Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [85]
Time had bent back, doubled upon itself; my search for refuge mirrored the voyage of my ancestor, who sought at least an economic refuge if not the spiritual one of his fellow passengers. This doubling came to stand, for me, for the kind of duality which is this town’s particular character.
There is first the sheer matter of elements. The narrowness of the Cape at its last dwindling spur means that we are almost completely surrounded by water; the sun comes up over the bay, and sets over the open sea. Provincetown feels like an island, but we are part of the mainland, albeit tenuously. Any shore is a meeting place of continuous activity, of constant negotiation between earth and water, relations shifting by the hour and season. What is land at noon may be sea at three.
Add to this irresolvable dialogue the enormous expanse of sky, whose business is always and everywhere more visible here, where there is so much more of it than in inland landscapes, and the result is a constant, alchemical process of change. This shape-shifting makes the forms and aspects of things mercurial, inconstant—as if this conjunction of elements, life on the boundary, made things themselves restless. We are a border town between worlds, and one of them is perhaps our last wilderness, that sun-hammered, fog-claimed expanse which remains—at least from here on the shore—unknowable, impenetrable.
We are a sort of border town, too, an Alexandria, in that here a mélange of cultures mingle, interlock, and remain separate at once: straight and gay year-rounders, summer people, tourists mixing in a fascinating spectrum of relationships between gender, orientation and identity, a range of possibilities that makes the world seem a broader place. In this zone what is expected is difference, surprise.
A sole example, of the endless ones possible: one warm autumn morning, a group of women gathered at the sidewalk café for brunch, then walked through town with a banner reading “DRAG DYKES.” They were lesbians dressed “as women,” complete with lipstick and wigs, faux leopard miniskirts and veiled hats. What seemed extraordinary to me were the tourists who were taking their pictures, a group of older visitors fresh off the fall foliage tour bus. The peculiarity of photographing women dressed as women seemed lost on them; one of the “cross-dressers” was patiently explaining to an elderly woman just who they were and what they were up to, though she didn’t seem to be getting very far. The ironies of the situation made me say—as I have so many times, even after five years in Provincetown—“Where else?” It’s something many of us here ask, affectionately, when the town yet again demonstrates its ability to surprise us.
What would my Pilgrim forefather make of all this? It’s too easy to suppose that he would find in the town which has evolved upon his wooded shore a kind of Babylon. He was himself an outsider, an opportunist who found in the Puritans’ voyage an opportunity to construct a life with larger boundaries than London must have offered a young man of no means or social standing. Provincetown’s pleasure-based economy—we live on the sale of consumables, from silk shirts to grilled tuna to soft ice cream—may well have appalled the Puritans, but then they were highly interested in selling the bounty of the New World to an eager market back home. Most of us were reacquainted, each Thanksgiving, with imagery of a sober piety, but it’s a quaint historical fiction to suppose them a united group with a certain faith in a particular ideology. They were, in fact, contentious and embattled, both in a threatening England and an even more uncertain America. We have more in common with their tremendous doubts, with their fear in the face of an unknown future, than with whatever certainties they may have claimed.
Storms, on the North Atlantic coast, are Shakespearean.
They move in like vast states of mind, and seem allied with moral forces, conjured by enchanters whose aim is to confound and instruct. One