COMPASS ME BACK TO THE PLACE AND TIME AGAIN: -- back to the 1960's and living in continued childlike wonder in that quietude of the best of times only a little village such as ours could offer. That's my father's, Old Cony's lobster boat the "Gale Storm" (named after the famous actress and singer) in the center, and the place where I first got a start growing up as a li'l shaver (with the traps all around and the ladder on the roof) --- in the fish house in behind. Humble origins, and be it ever so heartfeltly humble, Cony's fish house is, when all is said and done, still my eldest worldly muse.

COMPASS ME BACK TO when we lived up above in the fish shack on the cove in Port Clyde and sometimes heat-lightning sultry summer evenings, and my father, "Old Cony", Floyd B. Conant, tucking me in and telling me bedtime stories of the long haired lovely mermaids t'other side of Hupper Island. Except like a lot of the old timers that were fishing those waters then, they all called it "Hooper Island" which made it all sound even more mythic and mysterious a-place to my young ears, as if in the very words my mind conjured the image that owls were the main inhabitants over there, hooting out "hoo-hoo-Hooper", whils't the mermaids held rocky court and spoke in-sing-song low murmurs 'mongst themselves and mingled with laughter they continued on brushing their hair with cod-fish bones under the daring starry firmament. What could be finer in the world and more pleasing to the mind's eye? Compass me back and bring her 'round again; this, the mermaid's song.

COMPASS ME BACK TO those nights it seemed I heard them all. . . dreamy. . .fishermens voices at the ends of the wharfs. . . Giant's and over by the Cold Storage. . .voices carrying even further from across the water; the way voices do. Herring boats headed out toward Monhegan Island, or over towards Teel's and Big and Little Caldwell Islands. The smell of the all-mighty sea and the cove through the wire screen mesh of the dormer window where-by I listened for the mermaid's song across the Port Clyde harbor, all beyond the thinnest din of the village sounds and Cony's handsome hand-crank RCA Victor Victrola had long played its last tinny tune. Now the night time skies come creeping in, under which it was never in doubt the owls and the mermaids would be gathered together one more time again singing me this wonderful lullaby. . . Hoo-hoo-Hooper Island belonged to the owls and the mermaids in the opening place just before my dreams. When day was through it could well have been as the mermaid that was half woman and half fish -- the people that lived on "hoo-hoo-Hooper Island" -- maybe they were half owl when the stars came out. . . life is funny like that when you're a kid, thinkin' 'bout stuff. Yeah, it is.

COMPASS ME BACK TO old Port Clyde and Old Cony telling me these stories that have stayed the distance with me over the ever lasting years. I never got tired of the way he told the same stories over and over again. They were deeply comforting like a prayer and sounded like he was having conversations with the spirits of the place and times, and yet outside of the place where time is -- timeless. Old Cony speaking in that native tongue. Old Cony was 56 years old when I came along, and he tolled-in my mother who was a waif-thin-waif-in-waiting gazeworthy pixie-g-nymph o' 35, and the rest is history. Old Cony gave me these stories to wear in my heart and they became my the stuff my art is made out of, god bless his heart. . .and the child who has his own. These stories were told to me --GIFTED to me -- back in the late 1950's, and on into the early '60's; considerably before the advent of our Chief Justice John Roberts knowing about or ever showing up on the Port Clyde shores. You see. . . .back then Port Clyde was all about fishing and fishermen and their women, wives, loves and lovers, family ties, friendships, romances and rivalries, played out on the Port Clyde all-the-world's a stage stage, much like it is any place else. And while the fishermen toiled the briny sea for a living a great deal of the town-folk women worked over at the Port Clyde Packing Company, packing sardines. So the Port Clyde cannery had its own pick of the litter of mermaids-a-plenty as far as my father and many another was concerned. I've got pictures of him from that period in his life. He was a stone handsome devil, and anyway, that was the way life was around here back then, kind of rough and tumble hard scrabble, catch-as-catch can, or go without.

COMPASS ME BACK TO THE PLACE AND TIME AGAIN: and I'll be the first to admit it. . .there's a lot I miss about Old Port Clyde and my father and my mother, and the mermaid's song. Hell, even the way Old Cony said the word "mermaids" always sounded pretty exotic to me, with his thick Maine accent, so it sounded a lot like "Merry-maids". Season in and season out, I used to peer out from that dormer window where I could see the whole cove. There was Raspberry Island and Hooper Island, "the Cold Storage", and all the fish houses and trap lined wharfs across the way. I could also see up through into the heart of Port Clyde village, and back again, all the way out to Hart's Island. (Or as I thought of it then, and still do. . .Heart's Island). It was all a kind of magical mystery tour right in front of me every heart beat in those days, and none of it has really gone anywhere except deeper inside of me. I remember the stories Old Cony used to tell and how sometimes I'd look out the dormer window over towards Hooper Island and wonder about it all and fall into a rapture. It's the same rapture I paint out of now all these many years later. ~ C. W. O. ~