The Green Line

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The artist Thomas Dubs (Zurich /Provincetown) wrote this short story in September 2010: When he arrived in Provincetown, he noticed two thick black lines painted on Commercial Street. He couldn’t figure out what they were doing there and thought that the lines looked like the heavy marks of a truck losing oil or, as a second idea, that a military tank coming back from the war in Iraq had driven through Provincetown.

Later Dubs learned from friends that the two black lines had once been green. Originally the Town of Provincetown had had the idea of painting a green line from Center Street to Howland Street to draw walking tourists to the East End, home to several galleries, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum PAAM.

Thomas Dubs—a native of Switzerland—wanted to write about this as an experiment in English. After some thought he came up with the idea of inventing a naive tourist, traveling through the USA with a dictionary and arriving in Provincetown by ferry from Boston to look for the Green Line.