The Ballad of Uncle Walt's peepin' tommin' down to Port Clyde

Charles Wilder Oakes
"Got Caught"
(Private Collection).
Acrylic on panel
24 1/2 X 20 1/2 in.



A face through a fogged-up window. . .cleared away with a patched old overcoat cuff, and an old salt sea dog's paw, with the other clutching tight on a half swilled PBR, you want to bet!! My uncle Walt Anderson was notorious for a good many things, down around the back streets and shoreline lanes of "old Port Clyde". Certainly for being Andrew Wyeth's closest Maine friend, confidant, and subject of a good many of Andrew's best known paintings. Walter and his brother Robert Anderson, as do a great many of the former denizens of what I term "Old Port Clyde" seem to me now more and more like some legend followed up on and collected by the brothers Grimm. I recall at the last of it, in uncle Walt's last days, uncle Walt was a kind of good will ambassador for Andrew Wyeth and old Port Clyde -- the Port Clyde of the 1960's and up to the mid 70's, that still had "the old ways". . .I don't know quite how to say it any better than that. A way of life we all knew and loved down there -- rough and tumble, untidily gentrified, scrapin' and scrapping, all kinds of life rigmarole, comin' at ya and going' the other way, all to once.

Time flies, and in those days Port Clyde was populated with the kind of fishermen I remember, (bear with me for just a few names, because I can't name 'em all -- there's just too many of 'em) let's say: "Jack" Cushman, Buster, and Woodrow, the Hupper's, Carlos Davis, Old Cony and Crow Morris, Block, Fawd, Gump, Earl, the Simmons's, and Stanley Stone, and on and on, who are mostly all over to "The Ridge" now; them and their widows gone behind them too, and some of their children, even. A lot of these all in the family. The six Hussey sisters migrated over from Friendship village after all, to Port Clyde, and they married into the Port Clyde families, and they had children, and their children had children -- and time flies.

By the time I got to know uncle Walt, there was no question he was well on his way to becoming the town derelict, and I don't say that in any "judgmental sense", it was just simply his path to walk, and the way it was. Well we all knew uncle Walt also was well known to go out walkin' (shades of Patsy Cline on the radio from the old days) after hours. He'd be making his rounds and sizing' up who he'd likely be "peepin' Tommin'."

Hard to tell who he spied in on all across the years down to Port. I know more than a few certainly from first hand stories. But it was most likely whomever took his fancy at the time, and was within reasonable walking distance 'round town. A place where the lay of the land provided some brushy shelter. A good "hideout place" -- all the better to stand there and pound back a few frosties, stay out of the window and porch lights, and get entertained for the evening.

Summer wimmin in their rental places, were a good bet for sure, because they were "from away", and just by and large "clueless". Then there was always the current crop of choice local teenage girls, and probably a cadre of the old ladies too, sitting around half naked combing their hair after a good hot bath, on a Sunday night. All of them in their underwear unawares that Uncle Walt was lurking just outside the window having a few cold ones of liquid courage, and "peerin' in".

And we all knew it was uncle Walt, or blamed it on him at any rate. (Sometimes you see, if the wind blew something over outside, or started in a branch to scratching up against the outside of the house, you'd pause and someone would inevitably say: "Uncle Walt! " or "Uncle Walt?! that you?!!" and we'd all laugh and go back to eating supper).

Sometimes it really WAS uncle Walt, though. He'd get caught by someone and there'd be a shriek and a flurry of activity, but by the time you got into your own boots and threw a sweater on, and got the storm door open, all you could hear of Ol' Walt was distant scurrying sounds out there in the dark. Uncle Walt huffing and puffing, headed back to the village as fast as his hip boots could carry him down those snowy roads. And that would be that.

You could probably trail him, but he knew enough to hide his tracks once he got back near to base at Charlie Culver's fish house. He was a pirate, after all. Pirates know a lot of ways to hide things. Still and all come the early morning hours there'd be "evidence" on occasion, that old Walt had drifted 'round a-visitin'. A bottle of Reunité wine, dead soldiered, or some empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans laying half buried in the snow along with all these boot prints showing where uncle Walt had been milling around underneath the shelter of the spruce and fir trees, and walking back and fourth to the windows.


cwo

"Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde."

Here's a little before and after, as things were going along at the time. Basically the composition of the painting was pretty well nailed down even before I took the first photo of the painting. You know, before I added the "snow" coming down. The idea being to get all the broad areas and details taken care of first before I put the snow fall in the mix.

So this is my first painting I did about my mother. I painted it while I was in the hard-scrabble of coming off a life-long booze habit. I started it after the d.t.'s and hallucinations left me. I had to wait at least that long, as my painting hand wasn't very steady, and neither was much else about me, to be completely honest about it. Looking back today, I've not a doubt in my mind what-so-ever that her spirit was hooverin' 'round over me last summer, helpin' keep her boy on the straight-n-narrow from here to eternity. Hey, it's a mother's job. There's a blessin an' a curse to everythin' that comes our way. You only got to look at your bible to get my drift, if you don't see it in the daily news or otherwise get enough from experience every day.

I pulled it off, though. I finished "Portrait of my mother. . ." around the mid-summer mark of 2006. And it was sold not too long after mid-winter down in New York city. Beats all !! Now I can in all honesty tell folks that I "sold my mother down the river". Well, at least over to the Jersey side. Ha!

Most of the rest of the time in the five or six paintings I've done where my mother appears, she ranges from about 1/2 to a full 3/4 of and inch high, to a relatively gargantuan 3 full inches tall in one particular painting that I can think of; now long sold. (There's a lot of writing on the back of "Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde", by the way. Initially I had planned to make a large elaborate frame for it, out of an old time wooden storm door. I still have the storm door and the things I bought to go along with the plan that would fit into the frame. A few people have asked me whether I'm going to paint another one similar to this. Considering it took me THIS FRIGGEN LONG to paint THIS ONE, I'd say the chances aren't very good).

I like the look I captured on "Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde". My mother has that kind of "deer caught in the headlights look" going on which amuses me, mainly because there wasn't much that I can remember about her that caught her off guard. As I've come full circle in my appreciation of and for my mother, (and glad I lived long enough to see it through) I do appreciate that aspect of her personality. She wasn't one to suffer fools gladly, not by a long shot, and in fact some of 'em she'd take out after with a base ball bat or a stick or whatever was handy when someone got her ire up. It's the stuff of Port Clyde legend.

I kind-a miss that rough and tumble private "set-to" attitude of settling things that was quite common on the streets of old Port Clyde. I won't name names here of the various denizens who brawled their way into local lore. I don't have to. That my mother was a culprit amongst 'em is enough to say. She'd confront you and take you on whether you was a man or a woman, it didn't really matter much. You do that now a-days and it's cop-city. Everyone gets into the act, and it's assault and battery, and a li'l bit o' jail time for your jollies, but back then it was just par for the course. You got your face rubbed in it, or your ol' bald head pissed on, maybe a little do-see-doe (dose-e-doe?) of road rash, swinging your pard-nah round-n-round, ( a punch in the ear and another in the nose, a few to the old beer gut ) and you got on with things in the after-thrash. Sure, guns came out now and again, don't get me wrong. It's a small town and there's booze and lobstermen, and that's a tale as old as time. But guns for mowing down human beings is for cretins and is always a certinous act in any personal set of domestic problems. Since the whole town back then was mostly related to one another anyway, it's often a case of blood being thicker-n-water. If you drew it, you'd pay the price. Still and all, we all got along as best we knew how. What more can you ask?

But that aside, let's get back on course here. Dumping the garbage off the wharfs was a ritual that went on for a long time with us Port Clyde natives, and just about every other town on the coastline, stretching back to time immemorial. Sure, no one these days wants to cop to it, but it WENT ON just the same. All that feedin' on all that community garbage made for some honkin' size ("sizah's" we'd call 'em) wharf rats, I can tell you!!

Holy-moly, I'll tell you what -- I remember seeing 'em scurrying across the flats on the cove at low tide, day in and day out like family pets gone feral, or sometimes I'd hear 'em out there wrangling tin cans by moonlight (sometimes with the tin cans "on" -- actually over their heads), scavenging down the last succulent morsel out of some washed up Chef Boyardee Beef-a-Roni can, down amongst the rock-weed. I'd look out the childhood window I always looked out of at Cony's shack some of those nights when the natives were restless. Down in the cove by the foot of the docks some of them wharf rats to my wondering eyes did appear to be more or less the size of a freakin' Jack Russell Terrier, and every bit as frisky.

