by Matt Weiland
I try to verify other names of the storm’s victims that Angel conjured. But every search is fruitless. There’s no trace left of them. The only people within eye’s reach of the 1 DEAD IN ATTIC house are four Hondurans, non-English-speaking residents who came here after the storm to help rebuild. I comb through the phone book, calling all the names that could be related to the ones Angel came up with, but all their numbers in the pre-Katrina phone books are disconnected now, and the names are gone from the new books.
On the first day I met him, when we walked by the spot, Angel claimed a man was shot on a specific corner in Jackson Square ten years ago. Buckling over with pain, he cried that he felt the bullet enter his own chest.
But no one I talk to remembers this tragedy, even in such a public place, so long before the one which reset the clocks here. The police department’s homicide division tells me they lost all their records in the flooding. A spokeswoman dismisses it, saying, “There’s been a murder on almost every corner in New Orleans by now.”
The city’s record, its contemporary histories, the lives of so many of its people, are mostly lost, washed away. Only the ghosts remain.
MAINE
CAPITAL Augusta
ENTERED UNION 1820 (23rd)
ORIGIN OF NAME First used to distinguish the mainland from the offshore islands. Possibly meant as a compliment to Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I of England, who owned the province of Mayne in France.
NICKNAME PineTreeState
MOTTO Dirigo (“I lead”)
RESIDENTS Mainer
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 2
STATE BIRD chickadee
STATE FLOWER white pine cone and tassel
STATE TREE white pine tree
STATE SONG “State of Maine Song”
LAND AREA 30,862sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Piscataquis Co., 18 mi. N of Dover-Foxcroft
POPULATION 1,321,505
WHITE 96.9%
BLACK 0.5%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.6%
ASIAN 0.7%
HISPANIC/LATINO 0.7%
UNDER 18 23.6%
65 AND OVER 14.4%
MEDIAN AGE 38.6
MAINE
Heidi Julavits
By the time this essay is published I will already be in hiding, probably in a midsized Sunbelt city, living under a pseudonym, and receiving no packages. Maine, a Libertarian-minded, keep-to-your-own-business kind of state, does not take kindly to written assessments, possibly because to write about the place is to say “I am an authority,” and nobody, by Maine standards, is more deserving of a beat-down—or of persecution, or expulsion—than an authority. When my husband and I ask our neighbor, a professional boat-builder and former electrician, if he can lend some advice about boat-building and wiring, he’ll first demur that he knows nothing in the slightest about boat-building and wiring. Of boat-building—like three-million-dollar, ninety-foot yachts he says, “Anybody can do it.” Because authority holds such little weight, there is no zoning in our town, which means there are no building permits, which means you could, as my husband often jokingly threatened to do, erect a brownstone in your back field. Civilians rule in rural Maine, thus it’s best not to incite the civilians by writing about them.
But here I am, writing about them, an act of inexcusable treason since I am, if you subscribe to the legal definition, a “Mainer,” with a folder of convincing documentation that includes a birth certificate and a failed driving test from the Portland DMV. I’ll admit that my authority, already questionable, suffers innate limitations because I’m a certain kind of Mainer—Averagely Seaworthy First-Generation Over-Educated Urban Coastal pretty much describes my brand of nativeness. I can tie a bowline, I know a nun from a bell from a can, and a harbor seal from a lobster pot, but I know squat about the daily life trials facing the lake-and-mountain set. I didn’t portage a canoe until I was eighteen (and living in New Hampshire); I didn’t sight my first official moose until I was in my thirties. But because my Maine is the basis of the Maine cued in the minds of the non-Maine public when they hear the word “Maine,” I’m inclined to issue a cultural correction, even a doomed one. I’ve spent a lifetime bristling at the Murder She Wrote doddery quaint clapboard nonsense that passes as Maine in the cultural vernacular. Maine, according to this vernacular, is a state filled with people possessed of great, garbled wisdom who eat lobster like it’s bologna and die in ironic drowning accidents.
