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new york • The Viking Press • mcmxlix

[Transcriber Note: Lithographs have been omitted from this ebook due to copyright considerations.]

Table of Contents

Lithographs by Ruth Gannett

1
Cream Hill Changes

A little man with a big beaked nose, a parson yet a speculator in ideas as well as in lands, on October 12 and 13, 1762, planted grape and apple seeds on what he called his “farms” in the hills of Northwestern Connecticut. Some he planted high up on the back of Mount Tarrydiddle, and some deep in the woods toward the north township line. But when I bought an old farmhouse and a bit of land on Cream Hill a hundred and sixty-two years later, I did not know that this great-great-grandfather of mine had once owned two “farms” in that town, one across the brook to the east, the other two miles to the west.

I stumbled, a few years later, on a map he had drawn in his diary, and since then I have made many pilgrimages in search of Ezra Stiles’ farm sites. I can step into the woods a few yards from my house and walk through unbroken wilderness toward either of them. An overgrown town road abandoned more than a century ago, charcoal-burners’ traces unused for fifty years, or the fire road cut by the CCC boys in the early 1930’s can hardly be described as “breaks” in the forest.

Almost everywhere, deep in the woods, you come on massive lichen-grown stone walls, mute evidence of the pioneers’ back-breaking effort to tame this wilderness. Even the steepest of these hillsides was once cleared, and many of them were plowed and planted. But long ago the painful clearings quietly grew up again to trees.

Sometimes one finds, close to a stone wall, one of those curiously leveled and trench-girt circles of ground known hereabouts as “charcoal pits.” They indicate a second archaeological period in the brief history of white men in these hills. After the ground had been plowed and abandoned it grew up to brush, and then to birch and chestnut forest tall and thick enough to be worth cutting and processing into charcoal to stoke the furnaces that worked the iron ore from the Mount Riga iron mines, fifteen miles northwest of us. And when the iron mines were abandoned, early in this century, a third period began, in which, for the first time, the forests are cherished, by the state or by private owners who are not farmers but sentimental city folk like myself.

Clearing began with the first settlements in this region, and continued for about a century. Our town’s first settlers came in 1739, each of them contracting to clear six acres (and build an eighteen-foot-square house) within two years, but many of them were speculators interested only in proving their claims and selling. So poorly did they build that my great-great-grandfather Ezra, surveying his land in 1762, found on it what he called a “ruin”—a house that could not have been built more than twenty-three years before, but already was falling apart. Men who built as poorly as that doubtless “cleared” as casually.

Ezra, who had a curious taste for exact details, set down in his diary that our town counted sixty families in 1755 and one hundred and ten in 1762. I take it, therefore, that most of the land was then still primeval forest. The great hill clearings came later. Our town boomed for almost a century. In 1776 it had a larger population than it supports today; it reached its peak, more than double its present figure, in 1850. Since then the woods have been coming back. The stone walls we clamber across in the forests today are at least a century old; the charcoal pits date back, roughly, half a century. Today summer residents, handier with golf clubs or tennis rackets than with ax or scythe, are assisting the forests in their slow effort to return to their pristine state. Every year more fields grow up to brush.

It doesn’t take long for a field to grow up when farmers cease to work it. I have watched what twenty years can do in my own hill pasture. In 1924 I took a snapshot, looking down across an open fern-and-boulder-strewn pasture slope to the house and barns. Today, from the spot where I stood with my Kodak in 1924, you cannot even see a roof. The pasture has become the kind of dense, poor forest known hereabouts as “sprout land.”

First came the “hardhack,” yellow-starred shrubby cinquefoil; then the lush sumachs. Under the sumachs “popples” (aspens) and birches and elms found footing. Now ashes, hickories, and maples are taking over, with here and there an occasional young pine, visible only in winter when the hardwoods are bare.

Sometimes in winter, in the woods about us, I can trace cart tracks which cannot have been used for half a century; the slight depressions are invisible when leaf-covered. Cellar holes last longer—we have found seven abandoned cellar holes within a mile of our house—but even a cellar hole fills up and all but vanishes under the ever-forming soil in a century and a half. Despite Ezra’s careful maps, I have never been able to locate with precision the spots on his “farms” where he planted grape and apple seeds in 1762, or to discover the site of his “ruin.” It is all unbroken woods now, and I like it better so.

In Ezra’s day, I think, it was mostly oak forest hereabouts, with a sprinkling of chestnut that turned it into a candlelit woodland garden in spring, and an occasional patch of pine. The chestnut succumbed to the blight before my day here. Occasionally a tree growing from what must be very tired roots survives long enough to set a few flowers and ripen a bur or two, and then withers. People who have grown up since 1910 have no conception of the glory of these woods in May in the days when chestnut sprays illuminated the whole forest.

Cream Hill has changed since Ezra saw it. About the only trees in our town which can have been Ezra’s contemporaries are the 175-foot “virgin pines” near the Plains, great trees which are today glorified in the guidebooks as unique in New England. The land across the highway from me reaches up to a white oak on Rugg Mountain which has been used as a boundary marker for a century and a half, but that oak will not long bound or mark in any discernible fashion at all. It is only a shell today. No one can reckon its age by its rings; its hollow heart must have served as a home for squirrels and coons since long before I was born.

A tree three feet through looks big to city folk, or even to country folk, today. But on a three-foot ash, cut when the town rebuilt the Cream Hill Road in 1946, I could count only ninety rings. A three-foot hickory, which we cut after lightning struck it in the 1930’s, was barely a century old. Even the tall pines at the Plains were young in Ezra’s day. Some of them fell in the hurricane of 1938 and, when cut, proved to be almost exactly two hundred and fifty years old.

