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On this sea-drift sun, what can you do?
Portland was magnificent.
Somewhere I want credit for hauling myself out of bed on two hours' sleep for a drive up through several states and not even falling asleep in the car. I did fold the coats over into a pile in the back seat and fold myself over onto them. My brother kept glancing in the rear view mirror and pronouncing, "See? She's asleep?" at which point I would repeat back the last few lines of his conversation with his girlfriend and he would make aggrieved noises. It was great fun. All right, it's possible that I zoned out somewhere in northern New Hampshire, because I don't remember crossing the bridge into Maine at all. But other than that . . . (I am not a morning person.)
We arrived in the Portland area around eleven o'clock and promptly spent the next couple of hours at Two Lights State Park, one of the mainstays of our childhood summers. The rocks there are ancient seafloors raised up and folded over and broken across themselves, cut across with volcanic intrusions and weathered for millennia into slices and spars and huge slabs that the waves have cracked and filled up with tidepools, and the sea rushes in and booms white over them. When I tell stories that begin with a cold northern coast somewhere, Two Lights is what I'm thinking of. It also has the best clam shack on the planet, where we first tried to go for lunch around one o'clock, only to discover ninety-person lines and other tourist atrocities: so we got back in the car and drove about a mile over to Kettle Cove, where my brother and I always used to hunt crabs. It's a small sort of dent in the coastline, horned with the same dark rock as Two Lights, a shingleful of pebbles and mussel shell, and it's all overgrown with ankle-deep seaweed in slick, rust-and-verdigris mats that wash back and forth in high-tide waters and provide ample opportunity to slip and crack one's skull when the tide has gone out. Of course we looked for crabs and climbed out farther than we'd ever been allowed as children. And after about an hour, the lines back at Two Lights had calmed down enough for lunch, so we ate out on the clifftop on the same picnic benches that were there twenty years ago and, I swear, the same importunate seagulls. Not that I begrudge them. Truly, shrimp is the food of the gods, and perhaps Maine shrimp especially.
We went to Kettle Cove also to find stones or shells to put on my grandmother's grave. I don't know where the tradition comes from: I've always assumed it's a holdover from desert cairns, although my family explains it in terms of memories; like leaving remembrance. She's buried in Portland. I hadn't been there in three years, but the stones from last time were still there; no one moves them. We each left a stone for her. It's half convenience by now, half custom, but in our family they're always from the sea.
And we drove into Portland, around Casco Bay and over the bridge that I was amazed to see had finally been completed: between it and the Big Dig, I think as a child I assumed that municipal building projects were never, ever completed. There used to be Exchange Street, full of weird little stores that sell anything and everything. My grandmother would take me there in the afternoons and we rarely ever bought anything, but to window-shop for antique maps and china animals and space pens was enough. Now, in Old Port, what used to be the warehouse district, there's a whole four or five blocks of weird little stores that sell anything and everything, and naturally we wandered around. What I wish we'd taken photographs of was the China Sea Marine Trading Company at its new home on Fore Street, because it looks like Davy Jones' locker. Everything that a sunken ship might freight down to the bottom of the sea ended up in that shop: all crowded up with spyglasses and sextants and marlinspikes and rope-knots and divers' helmets and posters for extinct shipping lines and flintlocks and figureheads and old books and keys that don't unlock anything anymore . . . My brother was looking at the lanterns, because he was trying to replace the one in his room that was destroyed in last year's fire. (He didn't find one in this shop: as antiques, they were all out of his price range for the probability that something terrible would happen to them at school. So far his campus has had, each year, either flood or fire. We have an open pool on the likelihood of locusts.) I fell in love with the sea-green glass onion bottle in the front window: salvaged from a late seventeenth-century wreck in the Caribbean, and so swirled and crusted with old sand and bits of barnacle inside that it looked prismatic, iridescent, streaked like a wave breaking and cracked; full of dreams. It wasn't for sale, but the proprietor did consider selling it to me, until it turned out that the bottle couldn't be gotten out of the windowfront display—like a wreckage of the past; about the only thing I didn't see in there was a Jenny Haniver—without taking the whole thing apart. Alas. Whenever we go back to Portland, I'll visit it. I think some of my dreams are in there. I did take home a CD of Archie Fisher's; I owe Stan Rogers for his version of "The Witch of the Westmerelands," but I needed to hear the original.
