by Mark Doty
It was a disappointment to me to realize, in a while, that the camp was my passion, not Wally’s. Perhaps it was simply that it had seemed to represent, on those first sightings and during those first adventures of occupancy, another life, another set of possibilities—and once we had made it ours, the fact was that the old life continued. Part of the romance of the little house was the promise of safety, of tranquillity, of rest—and somehow it didn’t feel that way for Wally. He said he was bothered by the rednecks down the road, the kids who’d drive by too fast and leave a beer bottle tossed into the woods; I think he’d imagined the camp as an escape from the working-class Vermont neighborhood we lived in, but the cultures of Vermont were, inevitably, out here in the woods, too. The root of Wally’s disaffection, I imagine, was that he had other work to do. Because the diagnosis wasn’t mine, I could stand back further, practice the art of avoidance more successfully—though my passion for the place seems now a mixed gesture, both of avoidance and of reaching toward the future, of escape and of hope. I was playing, in some deeply serious way, with images of home, of inhabitation, of safety, of time. And though Wally would play with me at householding, at fixing up the place, occupying it together, his attention was, finally, elsewhere.
There was one superb summer night though, the tenth of August, the most memorable birthday of my life, my thirty-sixth. Four friends came to dinner; Wally had found antique Japanese paper lanterns at a yard sale, beautiful watery faded colors, and he hung them in the trees around the porch, with a lit candle in each one, so that they glowed and flickered romantically and dangerously. We played a stack of records on the windup phonograph—“In the Gloaming Oh My Darling,” “Indian Love Call,” bits of Verdi—and drank whiskey and a bottle of sixty-five-year-old port I’d found and saved for an occasion. Its complicated savor of plums and smoke and years made all those terms for the flavors of wines suddenly make sense: woody, fruity, resinous, deep, blooming, subtle, one flavor floating above the next like layers of silk. And it was an occasion: I was drunk, radiant, in good friendship, in love with my husband and my little house and my black prince of a puppy just now arriving at an adolescent maturity, calmly watching us eat. My friend Kathryn, who that night brought me a gift of a shrub, a forsythia to bring the cabin a flourish of gold in spring, wrote a little story about that night to read, years later, at Wally’s memorial:
We drive down a long road through the woods. It’s summer; we want it to last forever, cool cupping the day’s heat, pine trees, sun and moon together in the sky. We want it to last forever because we’re foolish and we think it can’t.
There’s a little house tucked into the edge of the woods. The door opens and we smell yeast, herbs, wet dog fur, the sweet smell of friends. The sun and moon are both big, one going down, the other rising higher and higher. In the trees around the house, Japanese lanterns, the real kind, lit with candles. Nothing in your life before has prepared you for such happiness. Nothing can shield you from this happiness, which is why no one before has ever dared to give it to you. There is also a faint bad smell in the house of rack and ruin, the legacy of the former owners. Wally wrinkles his nose. His nose and the wrinkling of it and the faint bad smell and the smell of Arden’s wet fur and the smell of Mark’s basil and sausage-stuffed bread and the smell of the pines and the smell of Lois’s cigarette smoke and the smell of the candle wax and all of a sudden we can see the scantily clad body of the woman who used to wander out into the gorse behind the house fifty years ago to excite the loggers, their faces pressed against the windows of the little train taking them back to camp. Chiffon and feathers, can’t you just see it, Wally says. His delighted eyes and the lights of the train and the Japanese lanterns and the match flaring and Mark’s bright smile and even though it would be so easy to judge the woman or revile the world for sending lust-driven men into her back yard while she dances there in her feathers and chiffon while her house goes to rack and ruin, even through we might pass judgement, being a forward-thinking group composed of a lesbian couple, a gay couple and a heterosexual couple, we don’t.
We are here in this house. We are here and the woman is alive and Mark and Wally have made this happen because they are what makes life happen, yeast and chiffon and the bread in your mouth and the train whistle now.
You cannot leave us. Sun and moon in the sky. I don’t even know which is which.
