Saw a cat hunting in a field as I drove the little boy in to school this morning and thought how devious and long is the preparation before the son of man can go out and get his own dinner. Even when a scholar has the multiplication table at his tongue’s end, it is a long way to the first field mouse.
Six days a week, eight months of the year, in war or in peace, Dameron goes down the bay in the morning and hauls his traps. He gets back about noon, his white riding-sail showing up first around the point, then the hull, then the sound of the engine idling and picking up again as he pulls his last two traps. Sometimes, if the sun is right, we can see pinwheels of light as he hurls crabs back into the sea, spinning them high in air. And sometimes, if he has had a good catch of lobsters, we can hear him singing as he picks up his mooring. It is a song of victory, the words of which I’ve never made out; but from this distance it sounds like a hymn being clowned.
He is as regular as a milk train, and his comings and goings give the day a positive quality that is steadying in a rattle-brained world. In fog we can’t see him but we can hear his motor, homebound in the white jungle; and then the creak of oar in lock, tracing the final leg of his journey, from mooring to wharf. He has no watch, yet we can set ours by his return. (We could set it by his departure too if we were up—but he leaves at six o’clock.)
I went with him in his boat the other day, to see what it was like, tending seventy traps. He told me he’s been lobstering twenty-five or six years. Before that he worked in yachts—in the days when there were yachts—and before that in coasting schooners. “I liked coasting fine,” he said, “but I had to get out of yachting.” A look of honest reminiscent fright came into his face. “Yachting didn’t agree with me. Hell, I was mad the whole time.”
“You know,” he explained, pushing a wooden plug into a lobster’s claw, “there’s a lot o’ them yacht owners who haven’t much use for the common man. That’s one thing about lobstering—it gives you a hell of an independent feeling.”
I nodded. Dameron’s whole boat smelled of independence—a rich blend of independence and herring bait. When you have your own boat you have your own world, and the sea is anybody’s front yard. Old Dameron, pulling his living out of the bay at the end of twelve fathoms of rope, was a crusty symbol of self-sufficiency. He cared for nobody, no not he, and nobody cared for him. Later in the fall he would haul his boat out on his own beach, with his own tackle. He would pull the engine out, take it up through the field to his woodshed, smear it with oil, and put it to bed in a carton from the grocer’s. On winter evenings he would catch up on his reading, knit his bait pockets, and mend his traps. On a nasty raw day in spring he would get the tar bucket out and tar his gear and hang it all over the place on bushes, like the Monday wash. Then he would pay the State a dollar for a license and seventy-five cents for an official measuring stick and be ready for another season of fishing, another cycle of days of fog, wind, rain, calm, and storm.
Freedom is a household word now, but it’s only once in a while that you see a man who is actively, almost belligerently free. It struck me as we worked our way homeward up the rough bay with our catch of lobsters and a fresh breeze in our teeth that this was what the fight was all about. This was it. Either we would continue to have it or we wouldn’t, this right to speak our own minds, haul our own traps, mind our own business, and wallow in the wide, wide sea.
Letter from a reader:
“We too came [to the country] to lead the simple life; we too started with 36 pullets—which were all eaten by rats; we too had a spring with eels and frogs where one could go to muse and be eaten by mosquitoes. We had them all, and have lost them quite completely. What we have now is some 8,000 chickens of varying ages and susceptibilities to coccidiosis, less income, twice or thrice as much work, and perpetual worry. We have become as accustomed to the peace and quiet of the country as you say one does to the roar of the Sixth Avenue El, and winding lanes are no more to us now than turnstiles in our urgent comings and goings to banks and grain mills and osteopaths.
“I see from what you say … that you sense your danger, but it is one thing to sense it, and another to avoid it…. It’s too late for us to turn back, but we hate to see others of our kind blithely tripping into the pit.”
