by John Hodgman
The ocean in Maine is traumatically cold. If you make the mistake of going into it, every cell in your body will begin shouting the first half of the word “hypothermia” into your brain; the second half will simply be frozen tears. And the beaches of Maine offer no relief as you launch yourself back onto shore, because the beaches of Maine are made out of jagged stones shaped like knives. Wherever the shoreline is merely slopes of smooth, unpunishing granite, Maine compensates by encrusting it with sharp barnacles and sea snails. No matter how careful you are, you cannot avoid crushing some of them under your feet. You become death when you walk on a beach in Maine, and every step is a sea snail genocide.
To be fair, there are also lakes in Maine. But you do not want to swim in them either, because lakes are disgusting. At least the ocean has tides, heaving its weeds and slimes and jellies out of your way every now and then. The ocean takes its garbage to the dump. But lakes are unmoving, fetid pools full of fish poop and frog parts. I don’t want to hear from you people who live in the Great Lakes regions. I am sure you will protest that your gigantic stale-water ponds also have tides and are basically imitation seas. That is even weirder. That’s like a dog pretending to be a human. And because it’s a stupid dog, it just wears a rubber human suit and everyone says: Why is that gross rubbery human crawling around on the floor over there?
And the bottom of every lake is a Lovecraftian hellscape. If you ever go snorkeling in your father-in-law’s lake in Maine, you will see for yourself that it is all ooze and muck and fallen trees and sunken demonic cities of impossible geometries. That last part is not true, but this is: you will see huge freshwater clams, and you will scream underwater. You will run through the foot-swallowing mud of the shallows and shore and back up to the house to seek confirmation of the madness that had just invaded your eyes.
And your father-in-law will say, “Yes: freshwater clams. They exist.”
Indeed, “They Exist” would be a pretty good slogan for a line of canned freshwater clams. But such a line will never exist. No person or thing wants to eat a freshwater clam, because all they do is suck in tepid fecal water all day. And, lacking natural predators, the freshwater clams grow to the size of Nerf footballs. They sit half-submerged in the mire, their pale shells opening and closing, singing to you as you snorkel above, “Join us, join us, join us.”
You don’t tell your father-in-law about the singing.
And even though scientists have done research and human explorers have, over the past one hundred years, discovered bodies of water that are actually appealing to enter and beaches that are not painful but in fact soft and warm and welcoming, the fact remains that people are still choosing to go to Maine, including us.
Because my wife loves Maine more than any other place on Earth, and because she also loves Maine more than any other person on Earth, we have visited Maine for some stretch of time almost every year that I have known her. Even when we grew up and had a perfectly good bogside summer home of our own in Massachusetts, we would abandon it every summer and begin the seven-hour drive northeast to her father’s house.
We would drive up along the coast, always stopping at the same place where she stopped as a child: Perry’s Nut House. It opened in 1927 in a former ship captain’s home: two stories of white shingles and green shutters now looming anachronistic and lonely next to the gas stations and failed restaurants that surround it on Route 1 outside of Belfast. Perry’s Nut House did not begin life, as I first imagined, as an old-time roadside lunatic asylum. Rather, it began and still serves as a tourist trap: a place for those wealthy Bostonians of yore to rest the engines of their Model As and Studebaker Dictators (thanks, Wikipedia!) on their way to Bar Harbor and stock up on bridge mix and nuts. Remember, they were still inventing “vacation” back in 1927. Someone said to someone else, “What do you think people on vacation want?”
And the other person said, “I don’t know. Nuts, maybe? Let’s say nuts.” And one of those people was named Perry.
