The sign at the seafood place in Eastham announces the price of lobster the way the Cumberland Farms across the highway displays the price of gas, on red plastic numbers that can easily be changed out, depending on today’s rate. Both keep going up.
It’s a Tuesday in October, and we’ve escaped the island for a few days now that the shoulder season has begun. SOFT SHOULDER shouts the sign on the way into Provincetown, the dunes threatening to swallow the narrow ribbon of asphalt that snakes its way from here all the way to Bishop, California.
I dragged the grey from Nantucket with me, the Pilgrim Monument rising out of a sleepy fog.Most places are closed, a mid-week respite before weekenders make this same pilgrimage down Route Six.
Norman Mailer wrote once that winter in Provincetown was so quiet, you could roll a bowling ball down Commercial Street and not hit a single soul. It’s not that quiet yet, but the damp is keeping people inside. Wet rainbow flags snap in the breeze. The drag queens don’t want to get their wigs wet.
All the fishing boats are tied up at the end of MacMillan Wharf. We find some barstool philosophers inside George’s Pizza, a place I had not been in 20 years, but whose phone number I could probably still recall, once etched on the wall of the kitchen of the condo I grew up in, near the white rotary telephone with the heavy receiver.
It’s not yet Halloween, but already this place looks ready to celebrate Christmas, with strands of multicolored twinkle lights woven throughout the shelf of liquor, their lights refracted, bending through the glass bottles. It is a little like being underwater.
The people at the bar are debating which unit of measurement is best: Imperial or Metric. On the TV, soccer plays but the Spanish announcer is muted. A woman starts talking about the history of Old Kings Highway, the way people used to get around Cape Cod before Route Six was constructed.
Soon the conversation turns to the streets of Provincetown, this rambling network of spider veins that splinters off from the main drag. Each patron offers up a fact or two about their favorite street, the people who used to live here, the houses that once stood.
“I’ve got a real working knowledge of this place,” a man says, and his words echo such that I scribble them down. I like the idea of knowing a place because you have worked there, not just visited, but stayed and gotten to know the people a little bit. The Cape would not survive the season without the people who come to work here, many of whom have already left to work in other seasonal towns. In the meantime, the rest of us left behind on this side of the bridge will do our best to keep the place warm until next summer.
