Wilderness
ALTHOUGH 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; there is no surf there, and the water that laps docilely up against the shore is always full of boats. The bay beach is especially good for dogs and small children, whose only other access to large, untrammeled space is the playing field of the high school on the hill. The bay beach is also good for strolling along in solitude, which is most satisfying, to me, on clear winter days, when the air is almost painfully sharp and scraps of snow linger on the sand. The beach is strewn with shells, but they are New England shells, almost exclusively bivalves, running from gray to brown to lighter brown with minor hints of mauve or deep, dusty purple. This is not a marine landscape prone to pinks or pale blues. The beach does yield the occasional treasure, an old clay pipe or a whole glass bottle that the ocean has turned opalescent. Paul Bowen, a sculptor who combs the beaches incessantly, has even found a few porcelain dolls’ heads, arms, and legs over the years, and I always walk along that section hoping to see a tiny white face, half buried in sand, offering prim scarlet lips and one empty blue eye from among the stones and shards.
LONG POINT
The remotest end of the sandy spiral on which Provincetown stands—the very tip of the Cape’s languidly unfurling hook—is called Long Point, a narrow scrap of dunes and grass. It is tentatively part of the mainland, but centuries ago the ocean dissolved most of the scrawny neck of sand that connected it. There is now a jetty that attaches Long Point to the far West End, built in 1911. In the 1700s, though, when Long Point was essentially an island, a community started up there, and eventually it grew to about two hundred people, most of whom operated salt works, where sea water was evaporated for salt. Everything these citizens needed, everything the Atlantic didn’t provide, was brought over by boat from Provincetown proper.
During the War of 1812 the British occupied Provincetown and cut off supplies to the people on Long Point. When the Civil War broke out, the people of Provincetown, fearing that the Confederate Army would invade and set up a similar blockade, built two fortresses of sand on Long Point, with a cannon in each. The Confederates never came anywhere near Provincetown, however, and as volunteers stood guard day after day and night after night over an uncontested stretch of salt water, the fortresses came to be known as Fort Useless and Fort Ridiculous.
Before the Civil War, toward the middle of the 1800s, the citizens of Long Point began to feel that they’d made a mistake in settling there at all. Their houses were almost flirtatiously available to gales and hurricanes, their salt wasn’t selling as it once had, and the notion that every egg, darning needle, or pair of socks had to be ordered and delivered by boat had lost its charm. So they had their houses, forty-eight of them, jacked up, loaded onto barges, and floated over to the mainland. Most of the old houses in Provincetown, being built on sand, had no foundations at all and could be moved from one place to another without much more difficulty than what would be involved in transporting a drydocked boat across land. On the mainland houses perched at the tops of dunes were known sometimes to work their way down slowly, over the years, until they rested at the feet of the dunes they had once crested.
The houses that were floated over from Long Point still stand, mostly in the West End of Provincetown, though there are a few in the East End as well. Each of them bears a blue plaque, with a picture of a house on a barge floating calmly over white squiggles of unprotesting waves.
At the tide’s lowest point you can walk to Long Point from the West End, over the expanse of wet sand. You can walk there, regardless of the tides, across the jetty that starts at the far west end of Commercial Street. The jetty is a thirty-foot-wide ribbon of rough granite blocks that extends almost to its own vanishing point when you stand on the mainland looking out to Long Point. You may want to walk all the way to the point, or you may just want to go partway out and sit on the rocks for a while. In summer, an hour or so before high tide, when the water is moving in, you can slide in from the rocks and let yourself be carried along by the tide, almost all the way back to shore.
If you do walk to Long Point, you will find yourself on a spit of sand about three hundred yards wide, with bay beach on one side, ocean beach on the other, and a swatch of dune grass running down the middle. It sports, like an austere ornament, a lighthouse and a long-empty shed once used to store oil for the light. You will be almost alone there, though the water around you will be thoroughly populated by boats. It is a favorite nesting ground for terns and gulls. When I went out there years ago with Christy, the man with whom I lived then, he strode into the dune grass and stirred up the birds. If I tell you that he stood exultantly among hundreds of shrieking white birds that circled and swooped furiously around him, looking just like a figure out of Dante, grinning majestically, while I stood by and worried about what it was doing to the birds, you may know everything you need to know about why we were together and why we had to part.
