Cap Lumiere Looking North (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

23 August finds us at Cap Lumiere, New Brunswick.  Our trailer is parked at the end of the road, but a grassy track continues along a ridge of old dunes parallel to the beach, at least a kilometre along the sandy spit, toward the mouth of the salt marsh which is three kilometres further on.

We camped were here in 1976 and '77, and are pleased to find it much the same as it was then.  I haven't been out to the salt marsh yet, but I've gone into the wind-sculpted "krumholtz" forest that shows darkly on the left of my view this evening, and glimpsed the bog behind it.  All four habitats, beach, salt marsh, forest, and bog, grade into one another in classic simplicity, and I described and drew the beautiful pattern of it in my first book Canadian Nature Notebook (Wild Habitats in the US) published in 1979.

The salty air is soft and sweet, smelling like home to me and I hear the rhythmic 'breathing' of the sea along the beach.  Frank Ross painted a stormy watercolour right here thrity three years ago, and I see the same clouds pressing against the krumholtz, but this evening there's a ribbon of pink below them and blue sky above with splendid mackerel clouds, and as I sit by the crest of the grassy dunes to paint, the colours all become more rich and vivid, like the crescendo of a symphony.