At some point Perry’s course-corrected and realized it had to offer other, non-nut merchandise to the weary traveler, and so it has since expanded to include all kinds of Maine-ish souvenirs and gewgaws and lobster onesies as well as a wide variety of fudge. Do you remember the real talk we had a few paragraphs ago about lakes? Similarly, can we now all agree, as adults, that fudge is repulsive? Look, I appreciate I am not an expert. As I have written before, I do not have a sweet tooth (I have an alcohol molar). But I have seen the same astonishing cake- and candy-themed competition shows that you have. Chefs are making impossible, beautiful things out of sugar: candy floss clouds and fantasy cities of marzipan and cakes that look like Boba Fett helmets and massive double cheeseburgers and a giant shrimp cocktail. OK: those last ones are weird and gross. But they prove that you can make sugar look like anything; no one is forcing you to make it look like fudge. I don’t need to tell you what fudge looks like. But I will anyway: it looks like a dark, impacted colon blockage that a surgeon has to remove to save your life. Stop eating it.
Like a lot of roadside stands from the early twentieth century, Perry’s doubled as a kind of museum of curiosities. I guess the idea was that any travel, no matter how close to home, should put you in contact with the worldly and exotic. Since there was not much of that in Maine, Perry’s, like many of its ilk, adorned itself with taxidermy, both natural and rogue. Some of it has been retired. The twin bear cubs posed as boxers with gloves sewn onto their paws, for example, disappeared when Perry’s briefly closed in 1997. That’s also when the large model elephant (Hawthorne II) that once stood outside Perry’s got sold and put atop the movie theater in Belfast. But there is still an imposing stuffed albatross and a full alligator skin hanging on the wall and a small mummy in the glass case beneath the cash register, staring up at the Mexican jumping beans and chunks of fool’s gold available for impulse purchase.
The centerpiece of the collection is a taxidermied gorilla someone dubbed “Ape-Braham” in order to correct any accidental delusion that this was an actual, serious endeavor at natural history. Ape-Braham was recently restored from his former moldering condition, and he looks great as he stands there at the front of the store, his eyes looking forlornly upward, inches from the new drop popcorn ceiling as if to say, “Welcome to Maine, children! Begin thinking about death!”
Upon every visit to Perry’s, I make sure to browse the Maine Humor section. “Maine Humor” is a very specific subset of comedy. It consists mostly of men with flinty, Down East accents giving bad directions to people from away. Also acceptable are stories about being chased by bears, defecated upon by seabirds, and near drownings. Punishment by nature is a common theme, appropriate to the state, and unflappability in the face of the same is another. Perry’s Maine Humor section has many books and CDs with titles like A Moose and a Lobster Walk into a Bar . . . and Suddenly the Cider Didn’t Taste So Good and Bangor? I Hardly Know Her! I had to make that last one up, because I guess the Maine humorists are just not doing their jobs.
Maine humorist John McDonald opens his CD, Ain’t He Some Funny!, with a warning that if you are expecting to laugh at what you are about to hear, you are missing the point of Maine Humor. He posits that you should look forward instead to a kind of low inner chuckling, so dry and so deep inside you that you may not realize it is happening. Thus my problem with Maine Humor. Comedy that abdicates its requirement to be funny is objectionable to me on two levels: first, it’s lazy; and second, that’s my thing.
The archetypal examples of Maine Humor are the “Bert and I” stories, recounting the non-adventures of a lobsterman (“I”) and his sternman, Bert. A typical “Bert and I” story (and the first) involves Bert and I starting their boat, the Bluebird. Then they go out to sea. Then they get stuck in fog. Then they get hit by a larger boat. The end. All of this is punctuated by dry asides and incomprehensible local terminology and vocal imitations of lobster boat engines made from breath and spittl
e that my wife finds disgusting and scary. There are many books and albums of these stories, and I have eventually come to enjoy them. Sometimes they actually are funny in a way that is very quiet and very occasional. But they are always hypnotic, the storyteller’s twisty, alien accent devolving into white noise. There is one live recording of “Bert and I” in which I can truly make out only every tenth word or so. Same with the audience, I’m pretty sure. But you hear the cadence of story in the stream of nonsense mouth sounds, and the dead pauses that intimate where jokes should be, and then you hear the audience, out of confused obligation, fill in the silence with laughter.
