Oh, I am so proud of the right sidebar at Gene & Clara's. Just look at all that great stuff. "Happening Recently Enough in Argyle, New York" is set just above the clickable list of labels. Right now we feature a painting by Tom Thomson.
Algonquin country, now Ontario's Algonquin Provincial Park, was his stamping ground. His best paintings date from 1914-1917.
I was there, in Algonquin, on a canoe trip, in July 1969. In a place that looked a lot like that (except for the snow) I looked up at the moon, where the crew of Apollo 11 were making the first landing.
Bit of a loner Thomson was, perhaps a bit of a misfit, and his death while out in a canoe on his favorite waters remains a mystery.
2 comments:
What did you think of the moon landing at the time?
Hi Andrew -
"Of all the weeks in all the summers of all my life, this week when I am in the wilderness has to be the one when Americans make first lunar landfall."
I really did stand there on one of those islands, looking up at the moon and thinking about what was happening. When I was done being annoyed at missing the live television broadcast, I forgot all complaints and just stayed excited about the future. Like the guy who stayed in the orbiter on that mission while the others landed, I figured we would be back again soon; we would start construction on the first moon base within a few months; my only problem would be how to get paid to go rather than pay to be a tourist.
The very next month, August 1969, was Woodstock. That shambles was an overture, a perfectly emblematic and descriptive overture, to the coming Decade of Disaster.
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