Goodbye, Old Paint

Sometimes sentiment overrides practicality. That’s not always a bad thing.

Arctic Mud in happier (and cleaner) days.

I believe that I’m the best person I know for picking out a good used car. I'm not talking about the late-model beauty that comes with a warranty, but the clunker your teenager buys with the money from his first job. I come by it honestly. I don’t think I ever paid more than $50 for a car before I married my husband with his big-city ways. In fact, the first time he came to call at my parents’ house, I was changing a tie-rod end.

Arctic Mud was a 2000 Suzuki Grand Vitara. It was my daughter Mary’s first car. I’d helped her sisters and her brother-in-law choose cars, but I wasn’t around to help her. Frankly, the thing was a wreck from day one. Still, she loved it.

Her dad and I helped her drive it to Alaska for college. On arrival, our first order of business was a new track bar. Most calls home started, "Mom, my car's making this noise," which would then be followed by another trip to a garage. When she decided to come back east, I strongly advised she sell it there. But she loved that old reprobate of an SUV, and I love her.

That car spent a disproportionate amount of its life being hauled. Thank goodness for AAA.

I cooked up a scheme. We’d fly back to Anchorage and fetch it and drive it back across the continent. Not the California to New York trip everyone takes, but Alaska to Newfoundland. It would be cold, and we’d be sleeping in the car, but we had warm blankets. Most of my luggage was for painting supplies. A nice pastor’s wife, Heidi Godfrey, took one look at the jacket I’d brought and gave me one more suitable for a late Alaska autumn.

It was Canada’s sesquicentennial. I’ve always loved the Great White North. What better way to honor it than to head down the Trans-Canada Highway and paint a little bit of the whole country?

We almost didn’t make it out of Anchorage. The car coughed, rattled, and died on the Glenn Highway. Pastor Godfrey and his wife rescued us again.

The catalytic converter was completely clogged. The replacement cost was irrelevant; no such part was to be had in Anchorage for a vehicle that old. That led to a miraculous intervention. A kindly stranger took the beast into his shop on his day off, opened the converter, cleaned it out and welded it back together. Catalytic converters are not supposed to be serviceable.

I did a lot of painting with my easel lashed to the bumper for stability.

It was a few days later and late afternoon, but we were finally on our way. North of Wasilla, AK, the muffler fell off. We picked it up off the road and looked for a shop. That led to our second miraculous mechanic. He welded and bolted and sent us on our way with a bill for $40 and several jars of salmon his wife had canned.

Arctic Mud behaved all the way north through the Brooks Range and back down again, where a breakdown would have been catastrophic. In fact, I had no more trouble until I tried to jump a ditch while bouncing out of a fire break. I snapped the tailpipe. But that was my fault, not the car’s.

The alternator went somewhere in the Great Plains, in a spot where we actually had cell phone reception. We were riding back to the closest town with the tow truck driver, when the airport on our right seemed to explode in flames. “Oh, it’s just firefighting practice,” he said. That was a pricey fix but the last of our repairs.

Much of our journey was on very dicey roads.

In Newfoundland, we drove north through Hurricane Matthew, which had morphed into a Thanksgiving Day blizzard. It seemed fitting that our trip was bookended by snowstorms, one in Alaska and one in Newfoundland. In all, we traveled 9,998 miles, a lot of it on rutted gravel roads.

Alaska has no state inspections, so our first order of business was to have Arctic Mud re-inspected back in Maine. Of course it failed. After all that driving, our neighborhood mechanic said it wasn’t worth fixing. Just Right Auto in Warren didn't agree, and managed to do it without bankrupting us.

It’s up for inspection again and this time it isn’t going to pass without a lot more money. The hood latch rusted away and came loose on the Masspike last month. Mary fixed it well enough to drive with a ratchet tie-down. The 4WD is making ominous sounds and it has a persistent check-engine light. So Arctic Mud, my boon companion, is off to the bone yard. It was, in many ways, the worst of cars, but it had a redoubtable spirit.

Goodbye, Old Paint. We’ll miss you.

The straw that broke the camel’s back

And the kindness that unbroke it.

