This Modern Writer: The Idea of History in Provincetown by Irene Turner

The Idea of History in Provincetown

A washed-ashore. That’s what your neighbors call you if you weren’t born in Provincetown. I’m neither: I flew in. Three tired passengers in a ten-seater prop plane. A hurricane’s due in six days.

Maybe that’s why I feel claustrophobic. Or maybe it’s that I don’t have my car. I live in Los Angeles, the densest city in the country. Even outstrips New York. But Provincetown is hemmed in by national park and ocean. 3500 permanent residents. 20,000 weekend guests. Small town gossip filled with summers of strangers, the Cape Cod spiral curls in on me.

Commercial Street is lined with tourist meccas — drag cabarets and straight-friendly gift shops and you can buy your lobster by the pound. On the sidewalk, touts wave menus and chat up hungry visitors. Labor Day is the last gasp of frantic relaxation before school and fall temperatures come in. There’s history here, but you have to pay attention to find it, and the near-record heat wraps a veil over my brain.

Laurel works at the Pilgrim Monument and Museum and she sees the past everywhere. Stand on the hill facing north to Boston and watch muskets flare and mow down the British. Out on the beach, a whaler’s dragged in a carcass, rendered the fat for tallow, let the guts drift. The Mayflower unloads its religious vagabonds – finding nothing but sandy, useless topsoil, they steal the Indian’s corn and go. I have bad sinuses, I can’t smell the ocean as it tumbles and slams to the shore.

If I could I’d be out with the once-prevalent Portuguese fishermen, salt spray in my eyes and face to the wind. Leathered skin and damp woolens and squint lines and wet rope and hard knots and a deep restlessness. Avoiding the storm winds that box the compass. Stinking enough that even I would wrinkle my nose as we hauled in our nets full of cod.

Only traces of Portuguese linger via restaurants. Linguiça, malassada, a pudding or two.

Laurel takes Provincetown with her when she travels. A trip to Holland means their Pilgrim Museum. When I leave Los Angeles, I want to get away. She’ll take any job so she can keep living on the Cape. “It’s easy, I’m lazy, it’s beautiful,” she says, but you can tell by her resume she’s had to work hard.

Around her is a graying, affluent, transient population – 60% of the tax bills are sent out of town. People are afraid it’s already driven out the traditional bohemian culture, that’s there’s nothing to replace it but wealth. Jackson Pollock in 1942 wasn’t anybody when he came here – now, he’d never make it out of New York.

I meet Steve, who’s researching the historic arts scene – the once yearly collisions of Rothko and Motherwell, etc., which created an influence far beyond a summer resort. When he first got dragged here on a day trip in the 70s, Steve wasn’t happy. Boring, expensive, too gay for a gay man – now he’s owned a place since 1992 and lived here full time for seven years. Once, he’d look at the art museum and think Who the hell is Charles Hawthorne?, but now he contributes to monographs on him.

Steve says God assigns you three enemies in Provincetown. In Los Angeles mine would be loneliness, fast food and the film business. But with winter’s snow haunting the wharf, I think they’d be alcohol here.

Steve has an emotional connection with a man in Los Angeles. They talk and visit, but each is rooted to his place, his sense of personal history. Neither will make the big move.

Lauren says most museums don’t have good collections of the 2oth century.  How old should things be before you know what to collect?

If I could move myself it would be to 1916, when the Provincetown Players produced Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill. The kickstarters of what would become the Little Theater movement, they brought a dark realism to the clichéd Broadway scene. Painting and sculpture endure, at least as long as I’ll be there to see it. The theatre left us, vanished, uncapturable, even in notices and critiques. O’Neill is a playwright full of secrets and ghosts – fitting he got his start here. Bound East for Cardiff was his first produced play. A dying sailor talks to his cabin mate as the rest of the crew preps for a storm.

Outside the house on the water where I’ve been given a bedroom, seaweed bakes in the sand. The wind picks up, breaks the feverish sun, chops and dots the swell. Hurricane Earl is due in 18 hours: it’s the best I’ve felt in days. I buy $9.99 sunglasses to protect from the glare.

I can’t stop staring at the sea.

Irene Turner was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for the film AN AMERICAN CRIME. Recent publications include Gargoyle and Pear Noir. She received a scholarship to attend the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown.