The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [75]
Cape Cod is a long, thin peninsula that sprouts out of the base of Massachusetts, runs out to sea for twenty miles or so and then curls back in on itself. It looks like an arm flexed to make a muscle – in fact, it looks remarkably like my arm because there’s almost no muscle in it. There are three roads along the lower part of the peninsula – one along the north shore, one along the south shore and one up the middle – but at the peninsula’s elbow at Rock Harbor, where it narrows and abruptly turns north, the three roads come together and there is just one long slow highway up the forearm to Provincetown at the fingertips. Provincetown was swarming with tourists. The town has just one route in and one route out. Only a few hundred people live there, but they get as many as 50,000 visitors a day during the summer and at holiday weekends such as this one. Parking was not allowed in the town itself – there were mean-spirited tow-away warnings everywhere – so I paid a couple of bucks to leave my car with several hundred others out in the middle of nowhere and trudged a long way into town.
Provincetown is built on sand. All around it stand rolling dunes broken only by occasional clumps of straw-coloured grass. The names of the businesses – Windy Ridge Motel, Gale Force Gift Shop – suggested that wind might be something of a local feature, and indeed there was sand drifted across the roads and piled in the doorways, and with every whipping breeze it flew in your eyes and face and dusted whatever food you happened to be eating. It must be an awful place to live. I might have disliked it less if Provincetown had tried just a little harder to be charming. I had seldom seen a place so singularly devoted to sucking money out of tourists. It was filled with ice-cream parlours and gift shops and places selling T-shirts, kites and beach paraphernalia.
I walked around for a while and had a hot dog with mustard and sand and a cup of coffee with cream and sand and had a look in a window of a real estate agency, where I noticed that a basic two-bedroom house by the beach was on offer at $190,000, though it did include a fireplace and all the sand you could eat. The beaches looked nice enough, but apart from that I couldn’t see a single real attraction in the place.
Provincetown is where the pilgrim fathers first touched American soil in 1620. There’s a big campanile-type tower in the middle of the town to commemorate the event. The pilgrims, curiously enough, didn’t mean to land on Cape Cod at all. They were aiming for Jamestown in Virginia, but missed their target by a mere 600 miles. I think that is a considerable achievement. Here’s another curious thing: they didn’t bring with them a single plough or horse or cow or even a fishing line. Does that strike you as just a little bit foolish? I mean to say, if you were going to start a new life in a land far, far away, don’t you think you would give some thought to how you were going to fend for yourself once you got there? Still, for all their shortcomings as planners, the pilgrim fathers were sufficiently on the ball not to linger in the Provincetown area and at the first opportunity they pushed on to mainland Massachusetts. So did I.
I had hoped to go to Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys had their summer home, but the traffic was so slow, especially around Woods Hole, where the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard departs, that I dared not. Every motel I passed – and there were hundreds – said No Vacancy. I got on Interstate 93, thinking I would follow it for a few miles just to get away from Cape Cod, and start looking for a room, but before I knew it I was in Boston, caught in the evening rush-hour. Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains. Every few hundred yards I would find my lane vanishing beneath me and other lanes merging with it from the right or left, or sometimes both. This wasn’t a road system, it was mobile hysteria.