I doubt my mother was the last of a kind doing dumping garbage off the docks, but I would be willing to bet, pretty near so. This was back in the days (lest we forget) when those that were too poor to own a car or a truck to go to the town dump just chucked bags of garbage off the wharfs end to go out with the tide. This was before plastic garbage bags were all the rage, mind you. These were paper grocery bags from Ralph Simmons's "Port Clyde General", and later when it became Nealy Morse's, and still later on through all them that owned it and my mother's days in Port Clyde she'd go down the trodden path to past Cony's shack -- although he was dead by then, old Cony, the shack was still standing, such as it was, so derelict it may as well have been make believe. Some kind of set decoration in a documentary about worn down gone to hell lobsterman's shacks and welfare mothers out on their "night errands" dumping their sacks of garbage off the ends of the wharfs of Port Clyde.

cwo

Port Clyde boy, born and raised, on the trail of Neil Diamond, (New York City born and raised)

It's been an interesting journey for me, painting the "self-portrait" as a teen age Neil Diamond painting. I've learned a lot about myself, which I had a "kind-a feeling" I was going to when I took it on. It's like saying to the universe "bring it on!" It's a challenge, in every sense of the word.

I didn't want to paint this painting. My first attitude toward the notion of such an undertaking was: "oh, come on, let's give this a big skip -- you've got to be kidding me!" I mean I get a lot of ideas for paintings, it doesn't mean I do them all. As if I could, or would want to.

It's that business my father used to say: "I'm gonna tow that around awhile before I haul it aboard". But this painting wanted to be done, I could tell, because I've been around myself long enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Still, I don't cotton much to the notion of "idol worship" like as in making somebody in the entertainment or sports industry some kind of god, and my Neil Diamond memories are intertwined with a lot of really great things as well as a lot of anxt -- some of it very existential that I felt as a teenager.

I mean. . .did I want to "go there". Well, painting for me has always been about exploration of my life and my actions and reactions to it. So yeah, in a very real sense when this image kept coming up for me to deal with it and get it out on canvas, it just got more and more in my way until I had to do something about it. Like put it out there.

Oh, crap! You know? But I'm glad I listened to that voice. It's always been for the best that I do.

I've met my fair share of celebrities over the years in different walks of the general entertainment world. When I worked on the "In the Bedroom" movie that was shot around here a few years ago for instance. I could have gone on and worked on other movies, and I was invited to do so. Basically I wanted to paint pictures. The movie industry is a kind of patron for a lot of writers and artists. Just not this one. I'm past it where I want to live in a hotel room in New York or Boston or god only knows where for months at a time. It's just another job, and a 12 to 16 hour a day one at that. I got a credit for "In the Bedroom." I've seen it twice. Too much of that stuff goes on around here as it is, I don't need to see it on the screen.

Andy Warhol's pithy statement about "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," which since the era of the internet I've heard adapted to: "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people" is 'bout the size of it, in my estimation.

Still with all due mercy shined on my adolescent psyche I didn't have much to hang onto as a kid, other than doing my art and writing, and at the time I'd taught myself how to play guitar. So there was music. I actually got to be a pretty good player and singer. I even wrote some songs. I still have them in a box of things from my high school days, that some how my mother managed not to throw out when she moved out of Port Clyde in the mid-1970's.

So in that sense, I learned to play the songs I liked, and wrote a few that also filled the bill. It's been tentative, because the room mates are still with me for a few more weeks, but I've picked up my guitar on again / off again, in the last few months and started strumming. Since it's an electric one, I'll wait just a bit longer 'til they're gone and then I'm going to cut loose.

I think Neil Diamond -- well, his songs I mean, helped me stay focused when I was that age. . . you know, a teenager. Basically I was a talented kid in a dead end town was how I looked at it. You never really appreciate "home" until you've been out in the world and learned a few lessons that it can kick your ass, no matter how talented you are. When you've got to pay the rent, and you've got to get a job to do that, you get to see just how dedicated you are. . .as opposed to how dedicated you "think" you are.

I've been painting a long time now. Closer to 40 years than 30, so I know when I'm onto something in the way I ought to be. And this "Neil-n-me" painting has hit that point "like a guitar hummin'" in the way he sang about in a song he put out during the summer of 1972 , (a fabled summer for me in the pantheon of my heart-most Port Clyde days for a fact ). The song was "Cracklin' Rosie". This was Neil Diamond's first American #1 hit by the way, something which I guess may or may not have registered at the time on my radar screen. I just liked the tune. I still associate it very much with that summer and fall, which marked my passage and that of all the rest of my classmates from grade-school down here in T-Harbor up to Georges Valley high school. 1972 was freshman year.


