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Join Frederick Studio Provincetown for “Glow,” a virtual opening on Friday, May 21st, at 7 p.m. It consists of new paintings by James Frederick that portray the natural light of the Outer Cape as well as the “inner glow” inspired by creating and working here. Watch on Facebook.
The Mass. Cultural Council has announced the recipients of the Covid-19 Relief Fund. It awarded grants of $1,500 to 781 artists, humanists, and scientists, $1,171,500 in total.
Twenty were from the Outer Cape. In Provincetown: visual artists Ramón S. Alcoléa, Karen Cappotto, Anastasia Egeli, Akiko Jackson, Chet Jones, and Gaston Lacombe; comedian Kristen Becker; multidisciplinary artist Andrew Fitzpatrick; filmmakers James Kubesch and Fermin Rojas; and, for theater, Robert DiVincenzo, Christopher Kosiavelon, and Michael Sottile.
In Truro: visual artist Donna Mahan and, for multidisciplinary arts, Stephanie Rein and Vanessa Vartabedian.
In Wellfleet: visual artists Megan Hinton and Julia Salinger.
And, finally, in Eastham: musician Billy Hardy. Congratulations to all.
The Lily House, a proposed free community hospice on the Outer Cape, is hosting a one-day virtual presentation, “Mortality: Life and Death During a Pandemic,” via Zoom on Saturday, November 14th, from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
The event is a fund-raiser for the Lily House, and features seven end-of-life experts exploring how we live and die in this time of Covid-19 and racial unrest — from Dr. Karen M. Wyatt on “How to Nurture What Really Matters: Lessons Learned From the Dying” to a Death Café led by Lily House co-founder and end-of-life doula Dawn Walsh.
Registration is on a sliding scale from $50 to $100. Read the full schedule and other details at thelilyhouse.org.
Mark Brennan’s 69-foot-long installation at Off Main Gallery in Wellfleet of continuous Outer Cape dunes in watercolor was a highlight of the summer season. Now, Brennan is back with a new virtual exhibit at offmaingallery.com, from Saturday, October 24th, through November 6th.
The show is called “Space in a Box,” and features oil-on-paper visions of ocean and sky, each three by five inches and floated in a distressed wood box hand-crafted by Brennan. The artworks are named after vessels that were shipwrecked along the Cape Cod shoreline over the last 400 years.
Unlike his installation, which expansively filled up the gallery space, these pieces are small-scale images of a vast seascape that are literally boxed in, evoking the tragic side of local maritime history.
All the Outer Cape libraries are participating in Climate Preparedness Week—Thursday, September 24th, through Wednesday, September 30th. A couple of highlights: “Neighborhood by Neighborhood: Mapping Our Resilience,” a Zoom talk about the Boston Mapping Project, on Friday, September 25th, at 10 a.m.; and “How Repair Events Can Transform Our Throwaway Culture,” a Zoom conversation with authors Elizabeth Knight and John Wackman, on Tuesday, September 29th, 6:30 p.m. All events are free. Get details at provincetownlibrary.org.
The self-reported response to the U.S. Census from the Outer Cape has been extremely low so far — under 25 percent for all four towns. Truro’s rate is the second lowest in the state, with only 5.2 percent of households self-reporting.
Statewide and national response rates are both around 60 percent.
These low response rates likely result from two factors. First, many houses are second homes, whose owners may not realize they must fill out a census form for each of their residences. For their second homes, they should indicate that zero people live there, to save census workers time trying to figure out whether anyone is home.
The second reason is that the federal government does not send census forms to post office boxes. That means in Truro, where there is no street delivery, nobody has received census identification numbers or instructions about how to complete the census.
New York Regional Census Bureau director Jeff Behler told the Independent that P.O. boxes are not tied to street addresses, which means they can’t be used to collect data. Therefore, for places like Truro, “They never got anything from the census asking them to respond,” he said.
Forms for completing the federal census, a count of every U.S. resident as of April 1, 2020, will eventually be hand-delivered to houses that do not receive mail delivery. Census workers started delivering those packages on March 15 but had to stop two days later due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In normal times, it would take only about two weeks to complete package delivery across the Northeast.
