How to Cook a Moose (15 page)

The mountains were layered one after another back to the horizon all around us in every direction, in shades of gray and blue and blue-gray and dark blue, like a roiling, turbulent, wild sea in a storm. Mount Washington turned into a massive giant wave about to send our little craft up its towering flank. We both saw it and shivered together in that pleasurable make-believe fear.

The wind died down. The sun stayed hidden. The granite we sat on felt warmer than I'd expected it would. It was dry up there—no rain pools in the rock for Dingo to lap at.

A flock of nine little birds, tits or pipits, maybe, starlings, the tiny kind whose silhouettes look a bit like Piper Cubs, lifted all at once out of the meadow just below us. They hurled themselves into the air high, high above our heads and, in a game of follow-the-leader, flew in a big circle, swooping and soaring around us, and coming to ground again, back where they'd started. A moment later, they performed the whole air show again.

After that, it was time to go. We hiked down to the car, nosed it down the vertical road, and headed home slowly with the windows open to let the fresh cool air stream in.

Maine is a true paradise in the summertime, one sweet golden-green-blue day after another, unfolding gently and without fanfare. After the long, dark, cold winter, the summer is a blissful return to light and warmth and the bright/earthy smell of plant life. Everyone
seems to burst forth into the fresh air to make the most of it as long as it lasts—people, dogs, cats, squirrels.

In New York during the summertime, people ran air conditioners, sweated profusely, stayed inside to avoid the suffocating heat. But in Maine, for that brief and shining season, the temperatures are perfect. Almost no one has air conditioners; it's a pleasure to walk around town without being dripped on by the condensation on window units, which happened on every block in New York. I measured summertime there by having to swerve on sidewalks to avoid the icy drips that reminded me of Legionnaires' disease and landed splat on my hot scalp. Up here, summer is serene. Instead of the ubiquitous humming of air conditioners, there's the cawing of seagulls and the whoosh of the breeze through treetops.

Seagulls aren't always conducive to serenity, however. By mid-June, when it's warm enough to sleep with the windows open, the neighborhood gulls caterwaul overhead, screaming bloody murder at one another in the sky, waking me up out of a deep sleep. City seagulls! They sound like Southie mothers shrieking, “SEAN, you betta not end up like ya fuckin FATHA!!” and “Bobby O'Houlihan, if I catch ya I'm gonna SKIN YA ALIVE!”

One morning, as I stared sleepily out the window into the blue predawn light, I could see one of them on the rooftop across the street, strutting along the peak, shrieking its head off, probably at another gull on another rooftop, waiting for a response, then shrieking back.

The British weren't coming. They had no predators to warn one another about, that I knew of. The sun wasn't even up yet; what urgent news could there have been to impart? How was this productive? How did this advance their cause in the world? Why weren't they down by the water, catching fish and nourishing themselves?

Seagulls were mysterious, I concluded. Then I put in earplugs, pulled a pillow over my head, and went back to sleep.

Later that morning, after our walk, we went to the farmers' market down in the park, by the fountains, under the trees. There was a bounteous array of food for sale, as well as a tightrope walker, a bluegrass band, and many calm and friendly dogs (as are all the dogs here; Portland has none of that weird Brooklyn neuroticism of both animals and owners). It felt like a nineteenth-century country fair; matter of fact, here we are. We bought some organic chorizo, rhubarb, lettuce, soft cheeses dusted with spices, big ripe tomatoes, zucchini—whatever was fresh and in season, until we ran out of cash.

At home, I washed and trimmed the rhubarb and cut it into four-inch pieces. I mixed two cups total of apple cider vinegar and rice vinegar with maple syrup, honey, salt, peppercorns, fresh sliced ginger, cardamom pods, sliced serrano peppers, and cloves. I let this mixture boil for five minutes, then turned off the flame and added the rhubarb. When it had cooled, I packed the rhubarb into a container and poured over it as much of the liquid as it would hold.

This was my first time ever making pickles; I was unreasonably excited by how easy it was and how good they were. The next day, Sunday, we packed a picnic and took it to the Eastern Prom—the rhubarb pickles along with deviled eggs, three kinds of cheese, flaxseed crackers, a bottle of chilled rosé, and dessert: an apple for Dingo and chocolate-covered strawberries for us.

We sat, all three of us in a row, on a picnic table overlooking Casco Bay, sheltered by the trees, warm in the sun, looking out at the sailboats trundling over the blue water and the shaggy green islands beyond as we feasted, feeling as if we had that corner of the world almost to ourselves, although it was a bright, warm, sunny holiday. Everyone had, no doubt, decamped for the beaches north and south of town. We sat on the picnic table, soaking in the briny, clean, grass-scented air, basking in the mellow sunshine, sipping our wine and feeding scraps to Dingo, who lounged happily in the shade. After
lunch, we packed everything up and took a good, long, fast walk up and around the headlands.

Later, at home, we fell instantly into a triple coma of a nap. I regained consciousness in the evening to find Dingo fed and walked and Brendan hard at work. Down in the kitchen, by some miracle, hungry yet again, I hauled out the farmers' market chorizo and a string bag of littleneck clams and opened a bottle of cold Orvieto.

