Rusty's Beach

Dispatch -- Day 33

I get up at 6:25 a.m. and go down to breakfast at 6:30 in the mess hall.  I then take my coffee out to the fish deck and look at the sunrise.  Most mornings they are spectacular!  I work from 7:30 to 11:30, when lunch is served.  Then I'm back at it from 12:30 to 4:30, when I can peel off my sweaty, sawdusty clothes, shower off, and go to supper at 5:00.  The meals are first-class, by the way, though often a bit heavy on the meat and potatoes.  Tonight we had green beans, ham with pineapple sauce, and baked potatoes.  Yummy!  Right after supper, or sometimes during, someone puts in a video movie.  (There's no TV reception...)  Westerns and suspense thrillers are the favorite genre.  I'll watch, or else take a walk, or just sit out the fish deck and enjoy the evening looking at the boats going by on the bayou.  I write and paint out there, too, and will put up a painting or two when I get back!  By 9:30 I'm done.  Lights out!

Dispatch -- Day 23

Louisiana Shrimp & Petroleum Festival in Morgan City.  We went for a couple of hours to see the 72nd annual festival in our neighboring town, Morgan City, on the Atchalafaya River.  There was live music in the park, an arts and crafts fair, and a carnival under the big bridge -- a smart move because it seems to rain here everyday lately.  There were two artists:  one guy did ink drawing of local scenes, and the other from Baton Rouge did watercolors from pigments all derived from Mississippi River mud.

"Only the green came from Alabama, all the rest came from Louisiana clay," he told me.

There were a few shrimp boats on the river and several houseboats all spruced up with streamers.  Everybody was friendly and the place was crowded!

Dispatch -- Day 22

Water on the lower deck hallways!  The fishing crew has their own level on the lower deck (below the water line) -- a galley, rooms with bunks, and a small lounge area.  We came down to work on the plumbing there and found water.  We thought the hull had sprung a leak!  It turned out to be an overflowing holding tank.  I helped mop up.  There are so many pumps and tanks and systems on this boat, it is mind-boggling.  I'm glad I'm just the carpenter and not the engineer!

Dispatch -- Food Run

On Monday (Day 9), three of us, including Phil the cook, went to the Super Store in Morgan City to re-stock the ship's pantry.  We filled three shopping carts.  My job was loading one of the carts with 21 one-gallong jugs of drinking water.  We piled all the food in the back of a very hot pickup truck, so most of the frozen stuff was half-thawed by the tiem we got it in the galley.  It was a fun diversion.  I also stocked up on bananas, juice, t-shirts, and a back-up pair of work shoes.

Dispatch -- Day 5

We're still tied up on the bayou in Amelia, LA.  I'm living and working on the boat -- a 60-foot commute from my bunk to the place on the fantail area I've staked out to do my carpentry projects.  I can watch the weather where I work and today there were dramatic rain squalls passing by every hour or two in the afternoon.  It's still hot, but the rain cools things off a tiny bit.  I'm building table tops with side boards so people's dinners don't slide off during rough seas.  I'll mount them to the conventional table tops in the dining room.

Dispatch -- Day 1

It is HOT here, but everybody is busy working on stuff.  I fixed the swinging door into the galley, and sanded then revarnished all the railings on the fish deck.  I'll be building some shelves tomorrow for the engineer.  Dad seems fine, though frustrated and cranky from when the boat's main air conditioning system went down the other day.  The engineer got it running again just last night.  It's old.  The boat is looking real good -- all the decks are painted and a lot of old stuff has been cleared out.

Sand Garden

The Sand Garden is only about 14" x 9"

This is my studio sand garden, along with lots of shells, sand dollars, and miscellaneous strange things.  It was a Christmas gift from my sister-in-law Karen or one of my daughters, I'm not sure which.  The sand is extra sand from my sand collecting, so it's from at least two oceans and several lakes.

