A bare-chested jogger holding a shirt in his hand ran in front of the rusty globe at the intersection of Franklin Arterial and Commercial Street.
Someone wearing a red lobster suit shuffled back and forth on the sidewalk on Commercial Street, occasionally waving in the general direction of people walking nearby.
A man in a white shirt put a bag in the backseat of an SUV near the entrance to a hotel.
A man walking a black lab spoke to another man pushing a child in a jogging stroller. Both men were wearing shorts.
2 pigeons and a gull were walking in the parking lot near Standard Baking Company, which was selling day-old Challah bread for $3 a loaf.
Day 2
A cop car on Congress Street flashed its lights, and then turned left onto Franklin Arterial.
Irish IRA was written in black spray paint on a dark yellow house at 28 Hampshire Street. The house next door had a “For Sale” sign from Sullivan Family Realty in the window.
An orange 3-speed bike was locked to a lamppost on Fore Street.
An African woman wearing a grey head covering walked past a sign on Park Avenue that said “Farmer's Market Today.”
A single container of Miyake Seafood Yakisoba cost 4.75 at the West End Deli.
Day 3
A white car with the license plate "MR LUNT" was parked on Moody Street.
The Portland Press Herald box at the corner of Moody and Munjoy was empty.
The Angela Adams vitrine on Congress at India had a display of umbrellas.
A bus without passengers crossed Franklin Arterial and headed up Congress Street toward the Eastern Prom.
A man in a jean jacket stopped to light a cigarette near Antoine's Formal Wear.
A TDBanknorth sign read 55 degrees.
A woman in a tan jacket reached up with her right hand to catch a key that was dropped to her from someone in a second floor window.
Day old ham and cheese croissants were half-price at Rosemont Market on Brighton Ave.
At my funeral, may the powers long forestall its occasion, I sincerely hope there to be an abundance of over-sized cubes of bright-orange, generic cheddar cheese, coupled with nearly transparent, essentially flavorless iceberg lettuce on offer; by special request, one could have it drowned in thousand island dressing.If those present were feasting upon piquant demi-canard confit (read: duck) coupled with a marvelous burgundy, audible groans of envy might emerge from the recently disembodied; imagine something like the indignation of the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
It might occur to attendees that they are enjoying themselves just a wee bit more than they ought to be. To prevent this, the idea would be to provide something to eat but also to make everyone there suffer for eating without me.Besides, when one contemplates other obvious examples of life-affirming activities, and the degree of their inappropriateness at a funeral, attendees should consider themselves lucky to be allowed any form of indulgence at all.
***
These, and other thoughts occurred to me out in the water on a particular Autumn morning when the offshore conditions in the Atlantic were such that most sea-going vessels were commanded to stay at harbor.Public beaches were closed to recreational access, and, for those who peruse such things, the figures from the NOAA weather buoys sent chills down the spine.Two compatriots and I arrived at the conclusion that this would be a fine occasion to ply our amateur surfing skills, and our pre-meeting phone conversation concluded with one of them cheerily intoning, “Hurricanes make for swell days.”
Here, a couple of caveats should be added.All of us had swum competitively at some point in our histories, and we’d all done a fair bit of surfing over the past couple of seasons.That said, the decision - in our considered analysis - didn’t cross over the threshold from asinine to suicidal.Second, while no one would deny the aquatic conditions that morning were certifiably hectic, the handful of professional-caliber surfers in Maine who were out probably never lost their cool, and if one regularly surfed Durban, South Africa, Mavericks, or Oahu, this might have been an average morning session. Suffice it to say that - for us - this was not the case nor any bit close to it.
Surfers refer to the main dish we were served that morning as a 'clean-up set.’After a concerted anaerobic effort, the three of us were positioned safely beyond the shore break sizing up the conditions when one of our troop, looking outward, simply yelled “Let’s go!” and started madly paddling toward the foreboding black lines growing on the horizon.Not even time for profanity.
I later recalled a very bad traffic accident I had been in, and remembered that at that moment - as I was watching headlights approach with terrifying inevitability - I could muster no string of inventive curses.I only said - in a plainspoken voice - “Oh no.”It adds insult to injury when, feeling the danger of great physical harm, one is reduced to monosyllabic babbling.It is also a clear indication that, in such situations, one is operating on the level of his or her most basic intuitions; more often than not, this is not good.
What the circumstances of a ‘clean-up set’ require is profoundly counter-intuitive; with a massive outside wave approaching, your only hope is to charge right at it, in order to get deep enough to pass over the wave before it breaks.Accomplish this and you’ll be lifted meters above sea-level by the rising wave and set back down as gently as a leaf settling onto the surface of a stream.Fail to get deep enough, and the quantum forces of a big breaking wave will spin you and your gear - some of which is rock hard and has sharp edges - like so many garments in an industrial washing machine.This serves to disorient you so severely that you have no sense of what direction is up, and holds you underwater for the entire length of a football field, allowing you ample time to wonder how much longer – hypothetically - you could keep holding your breath if you don’t make it to the surface soon.
I don’t know how big those waves were.
