Teabowls and garlic keepers in Wellfleet

The OysterFest in Wellfleet last weekend happened on two sunny fall days, which were also windy fall days. Much time on Saturday was spent keeping one hand on the tent to keep it from flying off into the ocean or town hall or Main Street, or somewhere. Forty-five pound weights on each corner of the tent weren't quite enough for a couple of the gusts. Wellfleet always seems windy that time of year, what with Cape Cod Bay on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.

It was again a crushing crowd of people, many of them buyers on Saturday, which is usually the better sales day of the two. Once again, certain pots got picked up and put down perhaps a hundred times each. I've got this one crackle-slipped and kaki-glazed mug that I swear is going to be worn out by lookers and never bought. I've still got it in my gallery. The same is true of certain serving bowls that were up near the front of the display. Look at serving bowl, pick up serving bowl, turn over serving bowl and look at the foot ring, put back serving bowl, walk on ...

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out habits like that. Some people seem to be driven to simply touch pots on their way by. That happened a lot with a pair of big vases at the front of the tent.

The more gratifying people are the ones who come in quietly and spend 10 or 15 minutes going from pot to pot, picking them up, holding them in two hands, trying them out. Those folks usually buy. Or they talk about what they're doing. One young woman said to me, after picking up about a dozen mugs, "I just have to touch them all." She eventually bought two mugs.

Two people - a man from New York Saturday, then on Sunday a Japanese woman from Harwich here on the Cape - picked up small teabowls, cradling them in two hands, lifting them toward their mouths. Clearly, I thought, tea ceremony people. And that was indeed true. The man bought a rough, faceted and Shino-glazed bowl that came out of the last firing. The woman spent a long time picking up small white bowls and then talking with me about her preference in teabowls and the customs of tea ceremony. She didn't buy a pot in the end, but will come here to look at more. Those are the kind of people who make selling pots a satisfying experience.

And then there was a small woman with an "OysterFest Volunteer" sticker on her sweather.

"Do you have any garlic keepers?" she asked.

"No, I'm sorry, in all these 150 pots there is not a single garlic keeper."

"Well, there's one at a pottery booth in the other parking lot."

"Why didn't you buy that one?"

"I didn't want to pay what he wanted for it."

"How much did he want?"

"$36."

"Well ... I'll tell you, there's a lot of work that goes into hand-making a garlic keeper."

"I know, but there's less discretionary income among people these days."

"That's right, and it's true of potters, too."

"Do you have fun at what you're doing?"

"Yes, to a certain extent, but I have to sell these pots, also."

"I know, I know ... "

It wasn't a pleasant conversation. And it came on Sunday at about noon, by which time I'd been in my tent three hours, watched people by the dozens walk by and had yet to sell a pot. So I wasn't ready to tsk-tsk the price of some other guy's garlic keeper. I told her she should try WalMart, that perhaps they had figured out how to make a dime profit on $5 Chinese garlic keepers.

"I don't think WalMart carries them," she said, completely missing the irony in that sentence.

Probably a good thing it was the last craft show of the season.

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And thanks here to fellow potter Lois Hirshberg, who owns a house in Wellfleet and put me up in a spare bedroom Friday and Saturday nights, sparing me very early rising Saturday and the battle through OysterFest traffic to get home Saturday night and return Sunday morning. Oh, and Lois also bought me the best fried clams I've had in years, from the Arnold's seafood stand at the lower end of the parking lot.

Leave the beach, come to the oysters

Saturday and Sunday, the little town of Wellfleet, way down-Cape near Eastham and Truro, will be filled with people chasing the wily bivalve. The OysterFest is in town, complete with shucking contests, music, lots of good seafood, decent beer, and many, many people like me selling things we more or less make with our hands.

Come on down.