Every time I walk along a beach, I look around for whatever the ocean has washed up.  Shells, stones, driftwood and sand dollars are my favorite items, which I pile on the windowsill and then add to (or rearrange in) the sand garden.  Sometimes someone -- I suspect Madeleine, my youngest -- does the rearranging, which always amuses me!

The miniature walkway is made of tiny, real bricks that I cut from a slab of clay.  The little Buddha has been the most permanent fixture.  I bought him at the gift shop in the National Taiwan Museum in Taipei, back in 1969 while on R&R from Viet Nam.  (Yes, I was there -- 69 to '70 -- another story!)

3-inch tall wood Buddha from Taipei

The plastic ball look slike a very old SuperBall that must have floated for years in the ocean to have acquired the barnacles.  It reminds me of an orange planet -- with volcanoes!  I found it about a year ago at the beach at Surfside, CA.  Remember SuperBalls?  They're still bouncing around...

Planet "SuperBall" with extinct volcanoes.

NEXT POSTS:  Dispatches from the Pacific Tuna King, a commercial tuna boat where I will be working for several weeks while it goes from Louisiana to Baja, California, via the Panama Canal!  Stay tuned!

Send sand

I’m working on ideas for producing a series of paintings using sand samples and the stories behind them -- either true or imagined!

Send me a small bag of sand from any saltwater beach in the world, and I will send you a signed, open edition print of Cleo’s Porch, from my Oceans and Dreams collection with my thanks!

Leave a comment to this post or send me an email, and I will tell you where to send the sand.

Please include 1) a description of the location the sand came from and/or the site marked on a map, 2) the date you found the sand, and 3) anything else you might have to say about it -- whatever comes to mind.  How did you get this sand?  Do you live at or near this beach?  Why were you there?

I'll also need a mailing address so I can send your print.

Cleo's Porch, 15" x 19" lithograph reproduction from the original watercolor, printed on heavy smooth paper.

Thanks!  --Rusty

Beach sand

I used to love playing in it and with it as a kid -- I'd even roll in it after swimming in the ocean to get warm (it felt wonderful!).  I'd get most of it off with a towel, but some always seemed to wind up in the sheets, to my mother's chagrin.  It was my first construction material -- I built sandcastles, freeways, tunnels, seawalls and forts, and I dug deep holes to hide in.  I've had as much fun as a dad, doing the same things on visits to Lake Michigan with my daughters.

I began to look closer at beach sand and noticed that there are varieties.  The sand I saw only at very low tide was fine and usually gray; where the waves broke on the beach, the sand was very coarse and more crystalline; it became more fine and white the further up the beach-slope we went.  There were sometimes streaks of black sand that we found we could pick up with a magnet -- iron sand!  It was fascinating.

Since the early 19902, I've been collecting sand from various places around the U.S., mostly from beaches, but also from rivers, lakes, the desert and some odd sources such as ant hills and hotel cigarette urns.  I recently learned that other people collect sand, too.  One such sand collector is Bob Campbell -- he has great info and links on his site.

The science of sand is wonderfully laid out in Sand, a book by Raymond Siever and published by Scientific American Library.

Low Tide

Low Tide
2007, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 50"

In the winter months, high tide is often in the morning and low tide -- sometimes really low tide -- is in the afternoon.

When I was in grade school, the lowest tides were often perfectly timed for when I was out of school (and shoes) and into shorts.  I'd run on the flat, lower beach that's only briefly revealed a few times a month, big breakers rolling and rolling until they were only about an inch high, and I would have a ball running and splashing through them.  It was easy to imagine that I was flying over much larger waves and the sensation seemed to propel me along until I was completely winded.  The beach was endless!

Low Tide is the newest of a recent series of surf paintings -- in fact, it's not finished yet, but should be in a few days.  The surf and sky are based on memories of similar beaches on the Oregon Coast, where I lived for many years, and where the low sand bars are just the same as on the beaches of Southern California.  I've recently gone back to painting "just surf" and am working simpler compositions on bigger canvases.  I plan to do some 6-foot and 7-foot-long paintings, as well.  I'll show more as they emerge!