Cashing Your Reality Check
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When our Portland Magazine headquarters were at the top of Forest Avenue, I received a telephone call asking for directions to our office. “Oh!” I said breezily. “We’re just steps from Congress Square, near the landmark Hay Building and the Charles Shipman Payson Wing of the Portland Museum of Art, designed by the firm of I.M. Pei.” Or some such Dolby-coated nonsense.
It was as if the phone went dead.
“Yeah, yeah,” the voice on the other end finally said. “Can you just tell me, how close are you guys to Bombshell Tattoo?”
Zah! There it was, the reality check, the sand in the clam that keeps Mainers grounded and real. Every single one of us treasures a different set of landmarks.
Just yesterday, I was headed for a bank branch I wasn’t accustomed to using. I asked my own branch of the same bank, “Where is this other branch, exactly? Is it opposite the beautiful Baxter Woods on Forest Avenue?”
“I don’t know about any Baxter Woods,” the teller shrugged. “But the branch I’m sending you is right next to the RSVP.”
“Oh, the liquor store!” I laughed. “Yes, I guess it’s best to get first things first.”
And then it hit me. The most lyrical spots in Maine are all the more beautiful because of the hardscrabble landmarks next door that ground us. As the screenwriters say, “The lower the lows, the higher the highs.”
One of the most transforming water views in all of Rockland is the Rockland Dunkin’ Donuts. We have so much raw beauty in Maine, we can rip it off the roll and throw it away.
Maybe that’s why, in Humbolt’s Gift, the late Norman Mailer–who grew up spending summers in Bar Harbor–has a scene where he’s climbing Otter Cliffs in Acadia National Park. As he moves up the cliff, he compares the tufts of grass sprouting from clefts and hand-holds to pubic hair. Looking down, he says the black rocks below hiss like a gas-station floor. The lower the lows, the higher the highs.
So if you wake up and it’s raining this summer, or if there’s a blue-dungeon fog outside your window, more often than not, it’s a prelude to incredible beauty. The stink of bait around lobster boats in Cape Porpoise is like caviar as you look out to Goat Island Light and the Atlantic beyond. It’s real. It’s ugly-beautiful. You know, it’s a Maine thing.
Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher