How to Cook a Moose by Kate Christensen Read Free Book Online

militia in the ensuing violence, and seven others were injured. Dow was later prosecuted in court when his own alderman sued him for not having properly authorized the shipment. Dow was acquitted, but, largely because of the Rum Riot and the lawsuit, the Maine Law was repealed in 1856.
    Meanwhile, Portland’s economy had rebounded from the embargo and war. The Grand Trunk Railway was built in 1853, which made Portland the primary ice-free winter seaport for Canadian exports,which lasted until the hub moved north to Nova Scotia in 1923, and the invention of icebreakers. The town was booming.
    Then came the Great Fire of 1866, which was ignited during Independence Day celebrations on the first Fourth of July after the Civil War. A firecracker or cigar ash ignited a building on Commercial Street and it spread to a lumberyard, then a sugarhouse, and then throughout the town. It finally burned out up on Munjoy Hill. Only two people were killed, but most of the commercial buildings, hundreds of houses, and half the churches of Portland were destroyed, 1,800 buildings in all, and 10,000 people were made homeless. Most of them took refuge in a tent city on Munjoy Hill on the East End, overlooking Casco Bay. (This area later turned into a working-class neighborhood that housed cannery workers; these days, as things always seem to go, it’s the most hip, happening, desirable neighborhood in town.)
    An old photograph of Portland taken just after the fire shows ashy rubble and drifting smoke. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was from Portland, wrote, “Desolation! Desolation! Desolation! It reminds me of Pompeii, that sepult city.” But once again, the town was rebuilt, this time, luckily, with brick. The Cumberland and Oxford Canal was built in 1932 to allow commercial shipping inland to Sebago Lake and Long Lake. During the ensuing building boom, which lasted through the 1930s, mansions sprang up on the West End, designed in grand style by famous nineteenth-century architects, most notably John Calvin Stevens: Federal, Queen Anne, Victorian, Romanesque, Gothic. The West End is now a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood of meticulously preserved and renovated houses on wide, clean streets, many of which, ours included, have been split up into apartments and condos.
    When the Maine Mall was built in South Portland in the 1970s, downtown Portland and the Old Port fell into decline and abandonment.Businesses closed; Congress Street was shuttered and vacant. But then, in yet another reversal of fortune, thanks to a combination of the city’s architectural preservation laws and the Maine College of Art, which opened in the 1990s, the peninsula boomed again with restaurants and businesses and shops. And now, downtown Portland is alive and well, full of tourists, locals, and students.
    The population of Portland proper is just over 65,000; the “greater Portland area” has about half a million people, which is more than a third of Maine’s total population. (What a vast and empty state, stretching way up north to tuck into the sheltering wing, or armpit, maybe, of Canada.) Still, it feels very small. And yet, for such a small city, I’m amazed by its diversity and cultural life, the overall sophisticated excellence of its many restaurants, and by the pervasive feeling here of belonging to the greater world. Portland isn’t a backwater, but it does have a marked sensibility, a collective tough-minded, resourceful fatalism appropriate to a city that’s been, over the centuries, seized, bombarded, rebuilt, burned, rebuilt, economically sunk, deprived of booze, burned to the ground again, rebuilt, economically sunk again, and revived. The city motto is Resurgam , or “I Will Rise Again”; the city seal shows a phoenix rising, of course, from ashes.

    It’s an hour and fifteen minutes’ drive, door to door, from the farmhouse through Maine to our house in Portland. The drive is entirely