2. Travel

Maine

First wife Diane and I travel the Maine coast. In late September of 1968 we travel from a still hot and muggy Washington D. C. into an early New England Fall. Blue skies, changing leaves, and keen sea air fills our young lungs and quicken our hearts. Fellow Navy photographer Bart Clapsaddle and his wife Jeanie lead the way. Diane and I are two California kids being introduced to the wonders of down east. In a 1965 VW bug with a luggage rack full of camping gear, two sailors and their wives camp on beaches and stay in quaint wood-heated cabins. We lean about wine and cheese and find it better than beer and chips. First taste of lobster comes from the fisherman's hand and is cooked in outside our tent in a pot of seawater. Clam chowder is discovered in a fisherman's cafe, and no soup since has been as good. On the West Coast Diane I had grown up on tacos, now we are young adults who live on lobster rolls and breath crisp Atlantic air. It’s as if we’ve come to tour a quaint and foreign land that makes Orange County seem a spoiled land of plastic glitter.
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  • On the mud flats of the Sheepscot River in Wiscasset, for a century, the ships Hesper and the Luther Little wait. I arrive in a storm with camera in 1968. But, I print this negative for the first time in 1969 at Sangly Point in the Philippines. Navy photographer Ron Letarte, who happens to be from Maine, sees the image and loves the glimpse of home. Years later, a storm destroys the ships and Letarte tells the story to a newspaper friend. I send him a print. The local paper runs this picture 35 years after I snap the shutter.
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  • Suddenly I love being a Navy photographer. Maine is a quaint foreign land where the people speak an unusual English dialect. Storybook settings beg my camera's attention, and slow speaking shopkeepers have stories to tell. Winter Harbor is salt air magic to explore. I inhale deeply after I catch the first of many aging fisherman.
  • So do Maine Fishermen go to art school? Clapsaddle,my shipmate on this voyage, has a MFA he got studying with Minor White at Rochester. He talks about the light, line shape and form day and night. It means much, I start to see. But where, I wonder do the fishermen learn to place their buckets, and tubs? See how they drape their bridal veil nets for my camera. H. Barton Clapsaddle is the best photography teacher I've met since Ansel Adams.
  • I see this scene and call it Donna Marie's World. It strikes me as an Andrew Wyeth composition. In his famous painting Wyeth placed Chistina in the foreground but I place the boat leaving the page. Like the crippled Christina Olson crawling a Maine field home, this craft called the Donna Marie is stranded in the mud as it waits the rising tide.
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  • “All around the block, all around the town,” the children the children sing as they push a willing cat on a wild ride around the village. The adults look guardedly to the stranger with a camera and form a tableau in the background.
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  • Children living in storybook Maine fishing villages spark memories. I’m reminded of early life on a Minnesota farm, and romping around the nearby Mississippi village of Dresbach. I once thought all children in the world lived in old wood houses next to sparkling water. In Maine it’s good to see some still do.
  • I think I like this tighter shot of the Maine kids better than the longer shot. I like the great kid poses they strike, even though the uncomfortable cuts into feet and hand bother me a bit. In those days I carry two 70mm cameras, one with telephoto and the other with normal lens. It's likely I used both cameras on these kids.
  • Two years after I take this image, Minor White would photograph this very lighthouse as a double exposure with a wood pattern that washes over the image like sea foam. Minor would call his image “Lighthouse and Wood,” 1970. In 1968 I’m taken by the sky, so, uh, Lighthouse and Sky, 1968.
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  • As a mischievous child, first wife Diane sparkles here with Bart Clapsaddle. The Maine coast seems the sort of place we went off into the world to see. Having studied photography under Minor White at Rochester Institute of Technology, Clapsaddle becomes influential in my photographic development. He shows us how to frame our journey as the photographic masters might have. Bart speaks the gospel Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams from the book of White. Our photographs of barns, doorways, water, and sky become luminous by the quality of light we capture on silver.
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