I was walking along Commercial Street with a friend one evening in post-holiday Provincetown, when she suddenly remarked, “God, how empty this place is!” I was tempted to say, “You don’t know the half of it” but didn’t. Still, her comment conjured up for me a vision of this same street sixty years ago when Provincetown in winter was truly a “ghost town.”
I was living there that winter when, after my freshman year at college, I decided I needed a break. I chose Provincetown because even then knew I wanted to be a writer and had heard that many writers had gotten their start in this little town. Of such casual associations are life journeys made.
During the fall I lived in one of Sunny Tasha’s unheated cottages off Howland Street. When the weather turned cold, I rented a two-room apartment on Center Street for the princely sum of $50 a month, opened my first bank account at the Seaman’s Savings, and eventually found a job as a reporter for The New Beacon, a local weekly newspaper. It was there I began to write a weekly column under the highly original title, “Flotsam and Jetsam” – my first published work.
When I moved there, I had no idea how empty Provincetown was in the off-season (which then started after Columbus Day). How empty was it? Well, it was six weeks before I met anyone my own age. There was one coffee shop on Macmillan Wharf, one restaurant, and the library. That was about it. This was years before the Fine Arts Work Center, no art galleries were open in the winter then, and I was too young to go into bars.
It was my first experience with acute loneliness. Desperate for human contact, I took to hitching a ride with the Bunny Bread truck driver on weekends to visit friends in Orleans. Still, by the first of the year, I was ready to pack it in and, tail between my legs, go back to college for the spring semester.
But just as I was about to give up, I happened upon an informal group of artists and writers that met occasionally to share their work and talk about art. They invited me to join them. The group included Sal Del Deo and Ciro Cozzi (who then ran Ciro and Sal’s Restaurant together), the painter Jim Forsberg, the playwright Connie Black, the journalist Heaton Vorse, and “Snowy”, who had thick snow-white hair and a mustache, but whose last name I never learned. Though I was by far the youngest member of the group, they treated me as an equal and made me feel my desire to make a life as a writer was perfectly normal.
Thanks to Heaton Vorse, I also became an informal secretary to his mother, Mary Heaton Vorse, the pioneer labor journalist, one of the founders of the legendary Provincetown Players, and author of the classic Provincetown memoir, Time and the Town. Though she was then in her late eighties and physically frail, her mind was still sharp, her memories intact, and her conversation pithy. She was still passionately involved in politics, local and national. She wrote letters for the burgeoning anti-nuclear movement, referred to one of the local selectmen as “a man who thinks a parking lot is the noblest work of God,” and remembered Eugene O’Neill as “a nice young man” whose expression was “a statue of despair.”
Next fall I returned to college, and it would be another decade or so before I returned to the Cape to live here year-round. But the town, which had initially seemed so depressingly empty, proved to be a place of hidden riches, one that sustained me through the winter, and, more importantly, gave me reason to believe that, someday, it would be possible to make a life in, and be part of, a truly creative community. And so it has.