Yet in Ezra’s diary he makes note of a pine tree three feet through with four hundred rings, and of an oak five feet through with two hundred and thirty-two rings. Such trees must have grown in dense forest, aspiring toward the light—in such forests as no living man has seen north of the Great Smokies, or east, in this latitude, of the Cascade Mountains. There must have been majestic woods hereabouts—beautiful to our imagining eyes, but a terrific chore to the farmer who yearned for clear fields.

They burned the trees off in those days, cutting only what they needed for lumber, and, obviously, they burned much of the soil with the trees, thereby changing the face of our countryside for generations to come. Decades later, the land was relogged several times; even today there is always a little commercial timber cutting going on in our woods. When the forest close to the old Salisbury and Mount Riga iron mines northwest of us was exhausted the charcoal-burners drifted down into our region. Old-timers say that the chestnut grew fast enough to make a fresh harvest of charcoal every forty years. But though the shafts of some of the old chestnuts still stand like corpses in our woods, the native chestnut as a race is almost as extinct as the mammoth.

There were still bear and deer in these woods in 1762. They were hunted out early in the nineteenth century. The deer have come back; the bear haven’t, and won’t, nor the wolves. Many of my farmer-neighbors pretty much live on more or less legal venison in winter nowadays, though old-timers recall that their grandparents never saw a wild deer.

Deer were among the first casualties of settlement; they vanished from this region in the early years of the Republic, and came back only when they had been scarce so long that farm boys had got out of the habit of deer hunting. A deer within a hundred miles of Boston or New York was headline news a mere half-century ago. Thoreau, in the middle of the nineteenth century, never saw a deer at Walden Pond. Partly because of changing gun-habits, partly as a result of the return of fields to woodland, the deer have come home again.

The birds change too. There were once wild turkeys in these hills, and, in spring, great flocks of wild pigeons. Possibly in the clearings there were heath hens—another race which has become totally extinct. There must have been a few ravens, those great cousins of the crow, and surely there were more eagles than today.

Yet robins, phoebes, house wrens, chipping sparrows, and barn swallows, the familiar birds of our yards today, may be ten times commoner in this town than in 1762—though the barn swallows become fewer as city-dwellers buy up the farms. Where the city man buys, manure piles dry up, flies—swallow-food—become fewer, and the swallows move. They nested in the empty barns on our place for one summer after the cows moved out; they have never nested there since. But, as the woods grow up about us, the thrushes—wood, Wilson’s, and even the northern hermit thrush—come closer. We sit on our porch on a June evening and listen to thrushes piping from a hillside that a quarter-century ago was home to meadowlarks, and, ten years ago, to brush-loving chewinks.

Even what the State Highway Department calls our “unspoiled Connecticut roadsides” are utterly different from the ragged roadsides Ezra saw in 1762, and automobiles and modern techniques of roadbuilding are not responsible for all the changes. The grasses in the fields, and the familiar roadside “wild flowers,” are newcomers.

There were more lady’s slippers, pink and yellow both, in the woods in Ezra’s day, more wintergreen and partridge-berry, because there were more pine woods, and the pine-woods flowers fade away when the hardwood second growth comes in. You find different flowers under ash and maple from those under oak and pine. There were, I am sure, fewer of the little bluets that my Quaker grandmother used to call “quaker-ladies”; they dust the cow pastures with their snow-like blossom in May. But there were fewer cow pastures in Ezra’s day, and today again, as the cow pastures grow up to brush, the quaker-ladies fade away.

Drive along any New England road today, and note the “wild” flowers that give it character: most of them are immigrants from Europe, strangers who arrived and made themselves at home with the white man. We recognize the pale pink bouncing Bet and the abundant banks of tawny day lilies as “escapes” from vanished gardens—partly because they tend to linger in the neighborhood of betraying lilac bushes and apple trees. But even deep into the woods along the old cart roads, other plant immigrants have wandered.

The yellow rocket and wild mustard that gleam in May; most of the clovers—the red, the pink alsike, the yellow hop, and the tall sweet white and sweet yellow clover—are immigrants. So are the feathery white wild carrot (“Queen Anne’s lace”) and the familiar yellow wild parsnip, the daisies and the starry yarrow, the sky-blue chicory and the coarse blue-weed that looks so lovely at a distance (I brought some of it into my garden once and had a time getting rid of it). So too are a golden army: the roadside buttercups, dandelions, butter-and-eggs, St.-John’s-wort, the delicate celandine poppy, tansy, the velvety-leaved mulleins, and the great coarse elecampane that some call “wild sunflower.”

Ezra probably never saw a black-eyed Susan; it came from our own West, years later, with clover seed. Our commoner thistles are from Europe, even that which we miscall Canada thistle. So is teasel. The handsome orange hawkweed, often called “devil’s paintbrush,” and the brilliant spiked loosestrife that paints the marshes purple in August, both invaded this countryside within the memory of living man; the pestiferous shrubby cinquefoil (which our farmers call “hardhack,” the name I give to steeplebush) is another European invader. Our “wild” roadsides are not native American at all.

