The Rower

Does Nature need us to be complete? One artist in a rowboat thought so. No, not that one.

Straight off the bow of the Little Dipper, silhouetted against the sun just now pillaring through the clouds up the North Channel: a rowboat, the cadence of the oars flashing like wingbeats. I throttle back, both to slacken my wake out of respect for the rower and because my mind is somewhere else. Even though I know it is July of 2023 in the Apostle Islands and the rower in front of me is my friend and artist Dale Whittaker in his new and as of yet unnamed rowing rig, my mind is scrolling back to another time and place, another rowboat, another artist, and the origins of my own search for a sense of place among these islands.

“Self-Portrait while Rowing” (Walter Anderson 1903-1965)

Horn Island is a thin brushstroke of sand and grass, 10 miles long, less than a mile wide and barely 20 feet above the high tideline at its peak. It sits twelve miles off-shore of Ocean City, Mississippi and is now a part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. I’ve often thought that it could easily be slipped in to the constellation of the Apostle Islands and seem right at home. But that is just the beginning of the connections.

In the 1950’s and early 60’s, a prolific, visionary, and fiercely-independent artist named Walter Anderson sought refuge from the world and a deep “realization” of his place in nature on Horn Island. Dubbed the “Hermit of Horn Island,” Anderson could often be seen festooned with a ratty old Fedora silhouetted against the setting sun, rowing his tiny, salvaged rowboat into the gathering darkness, refusing lifts from passing fishermen, taking up to six hours to make the 12 mile crossing to the island.

(Horn Island - Walter Anderson 1903-1965)

Anderson often called his trips to Horn Island “going home” even though he had a “home” complete with a wife and children that he left behind on shore. Once on the island, the artist would enter a state of reverie, pacing the beaches, crawling on his hands and knees through the mud, working feverishly to capture the ever-changing island light in hundred of watercolors. It consumed him, the island light, this contact with nature on his own terms. It was, to him, a “physical craving, like hunger or sex, a necessity, a burning,” he once said.

Anderson would work himself to exhaustion, creating painting after painting on flapping sheets of typing paper — vibrant, frenetic, colorful beachscapes, waves, birdlife, sea creatures, vegetation, nothing escaped his artistic eye and flashing brush strokes — and then scrounge whatever food he could before crawling off to sleep under his overturned boat only to wake and do it all again for weeks at a time.

It was, however, not all bursts of color and artistic reverie. Horn Island has its perils — fierce winds, prickly wildlife, swarming insects, scorching heat — and in the course of his almost euphoric episodes, Anderson would be subject to nearly all of them. Once, reaching for a bird nest to get a better view he was bitten by a cottonmouth and was near death when he was rescued by a pair of passing boaters. On his final trip to the island in 1965 Anderson, barely, survived what became known as Hurricane Betsy (the first $1 billion storm in the U.S.) and even then would not leave despite the pleas of his worried family relayed through the Coast Guard sent to “rescue” him from the storm-ravaged island.

Despite the perils, I was drawn to the story of Walter Anderson not just for the simplicity of living under an overturned boat, the freedom of pursuing the bursts of creativity unfettered by the outside world, but for his unique and thought-provoking vision of the role of an artist in the natural world. “Order is here,” he said of his wilderness island, “but it needs realizing.” Nature, in Anderson’s view, was somehow incomplete without an artist to “realize” it and “… needs only to be observed and appreciated.” Further, he believed that incomplete natural world is “only too glad to have assistance in establishing order.” It was the strength of his belief that it was his duty to be that artist that drove Walter Anderson to such life-threatening extremes.

The idea intrigued me. Photographer Ansel Adams, working at much the same time, would say something of the same thing, although not going as far as Anderson: “There are no forms in nature,” Adams wrote. “Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos.” Yet Adams was discussing compositional elements at the time and stopped well short of suggesting an artist somehow completes an otherwise incomplete nature with their work.

It is enticing to think that an artist is somehow vital to the natural world but over they years I’ve come to reject, for the most part, that idea in my own work. I am a witnesses to nature. The connection artists create with the landscape may well bring forth emotions in the other humans who view it but I do not believe that nature itself is gladdened by my work. Nature doesn’t need us, in my view. It is we who need nature, both in a physical and emotional sense. We need to feel like we belong. It is we who reach out to nature, not the other way around. It is we who should be “only too glad” to have that connection with the world around us. It is nature which complete us.

Yet the tools Anderson used in striving to develop a relationship with his surroundings on Horn Island, particularly seeking out direct physical contact, his insistence on solitude, and his detailed observations, were the same tools I have looked for in my desire to know the Apostle Islands. He studied the patterns on the legs of the hermit crab through a magnifying glass, waded eye-deep in the marsh to discover that “a bullrush is just wide enough for a little green frog to get on the other side of and have one eye on each edge, so that he is completely hidden except for his own eyes.” He wrote of, felt, and perhaps most importantly painted, that sense of wonder, surprise, and amazement at those fleeting moments when the seeming chaos of the world around us falls suddenly into alignment like a twist of the kaleidoscope of meaning and insight and we “see.”

Walter Anderson has been called the “John Muir of the Gulf Coast” and the “Henry Thoreau of the South.” I would not go that far, for a myriad of reasons. He was, however, a brilliant, troubled, self-absorbed, and fiercely-independent artist who, at great cost to himself and others, passionately pursued his vision. In his little rowboat and on his wild island, he caught glimpses of the kind of a sense of place that few of us ever know and pinned them to paper in his paintings, drawings, sketches, and writings. The passion of his pursuit has long inspired my own desire to look closely, think deeply, and build a relationship with my chosen place in the world, these islands. I can never see a Walter Anderson painting or a rowboat on the horizon, without feeling again the sweet pangs of that desire for connection welling up inside me.

It is exactly those pangs that course through me again as I slow the Little Dipper to idle and drift close to Dale in his rowboat for a quick “hello.” Still tangled in thoughts of Walter Anderson and Horn Island, I half expect Dale to be wearing a fedora, an artist, in a rowboat, among the islands, dreaming.

— to see more of Walter Anderson’s work, visit the website of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art by clicking the button below:

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