![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/colin08.jpg\" "\\"colin08\\"")
<\/a>Portland, we hardly know the North, South, East, and West of you.<\/p>\nAt the eastern extreme of our city on Jewell Island (next stop, London) is a circular enclosure called The Punch Bowl.<\/p>\n
Even when the sea is storming around it, inside the bowl it\u2019s as calm as the surface of a 10-foot-deep martini.<\/p>\n
Locals guard its secret carefully\u2013it\u2019s as rare as an oceanic lady slipper.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so funny\u2013people don\u2019t think of Jewell Island as Portland,\u201d but it\u2019s our easternmost boundary, a friend tells me in a hushed voice, as though he\u2019s the Deep Throat of the beautiful and exotic. \u201cThe Punch Bowl is big, tidal. It\u2019s way out there, magic, a whole different world. The water comes in and the water comes out and you\u2019ve got this circle out there. I\u2019m sorry I told you about it. If you\u2019re a yachtsman and you never come into the city, Portland is that<\/em>\u2013a beautiful, wild place,\u201d not the trendy bars of the Old Port.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a rum-soaked tradition that The Punch Bowl is precisely the spot where Captain Kidd hid his stash of gold coins. There\u2019s been talk about Kidd\u2019s lost fortune since his death in 1701\u2013long before the coastal defense observation towers were built at the periphery of our world during World War II.<\/p>\n Maybe the Kidd legend wound up out here because, like the coins, they\u2019re both at the end of the rainbow, part of the mythic \u2018You can\u2019t get there from here.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cSailing in from the east, you\u2019d think nobody lives in Portland,\u201d Deep Throat continues. \u201cOn Jewell, there are houses tangled and pulled apart by vines. In the fall, monarch butterflies pass through here on the way to Yucat\u00e1n.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s so much right in front of us, barely beyond our grasp. Why not discover ourselves while we\u2019re discovering summer? Maybe I\u2019ll see you east of Eden.<\/p>\n Summerguide 2012 Portland, we hardly know the North, South, East, and West of you. At the eastern extreme of our city on Jewell Island (next stop, London) is a circular enclosure called The Punch Bowl. Even when the sea is storming around it, inside the bowl it\u2019s as calm as the surface of a 10-foot-deep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-6054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor","tag-summerguide-2012"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6054"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14475,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6054\/revisions\/14475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"