The Race Point Rambler

Provincetown, East End

A belated Christmas present was delivered to me the other day. The reason it was late is that it took 30 years to make – 30 years and the combined talents of two starving artists and a crack beachcomber. One of the artists is a close relative of mine; she practices decoupage and can knit a sweater that looks like a Kandinsky. The other artist, her good friend, paints, sculpts and sews and worked years ago as an illustrator for the Provincetown Advocate. The beachcomber is my friend Buddy. He’s also a carpenter, an ex-lobsterman and an astute observer of dragonflies and tree swallows, but it was his eye for the oddity in the sands of the East End that led him to discover what would become my Christmas present.

One day back in the 1970s Buddy was kicking around the beach near the house he shared with my relative; we’ll call her Kandinsky. This particular stretch of shoreline in Provincetown was rich, at the time, in pottery shards — relics of the shipping trade that bustled in and out of the harbor all through the 1800s. Savvy treasure seekers would poke around the pilings behind the old ice house, where a creaking wharf once stood, and come up with bits of tile and porcelain and china, the crème de la crème of beach debris. A nice wedge of blue-and-white transferware beat sea glass any day.

From this Amarna of the Outer Cape, Buddy unearthed a tiny china doll. It was really just the head of a doll, about the size of a hazelnut, its black coiffure and Lilliputian features rendered in faded paint. He gave it to Kandinsky, who tucked it away in a safe place (she’s not just an artist, she’s a collector). Time passed and they broke up and moved on to other relationships and other houses, but she never lost track of the china doll. When she returned to the Cape a few years ago, after living for a while in Pennsylvania, she’d ditched 95 percent of her possessions, but not the doll.

Kandinsky has the resourcefulness of a true Lower Caper, and this talent really shines through at Christmas. She may not be a person of means but she is one of the best gift-givers I have ever known. She can find sterling silver in a pile of rusty cans at the swap shack and rare prints in a stack of moldering ephemera at the local thrift shop. If you need a pair of mittens, she’ll knit them for you; a pair of curtains, she’ll find some luxurious fabric somewhere and make them for you. Sometimes she’ll dig out something of her own and give it to you. This past Christmas she got it into her mind that I should have a doll.

Out came the bauble Buddy had combed from the beach in the East End. All it needed was a body and some clothes. Enter Margo: old cohort of theirs from Provincetown. Margo makes her living now as an artist in Eureka Springs, Ark., but she’s still attached to the Cape. Every now and then she sends me tokens of her time here — a pair of silver earrings hammered into the shape of codfish skeletons, a framed photograph of the sea with its lip on the great curve of Race Point. Anyway, it turned out Margo had found a doll’s head or two of her own when she lived here, and she welcomed the chance to dress this one up. The precious knick-knack was packed up and and sent off to Arkansas.

This is what Margo sent back:

The lonely doll head that was tumbled like a pebble through the waters of Provincetown Harbor before it landed in a box of odds and ends, to be tumbled about for another 30 years, now has arms, legs, feet, shoes, a dress, a necklace and a bouquet. I’m told she even has underwear on. And Margo kindly provided her with a place to live when she’s not on display: a box painted with scenes of beach roses and Long Point.

I’m writing to say thank you. It’s not just a gift from Buddy and Margo and my relative; it’s a gift from Old Provincetown, that generous, eccentric, unmistakable place lying underneath the place we think we live in. Fragments of it come to the surface now and then. If you’re lucky, they can even come to life.