Myth Happens

Before the news was overtaken by this latest and gratuitous moving fast and breaking of the world, I discovered that on Boxing Day there had been a three-alarm fire on the working waterfront of Portland's Custom House Wharf. I used to spend a lot of time there with my grandmother. She would buy her fish nowhere but from the Harbor Fish Market, which in the '80's and '90's had the great dried skin of a sturgeon on its wall along with its charts of catches and soundings and a wet-planked floor through which the harbor itself could occasionally be seen lapping in a wrack-green brindle of light. It smelled at once like open water and the clean insides of fish. It was spared the blaze; other addresses were not. Between the icing temperatures and the flashpaper of the buildings, the firefighting efforts sound even more heroic since no one seems to have died, but the damage beyond the total losses of gear and business remains significant. The Maine Coast Fishermen's Association has been taking donations for their support and partnered with a local restaurant toward the same end plus T-shirts. It is a small shoring-up of the world and it matters. "When I say charity, I don't mean, 'I've got a sixpence I don't want. You can have it.' I mean, 'I've got a sixpence I do want. You can still have it.'"