Motif #1 | Rockport

Rockport Harbor

There’s something sacred about a coastal run, more special now that I live in Massachusetts, before the town wakes, when boats bob like sleepy heads in the harbor and the scent of low tide turns movement into meditation. I was running in Rockport, Massachusetts, tracing a route that hugged the Atlantic, my breath syncing with the rhythm of the waves. A mist drifted in from the ocean, soft, moody, cinematic, giving the morning the quiet drama of a black-and-white film.

And then it appeared, perched at the water’s edge like a half-remembered dream: Motif #1. That modest red fishing shack, part barn, part beacon. The structure plein air painters have immortalized as “the most painted building in America.” Their reverence seeded something lasting. Today, Rockport boasts more than 25 galleries clustered around its harbor, featuring everything from classic New England seascapes to bold contemporary works. In many of them, you’ll find some version, some vision, of Motif # 1.

Kamalic Gallery

One of the many galleries in Rockport that feature Motif #1 painting.

Motif #1 was built in 1884, back when Rockport was more grit than gallery. Fishermen stored their gear there: nets, hooks, hard-earned hopes. Then the artists came. They saw something more. They turned that weathered structure into a symbol, a motif. When the Blizzard of 1978 swept the original into the sea, the town rebuilt it plank for plank, as if to say that replicas too can carry a soul.

Motif #1

Strangely, the moment brought me back to a conversation I’ve had earlier that morning with a friend, about AI. She had said something that lodged in my mind and began to echo again as I stood in that harbor.

“We panic when new tools arrive,” she told me. “Fire terrified us. So did the plow. Electricity. Steam engines. There’s even a story that people were afraid to ride trains moving at 40 miles per hour, thinking the speed would destroy their bodies. Then came the internet. And now, AI. The fear is always the same, that we’ll be replaced, made irrelevant, forgotten like yesterday’s trade. And yet, somehow, we never are.”

Boats in Rockport Harbor

I thought about that as I watched the reflection of Motif # 1 in the calm Rockport Harbor waters. Homo sapiens emerged roughly 300,000 years ago. And despite every fear that innovation would undo us, we’ve only multiplied, 8 billion strong and counting. What anthropologists call "behavioral modernity," our capacity for symbolic thought, innovation, and culture, emerged just 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. In evolutionary time, a blink. But we don’t think in eons. We think in decades. In lifespans. We measure life in decades. In increments of 100 years, if we’re lucky. Our perspective is brief. Our panic even briefer.

Galleries and shops in Rockport

Once, we had no jobs, the kind where we exchange services for wages. We foraged, wandered, bartered. Then we farmed, entered feudal systems, labored on land owned by the Lords. Eventually, we learned to clock in and clock out, and save for retirements. These are all new concepts in the timeline of our existence. And with each shift in labor, we declared the end of the world. It never was. Cities adapted. People re-skilled. Lamplighters gave way to electric grids and sparked something new. Typists became digital natives. Horse-drawn carriages yielded to planes, trains, and now, driverless cars. Entire industries disappeared in just the last 50 years. New ones rose just as fast.

Rockport Harbor with Motif #1 on the right

AI, my friend had said, isn’t the villain. It is just the next utility. Like electricity. Like Wi-Fi. It will hum quietly in the background. It might change the tempo, but not the tune. We will adapt. Again. We’re not at the end. We’re at the beginning. Again. As we always have been.

Rockport, too, reinvented itself. From cod to canvas. No one clung to the past with iron chains. The fishermen may be gone, but the soul of the place remains, only now expressed with a different brush. So, as I stood before Motif # 1, I didn’t see a relic. I saw a blueprint.

Motif #1