Exploring 'P-Town'. Photo / Robin McKelvie
When Robin McKelvie takes his teenage daughter on a bonding trip to America, they’re braced for political tension and cultural clashes. What they discover is surprising and sweet.
As a father I always try to give my daughters answers. But this time I didn’t have any for 17-year-old Tara. “Will we be okay getting into America? What will it be like with Trump in charge?” These are the nervous questions on our way across the ocean to Boston. I’ve booked a daddy and daughter post-exam bonding trip, but I share the anxiety forged in Tara by a welter of alarming news stories and social media reels.
A breeze through Boston Logan eases our collective stress as does our server at Wood Hills Pier on the city’s revamped waterfront. “We love having visitors here, everyone is welcome despite what you might hear on the news,” he smiles, adding with a wink as we tuck into boat-fresh New England seafood, “Scots are especially welcome”. Tara is delighted.
Delight turns to intrigue the next morning at the Boston Tea Party Museum, where America’s independence struggle ignited. Today history bursts viscerally alive here and Tara tosses her chest of “tea” with relish into the harbour. At home she never wants to talk politics; here her synapses are popping: we later spend a whole dinner talking Scottish independence. A focused meeting of minds, the kind I always dream of having, but that just rarely seems to happen at home.
Our best Boston meal arrives at another historic site, Union Oyster House, the oldest restaurant in America, where manager Wes Hagan tells us: “Boston and New England have always been very open no matter what is happening elsewhere.” I tempt Tara into trying her first lobster roll, an old favourite of mine. Tara devours it, starting to hit her stride. Excitedly, she points out, “Look at that dad, JFK used to sit at the table opposite.”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President in my middle-age mind who represented the epitome of the American Dream, drifts with us out of Boston on the fast ferry the following morning to the Cape Cod National Seashore, which he helped set up in 1961. It’s the heart of Provincetown – an oasis so horizontally relaxed locals abbreviate it to P’Town. Rainbow flags billow like a sea of sails in the face of the divisiveness of modern America.
As we ease ashore we swap our shoes for sandals and grab a map, the “Queer Adventure Guide & Map to LGBTQ+ Provincetown” from the ferry. The Pilgrim Fathers, who were only saved from disaster on their first American landfall here in 1672 by the indigenous Wampanoag people, would be turning in their puritanical graves.
The first thing we encounter is the New York Store, half ice cream parlour, half cannabis dispensary. Those rainbow flags flutter in the balmy air of Commercial St. Its Kennedy-era clapperboard buildings may look like the streaming shows Tara rotates on Netflix, but this is gloriously a very different America than the one Tara is bombarded with on social media.
As we tuck into the sugary delights at ScottCakes, whose logo is “Legalise Gay Cupcakes”, Tara smiles and asks, “Are we the only straight people in Provincetown?”. It’s a fair question in this marvellously inclusive escape. I generally try to reinforce the inclusiveness Tara gets taught at home. It’s all good in theory and in the classroom; life-affirming to actually experience a whole community in the real world where people can be who they want to be without fear of judgement. It’s the antithesis of what Tara was fearing in America.
The last of our New England triumvirate is Salem, another fast ferry ride away from Boston. Tara is visibly growing in confidence now. She leads the way with Google Maps across town and picks the venue from TikTok for a spot-on lobster roll. By now her fourth.
Salem was Tara’s must-see, a semi-mythical small city for her that evokes myriad spooky books she’s read, one of her favourite TV shows (including a re-booted Sabrina the Teenage Witch), and the notorious witch trials. All this swirls into its world-famous Halloween celebrations in Tara’s teenage mind.
I wasn’t so keen on Salem, fearing a distasteful Disney-style Halloween money grab that hollows out the horror behind the society that murdered 20 innocent souls (a further five died in custody) mainly on the “spectral evidence” of teenagers and their parents with axes to grind.
At Salem Witch Museum my fears are allayed. It delves deep into horrors, horrors that in many way Salem has been paying penance for ever since. We chat to a guide, who is very keen to impress on us that “Salem shows that we must always be on the lookout for witch trials in every guise”. As we leave we see a “No Kings” anti-Trump rally poster, which leads us deeper and deeper into conversation about the guide’s words.
On our last evening we sail out through a misty Salem evening with Mahi Cruises. I ask Tara if she has enjoyed her time in America. She beams, “what do you reckon?”. That smile is back between us, the one so easily lost in a flurry of deadlines and distractions. A smile that should never ever be lost. A smile, the smile, the bond, that we’ve re-discovered together an ocean away from home.