We returned from Provincetown, Mass.  last night – we spent the last five days  there – to the usual process of re-entry: blog problems, bills, broken gates and backed-up phone messages. We had a sweet and restful time in this enchanting and somewhat exotic old fishing town and creative enclave. We saw a drag show, went sailing, walked for miles and miles, ate wonderful seafood, read, talked, sat on the beach, visited old cemeteries, watched the sun rise and fall, walked on the dunes, hiked around old ponds and trails. My heart came along for the ride, we walked about 10 miles a day, I got my usual share of blisters.

While taking some photos, I fell into an old rock jetty on the beach. I still know how to fall without breaking my camera (or my rental wide angle lens) but the rocks banged up my back and my arm. I forgot that I shouldn’t be walking on jetties so soon after the surgery, it could have been nasty but I was able to climb out and wiser for it. And got a good photo or two, along with some colorful bruises.

I grew up in New England – in nearby Providence, R.I. – and I have been going to Provincetown my entire life,  watching it change constantly. I have walked on every street and beach there, seen the town’s evolution from a funky fishing community and magnet for creatives and outsiders. Writers, artists, poets and playwrights have always loved the town for it’s light, dunes, artistic vibe. Provincetown, like everything else, has changed. Artists and writers can’t afford to live there any longer, most of them have moved away, scattered to Vermont or other towns in Massachusetts.

Every time I visited Provincetown in my life, I ached to live there, to join the outsider artists and writers, to rent a dune shack or a cottage in town, to join the community of creative people who flocked there for the cheap rents and sense of community and support. Their ghostly traces are everywhere – Norman Mailer’s house, the old wharf where Eugene O’Neill’s Provincetown Players debuted wonderful works, Edward Hopper’s dune cottage, the galleries on the East End.

During my first marriage, we came to Cape Cod every year. My wife and daughter loved the beach, loved to sit and read there, I would go to Provincetown and walk the streets, visit friends, sit by the fishing pier and watch the ocean. I cannot sit long on the  beach, I suppose I am too restless. My heart always went there, I felt so connected to the place. They thought I was odd to wander around Provincetown all day, and they were right. I should have seen what that meant, but I was too blind. It often felt lonely to me, walking those beautiful streets.

It was so different this trip. I was, for the first time,just a tourist, wandering around with my camera, asking dumb questions, asking my Google map for help, looking for goo-gaws to buy for Maria, scoping out the best lobster rolls. There is a lot of freedom in that.

I realized that for the first time I no longer wish to live there, that the Provincetown I fantasized about was gone, the rich seem to have found all of the good creative places and taken them over. Sort of like the Pilgrims end up in Key West. I could not really live there. I could no longer afford it, and there is no community there for me to join and the houses, while beautiful, are just a little too perfect.  But as a tourist, I was finally and completely free to enjoy the great beauty, the ocean all around, the beautiful dunes. I think I always disdained the tourists, I never saw myself as one of them. I am one of them now, I saw that this week.

I remember Provincetown when  the old houses were fading and windblown, when the fishermen and their sons used to chase gay men through the streets and harass or beat them up if they could, I remember the fishing fleet stacked up at Macmillan Pier to unload their catches, great clouds of seagulls devouring the spillage.  I remember the Boston Irish families in their cottages on the East End, drinking beer and gathering on the beach under their tattered and colorful umbrellas.

I can’t imagine where Eugene O’Neill would go now to write his plays, or where Hopper would go to paint his dunes.  I wonder how many plays and paintings are being lost in our money-driven culture.

Today, gay people do not have to fight for their rights in Provincetown, gay  businessmen and women run the town and the fishermen are almost all gone. Many, if not most of the cottages and houses have been broken into condos, the town has become a summer place, hardly anyone lives there year round or in the winter any more, and the children have all vanished. Parking and real estate are the two big topics of conversation.  Last year, the old high school shut down, there were hardly any students.

If there are no longer any schools, there are gorgeous and spacious dog parks, filled with sculptures of the Mayflower and other art forms. Provincetown is a dog town, it is sometimes endearing, often quite over the top. If you are so inclined, bring your dog, he or she will be welcome just about everywhere.

Last week, I visited Alice Brock (of Alice’s Restaurant fame), now a Provincetown artist,  in her West End art studio. “I’m a dying breed,” she said “there are no rentals for people any more, the artists can’t afford the houses,  in the winter this place is desolate.” There is one food market and two or three taverns and restaurants.

In the summer it is not desolate. There are hip new Sushi and seafood restaurants owned by entrepeneurs from South Miami, and a string of art galleries catering to the new money, to people eager to put art on the walls of their refurbished old captain’s houses.

Over the years I met many of the writers and artists who were drawn to Provincetown, who shared apartments and cottages and wrote their plays, painted their pictures, took their photos. There is one left, he is hanging on by his fingernails in a decaying cottage outside of town. He is waiting to sell out, to move to Pennsylvania.

Provincetown has never looked more beautiful, it’s houses and cottages are being lavishly and loving restored, you will not see much peeling paint there, or untrimmed shrubs or cracks in the asphalt driveways (many are cobblestone). Gardens are taken very seriously there. And Provincetown still reveals it’s soul from time to time.

T   he drag queens still put on their shows for the tourists, and there are still those tacky-T-shirt and shell shops in the middle of town, along with fried clams, popcorn and fudge. The beautiful old churches are being restored and finding new uses – restaurants, art galleries, the town library which has a giant fishing schooner on the second floor. Provincetown has a Pilgrim monument, but the town is really a palace of change now, a mirror of American life and culture. There is not much of the Pilgrim presence left.

For all of my emotional history there, I have never enjoyed a visit there more.

This vacation was too short, as good vacations are. My surgery felt far away. Perhaps that is because Maria was with me, and love makes a difference. Or because I love where I live and no longer fantasize about living anywhere else. I’ve moved about 15 times in my life, and I tell people the problem with moving is that I always came too, the same face in the mirror, the same problems in a new location.  I am standing in my own truth now, I have found my home, Maria and I are our  own creative community.

I love Provincetown, I will always love it,  I accept it’s evolution with grace, I bow to it’s natural and man made beauty and glorious history, it’s artistic and rebellious spirit, which can never be fully quashed. I don’t want to live there any more, but I can’t imagine a better place to visit.