Cape Expectations

Cape Cod has long been the playground for the inhabitants of the US east coast, ever since 19th-century steamers left New York and Boston, piled with trippers bound for its shores. This fugitive spit of land, held out from the coast of Massachusetts like an arm with a clenched fist, has attracted visitors for even longer. Native Americans hunted and farmed it; Vikings may have been its first European visitors.

Back in 1621, it was the first landing place for the Pilgrim Fathers, who’d sailed across the Atlantic in search of religious freedom. The Mayflower Compact was signed in Cape Cod Bay. Modern America began here. And, according to the philosopher Henry David Thoreau, it ended here, too. “A man may stand here and put all America behind him,” he wrote in the 1850s.

The attractions of this place to Europeans, and particularly to the British, are obvious. There’s a fantastic familiarity about the Cape — not least in its place names: Truro, Chatham, Falmouth — towns that make you feel at home. There’s a gentility which belies the pace of modern America — a sense of the past, of abiding generations: I know at least one family here, the Mayos, who can trace their origins back to the 1650s.

The Cape’s appeal is traditional. Go to a quiet town like Wellfleet, and you’ll find a harbour, a few shops, some good restaurants, and that’s about it. No amusement arcades or strip malls. This is a subtle place, as evocative of the sea as the oysters for which Wellfleet is famous — so much so that Queen Victoria had them shipped over for the royal table. Sitting in the Bookstore & Restaurant, overlooking the harbour, with Mary Martin, ukulele-player and haikuist, we marvel — over our oysters and chablis — that you’d want to be anywhere else.

We’ve just swum in the foamy Atlantic at the secluded, beautiful beach at Longnook, where even on a hot midsummer day, there are barely two dozen people on the sand. Mary and I share the water only with a grey seal, although we know that there are sometimes other, less welcome visitors — great white sharks.

Whale-watch captain Todd Motta counsels caution. “You don’t want to go like that,” he says. He should know. The Mottas, one of the Portuguese and Azorean families who settled here in the 19th and 20th centuries, have fished these waters for decades. My stay here coincides with the Blessing of the Fleet, a procession of boats sporting Portuguese flags and the Stars and Stripes.

Cape Cod may have a Wasp reputation but Provincetown shows that great diversity that America at its best presents. This fishing village, set at the very tip of the Cape, happens to be one of the US’s premier gay resorts. The main drag, Commercial Street, is thronged with Barbra Streisand impersonators, lesbian parents and, during Bear Week, huge hairy gay men and their “significant otters”.

Overseeing it all is America’s greatest modern ironist — film-maker John Waters. He’s spent every summer in Provincetown since he hitchhiked here in the mid-Sixties, and has written all his movies — from Pink Flamingoes to Hairspray and A Dirty Shame — here.

Downtown Provincetown in high summer heaves with eclectic humanity but retreat to its low-key East End and you’ll find smart galleries such as Albert Merola’s. The Cape-wide Fall for the Arts Festival runs throughout October.

Here the lanes are lined with honeysuckle and the true scent of old money. Norman Mailer built the only brick house in town; it’s now a writer’s retreat. Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, still lives here, as does America’s unofficial poet laureate, Mary Oliver. Neighbouring Truro boasts summering Britons such as Helena Kennedy, Gordon Brown and Jon Snow. They come here for the peace, the beaches and the pine woods. Walk along Truro’s Ryder Beach and you’ll see shingled houses built by the early settlers. They’re contrasted with incredible modernist villas, built in the Bauhaus tradition; Walter Gropius was another Cape refugee. Tennessee Williams also lived nearby. Up Cape at Hyannisport is the Kennedy compound, and across the water lie Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, respectively Republican and Democrat retreats. Barack Obama relaxes at the latter.