Weeding in our gardens today, we are mostly rescuing European flowers and vegetables from European weeds. Not merely the useful timothy and redtop but the pernicious crab, quack, bent, foxtail, and wire grasses are importations; so is that pesky tiny daisy-like weed that my neighbors dub “German-weed” and the more poetic call “gallant soldiers.” So are the wiry-rooted sheep sorrel and the tough-rooted big docks, including the clinging burdock, most of our stinging nettles, the woolly catnip and the smoother peppermint, the ugly common plantain and the pretty little thyme-leaved speedwell that nestles in the lawn, shepherd’s purse, purple self-heal and the creeping gill-over-the-ground, the nightshade that is not really so deadly as its name indicates, and the little cheese mallow whose fruits the children munch, almost all the various pigweeds, both the common chickweed that blooms, in a year of thaws, during every month of the calendar, and the coarser mouse-ear chickweed.

A historical botanist could prolong that list almost infinitely. It is long enough to make this clear: the Cream Hill roadsides do not look today at all as they did in anyone’s great-great-grandfather’s time—not, at least, until mid-August, when the goldenrods flame. Our goldenrods and asters are native American. Ezra too must have admired them, when he rode his horse up from New Haven to inspect his tenant farms, his saddlebags prudently packed with sermons. Possibly he dismounted now and then to pick a native bottle gentian in the August woods, or, in September, to look closer at the reflection of the sky in a swampy patch of fringed gentian. His diary does not say. It details the salaries of Connecticut parsons; it comments on local industries and even reflects on the deplorable sexual customs of Indians, but it never mentions a wild flower.

As he rode northward, Ezra probably rode through cutover lands already growing up to bush, and these at least were certainly going native. For, though European wild flowers have taken over our roadsides and entered our woods, it is a striking fact that the only European tree you will find in Cream Hill woods is the apple. Those apple seeds Ezra planted in 1762 may have produced puny fruit, but the tree was tenacious. Its descendants are still reseeding themselves in competition with the maples and oaks, beside the imperishable stone walls. They prefer a little sunshine, but survive considerable shade. If the state forest program continues, however, and the overgrown pasture lands are given time to grow up into deep forests, it is probable that even the apples will die out of the shady woodlands, and that the forests will again be, as they were in Ezra’s day, one hundred per cent native American. Our forests change; they go through a cycle—sumach, popple, birch, elm and ash, maple, oak and pine—but, unlike the cycle of the roadsides, it is an all-American cycle.

Now this is a curious fact, worth meditating. Native American trees do not survive in the cities. Pines die in sooty air. The native sycamore struggles in the world of pavements, where its cousin the Oriental plane tree does well. English elms do better than American in New York City, though neither really likes the dirt of the metropolis. All the trees that really adapt themselves to solid-block city life come from Asia—the ginkgo or maidenhair tree, which thrives around Gramercy Park, on Central Park South, and West Eleventh and East Nineteenth Streets; the ailanthus or tree of heaven (the tree that grew in Brooklyn, which, before Betty Smith wrote her book, was better known as the Manhattan back-yard tree); the paper mulberry that is a weed in Brooklyn Heights back yards; and the horse chestnut.

So, too, the house or “English” sparrows, the pigeons, and the starlings—the three birds most at home the year round in New York City—are all Eurasian immigrants, as are the alley cats and rats and mice, the city’s only self-perpetuating quadrupeds.

It would seem that Americans—trees, flowers, and, perhaps, humans—were meant to be forest dwellers. Perhaps that is why so many of us who live most of our lives in cities feel that we shrink and shrivel, physically and spiritually, unless we sometimes get back to the country. We boast of our skyscrapers, but we are not at home in them. Something of the red man’s psychology has entered into us. It may be sheer mysticism, but it is a solacing thought that real Americans—windflowers, sugar maples, hermit thrushes, chipmunks, or humans—cannot stand the dust; while only authentic American trees and wild flowers and birds and mammals can survive in the forest. In the forests the world that Ezra saw is slowly returning; and in the forests we, too, feel an atavistic at-homeness.

2
Our Cream Hill

We didn’t come to Cream Hill with any dream of a self-sustaining farmlet, “five acres and liberty.” We didn’t come with any philosophy of escaping the noise and hurly-burly of city life. We never play golf, or bridge, and it is years since we have played tennis. We are not professional, or semi-professional, or even systematic amateur gardeners. We came to Cream Hill first, a quarter-century ago, to visit our friends Carl and Irita Van Doren. We fell in love with the region, and before the summer was out had contracted to buy the old Reed place, down the hill from the Van Dorens, on the north slope. In those days we thought of it primarily as a pleasant, cool spot for the children in the summer.

It is still “the old Reed place” to the older citizens of our town, though no Reeds have lived in it for a half-century. But a Reed, as far as anyone knows, built the first house on the site, and when that house burned down, just after the Civil War, a Reed rebuilt and enlarged it. A good many Reeds were born in our house, and some died there. When the Cream Hill Reeds died or wandered away, a neighboring farmer bought the place at auction, and for twenty-five years it was a sort of tenant farm, worked on shares.

Various families lived in our house, one of them for twenty years, but no one thought of giving their names to the place. We have lived in the house as much as we could for a quarter-century, four generations of us on occasion (for the children of 1924 have grown up and have their own children now), but only summer folk refer to it as “the Gannett place.” No Gannett has been born in the house, and none has died there. We are, after all, only summer or weekend residents, and it takes something deeper than that to establish the kind of title which goes by word of mouth. Anybody with a few dollars to spend can get his name inscribed on the tax books; but to establish one’s name as a part of the local landscape is another matter.

