Stories from the past roads

Stories from the road

July 2, 2015

Sunday River, Maine

It was cold and rainy this morning at 6:00 AM. Visibility was very limited, when I looked out the window of Phyllis’s house. The weather people said everything would clear up by 8:00 AM, and they were right, as we drove off toward Camden is beautiful sunshine.

We stopped for a blueberry muffin and coffee in Camden and then drove to Cushing, Maine to find the Olson home, made famous by Andrew Wyeth’s painting, “Christina’s World.” Apparently Christina’s father arrived in the area as a sailor from a Scandinavian country. He fell ill and couldn’t return to the ship, which left without him. He built a house high on a hill and lived with his wife and two children, Alvaro and Christina.

Andrew Wyeth lived in Cushing and befriended the Olsons. He used Christina as a model, and she appears in a number of his paintings. It was exciting to drive up to the Olson home in an isolated part of Cushing. No one was there as we took pictures. I noticed a small cemetery at the end of a field overlooking a salt-water inlet, and we decided to walk the several hundred yards to take a look at it.  Halfway there an SUV drove up. It stopped, and we saw that the driver was a young woman of perhaps twenty-two years of age. We had noticed tents in the field suggesting a wedding. We asked the woman who was getting married, and she said, “It is me, I am the bride.”  She was marrying a lobster fisherman on Saturday.

I asked her if her family owned the land. She said, “No Betsy let me use it.” I said Betsy who”, and she replied, “Betsy Wyeth,” Andrew’s wife, who was in her eighties. Further conversation revealed that her great aunt was Christina Olson, the woman made famous by Andrew Wyeth.

Before driving away she asked us to keep an eye open for her chocolate lab, which had run off into the woods. We told her we would and started walking toward the cemetery. The cemetery had perhaps fifteen or twenty gravestones at most, and was totally open in a small grove of trees. The ocean spread out below. I looked at the first gravestone and was shocked to read, “Andrew Wyeth”. I walked further and saw the grave of Christina, her brother, and her parents.  No one else was but the three of us in this place.

As we walked away, the chocolate lab came bounding from the woods, and chased his mistress’s SUV, which had returned to the field. I wished her well as we drove away from the Olson home on our way to Sunday River, where we would be spending the next three nights.