Revelling in the rugged beauty of the ‘other Portland’
LUMBERJACK shirts are earned in Portland, Maine, not bought at some overpriced boutique – you will find the latter at the other Portland in Oregon, 3,000 miles or so away on the West Coast.
The most atmospheric way to get to this Portland is to take Amtrak’s ‘Downeaster’ north from Boston.
It rattles its way through Woburn, Massachusetts; Exeter, Durham and Dover in New Hampshire; past small towns with smart private schools, Little League baseball games, universities, lakes and forests.
This train journey offers English-accented Americana on a 112-mile journey, accompanied by bells, whistles and conductors announcing stops in sing- song voices.
Portland isn’t quite the end of the line, but it feels like it. Even on a hot, cloudless day, there’s a tartness in the air. Mainers are rugged types with weather-beaten faces and typical backstories in no-nonsense industries, such as logging and shipping. And there’s special admiration for the hardy folk who live year-round on the islands off the coast here.
Portland’s downtown really is downtown, with a gentle incline down cobbled streets to the harbour. It’s a city with a whaling history and a downbeat recent past. ‘Half the shops were derelict on Commercial Street 20 years ago,’ says Ted of Maine Foodie Tours. These days the streets are packed with shops selling bean-to-bar chocolate, coffee brewed in the most painstaking way and a series of restaurants, all subscribing to the farm-to-fork philosophy.
The city’s best exponent of this kind of dining is called Lucky Catch. In a small boat, passengers dressed in rubber overalls get to trawl around the lobster pots in Casco Bay while Chris, the captain, points out the millionaire mansions and explains the etiquette of lobstering… only look at your own pots (they all have distinctive buoys), throw back very small and very large lobsters, nick the tail and throw back egg-bearing ones.
It’s the epitome of slow food – each lobster takes at least five years to grow the required size. I was particularly taken with a one-clawed wonder that we hauled on to the boat – and I went on to have it cooked at a restaurant on the pier.
My base was the Press Hotel, which until 2010 housed Portland’s newspaper, starting its new life last year.
It was very comfortable to bed down where reporters once slaved over deadlines – and the lobster Eggs Benedict in the morning was certainly better than any newspaperoffice canteen food I’ve ever tasted.
For the purest Portland experience, however, head to Andy’s Old Port Pub where owners Rick and Jennifer really do know the names of their locals and dish up the state’s culinary essentials of clam chowder, lobster roll and (home-made) blueberry pie, all at bargain prices.
It’s on the wharf, near the ferry that heads – in all weathers – to the ‘off-islands’ and the unofficial meeting place for the sort of people (of both sexes) who’ve grown up wearing plaid shirts.