Monday, August 8, 2011

When in Maine, this is the Main dish...

Lobster roll, a Maine speciality

A lobster roll, a fantastic invention.  Cooked lobster meat stuffed into a bread roll (like hot dog roll, but split on the top, not the side), with some mayonnaise and some dusting of paprika.  Eat.  Simple. Good. Amazing.

waiting for Lobster rolls
We had our only lobster rolls at the Lobster Shack at Two Lights, near Cape Elizabeth south of Portland on a dead end road that ends in a parking lot that immediately becomes too full and too crowded on summer days.  But it is worth it.

fog horns can be loud
 It is a little restaurant perched on the cliffs near the sea, and the closest building houses a fog horn (with appropriate signs to watch out for the sound, but how can you do that?  Doesn't it hit you when it hits you, without warning? Or does it sound a warning before, heh!?). The fog horn was on the day we were there, sounding its eerie warnings out in the fuzzy fog of the ocean.

sea gulls are ferocious
There are other warnings too, near the shack itself, since it is surrounded with highly adapted ferocsiouly behaving seagulls that have mastered the feats of 'getting the lobster before the human'.  Hold on to your food, or someone else will.

ocean in Maine
The best thing with Maine are the rocks and the coastline.  Granite and shale cliffs, rounded by the ice ages' massively thick glacier covers, and now with lichens and seaweeds as the only plant cover.  The feel is very similar to parts of Norway (without the mountains) and the west coast of Sweden (Bohuslän).  I love it.

Xanthoria lichens
This yellow lichen (Xanthoria) are typical for these coasts, and if I ever would be a painter I would paint giant closeups of imagined lichen macro images. 

ocean and sky and nothing more
And out there in this direction, are Scandinavia and England.  Far away from Cape Elizabeth, Cape Cod, Nantucket and Cape May, but certainly, Europe is there. Even if it is invisible.  Don't you ever wonder how we can be convinced of such things before we have experienced them?  We have to believe the invisible until we have sailed, flown, or swum there.

No comments: