I capture landscapes, travel, and street scenes with a focus on place, light, and the quiet moments that often go unnoticed. Select Limited Edition Fine Art prints produced with museum quality papers and ink are available in common sizes from 11 X 14 up to 40 X 80!
At first glance it is a person, bent beneath an unseen weight. Look longer and it becomes the landscape itself—thousands of Maine stones, rounded and soften by the North Atlantic, gathered into a human form. Created by Biddeford native Celeste Roberge, Rising Cairn reminds us that we carry the places we come from, one stone at a time.
The skiff waited below the pier as the last light settled over Cape Porpoise. Beyond the harbor, lobster boats rested at their moorings, ready for another tide. The village had grown quiet. The bait sheds were closed. The gulls had little left to argue about.
The boat wore its scars without complaint. Salt, sun, and hard seasons had stripped away the paint but not its purpose.
Tomorrow, before dawn, it would leave the harbor again. In the fishing village of Cape Porpoise, that is how summer has always begun.
*Numbered Limited Edition Fine Art prints of this photograph are available for your collection.
It was a good car. Heavy in the fenders and clean in the back, the way a fastback coupe ought to be. When you sat in the driver’s seat, you knew exactly what you had. The clutch was firm, and the 346-cubic-inch L-head V-8 didn’t shout; it just worked.
It idled with the steady, quiet breathing of a seasoned horse in the morning. Fortunately the red pegasus signs were a highway staple in ’42.
By the Summer, America was on the brink of change, and the shiny bits—the chrome, the brightwork—were going away. But the metal beneath remained honest. It handled the winding mountain roads with a quiet, dependable grace, holding the curve and taking the bumps without any fuss.
It was a true machine, built to travel the long road when the weather was clear and a man had somewhere to go.
The day does not ask what happened yesterday.
It comes anyway.
This morning the sky over Fortunes Rocks in Biddeford, Maine wore the color of distant fires. Smoke from another country painted Maine in soft shades of pink. It should have felt unsettling. Instead, it brought a quiet the beach has always understood.
The tide was out. The sand held the light. The ocean kept its own counsel.
After the weight this city carried on Monday of this week, there was comfort in knowing the sun still found its way through the haze. Sometimes peace arrives from unexpected places. Sometimes it is enough to stand still, breathe the salt air, and remember that even wounded sky’s can give us something beautiful.
The tide had gone, leaving bare mud flats to the early morning. In the distance Stage Island waited for seagulls and curious tourists from away, unchanged by another sunrise.
The light burned through smoke and clouds, dim enough to make the world feel older than it was this July morning. It touched the dark wet sand like a beacon of promise before fading into silence.
Some mornings ask nothing of you but to wait out the rain, stand still and listen for the gulls.
The bridge has carried trains for more than a century. Steel and stone do not remember the men who built them, but they remember the weight.
Every summer, boys came here with fishing poles and pockets full of worms and lures. They caught perch, bass, and stories. They stood on the timber ties and looked into the dark water where the Saco River moved without hurry.
Sometimes a dare was worth more than good judgment.
One boy would climb the rail. The others would shout. Then he would jump because boys believe they cannot die. They only believe they have something to prove. The river took him without ceremony and gave him back if it wished.
Around here, people spoke of the Saco River with respect. Every family, from both sides of the river, knew someone who had been lost to its currents. Every generation added another name. They called it the river’s curse. Legend held that after a young Native family drowned, allegedly at the hands of early settlers, the river never stopped collecting more than fish.
The trains still cross.
The river still waits below.
The midway always looked like hope before it looked like business. They always do. Dreams begin with hope.
Children waited at the ticket booth with the patience only children possess. Parents counted bills and watched the sky. The smell of strawberries, fried dough, and fresh-cut grass drifted across the fairgrounds while a local band played and the magician delighted another crowd.
The rides, mazes, and bouncy castles made promises only summer can make. By midafternoon the shortcake tent was out of cream, then out of strawberries. Soon the tickets would be gone, the vendors would pack up, and the music would fade.
But for one Saturday in late June, none of that mattered. Neighbors gathered after another long Maine winter. Children laughed. Old friends talked. The memories would last long after the last strawberry was gone.
The iron rusts where the snow once lay deep. A T-bar, the summit wheel of the old chairlift, and a few heavy grooming rollers are all that remain of Big A. The mountain is still there. It simply has different stories to tell now.
For me, one of those stories began in 1972 or so, when I first strapped on a pair of borrowed skis at Big A on Mount Agamenticus. Like so many southern Maine kids, it was where winter became adventure.
Big A opened in 1964 with ambitions that reached beyond its modest summit. Complete with a chairlift, T-bars, snowmaking, night skiing, and a bustling lodge, it became the place where generations learned to ski. But the challenges of coastal Maine winters and rising operating costs proved too much, and after the 1974–75 season, the lifts stopped turning. The mountain would eventually become the treasured conservation area it is today.
Whenever I come across these rusting pieces of steel, I don’t just see the remains of a ski area. I see a cold Sunday afternoons with my friends Ben and Ray, riding the T-bar to the top, laughing more than skiing, and learning lessons that had little to do with carving turns. Those afternoons seemed ordinary at the time. Looking back, they were anything but.
Sometimes history doesn’t disappear. It simply rusts in the woods, waiting for someone who remembers.
Leaving the Chowder House after lunch with an old friend, Goat Island appeared, low and white against the blue water. The lighthouse stood as it always had, plain and useful. There was nothing grand about it. It did its work.
The channel wound through the sand flats like a river that had forgotten where it belonged. The mud showed dark along the edges. Gulls picked at it and called to one another. Their voices carried across the harbor in the clean June air.
The fishing boats waited for the tide. Some leaned a little. Others rested flat on the bottom. They looked patient. Fishermen learn patience whether they want to or not.
We had known each other a long time. Long enough that silence was easy. We watched the harbor without needing to explain it.
Across the water the island keeper’s house and the light caught the sun. The white walls were bright against the sea. Beyond them was open ocean and the horizon, hard and straight.
The harbor smelled of salt, bait, diesel fuel and seaweed drying in the sun. It was the smell of work. Men would be out again when the tide returned. Lobster traps would be hauled. Lines would be tended. The day would continue as it always had.
We stood there a while longer and watched the water move slowly back toward the sea. It was a good day. The kind of day that asks nothing from a man except that he be there to see it.
The rain settles into the stone and darkens it. Water gathers beneath the statue’s chin and falls slowly into the garden below.
The face of old St. Francis is worn smooth in places, eaten rough in others by years of Maine weather and harder winters.
Moss holds to the cracks like natures glue. The leaves of the rhododendron behind it stay green and alive while the statue endures the changing of another season.
It bows its head as though listen to something long gone. No one had carved sorrow into the face, but time as placed it there anyway.
B.A.Neveux Photography 