Category: Fort Williams State Park

Posted on

And that’s why we can’t have nice things

Fences protect fools from the view. Unfortunately, they also separate the rest of us from it.
Rocky, by Carol L. Douglas. 

Last summer I painted a rocky outcropping at Fort Williams for Cape Elizabeth Land Trust’s Paint for Preservation. It is a long finger of granite pointing straight into the ocean, as dramatic as any point at Acadia, but only minutes from downtown Portland. And therein lies the problem. People were constantly crawling out to the end of the rock to take selfies. I watched a couple encourage their kids to do it. The drop is easily long enough to kill, and the surf below will take what the rocks don’t.

The foolishness of all these visitors was manifest in their footwear, which ranged from flip-flops to sandals. In two-and-a-half days I saw only one properly-shod climber. He had a safety mat and was practicing some kind of technical descent.
Kaaterskill Falls, by Carol L. Douglas
It reminded me of another popular tourist spot that’s also legendary among plein airpainters. That’s Kaaterskill Falls, a two-tier, 260-foot-tall waterfall in the Catskills. This was, in many ways, the heart of the Hudson River Schooland where plein air painting in America was born. When I first visited, it was easy enough to believe you were alone in the primeval wilderness. You approached the falls the same way as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and other great painters did, up a steep, 2.6-mile trail with very little in the way of safety improvements.
The last time I painted there was in 2014, with Jamie Williams Grossman and other friends from New York Plein Air Painters. It was shocking to see how many people crawled around the lip of the falls and its access trail wearing terrible footwear. That summer two visitors fell to their deaths.  Access was closed for 2015 while they made safety upgrades. When it reopened the following summer, there was another fatality.
The view of that rocky promontory is now obscured by a fence. (Photo courtesy of Karen Lybrand)
Inevitably, the state of Maine had to fence off the rocky point I painted before someone falls to their death.
Artist Karen Lybrand walks at Cape Elizabeth almost every day, and sent me photos of the new fence. “I’m sure the risk-takers will still find a way to take selfies on the cliff rocks,” she commented. Someone will feel the need to get past the safety restrictions, resulting in more safety restrictions.
You can see trail wear around the rocks. (Photo courtesy of Karen Lybrand.)
Maine was projected to have around 40 million visitors in 2018. They’re not necessarily from places where people understand the risks of the natural world, or are expected to take responsibility for their own safety. Their attitude toward wilderness will inevitably affect our access to wilderness.
I’ve done that painting from exactly the low angle I wanted; I couldn’t paint it again, but I don’t want to, either. And it’s perfectly paintable from over the fence; it just won’t have the same looming presence.
A 1920s postcard showing the Marginal Way approaching Perkins Cove in Ogunquit. That was before the path was so heavily traveled.
There are any number of coastal views that would be diminished with such a fence. They’re protected only by their isolation, and even that is slowly eroding as America’s population grows.
These are stunning views from places that are perfectly safe—until you stray from the path and do something stupid. But we can’t allow people to reap the consequences of their bad decisions in our litigious society, so they will be fenced off one by one.
Posted on

In praise of lighthouses

Lighthouses are neither kitschy nor camp; they’re hardworking symbols of our maritime history.
Lonely Lighthouse (Parrsboro, NS), Carol L. Douglas
This morning I am painting at Fort Williams State Park as part of Cape Elizabeth Land Trust’s 11th Annual Paint for Preservation. (Our locations are assigned; you can see a maphere.) This is the location of one of Maine’s most famous lighthouses, the beautiful Portland Head Light. It was first lit in 1791.
But I’ll be looking in the other direction. The Portland Head Light is unchanged from when Edward Hopper painted it in 1927. However, it would be difficult to set up in his vantage point now, since the park road runs over it. The lighthouse has been painted many, many times, and photographed even more often. I’d be hard-pressed to find anything new to say about it.
Not a cloud in the sky (Owl’s Head Keeper’s House), Carol L. Douglas
Maine’s lighthouses have been painted so often, they have become in some ways a painting clichĂ©. This is why critics sometimes sneer at lighthouse (along with lobster-boat) paintings. More fools they.
Our coastal history is both authentic and humble. There is evidence that people were building boats in Crete 130,000 years ago. Long before there were settled ports, people lit bonfires to guide mariners home. It didn’t take long before these were raised onto platforms. From there, the fixed tower was adopted.
Dyce Head in the early morning light, Carol L. Douglas
By the time Alexander the Greatcame along, lighthouses were an established navigational aid. Ptolemy II Philadelphus built the Pharos of Alexandriasometime around the third century BC. It was the biggest and most famous lighthouse in antiquity. It lasted through seventeen centuries and several major earthquakes. In 1480, Sultan Al-Ashraf Sayf ad-Din Qa’it Bay tore down the remains and used the rubble to build a fort on the site. The Pharos was about 350 feet tall, whereas the Portland Head Light is 101 feet.
The oldest lighthouse still standing is the Tower of Herculesin Galicia, Spain. At 187 feet, it too stands taller than the Portland Head Light. Its exact date of construction is unknown, but it was known to be standing by the 2nd century AD, either built or rebuilt under the Emperor Trajan.
Owl’s Head Light, Carol L. Douglas
Like so much ancient technology, lighthouse construction went into hiatus with the fall of the Roman empire. The modern lighthouse era began in the eighteenth century with the development of international sea trading. The more boats there were on the water, the more horrific losses were suffered from shipwreck.
Advances in structural engineering made it possible to put lighthouses on surf-scoured rocks and even underwater ledges. The Bell Rock Lighthouse, balancing on a reef off the coast of Scotland, was built with such precision that its masonry hasn’t been replaced since it was completed in 1810. It was painted beautifully by J.M.W Turner in 1819.
Cape Spear Road, Carol L. Douglas. That’s not one, but two, lighthouses.
The lighthouse keepers are long gone; their work has moved from oil lamps to remote operation by the Coast Guard. But they continue to serve a vital purpose on the seas.
Lighthouses come in a variety of shapes, from squat little caisson lights which look like sparkplugs, to tall, tapered towers, to the boxy little midcentury lighthouses of Nova Scotia. They’re often on remote, austere headlands, surrounded by pounding surf, lonely spruces, and great tumbles of rock.
How can anyone resist painting them?