still on land, to understand how graceful and small the town must look, how touchingly inconsequential, to whales as they breach, farther out.
I’m especially fond of walking to the end of MacMillan Wharf late at night, when it’s nearly empty. If you go there then, you will hear the boats creaking against the pilings. You will see the hard white light of the harbormaster’s office. The water will be full of gulls, calmer now that the fish are stored away, white as beacons as they swim along over the dim watery gray of their paddling feet. At the end of the wharf a brilliant blue Pepsi vending machine will shine against the black water and the starry black sky.
FISH
Most of the commercial fishing around Provincetown is done now by enormous corporate-owned boats, with auditorium-sized refrigerators, that can go far out into less-depleted waters and stay there until they’ve caught their limit. There are still tuna out there, in deep water, though they too are largely the quarry of big-money fishermen with expensive gear. A large tuna—they grow to eight feet and can weigh twelve hundred pounds—might bring as much as twenty thousand dollars; in summer several representatives of Japanese companies install themselves at MacMillan Wharf, ready to buy the choicest parts of the best tuna and overnight it to Japan. Every now and then a local hero takes one from a small boat, but it’s a job of Hemingway-esque proportions. A full-grown tuna is likely to be bigger than your boat. Once you’ve hooked it, you have to shoot it in the head, the way they shoot cattle in slaughterhouses, then lash it to the side of your boat and head back for shore. This happens rarely.
For all intents and purposes, only a few fish worth noticing remain close to the shores of Provincetown. There are, as I’ve said, scallops and squid and lobsters. There are flounders and what are known as trash fish—goosefish and dogfish and wolffish. And there are game fish.
The waters around Provincetown are full of bass and bluefish, which you can catch from the beach or a small boat. Blues are the criminals of the ocean. They are, essentially, sets of teeth that swim. When they’re running, in late August and early September, you can stand on the beach and see patches of roiling water, as close as twenty feet out, which occasionally manifest a flash of silver. This is a school of bluefish devouring a school of minnows. Catching blues involves a slightly perverse devotion to battle. Pulling one into your boat is something like being in a small room with an angry pit bull, and if you do win the fight, what you’ve got is a dark-fleshed, oily fish suitable only for grilling or smoking. Grilled bluefish can be a fine thing, but nobody prizes bluefish, no one hungers for it, no restaurant offers it as a signature dish.
Bluefish will eat anything. They will strike at a length of broom handle, painted white, with a hook at its end. James told me he once pulled a blue into his boat and fought so hard with it that one of its eyes was gouged out before the fish struggled back into the ocean, half blind. James, ever practical, used the disembodied eye as bait and almost immediately caught the same fish again, which had struck at its own eye on a hook.
Bass are another matter entirely. Bass are regal and lithe, calm the way athletes are calm, with athletes’ coiled, slumbering ferocity. Almost anyone can hook a bluefish (though not just anyone can land one); to hook bass you have to know what you’re doing. A bass is, essentially, a tunnel with a mouth at one end. They suck their food straight in without swallowing, so that if one takes your bait and you pull too soon, the bait and hook will just pop back out and the bass will swim away, barely traumatized. When a bass strikes, you’ve got to wait until the right moment and jerk the line in just the right way, so your hook buries itself in the fish’s stomach. Then the fight begins.
Bass are present but not plentiful, so the taking of them is strictly regulated. Fishermen are allowed one per day, and it must be at least thirty inches long. No fisherman with any conscience would think of violating those rules. James often hooks a bass that proves to be too small, or he keeps catching them after he’s