(Mystic, CT, February 27, 2018) – The world-famous Budweiser Clydesdales, the symbol of quality and tradition for Anheuser-Busch since 1933, are scheduled to be at Mystic Seaport March 22-25, in conjunction with the Mystic Irish Parade.
The horses will be housed in a special stable on the Museum’s Village Green, and will be available for public viewing during regular Museum hours. On March 22-25, children ages 13 and younger will be admitted free to the museum. Visit https://mysticseaport.wpengine.com/ for more information on the Clydesdales at the Museum.
The eight-horse team will be harnessed and hitched to the famous red beer wagon at the Museum on Saturday, March 24, and will walk the Museum grounds for a period of time, including making a beer delivery at Schaefer’s Spouter Tavern. Visit https://mysticseaport.wpengine.com/ for that schedule. On Sunday, March 25, the “Gentle Giants,” as they are often called, will participate in the Mystic Irish Parade, which steps off from the north parking lot at Mystic Seaport at 1 p.m.
The Clydesdales’ appearance in Mystic is one of hundreds made annually by the traveling hitches. Canadians of Scottish descent brought the first Clydesdales to America in the mid-1800s. Today, the giant draft horses are used primarily for breeding and show.
Horses chosen for the Budweiser Clydesdale hitch must be at least 3 years of age, stand approximately 18 hands – or six feet – at the shoulder, weigh an average of 2,000 pounds, must be bay in color, have four white legs, and a blaze of white on the face and black mane and tail. A gentle temperament is very important as hitch horses meet millions of people each year.
A single Clydesdale hitch horse will consume as much as 20-25 quarts of feed, 40-50 pounds of hay and 30 gallons of water per day.
About Mystic Seaport
Mystic Seaport is the nation’s leading maritime museum. Founded in 1929, the Museum is home to four National Historic Landmark vessels, including the Charles W. Morgan, America’s oldest commercial ship and the last wooden whaleship in the world. The Museum’s collection of more than two million artifacts includes more than 500 historic vessels and one of the largest collections of maritime photography in the country. The Thompson Exhibition Building provides a state-of-the-art gallery to host compelling, world-class exhibitions, including Murmur: Arctic Realities, which opened January 20, 2018. The Collections Research Center at Mystic Seaport provides scholars and researchers from around the world access to the Museum’s renowned archives. Mystic Seaport is located one mile south of Exit 90 off I-95 in Mystic, CT. For more information, please visit https://mysticseaport.wpengine.com/ and follow Mystic Seaport on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
His sculptures, for example, are massive. They don’t weigh just pounds, they weigh tons. They can be hundreds of feet long, or tall. They can made from wood salvaged from a 115-year-old schooner, or harvested from a long-dead forest in southeastern Alaska. They can be created to last forever, or to be eaten by termites.
And so it makes sense that Grade, who lives in Seattle, would eventually find his way to Alaska. Three years ago he was invited by Anchorage Museum to join its Polar Lab program, an immersion-type residency that would bring an international variety of artists to Alaska to be educated and inspired and then to create. His initial idea (again, extreme) was to find the northern-most tree in the U.S. It was to go along with the oldest tree (4,000 years old and atop an 11,000-foot mountain in Nevada) and the most banal (a hemlock in the Cascade range in Washington state).
After doing research and talking to Inuit hunters, he narrowed down the location. He and his wife Maria were dropped by a plane in Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve. They rafted about 100 miles down the Noatak River, and then hiked to find the tree. And there it was. The old Inuit hunter had told him “There will be a tree where it shouldn’t be” and that was, in fact, the case. The 18-foot tall poplar was easy to spot because, Grade notes, nothing on the tundra grows taller than about a couple feet.
There was also, as the hunter warned there could be, a grizzly bear at the tree, using it as a scratching post. They had to wait about 24 hours before that bear had every itch scratched, and left the area. When they got closer, Grade saw that the bark of the tree was coated in beautiful, thick, cinnamon-colored bear fur.
Once they were bear free, Grade laid plastic all around the base of the trunk, and then covered the tree in tin foil so he could make a plaster mold of it. When the mold was hardened, he broke it into pieces that would fit in the raft, and brought it home to create the third piece of his oldest-most northern- most banal tree concept. That project is still ongoing in his Seattle studio, one of 12 pieces he is working on simultaneously.
