The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (18 page)

Most visitors to coastal Maine know it in the summer. In the nature of visitation, people show up in the season. The snow and ice are a bleak memory now on the long warm days of early summer, but it seems to me that to understand a place best, the visitor needs to see figures in a landscape in all seasons. Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. You see that the population is actually quite small, the roads are empty, some of the restaurants are closed, the houses of the summer people are dark, their driveways unplowed. But Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. Boats are repaired, traps fixed, nets mended. “I need the winter to rest my body,” my friend the lobsterman told me, speaking of how he suspended his lobstering in December and did not resume until April.

But his son, younger and stronger, was preparing, this week in early March, to set out his traps—eight hundred of them. His chosen area was 35 miles out to sea; with his stern man helping, he could bait and set one hundred traps a day. What I take to be heroic effort is an average day for men like him, and women too—it's not unusual to see a woman piloting a lobster boat and hauling traps.

I love talking to this man and his neighbors, because they are the enduring community of the Maine coast, making a living in the same fruitful and laborious way that people here always have. The coast was known to Europe from the earliest times. John Cabot claimed it for King Henry VII in 1497, Verrazano sailed “down east” in 1524, Captain Weymouth set foot here in 1605 and was rowed in a shallop up St. George's River, which he named. Charts made during these voyages were used by Europeans seeking fish. Indeed, as Bill Caldwell writes in
Islands of Maine: Where America Really Began,
fishermen from England, France, Spain, and Portugal were familiar with Maine's islands—so much so that by the early 1600s as many as three hundred foreign fishing vessels were working the waters off the Maine coast.

The Wawenock chief Samoset, who befriended the Pilgrims at Plymouth, was born a little way down the coast, at Pemaquid. (He knew English; some say he learned it from another Indian, who'd been kidnapped by English explorers.) Thoreau claimed that the wilderness of Maine was as wild as any on earth, and his
Maine Woods
(portions of which appeared in
The Atlantic
) is persuasive on that theme. I agree with Bill Caldwell that America began here, and it endures here in the same venerable way.

The landscape of the midcoast is summed up in the plangent lines that begin the poem “Renascence,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was born near here:

 

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked the other way,
And saw three islands in a bay.

 

Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial. These traits, deplored by some people “from away,” are the secret of their survival. I like these Mainers for their self-sufficiency; they are uncomplaining almost to a fault, indeed studied self-deprecation is the normal mode for such people, who superstitiously make a point of never boasting of a great catch. “Not bad” is passionate for a Maine lobsterman. They are renewed by a sustaining culture. My friend the lobsterman is also a volunteer fireman, as well as a trained (and unpaid) emergency medical responder. Onshore, whenever his pager summons him, he hops in his pickup truck and answers the call.

Late fall and winter is also a time when Mainers get creative. I know many painters, sculptors, and weavers who spend this time of year at their art. The expression
cottage industry
does not do justice to others' achievements in knitting, quilting, basket-weaving, bottling maple syrup. Many of these products are sold at the State of Maine Cheese Company on Route 1, halfway between Rockland and Camden. This modest but well-stocked cheese-maker sells cheese curd squeezed that same day, as well as seven-year-old sharp cheddar and a dozen other varieties.

Rockland, the commercial hub of midcoast Maine, was a blue-collar town originally based on shipbuilding and later on the fishing, granite, and lime industries. After Camden, just up the coast, became gentrified and prosperous, Rockland—with fishing in decline, and no longer an exporter of rocks—reinvented itself as a destination, with a world-class art museum, the Farnsworth (a showcase for three generations of Wyeths), and a renovated classic one-screen movie theater, the Strand, as well as good restaurants, bookshops, and a series of weekend summer festivals celebrating lobsters, blues, and boats.

