Lindsey Danis
Ghost Houses
non-fiction
My great-grandfather owned a beach house in Rhode Island, and it fell into the sea one winter, the victim of shoreline erosion or maybe a hurricane. It was too close to the ocean to rebuild, the story goes, and I accept this as fact when I am young. That you can own something, a house, and then it can disappear and you own nothing.
As a child, I think of that ghost house as my inheritance, even though my grandfather was one of seven and there’s no indication it would have passed to me.
Another beach house comes my way when I’m six. My parents divorce. My father rents a beachfront cottage for the off-season. The house is musty, but the expanse of beach beyond its seawall captivates me. There are climbing rocks, craggy-skinned like elephants, which hide tide pool treasures. When I find a large conch shell, I bring it to my mother’s house, where I can listen to the echo of the sea until I return.
That fall, there’s a big storm. The waves pick up and the sea turns pearly gray to match the sky. I put on my winter jacket and hat and head to the seawall for one last look before going home with my mother, who’s come to fetch me. I wonder if the waves will climb over the seawall and sweep through the beach house, if nature will take this back, too.
Instead, a different storm comes. My father remarries within a year. They have their own child, and then a second. As their family grows, I am pushed out.
**
Decades later, my partner and I drive from Boston, where we live, to Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod. The three-lane highway narrows to two lanes once we hit the suburbs. We reach the town where I grew up, then the town where my father lives. Passing his exit, my body clenches. I cut him out of my life recently. Our estrangement is a scab I pick to check if it’s healing.
As we cross the bridge onto the Cape, soil turns to sand. Scrub pine grows thick. Drifting fog gives everything a mystic feel, as if the earth is ceding space to the ocean. We pass sand dunes and beach shacks that make me think of my ghost house. I imagine it perched on a cliff above the ocean, a rickety fence separating it from dunes, rough with beach grass, but it was more likely a small cottage, similar to these. There are no photos, so the house can take any shape I want.
In Boston, queer people are at best invisible, at worst bigots’ prey, homophobic slurs hurled from car windows as we walk down the street holding hands, but in Provincetown, we are the majority. Summer weekends bring women’s events, leather parties, and drag shows. There is a sense of queer history and a reminder of our struggles in the lesbian bookstore, the HRC store, the AIDS memorial set outside Town Hall, a block of dark gray quartzite with a wavy top to mimic the ocean and the word “remembering” carved on two sides.
We’ve arrived in time for the Blessing of the Fleet, part of the annual Portuguese Festival. My partner never misses a parade, so we zigzag through the streets to the open lawn in front of the library to claim a spot. Women in traditional Portuguese dress sashay down Commercial Street. They’re not that different from the drag queens, I think, taking in the women’s azure-colored dresses and tulle headpieces. Next is a dance troupe dressed in the colors of the Portuguese flag. They’re followed by fishing families who carry religious iconography and banners bearing the names of ships to be blessed.
An ex-girlfriend grew up near New Bedford; she was of Portuguese and Cape Verdean heritage. Early in our relationship, we took a day trip to Provincetown. We strolled the shops and traced paths through the sand dunes. We ate seafood and ice cream. I wanted the queer rite of passage to cement our love. I wanted to build a house that we would never have to leave. I wanted everything, all of it, forever, but our relationship didn’t last.
Old love and loss pull me out to sea until a band passes, and its festive music provides an anchor to the present. It’s a beautiful day in my favorite place, and I have a new love on my arm.
Strolling Commercial Street that night, we pass a stage set up in front of the saltwater taffy shop. A traditional Portuguese band plays. Pedicab drivers sit at attention. Couples holding hands slow their stroll to listen. Old-timers claim spots on the benches that surround Town Hall, nodding their heads to the beat. When a slow song starts, I grab my partner’s hand. We find a space amid the other couples. Then we twirl under the street lamps.
**
From 1820 to 1850, Provincetown was a wealthy whaling center. Portuguese sailors came from the Azores, trading poverty and military conscription at home for the dangers of whaling ships. When whaling declined, they stayed on and found work in textile mills throughout Southeastern Massachusetts, where a majority of Portuguese Americans still live. During the four-day Provincetown Portuguese Festival, there’s live music, dancing, caldo verde, and a bishop to bestow blessings for a safe and prosperous fishing season.
Centuries ago, these waters were abundant with mackerel, bass, herring, and lobster. Settler John Smith once wrote that cod were so plentiful that you could walk across their backs to shore. Cod is the state fish, but nowadays you’d be pressed to find it sold fresh. What’s in the supermarket seafood case is frozen, flown in from Iceland and Norway.
Overfishing is partly to blame. The seal population has exploded in recent years. Gray seals are so bold, they steal fish right off the line. The fish that remain no longer stay close to shore, but swim in deeper waters to avoid the seals. Biologists call this behavior change the ecology of fear: once a predator enters the environment, prey species adapt or die.
**
In November of 1620, the Pilgrims washed ashore in Provincetown. They signed the Mayflower Compact while in harbor. Running low on supplies, they made landfall and searched for food. The hungry Pilgrims helped themselves to corn left near burial sites for the Nauset, a local indigenous population. Nauset tribesmen returned from a hunting expedition to find the Pilgrims taking their corn and chasing them away. After their Indian encounter, the Pilgrims sailed on to Plymouth.
Near the breakwater, where at low tide you can walk along a string of stones to the land’s end, there is a memorial to the Pilgrims’ first landing place. There are no memorials to the Nauset. The tribe died off from diseases they contracted from colonial settlers.
