How to Cook a Moose (7 page)

Even on the sidewalks, watching people walk, I see how unstudied they are, how idiosyncratic, as if the furthest thing from their minds is how they might appear to anyone watching. A simple thing: Everyone
walks naturally here, probably because they're all too busy thinking about what they're doing to worry about how they look.

In New York, I had a handful of favorite bars, among which were a hipster bar, a hotel bar, a secret bar, a neighborhood hangout, and a faraway bar. Like most people I knew, I felt possessive, passionate about, and proud to know these places. I felt the same about my friends in New York, who were just as carefully selected and highly cherished. Instead of a group of them, I had individual close friends. I preferred to see them all alone, on “dates,” so we could hunker down face-to-face and really talk. And so, drinking in bars was, for many years, a nighttime, one-on-one thing for me, in a favorite place with a favorite friend.

And now, once we'd moved to Portland, it still was, but only because Brendan was the only person I knew in town. During our first winter here, we spent a lot of time alone together in a place around the corner from us; it was big and airy but cozy, full of couches and comfortable tables, with an open kitchen in the back and a full menu. It was comforting to have other people around us, thronging the couches and tables, greeting one another, but we had yet to find a tribe of our own, or even a friend. Luckily, we loved each other's company, because that was all we had for months.

Finally, in early May, a Brooklyn novelist friend who was temporarily homeless came to live with us for a few weeks. She took stock of our sorry lack of a social life and intervened.

“You need friends,” she said. “I'll introduce you to my writer friend Ron and his girlfriend, Lisa.”

I've always been slightly leery of other writers, as well as friends of friends. I'm afraid they'll be competitive and/or standoffish, and that I
won't like them as much as I should. But I couldn't afford to be leery of meeting anyone right now. In fact, I leapt at her offer like a hungry dog catching a thrown tidbit.

The next night, while Brendan was out of town, she and I met Ron and Lisa at the place around the corner. I liked them instantly. Ron was a novelist and Lisa worked in local politics; they both grew up in a small town north of Portland called Waterville. They were friendly, charming, low-key, smart, and (it must be said) extremely good-looking. The four of us chattered the night away.

Happy as I was to meet them, they were her friends, not mine. And then, after she went back to Brooklyn, Brendan and I spent most of the summer in the White Mountains, writing in his family's farmhouse, while contractors banged and sanded away in our Portland house.

So that might have been that. But in September, when we were back in town, we got an e-mail from Ron, inviting us to come and meet some of Portland's other writers at a bar called Sonny's. Improbably, this was to take place on a Wednesday at the astonishingly early hour of five p.m.

When I lived in New York, I rarely met anyone for a drink earlier than seven-thirty (except, of course, for brunch dates). Dinnertime was generally around ten p.m., so to me, five was arguably still lunchtime. Nonetheless, we accepted Ron's invitation with gladness in our hearts.

When Wednesday came around, I closed my laptop at four-thirty and walked downtown to Brendan's café and picked him up from “work.” We walked together around the corner to Sonny's, which is housed in the former Portland Savings Bank, a high-ceilinged antebellum building on Exchange Street in the Old Port, tucked into a corner of Tommy's Pocket Park, a tiny European-feeling square where street musicians congregate on benches under the old trees.

It was still light out. Tree leaves rustled in an ocean-scented wind. Seagulls shrieked on updrafts above mansard roofs. The brick of downtown glowed in the sunlight. It felt far too early, too nice out, to duck into a dark bar.

Then, through the plate-glass window in front, we caught sight of Ron with some other people at a big table. He saw us, too, and waved. In we went, feeling half-shy.

We entered through red velvet curtains into a foyer that wouldn't have been out of place in a Victorian bordello, which I mean in a good way: brocade fainting couch, low-hanging fringed lamps. The bar had exposed brick, vaulted ceilings, tile floors, stained-glass windows. The booths and tables were clearly designed to blend in and look as if they'd been there forever. There was an old bank-vault door high over the bar.

That first Sonny's night, in addition to Ron, we were joined by two female novelists, two guys who ran the local indie bookstore, as well as an old friend of Ron's from Waterville. We sat around that table until after eighty-thirty. (We would come to appreciate that in Portland, this is late, just as we'd come to appreciate getting home by nine p.m. after a big night out on the town.)

Throughout the fall and following winter, Wednesday night at Sonny's turned into a semi-regular thing. More writers and their spouses were folded in. One night, so many of us showed up that we took over the long table in the back room.

Several years later, Sonny's nights have become a social regularity. We all generally have two or maybe even three drinks over the course of an evening, enough to relax us but not enough to send us off our rockers. We're a warm, convivial, cheery bunch. We laugh a lot and have much to discuss. And this is New England: We create zero psychodrama—no contentious spats or pissing contests, no factions, backbiting, or bitchiness. We talk shop, commiserate over hardships and
setbacks and struggles, congratulate one another on books begun, finished, published, or good reviews, prizes won, and plum assignments.