Thunder Bay Freighter, Carol L. Douglas

I’ve driven more than a million miles in the last three decades. I'm a good, safe driver. That doesn’t mean I’m immune from problems created by others; nobody is.

On Sunday I was rear-ended in Massachusetts. (No, it was not my trusty Prius art-cart, but our family car.) The damage was minor. One can be graceful about such setbacks when one has good insurance.

On Monday I tried to write my blog and couldn’t remember the names of common paintbrushes. What typically takes me 90 minutes took, instead, four hours. Was I simply overtired? Probably, but I began to develop a throbbing headache. In the afternoon, I saw my PCP, just to be on the safe side. Either my brain was sloshed around a mite too hard, or I was in shock. In either case, the solution was rest.

Marshes along the Ottawa River, Carol L. Douglas

I didn’t have time for this; I never do. I teach plein air on Tuesdays; I was looking forward to speaking to the Bangor Art Society yesterday evening. I have four commissions to finish, a workshop ad to rewrite, paintings to collect, paintings to display. My sign needs its seasonal lights put up. The car, of course, must be fixed.

Add a problem with this blog that resolutely resists fixing. Thousands of Blogger users report that their readership has slumped, myself included. Either our usual sources of traffic have changed their algorithms or Google has changed its counters.

The answer is for people to subscribe, not grab the blog from Facebook. However, most people now read blogs on their phones. Blogger doesn’t support subscriptions on its phone version. To subscribe, readers must go to the desktop version and click the subscription box on the right. That's a tricky thing to ask people to do.

Great Lake Storm, Carol L. Douglas

Suddenly, it all seemed like too much. I put my head under my blanket and went to sleep. And slept until my husband came home from the Post Office.

“You have a package from Rosseau, Ontario,” he said.

Rosseau is a small village about two hours north of Toronto, where southern Ontario leaks into the wilderness of northern Canada. This is Group of Seven territory, not terribly far from Algonquin Provincial Park.

Inside was a copy of Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter, and a note.

Dear Carol,

This may seem odd, receiving a book in the mail from a stranger in another country, but I wanted to send you this particular book because I just finished reading it, and I think it may resonate with you for many reasons, not only because the main character is an artist, but also because of the settings such as Rochester and Thunder Bay—places that I know you are familiar with. This is my very small way of saying thank you for sharing wisdom and observations so generously and eloquently. I have learned and grown so much as an artist thanks to you.

Paula Banks

Rosseau, Ontario

Eastern Manitoba Forest, Carol L. Douglas

I’ve lived near the Canadian border all my life. The notion that Canadians are nice is a stereotype, but it’s also true. It’s particularly admirable when your next-door neighbor is a brash empire like we are.

Thank you, Paula Banks from Rosseau, Ontario, for setting me back on my feet. I hope we meet someday.

Monday Morning Art School: Extreme painting

Hunting season is approaching, posing unique issues for the plein air painter. I'm having (routine) medical tests this morning, so I asked a guest expert (my daughter) to answer my mailbag.

The Road to Seward, Alaska, by Carol L. Douglas

Dear Carol,

Last week, you mentioned the wild turkeys near your residency. I am, unfortunately, afflicted with both hoplophobia and meleagrisphobia – fears of guns and those creatures most fowl. When is it appropriate to pepper spray a turkey?

Yours, Allie N., New Mexico

Allie,

I have good news and I have bad news. As of 1992, the EPA was still looking for data on the effectiveness of capsaicin (the active spicy spice that makes spices spicy) against birds.¹ They accepted that it was probably effective against birds, in addition to other animals. Obviously, it has been several years since then. Two scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered in 2002 that, while birds have the vanilloid receptors that taste capsaicin for us, theirs are immune to capsaicin.² In conclusion, you could probably pepper spray a turkey and it would irritate and startle him. However, you’d get the same effect by shrieking and flapping your arms wildly. In my opinion, the perfect time to pepper spray a turkey is directly before he goes into the oven.

