Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown (Crown Journeys) by Michael Cunningham

By Michael Cunningham

During this party of 1 of America's oldest cities (incorporated in 1720), Michael Cunningham, writer of the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hours, brings us Provincetown, some of the most idiosyncratic and outstanding cities within the usa, perched at the sandy tip on the finish of Cape Cod.Provincetown, eccentric, bodily distant, and heartbreakingly appealing, has been amenable and interesting to outsiders for so long as it has existed. "It is the one small city i do know of the place those that dwell unconventionally appear to outnumber those that dwell in the prescribed bounds of domestic and certified marriage, good activity, and organic children," says Cunningham. "It is likely one of the locations on the planet you could disappear into. it's the Morocco of North the United States, the hot Orleans of the north."He first got here to where greater than two decades in the past, falling in love with the haunted fantastic thing about its seascape and the rambunctious allure of its denizens. even supposing Provincetown is essentially referred to as a summer time mecca of attractive shores, quirky retailers, and wild nightlife, in addition to a favored vacation spot for homosexual males and lesbians, it's also a spot of deep and enduring historical past, creative and differently. Few cities have attracted such a powerful array of artists and writers—from Tennessee Williams to Eugene O'Neill, Mark Rothko to Robert Motherwell—who, like Cunningham, have been interested in this finger of land since it was once . . . varied, nonjudgmental, the suitable position to flee to; to be rescued, healed, reborn, or just to stay in peace. As we keep on with Cunningham on his a variety of tours via Provincetown and its surrounding panorama, we're drawn into its heritage, its mysteries, its peculiarities—places you will not examine in any traditional go back and forth advisor.

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Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown (Crown Journeys)

During this social gathering of 1 of America's oldest cities (incorporated in 1720), Michael Cunningham, writer of the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hours, brings us Provincetown, the most idiosyncratic and notable cities within the usa, perched at the sandy tip on the finish of Cape Cod.

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Early settlers felled the trees for fuel and lumber, and replanted the landscape with pitch pine and scrub oak. With the big trees gone, a sand-sea began working its methodical way in from the beaches, and what you are seeing in this sedate landscape is actually an ongoing process of erosion. The best way to go through the dunes is on a bicycle, which you can rent from one of four places in town. A single snake of trail, not conspicuously marked, starts from the far end of the parking lot at Herring Cove and winds through the dunes.

Here are women whose breasts are mere pale rises of flesh, more modest by far than the pectorals of most of the men lounging and romping just up the beach, with pert and defiant cantaloupe-colored nipples the size of fingertips. Here are women with majestic moons, tropically pink, marbled by traceries of blue-green veins, topped with low-lying, elliptical aureoles of creamy brown. The women in the women’s section are more likely than the men to be throwing balls or Frisbees at the water’s edge.

Martha’s Vineyard, not fifty miles to the south and west, had lived through the upsurge of mountains and their erosion, through the rise and fall of oceans, the life and death of great forests and swamps. Dinosaurs had passed over Martha’s Vineyard, and their bones were compacted into the bedrock. Glaciers had come and gone, sucking the island to the north, pushing it like a ferry to the south again. Martha’s Vineyard had fossil deposits one million centuries old. The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the land I inhabited—that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curves in upon itself in a spiral at the tip of the Cape—had only been formed by wind and sea over the last ten thousand years.

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