Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown - By Michael Cunningham Page 0,15

them wrote that the landscape was full of “shrubbie pines, hurts [huckleberries], and such trash.” That winter, the Mayflower Compact was drawn up. A baby, Peregrine White, was born, and four people—Dorothy Bradford, James Chilton, Jasper Moore, and Edward Thompson—died. The latter three are buried in Provincetown. Dorothy Bradford went overboard and is believed to have committed suicide.

The Mayflower was a cargo ship, not meant for passengers, and so was available for relatively little money. The people we now know as the Pilgrims had first left England for Holland in search of religious freedom but had spent twelve years failing to find work there before deciding, in desperation, to sail to the New World. They were not Puritans; they called themselves “separatists,” and while they were a relatively serious group, they were not as stern as Puritans. They danced and played games. They were not averse to a little color in their dress.

Only about a third of them were separatists. The other two-thirds were people the separatists referred to as “strangers,” men and women who for one reason or another had failed to prosper in England and so came along on the Mayflower hoping to do better for themselves. The Pilgrims needed them to help pay for the boat. The majority of the Founding Fathers and Mothers were, from the very beginning, looking to make a buck. Less than a decade after its founding, the settlement at Plymouth was rife with robbery, alcoholism, and sex in all its unsanctioned forms. In his History of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford, Dorothy’s widower, complained about “incontinency between persons unmarried … but some married persons also. But that which is worse, even sodomy and buggery (things fearful to name) have broke forth in this land oftener than once.”

Provincetown has gone as unmentioned in this particular chapter of the American story as have the habits and proclivities of the Founding Fathers. Every Thanksgiving innumerable American schoolchildren produce paintings, dioramas, and pageants about the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock, but it would be the rare child who has ever heard the name Provincetown. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the town fathers tried to rectify the situation by building an enormous monument to the Pilgrims.

They held a national design competition, but all the submissions were variations on an obelisk, which was considered too much like the Washington Monument. The selectmen decided, for reasons that have not survived, on a replica of the Torre del Mangla in Siena, which stands in the Tuscan square where Dante once walked and where the palio, the chaotic annual horse race, is held. President Teddy Roosevelt laid the cornerstone in 1907, amid much fanfare; the tower was finished in 1910. It has become Provincetown’s identifying symbol, the anchor of the town, though it has not had the desired effect of educating the general public about the Mayflower’s first point of disembarkation on this continent. Few people have made the connection between an Italian bell tower and the Pilgrims’ landing.

The Pilgrim Monument is visible almost everywhere, in town and in the wild. If you look at it from the proper angle—obliquely, from any of its four corners—you can see the head of Donald Duck. The top of the tower is his hat, the arches are his eyes, and the crenelations under the arches are his beak. The Donald Duck head is slightly difficult to see, but once you’ve seen it, you can’t look at the Monument and see anything else.

THE LIVING

Provincetown has been rambunctious, remote, and amenable to outsiders for as long as it has existed. It was originally part of Truro, the next town over, but in 1727 Truro disgustedly drew a line at Beach Point, and the resulting sliver of loose morals and questionable practices was called Provincetown, over the protests of its citizens, who preferred the name Herringtown. Being inexpensive and loose, it has long attracted artists, who continue to compose a larger percentage of the general population than any other city or town I can think of. Eugene O’Neill lived there when he was a young, unknown alcoholic struggling to write plays; Tennessee Williams summered there when he was a world-famous alcoholic struggling to write plays. Milton Avery, Charles Hawthorne, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko have lived there, as have Edmund Wilson, John Reed, John Waters, Denis Johnson, and Divine. Norman Mailer, Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, and Mark Doty live there still.

Among the less well known are Radio Girl, who walked the streets announcing the