In “Provincetown,” Oliver turns her attentive gaze from forests and fields to the human community that has shaped her sense of home. Here, she finds that the same rules that applied to the natural world also apply to humans: The responsibilities of attention, the kinship that binds all living beings, and the discipline of living differently from the cultural mainstream. Provincetown becomes, in Oliver’s view, as wild and instructive a landscape as any she has encountered in the woods. Its people—rough-handed fishers, Portuguese families, women stirring soup in their kitchens—embody the same elemental truths Oliver finds in animals and weather. They, too, survive through instinct, labor, ritual, and resilience.

Oliver’s fishermen are especially emblematic of The Kinship of All Wild Things. Like the Great Horned Owl or the black bear, these men inhabit a life where risk is woven into daily existence. The ocean both provides and destroys, offering sustenance one morning and taking a boat the next. When a vessel is lost, the whole town grieves—a collective expression of the same recognition Oliver feels when she encounters a dead bird or a fallen tree. What makes this kinship distinct is its communal form: Grief is shared, loss is ritualized, and yet every dawn the fishermen return to the water. Their lives mirror the natural world’s mixture of beauty and terror.