Weather predictions vary a bit, but most seem to agree it will be windy. We've been warned by the powers that be to bring our tent weights. I go nowhere without them. It appeared for a while this week that we might get rain, but at the moment predictions are for sun. It's a lovely little town, with good restaurants and bars, and on this weekend with about 20,000 people squeezed into a space big enough for about a tenth that number. Never mind, though, it's a fun event and usually a good one for the vendors. The last gasp of "summer," so to speak.

So, do come if you're in the neighborhood.

As to the photo ... well, actually, it was shot in North Carolina last fall, between rain storms, but I'm guessing you could find a dozen or so places on the Atlantic beach near Wellfleet that would look exactly like that.

It's not all travelogue ...

I know, the last post was all about being a tourist and nothing about pots. So in the lead photo today are three soda-glazed teabowls from a firing two weeks ago at the Harvard ceramics facility in Boston. I fired there a few months ago, but didn't get everything into the load. So Crystal Ribich, the woman in charge of the workshop, got the last half-dozen of my pots in this month.

Nice results, I thought. Better than the first firing, which I think (and Crystal thinks) was a bit too tightly packed to let the atmosphere circulate as it should. These bowls showed much more of the effects of soda injection. These pots and a few hundred more will be with me at the Wellfleet OysterFest this weekend. Come to Wellfleet for the last celebration of the season, for good beer and many, many good oysters. It's a great weekend in the little town way down-Cape.

The past few days have been summer redux here, with temperatures in or near the 80s, bright sunshine and little wind. This is the kind of weather we hope for when the tourists have gone home and left the place to us. We got two good days of clamming in last Saturday and Sunday, paddling out to the clam flats each day. Then on Monday, Mike and Tammy called and Dee and joined them in paddling around Tobey Island in Bourne. Brilliant weather, flat seas, clear water in the rocks at the edge of Buzzards Bay. The cormorants were all over the rocks about 100 yards offshore. Potter Mark Heywood of Whynot Pottery will recognize the place where he clammed with us back in September.

And the habanero peppers are still coming in by the half-dozen from the garden. This handful is probably a year's supply of the hot little seedpods.

A few days far away ...

Dee and I drove to Down East Maine last week ... almost as far Down East as one can go, 450 miles to the 1,400-or-thereabouts-population town of Lubec.

The fishing town lies just over the bridge from the Canadian island of Campobello, also a maritime community. Dee's brother Jim lives in Lubec and we wanted to visit him and his partner Marilyn. Jim's not been well lately, so we wanted to catch up with him and with the town we last visited about 30 years ago.

Lubec is an end-of-the-road community. That is, it looks like most people got off the highway before the highway reached the town. The place has had a summer renaissance of a sort in the past several years, with a music school, a few good bed-and-breakfast inns (we stayed at The Peacock House and heartily recommend it and its owners Sue and Dennis Baker) and some renovated homes turned into summer cottages, but it still has the look of an old and worn New England memory. Civil war monument, hardscrabble waterfront fish piers and warehouses, one bar, restaurants that close for the year by the end of October, churches with congregations of a dozen on rainy October Sundays. It's not the kind of place where a visitor can find a New York Times. And probably that's a good thing.

Visitors are drawn by the remoteness of it all, the empty beaches and cold water, the seals in the channel between Lubec and the island and the bald eagles above, and some no doubt come for the preserved summer home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt on Campobello.

We came to see Jim and Marilyn in the old wood-frame house on Crow's Neck Road that Jim bought back in the '70s. He's made himself a life in the woods and on the water for more than 35 years, growing all his own vegetables, digging clams for consumption and for the market, working as a dependable framer and roofer on whatever carpentry job came his way. (Before he moved to Maine, Jim worked on my uncle Roger's carpentry crew on Martha's Vineyard and learned much of what he knows of basic house-building from my father, Paul Engley.)

We spent several hours of two days drinking coffee and talking with Jim and Marilyn. We drove often to Campobello (bring your passport), where we toured the Roosevelt home and drove the wet and empty roads. Dee went to the little Anglican church there on Sunday, while I drove to the vast crescent of black sand beach at Herring Cove and photographed rocks.

