A seacoast farm, such as this, extends far beyond the boundaries mentioned in the deed. My domain is arable many miles offshore, in the restless fields of protein. Cultivation begins close to the house with a rhubarb patch, but it ends down the bay beyond the outer islands, handlining for cod and haddock, with gulls like gnats round your ears, and the threat of fog always in the pit of your stomach.
I think it is the expansiveness of coastal farming that makes it so engrossing: the knowledge that your fence, on one side at least, shuts out no neighbor—you may climb it and keep going if you have a boat and the strength to raise a sail. The presence in the offing of the sea’s fickle yield, those self-sown crops given up grudgingly to the patient and the brave, is an attraction few men are proof against. Beyond one blue acre is another, each one a little farther from the house than the last. On a summer’s day I may start out down the lane with a pail to pick a few berries for my wife’s piemaking, but there is always the likelihood that I will turn up hours later with two small flounders and a look of profound accomplishment. A man who has spent much time and money in dreary restaurants moodily chewing filet of sole on the special luncheon is bound to become unmanageable when he discovers that he can produce the main fish course directly, at the edge of his own pasture, by a bit of trickery on a fine morning.
Below the barn are the asparagus and the potatoes and the potato bugs in season. Beyond is the pasture, where, amid juniper and granite and lambkill, grow the wild strawberries and the tame heifers. Keep walking and you come to the blueberries and cranberries. Take off your shoes, advance, and you are on the clam beds—the only crop on the place that squirts water at you in time of drought. Beyond the clams are the cunners and the flounders, hanging round the dock piles on the incoming tide. Near the ledges, off the point, are the lobsters. Two miles farther, off the red rocks, are the mackerel, flashing in schools, ready for the Sunday afternoon sociable when the whole village turns out for the harvest of fishes. Mackereling is the accepted Sabbath engagement in summertime; there are two or three spots known to be good, and the boats bunch up at these points, a clubby arrangement for man and fish. It is where you meet your friends, and, if the tide serves you, reap the benefit from your friends’ toll bait, which drifts down over your hook. Farthest from home are the cod and haddock. You must rise early the day you go to bring them in.
The salt water farms hereabouts give ample evidence that their owners have a great deal on their minds. Rocks and alders are the most conspicuous crops, and if a man can get a job firming the public highway he gives small thought to loosening the soil in his own garden. With the whole sea bottom to rake, he isn’t going to spend all his time weeding a bean row. He puts in a vegetable garden in spring, gives it a few vicious pokes with a hoe in June, and devotes the remainder of the year to lustier pursuits—grinding the valves of an old boat-engine, or mending a weir. My neighbor Mr. Dameron, who goes after the lobsters from early spring till late fall, tethers his cow a few paces from his landing, so that he can pick her up handily when he comes in from hauling his traps. The two of them walk up together through the field, he with his empty gas can, she with her full bag of milk.
There is a lively spirit here among us maritime agriculturalists. My neighbors are mostly descendants of sea rovers and are stifled by the confinements of a farm acre. The young men fit easier on an Indian motorcycle than on a disc harrow. And I have noticed that it is the easy-going ones among us who have the best time; in this climate, at the rate a stove eats wood, if a man were to grow too thrifty or forehanded he’d never be able to crawl out from under his own woodpile.
Although winter is still in possession of the land, the days are perceptibly longer. Skating on the frog pond under an early rising moon, I am conscious of the promise of pollywogs under my runners, and my thoughts turn to seeds and the germinal prospect. Snow, which came with a bang at Thanksgiving, is an old story to the little boy now; winter’s charms fade slowly out like the picture of Charlie McCarthy on the back of his sweatshirt. Sears Roebuck’s midwinter catalogue is shelved in favor of seed catalogues. Before another week is gone I shall have to map out a poultry program and decide whether to reduce my egg farming to reasonable family proportions or step it up to a commercial scale.
Last spring I started eighty-four day-old chicks under a coal brooder stove. I assumed that if I began with eighty-four I might, with good luck, wind up with an even dozen. The others I expected to meet a horrible death, since I had read that this is what always happens when a man starts to keep chickens. As things turned out I lost only three birds. One sickened and died, two were spirited away by a killer in the night. The others—eighty-one of them—grew so tall and handsome, and responded so well to loving-kindness and to rich food, and the young cockerels crowed so loudly at daybreak, that they became the talk of the countryside. We ate or sold forty-five broilers and roasters, and ended up with thirty-six pullets, all laying like a house afire. During the month of November I presented my little family with a frightful total of six hundred and seventy-two eggs, several of them double-yolked. In December production fell off slightly, because of the short days and long cold nights, but on the average we’ve been getting about twenty eggs a day, of which we consume maybe six or eight. The others have to be disposed of by one means or another. I haven’t yet recovered from my surprise.
For a few days, after the barrage of eggs started in the laying pen, my game wife tried to keep pace with the preposterous influx. She scheduled egg dishes daily—all sorts of rather soft, disagreeable desserts, the kind convalescents eat doggedly and without joy. We grimly faced a huge platter of scrambled eggs at breakfast, a floating island or a custard at noon, and at night drank eggnogs instead of Martinis. We even gave raw eggs to the dogs; it would improve their coats, we said. And once I saw my wife slip an egg to the pig when she thought nobody was looking. It was no use. For every egg we ate, my pullets laid two. Secretly I was impressed and delighted, although I got darn sick of floating island.
