Essays of E. B. White Read online

  There was a wedding in town this winter. Walter Crockett, our master carpenter and cabinetmaker, got married at the age of ninety-three. He met his bride—a younger woman—in the nursing home where they had both gone to die: and, such is the power of love, they sprang from the home and are happily settled in Penobscot, keeping house. This, it seems to me, pretty well takes the wind out of Barbara Walters’ sails. I heard her say on television that marriage, as we know it, is on the way out and will be gone by the year 2000. I didn’t take much stock in that. Many of the remarks you hear on television are questionable, except on the Tarzan hour, which I never miss if I can help it. In the jungle world men have managed to create for themselves, with its gloomy wars, its smashed atom, its hair sprays that threaten the ozone layer, its balance of power, and its absence of any sensible and orderly way (except Kissinger) to settle the myriad things that need to be settled, Tarzan in his loincloth is the one person who seems at home in the environment, as he utters his wild cry and swings along on those old moss-covered docking lines. His speech nowadays is immaculate, and his rapport with animals has always been good. There is a little five-year-old girl in our town who can’t tell time by the clock but knows instinctively when the hour of Tarzan is at hand. She runs to her grandmother and insists that the set be turned on so she can partake of the Weintraub delicatessen.

  All sorts of queer and unexpected events have taken place since my last report from the East. In the nearby town of Blue Hill, ordinarily a quiet village, heavy machinery arrived three summers ago and began ripping the town to pieces, to make room for a new steel-and-concrete wing for the hospital and a sewage-treatment plant for the town, at the head of the harbor. The noise was awful. Month after month, a giant crane swept the sky, and ten-wheel trucks bearing the legend WE MOVE THE EARTH banged through the streets, hauling gravel and rubble from one spot and dumping them into another spot. The hospital was in a survival situation: unless its bed patients were moved from the original wooden building into fireproof quarters, Medicare payments would be cut off, and this would spell certain doom. The operation cost more than $2 million—a tremendous tab for so small a community. People baked pies, knit sweaters, put on auction sales, staged variety shows in the town hall, and dug into sagging pocketbooks. It was a near thing for a while, but it’s over now: the wing is occupied. We have wall-to-wall carpeting in the corridors, parking space outside for a hundred cars, telephones by every bed, air conditioning, and a nurses’ station that goes beep beep. Patients have a view of the harbor and a view of the sewage-treatment facility.

  Meantime, over at Harborside on Cape Rosier, just above the beautiful little reversing falls of Goose Cove, a mining company called Callahan was busy. They dammed the falls, shutting out the tide, and dug a pit so deep you could look down and see China. The excavation greatly altered the appearance of Goose Cove without greatly enriching the community. The mining company soon milked the place dry of copper and zinc and got out, the way mining companies do. But nothing ever stands still around here: someone at Callahan must have taken a long last look at the salt water entering the abandoned pit from the open gate in the dam and thought, What a place to raise fish! In no time at all, the company banished minerals from its thoughts and stocked the pool with salmon. This enterprise promises to be a success. A young fellow named Bob Mant bought out Callahan in 1973, procured 800,000 Coho salmon eggs from the State of Washington, hatched the eggs in freshwater tanks, and then transferred the fingerlings into the pool, where they are now confined in large nylon nets, feeding on shrimp. Mant began to harvest his first crop last fall—100,000 Coho salmon. He cleans them and, with the help of another fellow, sells them for about a dollar and a quarter apiece to restaurants and markets around the state and as far west as Boston. One would assume that a salmon raised in a mine pit might easily contain as much mercury as a small thermometer. But the Goose Cove salmon have been studied by the University of Maine and by the State Department of Marine Resources and have been given a clean bill—“all metals negligible.” I ate two of the fish when I dined at a friend’s house recently and they were delicious—delicate, like a brook trout. I’m a believer in mercury, anyway, and am curing my arthritis on a diet of fish and rice, on the advice of a Chinese doctor named Dong, who wrote a cookbook for arthritics. Many fish contain mercury, and I am proceeding on the assumption that it is the mercury, not the fish, that knocks the arthritis. A man has to have a few firm beliefs to cling to in these chancy times. A New York waiter once told me I should eat the skins of fishes in order to stay healthy, and he may have been right. (You eat grapes to ward off cancer.)

