2/9/98.. Polarities.

Another pair of visitations last week reminded me why I don't write fiction. I've always wanted to. The Great American Novel and all that. The trouble is, real life is too distracting, and the characters more zany.

Mark wandered into Jeanine's one lunchtime, and pulled up a chair between Bruce and Mel. Said he was on his way to Diana's to design a mosaic firewall out of rough stones. Pulled out a fountain pen and began sketching on a napkin. Angie asked him if he wanted a menu and he nodded absentmindedly.

Mark has been an absentminded artist from an early age. As a teen his pen-and-ink drawings of Maine landscapes began selling in New York galleries, and he's kept a toe in that door ever since. But he's still a local boy. He says my drawings of Bowdoinham are refreshing to him because they aren't freighted with nostalgia. He tends to sink in to a vague moodiness. Angie asked him if he wanted to order, and he gazed into space without responding. We all smiled.

The boy wonder carries an air of muddled distractedness, which can be charming, or irritating as hell. Sometimes I think he affects incompetence to get others to do for him. I often run into Mark in Brent's shop, fumbling with a tool, and asking how something best be done. Brent invariably takes over and finishes the job. Then.. Brent does the same thing with me, and I prefer to run the tools in MY shop.

Mark's quite competent, of course, in his own way, and everything he creates has the same textural attractiveness he does. A soft and genial man who works in plush corduroy instead of coarse denim, wears a leather coat. In recent years he's turned to composing wood and stone sculpture, often encrusted with glittering mica. His best drawings, to my eye, are of trout streams in deep woods, and he can be found wading up one with a flyrod when the season turns. Similarly his sculpture rises out of found materials.. a hollow apple log, scavangings from an old quarry. He wanders the back country in search of inspiration. A kindred spirit.

"Do you want anything?" Angie asks. "Oh, sure," Mark mumbles, groping for the menu. She rolls her eyes.

The mosaic he's designing is to go behind Diana's woodstove, and the talk revolves around radiant temperatures and flammability. Bruce suggests he grout the pieces with refractory cement, but Mark has been using an epoxy which the manufacturer says is good up to 250 degrees. Considering that the stove is only a foot away from the wall (now shielded with asbestos) that doesn't sound good enough. But you can sense the artist's stubbornness. Like maybe she should move the stove. His napkin sketch resolves into an apple tree bending around the stovepipe thimble. Angie gives him a cup of coffee, with a shrug.

Mark is the kind of guy women love to take care of. A romantic figure, and a little helpless. Someone who appreciates the beauty in simple things. In short, a lady's man. Usually a lady with a comfortable house on the coast. Not that he doesn't agonize over his romantic foibles, but he never seems to do without a warm bed. When he's between ladies he spends the winter in Mexico, where he buys silver jewelry to peddle in New York and Boston.

He gave me a lift home from Jeanine's and we spend a couple hours looking at slides of Bowdoinham which I'm overhauling for drawing subjects, and talking about the nature of local forms. It was invigorating to see the material through other eyes. At a certain point Mark sort of wandered off, and I plunged back into the sawdust.

The next evening a VW Vanagon fluttered up the driveway and Eastman hustled out, along with his new dog, Brownie. The dog is some kind of rotweiller-chocolate lab mix, a scizzy combo if there ever was one. Eastman is dressed in a full suit of Carhardt canvas coveralls, torn, tattered and smeared in a thousand residuals. He's got on a tall cowboy hat, and wears his usual mad gleam.

I met Eastman at the first Maine Festival I ever peddled toys at, 20 years ago. He was a volunteer. We got talking boats. At that point he was an instructor at a wooden boatbuilding school, and we traded speculative designs. A few years later he gave me the specs for an 1880's sharpie which he'd gotten at Mystic Seaport Museum, and I modified them into the lines for our little bay boat. He was building his own version, a much more traditional craft, and was amused at my concoctions. Like dropping a 20horse outboard into an after well.