It was not a pottery vacation. We passed several potteries along Coastal Route 1, but communing with clay was confined to drinking from some of my old mugs at Jim's.

We took two days to come home, stopping for smoked fish at Capt. Vinny's in Lubec and then with Dee's uncle and aunt, Charles and Mary Dorchester, in Kenduskeag for a night of fish chowder and stories.

It's good to be home and back in the studio.

Photos: Marilyn, Jim and Dee; the Catholic church across from the Peacock House (Mass on Saturday afternoons); several wet rocks from Herring Cove.

A Shino-heavy firing ...

I squeezed in a firing yesterday, a couple of days before we head to Maine for a brief visit. I need more pots for the Wellfleet OysterFest show Oct. 15-16, and I wanted a few more squared bottles, a bunch of serving bowls and more mugs.

I was careful to keep the temperature to only a bit more than cone 10. Things got away from me a couple of weeks ago and I produced a record amount of ash glaze running off the pots. This firing was heavy on Shinos, which I know won't run. And things worked out pretty well. I'll post some photos. All for now.

Except ... let me give you some sizes for these pots. The shallow bowls at top are about six inches across, more or less; the vase with the finger swipes is about ten inches tall; the larger serving bowls are about nine inches across; and the taller bottles are perhaps eight to nine inches tall.

Damp, damp, damp ...

I swear, the small low bowls I threw 48 hours ago are still more or less as wet as they were on Thursday. And the brown stoneware and B-Mix mugs are still way more damp than they should be after three days of sitting out in the studio. It's been a warm, wet and humid week here on Cape Cod, after a cool weekend. My plan is to fire next week, probably Wednesday, but the chances of that happening are reduced with every passing hour of rain and/or humidity.

Whine, whine, whine ... I'm trying to get a fresh batch of serving bowls, squared bottles and mugs for the Wellfleet OysterFest show in mid-October and thought I'd have them fired weeks ahead. Think again ...

The top photo is of the big pan of paella we cooked one night last week when Meredith and Mark Heywood were visiting from North Carolina and our friends Henry and Louise were here from the UK. A great gathering of friends, with really good food.

Competing with Fairy Princess Halos ...

Well ... not really competing. I'm guessing that the young parents with little girls who seemed to swarm around the display of beribboned haloes at the Harwich Cranberry Festival last weekend would be unlikely to also go for a layered Shino teabowl. Just a guess on my part ...

It was a bit dismaying to be on the same aisle as the haloes when I set up Saturday, but I grew to appreciate the diversion of seeing little girls try on the ribbons and then march off through the craft fair with them. And, to be completely fair, these items were personally made (along with stuffed frogs and magic wands) by the women in the booth. I saw them making them as the show went on.

The pottery buyers found me, though, and it was a pretty good show on a cool but pretty Cape Cod weekend. I sold some good pots and made some money, which is a large part of the whole point. I continue to be fascinated by the things people touch when they come into my booth. There were six chowder or chile bowls on one table, and a hundred people over the two days must have picked up the bowls and showed them to a wife or husband or significant other. No one ... that is, not one person ... bought one. On the mug shelf, one Shino mug and one crackle-slip-amber-glaze mug were handled an equal number of times. I still have both. It's remarkable how people in a crowd seem to latch onto one or two things as visually interesting, but not something they want to purchase. I don't get it.

But many other things found new homes, including some very nice layered Shino pots. Who knew you could sell crackled and crawled Shino on Cape Cod? Next up, in mid-October, the last show of the season - the Wellfleet OysterFest.

Photos: One boy, with a bacon-and-egg skull and bones shirt, who did not go for the Fairy Princess Haloes; four funky squared Shino bottles, two of which found buyers; much handled but not purchased mugs; ditto on the chowder bowls.