Mary Helen

The Alaska Range, by Carol L. Douglas

Greetings Carol,

It’s my favorite time of year here in Success, Saskatchewan – the air is crisp and clear, the leaves are changing, and it’s finally moose season. I can’t wait to make all my favorite moose recipes once my wife comes back from hunting. Moose chili, moose enchiladas, moose tartare, coleslaw with moose meatballs, moose bulgogi – you name it, I’ll eat it! I love going with my wife on her hunting trips all around the wilderness of Saskatchewan. You’ve been there. You know how it is! It’s a great time to do some plein air painting while enjoying some quality time with the missus. How can I best keep myself from getting mistaken for a moose? You know, we share so many of the same features.

Bill Winkleman, Saskatchewan

Bill,

Moose season in Saskatchewan this year is from October to December. Soon it will be too cold to do much painting en plein air. However, here’s good advice on how to avoid being mistaken for a large ungulate:

• Wear brightly-colored clothing when out in the woods. I recommend a large, heavily starched tie-dye wizard’s hat.
• Try to sing as loudly as possible at all times. It’s common knowledge that moose are fans of jazz and Scandinavian black metal, so stick to old pop standards and famous Canadian sea shanties.

You may find that when you’re painting en plein air, you may find moose walking around en trails. Worse than that, you may find that some enterprising hunter has left moose entrails en trails and you have to walk gingerly. I recommend wellies.

Mary Helen

Confluence, by Carol L. Douglas

Carol –

My Oma and I are planning a cycling trip up the Alaska Highway next summer. We’ve already begun shopping for a truly inspiring collection of very tight, padded shorts and we’ve got our cameras ready to see all the wildlife. How do you get your best photos of bears?

Hildegard

Hildy,

It’s GREAT to hear from you again! My advice for taking photos of bears from your bicycle from the shoulder of the Alaska highway is, uh, DON’T!

Black bears can run between 25 and 30 miles an hour and brown bears can run even faster. A ridiculously lost polar bear can run even faster than that! For comparison, your 97-year old grandmother can probably only manage about ten miles an hour. Just put something to make noise in the spokes of your bike and leave the bears alone. Instead of stopping to photograph them as they forage on the roadside, why not take a quick snapshot of the other tourists taking their picture as you zoom by to safety?

Laird Hot Springs, by Carol L. Douglas. This was the site of a fatal bear attack in 1997.

In July 2018, conservation officers in British Columbia responded to 25 calls about grizzlies and 179 calls about black bears.^3,4 The Yukon Government reported that at least 63 bears were killed in Yukon,⁵ a five-year high. Human interaction with bears is not only dangerous for the humans, but dangerous for the bear. Remember – a fed bear is a dead bear.

Mary Helen

1. R.E.D. Facts - Capsaicin. (1992, June). Environmental Protection Agency.
2. Jordt, S., & Julius, D. (2002, February 8). Molecular basis for species-specific sensitivity to "hot" peppers. Cell, 108(3), 421-430.
3. Predator statistics: black bear. (2018, September). Conservation Officer Service of British Columbia.
4. Predator statistics: grizzly bear. (2018, September). Conservation Officer Service of British Columbia.
5. 63 bears destroyed in Yukon this year because of human conflict. (2017, November 29). CBC News.

The mystery of the missing boats

There is no shortage of painting subject matter in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.

Levitating Lobster Boats of Alma, NB, by Carol L. Douglas

Where other rural places have spare cars, here in coastal Maine you’re likely to find spare boats on jackstands. Boats are so ubiquitous that they blend into the landscape. Last winter Howard Gallagher found one wrecked along the roadside. I think he bought it.

Nova Scotia has a storied boat-building history. Parrsboro was once a port and shipbuilding region; old photos show a waterfront littered with boats. The famous ghost ship Mary Celeste was built near here, at Spencer’s Island. Bluenose was built on the Atlantic side, in the boatbuilding yards at Lunenberg.

Parrsboro harbour seems to be silted in.

I’m painting at the Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival next month. It was almost on our way home from Digby, if by “almost” you mean doubling your mileage.

In any new town, I usually start reconnoitering at the harbor. Parrsboro’s is silted in, with a sinuous rose-colored channel and mud flats, but no wharves or fishing fleet. This area is famous for its beaches, and I suppose Mother Nature gets wild when it starts flinging sand.

