Episode 64 | Portsmouth, NH to Camden, ME
I had a script for Portsmouth. Put it together a year before I got there, actually excited about it. Segments, opening lines, shot lists, interesting people to find. A real plan. I arrived, never looked at it once, and wandered around talking to myself in cobblestone alleys until people kept coming around corners and I gave up and went back to the room.
That’s fairly representative of how this project has gone.
Elephantine
The hotel guy recommended a breakfast place called Elephantine. Chef trained in France, classically, Paris apparently. I found it down one of those little brick alleyways that Portsmouth does very well, with a couple of small tables outside under the vines the way a certain kind of European café manages without even trying.
I sat down, ordered, and immediately had to listen to the couple at the next table.
They were late twenties, new parents, each apparently married to someone else, comparing daycares and simultaneously complaining that their six-month-old was exhausting and the daycare closes at 5:30 which was frankly an inconvenience. I sat with my coffee and thought about how to describe the feeling of wanting to lean over and say: you are going to want this time back. I know it doesn’t feel like that right now. But you will.
I didn’t say anything. They weren’t there to hear from me. I ate the pastry, which was excellent, and left.
The Walking Tour
Before heading north I caught a 10:30 walking tour I’d seen advertised. The guide was a retired physician of Norwegian descent named Neil, carrying a little book of historical photographs and clearly in possession of more knowledge about this town than could be delivered in ninety minutes.
Portsmouth was founded in 1623 and was once one of the busiest ports in colonial America — a shipbuilding center, a hub of commerce, a place where the Revolution didn’t just happen nearby but may have actually started, depending on which historians you believe and which incidents you’re willing to count. Three major fires over the centuries. Cycles of boom and decline and rebuilding. The brick buildings standing now are the survivors of all of that, and the boutique coffee shops and restaurants filling them are just the current chapter.
Neil had made the pivot from medicine to history guide, which is exactly the kind of story I keep circling on this trip and keep failing to get on camera. I talked to him briefly after the tour. He seemed comfortable with who he was and where he’d landed. That counts for something.
Walking tours. Do them. Especially in a town like Portsmouth. You will see more in ninety minutes than you’d find wandering on your own all day.
The Honest Part
Here’s what I know now, doing this edit almost a year later, looking at a pretty good script I wrote and never opened. I started this project because turning 60 felt like a hinge point, a moment where I could either keep moving or start standing still. I’d spent four decades building something. I wanted to go find out what else was out there.
Somewhere between the planning and the doing, I stopped thinking so much about why and just started doing it. Some days I filmed too much. Some days almost nothing. The best moments mostly happened when I wasn’t thinking about filming at all — a conversation at a fishing pier, a walking tour with a retired doctor, a crab fisherman talking about his second life on the water.
The script was good, by the way. It’s still sitting here. Maybe someone will film it someday.
The Drive to Camden
I drove into Maine through Kennebunkport and Rockland and the small coastal towns that string along Route 1 like lights on a wire. I want to tell you I captured something brilliant along the way. I didn’t. I was tired, thinking about too many things, and by the time I looked back at the footage it was mostly dashboard and rambling.
I attended a photo workshop years ago up this same stretch of Maine coast, run by photographer John Paul Caponigro at his studio in Cushing. Some of those images I’m sharing here as a substitute for the footage I didn’t get this time around. They’re a bit overprocessed in the style I was working in then, but the coast they’re from is the same one I was driving through. Maine doesn’t change that fast.
I arrived in Camden at blue hour, which lasted about fifteen minutes before it was gone. I got a few shots of the harbor. Dinner was unremarkable. Tomorrow morning I’m going to find a better vantage point and try again.
Maine doesn’t hand you its best light on a weeknight. You have to show up early.
