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fishermen. There was a lot of that. Those Portuguese fishermen had no small reputation as lovers. There was one grand lady I knew, who shall remain nameless. She was big, she was blonde, and she had been married to a distinguished literary intellectual in Western Massachusetts. He was a renowned critic and she was a fabulously beautiful woman, and big as a frigate. She left him that summer, came here to live, and ended up living with a young fisherman for an entire year. And if you were a young painter or a writer and you were invited out on a fishing boat, that was a big deal. The fishermen were much respected in those days, and properly so ��� they were real, and artists tend to have a tropism toward the real. Provincetown was not only most agreeable to the eye, but it was real, with real people. It had been a whaling town. It was real enough that when the Pilgrims came here, they decided to move on because it was a little bit too real. It wasn���t nurturing. CB: It was harsh. Even the Indians only came to Provincetown during the warmer months, like the present-day New Yorkers. They would come down from the mainland, out to the edge, to get shellfish and have a good time. They didn���t live here in the winter. The clay base of glacial Cape Cod ends at High Head in North Truro. The sea spit up all the sand that is Provincetown. So our turf is insubstantial and the foundations of houses are fragile. We are protected by the difficulty of surviving here. It���s very hard to live here, and in fact, in the days you remember in the ���50s and ���60s, hardly anybody lived here in the winter. NM: A friend of mine, John Elbert, spent a winter here, and I came up to visit him in ���57 or ���58. I���d known him in the Village. He was looking to save money and write. It was a grim winter, nothing was open. HYLAND 12