No one hereabouts seems to know what rules govern the attachment of family names to houses. The Van Dorens, up the hill, still refer to their house as “the Wickwire place,” and it is generally so called. But it wasn’t always the Wickwire place. It was built, back in the eighteenth century, as the Ward place. In those days the Wickwires lived in the valley by Dean’s Brook, on a road which can still be traced through the wilderness though it hasn’t been used, except by deer, for half a century. The Wickwire cellar holes—three of them, one for the big house and two for small tenant-houses—as well as the foundations for several barns, can still be discovered, though it takes a bit of hunting among the sumach and wild cherry.

Our neighbor Charles Gold, who died a few years ago, said his father told him that the Wickwires abandoned their old family farm site, and the town abandoned the road to it, about 1825, when the Wickwires moved up into the Ward place. Some time between 1825 and 1900 the Ward place became “the Wickwire place.” Seventy-five years, it seems, attach a family’s name to a place, even in conservative New England. The mere quarter-century that statisticians call “a generation” isn’t enough.

The old Reed place, having been rebuilt from the foundations after the Civil War, was in better repair than some of the more antique and picturesque houses hereabouts. It was a substantial old-fashioned, white-painted New England farmhouse, with a center hallway separating square rooms on either side of the main wing, and a smaller, lower-ceiled back wing. In accordance with orthodox custom the right-hand front room was a front parlor, seldom used except when the minister called, though Will Preston, whose mother was a Reed, tells me that in his boyhood they used to come up from the village in four-horse sleighs, carry the stoves out of the living room and front parlor, and there stage rousing square dances and polkas, which were quite enough to heat everybody without stoves.

The back wing consisted of a long dining room, used as a kitchen in winter, and, behind it, a summer kitchen or “cheese room” and a pantry. Water had once been piped into the kitchen, but the pipes had long ago rusted out. When we came to the Reed place, water flowed by gravity from a hill spring into a barrel standing outside the door, and was brought into the house in pails.

In the summer kitchen was a boarded-up fireplace, as thoroughly out of use as the rusted sink. The story went that old Mr. Reed had liked fireplaces, but that the younger Reeds preferred modern potbellied chunk stoves; so, when the house was rebuilt about 1867, the younger generation installed one fireplace in the back wing to please the old man, and, every autumn, wove a forest of pipes across the rest of the house, from potbellies to chimney holes. The original foundation for a great three-fireplace chimney block still occupies the whole center of our cellar, but it was not used when the house was rebuilt. Old Mr. Reed sat by his one fireplace for a year or two, and when he died the family boarded it up. It was still boarded up when we moved in, almost sixty years later, and in it was one of the finest collections of antique spiderwebs that I have ever seen. But the crane was intact, and there have been times when the crane came in handy.

We were not Blandings. It wasn’t necessary to rebuild our house; it was sound. We didn’t have money for fundamental remodeling, and anyway we liked the old lines. That first summer we had the water from the hill spring piped into the house and installed a single bathroom. We have been debating ever since where to put the other bathrooms, but we still get along with only one. We do most of our debating in spring, when the hill spring is overflowing; two years out of three it dries up in July or August, and we have to pump from the Maple Spring, which lies a long eighth of a mile downhill. The pump starts hard. In July or August of two years out of three we take few baths and don’t talk much about other bathrooms.

We also shifted the kitchen to what had been the front parlor and made of the whole back wing a sort of twin living room, with the fireplace as its center and the pantry shelves converted into bookcases. We planned other alterations; we have been planning them ever since. The house had not a single closet in it, except coat closets under the stairs—the Reeds evidently hung all their clothes on nails or tucked them into bureau drawers. The little closets we hastily built in corners were and are utterly inadequate, and we have been planning for twenty years to do something about them. But the house is livable as it is, and it may be that we have enjoyed our evanescent, shifting plans more than those who hire architects enjoy what the architects and carpenters solidly provide for them. There is a considerable satisfaction to be had from moving partitions on paper, without littering a house with debris or paying a cent for the job—and then, the next summer, planning the whole job differently.

The house had a pipeless wood-burning furnace in the cellar, and a telephone, but no electricity. In 1924 there was no public power in the town. It came in four years later, but at that time the company firmly refused to set poles down as thinly populated a road as ours. Just before the war one of our neighbors paid $825 for setting poles along the 3300 feet to her house, and, since our house was just as far from hers as hers had been from the power line, we studied her bills and stopped dreaming of electricity for several years. Now we are dreaming again—the rates have come down somewhat. We hated the oilstove we used for fifteen years, but we love the canned-gas stove, the gas icebox, and gas hot-water heater that we eventually installed. We’d like electric lights to read by, but we do not plan to replace the gas installations in the kitchen. What we really dream about today is an electric motor that will start the water coming uphill from the Maple Spring by the mere flick of a switch. To put it mildly, a 1925 gasoline motor that has stood out in the woods for twenty-odd years is not properly listed under the head of “modern conveniences.”

So we “moved in,” as we called it, a quarter-century ago, parking the children on Cream Hill for four summer months, coming up from our New York jobs for weekends and vacations, and closing the house when school reopened.

That first autumn we built heavy board frames to cover the doors and windows so that no one could break in. By the second year it seemed too much work to put them up again. Besides, we had begun to plan a few autumn and spring weekends. I had come up alone a few times, for off-season chores, and liked everything about it except the dark orderliness of a well boarded-up and put-away house.

