At 5 pm the fake-log heating stove technician arrived. He replaced the electric strike and lit the pilot light after 30 minutes of fake-log heating stove repair. I wondered what a weird economy they have here to support propane tank fillers and fake-log heating stove repairmen. For a minute, we turned the stove on, and watched the fire dance around the fake logs. We haven’t used the stove for warming because it smells weird. I’d rather freeze than believe the propane tank filler that the odor is a harmless additive.
The next day, for the inconvenience of having technicians walk through our rental, the owner L, sent us a $100 gift certificate for Charlotte’s lobster pound - a funky red and white lobster shack on the western side of the island. While the granite cliffs and birch tree forests are a perfect backdrop for human recreation, the shallow waters, rocky craggy seafloors by the coast are perfect habitats for lobsters. humans and lobsters intersect at the numerous lobster shacks that line the roads here.
I took J and B to Charlotte’s Lobster Pound after our canoe trip as recompense for our misadventures. As I ordered, I asked the cashier what she recommended, the clam chowder or the lobster bisque? The worst thing you can do at a seafood shack is to invest in a lobster bisque only to find out it’s some buttery creamy undrinkable concoction. The cashier responded she preferred the clam chowder. A voice from behind me said she recommended mixing the chowder with the bisque. Weird, in all my years of ordering soup, I have never heard of mixing soups. Feeling kind of adventurous, I ordered it. I would later find out the voice came from the owner of the lobster shack, ‘Charlotte’. She looked to be a roaming waitress, a funky looking woman with red dyed hair, a middle aged liv tyler look-alike with heart stickers pasted to her right cheek. Along with my hybrid soup, I ordered a foot-long sautéed lobster roll, a haddock sandwich, a seafood platter. While I ordered the food, J asked what the cashier what the ‘ultimate’ fries were? He had never seen French fries described and advertised as ‘ultimate’ in a menu before. The cashier nonchalantly responded “they’re just regular fries” to which J responded “oh”. In my mind I wondered what J was imagining- a set of foot long ultimate fries in grilled lobster meat sauce?
Tired of writing about hiking trails, I decided to write about lobsters. since they are ubiquitous in the northeast, they are often overlooked and hence a great subject to write about. in reality, though, lobsters are really strange creatures anatomically, biologically, and sexually. Since their evolution dates back to Paleozoic eras 360 million years ago… about as old as the cliffs of acadia, lobsters can be seen as ancient beings from the past. Sporting five pairs of jointed legs with the first pair as oversized pincer claws, lobsters have stalked eyes and antennas. They are invertebrates without a central nervous system, sporting a chitinous segmented shell and appendages arranged in pairs in the same phylum of other arthropods like insects, spiders, millipedes, and crustaceans. Essentially, they are the spidery cockroaches of the sea, scavengers and hunters of shellfish, fish, and even each other. There are 30 lobster species in the world of which the Homarus americanus which we ate in our hybrid soup thrives in the gulf of maine and can be found at a population density of 1 lobster per 1 square meter. Large lobsters hide in the best hiding spots, while the smaller lobsters are forced to burrow in the sand. in spring, millions of lobsters migrate towards the warmer shores here where the lobstermen set up their traps.
While lobsters molt throughout their lives, they shed their shells to accommodate larger bodies mostly in the summer. In the first five years they molt 25 times. A three pound lobster will molt every 3-5 years. Prior to a molt, a new shell forms under the old shell, drainIng the calcium out of the old shell by storing it for the new shell. After a molt, a lobster is vulnerable and completely exposed. The lobster eats its old shell to absorb calcium and seeks shelter and waits while its new shell hardens. You may wonder why I focus so much attention on lobster shells, but the shells play an integral part of their sex lives, which coming from a non-shelled species perspective, is riveting.
While the shell provides good protection from predators, it also blocks off access to a female lobster’s anatomy, lobsters have sex only after a female has molted. During mating season, an alpha male lobster will wander the ocean floor and purge females from their shelters. Homeless interested females, who only mate with alpha males, then wander over to the male’s shelter and pee inside through an opening in their face. The alpha male gleefully swirls the urine around himself. After this ‘golden lobster shower’ the female sheds her shell, the lobsters copulate, the female waits for her new shell to harden while staying in the male’s shelter for protection, then leaves as a new female immediately takes her place in the alpha male’s den.
Perhaps the strangest fact of lobsters is that they are one of the only animals in the world that don’t die of old age. If you cut off a lobster limb, it regenerates. In 1977 a centenarian 44 pound lobster was caught off the coast of nova scotia. In the 1800’s before commercial lobster harvesting, 4 foot lobsters weighing up to 100 pounds were not uncommon. If they weren’t so trapped and heavily consumed by humans, they would keep growing beyond the typical 1.5 pound portion size found in lobster shacks.