There are also dramatic headlands, lighthouses, and blueberry barrens. You could throw paint in any direction and create a masterpiece.

There's no shortage of painting subjects.

The plein air painter’s second favorite task is searching out new places to paint. After stopping to meet Parrsboro Creative’s Executive Director, Robert More, we started the serious business of shunpiking. Maine painter Mary Sheehan Winn summers in Parrsboro. She texted us directions.

There were no boats until we reached Advocate Harbour. This tiny hamlet is so isolated that in the clear summer light it looks and feels like Newfoundland or the Scottish Hebrides. Its small fishing fleet is cross-tied to a seawall so that the boats are grounded on their keels in the mud as the water drops. They can only come or leave at the mercy of the tide. That must make for long work days.

Since Canada’s national parks are free for their national sesquicentennial, I suggested to Bobbi that we head home through Fundy National Park. She was interested in seeing Hopewell Rocks.

The last time I was here was at high tide. Mary and I had gotten lost looking for the Cape Enrage lighthouse during our Trans-Canada Painting Adventure. Here I was, once again, trying to find my way while the tide inexorably covered the things for which I was searching. Coming across a causeway, Bobbi and I both stopped short.

“Boats!” cried Bobbi.

“I’ve painted here before!” I shouted.

The beautiful fleet at Alma, NB.

We were in Alma, NB, where I painted my last painting in Canada last fall: a terrific, tired fail of levitating lobster boats. Alma is a wonderful working harbor, the home port of North America’s first female sea-captain, Molly Kool.

We even managed to make Hopewell Rocks before they were swamped.  Alas, it was evening, time to head south to the border and home. I leave again this evening, heading west to New York. It’s summer, and that’s how we roll.

Postscript: this morning we realized that Baby Wipes take dead bugs off windshields. I wish I’d realized that last night when I was rolling sightless through moose country.

I’m my own restorer!

Mount Rundle, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas

While the storm raged outside my studio yesterday, I retouched paintings from my Canada trip. I’m nearly done with this task.

I’m working on paintings whose emulsion was damaged by being stacked before they were completely dry. There isn’t much thinking involved, since I did all that on site. I just mix the proper color, fill in scratches and smears, and restore the original appearance.

A typical smear.

How did they get banged up in the first place? I had wet-storage for about a dozen paintings. Generally, after that, work is dry enough to be wrapped and binned with wax paper liners. It may have been the constant cold, but for some reason, they weren’t setting up very fast. I was constantly shuffling paintings to keep the wettest ones to the top.

No Northern Lights tonight, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

In addition, the roads were jaw-breakingly bad in many places. Part of our daily routine was to check the tailpipe and repack the back of the truck. All that bouncing meant that some things were inevitably going to be damaged.

Muncho Lake, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

In only one of these paintings did I make a material change. That was to add reflections on Muncho Lake. I knew they were there at the time, and they were important for the composition. However, Mary was sick, sleeping in a motel room at Toad River. I’d been gone all day and that was long enough.

Avalanche Country, oil on canvas by Carol L. Douglas

I don’t have much need for reference pictures at this stage. Since I didn’t take many, that’s a good thing. In comparing my trip photos with my paintings, I notice how blue all my photos look, and how vague the structures of the mountains are. It seems to me that my little pocket Panasonic camera perceives atmospheric haze more than my aging eyes do.

Chugach range from Anchorage, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

My eyes, my camera, and my monitor are all subjective observers, so none of them can be called objectively “true” at the expense of the others. It’s just another caution about painting from photographs, and another thing to ponder in regards to Truthiness.

I also started my second studio painting from the trip, of the Athabasca Glacier. That day, there was a ferocious, ripping wind. Even with an airtight hood, my ears rang. My easel spun helplessly on its tripod. There was no way to paint on site, so I settled for a hike and some photographs.

Underpainting of Athabasca Glacier, by Carol L. Douglas

This underpainting is not an abstraction, just a vast simplification. It reminds me a little of Rockwell Kent. Having no real desire to go down that road, I sigh and tell myself this is probably the high point of the painting.