Since we stopped boarding up the house, it has been broken into three times. Once the invaders broke a window and heated a can of our beans in our frying pan by our fire. All that we resented was the broken window pane. A second invasion kicked in the back door and left it standing open so that the snow drifted in. After that, for several years, I left the house unlocked, with a note on the door saying that it was unlocked and requesting visitors to close the doors when leaving, as open doors were hard on paint. Then, one winter, several houses were broken into—an old pair of shoes and a windbreaker were taken from ours—and the state police, hearing of our sign, were shocked and requested that we lock up and omit inviting signs. We have obeyed them; but I am not sure that locks are any safeguard to as lonely a house as ours.

There came a time when Michael wanted a winter weekend, so Michael and I came up by train—in those days the hundred-mile trip was a five-hour expedition by automobile, and, anyway, we put the Model T up for the winter so thoroughly that it was a day’s job to get it ready for a fresh start. A farmer-neighbor brought us to the house; we built fires and made supper, and then I tucked a tired ten-year-old Michael into bed, complete with bedsocks and hot-water bags to keep him warm. I went to bed without such precautions, and woke up shivering. And when I woke up I was in panic, because Michael’s mother had somewhat frowned upon the whole idea of a winter weekend for a fragile ten-year-old, subject to all manner of colds and complications.

Before investigating Michael’s state of frigidity, I built up the furnace fire and the fireplace fire and heated fresh hot water on the oilstove. When I looked at the child, he was clear out of the covers, asleep on top of his blankets. Fearfully I felt to see if his wrists were frozen. They were warm. I felt his ankles. They were almost hot. So were his stomach and his neck. So I tucked Michael back, still sound asleep, under his blankets, and shamelessly took his hot-water bottle and bedsocks for my own use. The fragility of ten-year-olds is a myth!

In time the children grew up. Weekends stretched further and further around the calendar. Weekends came to mean even more to us than summers. For years now Cream Hill has been our year-round weekend home; we have spent several Christmases here. In fact, Cream Hill has become home as no New York apartment can ever be home.

Home, they say, is what you come back to when you go away. Home is the place to which you bring the things which keep permanent your years of travel. Home is a deposit of years of living, and I have never been able to understand how any house designed at one sitting by an alien decorator could properly be called “home.” Home grows and changes with the people who live in it.

To Cream Hill came, and there it still serves as a rug, the lambskin sleeping bag in which I crossed the Gobi Desert in 1926, from Kalgan in China to Verkhni-Udinsk on the Trans-Siberian; I like to look at it and recall the wide, cold plains of Mongolia. When Ruth and I first drove across this continent in 1933 and found our way to desert trading posts, we bought Navajo rugs for Cream Hill—a great striped “chief’s rug,” little saddle-covers, a corn-dance rug, and more conventional patterns. They keep the Southwest alive for us in New England. The Navajos fit comfortably with other rugs that we brought back from Guatemala in 1938 and from Oaxaca in 1939, and oddly well with the scatter rugs and patchwork quilts made by Ruth’s grandmother and mother and their contemporaries in California.

We brought to Cream Hill a great salad bowl that we found in the marketplace of Lubljana when we went to visit Louis Adamic’s family in Slovenia in 1935; we brought green plates made by the Orvieto potter who was so delighted because his daughter’s name was Naomi and Ruth’s name Ruth. Michael, when he went away to school, sent us brown glazed plates from the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Ruthy, when she had a summer job in the Great Smokies, sent us hickory-splint chairs; our hooked rugs came from Quebec, and our dining-room curtains were woven as skirt material in the highlands of Guatemala. The only trips any of us have ever taken from which we brought back nothing to furnish the house were in 1944, when Michael and I went overseas, he as a lieutenant in the infantry, I as a war correspondent, and we both came back empty-handed.

The house, obviously, is an unplanned hodgepodge; it is us. We like it; it is home.

3
Old-Time Vegetable Gardeners

In our first greenhorn summer on Cream Hill we planted in our garden almost precisely the same vegetables that Ezra had planted in his garden a hundred and seventy years before us. We have since become a little more exotic and individual in our tastes, but our Yankee neighbors think it mere eccentricity that we grow things like Chinese cabbage. They stick to the tried and true. The New England roadsides, forests, birds, even the weeds in the garden, have changed more than the straight rows in the Yankee vegetable garden.

My great-great-grandfather did not, as far as I know, set out a vegetable garden on Cream Hill, but his first vegetable garden, after his marriage in the winter of 1757, was obviously a matter of importance to him. I still have the copy of Nathaniel Ames’ “An Astronomical Diary: or, an Almanack for the Year of Our Lord Christ, 1757. . . . Boston, N.E. Printed: New-Haven: Re-printed and Sold by James Parker, and Company,” in the margins of which he set down some of the notable events of that year.

“Feb. 10 Married at New Haven, Aet. 29¼, My Wife 26½,” the first entry reads.

“March 8, Went to Keeping House,” the record continues. (This was in Newport, Rhode Island.)

“March 19th, Bottled off 11 Doz. Cyder.”

“31—began on Firkin of Butter.”

“April 4—Cato came.” (I suspect that Cato did much of the garden work later recorded.)

“April 26. Tap’d 2d Bb. good Cyder.”

The almanacs for this and succeeding years show that a New England clergyman’s household in those days required a barrel or more of “cyder” regularly, every winter month. As a bachelor, Ezra must have relied on his landlady; but the barrel-a-month that began in the spring of his marriage continued at least until he tired of making entries in the almanacs. In 1758 he tapped his “third barrel” on January 24, the fourth on February 20, the fifth March 18, the sixth April 21, the seventh May 19; and on July 7, when his last barrel may have gone sour, he “put up 8 Gall. Cyder for Vinegar.”

