In Portland, the sea’s never very far away

THE sun has been up for a couple of hours, but it still lingers low enough in the sky to glint sharply off a gentle sea. Night dampness clings to salt-musty air. But the chill isn’t enough to ward off ambitious sandcastle builders, and a mother and two toddlers are hard at it, little feet slapping audibly as the children lug pails of wet sand from the surf line.

All in all, not a bad way to start a Saturday.

Work had taken me to Boston and New York City late last summer, tantalizingly close to this beautiful stretch of New England coast. It’s the kind of trip best done for a week or two when you can rent a house on one of the islands speckling Portland’s Casco Bay, or in a quiet, hidden spot like Higgins Beach in the town of Scarborough, 10 miles south of Portland.

But this is where I was born, and where I spent the first seven years and 19 summers of my life. So I decided to sandwich a brief side trip in between Boston and New York appointments, figuring any time stolen here would be well spent.

For someone accustomed to Southern California’s endless congestion, the area around Portland is dizzyingly accessible. About 64,000 people live in the city and on its islands, part of a metropolitan population of 270,000 -- 50,000 fewer people than Anaheim, spread out over an area slightly larger than Orange County. Still, Portland is the last American city of any size as you head up the coast, or Down East as the journey is known here.

An old port and shipbuilding hub, Portland rides out into Casco Bay on the spine of a peninsula settled in 1632 by British fishermen and traders. The city, originally called Casco and then Falmouth, has been destroyed four times -- twice by Indians the British settlers displaced, once by the British during the American Revolution and once by a massive fire in July 1866 that left 10,000 of the city’s 13,000 residents homeless.

That last catastrophe defines the city’s architectural charm. Civic leaders gave up on flammable wood and decided to rebuild primarily with granite and brick, and Portland evolved into a beautiful enclave of Federal, Italianate and Victorian homes and businesses. There are pockets of modern buildings -- the leavings of urban renewal programs -- and old working-class two- and three-story wooden apartment houses. But 19th century charm dominates.

I arrived from Boston late on a Wednesday and settled in for the first of two nights at the Millbrook Motel in Scarborough, a booked-unseen bargain with spacious rooms and free Wi-Fi, which more than made up for the traffic noise from busy U.S. 1.

When I lived here, Scarborough was mostly rural, except for the stores and factories (including the boot-making plant my grandmother worked in) that line U.S. 1, the East Coast version of the Pacific Coast Highway. On summer nights, I could lie in bed and listen to whippoorwills and crickets in the deep forest behind our house, and the occasional growing drone, then whoosh of a lone car hurtling by. Now this is prized exurbia, and the modest Cape Cods, saltboxes and distinctive farmhouses of my childhood have been overwhelmed by modern mini-mansions carved out of pine, birch and hardwood forest.

I spent the first day poking around old haunts, driving Maine 9 along Scarborough Marsh to the sea at Pine Point, lunching on a lobster roll at Bailey’s, a local favorite, then exploring Prouts Neck, the next peninsula north, where Winslow Homer painted many of his haunting seascapes. The jagged nature of the landscape is the key to Maine’s coastal beauty. In Southern California, the mostly straight coastline is made up of beach after beach, beautiful but numbingly redundant. Here, it’s an intimate meander. Counting all the inlets and islands, Maine has more coastline than California.

And it changes by the hour.

The tides off Portland can swing 9 feet from low to high, which means the coastline expands and retreats as though the land were breathing. At low tide, wet rock and sand exposed to the sun and wind fill the air with the briny scent of decaying seaweed and ocean salt. It is a sweet perfume for those accustomed to it, and I finished the day breathing it in at Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth, where, as the name implies, dual lighthouses stand guard on fat fingers of rock jutting into the sea.

The exposed rocks -- like most of those on this stretch of the coast -- resemble massive petrified tree trunks lying in a jumble, and they are fun to scamper over like a human mountain goat. At tide’s ebb, the crags hold deep tidal pools filled with mussels and periwinkles, tiny crabs and all manner of shrimp-like larvae skittering among the green and rust-red seaweed. A great distraction -- but keep an eye on the rising tide or you can find yourself soaked and scrambling back to high ground.

The easternmost finger at Two Lights holds the Lobster Shack, an out-of-the-way spot for a classic tray of lobster, fries, biscuit and salad for $20 to $25. (The price varies with the catch.)

If there’s a prettier spot in which to eat fresh lobster, I haven’t found it. On nice days, boats chug past as you dine on picnic tables at the edge of the ocean. In the stormy spring and fall, the green and white-foamed sea writhes and crashes dramatically in an unparalleled dinner show watched from the warmth of the restaurant’s small dining room.

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Good place to unwind

I spent a couple of days reacquainting myself with the heart of Portland, although I stayed all but the last night outside the city, first in the Scarborough roadside motel, then Friday night at the Higgins Beach Inn. It’s a romantic throwback of a building that has been added onto over the decades and now has a comfortable, laid-back feel that might be a little too rustic for some -- no phones or TVs in the rooms. The neighborhood is vintage Maine beach town, made for unwinding and doing nothing but reading, splashing in the waves or building sand castles.

And it’s only a 10-minute drive from Portland. After watching the sand castle construction on the beach Saturday morning, I grab breakfast and head into the city, where local tourism revolves around the Old Port, which has been transformed over the last 30 years from dingy wharves into an energized neighborhood of shops and restaurants.