But non-natives—“From Aways” in native parlance—aren’t the only ones indulging in gross acts of distortion. Maine’s state slogan, recently changed from “Vacationland” to “The Way Life Should Be,” represents one of the boldest moves in the annals of intentional misrepresentation, depending on your notion of ideal living conditions. There are more obese people in Maine than in any other New England state. In Maine, it’s illegal to bait bears with donuts and then shoot them (presumably, people, and bears, should be less fat because of this law). Maine has more cat owners than any other state. Maine’s drug of choice is coffee brandy. If you want to grow your own food, which an astonishing number of people in Maine feel compelled to do, you have 122 days to accomplish this between frosts. The annual mean temperature on the coast, where I live four months per year, is 46 degrees (40 degrees up north). If you spend a year in Maine, you’ll enjoy 128 days of rain, 48 days of fog, and 17 days of snow. The only state poorer than Maine in 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina, was Louisiana. Meaning, the only state worse off financially was a state that suffered the most crippling natural disaster in the history of this country. In Maine, meanwhile, 2005 was business as usual—just a lot of fat people hanging out in the rain with their cats, drinking coffee brandy and trying, without cheating, to kill a bear.
It should come as no surprise that such an elite group would be extremely cautious, if not downright parsimonious, when extending membership privileges to others. And once they’ve hopped the cement walls that encircle the Maine border, people discover the state’s population divided into two categories—Natives and From Aways. Easy stuff on first inspection. Either you were born here or you were not. But From Away is a highly relative term, applicable to anyone who didn’t grow up in the place where you are standing at that very moment. Taken to its logical extreme, everyone is a From Away—i.e., everyone who isn’t You is a From Away—but Mainers don’t tend to get so Hegelian about it. Instead, they invoke the town line or the water boundary that separates you from the people who graciously took you in, like a family that loves to flash before you on a nightly basis your adoption papers. Take, for example, an obituary oft-cited by a friend when trying to convey, to the average tourist, just how far away they are from the place they’re currently visiting. According to this obituary, a woman had lived her entire ninety-plus years, save the first three weeks she was alive, on a remote island. She was known in her tiny community, in which she had clocked nearly a century marked primarily by winter, as the Woman From Away. I suffer similarly. I was born in Portland, Maine. I left the state when I was eighteen and returned at the age of thirty-three. My husband and I bought a house in a town three hours northeast of Portland. Thus I am a From Away in my home state.
The easy thing about being a From Away, however, is that your community has extremely low expectations for you. You’re meant to screw up regularly at great cost to your homeowner’s insurance, because such screw-ups are entertaining and an excellent way to warm the hearts of even the most indifferent natives. We proved highly entertaining. We showed up and promptly burst our pipes, ruining a room that had, based on the plaster and lathe we had to chunk into garbage bags, not been touched in nearly 200 years. In other words, we were the stupidest people in almost 200 years to live in this house. We were welcomed throughout the land. Months later I went into the bookstore twelve miles away, and the clerk said to me, “Aren’t you the person with the burst pipe?” Our tale of successful integration assumed some chilling misshapes in the coming year; a woman whose mother lives in D.C. sa
id she’d heard from another woman in D.C. who was friends with the woman who used to own our house that our house had burned down. I panicked before realizing this was just another variation on the Welcome You Delightful Idiot story.
I’m glad I didn’t have to burn my house down to be embraced as the know-nothing I was, but some people have gone to nearly that extreme. Take, for example, Auslander. Auslander showed up from a city and knew too much. He had big plans for the town, including a low-income housing project, a ferry, maybe even a university. Then he put the ashes from his woodstove in a plastic bag and left them on his barn floor. The barn caught fire, the volunteers were called. We weren’t in Maine at the time; two weeks later we drove up for a visit. A neighbor came by to say hello. “Did you hear about Auslander’s barn?” he asked. We decided to take a walk, get some brisk Maine air. Halfway to town a friend stopped in his truck. “Did you hear about Auslander’s barn?” he asked. Later another friend called. “Did you hear about Auslander’s barn?” she asked. There was a Schadenfreude-y undertone to this news, but it also had the sweet enthusiasm of a birth announcement. Auslander had finally arrived.