I got that letter quite a while ago, and have kept it around to study over, maybe even to answer. Nothing could be truer than that one’s relationship to the country changes by the simple fact of one’s living with it continuously; but so, for that matter, does one’s relationship to the woman one lives with, or to the plumbing and heating system. (I am fresh from a bout with the kitchen drain, and though the purity of our relationship is forever lost, I now feel the solid pleasure of close companionship with my own pipes. I may smell like a dishmop, but I have grown acquainted with my sink’s peculiar qualities and know its kinks.) My correspondent was probably asking too much of life if he expected to find in eight thousand chickens the original rapture of his first encounter with a pipping shell. I know all about the subtle erosion of character that takes place when one progresses, in imperceptible steps, from the keeping of pets to the managing of a commercial poultry operation. I haven’t stood up under it any too well. A year ago, when I was ready to house my pullets, I wrote that there was to be no purge, no culling of the little flock; I said I would put them all into the laying house without discrimination and let them eat their fill and lay if they chose. I am now compelled to record that this is not what happened. Of the 37 pullets, I put only 35 in the house, leaving two sad-looking sisters in a small pen in the orchard and later selling them (without mentioning that they were my culls) to a mysterious little man who arrived unheralded in a driving shower of rain to buy a rooster. By this simple but calculating deed I lost forever my amateur standing with a hen. Now, a whole year later, with four times the number of birds under my protection, I make no bones about culling. Only the physically fit survive in my tyranny. As in the Third Reich, in my henhouse the individual must be sacrificed to the good of the whole. I am degraded by this practice, but I fall in line just the same. Some day I may revolt; some day, instead of destroying a sick hen lest she infect the others, I shall destroy the others and nurse the sick one back to glowing health, thus re-establishing my own self-respect.
I am in fact very grateful for this letter from the man with eight thousand chickens, although long before I got it I sensed what he so eloquently expresses. I don’t know whether I came to the country to live the simple life; but I am now engaged in a life vastly more complex than anything the city has to offer. It has its compensations. Even through the demoralizing days of my expanding husbandry I have never quite lost my feeling for an egg, as such. I built a new henhouse this summer, to keep my mind off Europe, and I have chosen for its wall motto those fertile lines of Clarence Day’s:
O who that ever lived and loved
Can look upon an egg unmoved?
I haven’t yet had to be rubbed by an osteopath, but my trips to the grain mill are more numerous than they once were. This week, because of the invasion of Poland, the darn stuff is up thirty cents a bag.
War comes to each of us in his own fashion. Early on that Sunday when England and France finally lost their patience, wishing to put my affairs in order, I cleaned my comb and brush, pouring a few drops of household ammonia into the bowl of water, running the comb through the brush, then brushing the comb with a nail brush. At breakfast there was a house guest, in a bathrobe. She approached the war intellectually, through Versailles.
After breakfast I went to the garage and sorted some nails, putting the clapboard nails together in a bunch, the six-penny nails together, the boarding nails together, in cans. The blade of my jackknife being stiff, I eased it with a few drops of penetrating oil. We decided we would go to church—a solemn place for a solemn hour. The preparation was hurried (as though we were organizing a picnic on the spur of the moment). Church is at 10:30 here. The little boy was in tears about having to wear the blue suit, yet wanting to go. I wore a hat I found in a closet. The minister, a young fellow I recently sold some old hens to for a dollar apiece, said he believed the meek would inherit the earth. We sang “Am I a soldier of the Cross, Are there no foes for me to fight?” The storekeeper passed the plate. When we got back home I went out to the barn to fix some chum bait, and somebody came out after a while and announced: “Dinner, and the King.” The words came with painful slowness, as we all sat and chewed. Thus began the second war for democracy.
Some day, if I ever get around to it, I would like to write the definitive review of America’s most-fascinating book, the Sears Roebuck catalogue. It is a monumental volume, and in many households is a more powerful document than the Bible. It makes living in the country not only practical but a sort of perpetual night-before-Christmas.
When you buy something in a store you see it with your eyes and it has a prosaic and sometimes devastating reality. When you order something from Sears, it exists only in the mind’s eye, sugar-coated, triple-reinforced, and surrounded by an aura of light.
Around these parts the firm is known as “Sears and Roebuck.” The “and” is always used. It just got in there, somehow, and never got out.
I’ve been looking over the special “Back-to-School and Harvest Event” catalogue, a small edition of the main catalogue. The title conjures up all the standard autumnal visions: crisp days, button chrysanthemums, football, russet apples, children playing in school yards under yellowing maples. One forgets that the years march on. The first three items that I happened to strike were (1) some high-potency vitamin capsules “to ward off winter ills”; (2) a jitterbug shoe for young men, called “Swingaroo”—“plenty swishy with lots of funny sayings printed on the natural color uppers”; and (3) a harvest radio designed for smart moderns, in the shape of a rocket.
I guess as the years roll on and the wars roll on, we shall have to forget Currier and Ives and take the strange new harvest as it comes. This fall the crepe soles of the Swingaroo ($1.98) will, as the catalogue predicts, bounce with every drumbeat when autumn’s in the groove. Even the drums seem likely to be promoted from a swingtime band to a fife and drum corps. I note that one of the funny sayings printed on the natural color uppers is “I’ll mow ya down.” You can’t get ahead of Sears.