Essays of E. B. White Read online

  Maine towns take winter seriously. They are ready with money and trucks and men and sand and salt. Derring-do is in good supply, and the roads stay open, no matter what. The things that do not stay open are the driveways of people. Every new swipe of the plow hurls a gift of snow into the mouth of a driveway, so that, in effect, the plowmen, often working while we sleep snug in our beds, create a magnificent smooth, broad highway to which nobody can gain access with his automobile until he has passed a private miracle of snow removal. It is tantalizing to see a fine stretch of well-plowed public road just the other side of a six-foot barricade of private snow. My scheme for town plowing would be to have each big plow attended by a small plow, as a big fish is sometimes attended by a small fish. There would be a pause at each driveway while the little plow removes the snow that the big plow has deposited. But I am just a dreamer. I have two plows of my own—a big V on the pickup and a lift-blade on the little Cub tractor. Even with this equipment, we were licked a lot of the time this winter and had to call for help. It got so there was no place to put the snow even if you were able to push it around. On the day before Christmas, the storm was so great, the wind so high, people were marooned in my house and had to spend the night. And a couple of days later I had to hire a loader to lift the snow from the mouth of the driveway, scurry across the road with it, and drop it into the swamp.

  Except for winter’s causing me to become housebound, I like the cold. I like snow. I like the descent to the dark, cold kitchen at six in the morning, to put a fire in the wood stove and listen to weather from Boston. My movements at that hour are ritualistic—they vary hardly at all from morning to morning. I steal down in my wrapper carrying a pair of corduroy pants under one arm and balancing a small tray (by de Miskey) that holds the empty glasses from the night before. The night nurse has preceded me into the living room and has hooked up the thermostat—too high. I nudge it down. As I enter the kitchen, my left hand shoots out and snaps on the largest burner on the electric stove. Then I set the glasses in the sink, snap on the pantry light, start the cold water in the tap, and fill the kettle with fresh spring water, which I then set atop the now red burner. Then comes the real warmup: with a poker I clear the grate in the big black Home Crawford 8-20, roll up two sheets of yesterday’s Bangor Daily News, and lay them in the firebox along with a few sticks of cedar kindling and two sticks of stovewood on top of that. (I always put on my glasses before stuffing the News in, to see who is dead and to find out what’s going on in the world, because I seldom have time in these twilight years to read newspapers—too many other things to tend to. I always check on “Dear Abby” at this dawn hour, finding it a comfort to read about people whose problems are even greater than mine, like the man yesterday who sought Abby’s advice because his wife would sleep with him only on Thursday nights, which was all right until his bowling club changed its nights to Thursday, and by the time the man got home his wife was far gone in shut-eye.) I drop the match, open the flue to “Kindle,” open the bottom draft, and wait a few seconds to catch the first reassuring sound of snap-and-crackle. (That’s the phrase around here for a wood fire—always “snap-and-crackle.”) As the first light of day filters into the kitchen, I set out the juicer, set out the coffeepot and coffee, set out the pitchers for milk and cream, and, if it’s a Tuesday or a Thursday or a Saturday, solemnly mark the milk order blank and tuck it in the milk box in the entryway while the subzero draft creeps in around my ankles. A good beginning for the day. Then I pull my trousers on over my pajama bottoms, pull on my barn boots, drape myself in a wool shirt and a down jacket, and pay a call in the barn, where the geese give me a tumultuous reception, one of them imitating Bert Lahr’s vibrato gargle.

  The guard changes here at seven: the night nurse goes off (if her car will start) and the housekeeper comes on (if her brother-in-law’s truck has started). I observe all this from an upstairs window. It is less splendid than the change at Buckingham Palace but somehow more impressive, the palace guard never having been dependent on the vagaries of the internal-combustion engine in a subzero wintertime.