  Another experiment in aquaculture is being conducted in the Salt Pond just north of here, a handsome small inland sea between Blue Hill Bay and the Benjamin River. A neighbor of ours, Mark Richmond, is busy raising European oysters in trays submerged in the pond. At this writing, he has something like a half-million oysters under cultivation. Instead of being bedded on bottom, in the life style of most oysters, these pampered mollusks live in ballasted trays made of wire and wood, about the size of a small coffee table. In winter, when the pond is frozen, the trays are sunk below the ice. When the oysters are big enough to eat, they are sold to restaurants and individual gourmets. Thus, an owner of shorefront property can buy a couple of trays of oysters, moor them off his beach or tie them to his float, and when he is hungry wander down and bring home a first course for dinner—assuming he knows how to open an oyster. Richmond’s operation, like Mant’s, has the threat of mining hanging over it. The Salt Pond lies in tranquil beauty a few miles below the Kerramerican Mine, of Blue Hill, which discharges thousands of gallons of effluent every day into a handy little stream that drains, conveniently, into the pond and thence into the bay—a threat to shellfish. Everywhere trouble lurks. But the oysters are in no trouble right now, and may never be.

  For a number of years, the largest structure in this neighborhood was a four-story henhouse, about four miles up the road from where I live. It was our Empire State Building, visible a long way off, a landmark for boats coming up the bay. Lights burned at night for the hens, and food came to them by a conveyor belt. But the egg business fell on hard times and the henhouse went dark. For a while, it was just a deserted palace. Suddenly, one day, there were signs of life about the place. Cars were drawn up. And I learned at the store that the building had been bought by Noel Paul Stookey, the “Paul” of the musical group Peter, Paul, and Mary. A spicy item of local news. Stookey, undaunted by the lingering smell of departed hens, went quietly to work and converted one of the upper stories into a recording studio. He lives in a house nearby with his wife and three small daughters, rents the studio by the hour, plans to complete an album of his own in March, and hopes eventually to create a studio for animation, where he will put young artists to work. A queer and unexpected event.

  There has been a rash of thievery in our area. (I remember when you didn’t even bother to lock your door at night.) Boys have broken into stores and taken cigarettes and beer. Sophisticated burglars have entered the deserted houses of the summer people and stolen Hitchcock chairs. The most picturesque heist occurred a short distance up the road at Arcady, the Italianate villa built years ago by the widow of Ethelbert Nevin from the proceeds of “The Rosary” and “Mighty Lak a Rose.” The alleged thieves, enjoying the concealment of a twenty-foot-high cedar hedge, backed a U-Haul truck up to the door last November, extracted a seventeenth-century harpsichord valued at more than $40,000, and drove away. I like to think of them drawn up for a coffee break in some dismal picnic area, running a few scales and trying the instrument out for “Chopsticks.” In good time, they transferred the harpsichord to another rental truck and set out for California, arriving in San Francisco a few days later after a truly baroque journey—the harpsichord in the U-Haul, Arcady to the Golden Gate. The instrument was eventually recovered and identified through the combined efforts of an alert sheriff, a harpsichord maker, a grandson of the composer, and the Smit
hsonian Institution.

  Not long ago, the supersonic transport Concorde paid us a visit, dropping into the Bangor International Airport out of a clear sky. It flew away to the West Coast and later was back again, this time detained overnight in Bangor because of having to send to England for a part. Even in the midst of all the trouble we are now in, even though no one knows which way to turn and which way to go, there still persists the notion that we must get there with ever greater speed. My oldest grandson made his first trip abroad in January. He flew to Switzerland to visit a friend, and on arrival phoned home. When asked about his trip, he reported that “it was cramped” and he “didn’t like the movie.” Thus has travel degenerated in the age of speed. If the SST takes hold, we will soon be whisked from continent to continent, from zone to zone, and there won’t even be time enough not to like the movie. We will all be Kissingers, darting from flower to flower, without ever savoring the day.

