Lobster Tale
Childhood summers in Maine
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I visited Maine every summer as a kid. More specifically, I was dragged to Maine every summer to visit central-casting relatives — mean, hard-bitten girl cousins who glared at me and said everything was “wicked.” Dopey, lumbering boy cousins who always wanted to race me and always lost. More Beans of Egypt than Bushes of Kennebunkport.
I remember a train screaming through the woods in the darkness, a little too close to the rickety summer cabin for my taste. I remember small, questionably lake-worthy boats. I remember hard-drinking, crusty grown-ups, grousing from the depths of a nicotine haze. I remember the big moose in the yard of the most ancient relatives, a distraction from the narcotic of checkers and sour silence. I remember being cold in August and mad at the whole world.
The best thing I remember, though — really, the only thing that made those long northward treks tolerable — was lobster. Lobster happened at least twice each trip and the ritual was cheering in those dour, chilly Maine summers. First came the trip to the boat. “We get the lobsta right off the boat,” the grouchy men would croak and I went every time. I’d hang back on the gray, splintered dock with the cousins and watch the exchange of cash and crustaceans, bone-dry wit and weather reports.
My favorite cousins — the racing boys — lived in a blue split-level ranch with a paved driveway. It was there, on the blacktop, that folding tables were unfolded and covered with paper. There must have been beer for the grownups and something fizzy and thick with corn syrup for us kids, there must have been other food, but all I remember is the lobster. Lots and lots of fresh lobster and little pots of drawn butter.
As a Maryland girl, I was already well-versed in the deconstruction of the blue crab and could pick and eat with the best of them. But this — lobster — was a thing above, a superior creature, a palace to the crab shack. Crab is in my DNA, but the elegant architecture and jackpot payoff of the lobster was clearly closer to the heavens. Less work, more decadent, those great red arthropods heaped on the wobbly paper tables brightened the gloom, warmed the cool, and took the edge off the mean cousins and the warring adults. Lobster made it possible for me to look back on those dank Maine woods and their surly denizens with a fierce fondness.
Years later, as a young woman climbing social ladders, I found myself in the other Maine, the charming hamlet-by-the-rocky-coast Maine, the sunny one with tans and money and boats and boat shoes. Sitting in a precious, top-dollar, coastal eatery eating a pretentious chef’s vision of lobster with artisanal-this and champagne-that, it occurred to me how diluted the experience was. The meal was less-than somehow, the experience dull and sterile. The lobster — lobster! — cried out for its origin accompaniments. Gray skies, hard stares, soaked paper and wobbly tables. Pine trees, train whistles, hard liquor and cigarettes. Tiny cuts on fingers, blood mingling with sweet meat, overfull bellies, and foot races.
Lobster, for me, will forever be an incongruous marriage between decadence and danger, the best and the worst. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