And the thing about Sonny's itself, and our group of friends in Portland, is that we didn't choose them. They happened to us, just as we happened to them. But we couldn't have chosen a better bar or better people. Sometimes life is just lucky that way.

Our meetings have expanded to cocktail parties at our various houses, smaller dinner parties, individual friendships, and—gasp—occasional meetings at other bars in town. But Sonny's is still the writers' bar of Portland, Maine. And it's always a Sonny's night in my mind when we all get together, wherever we are.

Buckwheat Blini with Crème Fraîche and Salmon Roe

Acadians in northern Maine and Canada have a long tradition of eating crepe-like buckwheat pancakes called
ployes.
Every Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day, I make blini for breakfast. I use Acadian buckwheat flour fine-milled by Bouchard Family Farms in Acadia, all the salmon roe I can afford to buy from Browne's Trading Company on Commercial Street in Portland, and thick, buttery crème fraîche that comes in a little pink tub. I serve these crepes with mimosas made of cava and blood-orange juice. They are festive and delicious, filling but light, the perfect kickoff to a day of occasional eating, and a tip of the hat to Maine tradition.

2/3 cup buckwheat flour

1/3 cup gluten-free baking flour

1/4 tsp baking soda

1 tsp sugar

1 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups buttermilk

2 egg yolks

2 egg whites, beaten till stiff

1 T melted butter

Combine the dry ingredients and mix well. Add the buttermilk and egg yolks and stir until it's a smooth batter. Fold in the egg whites, then stir in the melted butter.

Drop spoonfuls of batter into very hot butter in a skillet to make small, thick, round pancakes. As soon as you drop the dough in, turn the heat down to low and let the pancakes sit until they bubble on top, then turn and cook them till browned. Slather crème fraîche on top and garnish with plenty of salmon roe and chopped chives. Serve them 3 to a plate.

Serves 4, with a few blini left over for snacking on later with cheese.

One day, on our way back to the farmhouse, we stopped in at the Portland Whole Foods for a week's worth of groceries. At the checkout, I said jokingly to the cashier, “Did you notice how healthy our food is?”

Instead of joining my self-mocking incredulousness at the heap of organic produce, the organic free-range eggs, the organic red rice and gluten-free organic pasta and organic steel-cut gluten-free oats, locally caught monkfish, free-range bison, organic free-range chicken thighs, and so forth, he said earnestly, “Oh my God, yes—doesn't it feel good to buy a bunch of food like this and go home and eat it?”

Caught off guard by his fervor, I laughed.

“Yes,” I admitted, “it does.”

The same cognitive dissonance I feel on those beautiful, pristine mornings in New Hampshire, when my thoughts turn to dire environmental crises, also intrudes naturally into every decision I make about food. Food is not a simple thing. Deciding what to eat carries implications that go far beyond our own mouths and stomachs. Grocery shopping
has become possibly more powerful than voting. And I am resolutely, unquestioningly nonjudgmental in almost all things, except other people's shopping carts. I can't help it. When I see a conveyer belt heading for the cashier loaded with individual plastic-wrapped, high fructose corn syrup–laden, GMO-heavy, processed, corporate-stamped dreck, I blanch like a Victorian maiden aunt whose niece is running out of the house in rouge and a plunging neckline. “There goes the world,” I gasp to myself with the hand-fluttering futility of the overly well-informed first-world consumer.

I'm not judging the people—just the terrible food, and the corporations that make it, and the political systems that give them so much power.

Even now, good, healthful food is scarce for many; money is tight; the environment is degraded and changing fast; sea levels are rising and the oceans are acidifying and warming and polluted with plastic and emptied of life by wide-scale dragnet fishing. Agribusiness pollutes the earth with pesticides and herbicides; Monsanto's genetically modified monocrops crowd out diversity and threaten organic farmers. Likely because of the widespread use of industrial-strength agricultural pesticides, bee colonies are dying out, which threatens food production, since much of the produce we eat depends on bees for pollination. It takes a hell of a lot of oil and gas to fuel the trucks and ships that transport great quantities of food vast distances, around the globe. And so on, and so on.

As catastrophe appears to loom ever closer, and in many ways feels as if it's already arrived, the question I keep coming back to time and again, the one I find myself wrestling with constantly, is: How should we eat in such a world? And
what
should we eat? For example, I try to buy so-called sustainable and non-threatened wild-caught fish—monkfish, mackerel, sardines, Alaskan salmon—but who knows if they're really okay, given the state of the oceans? It's terrible that something as
simple as buying fresh fish has become so fraught, but there it is. Farmed salmon? Full of PCBs. Tuna, swordfish? Loaded with mercury, and endangered. Sea bass? Endangered. Haddock, hake, cod? Overfished. What the hell? Who knows if anything is okay anymore? And who knows how much longer our infrastructure can sustain such luxury and impracticality?