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

unlike the paler, more ephemeral irises sold in flower shops it was hard to believe they were the same flower at all. It is possible to stride out into the landscape and return not only with dinner but with flowers for the table as well.
    Fresh local fish is not, however, as abundant in the restaurants of Provincetown as you might expect it to be. A century or more of excess has depleted the surrounding ocean, and much of what can still be coaxed from the water is bedded in ice and shipped elsewhere. There are only two or three raw bars in town, where you can actually procure shellfish forked out of the sand nearby. Fried clams are easier to find, and while a proper clam roll—crisply fried clams with briny, gelatinous bellies served on a grilled hot dog bun—is a marvelous thing, the precise origins and even the pristine freshness of the clams in question are not matters of great concern. Squid and scallops, among the less endangered inhabitants of these waters, are mysteriously hard to find in restaurants in town, and you’re at least as likely to be offered fresh cod in New York or Philadelphia as you are in Provincetown.
    To whatever extent a discernible local cuisine exists, it is Portuguese. The Portuguese food most common in New England runs to soups and stews, whatever can be simmered until its fibrousness or bitterness begins to yield. Kale soup studded with circles of linguiça, a Portuguese sausage, is a staple, as are dark, tomato-based squid stews and salt cod in various forms. Some of the local Portuguese families still dry cod in their yards, either laid out flat on the ground or hung from the limbs of trees. But Portuguese food, too, is increasingly hard to find, at least in part because the restaurants of Provincetown have, for some time now, aspired to a certain pan-American sophistication that tends to involve the same pasta and chicken, the same tuna and salmon and beef, that you can get just about anywhere. Generally speaking, you are best advised while in Provincetown to forget any protracted search for indigenous foods and just eat and drink whatever most appeals to you. You need not seek out the rare or quintessential; no one back home will be disappointed if you’ve failed to taste something famous that’s made in a seaside cavern and aged ten years in kelp, or that’s been retrieved by specially trained ferrets from the upper branches of particular trees, or that secretes a deadly venom unless harvested at the apogee of the full moon. You are free.

P ROOF OF G OLD
You think, living in this town, no one’s at war
because of how we all respect savage flowerings
for instance, or the queer biker who walks a stranger
to the curb because the wind is lit up from some strange
cellar to make us late. We think we belong
where we are better known .
I ride my bike. I ride my bike through speeds
like flavors, unzip the mile-long zipper that cinches
the street and sad bay together .
Fletcher named it the Bay of Take What’s Left .
But I have seen mornings when all the bay could do
was give nothing but proof of gold
waving. Gold, going on without us .
M ICHAEL K LEIN

Acquisitions
    W HEN YOU REACH the middle of town, you will see, if it is not the dead of winter, that there is a lot for sale. Like any tourist town, Provincetown needs you to buy things, many things, so it can live. The human impulse to shop is, of course, eternal and universal, one of our identifying characteristics as a species, and I confess to a queasy but ardent devotion to the search for magical objects among the gross output of the civilized world. I’ve never entirely shed my sense of shame about material-ism—if I were a true and poetic spirit, if I were the hero of the story I’d most like to tell about myself, wouldn’t I go to art museums with no thought of the gift shop?—but have long abandoned hope of transcending my own urge to search out and acquire. It’s hard to know what to do or say about this endless