In olive oil, I sautéed a lot of garlic, two medium leeks, two tomatoes, a jalapeno, and a red pepper. I stirred in two diced potatoes and the chopped chorizo, then added a cup of the white wine and a cup of chicken broth and two bay leaves, and simmered it until the potatoes were soft. Then I squeezed in the juice of one lemon and stirred, arranged the clams on top, covered the pot, and let it simmer till the clamshells opened. I added a big handful of minced Italian parsley, and we feasted for the second time that day.

The thick, tender chowder was rich with spicy pork fat and the sweetness of the clams and the mealy cubed potatoes; the cold, crisp white wine cooled our tongues.

Early the next morning, our bedroom flashed and banged with thunder and lightning, an intense electrical storm. Dingo crept in and we all huddled together, feeling safe in our house. When I took Dingo out, the air was humid, cool, dark, and sweet-smelling. The soaked dark sidewalks were strewn with vivid pollen and petals. I felt that by-now-familiar bone-deep happiness, feeling at home here, in this place.

The only trouble with summer in the Far North is that it's so short. Because Brendan and I are writers, not farmers, we make our hay in other ways. Like everyone else who lives up here year-round, we still have to work in the summertime, but we give ourselves over
completely to the evanescent sweetness and light, knowing what's coming in a few short months.

One unusually hot summer morning in the farmhouse, Brendan and I put on our bathing suits and set off toward the lake. We turned off the dirt road onto the steep path to Brendan's aunt's dock, dashing downward through clouds of horseflies that bit us freely and without restraint. At the lake, we stripped off our clothes and ran to the end of the dock and plunged into the clean, chilly-then-warm water, which was full of little wavelets and covered with a thin scrim of pollen.

By the time we got back to the house, we were hot all over again. We took cool showers and dressed in as little as possible and tried not to move. As the sun went down and we got hungry, we tried to imagine what we could possibly want to eat on such a day.

“I know,” said Brendan, whose parents grew up in Italy, and who learned to make many traditional Italian dishes from his father and his grandmother's Tuscan cook. “I have the perfect thing.”

He put a big pot of water on the stove and poured us each a small glass of Rioja with several ice cubes. When the water boiled, he plunged ten medium-size ripe Roma tomatoes into it for three or four minutes, until their skins split, then he took them out and peeled (but did not seed) them. Meanwhile, he peeled and chopped a heap of garlic.

In a deep skillet, he poured some of the olive oil from the stash of bottles in the cupboards over the fireplace, which came from his family's olive trees in Tuscany, and for which I thanked all the gods, every time we ate it.

I sipped my wine, looking out at the mountains, while Brendan sautéed the garlic for a scant minute, then added the chopped tomatoes along with all their juice and some salt and pepper and a smidgen of crushed red pepper. He let the sauce cook down for twenty minutes
or so until it thickened, then added a handful of chopped fresh basil at the very end and tossed the sauce with a pound of penne rigate.

Meanwhile, I threw together a simple salad and poured us some more Rioja over ice. We sat at the table in the pressing heat and devoured everything. It was the best pasta of any kind I've ever had, hands down, silky and rich and garlicky. I moaned
Yum
, and made other guttural animal noises as I ate. The cook took this as the highest praise, as he should have. We ate until the pasta dish was empty and all we could do was run a finger along its bottom to dredge up every molecule of that sweet, savory, beautiful sauce.

After dinner, cool air started to blow in with far-off thunder and lightning. We went outside and sat on the porch for a while and watched the dragonflies troll through the air like beautiful, predatory machines, eating mosquitoes. Over the fields, fireflies were winking and glinting.

The storm was slow in coming, and its approach was dramatic. As the darkening sky became saturated with electricity, echoing booms of rolling thunder and white-hot lightning cascaded through the high clouds, blinding explosions of streaking brachioles of light illuminating everything for several beats before fading.

I had never seen a lightning storm like this before. Naturally, I couldn't help but wonder whether this was a result of climate change; whenever the weather does anything extraordinary or extreme, it's the first thing I think. No matter how beautiful it is, no matter how exciting, it's always tinged with a sense of impending doom. I try to enjoy the beauty nonetheless, to let it win out over the sense of loss. All of life is like this; I think it always has been.

I put my arm around Brendan, and he put his arm around me, and we leaned into each other and watched the light show. Neither of us said a word. The hair on our arms prickled from the combined chill and electric charge in the air.

The next morning, we went kayaking on the lake, paddling past the rocky, piney little island where Brendan camped as a little boy with his brother and friends.

“This island seemed so big and far away back then,” he said.

We dove in and floated in the bathtub-warm water, low from drought, but still clean and sweet-smelling and silky on the skin.

We played Scrabble all afternoon in the summer barn, the windows open to the thunderstorm. At sunset, we sat on the stone bench down in the meadow and watched the light change on the mountains.

All summer long, we bought bags of fresh vegetables, local wine and cheese and ice cream, homemade sausage and blueberries from the farm stands just across the border in Maine. We went to the biodynamic farm nearby and bought eggs, lettuces, tomatoes, whatever else was on hand. We took deep, quiet, late-afternoon naps, sprawling barefoot on the couches. We climbed Foss Mountain's short, steep trail at sunset to look out over the whole mountain range and valley; we sat on the slab of granite at the top and watched two little boys pick blueberries, eating more than they managed to save.