Mom's Baltic Sketches

Mom's Baltic Sketches (and one from the Alps)

I went to visit Mom for her 83rd birthday in June. Since Dad's death, Mom's become a night owl. She stays up until two or three in the morning, pottering around her house in Portland and setting things to right. Much too late for me, but just right for Mom, we sat at the dining room table and she went through one of the many boxes of her artwork, with me scribbling frantically in my journal and snapping away with my digital camera as she roved through her memories.

Vacation on Rugen, July 1941, watercolors, pastels.

Rugen is an island in the Baltic. It was discovered as a place to get away from it all about the late 1800's, an artists' colony. Summer in Berlin was quite hot so people would go north. When I grew up there was a tourist business. The farmers would move above the stables during the six weeks of summer and rent their house out. You had to make reservations by December or January. We could use the farm kitchen too, or the farm woman would boil potatoes for us.

The artist women would go to the sea at 7:00 in the morning and meet the fishermen coming in. In the nets, they found fish their buyers hadn't ordered so they couldn't use them. There was one fish that had green bones. The fishermen thought that was of the devil so they threw it to the tourist women.

Pines, Fisherman's Nets

So we lived way cheaper there than we could in Berlin. There was fried fish, boiled potatoes, dill, parsley and lettuce from the garden. That was the noon meal, and afterwards we'd go to the forest and hunt for berries. In late morning we'd bathe.

More Pines

My mother Leonie had gone to school with Johanna Zaeste-Fell, a writer and illustrator who lived in Aachen. I still have a book of hers from 1938, Das Kind Susse. She was a clairvoyant and the book is full of stuff like that. She had three children, Roshild, Eite, and a boy with some other name from the sagas. He was twelve that summer, and I was 20. He had a crush on me, he always wanted to sleep right next to me.

One of the women would babysit and the others would go out to paint and talk. It was just a way of life, like now you might have a diary but then you painted anything that was of interest.

They had cliffs there, steep white cliffs like Dover. Down below there were lots of shipwrecks. The myth went around that, when it was dark, people would walk along the cliffs, leading cows with a lantern about their necks. The boats would think the cow was a lighthouse and wreck on the rocks below, and much of the wreckage stayed in the hands of the locals. But we never met those people, or maybe we did and didn't know who they were.

Walsertal, ink drawing, January 1942.

This was when Suzanne and I went to ski. We knew the place because in 1939 after my graduation from high school, three friends and I bought ski equipment with our own savings and went to Walsertal, which is a Swiss valley inaccessible from Switzerland. It opens to southwest Germany. That was the first time I saw the high Alps. Two years later during the war, Suzanne and I got there, somehow, and spent a week there skiing. Suzanne fractured her ankle, and now in 2004, x rays show there are all sorts of splinters floating around in there.