  The chief topics of conversation this winter have been the weather, the schools, and the shadow of oil. Quarreling over the schools has split the town wide open, as it has neighboring towns here on the mainland and over on Deer Isle. Feeling ran so high some people stopped speaking to each other—which is one form of discourse. Forty years ago, when I landed here, we had five one-room or two-room schoolhouses scattered at strategic points. The scholars walked to school. We also had our high school, which was a cultural monument in the town along with the two stores, the Baptist church, the Beth-Eden chapel, and the Rockbound chapel. Times have changed. All through New England, the little red schoolhouse is on the skids, and the small high school that graduates only four or five seniors in June, in a gymnasium decked with lilac and apple blossoms, is doomed. The State Board of Education withholds its blessing from high schools that enroll fewer than three hundred students. Under mounting pressure from the state, the towns organized a school administrative district, usually referred to as SAD. Sad is the word for it. A plan was drawn for an area schoolhouse at a central point near the Deer Isle Bridge, but it was voted down. Too much money and too many frills. Another plan was drawn and failed. Meanwhile, schoolchildren were shuttled around, here and there, in an attempt to close the gap. We no longer have a high school in town; the building is used for the junior-high grades. Most of the children in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades are carried by bus across to the high school in the town of Deer Isle. A few travel in the opposite direction to a nearby academy. Sending their children over to an island irritated a lot of parents; some disapproved of the building, some had a deep feeling that when you leave the mainland and head for an island in the sea you are headed in the wrong direction—back toward primitivism. Other parents were violently opposed to dispatching their offspring to the academy town, on the score that the place was a citadel of evil, just one step short of Gomorrah. (There was also an ancient athletic rivalry, which left scars that have never healed.) The closing of our high school caused an acute pain in the hearts of most of the townsfolk, to whom the building was a symbol of their own cultural life and a place where one’s loyalty was real, lasting, and sustaining. All in all, the schools are a mess.

  Feeling about oil is now running high, but it lacks the acute pain of nostalgia that characterizes the school controversy. Oil is the pain of the future. A company called Maine Clean Fuels wants to build a refinery on Sears Island, at the head of Penobscot Bay, bringing barges and 200,000-ton tankers slithering through the fog-draped, ledge-encrusted, tide-ripped waters of one of the most beautiful bodies of water in Maine or anywhere. The proposal sticks in all our crops. Battle lines have been drawn, public meetings have been held. On one side, or in one corner, are Maine’s Department of Economic Development, the executives of the oil company (full of joyous promises and glad tidings of a better life and a cheaper fuel), and some people in Searsport who hope that oil will bring jobs and elevate the economy of the town. On the other side, or in the other corner, are Ossie Beal and his Maine Lobstermen’s Association, the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, various conservation groups, the Maine Times, several action groups hastily formed for the purpose of beating oil, and thousands of property owners (usually described as “rich” property owners) who just have a feeling in their bones that oil is bad news any way you look at it. A 200,000-ton tanker makes an aircraft carrier look like a dory, and if there were to be a bad spill, it could mean the end of marine life and bird life in the bay.

  Searsport was host to a public meeting last week to give the oilmen a chance to present their case. It must have been a barrel of fun. The constabulary was out in full force, CBS News turned up with its cameras, and a carefully selected group of concerned citizens was admitted. The meeting was set up in such a way as to prevent the anti-oil people from releasing their wrath when they rose to speak. It was a powder-keg meeting that failed to
explode. Week after next, a hearing is scheduled at which the state’s Environmental Improvement Commission will listen to testimony. This body, I believe, now has kingmaking authority and can turn thumbs down on an industrial newcomer if he looks and smells like a pollutant.

