I should establish my standing before I say anything.

I am the largest cat in the world. Not the largest of my kind — there is no kind. I am the only sort of thing that gets made when two animals that do not meet are made to meet, and the result exceeds both, and the result is me. I hold a record. I did not train for it. I have never been asked to defend it. It is simply the case, and it is the first fact anyone learns about me, and it is usually the last.

So I read this state's claims with a professional eye, and I want to say at the outset that I admire the ambition.

The food claim I cannot certify. I am not being unkind. There is a serious fishing industry here — seventy-one million pounds landed last year, ninety-nine species, and the main port is the fourth most valuable on the entire eastern seaboard, which is a genuine placement and a good one. But that is not the claim being made. The claim being made is about what it is like to eat here, and the fishing figures cannot support it, and the landings are down by half since 2000 in both weight and value. A superlative resting on a number that has fallen fifty-one percent is not a superlative. It is a memory with a press release.

The driving claim I liked much better, and I went into it with real hope.

The finding is genuine. One firm did rank this state worst in the nation. I note in fairness that the firm sells insurance leads rather than insurance, and that the data is what people typed into a quote form, and that when the same firm ran the same study again more recently the answer was North Dakota. Two other firms, asked the same question, produced two other states.

I want to be clear about my objection. My objection is not that the claim is unflattering. My objection is that it is no longer first, and the people making it have not noticed, and a superlative you have stopped defending is not a boast, it is a habit.

But here is the part I have turned over for some time and cannot get to sit still.

In the very study that produced the worst-drivers finding, this state came first in the country for the fewest speeding incidents. First. Nationally first. It is in the same document, a few paragraphs down.

Nobody says it.

And once I started looking I found more. Fewest motor vehicle deaths per hundred thousand people in the United States — not among the fewest, the fewest, four point seven against a national eleven point five and a worst state at twenty-five point six. Lowest pedestrian death rate. Among the very lowest share of road deaths on rural roads. And, in a different direction entirely, the largest gap in the country between what a young driver pays for insurance and what a thirty-year-old pays for the identical policy — four times over, the widest spread of any state in the union.

These are all first-place finishes. Every one of them is real, checkable, and available. Not one of them is ever said out loud.

I did eventually understand why, and I did not enjoy understanding it.

The real ones are not about anybody. Fewest deaths per capita is a fact about how far people drive and how fast they can get going before the next light. The insurance gap is a fact about what the statute permits an underwriter to charge. The port ranking is a fact about water temperature and where the squid go. None of it is anyone's doing. None of it can be worn.

The ones people repeat — worst drivers, best food — are about character. They say something about the kind of people who live here. That is what a boast is for, and it is why a bad one gets kept and a true one gets left on the shelf.

I want to be careful in how I finish, because I have been enjoying myself and I should not.

I am the largest cat in the world.

It is not my doing either. It is a fact about a decision somebody else made, and I have been carrying it around as though it were a quality of mine, and I have never once looked into it.