We were having french toast at Columbia Restaurant in Wawa. Billy had smuggled in his own bottle of real maple syrup (stuff we picked up on Day 1 at Shaw’s Pancake House). I glanced up from my meal and examined the painting above our table.
“Look at that. It’s pretty good, actually. I bet a hipster would buy that,” I said.
I noticed that there was a 4×6 photo of a man standing in front of this very painting tucked into the corner of the frame.
“Wait a second…isn’t that guy sitting right over there?”
Sure enough, Ron Botham, the artist himself, was chewing the fat with some friends at a nearby table. That’s how small Wawa is.
So I introduced myself.
Turns out Ron, who is known simply as “R.B.” here in Wawa, paints one piece a year. Most are hanging inside the restaurant. The scenes come from his own wilderness experience, of which he has plenty because he also leads bear hunts.
(At this moment, I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore)
Of the wolves, R.B. said: “they were eating a moose. They ate EVERYTHING, even the blood out of the snow.”
If you’re interested in the paintings, the bear hunts (or both), you can call R.B. at 705-856-7250.
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Oh, my, I have certainly been gtiuly of all of these, some more (or less) than others. I enjoyed the article, but I found it to be very lengthy, and had a hard time getting all the way to the end. It would have been more effective for me had it been broken into smaller sections. Nevertheless, it was quite humbling to consider the part my husband and I played in the development of the current state of our adult children.