and I were having dinner with friends when our host’s Scottie was sprayed by a skunk. Since the dog’s owner was too drunk and stoned at the time to do much beyond register his dismay, Kenny and I took care of it as best we could. We had heard tomato juice was the only remedy, and so we rounded up all the tomato juice we could get from the neighbors, though we had to fall back on ketchup, tomato puree, and tomato soup, since actual tomato juice was not available in the required amounts. We put the dog in a tin basin and poured all the tomato products over her. It worked, more or less, but I can tell you that a skunk’s spray, close up, has a quality entirely different from those zones of reek you may have passed through on highways. It is worse than foul. It is the smell of annihilation. It has no parallel I can think of. It isn’t rot, it isn’t sulphur or ammonia; it is just indescribably bad, in a category of its own. You taste it when you breathe. You feel it infiltrating your nose and lungs. It was, in its way, a remarkable experience, though I wouldn’t care to repeat it. It was a reminder, the most potent one imaginable, that nature is very good at what it does; that that which survives is so clearly meant to do so.
If skunks and cats are the petite bourgeoisie of Provincetown, its most stolid and crankily respectable nonhuman citizens, other animals live there at a more ephemeral but insistent remove. On the remoter edges you may see a fox every now and then, bright russet, usually standing so still (it will have heard you coming as if you were a freight train) that you may not be sure, at first, that it’s a living thing at all—it is the very embodiment of the word attention. I have seen deer out in the dunes and, once, a doe and fawn browsing among the grass in the cemetery.
A hardy population of racoons and opossums and the occasional coyote moves more furtively than the skunks but with similar determination among the scraps and leftovers of late-night Provincetown. Late one night last summer, when my friend James and I had gone to retrieve our bicycles from where we’d left them, on the lawn in front of the Universalist church, an opossum came out of the bushes and stood directly in front of me. It was young, not by any means a baby but far from fully grown; it was an adolescent. It stood less than two feet before me, looking at me with an expression neither friendly nor fearful. It seemed merely curious. It was pale gray, almost white, with a shovel-shaped head, a nose the color of a pencil eraser, and eyes that were perfect black beads. We made eye contact. This has never happened to me with a wild animal. Automatically, without thinking, I reached over and touched it, gently, on the top of its head. I wasn’t petting it. I was trying to acknowledge it, to be polite, the way you might try to communicate not just your friendliness but your beingness to an extraterrestrial. It was foolish; I did it without thinking. The opossum’s pelt was rough but not unpleasantly so, like the bristles of a paintbrush. It didn’t bite me, but it did not like being touched; touching it had clearly not been the correct gesture. Still, it did not bolt away in terror. It simply slipped back into the bushes, and I went on to catch up with James.
The West End
ALTHOUGH IT IS now a semiorderly concentration of shops and houses, Provincetown was once so thoroughly devoted to the sea and what it yields as to seem as much a manifestation of the water as a human settlement. During its first hundred years, until the early 1800s, it was not really divided up into streets per se; it was simply a gathering of houses and shops, built on whatever patch of sand their builders selected. Gutted cod for salt cod, one of Provincetown’s most profitable early exports, lay drying on the sand before most of the houses, and cod hung drying from the trees as well. By way of ornamentation, most of the houses offered whale ribs and vertebrae in the stretches of sand where their gardens would have been.
Soil came to Provincetown by way of ships that sailed there from