Happy As A Clam

Forgive me for overturning my interdiction against writing about contentment so soon after issuing it, but I am excited to finally understand what that cliche means! I had long thought it to be as conceptually impenetrable as so many other dogeared English expressions, until my friend Andrew showed me how to curl up in a loose ball in shallow ocean water and let the waves slowly push me up onto the shore. Luckily there were no lifeguards around to give us shit for acting like dead people.

Two and a half weeks ago Andrew whisked me along for a luxurious car camping trip in Goose Rocks, Maine. Defining quaint, this teeny village lies just north of Kennebunkport (meaning I also got to give the finger live to the Bush summer estate.) It is a place special to Andrew and me because both of us were brought there by our Montreal families for summer vacations when we were children--a remarkable coincidence considering how small the place is (two long streets deep.)

Goose Rocks beach is renowned for its soft fine grey sand and shallow bay hugged by rocky bumps of islands which evoke the town's name. With its plenitude of colourful smartly kept freshly painted Victorian clapboard summer manses and its streetlamps from the 40s, it seems to be successfully holding onto the past. Despite its ample beauty, permits and observance of picky little bylaws about where, when, and how non-residents can park seem to have kept the beach from becoming more crowded than it was when I was last there in 1980. Even though there are no public trash cans, I found not a single empty juicebox or cigarette butt in the sand--that's what a powerful sense of 'our' the place has! This dedicated stewardship is one kind of conservatism I can admire.

Other kinds made me uneasy: the blinding whiteness and social homogeneity of the place. I half-jokingly refer to the place as a.k.a. Cape Cracker. I counted exactly four brown people in three towns over four days. The apparent absence of colour and socioeconomic difference was striking and creepy. Though it's always been an intensely bourgie place, the fame brought to the area by the election of Bush Sr. has pushed the summer rents up to the point where you can forget about staying anywhere in town for less than $3 000 a week. That effectively eliminates anyone who doesn't hang with stockbrokers or isn't tight with someone who does.

I thought of how much more uneasy I would likely feel if I wasn't a WASP and was visiting this place. Then I wondered if one of my non-white friends (or particulary savvy pale friends) were accompanying me if he or she would remark that my discomfort emanates from (pale) privilege itself: that my friend would be only a little more acutely aware than usual of their skin surrounded by that sea of blondes in Lilly Pulitzer dresses, but it would take such extreme privilege and homogeneity for me to feel that level of uncomfortable awareness of the privileges I can effortlessly enjoy merely on account of my birth circumstances while SO many other people cannot.

Needless to say, it was pretty easy to feel badass in Maine. All Andrew and I had to do was dress normally for dinner and drive into town listening to music we liked in order to feel like the band in a Motley Crue video--cruising past grimacing parents and school principals punching the air and choking on our dust.

I am very grateful for what I enjoyed there. This includes my close friendship with Andrew. I have loved him a long time, but this trip deepened my appreciation for him further still. It was neat to spontaneously spend long periods of quiet with him as we drove (140 k all the way down.) He was also his usual dashingly clowny self. He was so handsome in his open-cuffed white shirt and jeans. In the mornings we would sit at the picnic table, drink espresso, eat a gorgeous omelette he had made, and listen to Louis Armstrong on his car stereo. He thought of everything. He brought a tent, a tarp, stove, bedding, snacks, lantern, cutting board, bug repellent, scotch, and a tiny rubber chicken with a plasticized hard-boiled yolk you could squeeze out of its ass.

Oh, but that's not all. In the fireplace he built a 3 foot-tall sketch of a traditional Japanese building out of mill ends and let me see from inside what happens to the main beams of a wooden building when it is consumed by fire. The roof he laid on top made the inferno stretch out above the structure like wings. Later that same night we took a bottle of wine and a votive candle down to the pitch black beach. We watched a sheet lightning storm over the horizon clouds with a Harvest moon glowing off to the side.

On the sunny beach looking at the big sky upside down from between my legs it felt good to catch myself thinking of nothing for stretches of time. That mindless sensuality made me feel like a mollusk.