So we had an hour or so to kill before dinner; there was some contemplation of the harbor, but instead we drove out to Portland Head Light. Both my brother and I remember that when our grandmother was alive, we were allowed up into the lighthouse itself; but either it was closed to the public that afternoon or our grandmother had connections, because this time there was no going inside. But we walked up and down the sea-cliff and took photographs of a nineteenth-century romantic sunset happening over the water, with granite-piled clouds and hazy apricot light and a tall ship in the distance alongside an oil tanker. Down a hollow in the cliffside, some ducks were swimming in from the open sea in a little flotilla, on the darkening waves. And a little ways out on a rock-scarp of an island was what looked like an old lighthouse, abandoned, lightless; we never found out what it had been. Dinner was further seafood: my brother is a fish and chips addict, but his girlfriend and I had lobster rolls. And we drove back in the darkness to the loudest and most head-banging music that he owns, for the sake of his not falling asleep and crashing us into a moose, and dropped his girlfriend off at the campground where she works, and got home around midnight. Everyone seems to be somewhat sunburned. It was undoubtedly, absolutely worth it.
And between the three of us, I think we took about a hundred and fifty photographs. My favorites are excerpted below. All bow to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
time_shark.
(Cut for metric tonnage of photography.)
When I talk about learning to swim off the coast of Maine, I don't mean here: my parents were not homicidal and it's probably against the law. I learned to swim at Kettle Cove and Crescent Beach, which as its name implies is a broad, gentle moon-swathe of dunes that slope down in flour-colored sand to the kind of slow, tumbling combers that seem to have come in for miles. I would wander up and down its shore and collect sand dollars, sea urchin shells, draperies of kelp that I tangled around my shoulders and tied my hair back with; it's a perfect beach for sea glass. But somewhere on the archetypal level, my ideal coastline still looks as jagged and sea-split and crashed-into as Two Lights. You can see time in the earth here. The sea throws itself over and over onto the stones and drags itself away and that too is time.
The tide was coming in, we think. When it's out, the whole landscape is salt-dry ledges and tidepools hollowed in by the water; it's an alien landscape, except that it feels so much like home.
My brother, intrepid mountaineer.
I have dreams about landscapes raked this sharply: climbing endlessly into the sky. One of them made it into "Kouros." For that matter, "Till Human Voices Wake Us" takes place at Two Lights. But the brother in that story is not mine.
This was much less suicidal than it looks. The rocks are so weather-worn, there are handholds everywhere. I like how the sun lightens through the cresting waves.
As a child, I should properly have been inspired to become a geologist, so that I could tell the history of Two Lights from these stonescapes—mostly I just wanted to climb on them. I have no idea who the person in this picture is.
I'm reliably informed that any number of visitors to the park believe they're looking at petrified wood. When trees ruled the earth . . .
A sentinel seagull.
There's surprisingly little graffiti around Two Lights, given all the enticing flat surfaces of stone. Maybe park officials crack down on it; maybe things out of the sea come and get you if you deface their ancestral sacred space. But here's some from 1932 . . .
. . . and some from even earlier.
In which I photograph tidepools.
I didn't know my brother had taken this one until we downloaded the pictures. I had looked, he said—and his girlfriend agreed—like I was waiting for my lover to come back out of the sea.
"For some have eyes to see strange sights / And such a one I be, / But I ain't known as an honest man, / And nobody harks to me . . ."
Kettle Cove, where a host of small children were looking for crabs just as my brother and I used to. The place was always swarming with them—in the shadows of seaweed, underneath mussel-encrusted rocks, sidling through sun-struck reflections and we would hunt them through the tidepools as far out as we were allowed, before the rocks dropped away and there was just weed and water underfoot; riptides, kraken, God knew what. I seem to have commemorated the event with bladderwrack. I think it came out rather well.
The fearless crab hunters.
The first crab we came up with was thumbnail-sized and olive-stone green. Then my brother spotted a more impressive specimen and spent five minutes with his hiking boots on, wading through sea-wrack to the ankles to fish it up out of its pool. (I'd left my shoes in the car and rolled up my corduroys to create the world's worst knee-breeches, which I wore into Portland before I remembered and rolled them down.) How do I know his girlfriend is a good match? She didn't even eye us like lunatics. Strike through the mask!
"I pinch."
Sadly, because the whole point of the photograph was me with the crab, the crustacean is out of shot. Everyone else in my family seems to like this picture.
I loved these tidepools. They are miniature worlds.
