In Portland, the sea's never very far away

Higgins Beach, Maine — 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.