Maine: The way breathing should be

My aunt and uncle discovered Maine in the mid-1950s. They traveled to Ogunquit for their honeymoon and stayed in the then-sparkling new Town Line Motel on Route 1. When they returned from their odyssey to this northern wilderness, they told family members of their wondrous discovery: miles of empty beaches, dunes as high as three-deckers, cheap eats, copious quiet.

We started going to Maine in 1961, when I was just a baby.  For most of the next eighteen years, we spent one week every August in a two-bedroom cottage on Bourne Ave. in Moody. My parents rented it from a Swedish guy named Arvid Johnson who worked with another uncle at Wyman –Gordon, a company at the Worcester-Grafton line.  The fact that the man was a Swede fascinated me.  I didn’t know any Swedes. I knew Irish kids, Italians, and French kids.  For most of my childhood, I thought all houses in Maine were owned by people from Sweden.  Though I never met the guy, I imagined he looked like the Swedes pictured in my Scholastic Children’s Encyclopedia: tall, blonde, always wore bulky sweaters embroidered with snowflakes. 

The house looked like a normal house, though the front door was on the side, not the front.  Maybe that was a Swede thing. The cottage was white with pink shutters, had pine paneling inside, and had a kerosene stove that scared my parents.  

The night before our big annual week at the beach, my dad and I would drive to Cambridge Street and pick up our rented black and white television. When I think about it now, I don’t recall much vacation television-watching. One reason: reception was terrible. 

While my memory of television in Maine is as fuzzy as the screen was, I remember so many other things as though they just happened last week. 

My dad and I would walk to the general store every morning to buy our hometown newspaper, the Worcester Telegram. The store was a two-story farmhouse painted red with white trim. My mother would drive us down to Moody Beach, which was a three-minute ride, around 9:30. Then she’d go back to the cottage to make lunch. My mother would arrive several hours later, looking phenomenally well-rested despite her exhausting gourmet efforts. Here’s what would be in a typical lunch bag: four baloney sandwiches (each consisting of two pieces of bread, one piece of baloney, and a half gallon of French’s mustard); a cluster of green grapes; a few apples; a couple of Oreo cookies; a thermos of Kool-Aid, the red kind. Or maybe it was Hawaiian Punch. 

My mother would settle into her beach chair, a type that was low to the ground. She’d put a match book cover over her nose to protect it from sunburn, light up a Kent, and open a book. She’d spend the next few hours reading her book, or sleeping on the blanket, or chatting with her family. My cousins would rent the cottage behind us during the same week, and always showed up at the beach shortly after we did. We spent most of the week hanging around together. 

Back in the ‘60s, Moody was a kid paradise. When we weren’t body surfing in the chilly Atlantic, we were sliding down the dunes.  The dunes were so high and wide, it was possible to lose sight of your family blanket sometimes. Dune grass whipped our legs and crusty seaweed bruised our feet and we couldn't have cared less because one minute we were in the Himalayas, the next  trudging across the Sahara, or landing on the moon. 

When we got sick of the dunes, we’d do the castle thing, using buckets and cups to shape huge towers in the muddy valley left behind by the receding tides which lay a whole acre away from the dunes.  One summer, we got into building holes. There’s a whole photo album filled with us little kids digging a huge hole several feet wide and at least a fifth grader deep.

My dad, a former baseball player, always brought a ball to the beach.  Playing catch with my dad and the boy cousins was my favorite thing of all. As we got older, we walked more. Bunches of us would take long walks down to the Footbridge Beach. Sometimes we walked all the way down to Ogunquit.

  

At night and on rainy days we’d explore the little nearby towns. We’d visit Kennebunkport at least once each year. On rainy days, if the tide was in, we got a kick out of riding the shore route and watching for bits of ocean and pieces of seaweed to hit the windshield.   

 

We’d always find a great parking spot in the honor parking lot at Dock Square. Then we’d wander among the little shops. My parents’ favorite shop was I think called the Heather House, next to Dock Square Clothiers. They sold Irish and British imports: wool blankets, tartan plaid ties in scores of patterns, heraldic plaques, Waterford crystal, Royal Doulton Toby mugs, Belleek and Wedgewood china. This was the stuff my family was into. We’d always end our trip to Kennebunk with a drive past Walker Point.

Sometimes we’d go to the town of Ogunquit, but back then it wasn’t very built up. Other than a general store that sold Coppertone and water toys, there wasn’t much to see.  We’d usually drive straight through the town, up Israel Head Road to the little lighthouse at the Marginal Way, which was my father’s favorite place to take family photos. He liked the backdrop of rocks, splashing, and pretty ocean horizons. Sometimes we’d walk the Marginal Way to Perkins Cove, and sometimes we got in the car and drove. 

On the ride up to the Marginal Way, we’d always talk about the girl who went missing from The Lookout, a rickety old resort on our route.  She went missing in the early ‘70s I think. I believe eventually they’d found out she was murdered. On the way down from the Marginal Way, we’d always look for what we called the Mafia House, a solid brick armory of a structure with a huge columned porch enclosed in department store-sized windows. Massive iron gates surrounded the property, but you could still make out the expensive cushioned furniture and tall white sculptures behind the dark glass.