It was perfectly obvious that we now had a first-rate farm surplus problem on our hands (along with a heating problem, an earning-a-living problem, a Christmas gift problem, and six or eight other problems that bloom in the fall). Unless I proposed to set up a target and throw eggs at it each afternoon for diversion, we would have to act and act quickly. Eggs don’t keep. I turned instinctively to Sears Roebuck, and after studying the poultry section sent a hurry call for an egg scale and some cardboard egg cartons, the kind that hold one dozen eggs and have a picture of a hen staring fatuously at a nest. Six days later I timidly presented myself at the local store, bearing three dozen strictly fresh twenty-four-ounce fancy brown eggs, neatly packaged, to be credited to my account. I don’t know anything that ever embarrassed me more, unless it was the day in St. Luke’s Hospital when I misunderstood the nurse’s instructions and walked into the X-ray room naked except for my socks and garters.
The steady palming off of surplus eggs on a storekeeper who used to be my friend has done more to unnerve me about the country than anything else, although various people have assured me that I exaggerate the gravity of the situation, and some even say that the store turns right round and resells the eggs at a profit. I don’t know. I certainly have never seen anybody buy an egg in the stores where I trade. I’ve often hung around watching. It reminded me of the early days of authorhood, when I used to sneak into Brentano’s book store and hang around the counter where my book was kept (one copy of it) hoping that I would some day witness a sale. I never did. I have a suspicion the storekeeper takes my eggs home and eats them himself—or throws them at a target. The eggs simply disappear mysteriously behind the counter and show up as a sixty-cent or a ninety-cent credit on my slip. It has reduced my bills appreciably, but it has damn near destroyed my spirit. I am sure it has left its mark on the storekeeper, whose embarrassment equalled mine and to whom for all I know it has meant the difference between operating my account at a profit and at a loss. Anyway, it has shown me clearly that the personal-contact side of agriculture will never be my forte: I can handle production, but someone else will have to take over the marketing if I am to live through the ordeal.
The truth is I am unfit for barter, being of an apologetic rather than an acquisitive nature. And unless I can raise enough eggs so that I can ship them away impersonally in a standard thirty-dozen crate to the Boston market, I shall have to curtail my activities to a mere subsistence basis.
There are of course more ways than one of dealing with a surplus. One of my favorite people around here (although I have never met him) is an old fellow who has a place on the ridge and who is reputed to be a man of original mind. According to report, as I have it, he wears an overcoat winter and summer—just the same in summer as in winter, his theory being that if an overcoat can keep out the cold then by God it can keep out the heat too. A bachelor, he keeps two cows with whom he dwells contentedly, in peace and in filth. He is a master of surplus. There are days when he gets as much as twenty-four quarts of milk. Somebody once asked him what he did with all that milk.
“Drink what I feel like and throw the rest to hell,” he replied testily.
Such strength of character is seldom met with on a farm, though a farm is where it is most urgently needed.
I was sorry to hear the other day that a certain writer, appalled by the cruel events of the world, had pledged himself never to write anything that wasn’t constructive and significant and liberty-loving. I have an idea that this, in its own way, is bad news.
All word-mongers, at one time or another, have felt the divine necessity of using their talents, if any, on the side of right—but I didn’t realize that they were making any resolutions to that effect, and I don’t think they should. When liberty’s position is challenged, artists and writers are the ones who first take up the sword. They do so without persuasion, for the battle is peculiarly their own. In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into a panic. His is a double allegiance to freedom—an intellectual one springing from the conviction that pure thought has a right to function unimpeded, and a selfish one springing from his need, as a breadwinner, to be allowed to speak his piece. America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious. The transition has been disturbing, but it has been effected, and the last part has been accomplished largely by the good work of writers and artists, to whom liberty is a blessed condition that must be preserved on earth at all costs.
But to return to my man who has foresworn everything but what is good and significant. He worries me. I hope he isn’t serious, but I’m afraid he is. Having resolved to be nothing but significant, he is in a fair way to lose his effectiveness. A writer must believe in something, obviously, but he shouldn’t join a club. Letters flourish not when writers amalgamate, but when they are contemptuous of one another. (Poets are the most contemptuous of all the writing breeds, and in the long run the most exalted and influential.) Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or chinch bugs, and should write in the way that comes easy.
The movement is spreading. I know of one gifted crackpot, who used to be employed gainfully in the fields of humor and satire, who has taken a solemn pledge not to write anything funny or light-hearted or “insignificant” again till things get straightened around in the world. This seems to be distinctly deleterious and a little silly. A literature composed of nothing but liberty-loving thoughts is little better than the propaganda it seeks to defeat.
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone. A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom—he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. His gravest concern is lest gaiety, or truth in sheep’s clothing, somewhere gain a foothold, lest joy in some unguarded moment be unconfined. I honestly don’t believe that a humorist should take the veil today; he should wear his bells night and day, and squeeze the uttermost jape, even though he may feel that he should be writing a strong letter to the Herald Tribune.