THE SALT MARSH
Just beyond the jetty, past the hairpin curve Commercial Street makes as it turns back on itself and changes its name to Bradford Street, is the salt marsh. The long road that starts at the landward end of Cape Cod ends here, at this wild lawn of sea grass. The marsh reliably tells the time, the state of the weather, and the season: emerald in spring and summer, gold in fall, various browns in winter. Wind when it blows raises flashes and swells of paler color among the grasses and reeds, so you can stand at the edge of the marsh and see just how strongly the wind is blowing, and in what direction. Because the marsh is always at least partly flooded, reflected sky lights the grass from below. On sunny days it can seem unnaturally bright, and on cloudy days it looks even brighter.
It is puddled during low tides, inundated when the tide is high. It terminates in a range of dunes, beyond which is the ocean, though you can’t see it from where you now stand. You may see a heron or two, wading among the tidal pools. You will assuredly see the little white thumb of Wood End lighthouse, far away. (It is not the one on Long Point.) I’ve never gone there and don’t intend to. I know—or rather, I can imagine—that up close it’s merely an old plaster tower, its paint cracked and peeling, spattered all over its concrete base with seagull shit. I prefer that it remain a distant object, its romance undiluted, an image out of Virginia Woolf. I believe every city and town should contain at least one remote spot, preferably a beautiful and mysterious one, that you see but never visit.
HERRING COVE
Herring Cove is one of Provincetown’s two official public beaches. The other is Race Point. Herring Cove is the nearer of the two to town—you can walk or bike there. In summer, the town loop bus will take you there for free. From the salt marsh it’s about a half mile to the official public entrance, with its parking lot and snack bar, but my preferred point of ingress is the nearer one, across the dunes.
Go north from the salt marsh, past a small, murky lagoon to the right of the road, into a stand of trees, and stop where you see all the bicycles parked. There’s an unambiguous entrance there, between the trees.
It takes about fifteen minutes to get to the beach. You will find yourself in tidal flats, with high dunes on either side and the curving wall of dunes that line the ocean straight ahead. You may see the masts and upper deck of a boat sailing by, and that is a good if slightly surreal sight, a half-boat skimming placidly along over the sand.
There is a vague but discernible path, and you should stay on it. The landscape is fragile—it does not respond well to footsteps. If you’re walking out at low tide, the sand will be mostly dry, dotted here and there with clear pools. If you’re walking out at high tide, you will have to wade. If you go there in late afternoon or early evening, the dunes will glow with a pink-orange light like the inside of a conch shell.
The tidal pools, if it’s medium or high tide, will be full of minnows and little blue-black crabs. It is possible, though very rare, to see schools of squid that have gotten trapped by the receding tide and are waiting for the ocean to return. Squid alive are nothing like the ones in fish markets. They go opaque when they die. Alive, they are translucent, like jellyfish, and their eyes, though utterly unmammalian, are pale blue. When they swim, you see their eyes most clearly, and the spark of their tentacles.
Because this terrain is periodically submerged, you’ll find a good deal of what the ocean contains as you go along. The path is strewn with the bodies of crabs, which bleach to a freckled salmon color that they do not possess in life and ultimately to alabaster. You may see a dead bass or two, in the process of being picked clean by the gulls. You will see kelp and driftwood, sometimes in considerable piles, and you will see strands of rope torn from fishermen’s nets, black or yellow or turquoise or orange. I once found the end of a seagull’s wing out there, a harp of white feathers, and took it home to Kenny, glad not only to have happened upon such a thing but to be a man carrying a wing home to his lover, who would not be repelled by its gruesome beauty.
This walk, and the beach it leads to, is largely the province of gay men. As you near the beach and the dunes dwindle down into a broad, shallow basin, you’ll pass paths that meander out into the grass. They are dry at low tide. At high tide the water is as high as a man’s waist. These paths, this whole arena, is thoroughly populated on summer days—it is the Piazza San Marco of gay male Provincetown. Men walk to and from the beach. Men browse among the dunes, lounge on the small temporary islands that stand among the pools when the tide is in, wade or swim in the deeper parts. The paths that snake through the tall grasses form an elaborate series of mazes, and if you follow the paths at medium to high tide, you will find yourself up to your knees or waist in gently moving water surrounded on both sides by hedges of high grass. Men go into the grasses to have sex, and if you are uninterested in having sex with strangers or are bothered by the sight of other people doing it, you should avoid the grass maze and proceed directly to the beach, though even if you eschew the remoter reaches, you might pass two or more men sporting together, out in the open. In this bright, tidal landscape the men having sex always seem, at least to me, innocently bacchanalian—more creaturely than lewd. They seem to belong to a different version of the world, a more sylvan and semiclassical one, shameless and wild. They seem to have been freed from their labors and sorrows, their fears, even their hopes, and been given a summer hour or two in which desire is all that matters. I would be happy if the men who have sex in the salt marsh could be persuaded to wear fur leggings with hooves over their feet, attach little nubs of horns to their foreheads, and blow wistful tunes on pipes as they wander through the labyrinths of grass and water.
