How to Cook a Moose (12 page)

As I walked home, I felt yet again that near-melancholy sense of my own luck, my settled happiness. The melancholy came from an underlying and very real fear of losing it all. The woman at the shelter had illuminated that for me. This was the trouble with finding true love and a happy home: It couldn't last forever. Nothing could.

But that was the only trouble with any of it that I could see.

Soup Kitchen Stir-Fry

From the vegetable fridge, take all the fish tubs of chopped or sliced vegetables and chop and slice up everything that hasn't been prepped yet. Assemble your flavorings: the carafes of teriyaki and soy sauce and the jug of corn oil and the jar of roasted pureed garlic and the little thing of five-spice powder.

When everything is ready to go, heat a giant drum pan over two burners. Pour in about a cup of oil. When it's hot, throw in a wad of garlic and a heap of aromatics: onion, carrots, celery. Stir. After two minutes, add chopped peppers, cauliflower, mushrooms, broccoli, zucchini, and summer squash. Stir, and sprinkle with soy sauce and five-spice powder until it smells really good. Keep stirring. Add a heap of well-washed, minced, farm-share radish greens. Stir like mad. The drum pan should be over half full.

When the stir-fry is cooked (but not overcooked), get someone to help you lift the pan to divide the contents between two deep steam-table pans. In one of them, leave room for the chicken. Put the pans into heated steam-table slots and cover them.

Return the drum pan to the heat. Add a cup of corn oil. Stir-fry all the chopped chicken, adding teriyaki sauce at the end. When it's cooked, add it to the vegetable stir-fry pan in which you left extra room, and mix together well.

Florence House also is home to a number of hardworking, well-trained service dogs, registered emotional-support companions. Make sure to leave enough chicken out of the teriyaki sauce for anyone with a dog who asks for it.

Chapter Four

A Land of All Seasons

Often, when I tell others from away that I live in Maine, a fond, wistful look comes over their faces.

“Maine,” they sigh. “I
love
Maine.”

Invariably, what they mean is that they used to go to camp up here in the summers as children and teenagers, and now they have dreamy, blissful memories of lakes and canoes, rocky beaches and lobsters, hikes in pine forests, young love, first cigarettes, clandestine cans of beer, unforgettable adventures. I can see it all in their faraway expressions.

And then they look back at me, eyes focusing as something occurs to them.

“But what about the winters?” they ask. “How do you stand them? Aren't they awful?”

“I love the winters here,” I say. “They're not so bad. They were much worse in New York.”

And I mean it, for the most part.

The course of a typical year in northern New England provides so much intense drama and climatic variety, it's never the same place
twice. People love to discuss the weather up here; it's the most fascinating and important topic imaginable. In fact, a local saying borrowed from Mark Twain goes, “If you don't like the weather, wait a minute.”

Along with the northern Midwest and Alaska, whose winters are often colder, but no longer or more dramatic, the northeast corner of the United States has got some of the most interesting weather in the country. There's always a surprise: the January thaw, the late-March snowstorm, the occasional late-August frost. This land hosts tornadoes and blizzards, nor'easters and hurricanes. Spring rain gives way to golden sunshine gives way to sleet and fog in the course of a few hours, temperatures fluctuating accordingly.

Of course, in terms of the people who live here, there's very little variety. This region, apparently, is called by certain urbanites the South of the North, evidently because it's populated largely by the type of white people referred to as rednecks by city dwellers, who view them as uneducated, poor, backwoods-dwelling hicks who subsist on Walmart canned and junk food as well as hunting, fishing, foraging, and the occasional roadkill.

In all, the “non-Hispanic white” population here is 94.4 percent, the highest in the nation. The population is largely made up of people of French, Irish, and peasant English descent, with a very small smattering descended from Poles, Italians, Germans, Scots-Irish, and Swedes. Many families have been here since the seventeenth century and identify as simply American, or Mainers.

But weirdly, and disturbingly, after the demise of Jim Crow laws in the 1920s, the KKK established a highly active faction in Maine, the whitest state in the Union, persecuting the Irish and French Canadians, i.e., Catholics, the only “other” ethnicity around.

Despite the relative homogeneity, human nature being what it is, there's a certain degree of ingrained contentiousness among the various groups of people up here, groups that might seem fairly identical to
the uneducated “from-away” eye. Most of New Hampshire lies cheek by jowl along its common border with southwestern Maine, and New Hampshire is tucked under Maine like a long neck supporting a big head, but despite their compatible and even corollary mottoes, “Live Free or Die” and “The Way Life Should Be,” they're famously hostile, like Norway and Sweden, or those rival advice-giving identical twin sisters, Ann Landers and Dear Abby. Mainers tell a host of insulting off-color jokes about the degree of incestuousness and stupidity and low-life loucheness of New Hampshirites, who tell the exact same jokes about Mainers. Their hockey rivalry is legendary and ongoing.