Over the years Eastman has been a Saturday evening arriviste. There's a contra dance at the town hall in Bowdoinham on the first Saturday of every month, with a live fiddleband, and the usual flocking of seedeaters. Eastman is a regular, and generally stops by before the music strikes up. If he gets lucky at the dance, we don't see him after, but often enough we share a Sunday breakfast and hear about his current project.

A master of all trades, he's always got some extravagant scheme afoot, each more implausible than the last. They always sound like pipedreams, and he always pulls them off. I stopped doubting Eastman's ability to realize his dreams years ago. He's rebuilt classy old sailboats from the deadwood up. Resurrected dead vehicles and buildings. Worked for a few years as a machinist and metalcaster for Lee Nielsen, the fancy toolmaker who sells replica planes and such through Garrett Wade. Couple years back he took a dead Piper Cub in trade for a building job, reconditioned it and learned to fly. The next time he arrived here he barrel-rolled over the house and set down at Bowdoinham International, just over the hill. He's a tonic for a jaded homeworker.

Last time I saw him was last summer on the road by Chickawaukie Lake. My father and I were cruising a gallery in Rockport, and Eastman was on his way home on an old 3-speed bike with a basketful of tools. We stopped and bumped chests and insulted each other. I think Ross was amused.

This time he's driving a rebuilt camper (bought from a summer tourist who was hauling it behind a Winnebago). In July he'd said he and his ladyfriend were planning to get a van and tour the country. So my first insult is, "Are you coming or going?"

Coming, it turns out. He'd been living in the van for a couple of weeks, cruising around New England searching for pieces of a new dream. His lady had decamped, he'd rescued Brownie from a fire (she was chained to the building, but nobody was living there), and they'd settled into the van during the power outages. I mentioned the joys of hot water, and he headed for the shower. Brownie and CC fought over his coveralls.

Eastman's latest vision is a rail-truck. He wants to replicate an early ride-on-the-track automobile, and has been researching the subject with his usual thoroughness. He hauls in a boxload of books and reprints to lay it out for me. He's settled on a dual-rear Model-A pickup, with retractable guidewheels, and has been scrounging junkyards and other likely venues, for parts. He's talked with the current owners of abandoned rail lines around New England and worked out a deal where he can use the tracks and carry a radio to communicate with active trains. We'd brainstormed rail-bikes back when Marshall Dodge (the humorist who started the Festival) had one in his collection of junk, and Eastman has enlisted another Festivalite, the metal sculptor David McLaughlin, into this construction scheme. What goes around.. may make your head spin. Woo-woo.

When Peggy gets home from the girls' b-ball game, we have a last mugup, and Eastman takes Brownie out for a run on the river. Of course she falls into a marginal crack, and they both get soaked. This is one hyper dog, and her new owner is trying hard to calm her down, but he's not really a low-rev kind of guy. Although he's talking about inserting an overdrive gear between the Model-A's tranny and the rear end, for efficient rail cruising. Is this the new Eastman? Down to earth and on track?

In the AM we go junking. I need a spare wheel for the Owl, which we get at Moody's. Eastman follows one young woman in a pickup, who turns out to be a Bowdoin student on her way to class, and she doesn't seem to mind that two old guys are on her trail. As it happens, she knows Eastman through dances in Rockport. She's an island girl from North Haven. Long time since I was party to a prowl, and I suspect my embarrassment showed. When I saw her glance down at her chest, I realized that my companion wasn't as shy. Unlike Mark, whose bumbling reticence seems to attract women, Eastman's wired competence and outfront attitude presents a different polarity. I'm glad I'm not a single guy in my forties.

My pilot is a very casual driver. He runs red lights pro forma, wanders from lane to lane, and takes curves so wide we ride up on the snowbanks. Maybe rails are a good idea. We go a long way round to Bowdoinham so Eastman can check out a lady he knows at her job site, but she's home with a sick kid. "A longshot, anyhow," he says. With his enthusiastic boyish face, under his high bald dome, this master craftsman is a study in contrasts. He's good at everything but relationships. Except with other fictional characters.

While we have lunch at Jeanine's, he leaves Brownie tethered to the van at the town landing, howling at his master's absence. The chowder was great.