At 4 AM, despite dark skies and the look of midnight, Becky’s neon pink sign beckons “Open” to the passerby on Commercial Street in Portland. The only diner open at this hour in Portland, Becky’s caters to local fishermen, construction workers, postal workers and hungry Maine College of Art Students who have been up all night painting or working in the darkroom.
The fact that it’s nighttime for most of the world drops away as you are greeted with the warm smells of coffee and baking muffins and cheery golden lights. Although everyone but Becky’s daughter Katie, who waits tables at this hour, seems a little bleary-eyed, the humor is good, even folksy.
At one booth two fishermen, David and Barry, who live in Lubec but take a boat out from Portland Harbor, have just come in after fishing for 24 hours. After breakfast they will unload their fish at the dock – a full boat of herring that will make its way back up the coast to Prospect Harbor and Stinson’s Canning Co.
Under the bright lights of Becky’s, David and Barry look tired and almost shy as they pick at their omelets. They explain that this time of year they follow the fish as they migrate Northeast – so they start as far away as Portsmouth and Portland and then make their way back up to their home area downeast. As they tell me, “We just chase ’em.” They stay on the boat all week long, and then when the weekend comes, they get back in their cars in Portland and drive home, only to start all over again Monday morning.
The boat David and Barry fish from is owned by a businessman named Peter who owns three boats, they tell me. Peter, who’s sitting at the counter a few feet away polishing off scrambled eggs, bacon and white toast, has come up from Gloucester, where he lives, to attend to Barry and David’s boat, which was rammed by a much larger boat earlier this morning putting a hole “as big as a car” in its side.
Peter, with a thick Irish accent and wearing a green fleece and nice slacks, grew up on the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland, he tells me. When I ask why he’s at Becky’s this early he tells me “I was hongry.”
He’s up this morning to fix the busted boat and oversee selling the herring at the Fish Exchange. He wouldn’t usually be up this early if one of his boats wasn’t in trouble, he tells me, but he is used to getting up at this hour because he too used to fish off New England.
A little further down the counter, a few employees from Nancy’s Shellfish and The Bait Lady are finishing off their last cups of coffee and muffins (“best corn muffins in Portland”) before getting to work, selling bait to lobstermen. Peter sells them some of his herring.
Katie, Becky’s 21-year-old daughter, is one of six children, all of whom Becky raised on her own and supported with her diner, which she opened 13 years ago. All six have worked at one time or another at the diner. Katie has been working at the restaurant since she was 10 and claims that her mother wants her children to work here because she wants to teach them “a good work ethic and good values.” Katie’s father is a lobsterman, she tells me, so Becky knew fishermen’s hours and that there wasn’t anywhere open in the greater Portland area to feed the men coming off or getting on the boats.
Marilyn, the cook, comes in at 2:30 to get the muffins started and the coffeepots on. Katie, or another of Becky’s children, comes in at 3:30. According to Marilyn at least 10 or 11 regular customers come in every morning when the place opens – most, she says, just have muffins and coffee. She enjoys her regulars she says because we’ve “become quite the jokesters. I get jokes off the Internet and read ’em to ’em and we laugh a lot.”
By 5 AM, the place begins to empty out as the first rays of light brighten the sky outside. The postal worker who has been sitting in the corner watching TV is just brushing the last crumbs from his uniform and getting ready to get back to work – Becky’s, he tells me, was his “dinner break.”
Katie, who goes to the University of New Hampshire, tells me that when she’s at school she misses the regulars and the community because “it’s a nice relationship to have, starting the day with people who have known me since I was a little girl.”
Before I head home for a few hours’ sleep, Marilyn cooks me up some scrambled eggs with toast and coffee. The eggs are fluffy and fresh, the toast deliciously crisp and buttery. Homey and safe to those needing something comforting and predictable, Becky’s seems an idyllic place to start the day.