When we were researching the idea of launching the Independent, one big question was whether the Outer Cape economy was strong enough to support a newspaper. We had looked across the country for examples and learned that in communities where Main Street was deserted and storefronts were empty, formerly thriving newspapers were among the casualties. Where towns were humming, however, and the local paper did its job, there was reason for optimism.
Our local economy is admittedly weird. The recent discussions of “seasonal communities” have focused on housing, but the extreme seasonality of commerce here causes all kinds of headaches. People need year-round jobs, but many shops and restaurants go dark in the off-season. And some goods are simply nowhere to be found — when Silk & Feathers closed on Commercial Street, Ann Wood, who was then my colleague in the newsroom at the Banner, groaned: “You know a town’s in trouble when there’s no place to buy a pair of underwear,” she said.
“Winter felt long here this year,” wrote Paul Benson in last week’s story on Provincetown’s Commercial Street at the start of the summer season. He had counted a larger than usual number of empty storefronts and talked with people who questioned whether the town would recover its usual vibrancy when the weather warmed up.
The national mood certainly didn’t help. The constantly changing pronouncements about tariffs and the resulting wild swings in the stock market had people wondering if the bottom was about to fall out of the economy. It was hard to picture what it all would mean at this distance from Wall Street.
But as Paul went on to report, one by one, the lights came on in winter’s darkened windows. It turns out there are still entrepreneurs all around, with carefully nurtured visions and the nerve to take the plunge.
Looking around at restaurants and art galleries and bookstores and even our newspaper office, I note with some relief that our economy appears to be flourishing, even though we are pretty far from Silicon Valley or Starbase, Texas.
Twenty years ago, an adviser to President George W. Bush famously mocked journalist Ron Suskind for living in “the reality-based community.” “That’s not the way the world works anymore,” he said. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
The new businesses that we see opening around us are satisfyingly real. I’m glad to be far away from today’s empire of AI data farms and crypto billionaires.
But you could say that here on the Outer Cape we do create our own reality. We have people making jackets out of upholstery fabric and making rakes that are perfect for clamming on the sandy bottom of the bay. We have people putting on plays and coaching hockey.
The people who are starting new businesses are doing something risky, expensive, and exhausting. But it’s what keeps the community alive. Now all we need is for someone to open an underwear department.
