Souvenirs

Maine photographer Peter Ralston treated my wife and me last week to a half-hour's exploration on foot of Widow's Island, a 15-acre island in Pensobscot Bay.

We took home with us old bricks as souvenirs.

They came from the ruins of an asylum that once operated on the island, torn down by the WPA in 1935, long after it had ceased to serve its original purpose.

The US Navy built the asylum in 1888 to quarantine sailors sickened with deadly yellow fever. The brisk seaside climate was thought to aide recovery.

But the building never housed a single ailing sailor, because naval surgeons found a new treatment for yellow fever—inducing diarrhea with purgatives like mercury, coal tar, castor oil, and caffeine—the following year.

The Widow's Island Naval Sanitorium was another $50,000 federal boondoggle. 

The Navy donated the empty asylum to Maine in 1904, which turned it into a summer retreat for lunatics interned in asylums in Augusta and Bangor. 

As part of the land transfer, the state renamed Widow's Island after a local judge, and the asylum became known as the Chase Island Convalescent Hospital.

But locals continued to call the place Widow's Island.

The lunatic asylum only operated for a decade, after which the building was used as a school for the children of lighthouse keepers, and again as a naval hospital during World War I.

When the WPA tore down the building, it intended to recycle the thousands of bricks, and piled them neatly on the island's shore. 

That was a mistake.

Light-fingered lobstermen stole the bricks to weight their traps, pave the walkways around their homes, and line their chimneys.

Fortunately, they left a few for souvenir-hunters like us.

Maine Attaction

I'm tagging along with my wife in Maine this week while she studies landscape photography under the Wyeth family's official photographer, Peter Ralston.

Dogshead Island

Coastal Maine deserves its reputation as an über-romantic spot, and in mid-September teeters on Indian Summer, one of my favorite times of year.

Yesterday, we island-hopped for 14 straight hours in Peter's 37-foot lobster boat, The Raven, as he directed my wife in shooting hundreds of photos of skiffs, schooners, sailboats, shorelines, shacks, shanties, and seals. 

And lobstermen. Hundreds of lobstermen.

Our two-hour stop on Vinalhaven Island reminded me we were only miles—31, to be exact—from Monhegan Island, where artist Jamie Wyeth spends his summers.

Monhegan Island, known as the "Artists' Island," holds an esteemed place in American art history, having, before Wyeth summered there, been the summer home of Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Robert Henri, and Rockwell Kent. Jamie Wyeth in fact now owns and has lived in Kent's former island home.

Vinalhaven Island

Kent was drawn to Monhegan Island in 1905, and summered there off and on until 1953. Wyeth bought his home in 1968, but later moved to neighboring Southern Island, to escape the summer tourists.

In his lifetime, Kent was one of America's most revered artists; but Joe McCarthy put an end to his career. The witch-hunting senator accused (falsely) Kent of being a Communist. As a consequence, every museum in the country took down his paintings.

Jamie Wyeth, on the other hand, is the darling of American museums—and rightfully so. 

I love Wyeth's work. 

Serendipitously, Jamie Wyeth loves Rockwell Kent's work (most of which today is in Russia, gifted to that country out of spite by the beleaguered Kent) and collects it. He keeps his collection in his Southern Island home.

I love Rockwell Kent's work, too; maybe more.

Maine may be über-romantic, but it wouldn't be Maine after all without some weirdness. (It's the home of Stephen King.) 

Jamie Wyeth's homage to Kent, Portrait of Rockwell Kent, hints at that weirdness by including the contour of a woman falling from the rocks to her death in the background.

That's Kent's mistress, the New York socialite Sally Maynard Moran, who either committed suicide or was murdered in 1953. 

Her body was found in the ocean off Monhegan Island three weeks after her mysterious disappearance one night.

Nobody knows, to this date, what happened to her.

Above: Island Library by Jamie Wyeth. Watercolor, 28 x 20 inches. Wreck, Monhegan by Rockwell Kent. Oil on canvas panel. 7 x 13 inches. Portrait of Rockwell Kent by Jamie Wyeth. Oil on fiberboard. 34 x 26 inches. Maine photos by Robert Francis James.

Fauxbohs

 

In a magazine article about the home of interior designer Dallas Shaw, I encountered the unfamiliar term gypset.

"With this gypset-style approach, Shaw started with her favorite room," the article said.

A Google search shuttled me to the website of travel writer Julia Chaplin, where I found the definition.

"I coined the term gypset (gypsy + jet set) to describe an international group of artists, entrepreneurs, surfers, seekers, and bon vivants who lead semi-nomadic, unconventional lives." Chaplin writes. 

"They are people I’ve met in my travels who have perfected a creative approach to life that fuses the freelance and nomadic ways of the mythologic gypsy with the adventurous freedom of the jet set."

Martha Stewart-like, Chaplin has built an empire around the so-called gypset lifestyle, replete with branded clothing, books, excursions, and events.

While gypset describes the lifestyle, its practitioners are bohos, Chaplin says, free-spirited folks who are "nomadic entrepreneurs," and who plan the path to bohemianism with precision NASA would envy.

It ain't easy being laid back.

Chaplin's term inspires me to coin my own: fauxboh.

A fauxboh is a fake bohemian, someone who spends a fortune to look non-materialistic; uses a travel agent to book a spiritual journey; and works all day long to appear a carefree slouch. 

A fauxboh is the 2020s' version of the 1960s' plastic hippy, only better traveled. 

A fauxboh should not be confused with a fauxbo, a well-off poseur who dresses like he's homeless and penniless; in short, a fake hobo.

Nor should the term be confused with FOBO, the "fear of better options" that cripples most college applicants, job seekers, home buyers, and diners at Denny's.

Finally, a fauxboh should not be confused with a bobo, the term coined by journalist David Brooks to describe a bourgeois bohemian. 

A bobo is a well-heeled yuppie with a guilt complex. When he shops, he "shops organically," to offset the carbon footprint his five cars, two homes, and jet ski, snowmobile and motorboat leave; and when he buys, he "buys American," to compensate for the fact he outsources all his business to Mumbai. A bobo is a big-spending bohemian.

All these terms raise the question: who were the original bohemians?

The answer: gypsies.

Parisians were the first to call artists and dilettantes “bohemians,” in the early 1800s. But they borrowed the term from the one they'd been using for 400 years to label gypsies, the stateless Roma.

Banished from India to wander Europe and the Middle East for centuries, in 1423 the Roma were granted citizenship in the Kingdom of Bohemia. 

When they were cast out of the kingdom 274 years later, the gypsies migrated to France. 

The French called the Kingdom of Bohemia La Boheme, and the strange and nomadic newcomers from that land les Bohemiens.