Bourdain’s Field Notes
“It was here, all the way out at the tip of Cape Cod—Provincetown, Massachusetts—where the pilgrims first landed, and it was where I first landed. It was 1972, and I washed into a town with a headful of orange sunshine and a few friends. Provincetown was a wonderland of tolerance with a longtime tradition of accepting artists, writers, the badly behaved, the gay, the different. It was paradise.
I left Provincetown with restaurant experience, a suntan, and an ever deepening relationship with recreational drugs. I went to culinary school, then to New York City, and never returned. Today, however, I’m staying in Massachusetts, heading over to the western part of the state, one of the most beautiful areas of the country. There are gorgeous mill towns, Victorian houses, deeply felt, famously upright New England values. This is Norman Rockwell’s America, where something really inexplicable and unexpected has happened.