THE NORTH COAST

Readers familiar with The Buddha Diaries will recall that Ellie and I have a part-time assistant back home in California.  Maggie, a still fairly recent Occidental College graduate, comes in a couple of afternoons a week to help us out with, mostly, the business aspects of our lives: getting the digital apparatus to function as it should, helping me with getting word out about my books, lectures, "Slow Looking" events, and so on.  Brought up in the lovely coastal area to the north of Boston, she encouraged us to give Cape Cod a miss--too much traffic, she said; too many tourists--and instead planned for us to get together with her mother for a day's exploration outside the city.

Which is what we did, to our great delight, yesterday.  Cotton...

(seen here with Ellie)

... who turned out to be a wonderful guide for the day, is a hearty and good-humored skeptic, an artist with an unusual medium--more of this later--and who has the love of this part of the country running in her blood.  Kindly, and generously, she motored in to the city to pick us up in a little red rental car--her own four-wheel drive SUV has brake problems--and drove us out along the highway, stopping first in the area around Beverly Farms, where she herself grew up, and where we explored back roads lined with beautifully landscaped estates and homes that we learned had become prohibitively costly.

We drove through Manchester--Cotton scoffs at the recent addition of "by-the-Sea" as an invention of the real estate business--and stopped to look out over the yacht club, Tuck's Point and, further on, the "Singing Beach"--so-called because the sand appears to sing when walked-upon.  We ambled along the sea front at Gloucester...

... watching the diving ducks...

 (sorry, I don't know their name) and the action of the drawbridge, rising to allow passage for a couple of boats from the ocean to the harbor...

... and admired the Fisherman statue...

... a monument commemorating the hundreds of Gloucester area seamen lost at sea in the past century and more...

... including those made famous, in recent years, by the movie, "The Perfect Storm."

Hungry by this time, and ready for the lobster roll we have been looking forward to since our arrival on the East Coast, we arrived at Woodman's, in Essex, Maggie's favorite seafood source, where she had insisted that her mother bring us.  We feasted not only on outrageously delicious lobster rolls...

... but also, on Cotton's recommendation, a huge (thankfully shared!) portion of onion rings...A glass of IPA, for me, rounded out the perfect lunch.

In Ipswich, next (all these familiar English names!) we followed the scenic Argilla Road to Castle Hill, an imposing mansion...

... built by Richard T. Crane for his wife in 1928 (she hated the initial 1910 Italianate version, so he had the whole thing razed and rebuilt it in the English Stuart style in order to satisfy her whim).  The estate reaches as far as the eye can see, over manicured green slopes...

... and past the (still!) Italianate "Casino" to the sea.  A lovely vista, to be sure.  We walked the length of it, stood gazing down over the beaches and the sand bars beyond, out to, it seemed, infinity.

From Castle Hill, we headed for Cotton's temporary home in nearby Wenham, with a stop at the Russell Orchard for a stroll around the great barn where they sell fruits of all kinds, grown on the property, and out through the working farm yard to a second barn, where we found Big Darryl...

(picture gives no idea of actual size!)

... the most immense pig I have ever seen: the poor creature lay there, barely able to move--but apparently still capable to siring the two piglets in the pen behind.  Ponies, chickens, rabbits, ducks--all kinds of charming little animals that would have delighted Luka, had he been with us.

Arriving at Cotton's house, we had the good fortune to be able to say hello to Maggie's brother, Eli, who was in the driveway, busy working on those faulty brakes.  Cotton is less than thrilled with her temporary residence.  Having parted, finally, with the large family home--much to Maggie's distress--without knowing quite what the next step would be, she has been living in this spacious but, in her view, depressingly dark rented property while she looks for something new.  It's in fact a wonderful house, but has been terribly neglected in recent years; and the trees have grown large and close around it, blocking out the sunlight and leaving it with a damp feel that Cotton is anxious to leave behind her.  In the meantime, it provides ample storage space for her wonderful creations--a massive collection of theater costumes spanning many years of her work as a designer for theater of all kinds.

Cotton's great love is pantomime, and she has designed brilliant costumes, particularly for the character central to this particular genre, the male comedian in flamboyant drag (think Dame Edna), the source of endless absurd antics and merriment in this peculiarly English tradition... Here are some production pictures of her costumes for "Mother Goose":

But beyond pantomime, Cotton thrives on fantasy of all kinds (think "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and other Shakespeare masterpieces; think Theater of the Absurd and Commedia dell'Arte) and creates colorful, over-the-top costumes for witches and harlequins, goblins and fairies, monsters and freaks, all with a wonderful, generously humorous imagination.  She has closets overflowing with a treasure trove of this material; it should be in a museum...

From here, we drove around Conomo Point and over to Cotton's friend, Helen's house on Lufkin Point, overlooking many square miles of glorious marshland...

... leading out toward the sea.  Helen Tory is also an artist, of British origin; her capacious home...

... includes a studio, of course, along with a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and shrubs...

... and a cornucopia of vegetables; and what amounts to a small farm, with chickens and ducks, a llama, a couple of sheep...  We did the tour, starting in the kind of studio a working artist needs, filled with the tools of the trade and samples, everywhere, of her own...

... and her friends' work.  The fine quality of her monotypes...

Thanks, Helen.  Not sure why this came through so blue...?

... was another reminder, should we have needed one, that there are many brilliant artists out there, working in relative obscurity, but with skills and a sensitivity that deserves a wide public.  Helen depicts the things she loves--birds, mostly, and sheep--with tender and precise observation, in images that draw the eye in to her subjects and invite the viewer to share her affection for the natural world.

Together with Helen's daughter, Jemma, (seen here with her father, David, in that same "Mother Goose"...)

Unfortunately David was away on a visit to his native England at the time of our visit...),  we ate a lovely supper--stir-fried shrimp, bruschetta...

... a glass of wine--as the light began to fade; and were sorry to have to leave in good enough time for the long drive back to town, in order to be packed and ready for an early departure in the morning.

Ellie, Jemma, PC, and Helen