Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [83]
In November, our town weekly announced that a reenactment of the first landing, with local people in the role of the heroic voyagers, would take place on the beach where the actual landing seems to have occurred—somewhere, the article read, between the Red Inn and the Provincetown Inn. Without realizing it, I had rented a house in precisely the spot where my ancestor, 370 years before, had probably been among the sixteen armed men who first rode a longboat into shore from the Mayflower, carrying their muskets and a bottle of Holland gin, since they lacked fresh water. Over the next few gin-primed days, they reconnoitered, discovered a spring and a plentiful supply of quahogs and mussels, and raided a store of Wampanoag corn in what would later become Truro. The women came ashore, in order to allow the children to run on the beach, under close scrutiny—how exhilarating open space must have been, after their matchbox quarters—and to do laundry, for, as William Bradford informs us, “they had great need.” (Provincetown’s historical museum offers today a mural of the Pilgrim women boiling and wringing out those severe clothes.)
For months, then, I had been filling my eyes with a landscape that was part of my primogeniture, though I did not know it and though that landscape was now, of course, wildly changed. The Pilgrims encountered a Cape much more heavily wooded than it is today, since house- and boat-building would decimate virgin growth and produce a more barren, sandy landscape. As Provincetown transformed itself from an eighteenth-century fishing village to a nineteenth-century whaling town, and then to a Bohemian resort, property would become increasingly valuable. By late in this century the West End—once a less prestigious, Portuguese neighborhood—would contain the town’s priciest waterfront property, and every available bit of developable land would hold a welter of cottages and condos skewed at odd angles, a Cubist jigsaw rising up from the pristine beach where the First Laundry was hung to dry.
The town of Provincetown would like America to know that the Pilgrims landed here first (the Vikings were here, too, leaving a fragment of stone wall beneath what’s now a guest house a little nearer to the center of town). But travelers to this far outpost are, in general, drawn here by more recent traditions which have, since sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, made Provincetown first an arts colony and then—consequently?—a zone of tolerance and permission. Interest in uncovering and preserving the historical traditions of gay men and lesbians is recent, so it’s difficult to know when Provincetown first became a haven for the “Bohemian” expatriates of Eastern cities. Artists were drawn here by the beauty of the place and by cheap rents, and the influx of new citizenry found congenial hosts among the Portuguese fishing community which had arrived with the growth of whaling. Greenwich Village summered here in the teens and twenties, when a boat from one of the downtown piers traveled directly to this little tendril of land sixty miles out into the Atlantic. By the forties—when Tennessee Williams was finishing The Glass Menagerie in a rented shack, posing à la Grecque with a mock javelin for a nude photo in the dunes, and frequenting the bar at the Atlantic House, where (among others) Gene Krupa and Billie Holiday performed, Provincetown had established a social milieu so different from that of mainstream New England as to make it feel more like an island than the tip of a peninsula. Until the fifties, it was much easier to get here by boat than to risk a road frequently