Our wind often wafts steady from the southwest during summer months, though this year there has been enough fickleness, for those old enough to relate, to hum an old Frankie Sinatra cover ("The Summer Wind").
Getting underway in Provincetown Harbor, helping Captain Dan haul a mainsail, the wind was coming out of the north a little easterly, so not the biggest surprise though still unusual for a fine August afternoon.
This doesn’t diminish the beauty of tacking to Long Point and beyond; Provincetown Harbor is open and big enough to get steady, predictable wind from pretty much every direction. Also protected enough, including manmade help from a 1.25-mile breakwater of thousands of granite boulders lined up in 1911, to keep water fairly flat barring a hard fetch from the southeast — until gales take all bets off.
Given the town’s multi-faceted, often outrageous personality, expressed most flamboyantly last week during carnival, it’s easy to overlook that the harbor is responsible for Provincetown’s existence.
The same can be said for many places — other Cape towns, Boston and Baltimore, Sydney and Hong Kong — but there’s a unique intimacy and immediacy here. Nowhere else does a world-class harbor serve as a literal front porch running the length of town.
Then again, what town also can say its literal back porch is a world-class sand dune?
Commercial Street therefore becomes the communal living room where people tumble out of bedrooms to meet and greet, flop on benches (passing as sofas) to socialize, share a bite adjacent to kitchens, parlors, studies, studios, galleries, dark hallways.
Of course Mayflower Pilgrims had no clue this would evolve. They were looking for refuge within the Cape’s fist and wrist, far from their intended destination Virginia. The harbor provided only momentary relief; half of them were dead before the end of that first winter, the rest fled for Plymouth. This was their fault, not the harbor’s — plus there was only so much food they could steal from Native stashes.
These days the harbor remains the town’s essential infrastructure and asset, whether people know it or not; ask fishermen who land millions of dollars a year of fresh seafood, high-speed ferry boat operators shuttling boats to and from Boston, whalewatchers in the tens of thousands, restaurateurs and realtors who profit from the proximity and view.
But on a quintessential August afternoon sail, what seems more important is the harbor’s inviting character, and not just (or mainly) for people. Dolphins show up, bass and bluefish, mussels and crabs, seals and whales around the corner. A tidal skirt along Long Point’s inner curve is sandy, maybe three feet deep at high, then drops off a sheer shelf into dark deep water, life of great variety enjoying the vital upwelling current, eating and being eaten.
Comparisons are odious, as said in Shakespeare’s time. But still it can be said that as harbors go, few if any rival Provincetown’s. And looking back from the stern, monument rising overhead, MacMillan Wharf mimicking horizontally, this is the only place where the town seems to make coherent and logical sense, splayed out against the shore.
But of course that’s a mirage. So ready to come about, hard a lee.
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