Before anything more can happen in my studio, however, I have a driveway to shovel out. The morning dawned clear, still and cold, as if denying that it had ever stormed yesterday. “Liar!” I shout up at the sky, but to no avail.

Shovel I must. I’m having lunch with a student visiting from Tennessee. Later, a friend from Alabama is stopping by to teach me how to make biscuits. Maine is an out-of-the-way place to be the Crossroads of America, but a lot of the time it feels that way.

It’s not that I can’t do it, it’s that I don’t always want to.

The Wreck of the SS Ethie, by Carol L. Douglas.

You all know the Facebook game where artists are asked to post a painting every day for a week and tag another artist each day, right? (The one where, on the fourth day, you forget and never finish.) I love that game. I’m insatiably curious about other artists and their work.

Recently, my friend Elissa Gore played. She posted work from across her career, which has spanned four decades. Her early work was more detailed than her current paintings. That’s no surprise, since almost all of us are taught to paint literally before we learn to paint emotively.

Sometimes people who don’t paint make the error of thinking that non-realistic painting is somehow easier than strictly representational painting, that photorealism is the apotheosis of painting. “That looks just like a photo!” is not, in most cases, a compliment. Art is not about duplicating reality, but learning to step past reality and take your viewers with you.

The multi-colored shingle at Martin's Point in Gros Morne National Park.

The problem with a subject like The Wreck of the SS Ethie is that it is already playing games with your head. The shingle on this lonely coast in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland is wildly-colored. What’s left of the boat is not an elegant wooden corpse subsiding into the surf, but its steel guts scattered down the shore. Simplifying or abstracting in my usual frenetic style would just confuse the viewer.

I love geology almost as much as I do painting. Each year when I do my workshop, I point out the basalt inclusions in Acadia and how they now shape the erosion of the granite bedrock. Sand might be easier on the feet, but rocks are exciting.

At times, rocks can be conveyed as rough, slashing brush strokes, but that only works for ‘normal’ scenes, where your mind can fill in the gaps. For the out-of-the-ordinary, more information is needed. The rocks at Gros Morne have been ground in the surf so hard, they look like they’ve been through a rock tumbler. Many are striped. That requires time and patient attention to detail.

Weathered parts of the Ethie are thrown everywhere.

While I wouldn’t want to paint like that every day, it felt good.

You can read about the wreck of the Ethie and the brave Newfoundland dog who saved her passengers here. I wrote about the abstraction that was the basis for this painting here. And you can read an ode to the wee pup himself here.

Fixing mistakes

Mt. Hayes and the Alaska Range, by Carol L. Douglas

Sometimes when we rework old oil paintings, there’s a temptation to repaint the entire surface. The new paint looks lush and full; the old paint is dull and thin. That’s particularly true when you never got past thin layers in the first place. That old turpentine-thinned paint has oxidized. The drying leaves a pitted surface on the top of the paint, which appears chalky and grey.  

You can bring the color back up in these passages by varnishing, but you really shouldn’t paint into varnish or medium, no matter what you might have read elsewhere. The “fat over lean” rule applies even to old paintings.

If your painting is thoroughly dry, you can brush a light coating of turpentine or mineral spirits over the painting. That will bring up the colors of the oxidized passages long enough for you to make your corrections. It ought to stem the urge to repaint the whole thing. Of course, if large areas of your paintings are oxidizing, you’re not using medium correctly.

On Friday I shot an extremely short video of myself changing the color of the traps in a tree line. I sent this to a reader who was wondering how much paint to use in this correction phase. It doesn’t have much in the line of production values, but it might be helpful.

The painting of Mt. Hayes and the eastern Alaska Range was painted near Delta Junction, Alaska. It was early in our trans-Canada trip. Although it appeared surface dry when I wrapped it, the thicker white paint in the river and sky squished and flattened under the weight of subsequent paintings.

This was a simple resurfacing job—and that was a very good thing, since I have no reference photos. It also gave me the chance to adjust the color of the Tanana River, which looks like light chocolate milk, it’s carrying so much silt.

Lake of the Woods, by Carol L. Douglas

I’d realized after I left Lake of the Woods in western Ontario that I’d never actually finished painting in the sky. This was a very simple fix, but I used the moment to add a little warmth to the water in the foreground.