I've turned the corner and I'm on the home stretch with "Self portrait being a teenage Neil Diamond
rockin' the shack and Port Clyde Roads." The last update I did on it was February 26th, roughly a
month ago, in other words. I put it away for awhile (over three weeks now) while I got going painting on other things, tinkering with some other ones in various states of completion and also starting a bunch of new paintings. Sometimes you just need to see things with different eyes, that's all. It's kind of like any relationship. . .things need time to gestate.

It's reached the point where I"m going to put it in a temporary frame and hang it on the wall. That's always a good sign. It means it's time now for contemplation at a more leisurely pace. The composition is well established and won't change a whole lot from here on in. Not the "major" things in it anyway.
I pretty much know what's what, and what I want to put in and leave out now that I'm onto the final stretch.

It feels good to be onto the final stretch with the painting. I'll probably be tinkering with it for awhile, but basically it is just about finished. There's still some adjustments I've got to make, but they are pretty minor. At any rate, it's fitting the painting is almost done. It's coming into spring. I started it on Hallowe'en night, which I think is also fitting, since Hallowe'en is where we dress up to be some other character, other than ourselves.


cwo

Heart's Island

My father, "Old Cony" named his lobster boat the "Gale Storm". I never understood why. Maybe I still don't. But I have a few more clues, the older I get, and having put 2 + 2 together, about Gale Storm the actress and singer who's name was originally Josephine Owaissa Cottle (born April 5, 1922 in Bloomington, Texas), and the boat my father kept, the "Gale Storm". He had her built up in Stonington, before I was even a gleam in his eye. And when his days were done searching for and hauling in lobsters around the rocky shores of Port Clyde, he and some companions towed the hulk of the "Gale Storm" out to Hart's Island on the tide, beaching her and burning her. (Have I told you I always understood in the way little kids understand things that to my way of thinking it was "Heart's Island", instead of H-a-r-t-'s Island? No? Well, consider yourself told as of today. I still to this day think it's its "real name", regardless of what the charts or anyone else says: "Long live Heart's Island!" Yeaaah! Right up there with friggen "Treasure Island," and never so far away, ye boogers!! Love that, "ye boogers" part).


"Old Cony" doused his boat with gasoline and set her afire and looked on as she burned down to the ground out there on the ledges of Harts Island. I still have a piece of her (Cony's boat, the "Gale Storm") that I found on a trip out there a few years later. Some of his lobsterman friends and relatives had to help, because by then "Old Cony" had to watch his ticker and the amount of exertion he put on it. It wasn't like now where you can go in and do all the stuff modern medicine does with coronary by-pass surgery in order to prolong your life. "Those were the days my friend", as that song went during the late summer of 1968. Just not the days for those kind of miracles. Though god knows I prayed for one in the way kids do for their parents when you want a miracle and you know they are awful sick. When you love someone you want 'em to stick around as long as they can. You want your dad, 'cos you got stuff you wanna talk over from time to time when you're just ateen-ager. Yeah, you do.

I can't even imagine what kind of thoughts run through a mans mind watching his boat burn like that. Up go the memories; up in smoke. Still and all, burning the boat in a bonfire is a tradition amongst mariners that goes back a long ways. Readily apparent as well as symbolically, its a signal to our maker we've reached our physical limits and the worldly labors are just about done. It's time to hang up the lobster gauge for this life. As far as burning your boat these days -- Ha!! -- irrespective of any such sea-farin' tradition you can bet the DEP would have the last friggen laugh, 'til they go to meet the maker themselves.

Like I said in yesterday's post, I like the internet for re-searching stories or articles I'm writing -- particularly my new high speed "jobby", beats the jalopy dial-up hands-down I had all those years that's for sure -- and now as I get to the meat and potatoes of today's blog, it's gonna be coming in handy again. With the internet, I can get information at my fingertips that would flummox the living daylights out of me if I had to go out-sourcing, library to library or otherwise having to look it up elsewhere. Some of it is minutia, and generally pesky details but there is THAT SIDE OF ME that is a "researcher" of things, that really likes getting to the nitty-gritty details. Mostly what I need it for today is for "fact checkin'". Well, you'll see, but as with any story teller, I don't want you to see too much. I'm not interested in some kind of biography or biographical sketch about Gale Storm, the famous actress and singer, or even a "just the facts, mam", piece. That has all the folksiness of an instruction manual.

What I'm getting at here is when I'm writing a story for instance about Rum Runners in Port Clyde, it helps with the authenticity of things to know (just as a random thought here) if saaaaay: Pepsi Cola was around during prohibition (-- and yes the answer is, it WAS, so happens)! And did you know that during the Great Depression, Pepsi gained considerable popularity following the introduction in 1934 of a 12-ounce bottle? Coca-Cola only had six ounces. The jingle of the times on the radio went: "Pepsi cola hits the spot, twelve full ounces, that's a lot -- Twice as much for a nickel, too -- Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you!"