A neighboring tribe, the Wampanoag, still lives here. They received federal recognition in 2007 and have tribal land on nearby Martha’s Vineyard, which they call Noepe. At the living history museum in Plymouth, traditional Wampanoag homes sit adjacent to a replica Mayflower, bobbing in its moorings. Tribal members play their ancestors.
**
The year I propose to my partner—a formality, since she has already proposed to me, and I’ve accepted—I fetch my grandmother’s wedding ring from a safe deposit box in the town where I grew up. I imagine my grandmother would be pleased to have her ring in the world again. I never got to know her. After my grandparents divorced, she became a pet hoarder and an alcoholic, and my mother stopped speaking to her.
I met my grandmother a couple of times as a child, and then again at around age twelve. My mom drove us out to a restaurant in the town where she’d grown up. My grandmother ordered broiled fish with rice pilaf—old people’s food. She’d done her makeup and put on costume jewelry, but her hands still shook from drinking. While my mother tried to get a conversation going, I picked over my fish fry. What was I supposed to say to this stranger who sent me sporadic birthday cards? Why did she want to meet after all this time? Was she trying to get better? Were we supposed to help? I didn’t know and I didn’t know how to ask; they cut ties a decade before my birth. On the ride home, I stared out the window. It was easier to watch the strip malls blend into one another than think about my grandmother. Two years later, she was dead.
I’ve had the ring for a couple of weeks, stashed in my sock drawer, but I wanted to offer it here. We grab a bottle of wine and some firewood and head to the beach to watch the seals, who move from the open ocean toward the harbor at sunset. We do this every year.
The sand carries the day’s warmth. The beach is pockmarked with seaweed, dried beach grass, and broken shells. We build a log cabin with firewood and use the beach grass for tinder. As the flames catch, I feel in my pocket for the ring. It’s still there. I look out to sea and try to find the right words. I love my partner, but I don’t know what love looks like on a practical level. We’ve been together for four years, but I’m a child of divorce. I never learned how to stay.
One seal passes, then another. Bobbing on the waves, they pause to study us, then dive under, reemerging far up the beach. I have a deep affection for the seals, and will run toward the ocean, sinking my feet into the surf, so that we can share space for a few minutes. Their presence reminds me to drop the painful parts of my past and move forward. My marriage doesn’t have to be like my mother’s, or my grandmother’s. It can take any shape I want. I’ll probably never feel ready, but the sand beneath my toes grounds me as I hold out the ring.
It fits perfectly.
**
We go to Provincetown several times the year we are married, and then we move away from Boston. We return on our fifth anniversary, when marriage no longer feels as amorphous as the ghost house.
Day by day, we have built something. Some days, we talk about buying a beach house here, so we can always come back. We say we’ll paint the shutters bright but let the shingles weather to gray, we’ll put a whale weathervane on top, we’ll give our saltbox cottage a cutesy name. When I sell my book, I joke, keeping the fantasy going. We will never buy that house but for years, we have returned.
Since our last visit, Provincetown has made itself a cruise destination. Cruisers spill off the dock and onto Commercial Street, where my wife and I sit on a bench and share a grape nut ice cream. A middle-aged woman in a pink sweatshirt talks to her friend about “the gays,” and how this is their summer place. The women stare approvingly at us, anxious to come across as allies, then drift down the block.
We finish our ice cream and walk east. A few blocks later, we’re in a majority gay space again. Bistro tables are full of toned young men and comfortable, graying lesbians. We’re still here, I remind myself, but I’m unsettled. Provincetown was a place I could escape the judgment of Boston. This was our place when we had no place, this spit of land on the edge of the country, it’s been our place as we gained a foothold—sodomy decriminalized, marriage equality, employment, and housing protections—and now we have become its tourist attraction.
I always imagined the ghost house disappeared without warning, but perhaps my great-grandfather had advance notice, maybe enough to accept the loss. I was utterly unprepared for the ways in which queer people have been displaced from our communities and our collective history by gentrification and mainstreaming. We are here now, together, because the bars and clubs where we grew up dancing closed, because AIDS took too many, because no app can replicate the ripe potential of a hot summer night, salt in the air and brine in your mouth, of being around your people, but at times it feels like we’re vanishing.
On our last morning in town, I cross the breakwater across from the Pilgrim plaque, mourning the erosion of our collective history and the larger losses on the horizon. Scientists say Cape Cod may be underwater in fifty years. Every year, floods and erosion pull the beach out to sea; the land I love disappears while I bear witness.
When this loss feels inevitable, I think of my queer ancestors. Decades ago, the gay men who gathered on these beaches could be arrested for sodomy. Their names were published in the newspaper in times when there were no legal protections for queer people. Still, they came. They risked the loss of whatever stable lives they’d built for a few moments of communion.
To be here is a gift my queer ancestors dreamed and fought and loved into being. While I am here, I will hope, I will love, I will hold this ground.
Tonight we will have our usual bonfire. We will drink wine and watch the pink ball of sun slip below the horizon. When I leave, I will carry the ocean. I will be the wave until I return to shore.
Lindsey Danis is a Hudson-Valley-based writer whose essays have appeared in Longreads, Catapult, and Undomesticated, and have received a notable mention in Best American Travel Writing. Lindsey also runs the queer outdoor travel blog QueerAdventurers and is the creative nonfiction editor at Atlas + Alice.