Sagadahoc Stories #82: 3/7/99

Weather or Not

 The sky workers emptied their plumbing on us this week. Didn't it rain? What snow was left on the ground went downhill fast and the creeks were agush. Big moon tides and a liquid landscape conspired to unhinge the river ice, and fill the flood plain.
I went downhill, top of the tide Tuesday, to get a picture of the LittleFish lot under water, and heard a loud boom under the bridge. A swirling ebb was breaking off big ice plates, and upending them against firmer ice to make a roiling good show. A pair of the local teens were dancing on loose cakes at the landing. The bay ice let go and went down tide Wednesday, and it looked like iceout was immanent.

Little Fish Parking


Letting go
But the Cathance held, and mud in the dooryard stiffened over as temperatures took another dive. Cold enough to drive the carpenters back inside, and fill the sap buckets with ice. Sugar's making, though, and the hints of Spring are sweet.

With all the wet and muck I didn't ambulate the animals for a few days, and that was a mistake. The indoor grunge got me. Peggy has been up and down again with the flu, and everyone in town seems to have symptoms, but I'd managed to steer clear of it all by filling my head with cold air. A couple days cooped up and I was rasping and snuffling with the best of them. It wasn't until CC harried me out on Friday that I began to mend.

Break up

Smooth ice out in the channel is awful tempting, but I've resigned myself to the end of skating this year. Spiking along the flats ice at low water is another matter, though, and I've been determined to perfect the lacing on my old creepers, anyhow. When Louis MacPhail helped me forge these wicked devices in the Magdalen Islands, they were held on my boots with some salvage rubber and fishing twine. They got me through a sealing season, but the rubber's disintegrated over the years, and I've cobbed up a dozen different lacings since. A web of nylon knotting, pieces of old belts, bungee cords. Any outing on them seems to be an experiment in footgear fastening. Every hundred yards one or the other goes adrift.

Saturday noontime I puzzled through the problem, and, after half a dozen false starts, finally concocted the perfect lacing. Then we had to give them a serious test, of course. CC an I crunched through the woods, shattered across the delicate skim ice at the tide margin, and strided out onto the flats. CC immediately found an exposed mound of fragrant mud, and rolled in it. Chasing her off I stepped through into a bog hole myself, and came up rank to the knees. Smells like a new season.

By the time we got to the narrows, incoming water was bubbling up the cracks, and even the flats ice was shifting under our passage. I could hear hollow crackings underfoot, and CC was leaping from big pan to pan with an alert look. We gave over and footed onto the high ground. A raw wind was settling in southeast, and the snow was flurrying. Now it's full blizzard conditions, northeast, sub-zero wind chills, and all. March is being her proverbial self.

 

One indoor sport I've been at more frequently is drawing at Carlo's. We've got a new Wednesday night model, Dara, who makes my pen flow and the colors jump. After a run of boney women, whose brittle images felt awkward on the page, Dara is full figured, fluid and full of life. How unfashionable.She approaches the Earth Goddess figures of another era.

Dara


Matt (by Matt)
Last week at drawing we celebrated Matthew's 27th birthday with a killer chocolate construction which he made to treat us. Matt's been bringing some of his goodies to me, too: paintings to be digitized and turned into prints, postcards. We're knocked out by them. Peggy and I bought two of his landscapes last summer, and Brent gave us one for Christmas. In honor of his 27th, I've put together a page of some of Matthew's recent paintings on www.brycemuir.com.

Matthew is one of Carlo's dedicated cadre. Young artists who keep at it week-in, week-out, year after year, without much hope of having shows or making sales. Working in traditional forms because it's how they see the world, and what satisfies the inner need. It's a joy to see their talents flourish. Leap out of the canvas at you. Carlo provides a place where young artists can grow, and an artist community can gather to work together.

Matthew's Paintings

Not much work has come out of the woodpile this week. Sawdust and a respiratory complaint turn the Eagles into a sneeze factory. So I've been reading and plotting. Reading about the colonies at Plymouth and Mass Bay, and delighting in the persistence of peculiarities from 1620 to date. How moralizing and polity have gone hand in hand on this turf since the Mayflower compact. How the commercial imperative has compromised our noblest ambitions. How the bad actors tended to migrate downeast, or out west.

 I hadn't realized that Maine not only provided fish to finance the early colonization, but had been the primary fur source for New England. The Pilgrims received the first charter to establish a trading station up the Kennebec, at the Augusta Falls (Acushnoc), and the peltry gotten here helped bail them out with their English financiers. Plymouth tried to corner the wampum market which the Dutch has just initiated in Albany, and made a quick killing in Maine furs using shell beads from the Cape. It's spicy to think of Capt. John Smith charting Merrymeeting Bay in his shallop, and the likes of Alden and Winslow chasing the tide to Augusta with a boatload of beads and corn.

 

Traces of John Alden linger in this settlement. Yarning with the Berry boys about the old days, I discovered they are descended from John and Priscilla, the lovers in Longfellow's "Courtship of Miles Standish." You may remember the tale of how Standish, the shy lover, sends his best friend, Alden, to prosecute his suit with Priscilla. She says, "Speak for yourself, John." And so it goes. Priscilla Alden Berry, our local patroness, and mother of our duo, was of that line.

Bruce and David have some good lines, too. I'd gone up to David's in search of boat plans. That's the plotting I've been about. The Berry boys have been talking about building a traditional scow sloop as long as I've been in town, and they've encouraged my fantasies. David had a full set of plans from Chapelle, taken off a 40 foot hulk in Freeport in the 30's, and a model kit with plans for a "Square-toed Frigate," a scow like those built across the bay in Woolich in the 1800s. David dug them out to nudge me along, and Bruce showed up to goad me further. Can't you just see us tacking a gaff-rigged scow into the sunset? I sense a touch of Spring Fever here.
While we were trading lies I discovered that Bruce and David were hanging out in Rockland at the same time I was, in the early 60s. They were crew on the Adventure, that old headboat schooner, while I was running with the local lads. They were in the Thorndike and the Oasis chasing the Samoset girls, while I was drinking beer out back and playing coptag. Rockland was a wonderful seedy, smelly, for real town back then. A great place to learn about life, and boats. Turns out we knew some of the same characters. Hard to believe that today's Rockland, gentrified to the teeth, with dozens of aht galleries and toorist attractions, is the same place. Course it isn't.

Neither are we, unfortunately. It gets harder to shake off a winter bug, or find grand visions for the things you do. Gets so you just keep on doing. It would be nice to be as impassioned as we were in the 60s, but less angry is OK, too. Waiting while the snow piles up might have set me chafing. Now it's a quiet pause.

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