Chapter 4
Provincetown MA
It’s not unusual for the three thousand voting residents of Provincetown to head somewhere warm in the winter months. Our bustling seaside town hosts up to sixty thousand visitors in summer and shrinks to less than three hundred hearty souls by the time frigid January rolls in. The folks that stay here either live in town full time, like us, or are second home owners who feel like they’ve won the lottery having this glorious place to come whenever they can. This will be the first time in the six years we’ve lived here that Janet and I leave during winter. There’s a good reason why we’ve stayed put until now: some washashores are surprised by the desolation and loneliness of this peninsula and its winter freeze, but not us. Even though most of the shops and restaurants are closed, winter means we get to cozy in at home, read, cook, work, walk the beach and dunes in solitude, and visit friends we don’t see enough of during the busy summer and fall, when everyone and their brother wants to come visit.
Provincetown is a gem. It’s surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and famous for its vast beaches, sand dunes, gorgeous harbors, and piers. The town is a distinct vacation
destination for artists of all kinds, for gay and lesbian folks who cherish being able to be themselves, and for families, misfits, sailors, fishermen, and summer workers. Established in 1727, this is a still Portuguese fishing hub as well as a refuge for non-conforming creative types. The Catholic Portuguese and the Gay and Lesbian communities have never blended very well because of religious and lifestyle reasons, but even so, Provincetown’s tolerance is the stuff of legends. The bottom-line message is ‘Come to Provincetown and be whoever you want to be.’ This means a fifty-five-year-old high male school principal can publicly dress as a woman for a special week’s vacation and his heterosexual wife may very well be vacationing with him. Everyone has fantasies. In Provincetown, as long as they don’t harm anyone else, you’re free to go at them. When Janet and I first arrived here, part-time, we owned an eight hundred square foot condominium one block from Commercial Street, the main street in town and one of only two roads that run all of three miles from the east end to the west end of town. Our condo was the middle unit of three; originally a single-family house until divided up and gifted to the three children of Joy McNulty, the owner of the very famous Lobster Pot Restaurant. Before Joy, 20 Court Street had been a Brazilian convent where I’m told the resident nuns snapped rulers on the knuckles of their unruly students and afterwards played badminton in the backyard. Our place was as sweet as could be: two bedrooms, a living room with a four-window corner, a brick patio and a sunny roof deck, and a red fuzzy sectional couch that welcomed everyone who stayed with us, including dogs. For two decades, we made the three-plus hour drive almost every weekend to park the car and not set foot in it again until we headed home two or three days later. We never complained about the ride, not even once.
Provincetown is also superbly walkable. The east end, where we now live in a modest and ample single-family house, has most of the art galleries, almost all scattered along Commercial Street. The west end, where property is more expensive, extends to the very tip of the peninsula and the jetty, where you can balance yourself on huge rocks that take you all the way to Long Point, a small island where seals frolic barely a hundred feet from shore. There are always rescue stories of tourists stranded while walking on the jetty, initially balancing from one rock to another during low tide only to be surprised and trapped by an incoming high tide. These folks sometimes need rescue by the Coast Guard.
If you live here, you learn to follow the tide schedule closely. But one time Janet and I and our friend Liz uneventfully took the twenty-minute water taxi to Long Point. We swam and watched seals frolicking nearby and were sunburned and happily on our way back when the water taxi boat stopped a surprising distance from the shore.
“The tide is too shallow for us to go in any further,” the college aged captain announced. He instructed us to disembark about three hundred feet from shore and only slightly apologized about the wade to shore. The water was up to our knees when Janet stepped in a sand hole caused by the incoming and outgoing tides. She went down in slow motion, along with her camera, her iPhone and her iPad all falling backwards into the water. All soaked. She was furious, but Liz and I couldn’t stop laughing. We couldn’t help ourselves. We were little kids muffling our giggles in church. Now, even twenty years later, Janet still fumes when Liz and I cruelly relive all the details.
“You fell so gracefully on your ass,” we say. “And both your legs just shot straight up in the air.”
“Shut up,” Janet replies.