  Energy, of course, is the leading topic and the toughest nut to crack. The Maine House of Representatives quickly jumped on President Ford’s oil-import tariff and austerity program. One of the legislators came back strong with a counterproposal—an open season on moose. Whenever we Maine men feel something threatening our way of life from as far away as Washington, our thoughts turn unerringly to the gun on the rack and the rich flavor of wild meat.

  Our snowmobilers met the energy crunch with their customary directness and verve: they got up a two-day race meet in Bangor, the Paul Bunyan Snowmobile Championship, and tore round and round and round, drawing throngs to Bass Park from far and near. The Bangor Daily News reported the number of legs broken and backs sprained but neglected to report the number of gallons of gas it took to accomplish it. A year ago, with gasoline already showing signs of petering out, a snowmobile gymkhana was staged at the Blue Hill Fair Grounds. There was no snow on the track, so dump trucks were hired to transport snow all the way from Ellsworth to provide the surface for the racing. You don’t hear much complaint about snowmobilers, though. If a man were to lose the snowmobile vote in Maine, his political life would be at an end.

  Just the day-to-day activity of the concerned citizens bent on solving the energy crisis is itself a great drain on fuel: lights burn far into the night in the halls where the planners do their planning and the debaters hold their debates. I drove over to South Brooksville not long ago to attend an evening forum on nuclear power, sponsored by the public library. To get over and back, I had to travel twenty-five miles, which must have burned up a gallon and a half of gas. And the hall had to be lighted. And the representative from the Central Maine Power Company had to burn up a great deal more gas than I did, because he came a long distance for the powwow. People in this age are adjusted to the free use of power; they do not readily change their habits, even for a power shortage. On my way home over the road after the meeting, I noticed that most of the houses I passed were brightly lit—people sitting up late to watch television, with the oil-burner grinding away in the basement and the water pump leaping into action at the bidding of the pressure tank and the hot-water heater eating up the kilowatts in answer to the thermostat. A hundred years ago, the denizens of those same houses would have been abed long since. They would have had neither power nor a power shortage—merely a long night’s sleep. We don’t really know yet whether we can have energy all day and Johnny Carson all night. It just isn’t clear.

  The Central Maine Power Company feels very good about nuclear generating plants, is not worried about radiation or accidents, and is proposing to construct a plant on Sears Island in Penobscot Bay. (It has also acquired an option on four hundred acres of land on Cape Rosier, just in case.) A group calling itself Safe Power for Maine takes the opposite position and is disturbed that nuclear plants should be built while scientists are still in disagreement and before anyone has found a way to dispose of the nuclear waste safely. A Brooksville man who keeps goats got up in meeting and asked why, if nuclear plants were so safe, he had received a letter from a research firm employed by the power company inquiring as to the whereabouts of his goats. Mr. Randazza, the C.M.P. man, replied that it was a routine inquiry. “We must know where the goats are,” he said, “so corrective measures could be taken if something went wrong.” Iodine can contaminate milk, he acknowledged. But he was cheerful about the prospect. You would simply put the animals on a controlled diet, he said, and after about forty days the radioactivity would be gone.

  At this writing, no one knows what is going to happen at Eastport, if indeed anything ever does happen. Eastport is a small, down-at-heel town, nestled against the Canadian border and washed by the fabulous tides of Passamaquoddy Bay. Oilmen can never get Eastport out of their minds, because it has a deepwater harbor. Power companies find Eastport troubling their dreams at night because the place has probably the greatest natural-power potential of any town in Maine and perhaps of any town anywhere in the world. It is very disturbing, Eastport. For the last two years an oil company called Pittston has been trying to get a toe in the door—they propose to build a $350-million refinery there, and they have been pleading their case before the Maine Board of Environmental Protection. The hearings came to an end a few days ago, and the board’s decision will be rendered any minute now. To an oilman, Passamaquoddy is not just an Indian word, it is a dirty word: it suggests unlimited power that will go on forever or as long as the tides come surging in and go boiling out. At the Pittston Company hearings, Robert Monks, director of the state’s Office of Energy Resources, opposed granting the application. So did Horace Hildreth, Jr., lawyer for the Coastal Resources Action Committee. So did many others. Monks argued that the Pittston plan as now drafted would “forever foreclose” on the possibility of harnessing the tides of Passamaquoddy. And, of course, there is always the specter of an oil spill.

