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.


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