Sagadahoc Stories #107: 9/30/99

Sparring

Bowdoinham celebrated its birthday this month with a town fair and toodo at the waterfront. The fire department set up a toll booths by the bridge to pickpocket the traffic, the Boy Scouts hauled in a rental fry wagon, there was a dunk tank where you could immerse your favorite local authority, vendors sold everything from mums to pickled fiddleheads, Johnny Joyce dressed up as Clarabell, there was a canoe race, train rides, an art show in the Lodge, and David tied the Beth Alison to the ramp float and sold grilled chicken with designer vegetables.

Clarabell


Party Moose
The Rec Committee put the party together, bought a banner and T-shirts, and crossed their fingers for weather. Friday it was still Floyding and downcast, but Saturday morning was scrubbed brisk and glorious. I'd broken down the Moose and the Mermaid, which have been in Hank and Susy's yard, in case of a big blow, so I erected them on either side of the boat ramp for the festivities. The fire department lent me some muscle, and Dirigo 2000 just shivered slightly in the gusty air. By nine o'clock the lot was full of townsfolk celebrating themselves.

There'd been some talk of drawing an outside crowd and making a buck, but I didn't see an unfamiliar face. The vendors did just fine. Eric and Angie sold out of clam chowder, the trains were full, and there were grins all around. The petty animosities of local politics were stowed for a day, and the reverend's parishioners got to buy chances to dunk him.

Party Mermaid


Matt's Bridge
The only sour note was Carlo, who made a grand insulting gesture to all of us, then went to New York for Yom Kippur. You see, the organizing committee, in its camelness, determined that nude art was inappropriate for the party. They voted that Brent's naked ladies were verboten, and the rest of us better stay clothed. Brent was delighted to be BANNED IN BOWDOINHAM, his home town, but Carlo was OUTRAGED. Wrote a bombastic letter to the committee, and the press, about freedom of expression, the long tradition of naked art, how dare they, etc, etc.

He then went around demanding solidarity. We should all boycott the show in the name of higher principles, and if we didn't we weren't real artists, or friends of Carlo. He's been on a high horse all month, what with the grumbles about his genitalia show in Portland, and we all hoped that he'd come back from the Day of Atonement chilled out. After he was out of town, we went ahead and hung non-controversial work in the Lodge.

Matt's Tracks


Matt's Hall
You want to be part of a small town, you play by the local rules, and Carlo knows this as well as the rest of us. The whole point of living in the provinces is to enjoy provincialism. Studies of labia just won't wash in the boonies, no matter what the urban fixation of the moment is. If it were otherwise, why leave the city? This little show was a chance for some local artists to open the eyes of their neighbors, not an invitation to stick a thumb in them. Carlo is right: that art has to be free to tell naked truths. But In Your Face is too uptown for this burg. Nine disloyalists showed their work, made a few sales, and got to hang out. Matthew hung 15 of the Bowdoinham landscapes he's been doing this year, and I was knocked out again by his impressionistic take on town. How different perceptions transform the familiar. Carlo sneered that he had intended to show "a few landscapes, but no REAL art," before his political ox was gored. Well, if one purpose of art is to transform our perceptions, Matt's oils are as real as it gets. Cathy, the Rec chair, bought a big woodland interior from Matt, and that seemed like a perfect symmetry.

I went around sticking Olympus in everyone's face, to supplement the Rogues Gallery, and stuffed my own with baked goods. The Blues Buzzards blew, and Neil and Michael and a lady vocalist laid down some hot licks. I kept shuttling home to our dooryard, trying to get that last coat of finish on the Toad, but was drawn back by music blowing up the hill. By infant fussing time the town was sated. We broke it down and carried it away before dark.


Boat Launch
(Photos by Peggy Morin)
Next day we launched the Toad, and I'd assumed that would put a capstone on the frenzy for me. It's not so easy to rev down, however, when you've been running at full throttle. I kept wearing groves in the dooryard between work stations. Obsessing. Making spars.

Bob Kane and I had gone out in his woods and felled two plumb spruce, three weeks back. One, a standing dead stick behind his building, for a gaff, and the other a big green beauty, maybe 400 yards out. Limbed the gaffwood and hauled out 20 feet of it, no sweat. The other was a brute. It took all we had to hoist it on our shoulders and stagger through the old slash in 100 foot jags. We spent two hours humping it to Bob's road, like a pair of mules. Loaded both aboard Ebba, and huffed them home.

Spars


Mast Loaded
Jim had done all the rough work on the spruce, with a chainsaw and drawknife, by the time I started in after the launch. It had taken us a couple days to remember how to turn a tree into a spar, and I finally borrowed Bob's power planer, which we should have used in the first place. Even with the right tools, I spent all week making gaff and boom and mast, sun up to fall down. Still driven like a pieceworker with a mortgage due. So much for the leisure classes. Give a driven man the tools and materials and he can turn any pleasure into a treadmill.

At sunset the following Sunday evening I was ready to step the mast. Mr. Mann and Kayak Mike were on hand for the ceremony. With McLaughlin's tabernacle, it was a piece of cake setting the butt, and elevating the spar. Getting it stayed off was a goat roping. Between the free rotation of the unwedged butt, the unlocked hinge in the tabernacle, and the slight stretch of the Dacron shrouds and forestay, we wibbled and wobbled until pitch dark. I'll have to rethink the standing rigging before I spread sail, but at least she's sparred. Now all we need is the mainsail from Delano, and we can sail. A big orange moon came up to admire our handiwork.

Sunset Stepping


Toad in Fog
In the early morning fog on Monday, I walked down to Jimmy's to spy the Toad, before I went off to another Grand Jury session. Gaff riggers have such stubby masts compared to the high aspect sailboats of today that the Toad looks even more crude and comical with her stick in. She is a vision out of another time. Peggy observes that the magic boats of myth were all barges. Authur's and Cleopatra's and the Chinese Emperors'. The Toad has a touch of the magic. Something about the way she slides over the water makes her passage stately and sublime. Can't wait to see her with the big canvas hoisted.

Maybe I should learn about waiting, though. This last month took on a frantic aspect, which tended to overpower the joy. We do make such busyness out of our lives. Coming to the end of this creative frenzy is none too soon, and another confrontation with indictable larceny and felony sure grounds you. Fall is the time for buttoning up, and I'm ready.

Stepped


Deflated
I began posting dispatches on the web a year ago, so this is a birthday for The Journal of a Local Artist. And the balloons are going flat.. Been three years since I started producing a digital log, and doing daily drawings. Since we got home from America I've illustrated a small town at the millennium, followed local doings around the cycle of a year, and mouthed off more than enough.

So I'm going to sit out a spell. I'll probably do more paintings, post more dispatches, make more noises: but only when it feels right. The Toad will get shaken down and hauled out. I'll pick up the pieces: fulfill the commission promises I've been shelving, write the letters I've been meaning, fill out some empty spaces in the web site, run the dog more. I'll keep in touch. Occasionally.

Sail Laced


Hoisted
Last Thursday we had the first real autumn day. Jacket brisk northerly and a flutter down of leaves. Hardwoods blushing at the season's rude attention.The world is bronzed, with a red flame here and there. I'm going to hole up in my cave, and figure on the next step.

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