In the last painting, I corrected a lie. I’d intended to paint a house surrounded by fields and a windbreak, but couldn’t find the right combination of side road, farm and fields. In real life, my subject was fronted by a low waste area of reeds but I’d edited that out.

Windbreak, by Carol L. Douglas

When the glaciers from the last ice age receded, they left behind millions of shallow depressions. These wetlands are known as ‘prairie potholes.’ They are significant resources for plant and animal life and support millions of breeding waterfowl, whose numbers are being threatened as the potholes are drained for large-scale farming. I really shouldn’t have excised them from the one scene in which they appear, and it makes me consider whether I want to add a studio painting that does the potholes justice.

I expected that deleting the field and reinstating the reeds would take me a long time, but it was done in fifteen minutes or so. I will probably incise a little more texture into the reeds, but it’s never going to be my favorite painting.

Shipwrecked? That was partly in my mind.

Unfinished painting of the wreck of the SS Ethie, Newfoundland, by Carol L. Douglas

When Mary and I stood at Martin’s Point in Gros Morne National Park, we knew there would be no work done that day. We’d driven there specifically to paint the wreck of the SS Ethie. This is a lovely shipwreck story featuring a Newfoundland dog and a baby, but I’ve told it before.  

However, Hurricane Matthew was rumbling up the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The beach was windswept, cold and wet. It was starting to snow. This was one of the moments in my trans-Canada adventure where I just took photos and moved on.

The Ethie’s hero, a Newfoundland dog, came from tiny Sally’s Cove, seen in the mist.

Sadly, my photos captured nothing of the grinding energy of the sea that drove the Ethie into the rocks in the first place, on a similar wintry day. Her iron remains are scattered along a surprisingly long stretch of rock-studded beach, but that doesn’t really work in a painting.

Occasionally, I like to let my subconscious do some work. I reverted to a technique I used frequently about fifteen years ago. I improvised a series of shapes on a large canvas. The only guidance I gave myself was the word “maelstrom.” I didn’t start this with any sense of up or down, and I rotated the canvas as I worked.

My underpainting.

One of my former students in Rochester recently broke his leg. He is using the time experimenting with abstract painting. “I have come to believe that representational painting is easier because there is some reference,” Brad told me. In some ways, he’s right. That reaching down inside yourself is difficult business.

I can grip on to reality too hard, and one of my current goals is to let go, at least a little bit. There are important things to learn in the completely subjective side of painting, and it’s been too long since I’ve visited it.

As interesting as this was, I had to set it aside and return to my regularly-scheduled work. I’ve just bought a new laptop. My old one was, like my old dog, falling down regularly. It had developed the whiff of corruption in its hard drive and did not want to give up its secret gnosis, by which I mean the more than 32,000 images I consult on a regular basis.

Parts of the Ethie are scattered along the shore.

I’m not good at logical, hierarchical work. For one thing, there’s too much sitting. I just get mad and punch buttons until something happens. However, two days of pacing and swearing at a machine did give that abstraction time to settle in my head. Last night I sat down and converted it to a realistic painting—of sorts.

It's not that I literally took the abstraction and applied it to the painting, or that I took my reference photos and applied them to the abstraction. The underpainting was my sense of the motion of the surf, and I plugged in details of the wreck where I wanted them. I’m pretty sure I can make something of it.

Levitating lobster boat, and an unsalvageable ghost ship

“Working boats, Bay of Fundy,”Carol L. Douglas.

In the Canadian Maritimes, boats are sometimes left to rest on mudflats as the tide drops. Occasionally I’ll see that here in mid-coast Maine, but nowhere near as frequently. It’s something that interests me, and I’ve painted it before, in Rising Tide at Wadsworth Cove.

On the last day of my Trans-Canada adventure, I painted two working boats resting in the Bay of Fundy. This painting was, I thought, unsalvageable—the only one I did on that trip that I couldn’t redeem.  I had spent considerable time drafting, only to realize after I finished that the boat in the back appeared to be levitating.

My lobster boat appears to levitate here, too.

Yesterday I realized that the boat seems to be levitating in my reference photo, too. I spent considerable time repainting the foreground to anchor it, only to conclude that the lobster boat is still floating. I have concluded that levitation is just a Canadian reality.

Fundy Ghost is the name of the foreground trawler, and it’s an odd choice. This nickname is sometimes applied to the most famous ghost ship of all time, the Mary Celeste. She was launched as Amazon in 1861 from a shipyard on Spencer’s Island in Nova Scotia. On her maiden voyage, her captain fell ill and died. She suffered a collision in the narrows off Eastport and rammed and sank a brig in the English Channel. In 1867, she was wrecked off Cape Breton Island and sold as salvage to an American. He went broke in the process of restoring her.

The Mary Celeste painted as the Amazon, 1861, by an unknown artist.

After a major refit, the Mary Celeste headed from New York to Genoa, Italy, under the command of Captain Benjamin Briggs. Briggs was an experienced sailor, an abstemious Christian, and a married man. He brought his wife and infant daughter along on the trip, leaving his school-aged son with relatives. His crew were all experienced sailors of good character.

Eight days after Mary Celeste left harbor, a Nova Scotian boat named Dei Gratiafollowed her out along the same route. Midway between the Azores and Portugal, it came upon the Mary Celeste moving erratically under partially-set sails. The ship was deserted, the binnacle damaged and the lazar and fore hatches left open. The small yawl that served as the boat’s lifeboat was missing. Everything pointed to an orderly emergency departure, but the Briggs family and crew were never heard from again.

With great difficulty, Dei Gratia brought the Mary Celeste into Gibraltar. Salvage hearings found no evidence of piracy, fraud, or foul play.

Eventually, Mary Celeste returned to New York, where her bad reputation caught up with her. After rotting on the docks until 1874, she went into the West Indies trade.  She regularly lost money. In 1879, her captain, Edgar Tuthill, fell ill and died in Saint Helena.

“Rising Tide at Wadsworth Cove,” Carol L. Douglas

In 1884, a group of Boston shippers filled the Mary Celeste with junk and heavily insured her. Her captain, Gilman C. Parker, deliberately ran her aground in Haiti. Parker made the mistake of selling the salvage rights for $500 to the American consul, who promptly reported that the cargo was, in fact, worthless. The conspirators in Boston were arrested. Parker was additionally charged with the capital crime of barratry. He died three months later, the last victim of the cursed ghost ship of the Bay of Fundy.

Home, sweet home

“New Brunswick barn,” oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas.

My first painting yesterday was of a barn. The grillwork of a Model T glowed faintly in the gloom of the open door. I was interested in the apple tree, but thought fondly ofKari Ganoung Ruiz and how well she paints old cars.

The property owner eventually came over to chat. He knew exactly where I live because he visits the Owl’s Head Transportation Museum. He invited us to lunch, little knowing that for thousands of miles, Mary and I have fantasized that someone, anyone, would offer us a home-cooked meal. And this was the one day when we  couldn’t accept, because we had an absolutely strict timetable.

And he had leftover pie. Geesh.

Farm owner and his market truck.

Mary’s license arrived in Rockport Tuesday, so she had a photo of it on her phone. Still, I insisted on driving the Calais-to-Rockport leg of the trip. Searsport, Belfast, Lincolnville, and Camden, each in turn glowing gently in a light rain. Then I made the last rise up Richards Hill and was home.

9887.9 miles.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. I’ve learned a few things, however.

The most useless things I brought were my hiking poles. I never remembered to use them.

I packed very austerely for the trip, and still brought exactly 100 lbs. of stuff. My painting supplies and canvases were calculated just right; my clothes hardly mattered. However, I wish I’d also had:

• My painting umbrella and stool;
• Proper camping equipment including a tent, because that SUV really was impossible to sleep in;
• A more reliable car;
• An atlas of Canada. There is no substitute for a paper map.

I enjoyed everything about this trip, even when Mary was so ill. However, if I were to identify the most memorable moments, they would include:

• German bike tourists laboring up and down the Al-Can. That really is a strange hobby;
• Hiking to the foot of the Athabasca Glacier in an icy gale;
• All those oversized animal sculptures in small towns along the way;
• The Alaska Range, which is otherworldly;
• L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, which is humbling.

