The Water

IF YOU GO to Provincetown and spend all your time there on land, you cannot properly claim to have seen the place, any more than you could claim to have seen New Mexico if you went to Santa Fe and didn’t stray beyond the city limits. In Provincetown it is possible to imagine the Atlantic as a backdrop, there to provide shimmer and wind as a foil for all this commerce. Once you are a half-mile or less from shore, however, you understand that Provincetown and everything in it is actually a minor, if obstreperous and brightly lit, interruption in the ocean’s immense, inscrutable life.

MACMILLAN WHARF

In the exact middle of town is the entrance to MacMillan Wharf. This is where train tracks once ran right out onto the end of the wharf; where trains arrived empty and left loaded with whale oil, whalebone, and baleen. It is one of the half-dozen surviving wharves—there were once about sixty—and it still functions as it was meant to, though it’s nothing like what it was in its prime. Fishing boats still dock there, and some of what the fishermen are able to pull from the depleted waters is processed on the wharf.

The wharf is immense, by local standards. Underneath, amid the brown trunks of its pilings, which are covered with mussels and scraps of seaweed, it nurtures a swatch of permanent shade. On top it is, essentially, a wide asphalt road that extends well out into the water. Cars and trucks come and go at all hours. The wharf smells of fish, as you would expect it to, but its fish smell is layered. The fresh and briny covers something fetid, not just dead fish but old oil and machinery that has been overheated again and again and again. From the side of the wharf, you can see fish swimming in water that is the color of deep, cloudy jade—just minnows usually, though you might see a bass or a bluefish dart by. The Hindu docks there, an eighty-year-old schooner that takes tourists on two-hour sails. The whale-watching boats dock there, too.

Fishing is among the most dangerous of professions—the mortality rate among fishermen is almost ten times that among firefighters and policemen. This may account for the somber aspect that attaches to MacMillan Wharf, for all its tourist enticements. The wharf is subtly but discernibly haunted, a midway zone between the gaudy comforts of town and the shimmering immensity beyond. At the far end is a small village of trailers for processing fish, the harbormaster’s bungalow, and the Pirate Ship Whydah Museum, devoted to the treasure-laden ship of Captain Kidd, which sank in the waters off Wellfleet. All around them are the masts and lines of the small, privately owned fishing boats, the names of which tend to be either affectionate or wistful: the Chico Jess, the Joan Tom, the Second Effort, and the Blue Skies.

The fishing boats, when you see them up close from the wharf, are battered and faded, thoroughly marked by their rough use. Scallop boats go out for weeks at a time, in all weathers. Their decks are usually littered with plastic buckets, cork floats, and disorderly piles of rope and net, most of which have aged to a smoky chestnut color. It’s clear that the ocean and its weather turn that which was once white to gray or yellow, that which was once bright to chalk, and that which was once dark to brownish-black. What there is of color usually resides in a fisherman’s pair of new orange waders, or a shroud of new fishnet, white or green, that has not yet begun to blacken.

Walk out to the end of the wharf. Scavenging gulls will be making their usual racket. Men who have been darkened by the ocean will be working on the boats or standing in small groups, talking and drinking coffee from paper cups. From the end of the wharf you can get a closer look at the breakwater where the foghorn blows at night; you can see that all along its top it is a pearly, variegated white from seagull shit, which in that quantity is slightly phosphorescent. You can look farther out to Long Point, past the pleasure boats anchored in the bay. You can look back and see the long parabolic curve of the town and the ocean. It is the best way, while 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 caught his limit, just for the love of it, though he always throws those fish back. Once the fish is in the boat, however, before throwing it back, he does something he tells me is customary among people who love to fish. He kisses it.

WHALES

A hundred and fifty years ago the waters around Provincetown were so full of whales, it was possible to harpoon them from shore. The front yards of most houses sported, as lawn ornaments, whale jaws and whale ribs, often bedecked with morning glories. If a pod of whales ventured close to shore, whalers jumped into their boats and herded them onto the beach. Shebnah Rich wrote of one such melee in his book, History of Truro:

The surviving whales now live, largely unmolested, some distance out to sea. We who once killed them as recklessly and rampantly as pioneers killed off the buffalo of the prairies can pay to get on boats that will take us out to see them.

For years I resisted going out on the whale-watching boats. It felt unseemly, even grotesque, an intrusion on the privacy of creatures who ought better to be left alone. I could not imagine standing on the deck of a whale-watching boat without feeling like someone Diane Arbus would have been all too glad to photograph.

