Less Is More

My happy days on the Cape began and ended with a wait on the dock at either end for the ferry. It was in such shocking contrast with the the rest of the experience that I cannot erase it from my mind.  It has been several years since I was in Boston’s harbor area, where the old overhead highway has been replaced by a grand pedestrian boulevard covering over the traffic tunnel below ground.  Quite splendid and many blocks long.  Any sense of majesty, calm, or grandeur, befitting a great and historic city like Boston, is immediately destroyed by the absolute hordes of tourists milling about waiting to board tour buses or filling the shops and cafes of a more or less designated tourist area, that is, the famous Quincy Market, designed for them to get a sense of “history” “old” “historic” and all the other things that come to mind when you think Boston.  Of course, tourism is a major source of revenue for Boston and New England and we cannot fault it; I guess one must just stay away.  It happens the world over.  I think of the crush of humanity being marched mindlessly through the Vatican Museum who came not for the treasures on display therein but because Dan Brown’s novel talks of it.  Well, it helps pay for the cost of the architectural treasures, so be it.  I left  Provincetown on the very same ferry on which I arrived four days later, but this time proceeded by a long lunch and stroll about the town. Driving to the dock parking facility required driving through the throngs filling the streets of a density and indifference to the car that reminded one of any major Indian city.  Then we joined them as we walked to our restaurant.  The crowds of visitors were overwhelming, back and forth, to and fro, densely packed, looking at nothing really, registering the look of “Oh, here we are in famous Provincetown.”  Indeed, the shops and houses along the way were dressed up to be so quaint or so camp that it more or less defied rational looking.  Provincetown is one of the gay meccas of the United States, and the jubilant crowd was rejoicing in the decisions handed down the day before from the Supreme Court.  It was good to see so many gay men and women walking hand in hand with the ones they loved, or embracing them publicly. It was also amusing to contrast the Boston tourist crowd, usually groups of four, mother and father bulging with fat, and two tubby tots with hands full of candy working on the avoirdupois and the Provincetown male couples, dressed so neatly, such trim bodies, such elegance, perhaps a little bit over done, but working to preserve a look of youth and beauty, but overall, we shuddered. It was just the crowds, the milling.  Less is more, said Mies