At 4:30 am the eastern horizon is a searing white arc fringed by two complementary gradients. The glare is fantastic, but the building morning chorus is really the appeal at this hour. Seabirds have just begun to cackle in their dinosaur tongue; chickadees and thrushes throb in stereo phase. Each day is an aural spectacle before the ugly, flat sound of ten thousand cars wrings out its delicacy. It is really just the hours between midnight and 5 am that are available to the ear craving some good details. Days in Portland are battered with the percussive and graceless noises of industry, but at night our little city sinks back into rich acoustic intricacies.Stand on the Eastern Prom on a foggy evening. Listen to how the lighthouses create a perfect fifth with their warm, placid hooting. The hiss of traffic from Tukey's Bridge is a sustained D flat, and it forms a tense but beautiful chord with these horns of Spring Point (G) and Bug Light (D). Keep wandering and find the working waterfront brimming with musique concrète, the AC motors of chum factories and the electric generators of vacant fishing boats loosing their major thirds into Portland's empty night. The ocean is incredibly talented at carrying sound — listen to each ferry boat as it blasts its requisite launch signal, the noise fanning out across the bay and rolls into the distant Atlantic, or getting tangled up in the filthy mouth of the Fore River.
Portland, for its puny size, is rife with artists and musicians who proudly call it home. The blasted cold of its winters, its saturated summer heat, its waddling tourists, and its laughable job market do nothing to deter us. It hums in weird ways and in this manner serves to soothe our bitterness with its faults. Its vacant storefronts and dank apartments beg to be fed with new energy and innovation. It is at once safe, clueless, and incandescent. I live here because this city is song.
_Andrew Frederick
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Related:
Exploring deep within, Olive Café, Letters to the Portland editor: May 1, 2009, More 
- Exploring deep within
Hannah Holmes, the Maine-born, Portland-dwelling science writer, naturalist, and friend to all animals has turned her lens deeply inward in her latest book, The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself .
- Olive Café
Solid tastes at Olive Café
- Letters to the Portland editor: May 1, 2009
Is Rick Wormwood an inbred Maineiac as some would speculate?
- German birthday cake
Tuesday's gift from Portland's Choral Art Society to German composer Felix Mendelssohn, on the occasion of what would be his 200th birthday, will be one of his greatest works (Elijah), and one of their biggest undertakings.
- A mighty wind
This past Earth Day, President Barack Obama, speaking at an Iowa wind-turbine factory, delivered a gusty peroration. "The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy," he said. "America can be that nation. America must be that nation."
- Photos: Stetson Wind in Maine
Photos of Stetson Wind in Washington County, Maine
- Classic retro
Opened 20 years ago on an odd bayside corner, the Back Bay Grill looks seasoned rather than old.
- Teach a woman to fish...she'll never want to leave
The cluster of small shacks that comprise Jim's Smelt Camp in Bowdoinham look like a tiny shantytown; were that it was so — I would move right in.
- As the Pro Jo turns
A full-page advertisement that ran on page A7 of Monday's ProJo featured an illustration depicting a workshop of flinty Amish craftsmen busily building what the headline called an "Amish mantle and miracle invention" that helps "home heat bills hit rock bottom."
- Light that failed
How has Maine's term-limit law, restricting legislators to eight consecutive years in office, been working since it was approved by voters in 1993?
- The rain in Maine
If you're planning a trip to Vacationland this summer, be sure to bring your galoshes — the "gay storm" that's been satirized all over the Internet rolled into Maine last week.
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, Maine, Portland, Paul Reubens, More
, Maine, Portland, Paul Reubens, Chris Gray, Franklin Arterial, winter, Great State, Less