Here’s what you will talk about over dinner: You will talk about firewood. You will talk about the benefits of in-floor heating, and the R-value of your new insulation, and whether or not you should pre-buy your furnace oil. You will talk about unconventional uses for your Shop-Vac, such as catching bats or chugging loose the antique vegetable clog in your graywater pipe. You will talk about unconventional uses for your table saw, such as slicing homemade bread. You will talk about pouring dye in your toilet during the wintertime so that the effluent pattern will be marked in pink on the snow in your backyard, usually not in the desired fan shape but in a single graven line, suggesting that your leachfield’s kaput. You will talk about septic mounds and how to landscape them—someone will probably mention the lady who put a bocce court on top of hers and how it’s impossible to grow grass on hardpack without a few truckloads of superdirt. You’ll talk about the mother of four who left her husband for the piano teacher, the psycho guy who poisoned the well of a lesbian sandwich maker, the erotic outsider art produced by your plumber, the maybe-pedophile at the local zendo, whether you’d rather live next door to alpacas or miniature horses, whether so-and-so’s grandmother really did meet the actual spider that inspired E. B. White to write Charlotte’s Web, if the From Away who bought the general store is gay and if this means there will be snazzier food for sale, whether the furry carcass left on your porch by a coyote was once a bird, a rabbit, or a vole, if you should cut your house in two and move it, in pieces, further away from the road, if you want to invest in a quarter of a cow or half a pig, why you should never buy a boat, why you definitely should or definitely should not use blown-in insulation, whether or not it is symbolic that your carpenter’s favorite movie is Fitzcarraldo, when the winter will end, when the rain will end, when the fog will end.
Stano was just Stan until Gitano came along and he and Gitano got into it. (Note: What follows is accurate only to the degree that the gossip surrounding the battle between Gitano and Stano can be considered accurate. I’d put the accuracy percentage at about 82; I’d also posit that the composite story resulting from a collective effort at storytelling is, in fact, a kind of contemporary fable, true in its generalities if fanciful in its specifics.) Gitano is some kind of Vet who did time in various slammers for, rumors variously have it, drugs, drinking, sexual misdemeanors, or some criminal cocktail of the three. This is his second act in our town—his first act concluded abruptly when he started hanging around with the lobstermen’s teenage daughters, misdemeanoring them maybe, and the lobstermen ran him off. He signaled his peaceful return with a rock cairn—an impressive stack of round granite rocks that he balanced, one atop the other, across from the general store.
But peaceful his return was possibly not. Depending on whom you ask, Gitano has psychologically imprisoned an old lady who, conveniently, had no husband nor heirs to challenge this hostile (or not, depending) take-over. He lives with her in her antique Cape and does odd jobs—really fucking odd jobs—like painting a two-story-high whale breaching under a rainbow on the side of her barn, and painting her entire house a yellow that’s a number of shades harder on the eye than a New York taxi cab, and installing triangular second-floor dormers that strongly vibe Buckminster Fuller. Stan, a nervous sort of guy who thinks the world is out to get him—and it is—owns the inn and restaurant directly next to Gitano’s house. Stan took issue with the house’s lurid paint color, but the whale, painted in a style one might best call Hippie Van Acid Trip, put Stan over the very thin edge he travels daily. He got into it with Gitano, and Gitano got into it with him. Gitano wrote a sign, aimed at Stan’s customers, that read FOR THE AMOUNT of money you’re spending on dinner you could feed a starving FAMILY FOR A MONTH. For sale beneath the sign was a table full of sad seedlings. Stan tried to get Gitano kicked out of town again on a general nuisance charge; in retaliation, Gitano ran for town selectman. He lost.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, Gitano lashed out at his other neighbor, a sweet woman with a green thumb. He called this woman a fucking cunt and painted on the side of his house that faced her kitchen window the words go HOME, which might seem a strange message to send to a person inside her own house, but the woman spends half the year in Florida. Stan, meanwhile, decided to go after Gitano on an aesthetic violation. Appealing to the summer people, i.e., people with a bit more invested in the notion that their Vacationland remain the way life should be, i.e., easier on the eye and absent powerfully ugly houses, he asked that they demand Gitano repaint his Cape and lose the whale. This did not work. One of the most respected longtime From Aways pointed out that other From Aways, tackier McMansion-building From Aways, were threatening to move to our town from “the Island,” i.e., Mount Desert Island, on which there was no more McMansion land available. Those people, he said, would take one look at Gitano’s house and invest their money elsewhere. Fucking cunt, that house says to all who look upon it. Go home.