As states begin to reopen, census workers are starting to deliver packages again. Deliveries began in Maine and Vermont last week, but Behler is not sure when they will be able to get going in Massachusetts.
Behler said his office is following state and local guidelines to protect census workers. This year, census workers will not knock on doors. Rather, they’ll leave packages on doorsteps. “There’s no need to interact with the public for this operation, so we’re thinking we’ll start sooner rather than later,” Behler said.
Although it’s possible to fill out the census without an identification number by entering your street address online or over the phone, Behler encouraged residents to wait for the package to be delivered. “We’re asking residents to be patient,” he said. “If they complete it online without their I.D., and what they write doesn’t exactly match our street address, we will have to send someone out there to knock on their door.”
As the Independent reported on Dec. 6, the census bureau was having some difficulty recruiting workers. At that time, they had received only about 700 applications, a quarter of their goal. Now, however, Behler said that the bureau has met its goal for recruiting workers.
“There’s been no issue,” he said. “We’ve fully staffed all of our operations to date. But we’re still allowing people to apply. Some people who applied six months ago may no longer be interested in a position that goes door to door.”
Cape Cod Commission Executive Director Kristy Senatori said that the commission’s Complete Count Committee is trying to ensure that hard to count populations, like seniors, respond to the census. But with on the ground operations stalled, they’ve switched to using social media for outreach.
“Because we have an older demographic who are taking social distancing seriously, we have a lower response rate,” Senatori said. “Some people are having difficulty responding to the census.”
Each council on aging in Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham is offering to help seniors complete the census. Those having difficulties with technology or other questions can call their local council to ask for assistance.
The census bureau has asked Congress for an extension until April 30, 2021, to complete the 2020 census, which determines federal and state funding, along with legislative representation, for the next decade.
The original deadline for responding to the census was July 31. That has now been extended until Oct. 31, 2020.
We collected a lot of advice while researching the possibility of a new newspaper here. What we heard inspired us to go ahead and dive in, but every now and then someone said something that scared us. On one of those occasions a very smart person looked at us over her drink at the Red Inn and said, “Provincetown is over.”
Provincetown and the entire Outer Cape is not the same place it was 10 or 25 or 40 years ago. It is constantly changing, and some things that have been lost cannot be recreated. As Berta Walker said this week, the storytelling style of the late, great Napi Van Dereck will never be equaled.
But the stories yet to be told, in words and photographs and drawings, continue to multiply.
It seems appropriate that the death of this consummate collector of Provincetown art came in the week that we were compiling this special New Year’s issue, an experiment that some media industry consultants will no doubt consider knuckleheaded.
The results of our invitations to artists and photographers to contribute to what we hope will be an annual collection are, to our eyes and hearts, immensely moving.
Just look at the three women in Marnie Samuelson’s photograph of wild shellfish pickers and imagine telling them that this place is “over.” Spend a while in the presence of Marian Roth’s and John Andert’s memories of another time in Provincetown. Sample the weak coffee and stale cheese at A. Crock’s Unreliable Cafe as you consider the price of progress.
The works of the 15 visionary, generous, and decidedly eccentric friends and co-conspirators in this issue of the Independent go far beyond the scope of the “news” in any ordinary newspaper. But this is no ordinary place. It is confoundingly different and maddening and heartbreakingly precious. Newspapers have always been about words, with images to draw your attention and break up the gray columns of type. But art, like music, has the uncanny power to reveal and express meaning and truth that words cannot.
Our corner of the world with its earth and sea and sky has an unmatched beauty that pulls and holds us, even as the wind and sleet and rent and sudden, unexpected losses trip and stagger us. Not knowing who will answer, we send out our invitations and the answers come back, telling us that the end is over.
The New York Times reported on Monday that 47 percent of Americans say it’s hard for them to know whether the information they encounter is true. Many people have simply stopped even trying to follow the news because it makes them feel “numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.”
The authors of the Times story quoted a 50-year-old school administrator from West Virginia, who said, “There’s so much information that’s biased, that no one believes anything. There is so much out there and you don’t know what to believe, so it’s like there is nothing.”
This is pretty discouraging for a news junkie like me. Figuring out what to believe is how I happily spend a great deal of my time. I understand why people are turned off by the news these days, but the answer is not to stop believing that news has value.
