A town of sand and fog

Provincetown stands on a finger of land at the tip of Cape Cod, the barb at the hook's end, a fragile and low-lying geological assertion that was once knitted together by the roots of trees. Most of the trees, however, were felled by early settlers, and now, with the forests gone, the land on which Provincetown is built is essentially a sandbar, tenuously connected to the mainland, continually reconfigured by the actions of tides. When Thoreau went there in the mid-1800s, he called it "a filmy sliver of land lying flat on the ocean, a mere reflection of a sand-bar on the haze above.'' It has not changed much since then, at least not when seen from a distance. Built as it is at the very end of the Cape, which unfurls like a genie's shoe from the coastline of Massachusetts, it follows the curve of a long, lazy spiral and looks not out to sea but in, toward the thicker arm of the Cape. The distant lights you see at night across the bay are the neighbouring towns of Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham.

Provincetown stands on a finger of land at the tip of Cape Cod, the barb at the hook's end, a fragile and low-lying geological assertion that was once knitted together by the roots of trees. Most of the trees, however, were felled by early settlers, and now, with the forests gone, the land on which Provincetown is built is essentially a sandbar, tenuously connected to the mainland, continually reconfigured by the actions of tides. When Thoreau went there in the mid-1800s, he called it "a filmy sliver of land lying flat on the ocean, a mere reflection of a sand-bar on the haze above.'' It has not changed much since then, at least not when seen from a distance. Built as it is at the very end of the Cape, which unfurls like a genie's shoe from the coastline of Massachusetts, it follows the curve of a long, lazy spiral and looks not out to sea but in, toward the thicker arm of the Cape. The distant lights you see at night across the bay are the neighbouring towns of Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham.

If you stand on the beach on the harbour side, the ocean proper is behind you. If you turned around, walked diagonally through town and across the dunes to the other side, and sailed east, you'd dock eventually in Lisbon. By land, the only way back from Provincetown is the way you've come.

It is by no means inaccessible, but neither is it particularly easy to reach. In the 1700s storms or changes in currents sometimes washed away the single road that connected Provincetown to the rest of Cape Cod, and during those times it was reachable only by boat. Even when the weather and the ocean permitted, carriages that negotiated the sandy road often got stuck and sometimes capsized into the surf. Provincetown is now more firmly and reliably attached. You can drive there. It's almost exactly two hours from both Boston and Providence, if you don't hit traffic, though in summer that's unlikely. You can fly over from Boston, twenty-five minutes across the bay, and if you're lucky you might see whales breaching from the plane. In summer, from mid-May to Columbus Day, a ferry sails twice a day from Boston. Provincetown is by nature a destination. It is the land's end; it is not en route to anywhere else. One of its charms is the fact that those who go there have made some effort to do so.

Provincetown is three miles long and just slightly more than two blocks wide. Two streets run its entire length from east to west; Commercial, a narrow one-way street where almost all the businesses are, and Bradford, a more utilitarian two-way street a block north of Commercial.

Residential roads, some of them barely one car wide, run at right angles on a semiregular grid between Commercial and Bradford streets and then, north of Bradford, meander out into dunes or modest hollows of surviving forest, as the terrain dictates. Although the town has been there since before 1720 (the year it was incorporated) and has survived any number of disastrous storms, it is still possible that a major hurricane, if it hit head-on, would simply sweep everything away, since Provincetown has no bedrock, no firm purchase of any kind. It is a city of sand, more or less the way Arctic settlements are cities of ice. A visitor in 1808 wrote to friends in England that the sand was "so light that it drifts about the houses... similar to snow in a driving storm. There were no hard surfaces; upon stepping from the houses the foot sinks in the sand.'' Thoreau noted some forty years later, "The sand is the great enemy here... There was a schoolhouse filled with sand up to the tops of the desks.''

The sand has, by now, been domesticated, and Provincetown floats on layers of asphalt, pavement, and brick. Still, any house with a garden has had its soil brought in from elsewhere. Some of the older houses produce their offerings of grass and flowers from earth brought over as ballast in the holds of ships in the 1800s - it is soil that originated in Europe, Asia, or South America. On stormy days gusts of sand still blow through the streets.

IN HIGH SUMMER, Provincetown's tourist population is incalculable. In winter it shrinks to just more than 3,800 souls. I find it spectacular in all weathers, but for people looking for a conventional week or two at the beach, it is reliably sunny only in July, August, and early September, and even then days or weeks of rain can blow in from the Atlantic. In summer the days are warm and occasionally hot, the nights almost always cool. In winter it usually snows. Because the town is surrounded by ocean, it never gets as bone-chillingly cold as it does in Boston; twenty-seven miles across the bay.

