How to Cook a Moose (6 page)

Then I went over for a class at the nearby Springboard Pilates studio, which in those days was in the high-ceilinged, bay-windowed parlor-floor rooms of a lovely, solid nineteenth-century house. The mats and machines sat on old wood floors next to carved fireplaces with ceramic hearths. My Pilates instructor, Meredith, was impressively strong, curvy, and beautiful, and had the same dark, punchy sense of humor that our contractors had; clearly, it was a Maine thing. She was constantly reminding me to breathe into my ribs, button my buttons, stay long and focused. I tried, but then she picked a piece of lint off my sock or cracked a joke about slutty hips or demonstrated a move I couldn't quite do, fluidly and gracefully, but with comments so funny I couldn't follow her because I was laughing too hard. I was sure laughter somehow strengthened the core, and it was a trick of hers to get me in better shape. Pilates is extremely difficult and complicated, especially if you do it right, which I couldn't do yet, not even close, but my hour was always up before I was even aware of the time, and then it was time to buy groceries and go back to the farmhouse.

The history of this city is one of constant erasure, change, and reinvention. Portland, Maine (Portland, Oregon, was named after it), covers almost seventy square miles, about a third of which is land and two-thirds, water. It sits on a hilly peninsula on Casco Bay on the Gulf of Maine and the Atlantic Ocean. The Abenaki, or Wabanaki,
tribe, who lived all over New England before any Europeans arrived, called the peninsula Machigonne. In 1623, an English naval captain named Christopher Levett tried to found a village here on six thousand acres granted him by King Charles I, which he proposed calling York, after his hometown. He left a settlement here of ten men in a stone house he'd built (I can only imagine what their life was like), then he went back to England and wrote a book about his new town called York, hoping to drum up money and other settlers, but apparently no one in England wanted to invest in or move to Machigonne. The ten men left behind vanished into the fog of the historical unknown. There's a fort named after Levett here, but little else.

Then, in 1633, just a decade later, a fishing village was established on Casco Bay. This was the first permanent settlement of Europeans on the peninsula. The town was called Casco at first by the fishermen who lived there, but it was renamed Falmouth in 1658 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who took control of Casco Bay (as they were fond of doing, forcibly, to various regions of Maine through the decades and centuries).

In 1676, the Wabanaki destroyed Falmouth in a raid. The village was rebuilt in 1678, and then it was destroyed again in the Battle of Fort Loyal by a combined army of French and Wabanaki. The town wasn't resettled until after the 1713 Treaty of Falmouth, which established peace with the Wabanaki. But then the settlement was demolished and burned yet again, in the Revolutionary War, when the British Navy bombarded it for nine straight hours on October 18, 1775, leaving three-quarters of the town in ashes.

The surviving citizens were, understandably, hell-bent on independence. In scrappy Maine fashion, they rebuilt the town and established it as a shipping port, and so it came to pass that, in 1786, it was given the name of Portland, which finally stuck.

Then disaster struck again: Portland's fledgling shipping economy almost collapsed twice—first in the Embargo Act of 1807, which prohibited trade with England, and then in the three-year War of 1812, when the British blockaded the Atlantic Coast.

In 1820, after suffering and withstanding the sovereign entitlement and greedy land claims of both Massachusetts from the south and the English Crown by sea for two hundred years, as well as brutal attacks from the northern armies of Canadians and Native Americans, Maine finally became an official state. Portland was the capital for just twelve years, then it moved to Augusta, where it has remained.

The “Maine Law,” otherwise known as Prohibition, was passed in 1851 in Maine, and shortly thereafter in eighteen other states. Portland became a hotbed of protest, especially among the immigrant Irish population of the city, who felt personally attacked by the law. The Rum Riot took place in 1855 against the mayor, Neal S. Dow, the “Napoleon of Temperance,” whose historically landmarked house, with its plaque bearing Dow's name, is near Longfellow Square on Congress Street, right around the corner from our house and next door to a 7-Eleven.

Dow was rumored to have stockpiled a shipment of $1,600 worth of booze. He had, in fact, arranged for the shipment for pharmacists and doctors, since liquor was permitted under the law only for “medicinal and mechanical” purposes, but this fact wasn't widely reported. A mob of a few thousand protestors gathered; one man was killed by the militia in the ensuing violence, and seven others were injured. Dow was later prosecuted in court when his own alderman sued him for not having properly authorized the shipment. Dow was acquitted, but, largely because of the Rum Riot and the lawsuit, the Maine Law was repealed in 1856.

Meanwhile, Portland's economy had rebounded from the embargo and war. The Grand Trunk Railway was built in 1853, which made Portland the primary ice-free winter seaport for Canadian exports,
which lasted until the hub moved north to Nova Scotia in 1923, and the invention of icebreakers. The town was booming.

Then came the Great Fire of 1866, which was ignited during Independence Day celebrations on the first Fourth of July after the Civil War. A firecracker or cigar ash ignited a building on Commercial Street and it spread to a lumberyard, then a sugarhouse, and then throughout the town. It finally burned out up on Munjoy Hill. Only two people were killed, but most of the commercial buildings, hundreds of houses, and half the churches of Portland were destroyed, 1,800 buildings in all, and 10,000 people were made homeless. Most of them took refuge in a tent city on Munjoy Hill on the East End, overlooking Casco Bay. (This area later turned into a working-class neighborhood that housed cannery workers; these days, as things always seem to go, it's the most hip, happening, desirable neighborhood in town.)

