Maxwell thought that they wore the full-dress uniform of a Ruritanian admiral. Their table manners are hardly refined: they use their gizzards, lined with stones, to grind and crush the mussels and crabs which they swallow whole. Birds as machines.
They too have suffered. In Britain they were used for target practice during the Second World War; thousands of them, lying in rafts on the sea, were blasted away. On the Cape that winter I find many eider carcases strewn across the sand, ripped open and spatchcocked, as if the violent cold were too much even for them, despite their downy insulation. One victim’s eyes have long since puckered into blindness, but its nape is still tight, like the back of a rabbit’s neck, more fur than plumage. Eiders are still harvested for their air-filled feathers to make quilts and coats, ‘robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter with a shelter’, as Thoreau wrote. They tolerate our appropriation; they have no choice. But while we may have our uses for them, their features speak of something unknowable.
Perhaps it is those eyes. Yes, it’s those eyes. It always is. They take in the whole of the world, even as they ignore it.
Held out into the Atlantic, Cape Cod is a tensed bow, curled up and back on itself, a sandy curlicue which looks far too fragile to withstand what the ocean has to throw at it. Battered by successive storms, its tip has been shaped and reshaped for centuries. It is only halfway here, and not really there at all. It is porous. The sea seeps into it.
This is where America runs out. Sometimes, if the light is right, as it is this morning, the land across the bay fizzles into a mirage, a Fata Morgana stretching distant beaches into seeming cliffs, floating dreamily on the horizon. The further away you are, the less real everything else becomes. This place takes little account of what happens on the mainland; or rather, puts it all into perspective. It is a seismograph in the American ocean, sensing the rest of the world. Not for nothing did Marconi send out his radio signals from this shore; he also believed that in turn his transmitters might pick up the cries of sailors long since drowned in the Atlantic.
The inner bay arches around from the lower Cape, losing people as it goes. From empty-looking lanes where signs politely protest THICKLY SETTLED, as if there might be as many inhabitants as trees, you pass through Wellfleet’s woods and second homes to North Truro’s desultory holiday cottages on the open highway, as lonely as Edward Hopper’s paintings, and on to Provincetown, where the land widens briefly before dwindling to Long Point, a spit of sand as slender and elegant as the tail on the tiny green spelter monkey that sits above Pat’s woodstove. Long Point Light stands on the tip, a square stubby tower topped with a black crown lantern – it might welcome or warn off visitors, it doesn’t really matter which. Once you’re here, you never leave. This is the end and beginning of things.
I first came to Provincetown in the summer of 2001. Invited here by John Waters, I was in town for just five days; I had no idea then what they would mean to me now. Like some perverse mentor, John initiated me into the secrets of the place. We drank at the A-House, where grown men groomed one another’s bodies like animals eating each other’s fleas; and we drank at the Old Colony, a wooden cave that lurched as if it was drunken itself; and we drank at the Vets bar, where the straight men of the town took their last stand in the dingy light. On hot afternoons we hitched to Longnook, using a battered cardboard sign with our destination scrawled on it with a Sharpie, waiting on Route 6 for a ride. Once a police car stopped for us. We sat on the caged back seat like criminals and when we arrived, John said, ‘We’ve been paroled to the beach.’ He looked out over the ocean and declared it to be so beautiful that it was a joke. When he rode down Commercial Street on his bike with its wicker basket like the Wicked Witch of the West, I heard someone call ‘Your Majesty’ as we passed.
It was only at the end of my stay, about to take the ferry back to Boston, that I decided to go on a whalewatch. I stepped off the land and onto the boat. Forty minutes later, out on Stellwagen Bank, a humpback breached in front of me. It still hangs there.
It is not easy to get here. It never was. For most of its human history, Provincetown was accessible only by boat, or by a narrow strip of sand that connected it to the rest of the peninsula. And even when you did arrive, it was difficult to know what was here and what was there; what was land and what was sea. Maps from the eighteen-thirties show a place marooned by water, its margins partly inundated. There was no road till the twentieth century; the railway once raced visitors to Provincetown, but that was abandoned long ago, as were the steamers that brought trippers from New York. Nowadays ferries run only from May to October, and the little plane can be grounded by lightning striking the airstrip or fog shrouding the Cape. Provincetown is where Route 6 starts, running coast to coast for three and a half thousand miles all the way to Long Beach, California. But it was renumbered in 1964, and now North America’s longest highway seems to peter out in the sand, as if it had given up before it began. It is a long, long drive here from Boston, and the road becomes progressively narrower the further you go, curling back on itself till the sea presses in from all sides, leaving little space for tarmac, houses, or people. No one arrives here accidentally, unless they do. It is not on the way to anywhere else, except to the sea.
The lost people who find their way here discover the comfort of the tides, anchoring endless days which would spin out of control, faced with the wilderness all around. My time is defined by the sea, just as it is at home. But instead of having to cycle to it, I only have to roll off my bed, and stumble down the wooden steps. I sniff the air like a dog, and lower myself off the bulkhead. The eiders coo like camp comedians. The water is the water. I turn on my back, face up to the sky, the monument high on the hill behind me marking the arrival of the Pilgrims who set sail from Southampton for this shore three centuries ago. I swing my body towards it like a compass needle. It’s as though I’d swum all the way here. I count my strokes. The cold soon forces me out. I climb back upstairs to boil water for tea, holding my hands over the glowing electric element to restore the circulation enough to let me write.
On my desk sit the objects that spend my absence stashed away under the eaves like Christmas decorations. A swirly green glass whale I bought from the general store. A nineteen-twenties edition of Moby-Dick, a faded coloured plate stuck on its cover. A slat of driftwood found on the beach, with layers of green and white paint peeling away in waves. A tide table pinned to the wall, although I don’t really need it. My body is tuned to the ebb and flow; I hear it subconsciously in my sleep, and feel it wherever I am in town. Everyone else feels it too, even if they think they don’t. It stirs me from my bed and summons me to the sea, whatever the time of day or night.
I’ve spent many summers here; winters, too. I’ve seen it out of season, when the people fall away with the leaves to reveal its bones: the shingled houses and white lanes lined with crushed clam shells as if they led out of or under the sea. Squeezed on all sides by the sea, houses here are built efficiently, like ships; in a place like this, you don’t waste space or resources. An artist’s studio has drawers built into the risers of the stairs, turning them into one big ascending storage unit. At another cottage, over a glass of gin, I admire a galley kitchen with plates stored on sliding racks. The artist tells me they were designed by the previous owner, Mark Rothko. ‘He made us promise never to change them.’
Provincetown may be a resort to some, but it is at its best at its most austere, when everything is grey and white and hollow, and you can peer over picket fences into other lives; backyards full of buoys or old trucks where a century ago there would have been nets and harpoons. Once this was an industrial site – hunting whales, catching fish. Then it emptied, forgotten by the future which left its people behind, the insular people Melville knew, ‘not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own’.
On warm summer nights, Commercial Street, one of only two thoroughfares that thread through the town, is an open, sensual place; in the winter, when the cold comes inside and won’t leave of its own accord for half the year, the rawness returns it to a dark lane, winding nowhere. In 1943, when the town was further shadowed by the threat of air raids and German landings – as if its held-outness was a kind of sacrifice to the war going on across the ocean – the young Norman Mailer walked down the blacked-out street and back into the eighteenth century, or at least what he felt was ‘a close intimation of what it might have been like to live in New