When you climb over the dunes that front on the ocean, you arrive at the beach, where the water is almost always calm, since Herring Cove lies on the inward curl of the Cape and faces southwest rather than east. By international standards Herring Cove is not much of a beach. It is relatively narrow, and the sand near the water is almost entirely covered with stones that are difficult to walk on. New England, even at its most sybaritic, usually involves some measure of challenge or inconvenience; it is not prone to dropping ripe fruit straight from the tree into your outstretched hand. The stones themselves are lovely, for whatever comfort that may offer. They are consistently smooth and oval, shaped by the water—the most symmetrical of them are like Noguchi sculptures. If you are inclined to pick up stones from the beach, I should warn you that many of them, when wet, appear to be fantastic shades of ochre or deep red or dark green, but they lose their color after they dry. I prefer the glossy black ones, which dry to various shades of gray, from yellow-gray to a satisfying milky gray like chalk erased from a blackboard. I keep a bowl of them on my desk.
The southern part of the beach, in summer, is full of men. You will see almost no one there who is not a man. Men lie on the sand in groups, talking and laughing, listening to music. They promenade, wearing very little, and some of them are beautiful, though the whole notion of strolling lithely and muscularly along the sand, looking to populate strangers’ dreams, is complicated by the stones, which effectively eliminate the possibility of maintaining regal composure for more than a few paces at a time. The whole business of cruising and being cruised at Herring Cove is a slightly comic one, very different from, say, the broad sandy highway of a beach at Fire Island, where ambitious objects of desire can saunter from east to west and back again as imperturbably as floats in a military parade.
If you walk along the beach to your left, you’ll get, eventually, to the Wood End lighthouse and, ultimately, out to Long Point. If you walk to your right, you’ll reach the beach’s official entrance, where the parking lot is. Close to the entrance is the women’s section.
The transformation is fairly abrupt. For some time you will have walked among men lying on towels (with a few of the braver specimens splashing around in the chilly water); then you will pass through a short intermediate strip of men mixed with women; and then the beach will be full, almost exclusively, of women.
It is considered a truism in Provincetown that gay men go to the beach with Speedos and a towel, while lesbians take as much as they can carry. One resists generalities (and is attracted to generalities), but it is undeniable that here, in the women’s section, you are much more likely to see folding beach chairs, umbrellas, coolers, inflatable rafts, rubber sandals for walking over the stones, and other appurtenances. The women arrayed on the sand here are, to roughly equal extents, domestic and Amazonian. As a man walking through their sector, I always feel that I’m in a foreign country—a Sapphic society every bit as strange and fabulous, and just as particular unto itself, as the tribes of satyrs roaming the watery paths in the dunes. Bare breasts are more the norm than the exception here, and for some of us it is a unique opportunity to understand that the female breast is among the more profoundly variable of human wonders. Here are women with breasts firm as pears. Here are women whose breasts are mere pale rises of flesh, more modest by far than the pectorals of most of the men lounging and romping just up the beach, with pert and defiant cantaloupe-colored nipples the size of fingertips. Here are women with majestic moons, tropically pink, marbled by traceries of blue-green veins, topped with low-lying, elliptical aureoles of creamy brown. The women in the women’s section are more likely than the men to be throwing balls or Frisbees at the water’s edge. They are more likely to be swimming with dogs. They are far more likely to have children, who are entirely absent in the men’s section. The women’s part of the beach is a welter of children, of all races, and there are more of them every year.
If you continue on, you will pass an unfortunate asphalt embankment—atop it is a snack bar, bathrooms, and showers. Farther still you will find yourself on a long stretch of beach dominated by straight families who have parked their campers or trailers and more or less settled in. Some of the campers and trailers have awnings, where grandparents sit in the shade admiring the view or reading or tending to barbecue grills. Men and women fish from the beach and often wait for a strike sitting on aluminum lawn chairs. Kids run all over the place. The people on this part of the beach are noisier, less sexual, more communal. The gay and lesbian sections are, to a certain extent, feudal—each encampment of friends and lovers and children and pets tends to regard only itself, to speak only to acquaintances as they pass, and to observe strangers either surreptitiously or not at all. While I’m certain that these straight families don’t know each other and probably don’t mingle, they require so much more space, with their campers and barbecues and fishing gear, their three or four generations, that turf lines are impossible to maintain. Compared with the gay men and lesbians up the beach, they are differently yoked into their lives. They are ostentatiously available to their spouses and parents and children, and so, to an outsider anyway, they seem more like a village, with all that villages imply about common purpose. It seems—though I don’t imagine this is literally true—that one mother will casually pluck another woman’s child from the surf, and that one grandfather will offhandedly flip the burgers of another man’s son as the two middle-aged boys in question reel in a bluefish.
Farther down the beach is Hatches Harbor, one of the lesser-known wonders of Provincetown.
HATCHES HARBOR
Although I am agnostic on the subjects of magic, earth spirits, and conscious but invisible forces, I can’t deny that several places in Provincetown possess some sort of power beyond their physical attributes. Hatches Harbor is one such place. It is some distance beyond the public beach, well past the outer reaches of the parking lot, so the only way to get there is by walking on the sand. It is, as its name implies, a natural harbor, a vulnerable point in the land mass where the ocean has curled its way in. It was once an estuary that extended inland for over a mile, but a dike built in the 1930s reduced it to a series of braided tidal channels.
Hatches Harbor is not well known. You are likely to find, at most, a few other people there, and you are at least as likely to be entirely alone. The harbor is dominated by an enormous sandbar that stretches across it like the broad back of a whale, albeit the placid, utterly smooth whale’s back you might find in a children’s book. To the north stands still another lighthouse, bigger than the other two in Provincetown, a serious lighthouse, tall and staunch, neither sweet nor toylike as the other two are, meant to warn big ships of true dangers. (Over the centuries at least a hundred ships have sunk in these waters.) Inland, directly behind you as you face the ocean, are dunes and scrub pine. None of this is especially dramatic or spectacular, not in the way of Delphi or the Oregon coast. Surf doesn’t crash against cliffs here, eagles don’t wheel in the sky. It has a spare and subtle beauty, more nearly related to parts of the New Mexico desert or the lakes of Finland. The harbor, the horizon, and the dunes are all in perfect proportion, visibly part of the same overarching idea. It has a way of gently insisting on the beauty of the small—look here, three round stones in a round cup of clear water. Like any proper mystery, it can’t be adequately described or explained. I can only tell you that it is a place of great tranquillity, and that if you go there and stay for an hour or longer, you may feel, when you walk back, that you’ve been farther and longer away than you have actually been.
THE DUNES
Behind the beach at Herring Cove, behind all of Provincetown, is the Cape Cod National Seashore, established during the Kennedy administration as a recreation area and nature preserve. Whatever our feelings about John F. Kennedy as president, we can be grateful to him for that. The town cannot expand past a certain point; no one can build a resort hotel in the dunes or on the ocean beaches. The dunes are an intact ecosystem, as particular unto themselves as Zion in Utah or the Florida Everglades, though unlike Zion or the Everglades they were formed, in part, by man. Early settlers felled the trees for fuel and lumber, and replanted the landscape with pitch pine and scrub oak. With the big trees gone, a sand-sea began working its methodical way in from the beaches, and what you are seeing in this sedate landscape is actually an ongoing process of erosion.
The best way to go through the dunes is on a bicycle, which you can rent from one of four places in town. A single snake of trail, not conspicuously marked, starts from the far end of the parking lot at Herring Cove and winds through the dunes. The dunescape is simultaneously verdant and lunar. It is dotted with brush and scrubby, stunted pine. It has a smell: pine and salt, with an undercurrent of something I can only describe as dusty and green. In patches the landscape is almost pure sand, pristine as sugar. The sandy areas seem primeval in their silence and shadows, though they are, of course, not ancient at all—they weren’t like this a hundred years ago; a century from now they will be visibly different. Still, I often feel when I’m out there that I’m palpably on the surface of a planet, with a thin illusion of blue overhead and the universe beyond. It is especially wonderful to ride through the dunes at night, when the moon is full.
