How to Cook a Moose by Kate Christensen Page A

resident who owns a house in Maine, it strikes me that the more alike you are, the more you fight to distinguish yourselves . . .

    In 1652, the sparsely populated, hardscrabble land of Maine was annexed (unhappily) to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts until 1820, when it became the twenty-third state. Mainers’ long-held distrust and dislike of people from Massachusetts stems from very deep, ancient resentments fueled by almost two centuries of entitled rich people from the south imposing their greed and laws on struggling poor people in the north. These class wars continue today in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways, beginning with the notion of “summer people” and extending to a general squinty-eyed disapprobation of “Massholes.” Even so, Maine is chock-full of Red Sox and Patriots fans. It’s complicated. (New Hampshire, as one of the original colonies, never having been ruled by Massachusetts, understandably feels a bit more warmly toward its southern neighbor.)
    Maine’s population of 1.3 million people is distributed in a wildly uneven way throughout the state. Maine is the least densely populatedstate east of the Mississippi, having an average of forty-three people per square mile. But this is misleading; in the enormous, heavily forested counties in the northern interior, there’s an average of less than one person per square mile, as vast tracts of land up there are uninhabited and wild. Meanwhile, 40 percent of Mainers are crowded down in southern Maine, in and around Portland. Rural northern Mainers derisively refer to these southern urban dwellers as “flatlanders”; in other words, not really true Mainers at all. And so the population is further divided into “us” and “them.” Most of the French Mainers live in the north. (Although the state is 28 percent Catholic, it’s also the least religious state in the country.)
    Geographically, the region is as interesting as the weather, and the two are almost certainly related. I can hardly imagine this, but during the Ice Age, all of New Hampshire and Maine was covered in a glacier almost a mile deep, thick enough to cover even the highest mountain peaks. Called the Laurentide ice sheet or cap, this unruly ice monster swept down from Canada and covered all of New England for 18,000 years or so; just a geological blink of an eye, but it was enough to change the entire landscape. When it receded, it left a mess behind. It rucked up rocks and swept many of them to the coast, where they remain in glacial moraines. The gazillions of rocks that stayed behind had to be plowed and removed from fields every winter by farmers through the centuries and painstakingly stacked to build New England’s thousands of miles of stone walls.
    New Hampshire has the shortest coastline in the country, but Maine’s got the fourth-longest, after Alaska, Florida, and Louisiana, if you measure by all the coves, inlets, and jags: 3,478 miles of corrugated sea-edge in only 228 miles as the seagull flies. To travel up the Maine coast is to feel viscerally this folded-in, twisting sinuousness of the embrace of land and sea—cove after cove, inlet after inlet, creating one spit, peninsula, and tongue after another. Maine also has 3,166 islands,including freshwater. Land and water are intricately, complicatedly interconnected. Maine’s Midcoast region rises steeply from the sea into hills and mountains folding back inland to the Appalachians. Katahdin, which the Penobscot dubbed “The Greatest Mountain,” is the highest of these at 5,269 feet, and before the International Trail continued up into Canada, it was the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. And inland, the land-water dance continues: Maine has about 6,000 lakes and ponds; the much-smaller New Hampshire has 944.
    New Hampshire’s mountains are higher than Maine’s. In the Presidential Range of the White Mountains, Mount Washington is the