Then there is the heart of summer, which occurs sometime on or before the middle of August, Provincetown is far north, nearer to Nova Scotia than it is to Florida - fall comes early there. By Labor Day some of the leaves are already showing hints of red and yellow at their edges. But during the second week of August (sometimes earlier, sometimes later), there is a deep blue bowl of perfect days, noisier than winter but possessed of a similar underlying silence; a similar sense that the world is and will always be just this way - calm and warm, bleached with brightness, its contrasts subdued by a shimmer that makes it difficult to determine precisely where the ocean ends and the sky begins. One August afternoon several years ago I was reading on a pier and felt, suddenly, that I was in the middle of an enormous clock and that it was, at that moment, precisely noon; that I was present for the exact middle of the vernal year. A minute before it had still been rising summer; a minute later summer's decline would start, though nothing would appear to have changed.

I love these periods of stillness, look forward to them, though the weather is most wonderful, to me, in late spring and early fall. May and June in Provincetown tend to mists and fogs, and the town is as greenly muted as a village in the Scottish highlands. The foghorn blows all day as well as all night. The town has opened for the summer - stores and restaurants are lit, the single surviving movie theatre is back in business - but few tourists have arrived yet. The town is made up, for these weeks, almost entirely of its year-round and its full-time summer population, the people who work in the stores and restaurants, and they walk on Commercial Street through the mist exclaiming over one another, inquiring about how the winter went, full of a buoyancy that will erode steadily away until it reaches the point of exhaustion and exasperation that arrives on or near Labor Day weekend. But for now, during these weeks, there's all that sex and dancing ahead; there's all that money to be made. Hundreds of thousands of strangers are on their way - anyone could fall in love. There's a low spark, a hazy green glow, all the more potent for the drizzle that pervades. At this time, midnight, when the streetlamps illuminate little more than circles of fog, you find yourself entirely alone save for the foraging skunks; a man named Butchy, who wears a blue motorcycle helmet and a chest-length beard, wanders the streets at night with a black plastic trash bag full of something; and another man in a blond wig and a silver lamé dress, walking unaccompanied twenty paces ahead, sings "Loving You'' like a crackpot Lorelei, still trying to lure sailors to their deaths though she's no longer what she was.

In fall, from mid-September through the end of October, the opposite process occurs. Fall is probably never so thoroughly suffused with its piquant, precarious beauty as it is in a town about to go to sleep for the winter. The lights are blinking out, one by one: first the movie theatre closes, then some of the more ephemeral boutiques. Every week brings more absences. Still, most of the businesses hang on until Columbus Day weekend, but after that the town is in winter mode. It's much more a year-round proposition than it was when I arrived there twenty years ago - a fair number of places open on weekends through New Year's Day, and some open again as early as April; there are now two good year-round bookshops and a record store - but by mid January there will be only a handful of bars, a restaurant or two, and a scattering of shops. By February you could walk down Commercial Street late on a weekday night and pass no one at all. Snow blows down from the rooftops, eddies, and glints in the empty streetlight.

But from Labor Day through Halloween, the place is almost unbearably beautiful. The air during these weeks seems less like ether and more like a semisolid, clear and yet dense somehow, as if it were filled with the finest imaginable golden pollen. The sky tends toward brilliant ice-blue, and every thing and being is invested with a soft, gold-ish glow. Tin cans look good in this light; discarded shopping bags do. I'm not poet enough to tell you what the salt marsh looks like at high tide. I confess that when I lived year-round in Provincetown, I tended to become irritable toward the end of October, when one supernal day after another seemed to imply that the only reasonable human act was to abandon your foolish errands and plans, go outside, and fall to your knees. I found myself looking forward to the relative drear of November, when the light whitened and the streets became papered with dead leaves; when cans and shopping bags looked like simple trash again. At least by November I could get some work done.

If you go to Provincetown and spend all your time there on land, you cannot properly claim to have seen the place, any more than you could claim to have seen New Mexico if you went to Santa Fe and didn't stray beyond the city limits. In Provincetown it is possible to imagine the Atlantic as a backdrop, there to provide shimmer and wind as a foil for all this commerce. Once you are a half-mile or less from shore, however, you understand that Provincetown and everything in it is actually a minor, if obstreperous and brightly lit, interruption in the ocean's immense, inscrutable life.

In the exact middle of town is the entrance to MacMillan Wharf. This is where train tracks once ran right out onto the end of the wharf - where trains arrived empty and left loaded with whale oil, whalebone, and baleen. It is one of the half-dozen surviving wharves - there were once about sixty - and it still functions as it was meant to, though it's nothing like what it was in its prime. Fishing boats still dock there, and some of what the fishermen are able to pull from the depleted waters is processed on the wharf.