My brother's girlfriend and Kettle Cove.
Me and Kettle Cove.
In Portland. If a lobster says it, it must be true.
The gulls are watching us. Soul birds, one and all. Perhaps he did come back from the sea.
Our first sight of Portland Head Light.
My brother took a panoramic view, which does not reproduce on my computer. I think I took a postcard.
The lighthouse as the sunlight dies.
It doesn't come out particularly well in this photograph, but this is the kind of light that amazes me.
I don't know the story of the Annie C. Maguire. But it is not unremembered.
Clouds over the sea and nightfall. The dark speck down to the left is the abandoned lighthouse, if that's what it was.
"Sleep is a river flows on forever / And for your boatman choose old John of Dreams . . ."
Our last look at the lighthouse.
If a couple could be fined for cute . . .
It was a really, really good day.
Somewhere I want credit for hauling myself out of bed on two hours' sleep for a drive up through several states and not even falling asleep in the car. I did fold the coats over into a pile in the back seat and fold myself over onto them. My brother kept glancing in the rear view mirror and pronouncing, "See? She's asleep?" at which point I would repeat back the last few lines of his conversation with his girlfriend and he would make aggrieved noises. It was great fun. All right, it's possible that I zoned out somewhere in northern New Hampshire, because I don't remember crossing the bridge into Maine at all. But other than that . . . (I am not a morning person.)
We arrived in the Portland area around eleven o'clock and promptly spent the next couple of hours at Two Lights State Park, one of the mainstays of our childhood summers. The rocks there are ancient seafloors raised up and folded over and broken across themselves, cut across with volcanic intrusions and weathered for millennia into slices and spars and huge slabs that the waves have cracked and filled up with tidepools, and the sea rushes in and booms white over them. When I tell stories that begin with a cold northern coast somewhere, Two Lights is what I'm thinking of. It also has the best clam shack on the planet, where we first tried to go for lunch around one o'clock, only to discover ninety-person lines and other tourist atrocities: so we got back in the car and drove about a mile over to Kettle Cove, where my brother and I always used to hunt crabs. It's a small sort of dent in the coastline, horned with the same dark rock as Two Lights, a shingleful of pebbles and mussel shell, and it's all overgrown with ankle-deep seaweed in slick, rust-and-verdigris mats that wash back and forth in high-tide waters and provide ample opportunity to slip and crack one's skull when the tide has gone out. Of course we looked for crabs and climbed out farther than we'd ever been allowed as children. And after about an hour, the lines back at Two Lights had calmed down enough for lunch, so we ate out on the clifftop on the same picnic benches that were there twenty years ago and, I swear, the same importunate seagulls. Not that I begrudge them. Truly, shrimp is the food of the gods, and perhaps Maine shrimp especially.
We went to Kettle Cove also to find stones or shells to put on my grandmother's grave. I don't know where the tradition comes from: I've always assumed it's a holdover from desert cairns, although my family explains it in terms of memories; like leaving remembrance. She's buried in Portland. I hadn't been there in three years, but the stones from last time were still there; no one moves them. We each left a stone for her. It's half convenience by now, half custom, but in our family they're always from the sea.
And we drove into Portland, around Casco Bay and over the bridge that I was amazed to see had finally been completed: between it and the Big Dig, I think as a child I assumed that municipal building projects were never, ever completed. There used to be Exchange Street, full of weird little stores that sell anything and everything. My grandmother would take me there in the afternoons and we rarely ever bought anything, but to window-shop for antique maps and china animals and space pens was enough. Now, in Old Port, what used to be the warehouse district, there's a whole four or five blocks of weird little stores that sell anything and everything, and naturally we wandered around. What I wish we'd taken photographs of was the China Sea Marine Trading Company at its new home on Fore Street, because it looks like Davy Jones' locker. Everything that a sunken ship might freight down to the bottom of the sea ended up in that shop: all crowded up with spyglasses and sextants and marlinspikes and rope-knots and divers' helmets and posters for extinct shipping lines and flintlocks and figureheads and old books and keys that don't unlock anything anymore . . . My brother was looking at the lanterns, because he was trying to replace the one in his room that was destroyed in last year's fire. (He didn't find one in this shop: as antiques, they were all out of his price range for the probability that something terrible would happen to them at school. So far his campus has had, each year, either flood or fire. We have an open pool on the likelihood of locusts.) I fell in love with the sea-green glass onion bottle in the front window: salvaged from a late seventeenth-century wreck in the Caribbean, and so swirled and crusted with old sand and bits of barnacle inside that it looked prismatic, iridescent, streaked like a wave breaking and cracked; full of dreams. It wasn't for sale, but the proprietor did consider selling it to me, until it turned out that the bottle couldn't be gotten out of the windowfront display—like a wreckage of the past; about the only thing I didn't see in there was a Jenny Haniver—without taking the whole thing apart. Alas. Whenever we go back to Portland, I'll visit it. I think some of my dreams are in there. I did take home a CD of Archie Fisher's; I owe Stan Rogers for his version of "The Witch of the Westmerelands," but I needed to hear the original.