Doctors tend to be extraneous professionals in a place where sickness is ignored and pain is not often felt. My neighbor, when helping us quarter our felled maple crushed his thumb in the motorized wood splitter, remarked tonelessly “That smarts,” wrapped his thumb in a handkerchief, and went to work. If you bring your sick child to the doctor, she will say “Yup, she’s sick,” and send you home without a prescription. If you accidentally drop your baby on her head, the doctor will tell you about the time her baby ended up pinioned between the jaws of a wolfhound. Many people give birth to their children at home, including doctors. If you have a baby in the hospital, they will likely not offer you painkillers; if pressed, they will offer you a drug that dates back to the 1980s. Many people do not vaccinate their children; if you ask what will happen if that child wants to go to college and must produce an immunization record, they will say “I’m hoping she’ll apprentice.”
To decode: To treat pain or sickness would be to acknowledge that pain and sickness exist, and to acknowledge that pain and sickness exist would be to admit that we might be vulnerable to pain and sickness. This works as an emotional-physical management principle except when it really does not. People, as people do everywhere, particularly in cold climates braced by high levels of alcohol and stoicism, kill themselves. There was the farmer who went down to the shore and shot himself on the same rock where his own father had shot himself a few decades previous. There was the couple that committed couple suicide. Apparently one person was dying, one person was tired of living. They dealt with the problem alone and definitively. Their deaths made a poetically self-reliant Mainer sort of sense.
What was confusing about the farmer was this: He killed himself during the warm months. If you’ve ever spent a winter in Maine, metaphorical suicide is often invoked during the weeks of oppressive cold and dark (in Portland, on New Year’s Day, the sun rises at 7:14 a.m. and sets at 4:14 p.m.) Which makes a summer suici
de tragically perplexing. You survived the worst and now you kill yourself? But now I can better conceive of a summer suicide. In late June, when summer hasn’t even kicked in and already the days are getting shorter, I am seized by a kind of epic desperation. On these days I am reminded of doing drugs, and reach instead for my decanter of coffee brandy. I am reminded of when, after doing drugs on a semi-regular basis, your terror of the come-down creeps closer and closer to the apex of your druggy glory, until the moment when you’re nearing your happiest is also the moment most tinged with terror and apprehension because you’re about to begin the long descent. If you had to pull the plug, maybe the perfect ending place is on the upswing.
Before the Iraq War, the American flags Martha Stewartizing the porch of every white Maine farmhouse were about as indicative of their owners’ politics as a hanging plant. Then the U.S. invaded Iraq, and flag symbolism narrowed sharply from Generic Yankee to Pro-War Patriot. Most of the flags came down, but those that stayed up conveyed something very unmistakable. A flag dialogue ensued. A man began sticking white flags in his front lawn, flags like those little flags that mark an invisible fence, one flag for each dead American soldier. The town selectmen voted to hang American flags on the electrical poles leading into town, using money from the town budget for the project and neglecting to ask permission of the electric company. Sounding in from the margins were the rainbow flags, often in windsock form, that fluttered from mailboxes marking dirt driveways disappearing into the woods. Mostly these flags were employed in the Generic Cultural Diversity Tolerance sense. Yes, some were specifically flown as war protest flags, but the off-the-gridders who mount these flags tend to consider all governmental acts, even presumably benign ones, suspect. The rainbow represents a disapproval of the First World so consummate that the war is just a fraction of the American shit pie they’re fake-cheerfully rejecting. Also, none of them are gay.