Laura14

At eighteen I decided I was emancipated.

And ready for love.

Although I did not find love right away, I did a lot of looking for it, and did find some approximations. I will share just one of them here.

I located him near the end of a summer stint at art school in Provincetown, a small hamlet populated by tenth generation Portuguese fishing families some of whom still fish while the rest ply the tourist trade in a variety of forms.

Every summer Provincetown swells like a tick to ten times its normal size. Most of the summer people depart after Labor Day to resume their normal city lives. While on the Cape, they act like bohemians and generally bum around. There’s a good deal of drinking and drug taking and lots of partying. There is also sex. Although my summer experience was pretty dry in all departments since I don’t drink at all and had not yet, in that summer of 1963, been introduced to any drugs or to the sex act itself. I was aware of it. I just hadn’t found the right partner to try it out with. Not for lack of offers.

Provincetown was the site of the first Pilgrim landing. Before they hit Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims stopped off in what is now known as P-Town, which is situated at the end of the hook that Cape Cod makes as it reaches out to sea and curls back in on itself. At the very tip of town there is a long stone jetty that creates a protected harbor for the town and serves as a breakwater against the Atlantic Ocean waves that can be pretty brutal in a nor’easter. But not in summer. Then the jetty is a wonderful place to walk on a moonlit night.

The jetty sits high above the water, its huge flat rocks making a perfect roadway to nowhere, like something the builders of Atlantis might have left behind. Not like that one that runs for miles under water in the Bahamas smack in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. I’m sure that’s not Atlantis. It’s probably some old rum-running road that sank because its builders were so sloshed they didn’t support it correctly. Still it is a mystery the way those rocks under water are so symmetrical and stretch in such a straight line from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere. See, I think they once connected an entire atoll that has since disappeared. But where? Ah, there’s the real mystery. I’ll bet there are islands under water at various points along that road. I’ll bet they just got washed flat by the waves.

Cape Cod is like a barrier island even though it is really a peninsula. It gets battered around by the wind and water. Its dunes, miles and miles of them, shift continually. That’s what these seashores are supposed to do. We think of them as fixed. So we build houses and hotels and casinos and golf courses on them. Then a big storm comes and gouges out some great chunks and the ninth tee sinks like a sandbag and people wonder what happened to their investment. And then the government comes in and pays them to rebuild it. Now, you know that ninth tee is going to get hit again someday because that’s what sand does. It shifts. Ocracoke Island, the last inhabited island at the southern end of the Outer Banks of North Carolina doesn’t even remotely resemble the way the island looked on a map of one hundred years ago. Portsmouth Island, which is the next one south of Ocracoke, used to be inhabited but no one lives there now. In fact, one hundred and fifty years ago Portsmouth was the big island where most of the people lived and where all the big boats came into port. Then the island sands shifted and the channel between Portsmouth and Ocracoke closed up and the port just up and disappeared into the shifting sands. So that under water road in the Bermuda Triangle must have been heading somewhere but the shifting sands just shifted that somewhere to somewhere else. At least that’s my theory.