Island Breeze
Crops in the field
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Last week had some moments of pure delight. Barefoot early mornings
with vegetables. A spell of fine planking. Riots of flowers and
bowls full of salad. Butterflies in the noon stillness. Bats on
the edge of dark. A couple of those days you wait all year for
in Maine. |
| Then there's a payback. That summer visitor you wished had stayed
home comes for an extended stay. Hot and sultry, and full of discontent.
She blows in on a smoky southwester, smelling of the highway,
and proceeds to confuse the issue.You get dizzy and irritable.
Everything you lay hand to goes upside down. The Red Bitch of
the South is in town. |
Roses
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It's been hot enough to boil your brain, if you left it outside.
Middays in the high 90's, thick humidity, fine imported ozone
to make you wheeze. August weather in early June. This boatyard
has no shelter to hide in, and I'm as tanned as a tropical sailor.
Did they say the fire next time? |
| I kept planking the baby's bottom, but my oomph was running low.
Paintings, carvings, even the big sculpture, have a cycle of inspiration,
creation, and completion which culminates before the moon returns.
This Millennium Toad is just one long friggit. It's beginning
to feel like a day job. |
|
Port Clyde
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Mr. Mann has been inviting me to make an island getaway, but I've
been too stove up trying to get this ark constructed. Begrudging
every moment I couldn't be screwing pine on oak. By Saturday morning
I was so frazzled and fried I seized his latest offer with both
claws. He and I and Theo and CC hopped in the Hondacar and zagged
for Port Clyde. |
Lighthouse View
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We'd packed in lobster and beer and the usual bagful of grumbles,
and, as usual, the sea-bounced sun and the worry of water on granite
made us hungry for ingests, and forgetful of the baggage. I moved
off into that summer space which hovers between tears and torpor. |
| My eyes were too busy to let my hands go numb, though, and I proceeded
to sketch and color like mad, as if to make up for all the time
lost ark building. I'd left Olympus home, on the assumption that
I'd be doing plein airs and didn't need the digital companion,
but I was soon sorry. So much of the richness of the shore is
in redundancies. Millions of tiny mussels between billions of
tiny barnacles. The profuse swirlings of igneous intrusions, fractured
and piled by millennial forces. Beyond my powers to illustrate.
Maybe beyond photography. Mr. Mann led me out to a point where
the entire cosmos is portrayed in stone. Enough to make your head
spin. Or was it the lager? |
In Color
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Island Jeep
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Saturday night we retreated to the cottage theater for a screening
of family movies from the 50s. Not our family, though. The place
comes with a collection of 16mm nostalgias, and the machinery
to match. Snippets of period reportage, following a French family
from triple deckers to asbestos-sided suburbs, from Old Orchard
to Coral Gables. Seventh birthday cakes, and fun house mirrors.
Susy's short-shorts and Uncle Joe's new station wagon. Duckwalk
racing and sunbathing with cigarettes. Hilarious and sad, like
the human condition. Remind me to burn all our old mementos.
|
| Sunday morning I took my memories and the dog for an airing. It
took me a while to realize the entire island was in bloom. Every
least shrub and creeper putting out its colors and scents for
the height of sun. Wild roses in heady pink. Beach peas in uncapturable
violet. High- and low-bush blueberries. Butterblossoms and milleflora.
Indian paintbrush and snake-eyes. The evergreens were dense with
new candles, heavy with cones. Trails of fragrance ran down the
rising wind. Hard to be heartsick in bee-heaven. |
Clam Cove
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Mr. Mann
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Dog nirvana, too. A new catch toy every few yards. Floats and
buoys, lost balls and driftwood galore. CC knew what we were there
for, and ran all day, capering like a pup. We paused here and
there to just soak it up, and put a piece on paper. Burrowing
into the hushed thickets and dense spruce. Debouching onto the
windy ledges. Nosing into the tidepools, leaning against rocks
in a sunny lee.
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| The visual extravagance was matched by astonishing fecundity.
I misspent a chunk of my youth just alongshore from here, capturing
crustaceans and identifying the wrack, but I don't remember the
protoplasm being so thick. Are my eyes wider, or is there a bloom
happening, as the planet warms and the sky is full of gas? The
exuberance of sun-struck vegetables might just be the moment,
but the explosion of microfauna is like a millennial celebration.
I hoorawed, and the dog barked. |
Monhegan Ferry
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|
Our excuse for this episode was to prep the cottage for a couple
arriving Sunday afternoon, and to guide them in. By 3PM it was
blowing hard outside, and a back shore arrival out of the question.
When we crossed to Port Clyde it was starting to spit, and dark
scud was pushing over from seaward. While Mr. Mann did the honors
I hung round the docks and sketched. A dive boat was getting ready
to take photographers to Monhegan, and I chatted them up. They
reported that the profusion of life out there matches what I'd
seen in the pools, and the excitement in their eyes made me long
for a dry suit and tanks.
|
A couple was casting for mackerel off the float and they were
slaying them. The young woman was breathless with delight. "I
just caught FIVE on one cast," she declared. Her guy was busy
unhooking them and filling a cooler. "We'll use them for striper
bait down to Westport," he told me. When the dive boat pulled
away from the float, it began to pitch and heave, as the rising
swells tossed it, unprotected.
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Mackerel
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Backwater Idyll
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I ran downwind to the inner harbor, and admired a pair of young
men messing about on their wharf across the water. Here was an
idyll I once yearned for, and it still smells good. A shack by
the ocean on a quiet cove, with a boat at my feet, and a whole
life around me. Never mind the wet butt and the pickup payments.
There I was, an old geek with a sketchpad, gawping at the life.
I felt like a damned tourist in vacationland.
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| We hit the home turf about dark, and woke up to another broiler.
Guy and Darryl dripping on the roof, Seth building new stairs,
and the boat geek planking up her bottom. We were about cooked
by mid-afternoon, and they'd just buttoned up the roof with a
layer of tarpaper when the micro-burst struck. Hurricane force
winds tearing limbs and tossing the details. Buckets of rain.
No damage done here, but the burst took down a tree in Guy's dooryard,
blocked the road, and tore all the wires away. An hour later it
was sunny and hot as ever. Makes you wish you had a boat in the
water. Or a place on an island. |
Seth on Stairs
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