1 With my parents' arrival on the Midcoast in the winter of 1978, my dad became the only orthopedic surgeon in the county, which made us one of the richest families around, although to be "rich" in Damariscotta is to be middle class almost anywhere else. None of the locals have, or had, much money. We lived in a two-bedroom cottage, and my parents shared one yellow Volvo in those early days. Once I was old enough to go to school, my mom started going, too, studying art in Portland, accounting in New Hampshire, then forestry in Vermont. After she earned her degree, she found a job organizing weekend retreats hosted by a Penobscot named Jerry Crowfoot, the type of boondoggle where you made lodgings out of pine boughs, stripped deer hide from the carcass, ate like natives ate, et cetera. They made you camp next to a paper mill and you had to pretend you couldn't see the smokestacks or smell the sulfur. I was always bored. I mean, all my childhood--I begged for siblings, pleaded to move back to the suburbs of Boston--but especially on those Indian weekends. During one of the retreats, one that my dad was also forced to attend, he and I made a lacrosse stick out of branches, buck intestines, and straw. He had played lacrosse, like I would someday, at Dartmouth. Neither of us expected the stick to become anything more than ornamental, but somehow it could throw and catch without completely turning to tinder, and I still have the stick--it hangs on the wall of my classroom, between the whiteboard and the window. As we played catch--I must have been seven or eight--my dad said, "I'm sorry your mom and I have been fighting so much." This was not something I had noticed, so I didn't respond. I just threw the ball back in his direction. He caught it. "Anyway, you don't have to worry," he said. "We'll figure it out." "Okay," I said. The assumption was always that I'd stay in Damariscotta and attend Lincoln High School, but Lincoln didn't have a hockey team and I was outgrowing my club team in Augusta, so during my freshman year, I started applying to boarding schools and eventually gained acceptance to Phillips Exeter Academy. As a way of celebrating, my mom and dad told me they were getting divorced--although the coeval nature of our family's upheaval and my departure was, I'm pretty sure, a coincidence. I repeated my freshman year at Exeter, which put me on a different trajectory from my friends back home, and after that I always felt a little out of sync with everything I left behind, everyone who stayed on the Midcoast, like a severed trap marker that comes and goes on the tides, never finding the old block that once tied it to the river-bottom--not that I ever really missed the feeling of being chained to a place. After the divorce, my mom took the position of general manager at a general store overlooking the South Bristol Gut, the narrow waterway that links our river to the one to the east. South Bristol is populated in the winter almost entirely by lobstermen and their families, but in the summer it's close enough to Christmas Cove to semi-support the kind of store my mom ran--a place that sold imported cheese, charcuterie, The New York Times, wine that wasn't necessarily named after its varietal. I helped her there on summer afternoons, digging out ice cream, filling out crossword puzzles, and reading books like A Farewell to Arms and Catch-22, novels my favorite English teachers had recommended at the end of spring classes. Did I complain about the indignity of working for my mother? Yes. Yes, I did. But even then I had to admit--only to myself, obviously--that life could be worse because at least I was allowed to sleep in-- But then I caught a bad break: Tracey Thatch, Ed's mom, had her knee replaced. By my dad. Apparently he--Dad--had been observing my pathetic work ethic and so by the time he stopped by Tracey's hospital room in mid-June for a routine post-op consultation had already determined that his son's employment would be bargained off as a thank-you to the Thatches for allowing him to bill them for his services. The Thatch Lobster Pound was where my dad always stopped to fuel up his fishing boat, and it sat on a petrified forest of sea-stained pilings, on the other side of the harbor from my mother's general store, staring across like an old cranky seagull drying its wings. My dad knew precisely how convenient the new arrangement would be. And I understood, even then, that a real job, a hard job, was supposed to forge something substantial in me. On that first day, I reported as a bleary-eyed fifteen-year-old to a disjointed collection of gray buildings that toppled down the harbor bank and leveled out at the dock. Dawn hadn't even happened yet. The pier was wide enough to hold trucks that would back across the planks, load up, then drive straight to Boston or New York or anywhere else on the planet that featured Maine lobster on the menu. The Thatches owned the Pound and had for generations, but it was Ed--the elder of Wade and Tracey's two sons, a tall boy who wore tie-dyed T-shirts and baseball hats you could only get if you sent away the required number of proofs-of-purchase from cigarette cartons--who pretty much ran the place. He was lanky then but already strong. He could toss ninety-pound crates around the dock the way I could throw baskets of dirty laundry downstairs to the basement. On the morning I met him, there was no sun; the only light at the Pound came from a piss-colored lamp bolted atop the end of the pier. I found Ed in the process of coiling the diesel hose. "Andy, right?" he said. "Andrew." He finished making a perfectly circular stack of hose. Then he kicked it to make it pounce open and untangle like an angry snake. "Now you do it," he said. "Do what?" "Coil her up." "How?" "Didn't you just watch me?" I took the nozzle and started winding it in a circle, but it was rigid to my touch and wouldn't go where I wanted it to. "Nope," he said. I tried to wind it in the other direction. "Still nope." "What am I doing wrong?" "The whole damn thing." He took the hose, coiled it again, taking pains to demonstrate how one ought to make a twisting motion with every loop, and then he told me it was time to blast out the bait shed. Once inside the walk-in freezer, I stood ankle deep in a pool of blood and salt, shivering in my borrowed rubber boots as Ed tipped over the half-full barrels of redfish. It was the foulest room I had ever set foot in, all that waste redolent of a grisly mass homicide, but when I glanced across at Ed, he was grinning back at me while hosing a spray of clean water into a pool of roiling bloody water. "Hope you ate breakfast," he said. Then he shoved over a full barrel of bait and watched the guts splash onto my jeans and all the way up to my fleece. "Sorry bout that, Andy." Eventually Ed taught me how to bend at the knees while lifting lobster crates off the boats, and how to patch these crates when their wooden slats busted loose, but he always acted aggrieved by my perpetual ignorance, as if these skills were ones I should have intuited as an infant, so I despised the lessons and I despised the job, every moment of it. That Ed could work for hours on end for such paltry wages, at the age of, what, fourteen or fifteen, taking breaks only to patrol the river on his little skiff and haul his own traps without ever once bitching about the crappiness of it all, I took as evidence that there was something seriously wrong with him. Excerpted from The Midcoast: A Novel by Adam White All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
