The long finger of land points into the Atlantic and everything crowds toward the tip. Route 6 narrows. The pitch pine thins out and gives way to bare dunes that shift with each northeast storm so that the road has to be rerouted every few years, the asphalt just laid down somewhere new, as though the land has not yet decided where it wants to be.
In March the town is closed. Hardware stores open. The Portuguese bakery on Bradford Street opens at five in the morning for the fishermen who are still there, who have always been there, whose names are on the gravestones in the cemetery off Route 6 going back to the seventeen hundreds—Souza, Avila, Cabral—the same names still on the mailboxes, still on the boats. They don’t leave in the off-season because this is not their off-season. They are the season.
The light here is what the painters came for. Hawthorne came in 1899 and set up a school and told his students to paint the light, not the thing the light falls on. It comes off the water from two directions—the harbor side and the ocean side—and it has no shadows to speak of, or rather the shadows are thin and unconvincing, as though the light is too ambient to commit to making them. A figure standing on the pier casts a shadow that looks like a suggestion.
The mackerel boats go out before dawn. You can hear the engines if you’re awake—the low diesel rumble, the sound of someone who has a practical relationship with the sea. Not awe. Not vacation. The specific knowledge of where the fish are in this cold and how deep and what the weather will do by noon.
By nine in the morning they’re back. The gulls come from everywhere at once, screaming, as though they’ve been waiting just out of sight. The catch is unloaded and the ice is hosed down and the men drink coffee from a thermos. Nobody looks at the water. They’ve been looking at it for six hours already and it’s just the thing between them and the next day.
In the afternoon the light changes. The low March sun hits the dunes at an angle and makes them briefly golden, and for an hour the empty town looks like a stage set for a play that hasn’t started yet. The Pilgrim Monument stands at the top of the hill casting its long shadow over the colonial downtown, over the closed gallery windows full of art nobody is buying right now, over the guesthouse signs that say CLOSED FOR THE SEASON, over the benches where in August you cannot find a seat.
The monument is for the wrong landing. The Mayflower came here first—stopped in the harbor for five weeks before moving on to Plymouth—but Plymouth got the rock and the story and the Thanksgiving. Provincetown got the monument, the actual site, and a footnote. It’s a kind of justice nobody asked for.
At night the stars are visible. The absence of visitors means the absence of light pollution. Orion tilts toward the horizon. The tide is audible from anywhere in town, a slow respiration, patient with itself.
The people who live here year-round have a quality of attention that’s different. They see the place rather than the idea of the place. They know which road floods first in a storm, which neighbors have wood to spare, which of the summer people leave their windows unlocked. They have opinions about the weather that are essentially correct.
In two months the first of them will come back—the ones who rent the same cottage every year, who have done this for twenty years, who think of Provincetown as theirs in some way that is also true. The hardware store owners will have mixed feelings about this. The fishermen will have no feelings about it at all.
The mackerel will be somewhere else by then anyway.