Day Thirteen, Friday

Pace House Residency

Our time at the Pace home is quickly coming to an end. I feel a great amount of sadness over having to leave this place. It’s been such a joy to have very little to do on a daily basis, to watch Elanor run around naked in the front and back yard, to spend so much time with Kathleen, cooking amazing foods and staying up late playing board games. I hope upon our return to San Francisco I can maintain the discipline it takes to just sit and do nothing, as I so often did on the front porch of the Pace house. Here, with the absence of things like TV and the Internet and cell phones I was just naturally forced to do other activities like reading, or sitting and talking, and I spent tons of time making work and thinking about the work I was making.

As a last hurrah, my friend Peter is going to come up from Portland to see us today. Peter was one of my professors while I was at the Maine College of Art and I haven’t see him since I left there almost 5 years ago.

Peter was a great influence and provider of open instruction for me, and I feel like I was a great source of trouble for him. I often times was able to get him to derail our classes to the pub next door to school, or on another occasion move the entire class to our house, where everyone hung their photographs on the walls of our living room and we spent the afternoon drinking beer and eating soup.

I spent many semesters doing independent studies with Peter, making many short, small-gauge films, watching Wim Wenders films, and talking at length about photography. I am so excited to have him come visit us, so he can meet Elanor and we can talk shop once again.

I am not sure what else to say at this point; the last couple of days have been very slow and calm, and I largely spent them wrapping up the last few projects I needed to make and re-visiting some others that I had made earlier in our stay.  Instead of intensely making work, I went swimming in the ocean, picked blueberries in the meadow out beyond the house, and went for walks with Kathleen and Elanor.

We had a most delightful evening yesterday, as we for the first time ventured out beyond the edge of the woods behind the Pace House. We walked down this beautiful grass and moss covered path that opened up into a meadow that looked like something out of Lord of the Rings. The even more amazing thing was that the field was covered in blueberries. We had seen berries all along the path on our walk out there, and we had brought a basket in case we found some to pick, but the sheer amount of them out in the meadow was just incredible. We spent hours, almost right up till the sun went down, picking berries, all three of us just sitting down in the field and picking the area around us till it was bare and then moving on to another spot. In about an hour or so we picked about a pound of fresh, tiny, wild blue berries, which taste nothing like any blueberries we’d ever tasted before.

Unreal.

This morning I had a nearly spiritual moment at the Lily Pond. I was walking back down the road toward our house. I had shot all the film I brought so I was just walking, and I realized suddenly that there was nobody else there with me, the road normally being dotted with the cars of painters, their easels set up in the weeds along the road. Today I was alone, and the air was still and slightly cool in the morning sun. As I walked, I realized that at that time tomorrow I would be on my way to Boston, having to re-enter society from my unshowering, no shoes or shirt wearing, Huck Finn life on Deer Isle and at the Pace home over the last couple of weeks. As I realized this, I suddenly became aware of just how beautiful, in both the physical sense but also in the spatial and conceptual sense this place is. I felt like God had intended for life to be like this, and, sure, one can’t always lead the kind of life one might find while on vacation on the island, however, one should try to live in that sort of spirit as much as possible while continuing to maintain the responsibilities of a normal sort of life.