I got excited this week when I read K.C. Myers’s story about the three finalists for the job of Provincetown town manager (see page 1). One of them, I learned, lives in Webster on Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, which I once years ago spent many hours learning to pronounce. I was told back then that the name, in Nipmuc, means “You fish on your side, I’ll fish on my side, and no one will fish in the middle.” I believed it, of course.
That was before the internet. This week when I looked up the lake, which is said to have the longest name of any place in the U.S., I discovered that it has had many names over the years, and that the tongue-twistingly long one I knew was apparently invented, along with its supposed “meaning,” by Laurence J. Daly, editor of the Webster Times, around 1921.
So I had to revise my cherished belief about that crazy name based on this newly unearthed information. Does that bother me? Well, maybe a little. No one likes to find out that he has been broadcasting a false story for years. Now I have a new story, though, about a small-town newspaper editor, no less. What was he thinking? Was he trying to put Webster on the tourist map? Was he just having some fun?
For me, the fun part of newspaper work is digging around and trying to find out what actually happened and why. Sometimes you don’t know what to believe. And sometimes you discover things that lead you to change your mind about what you used to believe.
The Times article concludes that the loss of a shared sense of reliably believable news is causing people to avoid the news entirely. I’m happy to report that, based on the number of readers who have already subscribed to the Independent at least, that’s definitely not happening on the Outer Cape.
“Why did you call it the Provincetown Independent?” That’s probably the question we are asked most frequently at our Open Newsroom sessions at the town libraries and in casual conversations about the reasons for launching a newspaper to cover the Outer Cape.
The Independent, it’s true, is about much more than just Provincetown. Our mission is to cover all four of our towns with equal depth and insight into local government, history, and culture. Why not call it the Outer Cape Independent, or something similar that gives a fairer sense of our coverage area?
We thought about it seriously. And we certainly understand the sense of pride that advocates of Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham feel about those towns. We very nearly named the paper the Outermost Post, which got good reactions from many of the people we tested it on.
Naming a new venture is a fraught business. Once you pick a name, you’re pretty much stuck with it. I’m reminded of the ill-fated restaurant in Wellfleet that was named “Monkey See, Monkey Do.” Someone thought that was cute, I imagine. It’s tough to recover from that kind of stumble.
The more we thought about newspaper names, the more we were drawn to the ones that had a solid geographical anchor, that were grounded in a clearly identified place that was right there on the nameplate. Where I grew up the local paper was the Bergen Record. I never liked it as much after its name was shortened to the Record.
I have come to associate that sense of grounding, of a secure anchorage, with Provincetown, even though we don’t live there. When we first bought our dumpy, drafty little house in Wellfleet and came out from the city every weekend to work on fixing its endless flaws, we huddled by the wood stove on Saturday nights listening to Scott Penn on WOMR and felt comforted and connected. And when our own town seemed deserted and cold on winter nights we went to readings at the Fine Arts Work Center crowded with ideas, stories, and characters.
The Independent is devoted to advancing the civic, cultural, and spiritual life of Outer Cape Cod, and Provincetown, the furthest out of these outermost towns, is our capital city — the gravitational center that pulls us to it.
It’s also where newspapers for the Outer Cape have been published since at least the 1850s. Reading the archives of the old Advocate, we find the stories of all of our towns with their fascinating and strange idiosyncracies — all recorded through the decades in the pages of the Provincetown newspaper.
We are proud to be continuing that long tradition in a town like no other, with a name that tells people everywhere exactly where we stand in the world.
Every town on Cape Cod is encouraged to have a local comprehensive plan, developed in accordance with its residents’ expressed priorities, updated every 10 years, and certified by the Cape Cod Commission — the Cape’s regional planning agency. Only two of 15 towns do.
“Ten years goes by pretty quickly,” said Jon Idman, the commission’s chief regulatory officer. “Towns would spend tons of money on consultants and write these huge tomes and then 10 years would come up and they would say, ‘We just don’t have the resources to do this again.’ The focus should have been on implementation, not just developing a plan to put on a shelf.”
To remedy the situation, the Cape Cod Commission changed its rules for certification earlier this year.
“If the process you have discourages the development of plans and discourages certification that’s supposed to create a regional planning network, then you have to update your process,” Idman told the Independent.