Only the weight of grief, which is equal in measure to happiness. We drank port and the world grew dark. It isn’t as if we weren’t prepared. We are always in that house and here. It isn’t as if you didn’t prepare us, just that we want to revile the world. The lanterns shining in the trees, Arden snoring on the floor, Mark’s arm over your shoulders, can’t you just see it?
That autumn and winter the camp was my dream, something out of Chekhov. Arden and I would go at least once a week, even in the deepest snow, and build a fire in the stove in the unbelievably icy uninsulated main room, and walk in the snow, and study the marsh and the mountain. On warmer days we’d stay and I’d write letters, or read in the field guides to trees and fungi I’d bought. One winter day there was a sudden, enormous crash; ice falling from the roof? Too loud, too shockingly reverberant through the woods. A fallen tree? After Arden came out from his hiding place, the shelter of the wicker sofa, we walked down the road toward the marsh, our breath steaming in locomotive clouds. The barn had fallen, all at once, into a huge pick-up-sticks heap of gray boards and beams. The bull stood up the hill from it, entirely unruffled, chewing on a mouthful of straw.
Hunters shot the deer on our weather vane, so slap-happy for blood that a metal deer would do. Someone—a camper? one of the people who lived in those tiny blue trailers down the mountain road?—stole half our woodpile. How much I wanted to protect that little house—perhaps not so much from these superficial sorts of insults as on some deeper level. There was—how to say it—a particular kind of presence about the place, an atmosphere of particular density. It had about it the distilled resonance of home, yes, but also an otherness, a spirited presence, as if it were so fully inhabited by its history that we were simply another part of the continuous dream-life of the house, two more of its passing occupants. One lived in the camp on its terms; it imposed its personality upon you, and even your clothes would come to smell of its aura of gone summers, old oil lamps, whiskey, and mice. There is a space in my memory which the camp occupies which finally has not to do with the building itself, or my own experiences there, but with its spirits, which became mine during that year of ownership; possessed by them, I’m bound to that dreaming house always. It was a model of a refuge. But it was an isolated one, so it could not hold, could not sustain us. The community it offered was with the lonely and perfect woods, and with the past, with childhood and with ghosts.
By spring I was doing painting and repairs on my days off from teaching, and though I said I was doing them for us, doing things I wanted to do, I knew on some level I was fixing up the camp in order to let it go; I couldn’t know what sort of change was coming, but so much that had mattered before (my teaching, our houses) now seemed temporary, ephemeral; we were about to be moved along, in the course and current of things. Change was gathering speed, establishing direction.
Refuge (2)
Provincetown, 1990. The universe, God, the essence of benevolence gives us the unmatchable autumn of our lives: brilliant days brimming with warm October light that seem never to end. Our little rented cottage on the edge of what Melville called “the great unbounded” feels itself boundless; our attention’s turned outward from the tiny bayside rooms to the huge horizontals around us, an expanse of harbor and horizon wide as the world. We swim in the bay late into October, and walk the huge pewtery gleam of the tideflats barefoot into November. It seems a long time since either of us has felt this free or this happy. Illness seems far away, living easy. How did we get here?
It seemed effortless, or at least as if our efforts were richly, invisibly assisted; everything conspired
to bring us to a brighter, less freighted life. Lynda and David, spending a sabbatical year on the Cape, invited us down for a visit, in February, the off-est of the off-season, a time of the year I’d never seen Provincetown. Weary of the deep snow of Vermont, as well as its icy emotional weather, we found ourselves smitten with the coastal clutter of boarded shops and clapboard houses along the curve of the bay. Our friends had rented a big old drafty place across the street from the water, a former rooming house stocked with more beds than you could count. When it began to snow and snow, keeping us in town another day, we couldn’t have been happier. We ate kale soup just behind the steamed windows of one of the two open cafés. Our angelic waiter (a painter I still know, who’d later come to be a friend) welcomed us, a sort of everyday angel whose task it seemed to bless our meal, our visit, our days in a place that offered a sense of respite. After our dark northern days of adjustment and strength-seeking, this town was like balm.