So we had an hour or so to kill before dinner; there was some contemplation of the harbor, but instead we drove out to Portland Head Light. Both my brother and I remember that when our grandmother was alive, we were allowed up into the lighthouse itself; but either it was closed to the public that afternoon or our grandmother had connections, because this time there was no going inside. But we walked up and down the sea-cliff and took photographs of a nineteenth-century romantic sunset happening over the water, with granite-piled clouds and hazy apricot light and a tall ship in the distance alongside an oil tanker. Down a hollow in the cliffside, some ducks were swimming in from the open sea in a little flotilla, on the darkening waves. And a little ways out on a rock-scarp of an island was what looked like an old lighthouse, abandoned, lightless; we never found out what it had been. Dinner was further seafood: my brother is a fish and chips addict, but his girlfriend and I had lobster rolls. And we drove back in the darkness to the loudest and most head-banging music that he owns, for the sake of his not falling asleep and crashing us into a moose, and dropped his girlfriend off at the campground where she works, and got home around midnight. Everyone seems to be somewhat sunburned. It was undoubtedly, absolutely worth it.
And between the three of us, I think we took about a hundred and fifty photographs. My favorites are excerpted below. All bow to
time_shark.(Cut for metric tonnage of photography.)
When I talk about learning to swim off the coast of Maine, I don't mean here: my parents were not homicidal and it's probably against the law. I learned to swim at Kettle Cove and Crescent Beach, which as its name implies is a broad, gentle moon-swathe of dunes that slope down in flour-colored sand to the kind of slow, tumbling combers that seem to have come in for miles. I would wander up and down its shore and collect sand dollars, sea urchin shells, draperies of kelp that I tangled around my shoulders and tied my hair back with; it's a perfect beach for sea glass. But somewhere on the archetypal level, my ideal coastline still looks as jagged and sea-split and crashed-into as Two Lights. You can see time in the earth here. The sea throws itself over and over onto the stones and drags itself away and that too is time.
The tide was coming in, we think. When it's out, the whole landscape is salt-dry ledges and tidepools hollowed in by the water; it's an alien landscape, except that it feels so much like home.
My brother, intrepid mountaineer.
I have dreams about landscapes raked this sharply: climbing endlessly into the sky. One of them made it into "Kouros." For that matter, "Till Human Voices Wake Us" takes place at Two Lights. But the brother in that story is not mine.
This was much less suicidal than it looks. The rocks are so weather-worn, there are handholds everywhere. I like how the sun lightens through the cresting waves.
As a child, I should properly have been inspired to become a geologist, so that I could tell the history of Two Lights from these stonescapes—mostly I just wanted to climb on them. I have no idea who the person in this picture is.
I'm reliably informed that any number of visitors to the park believe they're looking at petrified wood. When trees ruled the earth . . .
A sentinel seagull.
There's surprisingly little graffiti around Two Lights, given all the enticing flat surfaces of stone. Maybe park officials crack down on it; maybe things out of the sea come and get you if you deface their ancestral sacred space. But here's some from 1932 . . .
. . . and some from even earlier.
In which I photograph tidepools.
I didn't know my brother had taken this one until we downloaded the pictures. I had looked, he said—and his girlfriend agreed—like I was waiting for my lover to come back out of the sea.
"For some have eyes to see strange sights / And such a one I be, / But I ain't known as an honest man, / And nobody harks to me . . ."
Kettle Cove, where a host of small children were looking for crabs just as my brother and I used to. The place was always swarming with them—in the shadows of seaweed, underneath mussel-encrusted rocks, sidling through sun-struck reflections and we would hunt them through the tidepools as far out as we were allowed, before the rocks dropped away and there was just weed and water underfoot; riptides, kraken, God knew what. I seem to have commemorated the event with bladderwrack. I think it came out rather well.