The sautéed lobster roll from charlotte’s lobster pound was delicious and unique. The roll was toasted and slightly sweet. The meat was tender and simply prepared without the typical mayonnaise sauce. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of the lobster roll to blog it so after reading about lobster sex habits, I searched charlotte’s lobster pound over the internet for pictures of foot longs. In addition to lobster roll pictures, I found photos and links to articles. I recognized the woman who I thought was the roaming waitress to be the founder of the shack. The old man taking the garbage out was her 84 year old dad. sifting through articles, I unexpectedly found lobster shack owners like charlotte are even stranger than the lobsters they serve.
one interview starts off with Charlotte quoting Dostoyevsky’s Brother’s Karamazof.
“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”
As an animal lover, charlotte struggles with the fact that her livelihood depends on the killing, processing, and cooking of hundreds and thousands of lobsters. wracked with guilt she started a buy and release program at her shack. She happily colored her shack in 1950’s diner aesthetic: black white red, and installed a goat petting farm in the back, fireplace to sit cozy in cold weather, yoga mats for those waiting for food... she puts sticker hearts on her cheek. these are all intentional distractions to keep peoples' minds off the heart of the lobster shack business. At any given moment, a live lobster is thrown into a boiling cauldron of water for a hungry customer. The poor lobster writhes in pain and struggles to get out, sometimes ripping its own claws off in agony... but within 15 minutes, the once sentient being that could’ve lived forever if it wasn’t cooked is now in a lobster roll cut up and herbed on sweet bread.
one night two years ago, charlotte prayed, “Hey universe or God or whoever, what can I do to make this better? I don’t want to turn this lobster shack into a lemonade stand, but I will if that’s what you want.” She woke up in the wee hours of the following morning with a plan: she’d try to get lobsters high. She set up a plastic box with a lobster in sea water, and connected the box via a tube to a pot pipe making a lobster bong. Her first experimental subject was a one-clawed lobster named Roscoe. After blowing marijuana smoke at roscoe, charlotte noticed the lobster was high… completely sedated. so sedated, it could peacefully walk around without rubber bands on its claws. according to her logic, taking a marijuana sedated lobster and putting it into a boiling pot of water is much more humane than putting a thrashing lobster into the pot. While she’s comfortable killing lobsters for her shack, she believes they should be put down according to the “Humane Slaughter Act — which requires animals be “rendered insensible to pain by a single blow or gunshot or an electrical, chemical or other means that is rapid and effective” before butchering. while this law applies only to cows, pigs, and other large four-legged livestock charlotte tries to butcher her lobsters humanely too.
Some people freeze lobsters thinking that this will sedate them. I think this sounds like siberian freeze torture. My father-in-law methodically shoves a stick up a lobster’s ass and watches the lobster tail contract and excrete brown liquid out before throwing it into a pot telling me “if you don’t do this, you’re eating lobster shit after it’s cooked”. Some sadistic people boil the lobster gradually raising the temperature of the water from a nice bath startpoint. Some comics like woody allen, chase their lobsters around the kitchen fearfully before dumping them in a pot. Some chefs stab the lobster's head right between the eyes for the quick kill. Others use the crustastun, a $4000 electrocution box made in england. Personally, I just stick a lobster in a boiling pot of water and walk out of the kitchen for 15 minutes. For charlotte, she would prefer to get her lobsters high in a makeshift bong and boil them. While she smokes she probably gets crazy ideas like mixing soups or forgets about her ethical mistreatment of lobsters.
Since pot smoke bonged sedated lobsters are not allowed for public sale now, charlotte had her 85-year-old father, an Episcopalian minister, take a drug test after eating a lot of stoned lobsters last summer. his drug test results came back negative for THC. As charlotte is raising funds to have an independent cannabis-testing lab analyze the lobster meat to confirm the absence of cannabis to allow their sale under the Health Inspection Program charlotte has “settled on liquid valerian extract as an alternative, putting a few drops in water so that lobsters can soak it in before they get cooked. A common remedy for sleeplessness and anxiety, valerian also happens to be an FDA-approved flavor enhancer, so state health inspectors have no problem with it.”
“The flavor is enhanced because the stress hormones are so diminished,” she suggested. “The meat tastes lighter, sweeter, happier.” Having experienced charlotte’s footlong sautéed lobster roll, I would have to agree it's a five star meal.
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| lobsters never die of old age |
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| charlotte's lobster pound |
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| footlong fantasy |
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| lobster bong |
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| fake log heating stove |
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