Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown Read Online Free PDF Page A

inconvenience; it is not prone to dropping ripe fruit straight from the tree into your outstretched hand. The stones themselves are lovely, for whatever comfort that may offer. They are consistently smooth and oval, shaped by the water—the most symmetrical of them are like Noguchi sculptures. If you are inclined to pick up stones from the beach, I should warn you that many of them, when wet, appear to be fantastic shades of ochre or deep red or dark green, but they lose their color after they dry. I prefer the glossy black ones, which dry to various shades of gray, from yellow-gray to a satisfying milky gray like chalk erased from a blackboard. I keep a bowl of them on my desk.
    The southern part of the beach, in summer, is full of men. You will see almost no one there who is not a man. Men lie on the sand in groups, talking and laughing, listening to music. They promenade, wearing very little, and some of them are beautiful, though the whole notion of strolling lithely and muscularly along the sand, looking to populate strangers’ dreams, is complicated by the stones, which effectively eliminate the possibility of maintaining regal composure for more than a few paces at a time. The whole business of cruising and being cruised at Herring Cove is a slightly 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