Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I suppose after all these decades of pumping gas he had become more or less incombust-
ible, like those snake handlers who grow immune to snake venom. But I wasn't inclined
to test this theory too closely. I paid him hastily and pulled straight back onto the highway,
much to the annoyance of a man in a forty-foot motor home who dripped mustard on his
lap in braking to avoid me. “That'll teach you to take a building on vacation,” I muttered
uncharitably and hoped that something heavy had fallen on his wife in back.
Cape Cod is a long, thin peninsula that sprouts out of the base of Massachusetts, runs out
to sea for twenty miles or so and then curls back in on itself. It looks like an arm flexed to
make a muscle-in fact, it looks remarkably like my arm because there's almost no muscle
in it. There are three roads along the lower part of the peninsula-one along the north shore,
one along the south shore and one up the middle-but at the peninsula's elbow at Rock Har-
bor, where it narrows and abruptly turns north, the three roads come together and there is
justonelongslowhighwayuptheforearmtoProvincetownatthefingertips.Provincetown
was swarming with tourists. The town has just one route in and one route out. Only a few
hundredpeople live there, buttheygetasmanyas50,000visitors adayduringthesummer
and on holiday weekends such as this one. Parking was not allowed in the town itself-there
were mean-spirited towaway warnings everywhere-so I paid a couple of bucks to leave my
car with several hundred others out in the middle of nowhere and trudged a long way into
town.
Provincetown is built on sand. All around it stand rolling dunes broken only by occasional
clumps of straw-colored grass. The names of the businesses-Windy Ridge Motel, Gale
Force Gift Shop-suggested that wind might be something of a local feature, and indeed
therewassanddriftedacrosstheroadsandpiledinthedoorways,andwitheverywhipping
breeze it flew in your eyes and face and dusted whatever food you happened to be eating.
Itmustbeanawfulplacetolive.ImighthavedislikeditlessifProvincetownhadtriedjust
a little harder to be charming. I had seldom seen a place so singularly devoted to sucking
money out of tourists. It was filled with ice cream parlors and gift shops and places selling
T-shirts, kites and beach paraphernalia.
I walked around for a while and had a hot dog with mustard and sand and a cup of coffee
with cream and sand and had a look in a window of a real estate agency, where I noticed
that a basic two-bedroom house by the beach was on offer at $l90,000, though it did in-
clude a fireplace and all the sand you could eat. The beaches looked nice enough, but apart
from that I couldn't see a single real attraction in the place.
Provincetown is where the Pilgrim fathers first touched American soil in 1620. There's a
big campanile-type tower in the middle of the town to commemorate the event. The Pil-