And so a process of realignment began, so subtle that we almost didn’t know it was happening. One day one of us suggested a trip back to Provincetown for spring break, and April found us in a rambling waterfront apartment in the West End. It was a week of brash new sun, crocus unfurling while the whole town emerged to wash windows, sweep walks, and take in the new light. As we did, walking with Lynda at the cranberry bog on the North Pamet Road, way up into the high, heathered dunes over the beach near Head of the Meadow. I remember one day especially, taking Arden to the beach at Race Point, and curling up together with a thermos of coffee in the shoulder of a dune, ignoring the books and paper we’d brought, dreaming there in that early sun which the skin receives with such gratitude that it seems better than all the rays of summer. The social climate of the town—its ready acceptance of us as a couple, its affirmation of our ordinariness—felt also like a drink of sunlight; dealing with HIV had underlined our sense of isolation, underscored the sense of difference northern New England’s homogeneous culture kept reminding us of anyway.
During the vacation, I had to leave town for a day, on some literary business. It was almost dark when I returned. At the point where the only road into town is suddenly a band of asphalt between two sand dunes, a thought leapt into my head: I’m home now. Home? Where did that come from? Home was three hundred miles away, and we’d be there in a few days. But I couldn’t escape this new sense of an arrival, a door in my life opening.
Driving back to Vermont, under ragged patches of cloud raining and hurrying across a sky scrubbed a clean April blue, we drove past the tail end of a rainbow whose ending place was plainly visible; you could actually look through the end of the rainbow into the wet grass. Home again, we almost didn’t even need to say it out loud: what were we doing here? I’d stayed five years in a job I was wearying of, and neither school nor the display business which Wally had built were priorities to him. We loved our house, I loved my garden, but these didn’t seem enough; now we needed community, like-minded company. We needed both support and a place that would leave us alone to work on what was essential, which was trying to understand what was happening to us, feeling our way, finding how to live well. Who knew how much time we’d have? Nothing, nothing erodes one’s patience like that question.
Solutions materialized as easily as our rainbow, emblem of promise and futurity. A friend called from Sarah Lawrence College, in New York, and offered me a job as her replacement during a year’s leave. Sarah Lawrence is a long way from Provincetown, but because the job involved teaching only on Mondays and Tuesdays, it was perfectly possible to drive down to the college, stay over and teach, then have the rest of the week on the Cape. Though the house was sold in fifteen minutes, there were endless things to do: cleaning out the accumulations of two men absurdly fond of barn sales and auctions and flea markets, deciding what was essential, letting go of one life and reaching uncertainly toward another. But a kind of ease prevailed, a sense that the rightness of what we were doing made a complex set of exchanges and arrangements possible. We seemed to be offered a series of gifts.
Walking Arden one morning by the rotary at the end of our town’s arterial street, where civilization ends and the road gives way to a wide, luminous salt marsh, I stopped to read what I’d been walking past for weeks, a neglected historical marker hidden in a bushy clump of junipers. Its verdigrised lettering noted that somewhere near the site, in November of 1620, the Pilgrims made their first landing before going on to Plymouth. This was a considerable shock to me, for one reason: my ancestor, Edward Dotey, was a passenger on that overcrowded, brightly painted boat.
This ancestry is no conventional source of pride. My family has been for generations a ragtag batch of poor Southerners; my mother’s father was a subsistence farmer in East Tennessee, lugging what millet he could to the mill every summer and living off the meager income it provided. My father’s father was a carpenter who, during the Depression, served time in prison for shooting one of his creditors. Southern to the bone, intermarried with dirt-poor Irish escapees of the potato famine, we found the idea of a noble Yankee ancestor oddly distant; I can understand now why my mother laughed, in the late fifties, when she was invited to join the Memphis chapter of the DAR.
And Edward Dotey himself is a bit of a problem, as near a figure to the archetypal American scoundrel as the first citizens of Plymouth can provide. The facts of his early life are scant, but it appears that the young man from London sold himself into indentured servitude to escape some fate worse than seven years without liberty in a relatively unknown and certainly inhospitable country. Perhaps he was avoiding debtor’s prison. Whatever his motivation, the hot-tempered Edward probably was a central figure in the Mayflower mutiny, in which the declaration of a group of young men that “when they came ashore, they would use their owne libertie” led to the signing of the Mayflower Compact.
Once settled in Plymouth, he distinguished himself by fighting the first duel on American soil, with one Edward Leister. He went to court and was convicted for “dealing fraudulentlie about a flitch of bacon.” Free of his servitude, he proceeded to amass a considerable amount of worldly goods, doubtless by less than admirable means. He filed America’s first lawsuit. He seems to have been more or less run out of the colony, ultimately, and died on Cape Cod, in 1655, having fathered nine children. He left behind a wealth of copper pots and iron implements, and a nasty reputation.
In November, our town weekly announced that a reenactment of the first landing, with local people in the role of the heroic voyagers, would take place on the beach where the actual landing seems to have occurred—somewhere, the article read, between the Red Inn and the Provincetown Inn. Without realizing it, I had rented a house in precisely the spot where my ancestor, 370 years before, had probably been among the sixteen armed men who first rode a longboat into shore from the Mayflower, carrying their muskets and a bottle of Holland gin, since they lacked fresh water. Over the next few gin-primed days, they reconnoitered, discovered a spring and a plentiful supply of quahogs and mussels, and raided a store of Wampanoag corn in what would later become Truro. The women came ashore, in order to allow the children to run on the beach, under close scrutiny—how exhilarating open space must have been, after their matchbox quarters—and to do laundry, for, as William Bradford informs us, “they had great need.” (Provincetown’s historical museum offers today a mural of the Pilgrim women boiling and wringing out those severe clothes.)
For months, then, I had been filling my eyes with a landscape that was part of my primogeniture, though I did not know it and though that landscape was now, of course, wildly changed. The Pilgrims encountered a Cape much more heavily wooded than it is today, since house- and boat-building would decimate virgin growth and produce a more barren, sandy landscape. As Provincetown transformed itself from an eighteenth-century fishing village to a nineteenth-century whaling town, and then to a Bohemian resort, property would become increasingly valuable. By late in this century the West End—once a less prestigious, Portuguese neighborhood—
would contain the town’s priciest waterfront property, and every available bit of developable land would hold a welter of cottages and condos skewed at odd angles, a Cubist jigsaw rising up from the pristine beach where the First Laundry was hung to dry.
The town of Provincetown would like America to know that the Pilgrims landed here first (the Vikings were here, too, leaving a fragment of stone wall beneath what’s now a guest house a little nearer to the center of town). But travelers to this far outpost are, in general, drawn here by more recent traditions which have, since sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, made Provincetown first an arts colony and then—consequently?—a zone of tolerance and permission. Interest in uncovering and preserving the historical traditions of gay men and lesbians is recent, so it’s difficult to know when Provincetown first became a haven for the “Bohemian” expatriates of Eastern cities. Artists were drawn here by the beauty of the place and by cheap rents, and the influx of new citizenry found congenial hosts among the Portuguese fishing community which had arrived with the growth of whaling. Greenwich Village summered here in the teens and twenties, when a boat from one of the downtown piers traveled directly to this little tendril of land sixty miles out into the Atlantic. By the forties—when Tennessee Williams was finishing The Glass Menagerie in a rented shack, posing à la Grecque with a mock javelin for a nude photo in the dunes, and frequenting the bar at the Atlantic House, where (among others) Gene Krupa and Billie Holiday performed, Provincetown had established a social milieu so different from that of mainstream New England as to make it feel more like an island than the tip of a peninsula. Until the fifties, it was much easier to get here by boat than to risk a road frequently buried under sand, so perhaps the very isolation of the place allowed it to evolve in its own direction, like those exotic islands where very particular sorts of species flourish. Poets and painters from New York built a community of value here, a culture where work was central and the tensions and competition of the city were held at bay. They generated a heady atmosphere of possibility; “We have been nervy,” said my friend Elise Asher, a painter in her seventies, “with freedom and imagination.”