Gone Fishing

Well, for fruit, mostly.

When you read this, I’ll be somewhere in midcoast Maine, scrounging around for free food. We’re headed north this weekend for a quick overnight trip up the coast to do a little fruit and nut exploring, which I’ll tell you all about next week, but in short, we’re scouting historic populations of native fruit and nut trees to collect seed to grow in the nursery and I am very, very excited about it. As a thick schmear of frosting on this cake, we found a little camp to rent for $40 a night, less than a quarter mile from the harbor where there’s a public pier. If I play my cards right and all the stars align, I might be able to wet a line - it’s been a while since I’ve fished salt water and the waning summer has me wanting it bad. So, here’s hopin I’ve gone fishin and not just fruitin, but fruitin’s just fine, too.

Here’s a medley of salty snacks I’ve put together for you to enjoy while I’m away, and in doing so, realized that salt makes me kind of sappy. Must be something in the water.

Let’s start with a taste of Wells beach…

A Longwinded Love Note to Crab Bisque

I got a text from my friend Ed

“I hauled up some crabs that were just too meaty to toss back - they’re yours if you want them.”

And I do.

I pull into his driveway and he’s sitting on the porch already picking some of the crabs for his own dinner, wearing an apron, gloves and a wide smile. His wife is out, so dinner is a mountain of crabmeat and pint glass of wine - a king alone in his castle. He brims with the same salty generosity as the first fisherman I met Downeast, George Sprague, who assured me I was lost even though I said I wasn’t when I pulled into the dockyard looking for lobster, where he then loaded me up with crabs for free, and sent me off with

“Don’t forget your butter and brandy.”. (You may remember George from "Salt and Friendship Are Not Optional")

Gram no doubt slaying all her siblings at rummy with that signature sweet smile on her face at the beach house kitchen table.

I bring the crabs to my family’s beach house, where I cook them for my mom and stepdad. We eat them loudly and messily at this little table where every member of our huge family has eaten. This is our first meal here without my gram, my mother’s mother, and that looms loud and messy too. I used to sit at this table with Gram when I was a kid, filling onion bags with hot dogs and rocks. She’d drive me down to the dock where I’d spend all day lobbing the bags out and inching them back, hopefully covered with crabs. One day my buckets were so full with big heavys that Gram drove me down to Billy’s chowder house and convinced me to knock on the kitchen door and see if they’d buy them. They said “No thanks." but boy do I love her for that.

My mom and I look at the pile of shells after dinner and remember my uncle sitting at this table after every lobster boil, skipping the family banter on the beach in favor of sitting alone in the kitchen, picking the bodies clean for chowder, sucking every last leg with a chaser of beer. I go home for the night and come back the next day to walk into a kitchen that smells just like when that cook opened the door at Billy’s. Mom had spent all morning at the table picking the shells clean and she’s got it all in a pot now for bisque.

“I got squeamish when I really thought about what I was doing.” She said.

“Wait till you try it with a mammal.” I tease.

She shakes her head “No thanks” and boy do I love her for that.

The bisque was the best I’ve ever had. Thanks, Mom.

I wrote this next poem two summers ago when a woman was killed by a great white shark in Harpswell, Maine. I never shared it, in fear it might be insensitive to the woman and her family, which, it may be, but that’s not my intent, and I trust anyone here knows that.