This fisherman’s truck and boat trailer were in a priority parking space at Naskeag Harbor on Tuesday (August 18).
These vehicles are fairly typical of those that you’ll see scattered around that Harbor and other small fishing ports around here that don’t have the facilities to tie up small boats that take fishermen (male and female) to their vessels.
Usually, the fishermen come to our Harbor in trucks or other vehicles that pull a small outboard motored boat on a trailer; the trailer is backed into the water; the boat floated off; the fishermen climb into the boat, and motor out to their fishing vessel. The process is reversed when they come ashore.
Seeing this truck “in nature” provoked a strange thought and a little unreliable research relating to painters who are famous for portraying fishermen and their environment, from Winslow Homer, to Marsden Hartley, to the present generation. I couldn’t find in their works any portrayals of vehicles used by fishermen to get to their boats and come back home after work, except maybe one painting.
That possible exception was a painting by the self-taught Mainer Philip Barter titled “West Bros. Lobster Co.” It showed many things on and near the named Company’s pier at which a fishing vessel was off-loading fish. Nearby, there was an old truck filled with old-fashioned wooden lobster traps.
Perhaps many artists consider such things as trucks distractions from the beauty of the coast or maybe they’re too hard to portray, but they certainly are not out of place in reality. (Brooklin, Maine)