I am sitting on the beach at Long Point, my legs stretched out towards the town that rests in unmistakable outline across the Harbor. I have, as it were, Provincetown at my feet. This is surely the best vantage point from which to view it, nestled, in Joseph Berger's sly image, "like a piece of silver that has just crossed the palm of Cape Cod."
It is true that Provincetown is generally considered the most commercial of any Cape town, and it even advertises that fact in the name of its main street. But the gaudy human carnival that swamps its narrow streets each summer, and now well into the fall, is essentially a veneer, and at most dominates a small stretch of the town. More than any other Cape Cod town, I think, Provincetown has managed to remain a community, in the traditional sense of that word, an identity unto itself. It is still primarily a collection of distinct neighborhoods, full, even in summer, of local residents tending their gardens, painting their chairs, walking their dogs, riding bicycles.
It strikes me, in fact, as a kind of poem, not in any sentimental sense, but rather as fitting Robert Frost's hard-nosed description of himself as "a unity of bursting opposites." P-Town contains a greater and more notorious ethnic and social diversity than any town over the Canal (not the least part of which is its high-level influx of seasonal tourism and money), yet its diverse parts not only manage somehow to coexist, but to form a recognizable and vital identity.
Much of Provincetown’s visual appeal is a random compactness, one of the few genuine examples left of the "Rural Seaside Charm" marketed like salt-water taffy by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce. This visual appeal depends, of course, on a certain consistency of architecture over time, marred only at its edges by ill-conceived high-rises and condos. But it also depends, as much or more, on the broad blue apron of the Harbor that sets it off in front, and on the "palm" in which the silver coin of the Town lies: that is, the unspoiled setting of ponds, forest and dunes of the National Seashore, known as the Provincelands, that backs up and surrounds the Town in concentric, protecting layers.
It is the Provincelands, or what the old Provincetowners always called "the outback," that has defined and shaped the character of the Town as much as anything else. And it is Provincetown's unspoiled surroundings that also make it the last Cape example of the traditional New England village; that is, a tight cluster of houses surrounded by a preponderance of open space. It is the nature of that open space - the freely-moving dunes, and the bright blue blade of the inner Harbor - that turns the eyes of the inhabitants around, curving us back to look at the rest of the Cape spilling down the inner shoreline of the Lower Cape, up the Sandwich Moraine, across the Canal, and finally around to the floating hills of Manomet across the Bay.
It is a unique perspective. Another name for Provincetown is Land’s End, and it is here indeed that we come to the end of things, standing at its tip and staring back to where we have come from, discovering that place anew.
