11/14/97 ... Boiled dinner.

Main Street plunges downhill to the flashing light at Jeanine's, our local bistro. Heart of the village. On the four corners at the light are, clockwise from the northeast, the Masonic Lodge, Town Landing Place (Jeanine's), the Knights of Pythias Hall (Curtis Insurance downstairs), and a three-unit rental property.

The Lodge is a four-square white temple trimmed in ochre and ornamented with varied courses of fancy shingle-work. Jeanine's and the KofP are stolid hip-roofed Tudoresques, like two tin-topped bread boxes in a giant's kitchen. Jeanine's is painted mud brown with ochre trim, the KofP is a pale blue-gray. The rental is a white nondescript hidden beneath a towering ornamental spruce. It's been burned out twice since we've lived here.

The whole town burned down in, what was it, 1908? Hard to believe that ocean-going vessels actually slid down ways in this little burg, to splash in the Cathance. Or to imagine the town full of mills and businesses, and the landscape denuded.

Back then a big water wheel spun in the tiderace under the Brooklyn Bridge (a single green box-girder), running grinders at the fertilizer mill just upstream.. turning sheepshit into an agricultural commodity. The sprawling mill is now abandoned. We live just uphill from the bridge, in an 1890's millworker's house, a five minute walk from Jeanine's.

I've spent the last six months looking intently at this little village. Drawing one local angle or another almost every day. It continues to unfold like an onion under careful scrutiny. Yielding storied images, or evocative compositions, or celebrations of the commonplace. Last week I was smitten by the big 3-phase transformer that couples the old shoe factory (now a biomedical instrument manufactory) to the grid. How many times had I walked under it, and never noticed?

Of course the locals have noticed me. Squatted down with a box of colors, the two dogs hanging round. They stop their cars and pickups to jaw and check out today's effort. The other pedestrians (a handful) already know me as a fellow foot soldier. I generally stop into Jeanine's, if I'm hard by during lunch hour. Get the latest gossip.

Small town restaurants are civic institutions, and it's worth 75 cents for a cup of tea to help keep one alive. Jeanine's seats 30, at seven tables and the counter in a cramped space, and you'd have to whisper to keep your conversation to yourself. Who'd want to? Eavesdropping and sticking your nose in is what a local bistro is about.

What you discover at a place like Jeanine's is the astonishing depths people can hide beneath their plaid shirts and baseball hats.You might end up overhearing a discussion of long lens photography between carpenters. It's like that every day. Maybe in every town.

Not that it ain't rough hewn. And the cuisine can be hard on you. This is the land of the four-square workingman's diet. Back when Bruce and Judy ran the place he used to call it "The Choke and Puke." Might have had something to do with that marriage. Or what running a restaurant does to a marriage. There've been 4 owner-couples of this place in the baker's dozen years we've lived here, and three of those marriages shipwrecked on this rock, or barely survived. How much that has to do with the menu, I can't say.

Not that Jeanine hasn't tried. Early on in her tenure she got creative with a chowder, and actually put something green in it. She got corrected by one of the regulars. "We don't put greens in a chowder," she was told.

So the fare tends to the heavy and grilled, which puts me down for the count, if I dare it. And the trade tends toward the ample, which Jeanine can sympathize with. She's sneaking in a bit of green cuisine, though, and finding that it broadens her audience in other ways. There's freshbaked Crow bread at the checkout counter, designer coffees, and she usually has a veggy soup or a chowder on special. Even offers veggyburgers. In the evening the place turns into a pizza factory.

The Mother of all Pizzas, Jeanine does the pizza shift. During the day she gets spelled by her partner, Diane, her two daughters, Allee and Angie, and Bob, a gruff-voiced hashslinger of the old school. After she and John split on the rock of restauranteurism, it looked like the Town Landing Place would change hands again, or wither away, but Jeanine hung on and the place has a vibrant air now, to this observer at least.

Of course it's still an exhausting treadmill to run a chow house, but it's become a family affair at the heart of Bowdoinham, and that may be the only way to deliver groceries and survive. The women share around the daycare of Allee's little boy, spell each other at need, and treat the rest of us like kinfolk. Know all our bad habits.

I started passing around my bundle of sketches over lunches, and Jeanine asked if she could sell copies. I delight in the idea of local arts at democratic prices, and jumped at the chance. At this point I've got 50-60 takes on town I'm willing to reproduce, and we've been playing around with plausible formats. The originals are 7X10 pen-and-inks with watercolor wash, and I started making color Xerox copies, 8 1/2X11. $5.00 per seems reasonable for a local angle. I love the rich saturated colors and hard edges you can get with color copiers. Then I discovered I could enlarge the images, and laminate them into placemats. At first to legal sized mats ($7.00), and then to 11X17 ($10.00). Then Homer died and we replaced him with this (as yet unChristened) device, with scanner and printer attached. Now my vehicle of choice is an 8 1/2X11 puter-print on cardstock, nicely matte and watercolory ($6.00). It's great to have bread and butter items you can sell to your neighbors. I put a display book of copies in the restaurant, and Jeanine actually took $400 worth of orders last Saturday. I seem to have been waylaid into another sideline.

But I get a little queasy now at Jeanine's, when the conversation at another table turns to the drawings. Kind of blows my cover. Right now they are a novelty, and a Christmas item, so they're getting passed around. I'll be interested to see if you can maintain a visual dialogue with a small town over time. Or your enthusiasm. And I need a source of supply for discount ink cartridges.

Meanwhile everyone is giving me business advice.. which is hopeless, of course. I'll burn brightly on this path as long as I'm inspired by the process, and the views, then leap to other tinder. In fact it's getting too chill to loiter with watercolors, and I've been snapping angles to paint from photos as the year goes down. Thinking fondly of a warm woodshop. Today it's snowing hard. First of the year.

There aren't many personal secrets in a small town, but its visual life can go unobserved from generation to generation. I've fallen into the role of visual historian in Bowdoinham, for now, and feel a certain responsibility as the eyes of the town. You'll never see it all, certainly, but the trying unfolds a place. There is an artistic Heisenberg principle: careful observation changes a place.. and the observer. You become part of the landscape, too. That painter with the dogs.

I've been scooching into Jeanine's after painting this week, to warm my hands around a hot cuppa, and listen to the lies go round. Shorey got his deer, but Max is still stalking that buck. Dry wood is a buck and a quarter from Larry Schrock. Do you really think they're going to chain off the sandpile so we can't sand our driveways with town sand?

A lady diner was laughing about my drawings the other day. She and her husband run a transformer supply outfit, and she hooted at all my power pole paintings. She commissioned me to paint her house as a Christmas present. "You can leave out the transformers," she said. I cashed her check with Jeanine and bought lunch.