The lasting image I am left with was friend number two just a bit further out than myself, almost vertical as he paddled up the face of a wave on his ten-foot board, with several feet of green water both below the tail and above the nose of it.When I broke through the lip of the same wave just before it curled, both friends gave a barbaric yawp of victory on my behalf.As the wave closed out behind us moments later, coastal residents from Florida to Nova Scotia took note of its thundering resonance.
Emerging from the session, all of us appeared unscathed, despite minor kinks in the neck or shoulders, and the odd nick from a fin or sand abrasion from a quick tour of the bottom.Our tone of conversation was typically jovial and self-deprecating, which reinforced the illusion that nothing of note was different than on any other given ‘dawn patrol’ morning.It wasn’t until we were driving across the bridge back into Portland that something was amiss came to light.
I wasn’t hungry.
***
A bit more background will be useful here.First, I am hungry by disposition.Always, even immediately after finishing a wonderful meal.In the normal habit of conversation with other people, of course, I naturally commiserate when someone says something like ‘I’m stuffed,’ or ‘I couldn’t eat another bite,’ but in doing so I’m being entirely disingenuous - I could eat many more bites.In truth, if there were no danger of getting caught doing so, I would gladly finish everything remaining on the table, perhaps in the room.Apparently at the zenith of their affluence, feasting Romans were known to force themselves to regurgitate in order to have more stomach room for continuing on with the feast.Were it not for my concern that bile probably somewhat ruins the palate, I would consider theirs a reasonable course of action.
Secondly, surfers are never not hungry - logicians will quibble, but this is different than saying they ‘are always hungry.’ There are various theories to account for this, most invoking the level of physical exertion involved and some chalking it up to extra calories being consumed in cold water, but whatever the case, a surfer - particularly immediately post-session - who claims not to be hungry is being sarcastic, self-sacrifingly polite or is just plain mistaken about his or her own internal condition.And yet I couldn’t eat.
The restorative power of a couple of slices and a pint, which had been most welcome many times before, offered nothing for me on this day.Of the dozen venues—just among my personal favorites, regardless of the route I took —that I would pass by returning to the East End from Casco Bay Bridge, no culinary offering was desirable.Hours later, as the time neared for me to go to work, I told myself that I must eat something for energy, but nothing—not even God’s own nectar in the guise of a crème anglaise milkshake—sounded appealing.
***
The restaurant was busy that Saturday evening, and amid the banter of our guests I would occasionally overhear remarks about the storm, be it the size of the waves someone had seen that day, or damage to property that had been done.I carried steaming plates of food with my usual care, but felt a very unusual disconnect from the sensuous aromas rising from the dishes I delivered.Typically, when serving people dinner I think of them both as benefactors and as recipients of a great gift; namely, the food which they are being served and which I have the privilege to bring to them.These feelings are balanced by just a modicum of jealousy since, as explained above, I would almost always be delighted to devour what I carry.Having spent a decade in the industry, I’ve also told myself that were I not to feel that way about the food and serving it, it would be time to move on.However, this evening was different.For reasons unbeknownst to me, I had come to view eating in the abstract, had suddenly lost a sense of what this was all about, and with that had lost my appetite both for food and its ferrying.
As the evening wound down, my last table took their leave and I was cleaning up in back when one of the chefs stopped me and asked if I’d like to try an oyster.
“Okay,” I said, after pausing for a moment, “Thanks.”With skilled, smooth movements, he shucked the calcified shell and cut the oyster free.Providing himself one as well, he explained they had a few extra left from the order for the evening, and we both chomped them down at once.The sensation was visceral.Every detail of the morning’s experience came back in a rush; the North Atlantic had been rendered into edible - indeed delicious - bite-sized morsels.
Shortly after, the other chef joined us and more oysters were cracked open.These were one of several varieties of Damariscotta River oysters whose texture, salt, and mineral content placed them on par with some the most well-regarded in the world.Near the river-mouth were shell pilings a half-mile long, evidence of Native Americans reliance on oysters as a food source here for roughly the past two thousand years.Still more oysters were opened, and pieces of our table bread were passed around.
***
Apparently, a woman and her two children hand-picked these particular oysters in scuba gear earlier the same day.I visualized this as we ate, imagining being underwater at the very same moment that morning, getting buried by a breaker while this industrious trio was retrieving our delicacy from deep in the river.I also thought about the bread I was now greedily munching on, complimenting the oysters deliciously; we knew the bakers by name, their biographies, where they sourced their ingredients and the stories behind all of the reticulate connections.I mused that the ubiquity and directness of such connections and their nearness to the surface here must be in part what makes Portland a place to eat above most others.
If we make sense of our lives in story-form, we’re bound to care about the tales surrounding what sustains us.Narrative lifts food from filling to fulfilling.Though my fast had hardly been worthy of Mahatma Gandhi or Kafka’s hunger artist, it was the remembrance of this principle that brought me back down to earth.I noticed that the lingering aromas from the kitchen had once more assumed their full powers of seduction, and after I was handed an IPA - as if on cue - glasses clinked all around and someone simply said, “To life.”
