Introduction to Wellfleet

42 miles NE of Sandwich; 14 miles S of Provincetown

Wellfleet -- with the well-tended look of a classic New England village -- is the favored destination of artists, writers, off-duty psychiatrists, and other contemplative types. Distinguished literati such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edmund Wilson put the rural village on the map in the 1920s, when Provincetown's bohemian heyday was fading. In her brief and tumultuous tenure as Wilson's wife, Mary McCarthy pilloried the pretensions of the summer population in her novel, A Charmed Life, but had to concede that the region possesses natural beauty: "steel-blue freshwater ponds and pine forests and mushrooms and white bluffs dropping to a strangely pebbled beach."

To this day, Wellfleet remains remarkably unspoiled. Once you depart from Route 6, commercialism is kept to a minimum, though the town boasts plenty of appealing shops -- including a number of distinguished galleries -- and a couple of excellent New American restaurants. It's hard to imagine any other community on the Cape supporting so sophisticated an undertaking as the Wellfleet Harbor Actors' Theatre, or hosting such a wholesome event as public square dancing on the Town Pier. And where else could you find, right next door to an outstanding nature preserve (the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary), a thriving drive-in movie theater?