Simply Scandinavian 19 T E M P L E S T P O R T L A N D 207 874 6768 SIMPLYSCANDINAVIAN.COM Portland’s best-kept secret for 20 years! Celebrate and Save Come visit, mention this ad, sign up for our private mailing list, and join our birthday club. Est. June 1998 Editorial Colin W. Sargent, Editor & Publisher 18 p o r t l a n d monthly magazine M y creative writing professor– from when I was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in An- napolis, Maryland–loves Maine. For many years, he rented Ragged Island every summer to catch the breezes off Harpswell. Wild with gulls and sea roses, Ragged Island is famous for having been the summer home of Edna St. Vincent Millay. But Dr. Al Lefcowitz was drawn by another magnetism. At dinner one night on the island a decade after I graduated, he told me his pet theory that the shore (and an island is rich with shore) draws people to its edge because the shore it- self is a decision between land and sea. It’s mystical. You can feel the lines of flux. That’s why so many people come to the shore to make decisions that are deeply important to their lives. It’s a place of romance, of two separate forces just barely touching. Shore–we come to propose to each other on bended knee here. On the flip side, I’ve seen people tossing their wedding rings into the surf. Smokers come to the shore to light up. Children come to the shore at the edge of growing up. Freud called dreams “sailing at night.” I like to think of the shore as the line of demarca- tion between wakefulness and dreams. Other imagery treats the shore as the line between life and death. When I was part of a squadron of Navy pilots, whenever we flew across the coast af- ter a long passage over water, we found our- selves “feet dry,” another way of saying we’d passed over ocean and were high above land. I can still hear my copilot radioing in our al- tered state: “Ah (crackle), this is Hotel Whis- key One Nine, feet dry at Angels Two.” (An- gels being altitude in thousands of feet.) The shore is why canoes and kayaks are so sensational. They’re silent and convey us from rockbound reality into…something else. Part of you is bobbing just below the surface. You’re floating into the world of the imagination. You’re at the shore of this issue right now. Can you hear the waves roaring? When you start to read, you’re pushing off from the shore. n Shore jesse stenbak