We followed autumn as it moved from Anchorage to St. John’s. That meant getting snowed on occasionally, but there were many more lovely days.

Standoff between Craftsman Perpendicular Gothic and Craftsman Romanesque in St. Mary’s Point, NB.

The parts we omitted and regret:

• The Al-Can’s lower leg, through Destruction Bay. It was an either-or choice, but I wish it could have been both;
• Northern Manitoba and its myriad lakes;
• Northwest Territories and Nunavut. That would require a seaplane, however;
• Prince Edward Island;

I never painted a mine, waterfall, lighthouse (up close) or iceberg. And in five weeks on the continent’s northernmost through road, some of it sleeping rough, I never saw the Northern Lights.

I’m taking the rest of today off, by the way.

Racing back west

“Cape Breton Highlands,” by Carol L. Douglas.

One of my friends was a co-driver in the 2010 Targa Newfoundland. This is an annual rally race covering 1400 miles over a seven-day period. They were driving a Porsche; I’m driving a 16-year-old Suzuki Grand Vitari with crates on the luggage rack. Otherwise it’s starting to feel similar, albeit with the addition of painting: paint, drive, paint, drive, sleep, repeat.

If you don’t have a cabin on the overnight ferry, you sleep in your seat. The first passage was quiet, if not terribly comfortable. The return boat was full of people whose trips had been disrupted by Hurricane Matthew. We were kept aware by small irritants: the hiss and rattle of a CPAP machine, a toddler’s cries, and the oversized screens that were never turned off. In the early morning hours, there were pleas for a doctor to report to deck seven. (“Is that person OK?” I asked someone later. She shook her head sadly.)

Another “one that got away.”

By the time we disembarked both of us were stiff and bleary. We raced toward to the Cape Breton Highlands. This was the only part of Nova Scotia I hadn’t been to before. Out west, the thrill of discovery fueled my painting; here, in a race to finish, visiting an unknown place was a dumb choice.

I don’t know if it was because I was fussy from exhaustion, but I was unmoved. The Highlands were smaller, more ordinary, and less breathtaking than Gros Morne. Well, of course. They aren’t trying to be Newfoundland, and they weren’t put there merely for my amusement.

“Cobequid Bay farm,” by Carol L. Douglas

I was worn out by nature; I wanted to paint a harbor. But this part of the Cabot Trail isn’t a working coast. It is full of restaurants, tea rooms, and gift shops, and even this late in the season, tourists.

“But you live in a tourist area,” Mary reminded me. That’s not entirely true. Undergirding mid-coast Maine’s tourism is its fisheries industry. A coast without working boats is a bland dish indeed.

Mary was surprised by a cow. (Photo by Mary Perot.)

I settled on a single lobster boat at anchor, never settling into a groove, painting anxiously until I was absolutely out of time.

And then I turned around. The dropping tide had left a cobbled beach curving toward me. It had everything one needs: foreground interest, color, structure, a headland in the distance.

Too late for that, I mused, as I reloaded my kit into the SUV. Stepping slightly off the road, I plunged into a ditch full of sticky muck, sinking instantly to mid-calf. It wasn’t quicksand, though, and Mary kindly pulled me out. Now I was both cranky and filthy.

Solitary farmhouse at Cobequid Bay. (Photo by Mary Perot.)

We raced like fools toward Cobequid Bay. “I’m not going to have time to paint a second painting,” I whined. But I did, and it was a lovely sunset across a farmer’s field: gentle and sweet like Nova Scotia itself.

Meanwhile, Mary raced down to the bay to take photos before the light disappeared. Access was blocked by a sign reading “Private Lane.” She parked and walked down to the water. Where does she learn this stuff?

Last light at Cobequid Bay. (Photo by Mary Perot.)

I start this morning from Moncton. It is 5.5 hours from my home in Rockport. If all goes well, I’ll be home late tonight. Spare a passing prayer for safe and easy travels. It’s been a long trip, and I want to get home.