Evan the Forager. The Maine Man
Last time it was the worst journey of my life. 10 hours, two silent kids in the back, a marriage imploding up front. We stopped half way to team up with friends, driving in parallel, for a fun night in a cheap motel. Indoor swimming pool dripping with algae and a bloodless dinner of chasmic silences at TGI Friday’s. What followed was a week of intrigue, duplicity and wretchedness. If you’ve never experienced the empty seat at the group dinner and the glow of distant texting in the garden, there’s a unique corner of Hell waiting for you. I didn’t give a fuck about Maine. If a fleet of bombers had been scrambled to turn it into a giant hibachi, I’d have cheered. Even the name made me gag. My Mainer friend Greg says it’s where marriages go to implode. There is a lane for them on I-95.
So I guess this is an exorcism. Or maybe baptism. And at 6.30 on a February morning, alone in a tiny cove on Deer Isle, it’s a compelling start. The indifferent beauty makes you choke up. It’s like it doesn’t know it’s beautiful. It’s just going about its business being a glassy sea that melts into a sky like milk, with porcupine islands that seem to float in space like prog-rock album covers by Roger Dean in the 70’s. It doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. The celtic seriousness of the sea sloughs off the trivia, the scheming and backbiting and late-onset juvenilia that characterizes life in a landlocked community in rural suburbia. Which is what I just left. And keep leaving.
Evan’s spending the winter in a house on the beach. He galumphs out, grinning broadly, like a bear that forgot to hibernate and wonders where everybody went. He arrived in November. It’s February and I’m not sure he’s changed his clothes. His bare feet are planted in unlaced boots, his hair is clustered on one side of his head as if trying to escape. Evan has 24 hour-a-day bedhead. Quite an achievement for a man who appears never to have slept. He bounces off the kitchen cabinets, roaring like a stegosaur, determined to welcome me to Maine with rösti. The first of many. Evan’s trying to perfect rösti. Not too thick, not too thin. Air-dried or dried in a twisted tea-towel? Long strokes on the grater or rapid machine-gun rattle? Because whilst Evan might seem at first to be an eager sea-lion that ate Jackie Gleason, he’s actually a spinster maiden aunt. He’s Cousin Charlotte from A Room With A View. There are rules. And there are rules about those rules. Tea will be made in a pot. The pot will be warmed. Teabags will be plucked from the counter between finger-and thumb, like crumpled sheets of used toilet-paper, and consigned to the compost. Loose Wuyuan Black will be spooned from a tiny tin into the tiny strainer which will be inserted into the tiny pot. And on it goes. By the time Evan has titrated your tea, it’s time for more rösti.
We’re off to dinner in Blue Hill. Mary Alice and Max are cooking in the back room of the wine shop, the kind of thing we talk about in the Catskills and never do. Evan boulders in, bellowing like a moose, grabbing things off shelves as if it’s a stick-up. It may be the four cans of sake we sucked down in the truck, but everything has the exaggerated, accelerated quality of a silent movie. Max skips out of the kitchen like a nutty professor mid-way through a chemistry experiment, wearing floral oven-gloves and a pinnie. He bounces with glee at our appearance and the words ‘Goody! Goody!’ appear on the screen as Art Deco subtitles. Mary Alice stirs something at the stove, a wry island of serenity in the maelstrom of stapstick. This is good stuff. It’s full of love and joy, it’s quick and witty and gay. It’s everything you’d want if you’d chosen to endure a long winter far from the madding crowd. And it’s everything I don’t have.
The days play out slow. I’m on a walking binge. I’ve discovered a new form of flab that bands my midriff and creeps up its flanks like an ambush. If I bounce gently it jiggles, as if I’m being peppered by a fusillade of bb guns. I don’t like it. Stout and tight would be fine. I’m not trying to be one of those antique stagehands who look like a teenage girl from behind until they turn and have the face of Iggy Pop. But thickly-trowelled risotto is not okay. So I walk, every day, fast and far into the empty village for poached eggs on toast. I leave Evan groaning on the undersize living-room couch he is determined to call a bed despite the house being replete with beds.