  I have never experienced the great tides and swift currents of the waters around Eastport, have never ventured that far east in a small boat. But I’ve examined the charts of those legendary seas, and my opinion is that the only person who could successfully guide a supertanker around East Quoddy Head and into the hairpin turn from the Bay of Fundy to Head Harbour Passage would be Harold Lloyd—on a good day. Lloyd could do it, but the thought of a run-of-the-mill Liberian flagship captain attempting it gives me goose pimples the size of sea urchins. The captain might easily blow it, particularly if the fog were to shut in, as it does about half the time. Brooks Hamilton, a professor at the University of Maine who navigated an LST in the Second World War, has calculated that in one slackwater period there is just barely time enough to get a ship from East Quoddy Head to a berth in Eastport before the current starts the other way.

  Governor Longley wants to explore tidal power; Muskie does, Hathaway does, President Ford does. But Quoddy still has a bad name from the old boondoggling days. Canada is at work on a scheme for developing tidal power. Even if Pittston’s application is granted, there’s a good chance no oil refinery will be built there, because Canada controls a piece of the sea through which the tankers would have to pass. Energy, energy, energy!

  The government itself forces a citizen to burn fuel. I sat up most of one night in January, making out W-2 statements for the employees who were in and out of our house at one time or another during 1974. I’m not good at filling out forms: all those long Social Security numbers, all those enigmatic little cubicles, all those unwieldy sheets of carbon paper. Lights blazed, while the furnace plugged away in the cellar to keep me from freezing to death. The very next morning, a letter arrived from the I.R.S. advising me, in a pleasant and chatty fashion, that our returns for 1972 and 1973 were up for audit and would I please have the following documents ready for the inspector’s visit. Then followed a list as long as your arm. If I’m to produce all those curios, the lights will burn late enough to satisfy even the insatiable electric company.

  I believe, from the sessions I’ve attended in my kitchen, which is where I get my most reliable information, that what most deeply disturbs the people
in the small towns of Maine these days is not gasoline, not the cost of living, not unemployment. I think people are disturbed by the discovery that no longer is a small town autonomous—it is a creature of the state and of the Federal Government. We have accepted money for our schools, our libraries, our hospitals, our winter roads. Now we face the inevitable consequence: the benefactor wants to call the turns. The Blue Hill Hospital’s $2-million wing had hardly opened its doors when the citizens of the town awoke one morning to find, in the Portland Sunday Telegram, a story based on an interview with Mark Knowles, director of the State Comprehensive Health Planning Agency, suggesting that small hospitals “under thirty-five beds” might soon be marked for oblivion. People who have just gone through the agonies of raising a great deal of money for a well-loved local institution don’t take it lightly when they hear that perhaps their work has been for nothing. People were mad as hops. Yankees don’t want a planner in Augusta or in Washington telling them where to put a hospital or a school or how many beds or desks to install. They are accustomed to making decisions like that for themselves. They feel it is their right. (They also take the grants, and once the habit has been formed it is not likely to be broken.) Knowles made the big mistake of using the word “parameter” in a letter to the president of the Maine Hospital Association. Most of us are familiar with a “perimeter,” but a “parameter” was a little too much, considering the raw state of our nerves. It’s bad enough to hear that your hospital is the wrong size, without having a parameter thrown at you.

  With so much that is disturbing our lives and clouding our future, beginning right here in my own little principality, with its private pools of energy (the woodpile, the black stove, the germ in the seed, the chick in the egg), and extending outward to our unhappy land and our plundered planet, it is hard to foretell what is going to happen. I know one thing that has happened: the willow by the brook has slipped into her yellow dress, lending, along with the faded pink of the snow fences, a spot of color to the vast gray-and-white world. I know, too, that on some not too distant night, somewhere in pond or ditch or low place, a frog will awake, raise his voice in praise, and be joined by others. I will feel a whole lot better when I hear the frogs.