RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ rattle, urgent spirits seeking admission. Timbers creak as a ship caught in ice; articulated chimney cowls squeak like weather vanes turning in the wind. The house reverberates as though remembering how it was built, an echo chamber resonant with everything happening outside and everything that ever happened within. It may be inanimate, but it makes me more alive, this big beach hut. How could anyone not feel that way, knowing that out there is the sea, and all land is lost to the horizon?

      The front hits us, head on. The waves, which yesterday lapped the footings of the house, turn over themselves in their remorseless assault on the bulkhead that acts as a buffer between the house and the sea. Town regulations, designed to allow the shifting sand its sway, mean that even the most luxurious decks and dining rooms are temporary arrangements. Pat’s house, now in its sixth decade, was built to be part of rather than apart from the water; in stormy spring tides the sea actually runs right underneath it, disdaining its foundations. By the end of the century all those exclusive properties and ramshackle shacks alike will yield to the waves. ‘The truth is,’ the philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote on one of his visits to the Cape, ‘their houses are floating ones, and their home is on the ocean.’

      Directly in front of the house is a raft tethered by a chain to the sea bed. It’s another stage, a four-foot-square island of performance. In the winter seals lounge on it, their doggy heads and flappy feet held in the air to keep warm. Summer visitors think the raft is built for human swimmers; they soon realise that it’s covered in deposits from its other tenants, the eider ducks that take up winter leases, and for whom it is a safe perch even when it rocks wildly in high seas.

      Pat and I watch a duck and drake circling the float as if sizing it up. The male makes the first move, followed by his partner. They stake out their separate corners, like a couple seeking their own space. Another male appears with his mate; she is allowed on board, he is rebuffed by the first male. It’s a stand-off. There follows a ritual puffing up of chests and fluttering of wings, like a contest on the dance floor. The inevitable compromise is reached, and the newcomers are admitted. Soon, in the niceties of eider choreography, a third couple arrive and the same rite is observed. All their gestures and cooing, which seem quaint to our anthropomorphic eyes – as if they were saying to each newcomer, ‘No room, no room’ – are in fact grim and determined expressions of potential violence and struggle for precedence.

      Eiders are another of this shore’s animal spirits. They preside, like the cormorants and the seals, imbued with their own inscrutability. The raft is their portal: I imagine them diving off it and coming up in a willow-pattern world to reassume their imperial presence, shrugging their lordly wings as they do so. They may be the largest of the ducks, but they’re also the fastest bird in level flight, able to fly at seventy miles an hour against fierce nor’easterlies. They are endlessly interesting to me, seen from my deck or through my binoculars. Their heads slope down to wedge-shaped bills, redolent of Roman noses or a grey seal’s snout. Their black eye patches and pistachio-green napes look like exotic make-up, although Gavin 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 СКАЧАТЬ