Evan’s a forager. He’s actually the Forager. That’s his name. But if it’s winter in Maine there’s little to forage, so he’s using the off-season to write a book for Emilia Terragni at Phaidon. Foraging for words. I give him his mornings, waxing Thoreau about morels or the quality of dappled light on long-abandoned limekilns, and putter along the shoreline by myself, get caught by the rising tide, come home with Muck boots full of brine. Each night we vouch to wake early, take the mail boat out to Isle au Haut, find us some steamers, sing some Gordon Bok. Plans made late on too many bottles of violet Alto Aldige that have no hope of reaching fruition. He’s horrified by the twenty dollar fare, takes it personally, flounces round the kitchen huffing and puffing before rustling up rösti. The afternoons we explore together, past Stonington to where Audrey Cooper sits perched in her saltbox waiting out the winter with Abyssinian eyes. Or beyond Brooklin, on foot to Naskeag and Herrick Bay with views over to Flye Island and distant Acadia.
Our last afternoon we forage. We’ve promised Max bivalves for his linguine alle vongole and Evan says he knows where they are. The sun is setting as we park on a bridge over an unprepossessing mudflat. The sky is gunmetal grey. So is the sand. It’s the moon, but wet. We stagger out of the truck with a hand-rake and 5 gallon construction pail and traipse across the mire, shadowy fugures from The Road. It’s cold, raining horizontally, and I’m in an APC shearling with a Venetian linen scarf tied round my head like a man with a toothache. We are clearly the only things alive for a hundred miles around.
Evan’s pointing out little depressions in the mud. ‘There’s a clam there’ he says, and I couldn’t give a fuck. He digs. The mud is black as cancer, but still he digs. Nothing. ‘Got away’ he says. Right, Evan, the buried clam sprouted underground legs and sprinted off through the sand like Flo-Jo. I stare at him with all the enthusiasm of Mount Rushmore. ‘Why don’t you have a go?’ he says. I take the rake. He points to more dimples, tiny blowholes in the sand. I trudge towards one and am greeted by a trouser-splooging squirt, a two-foot airborne extrusion of clammy ejaculate. I squeal. There’s something down there! ‘Dig!’ shouts Evan and I’m digging like a fucking spaniel, arse in the air, my rake a blur of mud and steel. And I hit something. Like a rock. I get a tine under the side, and out it pops. A cream-coloured mollusk the size of your fist. ‘Hen clam!’ says Evan. I thrust it in the air, Rocky Balboa on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. ‘Look, follow the seam!’ I look. There’s a series of blowholes, each a couple of feet from the next, angling in a straight line towards the water. ‘Keep digging!’ he shouts.
We arrive in East Blue Hill with five hens and a quahog. Max, thrilled, is prancing round the kitchen with a bottle of Grignolino. Sam kindheartedly endures our deafening fables while Mary Alice plays Bach on the piano. Nobody in Bovina plays Bach on the piano. Nobody in Bovina has a piano. They’ve got guns, a ferret in a cage and a machine to put the skins on sausages. I need to be here. Mary Alice offers a bed for the night and we all start to clean the clams. ‘You really don’t have to leave’ she says.
I’m up at 4.30 and on my way. Nine inches of fresh snow have fallen, roads are unploughed, there is every reason to stay. Every now and then something, someone, strikes you in the back of the head like a seagull chasing a french fry. A town on the Adriatic, a magical friend in a terrible village in the Catskills, a barn in Brittany. Grab the sash with both hands, throw open the window onto a symphony of light and air.
‘Oh, my Joanie, don’t you know
That the stars are swingin’ slow
And the seas are rollin’ easy
As they did so long ago
If I had a thing to give you
I would tell you one more time
That the world is always turning toward the morning’
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