In these same dunes but miles up Cape, too far for biking, is the place where Guglielmo Marconi first tested the telegraph—where a human being was able, for the first time, to send and receive wireless messages across the Atlantic. The building in which he conducted his experiment has since fallen into the ocean, but a weathered gazebo bearing a plaque stands today to commemorate the spot where, over a hundred years ago, Marconi sat day after day and night after night, convinced that he could communicate not only with those living on other continents but with the dead as well. He thought sound waves did not vanish over time; he believed he could find a way to hear the cries of men on ships sunk long ago, the voices of children whose own children were ancient by then, the musket reports of Columbus’s men as they showed the Tecumwah tribe what terrible new gods had arrived on their shores.
The Marconi Station, however, is a separate trip altogether, one that would require a car. This trail you’re on is merely a meandering, four-mile-long circle that takes you back, ultimately, to the East End of Provincetown. It offers only one choice, at roughly its midpoint. You can go straight ahead, through the beech forest and ultimately back to town, or you can turn left and ride out to Race Point.
RACE POINT
The beach at Race Point is, to my mind, superior to the one at Herring Cove, and I, who enjoy a beach full of gay men, have often wished my brothers had elected to colonize Race Point instead. Its sole disadvantage is the fact that it is several miles from town, and you can get there only on a bicycle or in a car. If you drive, you may very well find the parking lot full by ten A.M. on a summer day.
The beach at Race Point arcs north to northwest. It is more directly canted toward the open ocean than the one at Herring Cove, and so the water there is prone to do something more exciting than just plash quietly up against the sand. It has actual waves, though you’d have to go farther still, to the beaches of Truro and Wellfleet, before encountering anything that could be called surf. To get to the beach, you lope down a bank of dunes, on which patches of low grass have drawn windblown circles around themselves in the sand. The beach is broad and generous, at all tides, and not nearly so strewn with stones. Being less accessible, it is never as crowded as the beach at Herring Cove, and the people who go there are much more a mixed bag. You’ll find yourself among tourist families, townies with or without families, and the occasional renegade gay man or lesbian. It was at Race Point, several years ago, that we encountered a lesson in the mutability of desire, courtesy of Uncle Donald.
Kenny and I had gone with our friend Melanie to Race Point on an August afternoon (Melanie has a car) and put down our towels near a small family gathering. Beaches are, of course, perfect sites for eavesdropping, and as we lay in the sun, we quickly discerned the following about our neighbors. They were a handsome, dark-haired Englishwoman, her American husband, their five-year-old son, and the woman’s gay younger brother, Donald. We knew his name was Donald because the little boy, transported by love, said “Uncle Donald” whenever it was called for and sometimes when it was not. Uncle Donald was a lithe man in his early thirties, wearing blue Speedos. He was wonderful with the child. They played together in the water, played in the sand; Uncle Donald was patient if ironic about the child’s endless assertion of suddenly devised games with arcane and elaborate rules. When Uncle Donald reached his limit, they lay down together on his towel. The boy announced that Uncle Donald was his mattress, sprawled on top of him, and fell asleep. Uncle Donald teased his sister, who teased him back. The phrase “looking for love in all the wrong places” was mentioned. In repose, with a slumbering child on his stomach, Donald might have been carved from pale pink marble. His lean, compact body was hairless except for two light-brown tufts in his armpits. His face, in profile, was angular, with a potent brow and a firm jut of chin. Kenny and I agreed, in whispers, that we wanted him and wanted, with roughly equivalent ardor, to be him. Melanie declared her willingness to give up women, at least for a while. Donald was wry and kind; innocently virtuous the way a prince might be if princes ever managed to live unashamedly among fountains and marbled halls, so adored that they returned adoration automatically, as a matter of course, because they had known nothing else.
Less than an hour later the little extended family prepared to leave. We watched, surreptitiously, as Uncle Donald woke the child, set him on his feet again, stroked his hair. We watched then as Donald put on baggy chinos and a polo shirt, as he plopped a dramatically unflattering canvas hat on his head. Standing, in clothes, he slouched. They departed, with the child scampering and cavorting around the object of his affections, who had by then transformed himself into a citizen in poly-blends; a regular guy, unenchanted, with ordinary features (we saw, once he was dressed, that he in fact had a pleasant but unremarkable face, with too much chin for its modest nose and too much forehead for its close-set eyes); someone you wouldn’t glance at twice on the street. He went off (I imagine) to join the multitude of others cruising the streets or nursing beers in the semidark at the edges of dance floors; off to hope and wish and wonder; to admire the flashier guys dancing shirtless or laughing heedlessly with their packs of friends; to try his luck along with everybody else who was out there, the whole wistful, unruly crew, looking for love in all the wrong places.