It’s a kind of genius, akin to the anticomedy of Andy Kaufman, and doubly so because it’s all bogus. There is no Bert and there is no I. That live recording was by Marshall Dodge, who was from New York. He and his college classmate Robert Bryan (also from New York) started collecting Maine stories when they were at Yale in the ’50s, then recorded them in their own imitations of Maine accents to great acclaim through the ’70s: an act of cultural appropriation and weird white minstrelsy that would not be rivaled in sheer gall until the advent of Larry the Cable Guy. I’ve watched what few videos of Dodge exist on YouTube. He’s a powerfully skilled storyteller, and whoever he was in truth hid behind his dark eyes and hollow-cheeked deadpan. Dodge claimed that he had spent no more than a week in Maine before the first “Bert and I” recording. I know this from his obituary: he was struck by a car while riding a bicycle in Hawaii, an inversion on every level of the first Bluebird story, in that Hawaii is warm, a bicycle goes on land, and when the Bluebird sank, Bert and I survived. Marshall Dodge didn’t. He was forty-five years old.
I was forty-five myself when I learned this fact. But I was haunted by Maine Humor long before that. Summer after summer through my twenties and thirties as we stopped at Perry’s I would find myself staring at this section with a mix of repulsion and relief. Whatever was happening in my career at that time, first as a writer, then as a performer . . . whatever anxieties I felt about my doubtful qualifications and fortunes, I could always console myself: At least I am not this. At least I am not a middle-aged, Yale-educated phony peddling half-funny stories about the state of Maine.
Please put this book down for a moment to appreciate my incredible mastery of literary irony. I’ll just be over here curling into a ball, trying to disappear forever.
A Kingdom Property
There is one more thing I want to tell you about Perry’s Nut House. One recent summer, taped to the door was a sign. It was a plain sheet of printer paper, with the following words handwritten on it in angry Sharpie: “NO BATHROOM.” This was a lie. Of course there is a bathroom in Perry’s Nut House: it is a building. Having a bathroom was probably the whole point of Perry’s Nut House when it began in the ’20s: lure travelers in with the bathroom, then while you have them, sell them on the fudge. It was a perfect fudge-out/fudge-in economy. If you did not appreciate that particularly brilliant allusion, hand this book to your nine-year-old.
If it were being honest, the sign on the door of Perry’s Nut House should have said this:
Yes. There is a bathroom. But you cannot use it. Because we hate you. Because we live here all the time. For ten months of darkness we endure. We stare down the lonely cold. And just when it starts to get warm again, you show up. You show up with demands: for lobster rolls and driving directions, housecleaning and landscaping, life experiences and fudge. And yes, this is a voluntary agreement. We are willingly selling you these things because we need your money to keep our houses warm when you aren’t here. And we will admit that we take a certain pleasure in selling to you and then watching you eat a substance that looks like human feces. (Fudge.) But it is still difficult. And over the years, the anger we feel over your making us work during what is, after all, our summer too becomes hard to bear. So we take our small vengeances where we can. Cont’d on back of sign. Please turn over.
(Page 2)
So no. You may not use the bathroom. In fact, we would rather your child vomit on our front steps than let you use the bathroom. Signed, the management of Perry’s Nut House.
I know the second page of the sign I just made up is true because I saw it happen. That same summer the sign appeared, my wife and I watched a young mother comfort her crying four-year-old daughter as she heaped sick upon Perry’s doorstep. And in that moment I felt I could hear the spirit of that ancient building, hissing to itself contentedly. “Yes . . . good!” it seemed to say, voicing Maine resentment logic at its finest: “Vomit all over ME! That will teach YOU!”
So yes, Maine is called Vacationland. But what it should really say on that sign above the Piscataqua River Bridge is “MAINE: PUTTING THE SPITE IN HOSPITALITY SINCE 1820.”
There is tremendous wealth in Maine, especially on the coast, and tremendous poverty, and in the summer, when wealth comes to visit, they are literal neighbors. You can’t see the biggest old money estates. But drive along one peninsula road and you will see the tall privet hedges that conceal them; and then a handful of new money mansions that want to be seen, their too-perfect, computer-designed gables slashing the skyline like bad CGI; and then next to them tiny, crumbling saltwater farmhouses—just boxes really—their dooryards ramshackled with junk and weeded-over boat trailers, loitering chickens, the husk of a purple VW pickup truck.