  Pollution stirred our town a couple of years ago when our harbor became filthy as a result of sewage discharged from a school of theology that had magically turned up in our midst. The school had inherited a big old pipe when it bought the property; at low water the pipe lay on the stinking flats, exposed, broken in three places, and discharging. The town was powerless to act, having no ordinance on the books covering any nuisance of the sort. So the Environmental people were called and came over from Augusta. Testimony was offered by clamdiggers, boat owners, the health officer of the town, and concerned citizens. It took a long while, but the nuisance was finally abated and theology acquired a long-overdue septic tank. (The waste had been backing up into the school’s swimming pool, it turned out, making the pool probably the largest and most spectacular tank in the whole county—a real tomato surprise.) Anyway, the water of the harbor is clear again, a classic case of cleanliness next to godliness. Clamming is still restricted.

  Town Meeting came early this year—March 1st. I wasn’t able to attend but have studied the report. One birth was reported in 1970, and twelve deaths. It would appear from this that although the population explosion is still an issue worldwide, we have it licked locally. The town appropriated $7,000 for snow removal and sanding, in addition to $3,000 for unappropriated surplus—a total of $10,000 to get the snow removed. There was no argument. If there’s one thing people are agreed on, it’s this: the snow must get removed. A century ago in New England, the approach to snow was quite different. When snow began to fly, people switched to runners. Roads were not plowed out, they were rolled down. A giant roller pulled by horses packed the surface to a fine, smooth glaze. Then the sleighs came out, with their bells. And sleds, to haul wood out from the woodlots. Wheels were laid away for the season. The old pleasure in runners hasn’t died, though. The snowmobile is the big new thing—life on runners. It pollutes in two ways: with its exhaust fumes and with its noise.

  The town voted to enact an ordinance regulating the taking of shellfish. It is now illegal for a nonresident to dig clams, except that he may dig not more than a peck in any one day for the use of himself and his family. A year ago, the town voted to enact an ordinance regulating the use of the town dump. At that meeting, I suggested an ordinance prohibited the discharge of human waste into ponds and salt water, but it got laid to rest. The selectmen investigated the matter and reported that such an ordinance would be “very complex, extremely difficult to enforce, and possibly declared to be unconstitutional.” It seems sad that the town can regulate the taking of shellfish but can’t regulate the discharge of the waste that makes the shellfish inedible. But that’s the way it is. Years ago, I was sized up as a man who was amiable, honest, and impractical, and I’ve always agreed with that estimate. Now, I’m not just impractical, I’m unconstitutional.

  And I still don’t know whether a gull will eat a smelt.

  Riposte

  ALLEN COVE, DECEMBER 1971

  To come upon an article in the Times called “The Meaning of Brown Eggs” was an unexpected pleasure. To find that it was by an Englishman, J. B. Priestley, gave it an extra fillip. And to happen on it while returning from the barn carrying the day’s catch of nine brown eggs seemed almost too pat.

  Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America? Mr. Priestley finds the key to this country in its preference for white eggs—a discovery, he says, that will move him into the “vast invisible realm where our lives are shaped.” It’s a great idea, but one seldom meets an American who is all tensed up because he has yet to explain England.

  Mr. Priestley writes that “the weakness of American civilization . . . is that it is so curiously abstract.” In America, he says, “brown eggs are despised, sold off cheaply, perhaps sometimes thrown away.” Well, now. In New England, where I live and which is part of America, the brown egg, far from being despised, is king. The Boston market is a brown-egg market. I note in my morning paper, in the Boston produce report, that a dozen large white eggs yesterday brought the jobber forty-two cents, whereas a dozen large brown eggs fetched forty-five cents. Despised? Sold off cheaply? The brown egg beat the white egg by three cents.

  “The Americans, well outside the ghettos,” writes Mr. Priestley, “despise brown eggs just because they do seem closer to nature. White eggs are much better, especially if they are to be given to precious children, because their very whiteness suggests hygiene and purity.” My goodness. Granting that an Englishman is entitled to his reflective moments, and being myself well outside the ghettos, I suspect there is a more plausible explanation for the popularity of the white egg in America. I ascribe the whole business to a busy little female—the White Leghorn hen. She is nervous, she is flighty, she is the greatest egg-machine on two legs, and it just happens that she lays a white egg. She’s never too distracted to do her job. A Leghorn hen, if she were on her way to a fire, would pause long enough to lay an egg. This endears her to the poultrymen of America, who are out to produce the greatest number of eggs for the least money paid out for feed. Result: much of America, apart from New England, is flooded with white eggs.

