comic one, very different from, say, the broad sandy highway of a beach at Fire Island, where ambitious objects of desire can saunter from east to west and back again as imperturbably as floats in a military parade.
If you walk along the beach to your left, you’ll get, eventually, to the Wood End lighthouse and, ultimately, out to Long Point. If you walk to your right, you’ll reach the beach’s official entrance, where the parking lot is. Close to the entrance is the women’s section.
The transformation is fairly abrupt. For some time you will have walked among men lying on towels (with a few of the braver specimens splashing around in the chilly water); then you will pass through a short intermediate strip of men mixed with women; and then the beach will be full, almost exclusively, of women.
It is considered a truism in Provincetown that gay men go to the beach with Speedos and a towel, while lesbians take as much as they can carry. One resists generalities (and is attracted to generalities), but it is undeniable that here, in the women’s section, you are much more likely to see folding beach chairs, umbrellas, coolers, inflatable rafts, rubber sandals for walking over the stones, and other appurtenances. The women arrayed on the sand here are, to roughly equal extents, domestic and Amazonian. As a man walking through their sector, I always feel that I’m in a foreign country—a Sapphic society every bit as strange and fabulous, and just as particular unto itself, as the tribes of satyrs roaming the watery paths in the dunes. Bare breasts are more the norm than the exception here, and for some of us it is a unique opportunity to understand that the female breast is among the more profoundly variable of human wonders. Here are women with breasts firm as pears. 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. They are more likely to be swimming with dogs. They are far more likely to have children, who are entirely absent in the men’s section. The women’s part of the beach is a welter of children, of all races, and there are more of them every year.
If you continue on, you will pass an unfortunate asphalt embankment—atop it is a snack bar, bathrooms, and showers. Farther still you will find yourself on a long stretch of beach dominated by straight families who have parked their campers or trailers and more or less settled in. Some of the campers and trailers have awnings, where grandparents sit in the shade admiring the view or reading or tending to barbecue grills. Men and women fish from the beach and often wait for a strike sitting on aluminum lawn chairs. Kids run all over the place. The people on this part of the beach are noisier, less sexual, more communal. The gay and lesbian sections are, to a certain extent, feudal—each encampment of friends and lovers and children and pets tends to regard only itself, to speak only to acquaintances as they pass, and to observe strangers either surreptitiously or not at all. While I’m certain that these straight families don’t know each other and probably don’t mingle, they require so much more space, with their campers and barbecues and fishing gear, their three or four generations, that turf lines are impossible to maintain. Compared with the gay men and lesbians up the beach, they are differently yoked into their lives. They are ostentatiously available to their spouses and parents and children, and so, to an outsider anyway, they seem more like a village, with all that villages imply about common purpose. It seems—though I don’t imagine this is literally true—that one mother will casually pluck another woman’s child from the surf, and that one grandfather will offhandedly flip the burgers of another man’s son as the two middle-aged boys in question reel in a bluefish.
Farther down the beach is Hatches Harbor, one of the lesser-known wonders of Provincetown.
HATCHES HARBOR
Although I am agnostic on the subjects of magic, earth spirits, and conscious