Once my wife and I went to an estate auction at a big, flaking white-shingled house a few towns over from where we were staying. This was the family seat of an old Maine working family whose name you would know if you spent any time there in the summer and needed plumbing or gas or plowing or repair or gravel or any other life-necessity you failed to study in college. Basically every true Mainer on this particular peninsula is either a Carter or a Gray or an Astbury or this one other name that I will not reveal, to protect their privacy. This family had run a general store for decades, but it had closed years ago. And with no heir willing to maintain it, the family home was now for sale, all of its contents seemingly exhaled into the driveway in one big, final death rattle of a breath.
Watching things decay, decline, and end is a popular Maine hobby, so locals and summer people alike had come and posted up their folding camp chairs to watch the auctioneer sell off this pair of old side tables, this box of tools, these cassette tapes, this captain’s chest, this generator, this mysterious and dangerous-looking piece of farm equipment, this length of heavy rope.
There were also some obvious fellow New Yorkers there: a clutch of two affluent, super-liberal families, the guys both wearing porkpie hats and the women in huge sunglasses. They were adults of the flashy/dress-too-young kind where you don’t know what the story is—it’s either two hetero couples or two same-sex couples, with the two nineteen-year-old daughters orbiting them, whispering around in their vintage dresses, the tattoos of math equations on their arms, who are either sisters or lovers.
The Porkpies smiled too brightly as each item was heaved off the pile and brought to the auctioneer by an army of husky young men in shirts without sleeves. An empty bookcase; a secretary with spindly legs; a crate of antique Clicquot Club root beer bottles; a box of old toys including a toy ambulance with a doll’s hand shoved in the back; old license plates; Limoges. The auctioneer would try to talk up everything, but toward the end of the day his patter deflated. At one point an old ten-speed was brought before him. “We have here a bicycle,” he said. “It’s just a good, good, good bike.”
On the one hand I sympathized with the auctioneer. The sheer volume of stuff was overwhelming. But mostly he was terrible. He either didn’t know much about what he was selling, or he didn’t care. As he got worn out and bored, and as the Porkpies and the other few bidders began to sense his surrender, beautiful old bureaus and pressed-back dinner chairs were going for tens of dollars. He had the hand-painted general store sign that once announced the family name in town, and he let someone steal it for something like a hundred dollars. The family ha
d entrusted him to get as much money out of the house as he could, and he was basically throwing its bones out into the road for the Porkpies to bring back to New York and mount in their apartment as a twee novelty. It was a miserable thing to observe. Especially as I was presently losing to them in a bidding war on a box of old bow ties and ascots.
I didn’t think I was as bad as them. But then, the most compelling villains always think they are the heroes. That was the secret to the longevity of the computer ads I was in: the PC thought he was there to help the Mac become a better, more boring computer.
By the time of the Porkpies and the auction, we had already stopped staying with my father-in-law and started renting a house in Maine. It was a fancy house in a fairly fancy town on this peninsula, the kind of large old manor that has a name. But I will call it what the owner, a retired surgeon, called it: a Kingdom Property. I took it at the time to be some specific real estate term, but I’ve never seen or heard that phrase again.
The former surgeon and his wife lived in the Kingdom Property in the winter, but rented it out during the summer. It had black gables and bone-white shingles, with two additions, one from the ’40s, the other from the ’80s, sprawling out from its one-hundred-year-old enduring core. It presided at the top of a grassy hill. A winding gravel drive led up to it, colonnaded on either side by tall, wispy pines. Its front lawn overlooked the bay. Its back lawn was dozens of acres of protected woodland and fields. Some of the fields were unmowed, and at twilight the tall grass was full of deer and mosquitoes. Other fields were rented out to a man with cows, the grass kept short by the chew and trod of his micro-herd of Belted Galloways.