An old photograph of Portland taken just after the fire shows ashy rubble and drifting smoke. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was from Portland, wrote, “Desolation! Desolation! Desolation! It reminds me of Pompeii, that sepult city.” But once again, the town was rebuilt, this time, luckily, with brick. The Cumberland and Oxford Canal was built in 1932 to allow commercial shipping inland to Sebago Lake and Long Lake. During the ensuing building boom, which lasted through the 1930s, mansions sprang up on the West End, designed in grand style by famous nineteenth-century architects, most notably John Calvin Stevens: Federal, Queen Anne, Victorian, Romanesque, Gothic. The West End is now a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood of meticulously preserved and renovated houses on wide, clean streets, many of which, ours included, have been split up into apartments and condos.

When the Maine Mall was built in South Portland in the 1970s, downtown Portland and the Old Port fell into decline and abandonment.
Businesses closed; Congress Street was shuttered and vacant. But then, in yet another reversal of fortune, thanks to a combination of the city's architectural preservation laws and the Maine College of Art, which opened in the 1990s, the peninsula boomed again with restaurants and businesses and shops. And now, downtown Portland is alive and well, full of tourists, locals, and students.

The population of Portland proper is just over 65,000; the “greater Portland area” has about half a million people, which is more than a third of Maine's total population. (What a vast and empty state, stretching way up north to tuck into the sheltering wing, or armpit, maybe, of Canada.) Still, it feels very small. And yet, for such a small city, I'm amazed by its diversity and cultural life, the overall sophisticated excellence of its many restaurants, and by the pervasive feeling here of belonging to the greater world. Portland isn't a backwater, but it does have a marked sensibility, a collective tough-minded, resourceful fatalism appropriate to a city that's been, over the centuries, seized, bombarded, rebuilt, burned, rebuilt, economically sunk, deprived of booze, burned to the ground again, rebuilt, economically sunk again, and revived. The city motto is
Resurgam
, or “I Will Rise Again”; the city seal shows a phoenix rising, of course, from ashes.

It's an hour and fifteen minutes' drive, door to door, from the farmhouse through Maine to our house in Portland. The drive is entirely on small country roads through woods and tiny towns and farmland, past lakes and rivers, down from the mountains to the coast. Almost the only businesses we pass are old, unique—the Mediocre Deli, Kate's Bait and Tackle, an old 1950s diner in a brightly painted saltbox house, Smiling Hill Farm (which has a sign advertising Ice Cream Lunch). Even the gas stations look homey and singular. There
are almost no chains except Dunkin' Donuts, few fast-food franchises or signs of the present-day corporate ubiquity.

Driving into the city itself is a continuation of this cozy, time-warp landscape. When we first moved to Portland, it felt permanently 1987 here, in a good way. One discreet Starbucks tucked in the old brick downtown and the superstores hidden down on Marginal Way—Trader Joe's, Whole Foods—were almost the only indications of this new millennium. All the other coffee shops, bars, and restaurants, all the businesses, were what used to be known as mom-and-pop—run by the actual people who owned them.

The people likewise looked as if they'd been airlifted in a time ship from 1987. Almost everyone smoked. Skateboards and dreadlocks and piercings abounded, and almost everyone under forty-five was heavily tattooed. Men wore plain denim jeans and plaid shirts, sweatshirts, jean jackets, leather jackets, and Nikes. Women wore leggings, denim skirts, vintage dresses with boots. In the bars, there was a sense of unforced, easy warmth; people here all seemed to know one another. When someone came in, he or she was greeted by one or more of the big, friendly groups gathered hugger-mugger around small tables.

It struck me right away as the kind of place that sneaks up on you. Or maybe it's a self-selecting town where the people who move here all seem to really want to be here; I've never heard any resident say a negative thing about Portland. It's all passionately understated joy with an undertone that says, “We get it.” If you're not Portland's type, it lets you move on down the road without a twinge. If you are its type, it gets its hooks in you so gently, so gradually, you don't know it until you find yourself as happy here as everyone else.

But it took a while for me, used to big-city attitudes and rapid-fire competitive one-upmanship and in-your-face, nosy, hotheaded aggression, to understand the dark, wry, wacky sense of humor and
the fierce but quiet work ethic of Mainers that is somehow never puritanical or self-righteous, as well as the lack of judgment, the mind-your-own-business attitude, and the fierce pride of place.

In 2011, the social posturing and intense, self-conscious attitudes of my old stomping ground, North Brooklyn, had not yet found their way this far north—not even close—and I hoped they never would, despite the fact that, as soon as we moved here, we were barraged by people telling us that “Portland is already over, it's too late, it's being ruined by hipsterization” . . . To which I could only say, you've never lived in North Brooklyn. But of course, places change. And Portland is catching on as a place people want to visit, and even move to. (The fact that I'm contributing to the trend has not escaped my notice.)

But so far, Portland is a haven from all that for me. In fact, having lived in both places, I have the strong impression and suspicion that hipster culture was borrowed from the north by early adopters who imported it to the urbanized south—from Alaska to Seattle, from Maine down to Brooklyn. That's the only explanation I can understand for all the current coastal-urban facial hair and plaid shirts and artisanal charcuterie and small-batch beer and hand-crafted jerky and flash-pickled ramps, fiddleheads, scapes . . . hipsters' yearning for authenticity and a return to the old ways is reflected in their imitation of the people who actually
do
wear those clothes and look like that, who actually do make these things, because they can't afford not to (plus, beards are warm). Mainers do it themselves because no one else is going to do it for them. They're not aware of being trendy; they're doing the best they can with what they have, according to the old ways.