I'll never use that information in a story other than this one, but there you go. Plus I learned something. That's not such a bad thing.


With all that information so readily available on the internet, I have to say sure as heck the Encyclopedia Britannica set I unearthed the other day from the attic where they've been stored some 8 years now ain't gonna hack it. I mean, what am I going to do with 'em? They are worse than relics, and make no mistake about it, with all the activity going on here at the house, with roommates getting ready to move out, I've got spring cleaning fever. I'm in the mood to get rid of anything and everything that doesn't serve the spartan lifestyle around here. A few paintings and some pictures on the walls, some antiques, a few plants, and a few chairs, and a kitchen table, and it's lookin' like home to me! Simplify, simplify, simplify, and as Thoreau says: "As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler". I'll be the first lead off to give an ol' fashioned tent revival hoot-n-a-holla "Amen Brother!" on that account!


So here's a "for instance" on the internet researching gig. This dip net I've put in the internet water concerns dredging up info about one Gale Storm. Gale Storm was a popular movie actress/singer, whom I never heard of until I was somewhere along in 7th or 8th grade down to T-Harbor, in the building they demolished to make way for the new town office & fire station facilities. Even then, having heard about Gale Storm, she was a blip on my radar screen. Back then I had more important things to do, like making sure I had the entire Detroit Tigers baseball team in my base ball card collection, then the Boston Red Sox, and after that the NY Yankees. Making enough money to get Alice Cushman to pick me up a Neil Diamond album at W.T. Grant's where she worked as a clerk. That was what concerned me.

I wasn't even born when "My Little Margie", premiered as a summer replacement for the "I Love Lucy" show in June of 1952. And when the series was cancelled in 1955, I still wasn't born yet, for that matter. I was however born by the time The Gale Storm Show , a tv sitcom came along; but of course I don't remember THAT, either. Still and all The Gale Storm show ran between 1956 and 1960 (initially on CBS and during it's last year it was on ABC) -- and in it's later syndication by the way -- (so says the dip-net into the internet quick research I can do with all this high speed at my command), it was retitled Oh, Susanna! According to the internet, Gale Storm is still alive and kicking. Not so, Lucille Ball, or my father, or my mother, or Alice Cushman for that matter.

What you can't find out on the internet, is that Gale Storm was the name of my father's "Old Cony's" fishing boat. When I was a kid I went along not knowing a thing about the movie actress/singer Gale Storm. I simply had no consciousness of any such person. Now Patsy Cline I knew, because when I was a kid you'd hear her voice in every fish shack on the cove. There weren't all that many stations on the radio to choose from back then, lets not forget, so as a kid you could actually go from one fish shack to the next, to the next, to the next until you made your circuit around the entire cove, and hear an entire Patsy Cline or Hank Williams or Ernest Tubb honky-tonk song, except for the time you spent running along the path to get there. It's likely Gale Storm was singing her heart out in old Port Clyde back in those little kid days walking shack to shack as I listened to the fishermen tell their gossip and stories. I'm sure Gale Storm was in the background providing the vocals. I didn't even have a television until the summer of 1968. Then of course like how it was with the radios scattered in the fisherman's shacks along the cove, there were but a few scant channels available on tv down to Port Clyde. For tv, we all had rabbit ears to get the thing to come in. Basically all we had was channel 5, 6, 8, 13, and sometimes 2, and occasionally channel 10 which in those days most successfully was known for it's steady test-pattern.

However, now I can see why and understand and certainly appreciate WHY "Old Cony" named his boat the Gale Storm. (Now-a-days I even know a few women that have become friends of mine that were named "Gale" after the actress -- same spelling and all, not the more "traditional" if you will, "Gail"). But as far as "Old Cony" naming his boat the Gale Storm, I get the picture. I don't need rabbit ears to scope it in. "Old Cony" was "crazy like a fox" on that one. He got to go out with her every day -- Gale Storm -- the boat that is. But in a 2 + 2 way symbolically I'm quietly pleased to think he went out with Gale Storm the spirit woman too, since as we all know, boats are "notorious she's". Well however you slice it, here's a tip and a nod to you, Cony, Gale Storm's got my vote too. Very lovely lady. If before my time. I still can appreciate it, and now I understand a little bit more.

your son,

cwo