Last week was Family Week in Provincetown, and Commercial Street was packed with people pushing strollers and hundreds of kids of every age and disposition. It’s an unusual and welcome sight in a town whose population of children declined for decades, reaching the woeful point in 2013 when the high school was shut down for lack of students. (The Provincetown Schools have made a modest but significant comeback in the last decade, with enrollment increasing from an all-time low of 97 students in 2011 to 137 last year.)
The week swings open the gate to August, when families seem to suddenly fill all the towns on the Outer Cape. Our own children and grandchildren arrived from New York on Sunday, and on Monday evening when we came home from work they reported having spent “a perfect Wellfleet day” swimming at Great Pond and watching fiddler crabs at Indian Neck.
It’s a kind of paradise for children here, really, and memories of childhood moments on the beaches, dunes, and marshes and in the waves, the pine woods, and the dreamy, clear water of the kettle ponds clearly maintain a powerful lifelong grip. I first came to Wellfleet as a child with my grown-up sister, Harriet, and her young family; they rented a cottage every August at what was then called the Surfside Colony.
The children who grow up here year-round have an even more profound experience of the place. Reading Kai Potter’s Noticing, his collection of essays on the landscape in the quiet season, makes that clear.
Not enough children are growing up in our towns. The U.S. Census Bureau puts Provincetown’s median age at 56.1; Wellfleet’s is 59.1, Eastham’s is 59.8, and Truro’s is 65. People who want not just a vacation but to work and make a life here face almost insurmountable obstacles.
But we have been lucky to find talented young writers to come to Provincetown and work with us at the Independent — our summer and winter fellows and a series of reporters whose energy, commitment, and courage have inspired us and made a big difference in our knowledge and understanding of this community — and of the whole idea of community.
For those of us who find this place so wondrous, it is at times easy to forget that most of these young people’s dreams are elsewhere.
Our four summer fellows will depart in a week. And four other fine journalists are also leaving our newsroom in a few weeks: associate editor Paul Sullivan, who has a grant to write a book, and staff reporters Sophie Mann-Shafir, Sam Pollak, and Jack Styler. Sophie and Jack will be going to Europe to do research with Fulbright awards; Sam will pursue the next step in his career in New York City.
We are bereft and proud of them at the same time. We are ready for others to come and carry on their work. Please help us find them by spreading the word.
