Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown Read Free

serviceable clapboard buildings, unornamented, innocent of the cupolas and widows’ walks I’d expected before I came. There were, on that day in late September, many signs advertising end-of-season sales, and occasional strings of colored pennants like the ones strung over used-car lots. The stores all looked slightly smaller than life size, the way the buildings on Main Street USA in Disneyland are built at eleven inches to the foot, so as to appear less inhibiting than real buildings in an actual town, though the effect here, at least on me, was not at all comforting. The ocean was nowhere in sight. The people we passed were not the prosperous, slightly hippie-fied citizens I’d expected. They were mostly tourists, pushing children in strollers past the souvenir shops. They looked generally as baffled and disappointed as we were.
    I moved into my studio and said good-bye to Sarah and Jamie the way a child says good-bye to his parents as they leave him at a doubtful-looking summer camp. It was late afternoon, just beginning to get dark. I went off to explore the town.
    On foot the initial signs were more encouraging than they’d been from Sarah and Jamie’s van. I learned that if you found your way down among the buildings, you soon reached the bay, a vast body of dark blue water where a foghorn blew like a bassoon and where, as evening progressed, a single green light, like the one Gatsby worshiped, shone on a peninsula several hundred yards out. I discovered a movie theater in the center of town, a stalwart red-brick building in the tradition of small-town American movie palaces (it has since burned down), which was showing Gone With the Wind . The show started in twenty minutes. I saw Gone With the Wind among five or six other patrons, and it was thoroughly satisfying, even if the print was rather old and patched together, so that when Scarlett O’Hara stumbled on the landing in her Atlanta mansion, she was teleported instantaneously to the bottom of the stairs.
    When I left the theater, however, I learned that it was screening Gone With the Wind one more time, the following night, and then closing until May. The other two theaters had already closed for the season. All right, I thought. Who needs movies? I’ll read every night. I walked on and found a nice little bar where lean women in leather jackets played pool and a covey of men sat by the fireplace, laughing at jokes so familiar they barely needed to be told at all. I ordered a beer and learned from the bartender that the bar would be open until the end of the week and would then close until May.
    Over the next few days it became apparent that the entire town, with the exception of essentials like the grocery and drug stores and, bless it, a courageous little bookshop, intended to close from early October until mid-May. There would be fewer and fewer tourists. There would soon be only, as I quickly learned, the handful of local residents, bundled against the increasingly cold weather, most of them vanished by nightfall except the town’s most visible disturbed person, a handsome, disheveled man who looked slightly scorched, as if he had just escaped from a fire, and who walked up and down Commercial Street all day and into the night, in the same dark jeans and flannel shirt, muttering ferociously into the gelid air. There would be two bars, both of which catered to fishermen, and one struggling vegetarian café. All right, I thought. No distractions. I’ll just write and read for seven months.
    I did read, though restlessly and randomly—half of The Charterhouse of Parma , some Philip Roth, some Dorothy Sayers. I had trouble concentrating. I did not write, although I tried my hardest to. My bluff had been called. Given the ideal circumstances, a room of my own, free of distractions, I found I could not write at all. I stayed up late and slept as late as I could, but I had to wake eventually and face another empty day during which I would stare at my