Read Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown for Free Online Page B

are surrounded by the Atlantic in three different aspects: the ocean proper, the bay, and the brackish lake.
    The lunar stillness that pervades out there is difficult to describe. It involves a repose that is pleasurable without being exactly comforting. You feel as if you are in the eye of something. You are aware—I am aware, anyway—of the world as a place that doesn’t know or care that it’s beautiful, that produces beauty incidentally while pursuing its true imperatives to simply exist and change; a world that is, more than anything else, silent and unpopulated as it lives according to geological time. You feel, momentarily, what I imagine nomads might feel as they cross the desert. You are at home, and you are at the same time in a place too full of its own eternal business, too old and too young, to notice whether you live or die, you with your pots and pans and rugs and bells.

T HE S NAKES OF S EPTEMBER
All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery ,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden ,
a whisper among the viburnums ,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow ,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket .
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent ,
I should have thought them gone ,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost .
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden ,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce , dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot .
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins .
After all ,
we are partners in this land ,
co-signers of a covenant .
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles .
S TANLEY K UNITZ

The Town
    P ROVINCETOWN IS, HAS always been, an eccentrics’ sanctuary, more or less the way other places are bird sanctuaries or wild game preserves. It is the only small town I know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed boundaries of home and licensed marriage, respectable job and biological children. It is where people who were the outcasts and untouchables in other towns can become prominent members of society. Until recently it was possible to live there cheaply and well, and it has long been possible for, say, two men to walk down Commercial Street holding hands and carrying their adopted Peruvian baby without exciting any unusual degree of interest.
    It has been attracting refugees, rebels, and visionaries for almost four hundred years.
    T HE P ILGRIM M OTHERS AND F ATHERS
    Provincetown’s first settlers were, in fact, the Pilgrims, who sailed the Mayflower into Provincetown Harbor in 1620. They spent the winter there but, finding too little fresh water, sailed that spring to Plymouth, which has gone into the history books as the Pilgrims’ initial point of disembarkation. Provincetown is, understandably, not happy about this misrepresentation of the facts.
    The Mayflower arrived in what is now Provincetown Harbor after sixty-six days at sea. The Pilgrims’ reaction seems to have been less than rapturous. One of them wrote that the landscape was full of “shrubbie pines, hurts [huckleberries], and such trash.” That winter, the Mayflower Compact was drawn up. A baby, Peregrine White, was born, and four people—Dorothy Bradford, James Chilton, Jasper Moore, and Edward Thompson—died. The latter three are buried in Provincetown. Dorothy Bradford went overboard and is believed to have committed suicide.
    The Mayflower was a cargo ship, not meant for passengers, and so was available for relatively little money. The people we now know as the Pilgrims had first left England for Holland in search of religious freedom but had spent twelve years failing to find work there before deciding, in desperation, to sail to the New World. They were not Puritans; they called themselves “separatists,” and while they were a relatively