What his household drank in summer—could it have been water?—his records do not make clear, but on July 5, 1757, he “Bottled 44 bottles Claret, i.e., 10 gal.,” and in the almanacs there is one notation of planting hops.

Ezra’s garden records begin after the second barrel of cider had been tapped in 1757 and continue, irregularly, for four years. Taken as a whole, they give a picture of a New England village garden in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The mulberry trees were a part of the great American silk craze. For forty years Ezra was a devout advocate of a native American silk industry. He planted mulberry trees when he was a parson in Newport; he lobbied for a state bounty on planting the trees when he was president of Yale, and in 1789 he had the tenant on his farm on Mount Tarrydiddle in our town plant two thousand mulberry seedlings in this unsilklike climate. He kept silkworms in his Newport attic; on July 8, 1771, he noted in his diary that he had “above Three Thousd Silkworms cocooing.” That year he sent twenty-one ounces of silk of his own production to London to be made into silk cloth for a dress for his wife. As his wife’s gown required ten yards and a quarter, twenty-three inches wide, Ezra’s silk harvest was not quite adequate, and his London agent had to procure of Dr. Franklin enough Philadelphia silk to make up the deficit. This grieved Ezra, but at least, he consoled himself, the gown was all-American.

Returning to Ezra’s 1758 almanac record:

Careful entries about tapping barrels of cider continued for several more years, interspersed with notes about opening firkins of butter, salting down hogs (two at a time), cutting cheeses, and beginning on bushels of Indian meal, but, except for occasional notes on his precious mulberry trees, the garden entries cease after those first four years. Ezra’s thoughts turned more and more from the salvation of his stomach to the salvation of his soul.

Ezra’s asparagus, sowed from seed in 1758, could not have given him anything good to eat until after he had lost interest in making garden notes. Peas, lettuce, radishes, beans, squash, and celery were his green crops. He never mentions canning, or even brining, vegetables. Rubber was just beginning to reach Europe, as a curiosity from the Brazilian jungles, in his day. I doubt that Ezra ever heard of it; certainly he never saw a rubber jar-ring, or a glass Mason jar, and probably he never saw a soldered tin can. Ezra’s wife died young, but the summer canning season was not one of the worries that drove her to her grave.

I suspect that Ezra left his turnips and his parsnips in the ground, and dug them as needed, throughout the mild Newport winters. He seems to have put into his cellar—besides the cider—about four bushels each of carrots and beets and half as many onions, some three hundred and fifty cabbages, and several hundred pickled cucumbers. From his references to setting out cabbage “stumps” in March, I gather that he did not pickle his cabbages or make sauerkraut; he put them away, and when they began to rot he set some of them out afresh, in the hope that they would grow new hearts. The Stiles family must have grown pretty sick of that cabbage.

How many potatoes Ezra dug he never says; and it is noteworthy that he never mentions eating corn except as “Indian meal.” Presumably all his corn was of the type we call fodder corn, and all of it went to the grist mill. I think it is an illusion—akin to the famous illusion that the Pilgrims built log cabins^[1]—that the Pilgrims and their early successors in New England munched sweet corn off the cob.

Corn-gnawing, like baseball, seems to be a nineteenth-century American invention, and its origin, like the origin of baseball, is a topic for scholarly dispute. It is probably significant that the first truly sweet corn was brought to New England and the Hudson Valley after General Sullivan’s conquest of the Seneca country in Western New York in 1779, and contemporary accounts make clear that it was regarded as a sensational discovery. Adventurous eaters, like small boys today, may have been tempted to chew roasted ears of fodder corn in earlier years, but, as small boys quickly learn, it’s the sweet corn that tastes good.

So far as I can learn, the only hint of early colonial corn-on-the-cob eating is contained in a report made in 1662 by John Winthrop, Jr., governor of Connecticut, and buried in the archives of the Royal Society of London until Fulmer Mood published it in The New England Quarterly in 1937.

The English settlers, Governor Winthrop said, made good bread of the meal, which was at its best when “made into a thinner mixture a little stiffer than the Battar for Pancakes or puddings and then baked in a very hott oven, standing all day or all night therein. . . . But the most ordinary way is this, the Oven being very hott they have a great Wooden Dish fastened to a long staff, which may hold the quantity of a Pottle, and that being filled, they empty it on an heape in the Oven, upon the bare floore thereof cleane Swept, and so fill the Oven, and usually lay a second laying upon the top of the first.” They also, he said, made “samp,” a coarse cornmeal mush.

The Indians, Governor Winthrop observed, commonly boiled their corn whole, and ate it with their fish or venison instead of bread. Sometimes they parched it in the ashes, stirring it so it would not burn, until it “turned almost quite the inside outward, which wilbe almost white and flowry, this they sift very cleane from the Ashes, and then beate it in their wooden Morters with a long Stone for a pestle, into a fine meale, which is a constant food amongst them, both at home, and especially when they travell”—apparently a cold popcorn meal!

Then, as an afterthought, Governor Winthrop also mentioned that the Indians sometimes ate green corn. This they had three manners of preparing. Sometimes they boiled the green ears, dried the product, and packed it “for their store”—this they called “Pondomenast.” Sometimes they boiled the green ears “amongst their Fish or Venison or Beavers Flesh.” And sometimes “these Eares while they are greene and sweete they roast before the fire, or covered with Embers, and so Eate the Corne, picking it off the roasted Eares as they Eate it.”

That seems to have been corn on the cob. It is the only reference to corn on the cob prior to Sullivan’s expedition which I have ever discovered, and it is described as an occasional aberration, practiced only by the Indians.