I was wrong. The whale-watching excursions are miraculous, and I urge anyone who feels reluctant for any reason to simply get on a boat and go. While I’ve tried to shy away from promoting any one local enterprise over another except when it seems absolutely necessary, I should tell you that the Dolphin fleet is the one operated by the Center for Coastal Studies, which uses the profits to fund its ongoing study of the migratory and other habits of whales.

The trip takes about four hours, and much of that time involves churning your way across empty water to get to the places where the whales feed. Whales are migratory—they winter to the south and come north in summer. You are most likely to see humpbacks, which are barnacle-bearded creatures, snouted, with broad black-gray backs and pale gray bellies. Their mouths (like most whales, they eat plankton) are gigantic hinges set high in their heads, and their eyes, surprisingly small, are set far back and low, close to their mouths. You may also see pilot whales or schools of dolphin. I should warn you that from day to day and summer to summer the whales are capricious in their choices of feeding grounds. They are always out there, but some summers they are too far away for the boats to get to where they are and back within four hours, and some days they seem simply to have decided to be in a place where the boats are not. Whale watches are gambles. You might see no more than a distant breaching or two; you might return having witnessed nothing beyond a distant almond shape, expelling a miniature spray of water. I have been on a fruitless trip during which, after hours of sailing around and seeing nothing, a middle-aged woman stood at the prow of the boat, wearing a pantsuit and holding a straw clutch decorated with straw strawberries, and said, “Ooh, come on, you finky whales.” The leviathans did not respond.

On a good day, however, you will see them come to within feet of the boat, and it is one of the more remarkable things that can happen to a human being. The whales don’t seem to mind the boats—if anything, they seem mildly curious about them, the way a land-living creature might wonder about a rock or a tree it could swear hadn’t been there yesterday. They are docile but not in any way bovine. They are, of course, immense, though you don’t comprehend that fully until you’ve seen one up close. They are benign, enormously powerful, and unconcerned with us. They are, at close range, utterly fleshly. Their slick backs are scarred and notched; the flesh of their underbellies is scored with pliant-looking ridges you could sink your whole hand into. Their heads and bodies are sometimes freckled and dappled like an Appaloosa’s hindquarters. Being mammals, they are not entirely hairless. Their eyes have short, bristly lashes. They snort and sigh and exhale; they expel jets of water through their blowholes, which form spangles of iridescent mist over their backs. They smell powerfully of fish and of themselves, a smell like that of fish but oilier, deeper, so potently rank, you suspect it may linger in your clothes and hair.

If you’re very fortunate, you may see a whale jump straight up from the water, three-quarters of its length, and crash down again. A whale when it jumps is, momentarily, aloft, suspended: all that tonnage, all that blubber, though the word blubber is hard to apply to such sleek and muscular beings. If you see one jump, you will understand how perfectly built they are (you who were never really meant to walk upright), how much like living torpedoes. There is nothing about them that does not speak directly to their ability to swim. Their flukes are enormous, gracefully curved, broad and flat, covered with barnacles. Their mouths, meant to scoop up vast quantities of plankton, constitute almost a third of their bodies; their heads in profile are wedges that terminate in the broad hard-rubber rims of their mouths, which meet in an overlap, like the lid of a box.

The whales don’t jump often, at least not for the benefit of whale-watching boats. They are more prone to breaching, their heads underwater, showing their scarred, glistening backs as they take in oxygen through their blowholes. After a minute or two they dive again. Their backs disappear underwater, and a moment later, as they angle themselves to dive, they flip their two-pronged black tails up from amid the chaos of churn and foam they’ve created.

I once stood at the rail and watched a humpback swim under the boat, no more than twenty feet down, so we could see its whole body, so we could fully understand how buoyant it was and begin to understand that it truly occupied the water. The whale was deep green in the green-blue water, shadowy as an X-ray, netted with pallid light. The sight was stirring and somewhat frightening, not because the whale could or would damage the boat but because it was revealed, briefly, in its realm, the vastness that lay under us, with its schools of darting fish; its granular, sun-filtered green that would deepen by slow degrees to jade, lusterless emerald, and then pure black; its submerged cliffs and plains and valleys where, among the fissures, darker fish swam over a bare, porous landscape of rock without needing to see; where pinpoints of luminescence drifted and anemones waved their translucent petals.