ODYSSEY - Day Six - A Portland Tour

I'm posting this video to lighten things up a bit.  It is a short tour of the eastern end of Portland.  I just spent the day visiting some areas of the city I hadn't seen in a while.

I started out by hanging with my squirrel pal, Gimmee, in the Mill Creek Park of South Portland.  Then I crossed over the Casco Bay Bridge (which I always call "The South Portland Bridge" for some reason), taking a shot of Yarmouth (my hometown) over the railing way off in the distance, across the bay.

As I stepped off the bridge into Portland proper, I turned right and made my way down Fore Street, toward the East End. 

After passing all the pubs and bars on Fore Street and frankly wishing I had the money to get a burger and a beer, I remembered all the times I'd gone in to each of them with friends.  Gritty's especially, brought back memories of "twenty-five cent Wednesdays"; when back in the mid 1990's every Wednesday from 4:00 to 6:00 pm they would serve their own ale at $0.25 per mug.  I was in college then and remember walking up from the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine (USM) with my good friends, Ed and Leisl.  There would be a line all the way around the block waiting to get into the place.  It was awesome!

When I got to India Street I decided to stop by my very first apartment at 75 Federal Street.  I had moved there after my Freshman year at the University of Maine at Farmington (UMF).  My terrible grades - due to WAY too much partying and skipping classes - had put me on academic probation.  My plan was to move back south and to transfer to and attend USM as a "special student" until I could get my grades up to re-enroll as a full-time student. 

My girlfriend at the time, Dawna, and I were pretty sick of having to stay with our parents and found this Federal Street apartment--I was only 20.  We briefly got jobs at Webber Oil as telemarketing surveyors.  Neither of us took the job seriously.  We just faked our numbers and drank large amounts of coffee there, until we both decided to quit.  I put together a promotion pack for my band, ICE, and we did a fairly successful tour of high school dances for the next school year.  I did some of my very early recordings in that apartment, to be published someday.  But Dawna and I never really made enough to pay the bills and were doomed to giving up our apartment.

Eventually, with the separation of my parents, we decided to move back to my childhood house in Yarmouth to keep my mom company...not that that was HER desire.  We pretty much used it as an excuse to live for free for a while there, until we finally broke up.  And then a house fire destroyed nearly all of my things in 1991.  This is a tale for a future post.

Moving on from that first apartment, I made my way down Congress Street, then down Washington Ave, taking a right and heading up hill onto Cumberland Ave (where I took a picture of the gas prices at the 7-11), until I reached Sheridan Street.  I took a left on Sheridan, walking west to Walnut Street.  When I reached Walnut I took a good shot of my old apartment there.  I rented it with my college roommate and best friend from UMF, Jim (the "Catman"), a guy I had stayed in touch with through those early years.  The apartment at 89 Walnut looked like the present owner had really let it go.  I remeber having some really good times in that house, which we affectionately called "The Funhouse."  Someday I'll tell some stories about that too.

I took a right onto Walnut and headed up and over the hill (that whole part of the city is called "Munjoy Hill" or just "The Hill") and worked my way south east along the Eastern Promenade, turning back on my direction by taking a left and walking down Cutler Street to take a good shot of Casco Bay.  Then it was back on to the southern direction, hugging the coast on the Easter Promenade Trail, where I found a sailboat race right off shore.  Further on I ran across the now-still narrow gage railroad and train. 

Finally coming back to Commercial Street I stopped through the Casco Bay Line Ferry terminal where I passed the "Whaling Wall" and was privileged to use the singular worst-kept public bathroom in the city.  Interestingly, when I used to live at the Walnut Street apartment I was a job coach working for The Pine Tree Society, with a mentally disabled Korean guy who had the unfortunate name, Suck Ho Kim. His job (and to some extent mine) WAS washing windows and emptying trash at the Portland Jetport.  This wasn't a bad gig.  When we took breaks we could sit on the seats facing the runway.  I would read the Wall Street Journal and he would say, "Prane rand!  Prane fry!" over and over.  This constant air traffic never failed to entrance him. 

He was a good guy I really liked him.  He didn't "look" disabled (whatever that means) so people often didn't understand why I would be telling him what to do all the time.  One woman at the food court, while selling us extremely over-priced sandwiches, muttered to me, while Suck Ho was throwing something away, "Your friend is kind of 'odd.'"  When I told her the situation, she felt very embarrassed.  This kind of thing happened a lot.

Unfortunately, after the terrorists used this airport on their way to commit the atrocities of 9/11, Suck Ho and I were moved across the city and assigned the new job of cleaning the bathrooms and sweeping the terminals of the Casco Bay Line building.  That was a major demotion, for sure.  And I was experiencing a nasty bit of sciatica at the time, heaping pain upon misery.  This all came back to me last week, as I stood on the sticky floor of the smelly, disgusting bathroom that I used to clean with Suck Ho, and remembered our first day there. 

We got the mop and cleaning supplies from the closet and entered the men's room.  We cleaned most of it until we reached the last stall, where we noticed that someone had gotten very creative by taking their own shit and smearing it all over the inside of the stall, concluded with a rather well-drawn smiley face.  I refused to let him do anything in that stall and we just left it.  Then we did the women's room which was only slightly less gross. 

As we were sweeping up the floor of the waiting room later in the afternoon, near the ticket window, the maintenance man walked up and asked us to follow him into the bathroom.  We entered the bathroom and the three of us walked over to the last stall where he pushed open the door.  He said, "What's this?" 

I looked him straight in the eyes and said, "Well... it looks like shit to me."

He turned just a little bit red, and trying to restrain himself, stammered out, "I want this cleaned before you leave."

I then felt that characteristic rage that has gotten me in trouble so many times in my life.  But I kept it back as best I could as I replied, "We don't clean shit."  Then I looked at Suck Ho and said, "It's time to leave, buddy."  We turned and left the maintenance dude fuming in a toilet stall, staring at a shitty smiley face.  I wrote up the entire incident in the day's report.  The next day I got a call from my boss who said that the maintenance guy had called her to complain.  But, as with the woman at the airport, he hadn't taken Suck Ho to be a "special" case, and finally understood why I said what I said.  The next time we went to clean, the maintenance guy did everything he could do to avoid us.  Just as well, I thought.

From there my tour took me up Commercial Street a little way further, then up to Fore Street, where I finally got back the Casco Bay Bridge, crossed over to South Portland, and took a rest in the Mill Creek Park, on the bench where I had begun the day's adventure.  I was hoping to see Gimmee again, but he must have been curled up in his little evening nest somewhere.  The sun was going down and apparently it was bedtime for squirrels.  The fog crept in from the waterfront and the temp dropped dramatically; meaning it was time to head back to my nest...a sleeping bag in an attic.  It was a fine day though--a good trip down memory lane and a way to take on a few new memories. 

Enjoy the video!