Isle au haut
Moving between forest and coastline on Isle au Haut, as fog swallowed the landscape and lobster boats worked somewhere offshore.
We spent the day moving in and out of the woods along the coast of Isle au Haut. At times the shoreline seemed untouched, except for the occasional blue trail markers. Granite dropping into the ocean with no one else around. The trail meandered from rocky and rugged to quiet tunnels through the forest. Even when the sun was shining, it felt unforgiving and wild. Fog moved in, swallowing the landscape and narrowing the world around us. Somewhere offshore, lobster boats worked, their engines carrying across the water long before we could see them.
Turning Your Head In Nellieville
At Peter Beerits’s sculpture garden in Deer Isle, Maine, my kids knew exactly what to do. I was slower to catch on.
The kids knew what to do and as soon as the car door closed in Nervous Nellie’s parking lot, they were off to explore. I was slower to react, though forced to keep up. Fortunately, I did steal a glance at the welcome sign and noticed that exploring the spaces was encouraged. I think it also said touching the art was okay, but I kept that to myself.
We started with the Western town. Interiors were decorated with all manner of interesting ephemera, including a lot of taxidermy, but it was the people sculptures that began to transport me. We were entering their world, rooms with themes ranging from a jail to a juke joint. My son's initial reaction to the people-like sculptures was fear. They had a presence, and there was something about their stillness that filled the spaces. What struck me was their eerily fixed gaze.
Exploring the various buildings felt more like entering a sculpture, being inside the art instead of observing its surface. It was thrilling, and there were rewards for looking carefully. My daughter even noticed an installation on a second-story window ledge, only visible to those who craned their necks. My eyes roamed eagerly, searching for what was next, a stark contrast to the figures who all looked straight ahead.
As we moved through the sculpture park, the urge to capture it was overwhelming and I knew it was impossible. There were sculptures within sculptures, a fractal of creativity. The artist, Peter Beerits, seemed able to create anything he wanted, making something as simple as a rusty pile of chains into a form worth considering.
I began to feel uneasy with the way he rendered the faces of the “inhabitants.” They felt labored, and while composed of an interesting variety of materials, the faces remained estranged from the overall feeling of playful artistic freedom. Their unchanging field of view began to feel torturous in a place that rewarded looking in every direction.
There was a distinct point during our walk when I was forced to simply surrender my analytical sense. It was a struggle to free objects from their known utility and just revel in their form. It was overwhelming, maybe like a return to a child's view of the world where much is unknown but shapes, textures and sounds are that much more enticing. That this heightened way of seeing could be sustained struck me as an achievement, hard to describe, but it felt like mastery.
I felt melancholic staring at a damaged but very shiny outdoor gas grill. It was actually beautiful, a form I had only a second earlier labeled as junk. How could one exist in the world on this wavelength of aesthetic intoxication, the beauty of our industrialized mess becoming too much to bear? Maybe it was easier to see things as they are intended, to be adult-like and practical.
We walked further into the park, and the scale of the pieces changed when we encountered giant knights and a castle structure. It was like my desire to keep this childlike vision had shrunk me down to child size. The wonder mixed with sadness when we walked toward a collection of broken-down vehicles gathered in the woods, apparently watching an invisible film from an old, busted-up projector operated by an elf. To be an adult felt like losing the ability to view these films, to no longer see the magic of these mechanical beings playing together.
The kids continued to devour the structures, and I struggled to photograph what I was feeling: what is the point of photographing sculpture anyway? A place like this needs to be experienced in three dimensions. My mind came back to the faces and they suddenly felt like a mirror.
On our way out, we stopped to read the welcome sign. Peter Beerits has been building Nellieville for the past thirty years, and I hope he never stops.
Postcards from Maine
I returned with a Forestry degree after college and spent a summer working in the North Maine woods. I remember my boss, at the time, giving directions, “Drive to the top of New Hampshire, head North through Canada for two hours and then take a right into Maine” Needless to say, I saw many more bears than people that summer. In the years since, I have been fortunate to film and photograph for Yankee Magazine from Kennebunkport to Lubec. One winter I explored Caribou by snow machine, followed by a summer voyage on Moosehead Lake with Captain Rocky aboard the steamboat Katahdin.
Maine has always pulled me Eastward to its mountains, lakes, forests and coastline. As a young boy I remember being woken up before dawn to watch the sunrise on Cadillac Mountain. I returned with a Forestry degree after college and spent a summer working in the North Maine woods. I remember my boss, at the time, giving directions, “Drive to the top of New Hampshire, head North through Canada for 2 hours and then take a right into Maine” Needless to say, I saw many more moose than people that summer. In the years since, I have been fortunate to film and photograph for Yankee Magazine from Kennebunkport to Lubec. One winter I explored, and filmed, the Caribou area by snow machine, followed by a summer voyage on Moosehead Lake with Captain Rocky aboard the Steamboat Katahdin.
As the Director of Photography for a PBS show, Weekends With Yankee, I got to look back at the Maine coast from inside the Nubble Lighthouse, mountain biked in Bethel, raced a schooner in the fog and filmed a memorable trip to Eastern Egg Island with the Puffin Man, Steve Kress. One of the best parts of my job is getting to share these places and stories with my kids. Last week I took them to another place I learned about from behind the camera, Rangeley. Ironically, I almost do not want to identify this area by name for fear of spoiling it. Too late… but I love the lack of development, long views, cold water and of course, the Loons. My daughter even commented that, “It just feels calm up here.”. A statement made humorous by sharing that our town has less than 500 residents and a single traffic light.
Rangeley Lake, Maine.
If I am being honest, I did not succeed in prying my children entirely off of screens, but the majority of their time was spent blissfully immersed in nature. A highlight being skipping stones, and then racing, with swim goggles on to retrieve them. The reality of our time blew in one day from the West, with a smokey haze replacing the endless blue. I recently finished the book “Immemorial” by Lauren Markham, and it was there that I learned of the term, Solastalgia. It is defined as, “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home, but the environment has been altered and feels unfamiliar.” Kids today will inhabit a world vastly different from what I experienced growing up, with deadly floods and catastrophic fire becoming a normal headline. I hope our adventures together in Maine remain recognizable and that they can share a love of the natural world with their own kids.
