Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [84]
In such a climate, of course, queer people have felt at home. How kind this atmosphere seemed to us, and how deeply gratifying to be able to do many of the things that heterosexual couples do without reservation every day: to touch one’s lover on the street, for instance, without considering consequences. To shop together for groceries or talk intimately in a café without self-consciousness. I didn’t realize, until time in Provincetown allowed me to begin to set such self-awareness aside, how watched I’d felt those five years in Vermont, how singled out, not allowed to forget my difference. I was perfectly willing to be out, in that little Northern town, and a part of me enjoyed being a crusader. But no one wants to live like that constantly; it takes an enormous amount of energy to watch oneself, to be watched all the time. Provincetown allowed us alternately to celebrate our difference and to forget it, and both opportunities were welcome.
One day, walking home on the beach from the center of town, we heard sudden footsteps behind us. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that two men were approaching us very quickly, walking with a kind of deliberation that didn’t suggest strolling. I felt myself tighten, tension stiffening my neck and shoulders, my body bracing itself as the speeding footsteps came right up behind us. I turned around swiftly, and there were the two men who’d been bearing down on us, just a few feet away—holding hands. First I laughed. And then I realized how much fear I carried, how much learned apprehension was held in my body, a guardedness my environment no longer warranted. How much of their emotional, intellectual, physical energies are gay people required to sink into such cautions? How much of ourselves do we lose, in our necessary defensiveness?
So I’d returned, an unknowing family envoy after nearly four hundred years, to a point of origin. I read histories of the Plymouth Colony. Wally and I spent Thanksgiving wandering through the replica of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor; strangely bright in its colors, staffed by actors imitating Puritans and sailors, it remained a replica. We even visited Plymouth Plantation, a sort of “living history” park where the staff spend their days in character in seventeenth-century costume, discussing seventeenth-century matters in their reproduction village and producing, at least in us, a weirdly discomforting effect. Most disquieting of all was the “Indian village” beyond the fences of the Pilgrim settlement, where the descendants of native peoples cooked over open fires and played with a deerskin ball, enduring questions and flashbulbs and looking irremediably sad. I felt no closer to my distant ancestor, gained no firmer sense of who he might have been. I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor from the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind there, a wind that had picked up speed and vigor and the scent of salt and freedom from its Atlantic crossing. Until it was too cold and raw to stay out any longer, I’d study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the Milky Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they’d been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation’s slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November’s chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane