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 wharf and over by the Cold
Storage landing.
. .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. The smell of the
all-mighty sea and the cove through the rusty 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 long done playing 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.
Holy Cats! -- You bet!
-- This here beauty was
made with a Mac. ! 