5/26/98... Cut bait.

Jimmy finally got bait.

It's been a hard season for the fishermen. First the whole elvering fiasco, with thousands of outastate interlopers siphoning off every last wriggler, and the profit margins. Then the run of baitfish was nada.

Stinson shut off the little guys, only selling to the big bait dealers from down south. Hard to see tankerloads of herring rolling out when you can't set your traps.

Even the eagles abandoned Bowdoinham. You'd see them in New Meadows and the Royal River, the lower Kennebec and Sebasco, but up here in the home turf they were some scarce.

Bruce's lung collapsed for the third time this week, so he'll be late on the season, if he gets to chase eel at all this year. Going in Wednesday to have three blebs excised.

The Cambodians have appeared on the banks of the Cathance, fishing for the perch, but I haven't seen any big feeds going down. Even the harbor seal who tended in the Bay last year hasn't shown up.

What have shown in force are the jetskis, and the big party boats. Now we have a new and improved boat launch and ramp, Bowdoinham is a blue collar destination resort. Memorial Day weekend was a zoo on the waterfront. It's finally happened here. Recreation has replaced commerce on the river. Welcome to America.

Sharpie took up her caulking, except for along the port chine and under the splice in the trunk log. I've been digging out putty and shoving in cotton to staunch the flow. Guess she'll be good for the season.

I can't complain about recreational boating. I've been moored off the town float for 15 seasons, advertising the joys of watersport. But Sharpie looks comical now, surrounded by plastic leviathans. And The Committee is making noises about my being "in the way" for approaches and departures. So much for a quiet backwater. Our solitude wasn't helped by the loud self-promotion of The Friends of Merrymeeting Bay, either. "Save our hidden treasure." Enviros should think about media pollution.

Ashore, the flowers continue to run riot, and we've got all the garden in except tomato sets. Between the thunder squall and the wind lashing of the past few days, we've been just as glad to keep them under cover. But they're getting leggy. Beans are up, and we had our first homegrown salad on Saturday. Yum.

So I've run out of excuses. Just have to work on my commissions. I got the big restaurant job. Fill a 22X14 foot space on the entry wall of the new restaurant at Sebasco Harbor Estates, then design another piece for the wall by the boat dock. While we were discussing designs a mature bald swooped us, and my patron jumped at the idea of an eagle in the sunset, today's catch in his talons. I'm hunting for red wood.

This commission was sparked by a lobster of mine, clutching the new moon, which hangs on Steve and Arlene's barn in Bunganuc. I like the symmetry of a lunar lobster and a solar eagle.

It's hard to rise above cliche when you deal with iconic images. Lighthouses. Lobsterboats. Rocky islands. All that MAINE drek. The locals are so fed up with it that the state is going to take the damned crustacean off our license plates. So how do you evoke the spirit of place, and touch those archtypal eyefuls, without a cringe? A yawn? The perennial puzzle.

In the case of MARILYN and THE KING, cliche is essential. They stand on the boundary between pop kitsch and myth. Awe and shucks. But the genius locus loses its charge with commercialization, and the coast of Maine has been oversold.

The power of salt on granite.. and the smell of rockweed.. is still a mystery, though. Still worth conjuring. How do you get behind the obvious to hint at the secret? Always the problem with representational work, but compounded by trite familiarity. What could be more banal than a lobster sign in Maine?

Master of Banality. How's that for an ambition? When Mr. Mann saw a watercolor I'd done of a fire hydrant here in town, he declared it the start of my Pathetic Period. I've moved up to the banal. I've also returned to the midday al fresco exercise. And that rattles the same cage. I've now done 100 paintings of Bowdoinham. Limned every obvious view at least once. What more is there to say? How do you SEE it afresh?

I'd gotten so there wasn't an interesting subject in sight. It was ALL cliche for me. Small town. HoHum. Now I'm seeing new angles. All the betweens and asides. Fascinating. The process is less and less about LANDSCAPE. The big pot. It's more about shards. Refractions of the view. The paintings have always had skewed angles, but they tended to have a center weight. A SUBJECT. This is starting to dissolve. Maybe something else will come through.

I was sitting down at Jimmy's dock one noontide this week, drawing his eelboat. As I started to line in the background I noticed a boat at the landing that looked awful familiar. It was the Ace, Capt. Ken's runabout. I tossed my kit in the bag and jumped on the bike. Sure enough, he was up in my shop writing me a "Where were you?"

So I got my first ride on the Bay. Down to Bath to check out the bridge building. A splendid afternoon on the water. Ken complained that there were no markers out in the serpentine channel of the Bay. No eel pots in the deepholes. Now Jimmy's got bait, his traps are going overboard. You can find your way to Bowdoinham.