Maine does not end at its coast. Its beauty is repeated in its islands, thousands of them if one also counts those rock ledges known locally as “knubbles”—small knobs—some of them supporting a tree or two. Traditionally many Maine islands were offshore depots for fishing and lobstering; some served as pastures for keeping cows, or for quarrying granite; lighthouses still stand on some of them. Some are privately owned, with summerhouses on them, and a look of defiant seclusion as though challenging John Donne's assertion that no man is an island. On the Maine coast, some men are islands.

Headed out with my friend that day to one of those granite islands topped by tall spruce trees, I asked him what he had been doing lately.

“Shrimpun,” he said.

He and his son had spent the past few weeks trapping and netting shrimp. It was a hard business at sea on those windy, freezing winter days, hard too because the shrimp have a short shelf life unless they're quickly shipped, peeled, and frozen. They are medium-sized. The catch is not huge. The price that week was 75 cents a pound. Not much, but never mind.

“Tasty?”

“Wicked tasty.”

FROM
The Hudson Review

 

D
EAR H
,

Victor Hugo put his readers on top of Notre Dame, asking them to imagine themselves as a bird sitting upon its towers in the late Middle Ages and looking down at the city spreading itself around them, the bridges and streets and palaces, spires and hovels and maybe the gallows too. But all I can do is put you up seven floors in our building on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet in Montparnasse, and with a view from our windows onto the functional Rue du Départ. Not a good view either, not really, or not entirely. In the morning, true, the metallic buildings of La Défense, way off to the west, do catch the pink of the sunrise. The Eiffel Tower is always there as well, more than a mile away but still close enough to look big, and on some nights it seems to go off like a sparkler, its lights popping red and gold as if it were shorting itself out. But there's another tower too, the fifty-odd stories of the Tour Montparnasse just across the street, and depending on where I stand it can entirely fill my window with its dull brown mass.

The view improves when I look down, turning my eyes to the esplanade that stretches between the Tour and the neighboring train station. There's a merry-go-round that rarely seems to attract a child, and a line stretching in front of the Parisian equivalent of the Times Square TKTS booth, buying discounted theater seats for that evening's shows. There's an ever-changing and yet never visibly used litter of construction materials—today it's huge wooden spools of black electric cables. Sometimes there's a group of break dancers, or balletic kick-boxers whose feet miss contact by one deliberate inch, and usually I can spot the three soldiers who perpetually patrol the square in berets and camouflage, two of them out front with automatic weapons and a third, usually older, walking ten yards behind them. In the dark of a winter morning they sometimes seem the only things moving out there, distinguishable not so much by their profile as by their pace, whose slow methodical steps don't appear to take them toward anything, not the bus stop or the taxi stand or the sliding doors of the Gare Montparnasse itself.

On Friday nights the roller-bladers gather on the esplanade toward ten, a cortege of maybe two thousand skaters marshaled by yellow-reflector-jacketed volunteers. Voices call, and as the sound echoes off the buildings it becomes a roar; then the swoosh of their wheels, and then something like silence. These moving packs aren't quite as big as they once were, but they're still exciting to watch, with the wild benign energy of a circus parade. I like being in the streets as they prepare to take off, and afterward make my own small loop through the
quartier.
There are dozens of restaurants here, few of them good—kebabs and crepes and cafés, chain steak joints and sushi shops, and now that it's warm out they all seem to have outdoor terraces, so loud and full and busy that you move down the sidewalk in a haze of secondhand smoke. It may now be banned inside restaurants and bars, but a lot of people here do still smoke, in a way that they don't anywhere in America, and sometimes I think that the sidewalks are made entirely of cigarettes and high heels, tap tap, puff puff. In passing another pedestrian you have to make sure you won't be accidentally jabbed by flame, and in fact other people's smoking has even made me lose sleep.

Not because I worry about their health—no, it's because the kids at the tough down-market club at the foot of the Tour Montparnasse come out for a drag at 4
A.M.
, and their voices can make the place seem as loud as day. The club empties for good around six, with a certain violence, and on most Sunday mornings I stand in the window with my first cup of coffee and watch the police cars come to pick up after a fistfight. The fights are short, brutal, and governed by a strict code. The club's bouncers won't let anything happen in the doorway, so the kids move a few yards down the street and begin; the police, in turn, are careful not to arrive until it's over. I suppose it could be worse—its American equivalent would probably feature knives and guns. But a boot can do a lot of damage, and most weekends there's an ambulance too.

