Free Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown by Michael Cunningham Page A

name, in North Truro.
    Elton John is trying to buy a house in Provincetown but can’t find one he likes.
    Provincetown is one of the designated areas for the federal Witness Protection Program, and many of its innocous-seeming citizens (to whatever extent anyone in Provincetown can be called innocuous) have informed on members of crime syndicates and been resettled in Provincetown with new identities.
    Jackie Onassis once showed up at the A-House with Gore Vidal and a phalanx of bodyguards.
    It should also be noted that there is always a celebrity who has been seen with absolute certainty somewhere in town. These sightings have ranged, over the years, from Kevin Spacey to Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn (with and without Kurt Russell), and, perennially, Barbra Streisand. The only celebrity I have ever seen there is Gene Rayburn, former host of The Match Game , gliding down Commercial Street on Rollerblades.
    Conversation in general, which includes but is not limited to gossip, is both valued and widely practiced in Provincetown. Its citizens are a loquacious people, fond of stories of all kinds. It is common for a Provincetownian driving along Commercial Street to see a friend passing on foot or on a bicycle and stop to talk to that person at medium length. If you are in a car behind one of these impromptu klatsches, please do not honk your horn, unless the conversation goes on for a truly unconscionable period or you have mistakenly taken poison and are on your way to procure the antidote. It is impolite. Provincetown is an ecosystem, and these street sessions are among its inhabitants’ innate characteristics. Displays of impatience or aggressiveness are not considered the badges of personal importance they are in some other places. Anyone in a great hurry is generally perceived not as a mover and shaker but simply as an intruder from a noisier, less interesting world and is likely to be ignored.

Eating and Drinking
    P ROVINCETOWN IS, OF course, part of New England, a region of hard-knobbed hills and low mountains rising up from a cold ocean amenable only to crustaceans, squid, and some of the hardier, less glamorous finned fish: cods and blues, flounder and bass; fish that tend toward practical shapes, the torpedo or the platter; fish with powerful jaws and blunt, businesslike heads and sleek strong bodies of gunmetal, pewter, or muddy brown. The soil around there produces almost nothing delicate—no fragile or thin-skinned fruits, no tentative greens that would expire in a cold snap, hardly anything that can reasonably be eaten raw. Cranberries and pumpkins do well; bivalves flourish in the chill waters. It is most agreeable to that which has developed thick rinds or shells. If New England has been, from its inception, home to preternaturally determined human settlers, to those who equate hardship with virtue, its Puritan and Calvinist roots are apparent in its diet, which runs not only, of necessity, to that which must have the toughness boiled out of it before it can be served but which tends to eschew, by choice, any spices more flamboyant than salt and pepper. When a friend of mine moved from New Orleans to Boston, she said one night in exasperation, after another bland and sensible meal, “You notice they didn’t call it New France . You notice they didn’t call it New Italy”
    Fresh fish is Provincetown’s most prominent glory, and most fabulous among its fish, to me, are the clams and oysters that come from the tidal flats of Wellfleet, two towns away. A Wellfleet oyster, especially in the colder months, is supernal: firm and immaculately saline, a little mouthful of the Atlantic itself. One autumn several years ago when I was staying for a few days with a friend, she came home in the afternoon with a bucket each of clams and oysters she had dug from the flats in Wellfleet, bearded with bright brown seaweed, and a huge bouquet of wild irises, dark as bruises, with tight, cogent little blossoms so