What’s that? A pingo.
While they were trekking to the tree, Grade said he noticed these large earthen mounds randomly poking up across the
John Grade on “his” pingo in Alaska.
tundra. “I was curious,” Grade said. “They were pingos (pingo means “small hill” in Inuvialuktun). I wanted to learn more about them. They are so old, and so slow growing, and outside of the Inuit people, few people know about them.”
Pingos occur where the ground remains frozen for years at a time, in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia. There are two types — an open-system pingo occurs when artesian water pushes up near the surface and freezes into an ice lens that forces the topsoil upward as it continues to grow. A closed-system pingo occurs when a former lakebed or dry river channel refreezes and develops a pressurized ice lens that pushes on the tundra. Most pingos along the lower Noatak River are closed-system pingos. Over centuries, pingos may grow as large as 2,000 feet across and 180 feet tall.
“I knew I wanted to work with a pingo very directly,” Grade says. “I wanted to marry what I studied empirically with what I experienced personally. They are two very different things.”
He found a pair of scientists who are inventorying pingos, and they shared aerial photos of hundreds of them with him. There was one particular pingo in this inventory that Grade was particularly drawn to, and he made it the background photo for his computer monitor so he could look at it often.
Then back he went to Noatak Preserve, this time by helicopter, which allowed him to spend time over various pingos, getting a deep “bird’s eye view” of each one, and its relationship to the landscape around it. He mapped the area using photogrammetry, which is the science of making measurements from photographs, especially for recovering the exact positions of surface points. Grade’s goal was to determine which pingo he found most compelling, to use as the basis for his sculpture.
He discovered later, back in Seattle, that the one he chose was the same one that served as his computer desktop photo. He liked this pingo because it was “a little off kilter at the top. It spoke to me. Is it growing? Is it collapsing? Is it somewhere in between? Sometimes they have foliage on them but this one was relatively bare. It was compelling.”
The pingo, from memory
As soon as he was back in the studio, Grade re-created the pingo from memory. He wanted to be able to combine his personal recollection of the area with the categorical information he had from his photogrammetry. “I didn’t want to make a piece of science,” he said. “It’s historic, it’s a barometer of time, it’s a measurement of this landscape in time. But it’s more than that. It’s so slow. I wanted to juxtapose that with a murmuration of birds, which is so fleeting. That was an ‘a ha’ moment for me. In the Arctic there are these strange topographical shifts, the tussocks, the bog. You can really only see these differences from a bird’s perspective.”
“Murmur: Arctic Realities” by John Grade. Andy Price/Mystic Seaport photo
And so Murmur: Arctic Realities began to take shape in his mind, and in his studio. He assembled a team of 20 who worked straight through for five months to make a deadline for the debut exhibition at Mystic Seaport. It involves carved Alaskan yellow cedar, fabricated steel, computer assisted design, computer programming to make it move, hydraulics and pneumatics and an air compressor to give it life.
And he knew it would be big, although the sculpted pingo is about half the size of the real life pingo, which rose about 30 feet from the tundra floor and was about 100 feet long. “I want people to feel something viscerally,” he said of his broader work, and “Murmur” specifically. “When it’s bigger, it’s on its own terms. It’s not a metaphor. This piece helps us see history as something alive, evolving, and current. And it’s messy. It’s not one thing. It’s layering, it’s multiple vantages, it’s two things at once.”
The team he assembled to move the piece from concept to reality was just as layered. “There are so many threads of expertise in this project,” Grade said. “I’m there sitting with the structural engineer and the metal fabrication people, talking about the design and how it can all work together. The biggest distinction between my work now and my work when I started is that 20 years ago I worked in complete solitude and now I am surrounded by a social dynamic. Now I would say it’s half solitary and half a total social immersion. But the key to me is, all these people and all these special skills, they bring their ideas and their input and it makes the project that much richer.”
The Shipyard’s new aluminum work boat VOLUNTEER on the shiplift. (All photos unless noted by Zell Steever)
One thing about wood: It’s not shiny.
