City Notes

I wrote this while living in Portland years ago, and always meant to send it to some magazine, but none ever came to mind. My last post reminded of it, so I yarded it out and remixed it.

Winter.  The sun has already edged behind the city line.  Long blocks of shadow hammer the water and shells of salt ice opaque in the light cover my canoe, paddle, and mittens.  Eiders and loons circle and dive.  Waves rise to crash and fall against the riprap seawall that holds a small lighthouse called Bug Light.  Out across the harbor, the city clock flashes atop the Time and Temperature Building, huge digits that read 13 degrees.   

I hold my paddle perpendicular across my canoe's gunwales.  The tide turns the boat side-to the current and pulls me toward the mouth of the harbor.  I drift.  I wait again for the temperature to flash.

13 degrees.

I’m the only one out here, not a ferryboat or a lobster boat or a tug boat or even a water taxi on the move.  The water that had moments ago glistened on my paddle has just now frozen into salt droplets that hang like pearls from the blade’s edge.

I grin.  I take up the paddle and drive it into the water.  The boat straightens and with a surge I move forward.

On the far side of the harbor, a quarter mile off, a Casco Bay ferry sounds its horn then exits the terminal.  I hug the southern edge of the harbor—the north shore of South Portland—and work around the hulking black stern of a docked oil tanker.  The ship towers above me, the sheer size of the boat daunting with its rust-streaked name written in massive letters that I can't read due to the sharpness of the angle.   

Jade at DiMillo's Marina in Portland. Shrink-wrapped for the winter.

This is a new place for me.  I live downtown, in Portland's Old Port, on my sailboat at a slip adjacent to a floating restaurant that was once a car ferry.  I have been here since fall and the place I left was a beautiful and isolated peninsula with so little infrastructure that the rural gas station 15 miles north lit the far horizon.  Here at the marina, the stadium-style floodlights glow so brightly through the night that I've had to break myself of the instinct to wake at all hours thinking it to be full daylight; I cannot see beyond the specific dome of the lights—no moon, no stars, no ocean—and several times a week the hull of my sailboat echoes as a container ship from Gibraltar or somewhere blacks-out the skyline as it slowly moves up the harbor, its huge props drumming.

Jade at DiMillo's in Portland's Old Port. The white "building" in the background is the old car ferry, now a floating restaurant.

For years, living in the far reaches of coastal Maine, I paddled almost exclusively in the winter, and I came to notice some of the changes in the ocean, the translucent greens and blues as if winter water loses its summertime haze and becomes clear, cold, crisp; and I’d become accustomed to the vitality that I found within that beauty and clarity, to paddling past ice-slicked granite ledges that fall into the water, past braids of rockweed and strings of kelp that swish like individual flames; the sound from these actions makes the world feel right to me: it’s the sigh of water, the push of swell, the gentle crinkle of seaweed as the icy water recedes--and I think often of author John Graves's line that friend Kuntz in Alaska recently recalled to me: Without the year’s changes, for me, there is little morality.    

My world had changed.  A long and good relationship had ended.  Loved ones had again left this place.  The lobsterman I had worked for, and who had become a close friend, had died recently, as had the elderly woman who’d supplied a cabin in which I could live and write—a cabin which had become my first true home.  My border collie, Henry, who’d been glued to my side for 16 years and thousands of miles by horse, canoe, and skis was freshly buried beneath an apple tree, and all I had left was a sailboat that had literally been through a large-scale explosion.

The days grew short and cold.  I was empty.  I sailed away from the hinterlands that had always comforted and sustained me—be those lands coastal or mountainous—and I did so at a time when I needed that sustenance, needed those moments walking the spruce bogs or sitting on the seaside granite shelves, moments when silence brings alignment, when the rattle of human tragedy falls to gentle rhythm.

Why I left downeast, I am not purely sure, but there was no question that it was time to go, and it occurs to me now, paddling these new waters, that I left in search of a new shape, an alternate pattern. Perhaps it was simply the ocean I was after, and this city is where I arrived. Too many loved ones have died far too young in my life and I carry them with me even as I tell myself that they exist there in my wake; the dead are a delicate balance and despite the old saying that wherever you go, there you are, there exists an importance to a change of ecology. Science says that some of us have wandering in our genes, and that our minds (the amygdala) thrive on the act of navigation. We were made to find our way.

