BATTLE ON THE HIGH SEAS

When I was a young boy in Ashland, Massachusetts, located about 25 miles west of Boston, there was a vacant wooded lot that would flood every spring and fall. Nearby there was a dairy farm with pastures that the farmer used to let his cows graze in. In this part of New England people used oil to heat their homes.  To contain that oil were used steel tanks. So the farmers would cut those tanks in two and use each half as watering troughs for the cows.

Now being the adventurous lads we were, we would carry off, take without permission, abscond, steal, a few of these tanks and use them as boats, for they would float quite well. Then with long branches as oars we would stage battles on the high seas. It was a great deal of fun.

This art was taken from memory and painted using a technique called pointillism which uses the tip of the brush and puts those dotted colors juxtaposed like pixels on a TV to generate the illusion of other colors, hues, and shades.

We played as children, not so much as I have observed children of today play in Mount Lebanon.  We had adventures.   In the small town that I grew up in, Ashland in Massachusetts, at the time there were numerous dairy farms.   One such farm was named Whitney Beef.  It bordered the woods that started at the top of my street and ran all the way to Route 126.  As children we used to steal the watering troughs for the cows.  These troughs littered pastures.   We stole them to use as boats.  The watering troughs were simply steel oil tanks cut-welded in half.   Most people heated their homes by burning heating-oil, so these tanks were in abundance.  We would drag the steel half-tanks to any body of water that was navigable.  The painting draws from my memory one such woodland pond at the top of my street.   We would use wooden poles to propel these craft into one another.   We would rock the round bottomed vessels to make great waves.   And I, along with my German Shepherd dog would return home covered in mud and the smell of swamp.   Another thing, our neighborhood was populated with German Shepherds.   There were no leash-laws back then.  Kids my age on our street had a constant companion, a guardian, a therapist who listened, and a creature that gave unlimited unconditional love, all embodied in grey fur and two pointy ears.   Parents today should give that a bit of thought.  Our mailman too had a Collie.  He would drive down the street putting mail in each perspective box.   He also had with him a box filled with dog biscuits.  His Collie was very well behaved and as he drove to each stop sitting equally behaved and expectantly would be a German Shepherd.