Paraphrasing Mark Twain, the coldest winter I ever spent was Memorial Day weekend in Maine. Actually, make that the two coldest winters since I thought Memorial Day weekend at Lakewood Camps in 2015 was the coldest but Portland in 2021 brought all the elements to bear, and how. There was no nor’easter on that down east weekend, just ice. In Portland, you have ALL the rain, wind, and cold. Fun!
(cue scratchy old wildlife documentary film sound effects) As COVID-19 restrictions are loosened in New England, the Laskin fry emerge from captivity, looking to flee the home nest as fast as they possibly can . . . the tall one was released onto his beloved knoll, a full four weeks before actual campers will arrive at the happiest place on earth a.k.a. William Lawrence Camp, while the smaller one will emerge from her cocoon at Laurel Lake four weeks later.
Petey-drop-off necessitated a road trip to New Hampshire, and that’s close to Maine, and if you follow food you know that Portland is a big destination for that so plans were made for a nice weekend there with a high probability of some great eats.* But you know, I said to Bill, we should make sure that Izzy wants to do this with us, because the last thing you want on a long weekend is a sullen teenager who Does Not Want To Be There. Let the record show that I asked her, if we planned a weekend in Portland after dropping Petey off, would that be of interest? Yes! she said instantly, with no hesitation.
She lies. Like a freaking rug, she lies.
She also loves her brother more than pretty much anything else on the planet, although she readily acknowledges that if she wasn’t related to him, she’d hate him. But the pandemic has brought those two close, united in their affectionate disdain for their aged father and ridiculous mother. They created a goofy little club of brightness in the dark days of a full shutdown, remote learning, and general constraint. They are, you might even say, besties.
So as the day of Petey’s departure crept closer, enthusiasm for the plans rather waned. Until, the moment of departure at hand, a full-on demonstration of adolescence ensued, including a flood of tears and shouting and culminating with the cri de coeur that “I don’t want to go eat fucking fish in fucking Maine!” (Hope you enjoyed that show in the driveway, neighbors!)
Spoiler alert: she got over it, even if she did predict that it would just be hell. Portland would be hell, fish would be hell, parents would be hell. You should play Highway to Hell as you leave, said Petey, and Bill and I talked about all the ways we could make it even worse (talk in our fake Irish accents, spend the whole time in art museums, etc.). Thus began Izzy’s descent through the seven circles of vacation hell. There isn’t really any particular order but we might think that these circles include:
- Parents
- Hotels with parents.
- Museums. (With parents.)
- Eating a lot of interminable meals. (With parents.)
- Crap weather. (With parents.)
- Portland. (With parents.)
- Staying with parents in hotels and going to museums and eating a lot of interminable meals all during crap weather in Portland.
There are probably more but these serve for the moment. This weekend is going to be a barrel of laughs!(1)
Anyhoo, in Maine they call this month May-nuary because it can feel like that, and this was probably the crappiest Memorial Day weekend on record. I mean, at least at Lakewood Camps, the sun came out even if there was still snow in the shady places.
But if you travel with Bill Laskin, you have a traveling companion who is determined to take advantage of any slivers of not-crap weather in order to See the Sights. With a break in the rain before dinner our first night, we ventured to Fort Williams Park, home to the postcard-perfect Portland Head Light. If you like lighthouses, you have to go to Maine. There are several just in the harbor and they are all impossibly photogenic, perched as they usually are on some rocky bit, with waves crashing all about. Does anyone take a bad picture of a lighthouse? Not in Maine, I’d venture. Izzy and I are mesmerized by the surf on the rocky shore and declare that if we lived here we’d never get anything done because we’d just watch the sea all day. Surf on rocky shores is not hell, although too many lighthouses may be.
At dinner that evening we heard from Petey via text (forgot his laundry bag, sent a picture of a big refuse fire), and followed the Bruins’ winning ways. Not at all hellish – things are looking up!
You should generally trust Bill when he gets into full-on planning mode because he doesn’t (usually) steer you wrong. Spying another opening in the weather on Saturday morning, he proposes a 15-minute ferry ride to nearby Peaks Island, where there is some nice scenery and old World War Two-era artillery batteries to explore. Sounds a little hellish but what else does she have to do?
Now, Maine has a lot of coastline but so do a lot of states – but nobody does coastal defense like these people. At Fort Williams Park we came across the first of dozens of abandoned coastal gun placements, a huge early 20th c. battery, but there have been forts defending Casco Bay and the mouth of the Kennebec River since the 18th century. Things really got hopping in the 1850s and 60s when several forts were constructed or reinforced and now every island/cove/general outcropping has some remnant of a WW2 or earlier battery or bunker or something. Mostly they are vaguely ominous looking blocky concrete structures with slitty openings but some, like Fort Gorges on its own island in the harbor, are of the more symmetrical and elegant 19th c. variety. There are trees growing out of the top of that one, which soften it up a bit.