Sure, you can sand it and varnish it and make it all smooth and shiny. But it doesn’t start out shiny.
Aluminum, on the other hand, is shiny. From minute one, it’s smooth and shiny, and if a ray of sunlight falls on it, it even sparkles.
The other thing about aluminum is that it’s trickier to cut than wood. And of course, while wood compresses when you attach one piece to another, aluminum doesn’t give, a factor that must be accounted for when making the complex calculations so all of the parts will fit together.
But other than those sort of minor details, building a boat out of aluminum is strikingly similar to building one out of wood. Walter Ansel, senior shipwright in the Museum’s Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard, has spent the last two years overseeing construction of an aluminum garvey push boat that will be added to the working vessels at Mystic Seaport this spring.
Slated to be named Volunteer, the “little tug boat” will be launched during PILOTS weekend May 5-6. Ansel’s ability to design and build this boat is thanks to a grant he received from the Museum’s PILOTS Fellowship Program, which provides funding for employees to receive extra training in specialized areas. Ansel is halfway through a four-year Yacht and Boat Design program at the Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology, studying design using all hull structural materials.
So her name derives from her creator’s funding source, but also from the fact that Ansel was assisted over the last two years by volunteers Wayne Whalen and Zell Steever. And while Steever drives over from Noank to work on the boat, Whalen drives up once a month for three days from his home in Cape May, N.J. And they wouldn’t have been able to do it without him, because he’s the fabricator and welder on the team. Steever is the patternmaker and ship fitter.
The present garvey, MAYNARD BRAY, was built by the Museum in 1976. Here she helps maneuver the MAYFLOWER II in 2016. (Photo by Mystic Seaport)
Volunteer will work alongside the Maynard Bray, a garvey push boat designed and built by Ansel’s father, Willets Ansel, 40 years ago. Maynard Bray is a beloved icon along the Museum waterfront, with her distinctive “pudding” of rope along her bow, which acts as a bumper.Volunteer will have a similar pudding, made by the shipyard’s riggers.
Volunteer will have twice the horsepower of Maynard Bray. She will be used to wash down Museum vessels, pump out water from boats that need it, and push and pull boats and floats into place. If signature vessels like the Charles W. Morgan, Joseph Conrad, or L.A. Dunton need to be moved, Volunteer will be there.
It has been both an education and a labor of love for these three men, as they have worked with Computer Assisted Design (CAD) to shape and cut the parts. The boat is made of marine-grade aluminum, measures 20-feet long and eight-feet wide, powered by an 85-horsepower diesel engine that came from Museum Trustee Barclay Collins’ sailboat. It was refurbished by the engine restoration team in the shipyard, led by Scott Noseworthy and volunteers John Seravezza and Jim Cream.
Ansel recruited Whalen and Steever to volunteer in the shipyard through his teaching at The WoodenBoat School. He met Whalen 12 years ago at the school, and mentioned to him that the fishing boat Roann was about to undergo a major restoration. Whalen had experience with a similar boat in New Jersey, and so he drove up once a month for three days to work on her. That lasted six years. He has since stayed involved with projects that were in need of welding or fabrication.
Ansel said the experience of building the aluminum boat has been similar to building a plywood vessel. “The welding can be a challenge,” he said, “but sawing the pieces has been relatively easy. The welding had a steep learning curve. And what we learned when we were putting pieces together was that, unlike wood, aluminum doesn’t compress, so we had to adjust the measurements just a little to accommodate that.”
They took advantage of having a high-tech friend in nearby Groton, Peter Legnos, whose company LBI can do precision metal cutting using a water jet. They took their CAD drawings and the aluminum to his shop and he cut it for them, saving them weeks of work if they had done it by hand. It also was far more precise than hand-sawing.
“This has been a total learning experience,” Ansel said. “It’s been exciting to do something completely different.” And if the Museum had purchased a boat like this, it would’ve cost considerably more than the construction has.
They will paint the bottom but they won’t paint the rest of the boat for at least her first year, and Ansel hopes never. “It will be at least a year because we want her to cure and corrode a little,” he said. “When she’s out in the weather, she will turn dull.”
