, as if the sea delighted in nothing more than contradiction and metaphor.
This is the sort of pleasure which makes me want to live here forever. There are few ways to make a decent living here, and urban centers which offer more opportunities are hours away. There is no movie theater, in the off season, and even in season there’s no place to buy a computer ribbon. Town government is, to be polite, antediluvian, a complex, inbred system of rivalries and affiliations, Florentine in its complexity. Every season we must endure the deluge of hordes of tourists, and our own attempts to sell them all the T-shirts and lobster dinners they can consume. We exhaust ourselves in the process, and they exhaust us further, and we become increasingly rude and exasperated by the crowds, uneasily so, since we know how much we depend upon them. No one has fun in August. One can wait in line to buy a stamp, and negotiate a maze of pedestrians, bicycles, and cars rivaling Singapore to get from one end of town to the other.
There are substantially good reasons not to live here, and just when they descend on me in force, something—be it the low call of Long Point Light perched at the tip of the harbor like the Pharos of Alexandria, or the sight of a pair of teenage boys comfortably holding hands downtown, perhaps for the first time in their lives, reminds me why it’s worth it. We’re face to face with a raft of contradictions, both natural and cultural. Here, at land’s end, in the superb setting of this landscape, our gems are the rich possibilities of human love, human pleasures, the splendid diversity and sameness of our longings. It is a place worthy of pilgrimage, where the elements arrange, as they conjoin, small tableaux of miracle and reversal.