Suspicious lot, these Mainers, who did they think was coming all the way up here in the rain to get them anyway? Since the 1700s, they wanted no part of the British, the French, the Germans, heck even the Confederacy was considered a threat.(2) By the 1940s there were big guns all over the place as well as underwater minefields, as Casco Bay was mostly a naval anchorage during WW2. Sounds like catnip for German U-boats which hunted up and down the East Coast throughout the war. When you visit the Portland Head Light, you can read a memorial to the USS Eagle-56, a sub chaser that exploded and sank about nine miles off the coast, in late April, 1945. So late in the conflict! All the way up here in Maine! What would the Germans have done if they’d landed, imprison lobsters for their obvious Communist leanings? At any rate, even though there were known to be U-boats in the area, the Navy nevertheless determined that it was NOT an attack, rather that a boiler on the ship had exploded, causing her to break in two and sink, with a loss of 49 hands. Boiler shmoiler, said some of the survivors, that was a U-boat that torpedoed us, that was. For reasons that seem to be lost to the depths, it took until 2001 for the Navy to change its mind on the cause of this sinking, the first – and only – time it has overruled itself in such matters. Why is this important? Because there were still three survivors alive in 2001. And when your boat is torpedoed, you deserve at least a Purple Heart. A civilian dive team found the wreck in 2018, and guess what: the boilers were intact. The Eagle-56 rests at 300 feet in dark, cold water, her unused depth charges still in place, now considered an official war gravesight.(3)
But back to Peaks Island, which you can walk across and then through some woods in about half an hour, to find Battery Steele. Which you immediately realize has already been found by a lot of people, particularly modern graffiti artists. We’ve read that there is also WW2 era graffiti in the battery itself, so we are prepared with camera and flashlights but when we get there we find that it is REALLY big and REALLY dark and we don’t really feel like going very far down that long dark tunnel just to see that Joe Was Here in 1943. Still, the effect of the graffiti and the riot of greenery growing wild on the concrete, in the middle of the woods right near the rocky coast, is visually arresting.
Now you might think that a WW2-era gun battery is excitement enough but the real highlight on Peaks Island is the world-famous Umbrella Cover Museum. Yes, you read that correctly: this cabinet has just one type of curiosity: umbrella covers. Not umbrellas, just their, um, covers. The Director and Curator Nancy 3. Hoffman (you read that right, too) has obtained umbrella covers (“sheaths”) from all over the world, and in fact is the Guinness World Record holder for owning umbrella covers. People also send them to her now because she is famous for this collection, and she has them exhibited thematically: US States, Colleges and Universities, Art and the Umbrella Cover, Climate Change, and so on. When you go in, you become a CAPTIVE AUDIENCE to Ms. Hoffman’s well-developed presentation about her collection. You might play a game among the Plaids, trying to guess which one is from Scotland (you get a cocktail umbrella prize whether you are right or wrong). And if your group is deemed mature enough, she’ll let you look at the “racy” collection in the bathroom (leopard print and mesh) and the X-rated one (something to do with Freud, about which Bill asked later, “Did you get what was X-rated about that?” I did not.) Ms. Hoffman finishes with a flourish, donning an accordion and singing “Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella.”
I think I might like to live on Peaks Island, said Izzy, when we started walking around. I’m pretty sure that the Umbrella Cover Museum sealed the deal. Peaks Island: not a circle of hell.
We bring a good old Nor’easter with us back to the mainland, which settles in as we sit down at an outdoor table for an otherwise outstanding lunch. You might have bailed, but you would have been sorry, it was that good. Hellish, but not hell.
The rain in Maine falls everywhere, but if you are like just about everyone else there this weekend, you’ll head to LL Bean for something to do and you’ll be glad you did. From the trout pond to the one-of-only-two taxidermy’d bull moose with locked horns in North America to the vast and mesmerizing collection of fishing flies, you can really while away the hours at this outdoor-life mecca. Alas, there is no winter or ski gear out at this time of year but we do spy the Bean-ermobile (a giant Bean Boot shaped vehicle, much like the Weinermobile) and a whole lot of very lifelike animals. Everyone got something and Izzy loved it so clearly not a circle of hell.
We spend Sunday morning visiting with our friends Jim and Valerie, a lovely and un-hellish time, before joining the traffic parade back to Mass. Traffic from Maine to Mass: definitely one or more circles of hell.
What started shakily ended up . . . okay. Izzy emerged from her fiery trial stronger but with a burning impatience to get the heck out of here and off to the paradise known as Fleur de Lis Camp for Girls. We’ll have to come up with some other way to torment her in the fall.
*One way in which Portland did not disappoint was in the eats department, so here are some notes on that activity.
Duckfat: famous for fries cooked in, well, duckfat. How do you cheer up a grumpy teenager? Ask if she wants to go directly to poutine for lunch. Not a circle of hell.
Woodford Food and Beverage: local-ish, casual, kind of groovy, freshest mussels ever, dinner INSIDE a restaurant with excellent cocktails and occasional texts from the lost son – everyone is happy. Not a circle of hell.
The Porthole: one senses that they may have opened for post-covid business that morning. Turns out that crab is really really good in an omelet but these people don’t know jack about biscuits and gravy. Possibly a circle of hell.
The Honey Paw: the Korean fried chicken! The ramen! The Chinese fried bread! The hot toddy! The wind and cold!!!! Too cold to be a circle of hell.
Helm: finer dining with really lovely fish of all kinds and a rather amazing ice cream sandwich. But maybe a circle of hell because dinner and long and f’ing fish.
Tandem Bakery: only Bill went to obtain treats for Sunday morning so we can’t be absolutely sure but I think we all agree that no circle of hell could produce scones and biscuits and cookies like those, oh myyyyyy