Jade and the Kruger canoe. DiMillo's.

In Portland, I find myself drawn to the city harbor’s industrial fairways.  Portland lies on the north side of the harbor, and the shoreline is a mix of commercial and industrial wharves separated by fairways that stab like alleys of water into the city’s gut.  These channels are narrow, perhaps a quarter mile long; some lead to restaurants, bars, condominiums; others to commercial fishing fleets, fish wharves, boatyards.  Many consist of falling-down piers, rotted-out pylons, derelict lobster traps, broken floats.  They smell of salt and fish, oil and diesel fuel.  I paddle my canoe.  Pedestrians look down at me from the walkways above, and commercial fishermen and boatmen and stevedores grin or shake their heads as they toss their cigarettes overboard and go back to work.      

Here in the harbor, I find a breed of sustenance that echoes that which I typically seek in wild places, though the long-term sustainability of such an endeavor is suspect (it occurs to me that once civilization finally ruins all of our wild places, art is what will remain and what will hopefully keep our souls--and our amygdalae--intact.).

Yet perhaps my need for wildness is more complex than a need for landscape or solitude or beauty; wildness for me is also about proximity, about maintaining an intimacy with the workings of life; it’s the same reason that I loathe city parks—they seem wrong, fraudulent; lipstick and perfume; I'd rather walk the alleys, see the deep function of the city, the pipes and sewers and vents, for therein lies the fundaments, the guts, the viscera. The heart. 

Paddling my canoe, I find that basic and elemental functioning in the tankers that carry our energy, the freighters that carry our stuff, the fishing boats that carry our food, the barges and ferries and waterside industries that have for so long enabled our civilization to be what it is, good and bad.

Lobster traps on a wharf in Portland, Maine.

And the morality of experiencing how needs are met--the ugly, inner-workings of civilization--makes me feel like I belong here. To an extent, it appeases that need for wildness. I feel grounded in a place where I see so much as untethered from basic human need, a place where the obsolete need for comfort supersedes the elemental need for the elemental. If we don't even see where our things come from, or where our shit goes, we become untethered, separated.

Technology has far outpaced evolution. As homo sapiens, we've been around for over half a million years, and many more millions of years of evolution led to that point. Yet somehow we tell ourselves that we can drop our connection to the workings of life and replace it with social media and designer coffee drinks and proper behavior. Put simply, we want our meat to come from the store, not from the animal, be ye carnivore or vegetarian.

And when all of those connections disappear, when that byssal that runs through us and tethers us to this place is severed, what are we left with? A culture in collapse, I suppose. As we've done to the planet, we've done to ourselves. We cannot be healthier than the environment in which we exist, and yet we look around in awe at the state of humanity.

But those connections still exist, if we make the effort to find them.

In search of the guts. An island shepherd culls her sheep herd and fills her freezer.

Enough. As the lobsterman I used to work for would say, We're just people.

So. In this small city, surrounded by so much I don’t understand, I paddle.  I paddle some days to the islands with their clear waters and forests of kelp, their shelves of iced granite and snow-heavy spruces, but oftentimes I stick to the fairways, to the industrial riversides, to the derelict wharves and rusted oil tankers; in my small sea-going canoe, I am minuscule within those pushy currents beside those huge ships and piers, and there's a sense of letting-go, of giving-in, of joining the waters—and this sense is not unlike the feeling one gets atop a mountain, within a canyon, along a river, amidst a long sit beneath a big tree; and eventually I regain perspective, and I relearn the fact that death, and grief, are part of it all.

At the edge of dark, when the waterfront lights flick along the harbor and hide the night sky, I paddle toward the marina where my sailboat is tied, its small wood stove pumping smoke—so strange against the city’s silhouette.  And despite the chic urban commerce, I feel comforted by the life that exists amid this rise of buildings, this swath of retail and commerce, this world of light and noise, traffic and water.