 

We all decided that the glass was bullet-proof and that the home was some scary gangster’s secret getaway.  My parents, who loved spy novels and murder stories, encouraged this. 

We had several jobs to fulfill in Perkins Cove as part of our vacation responsibilities. We had to go into ALL the gift stores. We had to stay with my mother in Swamp John’s and whine about being bored until she left without buying anything. We had to stop by the Finestkind and watch the fisherman bring in their catches. All of us, my parents included, had to make loud comments that everyone around us could hear about how gross the fish smelled and looked. We would all swear to never eat tuna again and of course the next day’s beach lunch was always tuna and it was delicious. 

We would have to watch Val McGann paint his pictures. McGann usually settled himself somewhere at the edge of the parking lot. Next to his easel was a big board to which was glued all kinds of newspaper stories featuring his work. Every time we went to Perkins Cove, we would read the newspaper clippings and my father would comment on how the artist's ocean storm scenes, the splashing, the rocks,  were so realistic. My mother would say that one day they would have to buy a painting. Then we would walk away.

 

No visit to the Cove was complete without setting foot on the drawbridge, which was a shaky contraption, I remember, before it was destroyed in the Blizzard of ’78 and then rebuilt into the sober structure that stands today. The little ones never ventured onto the bridge at all. I was somewhat brave, and usually my dad could coax me to walk all the way out to the middle.  I’m pretty sure the bridge swayed under our weight. Or maybe it was just my father putting ideas into my head. 

Today I went to Maine with my parents. I drove. Here’s what we did. 

We scooted straight up to Kennebunkport and squeezed into the honor parking lot. There were people and cars everywhere, even though it was a perfect beach day. I put three dollars in the pay slot, though my father said we weren’t going to be there very long and really it would be fine to leave a quarter.

I bought a Val McGann painting, an inexpensive miniature. The artist once known as JFK’s favorite seascapist according to all his newspaper stories, still paints every day, though he’s got to be eighty-five or more.  He’s gotten a little silly and now paints some seascapes with pears and apples sitting upright in the foreground. He calls these paintings “Beach Bums.” I like the idea of being silly at eighty-five, so I bought myself a tiny painting of two bare-bottomed pieces of fruit sunning on the beach.  

We mentioned how crowded the town was. The clerk at the painting store said it was actually a pretty slow day. “So, do you close for the winter or are you open all year-round?” My dad asked this. She said they closed in October. We window shopped, we walked through a few stores. My dad asked in every one if they closed for the winter or were open year-round. We got in the car and drove to Walker Point, passing a shingled house on the coast my mother always called the Hitchcock House, because it has a creepy profile. 

“Hey! There’s the Hitchcock House,” my dad said. 

“I’ve always loved that house,” my mother said. 

As we came upon the Bush compound, my dad made jokes about George Bush and wondered if we should pop in and say hello. My mother said she didn’t feel like visiting with them today and perhaps we should all duck as we drove by so they wouldn’t see us.

We drove to Wells and ate lobster rolls at Lord’s at the end of Harbor Road and got a fifteen percent discount because we’d ordered between two and four in the afternoon.  Nobody was mean to us. In the past, the skinny old lady hostess used to be quite stern, so we had certain expectations this visit. By the way, Lord's closes in October. 

We drove past Congdon’s, where we used to get breakfast every last morning in Maine. My dad always had blueberry pancakes. I liked the silver dollars. My mom couldn’t remember what she used to eat, but mentioned she was glad she’d just had a coffee at Lord’s.

  

We drove down Shore Road and meandered all the way to Moody but didn’t get out of the car because to pay for parking there you now need to take out a small mortgage first. Parking used to be free, my dad said. We found our old house on Bourne Ave. It’s been added to and covered in tan vinyl. There are no pink shutters. We passed the Town Line Motel. My mother noted that though it’s over fifty years old, it looks better than most of the new stuff that’s popped up the last few years. 

We passed the site of our favorite ice cream place, The Viking. It’s now a steakhouse. Like the world really needs another steakhouse. We all sighed and talked about how we used to fill our bowls to overflowing with marshmallow sauce, caramel and chocolate at the Viking's make your own sundae bar. Then we drove through Ogunquit and took Israel Head Road to the Marginal Way. The place was packed so we couldn’t park. On the way to Perkins Cove we passed the Mafia House. My parents agreed that it hadn’t changed a bit.

Perkins Cove was packed too, so we did a quick drive through then headed south. My dad snorted at the nerve some people had, charging twelve bucks for parking.

We took the back roads to York and pigged out at Brown’s ice cream stand, where a small cone is still larger than your head. We found a parking spot at Nubble Light and my parents observed that the water certainly looked blue today and the splashing of the waves was just lovely.  A soft wind had picked up and my mother remarked that the air was wonderful. 

“It’s always so easy to breathe in Maine,” she said. 

We inhaled deeply. We agreed. We talked about coming up again, maybe in September when the crowds thin. Then we headed home.