The city has paid close attention to maintaining the flavor of the past. The Old Port’s mostly 19th century brick buildings house locally owned artists’ outlets and co-ops, brewpubs and souvenir shops intermingled with restaurants and small nightclubs. The highly regarded Hugo’s -- chef Rob Evans’ resume includes Napa Valley’s French Laundry -- is a couple of blocks away.

But this isn’t a neighborhood just for tourists. Lobster boats drop off their catches at the wharves, where fresh seafood is sold from tanks and iced bins. Nearby is the pier for the Casco Bay Lines’ yellow-and-white ferries that service island communities. I buy a $6.25 round-trip ticket for a morning run to Peaks Island, about a mile across the bay, where the Fifth Maine Regimental Museum overlooks Whitehead Passage.

Portland’s beauty obscures a military past. Ft. Gorges, a three-story sod-roofed garrison, seems to float out in the bay where it was built atop Hog Island Ledge in the mid-1800s. During World War II, Hussey Sound, just off the eastern tip of Portland’s peninsula, was a staging area for naval ships escorting North Atlantic convoys.

At the regimental museum, snatches of this history are encased in glass and reflected in displays of what life was like for soldiers deployed to fight Hitler from these rocky, sparsely populated islands. More of it can be found, too, in the small museum at Portland Head Light, one of the nation’s first lighthouses, which I see for a few minutes as the ferry chugs back to the mainland.

I get lost in even more history at the Portland Museum of Art, a pleasantly rich collection of works by such Maine artists as Homer and the Wyeths, plus sculptures and paintings by Rodin, Cezanne and Degas. The museum wraps around a local landmark, the McLellan House, built in 1801 for a local shipping fleet owner and incorporated as an exhibit in the museum.

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow grew up in a brick house on Congress Street, and it’s now a museum of period furniture and styles just down the peninsula from the art museum. I visit its garden, a long and narrow sanctuary from a warm and muggy afternoon. The place is mine alone, and I rest my legs amid flowering hydrangeas and hyacinths, stands of ferns and lush green lilacs and small birches. Bees and butterflies slice through the air as white gulls reel and screech high overhead.

Portland is a good walking town, and from the Longfellow home I meander down Congress, poking into shops along the way. I consider walking up to Munjoy Hill, the peak of the peninsula, to visit the Portland Observatory, an 87-foot-tall wooden tower shaped like a lighthouse but built as an observation station, allowing the harbormaster to keep track of who was coming and going. (You can climb to the top for a spectacular view of the harbor.)

I choose the path of least resistance downhill to Monument Square and its 1883 statue honoring the Civil War dead, then cut to the right near the Portland Press Herald building, where my grandfather worked for decades on the newspaper’s city desk, and back down to the Old Port and Commercial Street Pub.

The bar occupies a corner across from a line of red-brick buildings hiding the wharves, and on this late afternoon, has the settled feeling of a busy workday transitioning into playtime.

Two burly Ukrainian men sit over thick mugs of beer, one of them arguing the progression of World War II with a somewhat-addled barfly. Pool balls click loudly from two tables as the tattooed day barmaid checks out and the tattooed night barman checks in. A few feet away, a lobsterman loudly updates another regular about the trap lines he found cut that morning out in Casco Bay, part of an ongoing spat with a fellow trap-setter.

With my hotel just a few blocks’ walk up the peninsula, I order another pint and absorb the energy of others while wondering about life had my family never moved from here, and about the twisting paths that have turned a Mainer into a Southern Californian.

All in all, not a bad way to end a Saturday.

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Lobster country

GETTING THERE:

From LAX to Portland, Maine, connecting service (change of plane) is available on United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, US Airways and America West. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $419.

WHERE TO STAY:

Millbrook Motel, 321 U.S. 1, Scarborough 04074; (800) 371-6005, www.millbrookmotel.com. A reasonably priced, convenient base for visiting Portland and beach towns. Rooms spacious and functional. Doubles from $53.

Higgins Beach Inn, 34 Ocean Ave., Higgins Beach 04074; (800) 836-2322, www.higginsbeachinn.com A rambling inn 1 1/2 blocks from a secluded beach. Open mid-May to mid-October. Doubles from $75.

Holiday Inn by the Bay, 88 Spring St., Portland 04101; (800) 345-5050, www.innbythebay.com. Perched near the city’s museums and a short walk from the Old Port Exchange. Doubles from $160.

WHERE TO EAT:

Lobster Shack, 225 Two Lights Road, Cape Elizabeth; (207) 799-1677. Ocean-side restaurant serving traditional Maine fare -- lobster, lobster rolls and fried clams. $3.95 to $19.95.

Gritty McDuff’s, 396 Fore St., Portland; (207) 772-2739 www.grittys.com. A classic brewpub in the heart of the Old Port with better-than-average food. Entrees $8 to $13.

Hugo’s, 88 Middle St., Portland; (207) 774-8538, www.hugos.net. Cuisine by chef Rob Evans, formerly of the French Laundry in Napa Valley. Four-course prix-fixe menu is $60.

TO LEARN MORE:

Convention & Visitors Bureau of Greater Portland, (207) 772-5800, www.visitportland.com. or the Maine Office of Tourism, (888) 624-6345, www.visitmaine.com

-- Scott Martelle