Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown by Michael Cunningham Page A

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    P ROVINCETOWN’S LARGE, DISORDERLY party of transients, émigrés, tourists, summer homeowners, et cetera goes on at an almost total remove, in every sense but the geographical, from the generally more settled lives of the people who were born there and who are mostly the descendants of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. When the whaling industry was annihilated by the rise of petroleum oil in the mid-1800s, Provincetown became a fishing village, and the population came to be dominated by the Portuguese whose families had fished for centuries. They thrived there until recently, when the waters around Provincetown were almost entirely fished out; now many of the Portuguese American citizens live in several small enclaves on the far side of Bradford Street. The more prosperous among them run most of the operations that require year-round residence. They operate the gas and oil companies and own or staff the banks and markets and drugstores. When, in her 1942 book Time and the Town , the only book I know about Provincetown, Mary Heaton Vorse referred to them as “Dark faces on the streets, beautiful dark-eyed girls who love color and who make the streets gay with their bright dresses and their laughter,” I suspect she meant it as a compliment. These “colorful characters” are now the old guard, the town’s most respectable and conservative citizens. The same names, some of them Anglicized more than two hundred years ago, appear over and over again on the tombstones in the town cemetery: Atkins, Avellar, Cabral, Cook, Days, Enos, Rose, Tasha, Silva, Snow.

F ROM N OWHERE
I think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling
no matter the weather, when our lives are rather lakes
unlocking in a constant and bewildering spring. Listen ,
a day comes, when you say what all winter
I’ve been meaning to ask, and a crack booms and echoes
where ice had seemed solid, scattering ducks
and scaring us half to death. In Vermont, you dreamed
from the crown of a hill and across a ravine
you saw lights so familiar they might have been ours
shining back from the future .
And waking, you walked there, to the real place ,
and when you saw only trees, came back bleak
with a foreknowledge we have both come to believe in .
But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere ,
and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds with the wooden spoon, I remembered , this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture
after gesture, what else can we know of safety
or of fruitfulness? We walk with mincing steps within
a thaw as slow as February, wading through currents
that surprise us with their sudden warmth. Remember ,
last week you woke still whistling for a bird
that had miraculously escaped its cage, and look, today ,
a swallow has come to settle behind this rented rain gutter ,
gripping a twig twice his size in his beak, staggering
under its weight, so delicately, so precariously, it seems
from here, holding all he knows in his mouth .
M ARIE H OWE

Animals
    I N ADDITION TO its human population, Provincetown is home to a number of thriving animal contingents. It is a big dog town, the sort of place where local dogs (a standard poodle named Dorothy, a black Labrador mix known as Lucy, the long-haired dachshund of the portly man who walks the streets in caftans) are as thoroughly known in their idiosyncrasies of being as the residents and are just as likely to be greeted by name if they saunter into a shop or café.
    Provincetown also boasts a considerable cohort of stately cats, more often than not white with bold black markings, like living Franz Kline paintings, descendants of a long-gone ur-cat. The cats possess, in toto, whatever remains of the placid, burgherish entitlement of the old whaling captains. Dogs, though abundant in Provincetown, do not rule, at least in part because strictly enforced leash laws, which apply even on the beaches, keep them forever relegated to the status of pet. They are named