Nor am I sure that Sullivan’s discovery of sweet corn made corn on the cob a national pastime, though there are suggestions of it in the writings of those great gourmets and experimenters, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Carl Van Doren once reminded me that Benjamin Franklin wrote his “Observations on Mayz” in France in 1785, and remarked: “The family can begin to make use of it before the time of full harvest; for the tender green ears, stripped of their leaves and roasted by a quick fire till the grain is brown, and eaten with a little salt or butter, is a delicacy. . . . When the grain is riper and harder, the ears, boiled in their leaves and eaten with butter, are also good and agreeable.”

Thomas Jefferson, another experimenter, wrote in 1787, also from Paris: “I cultivate in my garden here Indian corn for the use of my own table to eat green in our manner. . . . I had at Monticello a species of small white rare ripe corn which we call homony corn, and of which we used to make about twenty barrels a year for table use, green, in homony and in bread.”

“To eat green in our manner”—that, to modern ears, sounds like corn on the cob. But read Franklin’s words, and Jefferson’s words, again and skeptically; they do not establish that either of these great patriots knew the present-day national ritual of grasping with both hands a fresh ear of corn, buttering it and salting it, and gnawing into it like a squirrel. I suspect that, like nice Nellies today, they had the corn cut from the cob in the kitchen, buttered, and served with a spoon.

Nowadays the phrase “roasting ears” implies “corn on the cob.” But it was not so in the early years of the Republic. Listen to Dr. Daniel Drake, a frontier doctor, born in 1785, who grew up near Mayslick, Kentucky, and in 1847 set down for his children the glories of “roasting ears” as he had known them in his youth.

“Eaten with new milk,” indeed! That was not corn on the cob. That was a kind of mere porridge. It seems probable that the munching sound which nowadays spreads in midsummer from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson’s Bay, and from Maine to California, dates only from the middle of the nineteenth century; the tradition that carries corn on the cob back to the Pilgrim Fathers is another myth.

Ezra Stiles, I am sure, never set his teeth into an ear of tender green corn on the cob. Poor man!

It seems curious that Ezra grew no spinach. Spinach was a familiar vegetable in England at the time; it was listed by John Randolph of Virginia, probably about 1765, in what is called “the first manual of gardening ever published in America.” Spinach also appears in Thomas Jefferson’s garden books, and on Timothy Dwight’s amazingly long list of vegetables cultivated in New England gardens about 1820.

Peppers and cauliflowers, melons and salsify (which the Reverend Timothy Dwight, with the phony near-erudition typical of him, pompously called “sal souffée”), also appear in all these garden records. Broccoli appears in Randolph’s and Jefferson’s (the idea that broccoli is a twentieth-century introduction is another common illusion); eggplant and tomatoes are in Jefferson’s and Dwight’s listings. Jefferson boasted of having introduced Brussels sprouts—he called them “sprout kale”—to American gardens in 1810.

But even today cauliflowers and broccoli, peppers, melons, eggplant, and salsify are absent from most New England farm gardens. The tomato is the only vegetable that has been adopted almost universally since my great-great-grandfather planted his home garden close to two hundred years ago. The proportions have changed, but the pattern of the New England garden has hardly changed at all. As to the tomato, that is an odd and special story, still something of a mystery, to which I shall return in a later chapter.

In eating, as in politics, your modern American is inclined to be an anti-experimenter, a rugged traditionalist, a head-in-the-mud, don’t-try-anything-new conservative. And it is as difficult to understand the growth of this cult of the past in the garden as it is in the world of politics. It has no roots in the history of the American people. The men who built this nation were not afraid of experiments; they did not believe that all wisdom lay in the remote past. They were excited by the new. Thomas Jefferson’s whole life, like Ben Franklin’s, was one long experiment; and Jefferson’s famous “Garden Book,” even into his old age, is full of excited discoveries.

Even Timothy Dwight, the conservative man who hated Thomas Jefferson’s politics and suspected Ezra Stiles, his own predecessor in the presidency of Yale College, of dangerous radicalism—even Timothy Dwight left a record of New England gardens which puts modern Yankees to shame. Timothy’s Travels in New-England and New-York was published in 1821, and in it he listed the “vegetables cultivated in the New England gardens for the table” as follows:

To this Timothy Dwight added a list of garden fruits which included cucumbers, squashes, three kinds of melons, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, currants, strawberries, “nasturtions,” mandrakes, and love apples (tomatoes). He said that the largest watermelons weighed fifty pounds, indicated that he had trouble with nectarine and apricot trees, and proved himself a modern American by his comment on corn. “At New-Haven,” he recorded, “the sweet corn may be had in full perfection for the table by successive plantings from the middle of July to the middle of November. I commonly plant it at twelve different periods in the season.”

No one, surely, would put out twelve plantings of corn for the sole pleasure of eating it with milk. The Reverend Timothy Dwight was a true worshiper of the old American corn gods, though his written words—except those on corn—are narrowly Calvinist.

4
Innocents in the Parsley Patch

My pre-Cream Hill experience in vegetable gardening had been chiefly in a summer when my father, in an unnatural burst of agricultural enthusiasm, had the vacant lot at the end of Sibley Place in Rochester, New York, plowed up, and turned this “ranch,” as we called it, over to the firm of “Gannett and Leete, Gardeners and Dealers in Fresh Vegetables.”

