XXXIV

IT IS late at night on Federal Route 1, the Atlantic Highway of the maps. The traffic is no such traffic as one may find at the entrance of any city; nevertheless, on it goes, relentless though not continuous, the trucks coming out of some tunnel of pines glowing with starry lights like rushing constellations. The farm lies about three miles from the route, and in summer when the nights are still and the wind is due south, I can sometimes hear the far, far away sound of some wheeled monster changing gears on our long climb to the eastward. What are they carrying? Barrels and crates of food, probably, those going east and north carrying in more food for our augmented population, those going south and west carrying the local catch of sea food to the cities up the coast.

But I intend to devote no chronicle to Route 1. For the greater part of its length, as it crosses the state, it is a vulgar confusion of predatory billboards and trashy signs which are destructively allowed to steal and exploit one of the great landscapes of the nation. I take courage in the fact that the village has not thus sold its birthright and its soul, and that as you cross it and its fields, you will have great views of the forest and the coastal mountains. What interests me about Route 1 is its place in the village economy. Our season is short, our northern winters glorious and cold, and for many a household on Route 1, the highway helps earn the family living.

The cars pass, cars from all over the Union, cars from Massachusetts and from California and Idaho, and many trailers, I notice, from the mountain West. As the stream passes, our various farms on the highway begin rather modestly to display their wares. A small board painted white and lettered in black or dark blue serves as a tug at the sleeve as you go by.

We manage to offer, I think, quite a variety of things. Our salesroom may be the kitchen with its morning fire dying out, or the front parlor with its cottage organ and the family Bible; a pocket-sized booth or the open lawn. We have country hooked rugs and braided rugs—these we hang on a clothesline near the road and in the shade. We have pieced quilts, we have toys and toy lobster pots, we have miniature sea gulls, we have antiques—they can be anything these days—we have doughnuts in a crock and excellent home-made bread and fresh jams properly made with this summer’s plenty of sugar. At Ralph and Doris Keene’s, an old-fashioned curlicue “whatnot” stands by the hollyhocks and the side door, genially garnished with summer vegetables. And the cars whiz on or stop, and we make change out of an old cigar box with a lid.

No local sign is more characteristic than a board saying “Kittens.” We are great cat-traders, our cats being the famous “Maine shags” of the old coast. These cats of ours, often thought to be some out-of-the-way variety of Persian, are not Persians at all but the hardy, long-haired cat of northern Manchuria, and the race is said to have been introduced here by some trading sea captain in the early nineteenth century. They are good cats and have personality. Purchasers usually have to knock at the kitchen door and wait till the balls of fluff are coaxed from under the stove. Such kittens, moreover, are often shipped instead of being given over directly to the automobilists.

And so it goes; the little trading venture being now at its height. It is good for us, for it not only adds a new interest to the summer but it gives us a wider idea of the great nation behind us to the west. When winter comes, we shall talk of the pleasant visit from the people with the Wisconsin number-plates, and the lady from New Jersey who bought the home-made bread every Tuesday morning. I’ve never kept store myself, not being on the Route, but I think I shall have to get some friend to let me try it for a day.

FARM DIARY

As we return from the evening movies, the headlight glare picks up a fox cub sitting in the middle of the country road. He runs ahead of us awhile, and then runs off to one side into the grass of a field. He seems more yellow in color than red, which makes us mistake him at a distance for a barn cat. / Autumn tent-caterpillars spinning their destructive webs on various old apple trees. / While talking with a charming lady about the living relation here of the sea and the old coastal towns, she tells me that in her girlhood she was on a ship wrecked by a typhoon off the coast of Formosa. / We share the last hot-spell with the rest of the world, and when it ends, we do not have summer again, but a clear cool foretaste of September. / Fishing communities now holding their “Fisherman’s Festivals” with shore dinners and “all the lobster you can eat for a dollar.” What I like to see is the show of the fishermen’s handicrafts and the actual weaving of nets and lobster pot heads. A show put on, I suppose, for our summer visitors, and one which is both interesting and humanly right.

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When this twentieth century of ours became obsessed with a passion for mere size, what was lost sight of was the ancient wisdom that the emotions have their own standards of judgment and their own sense of scale. In the emotional world a small thing can touch the heart and the imagination every bit as much as something impressively gigantic; a fine phrase is as good as an epic, and a small brook in the quiet of a wood can have its say with a voice more profound than the thunder of any cataract.

Who would live happily in the country must be wisely prepared to take great pleasure in little things. Country living is a pageant of Nature and the year; it can no more stay fixed than a movement in music, and as the seasons pass, they enrich life far more with little things than with great, with remembered moments rather than the slower hours. A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear, black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, and chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.