In all this, I suppose, the area is only being true to its own past. I've been reading a lot about the history of Paris on this sabbatical year, and with special attention to Eric Hazan's account of the city's neighborhoods in
The Invention of Paris,
and one of the things I've learned is that in the later eighteenth century the barrier wall at which taxes were levied on goods coming into Paris ran along what's now the Boulevard Edgar Quinet. The tollgate was just a block away from our building, at the boulevard's intersection with the Rue de la Gaîté. Wine was heavily taxed as it crossed into what was then the city proper, but people could move back and forth for free. So the area just outside the wall became a nightspot, where one could drink on the cheap, and Hazan suggests that the ghost of the tax barrier endures today in the honky-tonk life of the Rue de la Gaité in particular, with its vaudeville theaters and porn shops, their windows painted dark and a curtain over the door.

Yet the area changes once I cross Quinet on the other side and enter the narrow Rue Delambre. It's one of those well-ordered little Parisian streets with separate shops for meat and cheese and fish, a florist and a greengrocer and two bakeries. I walk it half a dozen times a day, and it puts me out into one of the old fabled lands of American expatriation, the big bars and cafés of the Boulevard Montparnasse, places once fueled by Prohibition. You know the names—La Coupole and Le Select, Le Dôme and La Rotonde. I like the Select in the morning, when I sit inside at a battered wood table, spreading out whatever I'm working on and getting up occasionally to pet the house cat, Mickey. (
Mal élevé,
the
patronne
says as the beast walks across the bar.) And the café at the Dôme is a good place for a drink toward six, never too crowded and with most of its clientele a set of elderly regulars whom the waiters treat with exquisite courtesy. Though I'm not really interested in the Lost Generation, in the memories of Montparnasse or even the frenetic American city of the fifties, the
Paris Review
on the one hand and Elaine Dundy's 1958 novel
The Dud Avocado
on the other. I've made no visits to Hemingway sites, and have walked by Gertrude Stein's apartment on the Rue de Fleurus only on my way to dinner. But I have gone to the Closerie des Lilas and made a silent toast to that better Parisian A. J. Liebling, who found a welcome there, as he writes in
Normandy Revisited,
on the night of the liberation in August 1944.

My most regular pilgrimage, however, is to the Cimetière du Montparnasse, whose entrance lies a few hundred yards outside our door. Its tombs don't have quite the marquee value of the Père Lachaise, far away in the hilly twentieth
arrondissement, where women leave a red lipstick imprint on the grave of Oscar Wilde, and the wandering youth of all nations gather to see Jim Morrison. But it's a better place for anyone interested in twentieth-century culture. Sartre once lived in our building, and he's stayed on in the neighborhood, under the same stone with Simone de Beauvoir. Ionesco, Brancusi, Brassaï, and Man Ray have their plots there as well. Eric Rohmer was buried here just last year, and Susan Sontag in 2004, though she didn't die in Paris. I found her grave by accident one morning last fall, a flat dark slab among other flat dark slabs, but the cemetery's office is perpetually out of maps and I haven't been able to trace it since. Beckett is easier, he lies on one of the main avenues, and my wife and I stood there on Easter morning, a German couple next to us snapping photos of the banana somebody had left there in honor of
Krapp's Last Tape,
where the fruit figures as a prop. And there was some other produce across the way, at the only grave here that seems to rival the various cults of the Père Lachaise. It belongs to the singer Serge Gainsbourg, dead now twenty years, and along with many flowers there was a litter of metro tickets and cigarette lighters, objects that had figured in his songs, and then a head of curly Savoy cabbage. I needed Google to explain that one, I'll confess—a 1976 album called
L'homme à tête de chou.