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 time_shark.

(Cut for metric tonnage of photography.)
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