THE BEECH FOREST
If you go straight on the dune trail and skip Race Point, you will eventually reach the beech forest. There is a clear point of demarcation between the sand and the woods it has partially engulfed. First you will see what appear to be outcroppings of bare twigs protruding from the sand—these are the tops of dead trees. Several yards farther on you will see dead trees mired to their lower branches in sand, and then trees that are covered only halfway up their trunks, still alive but beginning to die. Then you will be among the living trees. The sand-glacier in the beech forest has been more or less halted by conservationists, but the dunes north of the forest remain in motion. On old maps you can locate buried forests, and walk across pristine dunes with deceased forests inside them.
The beech forest in summer is shady and slightly dank; it is full of a greened, deepened light. The smell changes from dusty pine to a fermented odor of pine tar, decomposing leaves, and an indefinable, organic rankness that resembles, at its most potent, the smell of a wet dog. You will pass a shallow pond that freezes over in winter and that wears, in summer, a skin of pale green lily pads with trumpet-shaped flowers—yellow at the edges of the pond, white in the slightly deeper water toward the middle. You can stay on the narrow asphalt bike trail, or you can leave your bike and wander into the woods along any of the sandy paths that meander off among the trees. If you do that, you’ll quickly find yourself walking among tupelo and inkberry, white oaks and red maples, as well as the eponymous beech trees, all of which form surprisingly orderly hallways and small, roomlike clearings, with lush carpets of fallen leaves and canopies of branches thick enough to shelter you in a rainstorm. It would not be entirely surprising to find chairs and lamps out there, and a table set for tea. People sometimes get married in these clearings, and local children go there for all the childish purposes that require concealment. The trunks of the trees are covered with carvings: initials and obscenities; various assertions that so-and-so was here, in 1990 or 1975 or 1969; declarations of eternal love to vanished objects named Jim, Carol, Drew, Calla, Tom, Ken, and Lindy, among others. The old ones, from the fifties and sixties, have all but faded into the bark—they look like name-shaped scars manifested by the trees themselves. The newer ones are various shades of gray, depending on their age. Only the very recent names are raw and white, though they too, of course, will fade.
SNAIL ROAD
The last wild place on land I want to tell you about is the dune at the end of Snail Road. Snail Road is actually a dirt path, though wide enough to accommodate a car, and you can in fact park your car there if you need to. It is on the East End of town, on the far side of the highway. The path is arcaded by the branches of trees. At its far end stands the dune known as Mt. Ararat, a single, titanic rise of sand, utterly barren. It could be a dune in the Sahara.
This is another of those strangely potent places. Everyone I know who has spent any time on the dune agrees that there’s, well, something there, though outwardly it is neither more nor less than an enormous arc of sand cutting across the sky. Climb to the top of it. On one side you’ll see the treetops and rooftops of town; on the other you’ll look across a span of lesser dunes to the Atlantic. To the east, in the direction of Truro, is Pilgrim Lake, though you can’t quite see it from atop Mt. Ararat. Pilgrim Lake was once East Harbor but is now, essentially, an enormous puddle. About 150 years ago, the town fathers realized that windblown sand was accumulating in East Harbor in such quantities that it threatened not only to render the harbor too shallow for boats but might extend out along the coast and spoil all of Provincetown’s harbor. So they diked off East Harbor and laid railroad tracks on the new embankment that separated it from the open water. The only road into Provincetown still runs along that embankment, parallel to the long-vanished train tracks.
Being stilled and sourceless, Pilgrim Lake feels vaguely sinister. It is Provincetown’s Dead Sea. Although it is every bit as bright in sunlight as the ocean from which it has been separated, it shimmers differently. It is steelier, more opaque. From the dune at the end of Snail Road, you are surrounded by the Atlantic in three different aspects: the ocean proper, the bay, and the brackish lake.
The lunar stillness that pervades out there is difficult to describe. It involves a repose that is pleasurable without being exactly comforting. You feel as if you are in the eye of something. You are aware—I am aware, anyway—of the world as a place that doesn’t know or care that it’s beautiful, that produces beauty incidentally while pursuing its true imperatives to simply exist and change; a world that is, more than anything else, silent and unpopulated as it lives according to geological time. You feel, momentarily, what I imagine nomads might feel as they cross the desert. You are at home, and you are at the same time in a place too full of its own eternal business, too old and too young, to notice whether you live or die, you with your pots and pans and rugs and bells.