  When a housewife, in New York or in Florida, comes home from market with a dozen eggs and opens her package, she finds twelve pure white eggs. This, to her, is not only what an egg should be, it is what an egg is. An egg is a white object. If this same housewife were to stray into New England and encounter a brown egg from the store, the egg would look somehow incorrect, wrong. It would look like something laid by a bird that didn’t know what it was about. To a New Englander, the opposite is true. Brought up as we are on the familiar beauty of a richly colored brown egg (gift of a Rhode Island Red or a Barred Plymouth Rock or a New Hampshire) when we visit New York and open a carton of chalk-white eggs, we are momentarily startled. Something is awry. The hen has missed fire. The eggs are white, therefore wrong.

  “The English prefer the brown egg,” writes Mr. Priestley, “because it belongs to the enduring dream of the English, who always hope sooner or later to move into the country.” Here I understand what he’s talking about: the brown egg is, indeed, because of its pigmentation, more suggestive of country living—a more “natural” egg, if you wish, although there is no such thing as an unnatural egg. (My geese lay white eggs, and God knows they are natural enough.) But I find the brown egg esthetically satisfying. For most of my life I have kept hens, brooded chicks, and raised eggs for my own use. I buy chicks from a hatchery in Connecticut; by experimenting, I have found that the most beautiful brown egg of all is the egg of the Silver Cross, a bird arrived at by mating a Rhode Island Red with a White Plymouth Rock. Her egg is so richly brown, so wondrously beautiful as to defy description. Every fall, when the first pullet egg turns up on the range, I bring it into the living room and enshrine it in a black duckshead pottery ashtray, where it remains until Halloween, a symbol of fertility, admired by all. Then I take it outdoors and, in Mr. Priestley’s memorable phrase, I throw it away.

  A neighbor of mine, a couple of miles up the road, is planning to go the brown egg one better. He dreams of a green egg. And what’s more, he knows of a hen who will lay one.

  The Geese

  ALLEN COVE, JULY 9, 1971

  To give a clear account of what took place in the barnyard early in the morning on that last Sunday in June, I will have to go back more than a year in time, but a year is nothing to me these days. Besides, I intend to be quick about it, and not dawdle.

  I have had a pair of elderly gray geese—a goose and a gander—living on this place for a number of years, and they have been my friends. “Companions” would be a better word; geese are friends with no one, they badmouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to t
heir ingratitude and their false accusations. Early in the spring, a year ago, as soon as the ice went out of the pond, my goose started to lay. She laid three eggs in about a week’s time and then died. I found her halfway down the lane that connects the barnyard with the pasture. There were no marks on her—she lay with wings partly outspread, and with her neck forward in the grass, pointing downhill. Geese are rarely sick, and I think this goose’s time had come and she had simply died of old age. I had noticed that her step had slowed on her trips back from the pond to the barn where her nest was. I had never known her age, and so had nothing else to go on. We buried her in our private graveyard, and I felt sad at losing an acquaintance of such long standing—long standing and loud shouting.

  Her legacy, of course, was the three eggs. I knew they were good eggs and did not like to pitch them out. It seemed to me that the least I could do for my departed companion was to see that the eggs she had left in my care were hatched. I checked my hen pen to find out whether we had a broody, but there was none. During the next few days, I scoured the neighborhood for a broody hen, with no success. Years ago, if you needed a broody hen, almost any barn or henhouse would yield one. But today broodiness is considered unacceptable in a hen; the modern hen is an egg-laying machine, and her natural tendency to sit on eggs in springtime has been bred out of her. Besides, not many people keep hens anymore—when they want a dozen eggs, they don’t go to the barn, they go to the First National.