Services We Offer In Provincetown, MA

Life in Provincetown, Massachusetts: the last three miles of the Cape

The end of the road

Route 6 runs the length of Cape Cod and then it stops, because there is nowhere further to go. Provincetown is what is at the end of it — a curl of sand at the very tip of the peninsula, with water on three sides and Long Point trailing off into the bay like a hook the land forgot to finish.

The whole town is built along two streets. Commercial Street runs about three miles end to end, close enough to the water in places that you can hear it over the conversation, and Bradford Street runs parallel behind it doing the practical work. Everything else is a lane connecting the two. People here do not say north or south; they say the West End or the East End, and everyone knows which is meant.

Weather that comes off the water

Almost nothing here is more than a few hundred yards from salt water, and the climate behaves accordingly. Spring is late and grudging. Summer is humid rather than hot, with fog that rolls in off the bay and sits. Autumn goes on and on, mild well past the point where the rest of Massachusetts has given up on it, and winter arrives as wind more than as cold.

The practical effect is damp. Salt air holds moisture against a building and works its way into anything wooden, and a town whose housing stock is mostly nineteenth-century timber, built close together on narrow lots, feels that more than a place with room between the houses and a modern envelope around them.

Two towns in one year

A few thousand people live here through the winter. In July the number is many times that, and it happens fast. The ferries and the whale watch boats work out of MacMillan Pier alongside what is left of the fishing fleet, the guest houses fill, and Commercial Street becomes a place you walk rather than drive.

Then it empties again, more or less overnight, and the same buildings sit shut through the wet months with nobody in them. Both halves of that year are real, and a building here has to survive both.

The land around the edges

Most of what surrounds the town is not town at all. The Cape Cod National Seashore takes in the dunes, the back shore and the beaches — Herring Cove facing west into the sunset, Race Point out on the corner where the ocean starts — and the dune shacks stand out there in the sand where writers and painters have been going for a century.

The Pilgrim Monument sits on High Pole Hill above all of it, which means that from most of the town you can work out roughly where you are by looking up. Truro and Wellfleet are the towns down the road, and after that it is a long way to anywhere.

Where we fit in

EcoGeek is family owned and operated, and we are a local outfit rather than a company driving out from off-Cape for the afternoon. Knowing how buildings behave in this environment is most of the work, and it is the part that does not transfer from somewhere else.

What we use is chosen to be safe around children and animals. That is not a line we picked for the website; it is the reason the company has the name it has.

Why it feels like home

Three miles of street, a harbor full of boats, a monument on the hill and a national park wrapped around the outside of it. Provincetown is a genuinely odd and genuinely lovely place to live, and an interesting one to work in. We are glad to be here — ZIP code 02657, the end of the line, and no complaints about it.