Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown Read Free Page B

with objects or ideas? Thirty centuries of literature haven’t begun to solve the mystery; nor have they in any way slaked our interest in it.
    Provincetown is a mysterious place, and those of us who love it tend to do so with a peculiar, inscrutable intensity. With this book I hope to offer neither more nor less than the story of my own particular devotion, with the understanding that my Provincetown differs profoundly from the Provincetown of others. It is not a place that inspires objectivity—even its history is as much speculation and rumor as it is recorded fact—and the Provincetown you get from me, aside from certain particulars of geography and weather, will not resemble the Provincetown you would get from the head librarian, from the native-born fisherman who still struggles to make a living from the depleted waters of the North Atlantic, or from the woman who moved there twenty years ago to live as much apart from men as she possibly could. This book is a little plastic cup with a clamshell in it, found in the tidal shallows, raised in slightly bewildered homage as the boats in the harbor shine like ghosts.

L ONG P OINT L IGHT
Long Point’s apparitional
   this warm spring morning ,
     the strand a blur of sandy light ,
and the square white
   of the lighthouse—separated from us
     by the bay’s ultramarine
as if it were nowhere
   we could ever go—gleams
     like a tower’s ghost, hazing
into the rinsed blue of March ,
   our last outpost in the huge
     indetermination of sea .
It seems cheerful enough ,
   in the strengthening sunlight ,
   fixed point accompanying our walk
along the shore. Sometimes I think
   it’s the where-we-will-be ,
     only not yet, like some visible outcropping
of the afterlife. In the dark
   its deeper invitations emerge:
     green witness at night’s end ,
flickering margin of horizon ,
   marker of safety and limit .
     But limitless, the way it calls us ,
and where it seems to want us
   to come. And so I invite it
     into the poem, to speak ,
and the lighthouse says:
  Here is the world you asked for,
    gorgeous and opportune,
here is nine o’clock harbor-wide,
  and a glinting code: promise and warning.
    The morning’s the size of heaven.
What will you do with it?
M ARK D OTY

Wilderness
    A LTHOUGH THE DESKS in the schools are no longer half buried in sand, and sand-drifts no longer pile up against the walls of houses, Provincetown is still thoroughly infiltrated by its skittish, sandy wilderness. Auto body shops stand in the shadows of dunes; the waterfront houses are built directly on sand and have shells and beach grass where their inland sisters would have lawns. There is no place where you can’t hear the foghorn. The wilderness offers escape from the noise and commerce; town offers at least partial sanctuary from the abiding patience out there, that which sifts through your windows at night and will be there long after you are gone.
    In a sense Provincetown is a beach. If you stand on the shore watching the tide recede, you are merely that much closer to the water and that much more available to weather than you would be in the middle of town. All along the bay side, the entire length of town, the beach slopes gently, bearded with kelp and dry sea grass. Because Provincetown stands low on the continental shelf, it is profoundly affected by tides, which can exceed a twelve-foot drop at the syzygy of sun, moon, and earth. Interludes of beach that are more than a hundred yards wide at low tide vanish entirely when the tide is high. The water of the bay is utterly calm in most weathers and warmer than that of the ocean beaches, but this being the North Atlantic, no water anywhere is ever what you could rightfully call warm, not even in August. Except in extreme weather the bay beach is entirely domesticated, the backyard of the town, never empty but never crowded, either;