The wharf is immense, by local standards. Underneath, amid the brown trunks of its pilings, which are covered with mussels and scraps of seaweed, it nurtures a swatch of permanent shade. On top it is, essentially, a wide asphalt road that extends well out into the water. Cars and trucks come and go at all hours. The wharf smells of fish, as you would expect it to, but its fish smell is layered. The fresh and briny covers something fetid, not just dead fish but old oil and machinery that has been overheated again and again and again. From the side of the wharf, you can see fish swimming in water that is the colour of deep, cloudy jade - just minnows usually, though you might see a bass or a bluefish dart by. The Hindu docks there, an eighty-year-old schooner that takes tourists on two-hour sails. The whale-watching boats dock there, too.

Fishing is among the most dangerous of professions - the mortality rate among fishermen is almost ten times that among firefighters and policemen. This may account for the sombre aspect that attaches to MacMillan Wharf, for all its tourist enticements. The wharf is subtly but discernibly haunted, a midway zone between the gaudy comforts of town and the shimmering immensity beyond. At the far end is a small village of trailers for processing fish, the harbourmaster's bungalow, and the Pirate Ship Whydah Museum, devoted to the treasure-laden ship of Captain Kidd, which sank in the waters off Wellfleet. All around them are the masts and lines of the small, privately owned fishing boats, the names of which tend to be either affectionate or wistful: the Chico Jess, the Joan Tom, the Second Effort, and the Blue Skies.

The fishing boats, when you see them up close from the wharf, are battered and faded, thoroughly marked by their rough use. Scallop boats go out for weeks at a time, in all weathers. Their docks are usually littered with plastic buckets, cork floats, and disorderly piles of rope and net, most of which have aged to a smoky chestnut color. It's clear that the ocean and its weather turn that which was once white to grey or yellow, that which was once bright to chalk, and that which was once dark to brownish-black. What there is of color usually resides in a fisherman's pair of new orange waders, or a shroud of new fishnet, white or green, that has not yet begun to blacken.

Walk out to the end of the wharf. Scavenging gulls will be making their usual racket. Men who have been darkened by the ocean will be working on the boats or standing in small groups, talking and drinking coffee from paper cups. From the end of the wharf you can get a closer look at the breakwater where the foghorn blows at night; you can see that all along its top it is a pearly, variegated white from seagull shit, which in that quantity is slightly phosphorescent. You can look farther out to Long Point, past the pleasure boats anchored in the bay. You can look back and see the long parabolic curve of the town and the ocean. It is the best way, while still on land, to understand how graceful and small the town must look, how touchingly inconsequential, to whales as they breach, farther out.

I'm especially fond of walking to the end of MacMillan Wharf late at night, when it's nearly empty. If you go there then, you will hear the boats creaking against the pilings. You will see the hard white light of the harbour-master's office. The water will be full of gulls, calmer now that the fish are stored away, white as beacons as they swim along over the dim watery gray of their paddling feet. At the end of the wharf a brilliant blue Pepsi vending machine will shine against the black water and the starry black sky.

This is an edited extract from 'Land's End, a walk in Provincetown', by Michael Cunningham, published by Vintage in May

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

GETTING THERE

You can fly non-stop from Heathrow to Boston on American Airlines (08457 789 789, www.aa.com), British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) and Virgin Atlantic (0870 380 2007, www.virgin-atlantic.com). Fares for May are around £300 return through discount agents (or, with BA, online for £302), but these will rise sharply from June to September. American will also fly from Manchester, starting on 16 May; an introductory offer of £289 is available from the airline for flights within the first month, but only if you book by 30 April.

STAYING THERE

The Crowne Pointe Historic Inn (001 508 487 6767, www.crownepointe.com) in Provincetown is the 19th-century home of a prosperous local captain. It costs from £76 for a double room, which includes breakfast and afternoon cheese and wine.

WHERE TO EAT

The Lobster Pot Restaurant at 321 Commercial Street in Provincetown (001 508 487 0842, www.ptownlobsterpot.com) is a traditional diner with a harbour view and home of award-winning clam chowder. Mews Restaurant & Cafe, along the road at 429 Commercial Street (001 508 487 1500, www.mews.com) has a beachfront dining room and more casual upstairs café.

MORE INFORMATION

For more information about the area, check out the official tourist office Discover New England (020-7491 1112, www.discovernewengland.org).

EVENTS

May sees the height of the whale-watching season around Stellwagen Bank, which continues until August.

For some unusual ornithology, visit the second annual Birdman Competition on 30 May. The competition is organised by the Gay Men's Domestic Violence Project (www.gmdvp.org/pages/home.htm) and is based on the English event in Bognor Regis.

For a more cultured approach to your holiday, visit the Provincetown International Film Festival (00 1 508 487 3456, www.ptownfilmfest.org), which runs from 16 to 20 June.

By Oliver Mann