December 2009

I love the story of the People of the Dawn mooning Giovanni da Verrazzano’s ships as they first sailed down our wild coast in 1524 to document their own claim of having ‘discovered’ Vacationland. After all, Verrazzano was From Away.

But a few centuries after this first contact, how can any of us laugh at someone From Away when we can’t even agree on what From Here is? When even Tim Sample doesn’t talk like Tim Sample?

When did some of us become so insular and self-conscious?

“My theory is, it started in the world of art,” says William David Barry of Maine Historical Society. “Through the John Neal (1793-1876) era, it was possible to launch yourself as an internationally famous painter or art critic here–Neal was ‘America’s first art critic’–and stay here. You really could live in the Forest City and sell your work in London, Paris, and New York” without risking censure for your eccentric behavior. “Then, after the Great Fire of 1866, when shipping went down here, forget it.”

Barry says, “You can actually see the dividing line where people look at Maine and Portland as being as good or better than anywhere else in the world, and then see a kind of jealousy for other places settling in, as though all that was left to us was the right to argue who’s been here the longest.”

In fact, “you can track it to quotes about Winslow Homer. In 1888, John T. Hull, in Handbook of Portland, makes a point of saying, ‘Winslow Homer, the well-known New York artist, has his summer studio at Prouts,’” with all the suspicion and veneration that attends to that. A few decades earlier, “John Neal would simply have called Homer a Maine painter.“

Then there’s 1889. Barry points to the story of some “Walter Corey chairs having been praised as ‘fine Philadelphia furniture’” at a local soirée, only for a guest to flip them over and discover the Exchange Street labels. An embarrassed Portland Sunday Telegram lamented, ‘We know that it is a too frequent characteristic of Portland people to deem everything which emanates from our own city inferior until it is proven otherwise.’”

Nowadays, no one’s immune from being accused of being From Away. In just the past year, someone has come up to me and whispered, “Where you from?”

“I’m from right here.”

“No,” he said, lifting an eyebrow, “I mean, where were you born?”

“At the Maine Eye & Ear Infirmary,” I said. It’s where many Portlanders from the Dave Astor Show years were born. Stephen King was born there, I think. What could be more Maine than that? Game, set, match, even if Bob Skoglund jokes and calls me a “year-round summer person” because he correctly senses that part of me doesn’t know if I’m from anywhere.

“Oh yeah?” the man said, deepening his suspicion. “What floor?”