As a newcomer, and a New Hampshire resident who owns a house in Maine, it strikes me that the more alike you are, the more you fight to distinguish yourselves . . .

In 1652, the sparsely populated, hardscrabble land of Maine was annexed (unhappily) to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts until 1820, when it became the twenty-third state. Mainers' long-held distrust and dislike of people from Massachusetts stems from very deep, ancient resentments fueled by almost two centuries of entitled rich people from the south imposing their greed and laws on struggling poor people in the north. These class wars continue today in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways, beginning with the notion of “summer people” and extending to a general squinty-eyed disapprobation of “Massholes.” Even so, Maine is chock-full of Red Sox and Patriots fans. It's complicated. (New Hampshire, as one of the original colonies, never having been ruled by Massachusetts, understandably feels a bit more warmly toward its southern neighbor.)

Maine's population of 1.3 million people is distributed in a wildly uneven way throughout the state. Maine is the least densely populated
state east of the Mississippi, having an average of forty-three people per square mile. But this is misleading; in the enormous, heavily forested counties in the northern interior, there's an average of less than one person per square mile, as vast tracts of land up there are uninhabited and wild. Meanwhile, 40 percent of Mainers are crowded down in southern Maine, in and around Portland. Rural northern Mainers derisively refer to these southern urban dwellers as “flatlanders”; in other words, not really true Mainers at all. And so the population is further divided into “us” and “them.” Most of the French Mainers live in the north. (Although the state is 28 percent Catholic, it's also the least religious state in the country.)

Geographically, the region is as interesting as the weather, and the two are almost certainly related. I can hardly imagine this, but during the Ice Age, all of New Hampshire and Maine was covered in a glacier almost a mile deep, thick enough to cover even the highest mountain peaks. Called the Laurentide ice sheet or cap, this unruly ice monster swept down from Canada and covered all of New England for 18,000 years or so; just a geological blink of an eye, but it was enough to change the entire landscape. When it receded, it left a mess behind. It rucked up rocks and swept many of them to the coast, where they remain in glacial moraines. The gazillions of rocks that stayed behind had to be plowed and removed from fields every winter by farmers through the centuries and painstakingly stacked to build New England's thousands of miles of stone walls.

New Hampshire has the shortest coastline in the country, but Maine's got the fourth-longest, after Alaska, Florida, and Louisiana, if you measure by all the coves, inlets, and jags: 3,478 miles of corrugated sea-edge in only 228 miles as the seagull flies. To travel up the Maine coast is to feel viscerally this folded-in, twisting sinuousness of the embrace of land and sea—cove after cove, inlet after inlet, creating one spit, peninsula, and tongue after another. Maine also has 3,166 islands,
including freshwater. Land and water are intricately, complicatedly interconnected. Maine's Midcoast region rises steeply from the sea into hills and mountains folding back inland to the Appalachians. Katahdin, which the Penobscot dubbed “The Greatest Mountain,” is the highest of these at 5,269 feet, and before the International Trail continued up into Canada, it was the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. And inland, the land-water dance continues: Maine has about 6,000 lakes and ponds; the much-smaller New Hampshire has 944.

New Hampshire's mountains are higher than Maine's. In the Presidential Range of the White Mountains, Mount Washington is the tallest peak in New England, at 6,288 feet. It's also where some of the worst weather in the world occurs, including the highest-ever recorded wind speed in the western and northern hemispheres, 231 mph in 1934. It gets almost 100 inches of precipitation a year, a lot of it very quickly, the record being 11 inches of rain in twenty-four hours. The lowest recorded temperature at the summit is -59 degrees F, the highest a balmy 72 F; all year, enormous storms rage on the mountain, which sits at a lucky confluence of Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf weather systems and gets them all, all at once, in full force.

Down in the valleys, where we live, the temperatures and winds are milder, but no less interesting to a newcomer like me. Growing up in Arizona, I had little experience of seasons, except for the extreme summers, which were so scorchingly hot, we tried to stay inside a lot of the time. In the deepest winter, when the temperatures dropped into the 60s, we put on cardigans and turned off the air conditioner. Later, when I lived in New York, the seasons were dramatic but unconnected to the natural world, fundamentally human. Winter meant keen, street-focused winds, banks of rocklike, black snow and snarled traffic, and internal coat-hunched thoughts; spring meant an explosion of urban social life and a shedding of garments. Summer meant sweltering streets and frequent escapes to local beaches or
wherever else you could go, and autumn meant a return to interiority, a back-to-school intellectual energy.