The road to Provincetown is a dead-end street. The spit of land it sits on, so slim there’s only one way in and one out, perched as it is like a ball at the tip of a seal’s nose. Looking at the Cape on a map, the peninsula resembles a fish hook tossed out into the open Atlantic by the mainland to see what proverbial fish in the sea might find available for the reeling in and keeping. Cape Cod thus turns in on itself and Provincetown faces not Open Ocean but Plymouth, Massachusetts, home to the rock where the Mayflower landed in 1620 and the pilgrims disembarked to begin building the idea of a new England. This is Pilgrim country.
I was playing pilgrim.
It was Memorial Day weekend and, wanting to maximize the extra leisure time at my disposal, I had escaped Philadelphia, where I had been logging 12-hour days in front of a screen and eating too much instant shells and cheese after 8pm. For company, I’d invited a man I was seeing, Josh, a documentary filmmaker from Manhattan by way of Kentucky.
Good opportunity
We’d met through friends a number of years back but only begun dating a few months earlier, traveling between our respective cities on weekends as we tried to get a better feel for each other. This three-day weekend had seemed a good opportunity to make some progress in that department, so we made a plan to get some sun, some beach, some fried fish, and to do something about which I’d recently gotten a bee in my bonnet: pay my respects the late poet Stanley Kunitz by visiting his summer cottage and garden, neither of which are open to the public.
Ever since my college poetry professor had passed around a copy of Kunitz’s “Robin Redbreast,” he’d become a poet to whose work I found myself returning over the years, often finding in it whatever solace I sought at this point or that as my early twenties gave way to my late-twenties and those to thirty and so on. In “Robin Redbreast” Kunitz describes an encounter with the “dingiest bird you ever saw” and relates how he picked up the injured animal and felt its heart throbbing in his hand. He lifts the bird up, encouraging it to fly off, only to discover a hole in its head “where the hunter’s brand / had tunneled out his wits,” and through that hole, “the cold flash of the blue / unappeasable sky.” I remember taking the photocopy home and pinning it to my bulletin board, never hearing the phrase “like a hole in my head” quite the same way again.
Graduating seniors
When the time came, that same poetry professor had hosted a dinner at her house for her graduating seniors. For each us she made a small bag of souvenirs, complete with a line of poetry she said reminded her of us. In my bag was a line from Kunitz’s poem “The Layers,” that said, “[N]o doubt the next chapter / in my book of transformations / is already written. / I am not done with my changes.” It’s a poem I now give to my own students in the introductory creative writing class I teach, and when I read it aloud for them, I pause a little longer at the end of it than I do with other poems, wondering whether these children on the cusp of adulthood understand yet what change means.
Had I considered it, it probably would have dawned on me that Memorial Day weekend in Provincetown might be a madhouse, which it was. Driving into town on that gray, misty Friday evening there were women everywhere, swarming the town like ants on honey. They filled sidewalks, walked abreast down the middle of streets, hung from windows, congregated on balconies, on lawns, outside of bars, in couples and larger groups. It was a joyous if alternate universe, and Josh and I stared at each other wide-eyed bafflement, wondering what it was we’d just driven into.
A quick google as we sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic waiting for the walls of women to part and make way for slow-moving vehicles, revealed the mystery: “Women’s Weekend,” known more colloquially as “Baby Dyke Weekend” because it’s marketed to the under-35 set.
Town slogan
Apparently, every Memorial Day, lesbians flock to Provincetown by the thousands. Think David Byrne’s “Independence Day”: Hey mister, hey lady, hey sisters, walking hand in hand, We’ll be lovers, in the open, We’ll be lovers on Independence Day. Hand in hand, hand in hand, hand in hand, hand in hand . . . The song sounds like a block party in the name of human love and I smiled, thinking how the town slogan, the “Birthplace of American Liberty,” had become more apt than its founders could have ever anticipated.
Aside from boasting the highest proportion of same-sex couples of any zip code in the country, Provincetown is also an artists’ colony.
That’s what attracted Kunitz and his third wife, Elise Asher, a painter, to the town in the late 1950s. When the vibrancy of the artistic community they’d initially come for appeared to be waning, he co-founded the Fine Arts Work Center.
Art fellowship
His love of Provincetown’s seclusion and his need for the vibrancy of its cultural life reflects the push and pull he felt between the rural and urban. While he believed “art withers without fellowship,” he also said that he was more at peace with himself when “in daily contact with the natural world.”
- Paris Review
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