The fearless crab hunters.
The first crab we came up with was thumbnail-sized and olive-stone green. Then my brother spotted a more impressive specimen and spent five minutes with his hiking boots on, wading through sea-wrack to the ankles to fish it up out of its pool. (I'd left my shoes in the car and rolled up my corduroys to create the world's worst knee-breeches, which I wore into Portland before I remembered and rolled them down.) How do I know his girlfriend is a good match? She didn't even eye us like lunatics. Strike through the mask!
"I pinch."
Sadly, because the whole point of the photograph was me with the crab, the crustacean is out of shot. Everyone else in my family seems to like this picture.
I loved these tidepools. They are miniature worlds.
My brother's girlfriend and Kettle Cove.
Me and Kettle Cove.
In Portland. If a lobster says it, it must be true.
The gulls are watching us. Soul birds, one and all. Perhaps he did come back from the sea.
Our first sight of Portland Head Light.
My brother took a panoramic view, which does not reproduce on my computer. I think I took a postcard.
The lighthouse as the sunlight dies.
It doesn't come out particularly well in this photograph, but this is the kind of light that amazes me.
I don't know the story of the Annie C. Maguire. But it is not unremembered.
Clouds over the sea and nightfall. The dark speck down to the left is the abandoned lighthouse, if that's what it was.
"Sleep is a river flows on forever / And for your boatman choose old John of Dreams . . ."
Our last look at the lighthouse.
If a couple could be fined for cute . . .
It was a really, really good day.
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. . . That's tragic. You need to visit New England and remedy this.
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You should! I'm not so familiar with the Pacific coast.
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I am definitely an Ocean Person.
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That's lovely.
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Heh. Thanks.
I like rocks . . .
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Me, too. When I returned to Wisconsin from a trip to the Badlands and Yellowstone long ago, I discovered that I had taken several rolls of rock pictures with hardly a human to be found...a few antelope and geysers....
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Thanks. I can't take any credit for it; my brother takes good photographs.
there should be a story there.
The internet in all its mystery yields the following information:
Late on Christmas Eve in 1886, the three masted bark Annie C. Maguire struck the ledge at Portland Head. Keeper Joshua Strout, his son, wife, and volunteers rigged an ordinary ladder as a gangplank between the shore and the ledge the ship was heeled against. Captain O'Neil, the ship's master, his wife, two mates, and the nine man crew clambered onto the ledge and then to safety . The cause of the wreck is puzzling since visibility was not a problem. Members of the crew reported they "plainly saw Portland Light before the disaster and are unable to account for same."
There's still a story there.
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If that is Gordon Bok, yes; yes, I do.
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Perhaps it wasn't the lighthouse at all. Smugglers? Or better yet, will-o-wisps? Drowned souls mourning their lost lives?
Thanks for looking this up!
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It is. I'd missed it.
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The 19th century graffiti amazes me; I'm not sure why.
The tidepools really are miniature worlds; in some ways, they remind me of those gorgeous pictures of nebulas in space...
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I hope you have a wonderful time. Visit the beaches!
The 19th century graffiti amazes me; I'm not sure why.
I'm always amazed by the random details of people's lives that aren't necessarily what survives into history. Like the (by now famous example of the) eighteenth-century knuckledusters, or graffiti from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Everybody knows about classical marbles and the Age of Sail. The minutiae are often lost or forgotten. I don't know who those people were, who left their initials at Two Lights. But I like that I'm wondering about them.
oh brother
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I don't think anyone ever has. He'd probably be flattered.
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Thanks for sharing this wonderful day out.
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If you ever do scan them, though, I'd love to see them. When (and where) were you in Maine?
though you looked more to me as if you were about to turn into a cormorant and take wing...
Heh. Thank you. I like that . . .
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We have friends in Wellesley, and we've visited them a few times over the past - ooh, coming up for twenty years, I suppose. When we do, we hire a car for a week and go exploring. First time was up to Quebec and back through Maine, second time was Cape Cod, and then Acadia...
I like that . . .
Well, I wouldn't have told you if I hadn't been reasonably confident you wouldn't be insulted!
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Nice. I was only in Acadia once, when I was twelve or thirteen; I remember that we got up to watch the sun rise from the easternmost point of the United States, and of course it was raining . . .
Well, I wouldn't have told you if I hadn't been reasonably confident you wouldn't be insulted!
I'm very complimented!