Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown - By Michael Cunningham Page 0,13

so adored that they returned adoration automatically, as a matter of course, because they had known nothing else.

Less than an hour later the little extended family prepared to leave. We watched, surreptitiously, as Uncle Donald woke the child, set him on his feet again, stroked his hair. We watched then as Donald put on baggy chinos and a polo shirt, as he plopped a dramatically unflattering canvas hat on his head. Standing, in clothes, he slouched. They departed, with the child scampering and cavorting around the object of his affections, who had by then transformed himself into a citizen in poly-blends; a regular guy, unenchanted, with ordinary features (we saw, once he was dressed, that he in fact had a pleasant but unremarkable face, with too much chin for its modest nose and too much forehead for its close-set eyes); someone you wouldn’t glance at twice on the street. He went off (I imagine) to join the multitude of others cruising the streets or nursing beers in the semidark at the edges of dance floors; off to hope and wish and wonder; to admire the flashier guys dancing shirtless or laughing heedlessly with their packs of friends; to try his luck along with everybody else who was out there, the whole wistful, unruly crew, looking for love in all the wrong places.

THE BEECH FOREST

If you go straight on the dune trail and skip Race Point, you will eventually reach the beech forest. There is a clear point of demarcation between the sand and the woods it has partially engulfed. First you will see what appear to be outcroppings of bare twigs protruding from the sand—these are the tops of dead trees. Several yards farther on you will see dead trees mired to their lower branches in sand, and then trees that are covered only halfway up their trunks, still alive but beginning to die. Then you will be among the living trees. The sand-glacier in the beech forest has been more or less halted by conservationists, but the dunes north of the forest remain in motion. On old maps you can locate buried forests, and walk across pristine dunes with deceased forests inside them.

The beech forest in summer is shady and slightly dank; it is full of a greened, deepened light. The smell changes from dusty pine to a fermented odor of pine tar, decomposing leaves, and an indefinable, organic rankness that resembles, at its most potent, the smell of a wet dog. You will pass a shallow pond that freezes over in winter and that wears, in summer, a skin of pale green lily pads with trumpet-shaped flowers—yellow at the edges of the pond, white in the slightly deeper water toward the middle. You can stay on the narrow asphalt bike trail, or you can leave your bike and wander into the woods along any of the sandy paths that meander off among the trees. If you do that, you’ll quickly find yourself walking among tupelo and inkberry, white oaks and red maples, as well as the eponymous beech trees, all of which form surprisingly orderly hallways and small, roomlike clearings, with lush carpets of fallen leaves and canopies of branches thick enough to shelter you in a rainstorm. It would not be entirely surprising to find chairs and lamps out there, and a table set for tea. People sometimes get married in these clearings, and local children go there for all the childish purposes that require concealment. The trunks of the trees are covered with carvings: initials and obscenities; various assertions that so-and-so was here, in 1990 or 1975 or 1969; declarations of eternal love to vanished objects named Jim, Carol, Drew, Calla, Tom, Ken, and Lindy, among others. The old ones, from the fifties and sixties, have all but faded into the bark—they look like name-shaped scars manifested by the trees themselves. The newer ones are various shades of gray, depending on their age. Only the very recent names are raw and white, though they too, of course, will fade.

SNAIL ROAD

The last wild place on land I want to tell you about is the dune at the end of Snail Road. Snail Road is actually a dirt path, though wide enough to accommodate a car, and you can in fact park your car there if you need to. It is on the East End of town, on the far side of the highway. The path is arcaded by the branches of trees. At its far end stands