“Leete” was my inseparable companion Sid, who, though a year younger than I, was sprouting faster, and that spring had already attained the dignity of long pants. Sid and I planted a variety of seeds, some of which came up; we sold a few radishes to the neighbors in June, and then we let the weeds take over. In midsummer we discovered to our amazement that beets, carrots, and string beans were flourishing amidst our pigweed. We then made a round of the neighboring grocery stores, ascertained the highest going prices for our crops, and attained affluence beyond our dreams by selling a few bunches to the neighbors. The main burden of the selling fell on Gannett because the “ranch” was on his street and his neighbors were most willing to buy, but the enterprise ended on the day when Gannett went into long pants.

I was a runt; for some reason I did most of my growing after I entered college. I had jeered at my high-school classmates who adopted long pants before they attained the conventional height of five feet four. But when I was left the only short-trousered member of the class, a family council determined that, even though I was still a fraction short of five feet two, I should invest in long trousers, as became a high-school upperclassman.

I can still remember the agony of that day. Beets, carrots, and beans in hand, I tried to make the rounds. But I could not screw up my courage to the point of facing the jeers of the cooks and housekeepers when they first gazed on the comic spectacle of my new long pants. At door after door I hesitated. Finally I threw the vegetables away, and that afternoon I told Sid that I would no longer have time to sell vegetables; school was too near. I still don’t know whether he understood the emotional disturbance behind that decision.

We didn’t learn much about vegetable gardening on our “ranch”. Nor did I learn much in the six weeks, a summer or two later, that I worked on a Canadian farm. The farmer had contracted to pay me five dollars a week for my services, but after observing my activity for two weeks, he informed me, quite accurately, that I wasn’t worth it. I stuck it out a month longer, for bed and board, and hoed a lot of vegetables, but without sympathetic study of their personalities.

So I came to Cream Hill, and to vegetable growing, almost virginally innocent. That first summer I had the old farm garden plowed—in those days there were accommodating neighbors with horses and plows, notably one Howard Bailey, who with his eight children squatted in a charcoal-burners’ log cabin down the hill. (A city woman bought the land, ordered Howard off and burned the cabin down, some years later.) Immediately after the plowing, I planted.

In my innocence I began with equal long rows of spinach and Swiss chard, beets and carrots, onions, string beans, lettuce, peas and corn, and—so help me!—radishes and parsley. Later I put in a few hills of squash and cucumber, and a few plants, grown by the postmaster in his hothouse, of cabbages, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. From our row of peas we had about one good mess; the woodchucks had several. Our one row of radishes would have supplied the entire neighborhood, and we had parsley enough to garnish most of New England. Beans and squash, of course, became our main crops; we ate string beans and squash until they came out of our ears. Michael had whooping cough that summer, and usually lost two or three meals before he persuaded one to stay down, but we always had enough beans to fill and refill him. And Swiss chard—we ate it as greens, and we ate the white stalks creamed like celery, until we cursed the Swiss for inventing it. Of course we didn’t have enough corn—it is practically impossible to have enough corn. And we set the cabbages so close that they got in each other’s way, and the tomatoes were just beginning to ripen when we closed for the winter.

That was also one of the many years when I tried to raise muskmelons. I kept a careful record of my garden that year, and this is the muskmelon story:

The next year we moved the garden closer to the house and built a fence about it, laying chickenwire eighteen inches up and eighteen inches out along the ground. The wire is still there, with a good many patches and replacements. In some years it has kept the woodchucks out. Usually, somewhere along the line, a fat woodchuck manages to burrow or bite his way through. The passion of a woodchuck for moving from the lush green fields around us into the comparative desert brownness of a garden with a few small green shoots breaking tentatively through the ground is one of the most impressive examples of rugged individualism and piratical private enterprise known to nature.

We have shot, trapped, poisoned, and even, on occasion, sledge-hammered individual woodchucks, but never outwitted the tribe. We loathe them. On the other hand, we were almost happy to discover that in autumn the deer would leap our fence and root up whatever was left in the garden. Nevertheless, pleased as we were at this evidence of surviving wildness, we set a strand of barbed wire six feet high about the garden, and, when the deer leaped that, strung another wire at eight feet. So far the eight-foot strand has not been leaped except in winter.

The second year I planned the vegetable garden more intelligently and began a long series of more experimental crops. That year we grew our first Brussels sprouts and cauliflowers, and tried a package of pois mange-tout which I had picked up in Paris on the way home from China. Pois mange-tout—you eat them pod and all before the peas mature—are delicious in Paris and also in New York’s Chinatown, where they call them “snow peas,” but any we have grown on Cream Hill have always turned out to be tough, stringy, and tasteless. I suspect they need more water than falls in our hills.

Most of what happens in a vegetable garden remains a mystery to me, despite almost a quarter-century of more or less assiduous effort and observation, and considerable reading. The life of a book reviewer offers abundant opportunity to read books about gardens, but one-half of the books seem to be written by people with rare old loyal country characters to assist them, and the other half by retired capitalists, or capitalists’ wives, with nothing whatever to do except garden. Neither kind of book applies to our kind of gardening.

We have sometimes, but not always, been able to get our garden plowed, and there have been years when we had a little help in hoeing, usually resulting in the loss of our choicest oddments. We do what is done ourselves, on weekends, and there are weekends—too rainy, too hot, or just plain too pleasant—when one does not care to spend all one’s waking hours in the garden. Most guests are themselves allergic to gardening and tend to discourage their hosts’ efforts. There are times when one wants to walk in the woods, go swimming, climb mountains, or even just sit and read—or sit and not read. Accordingly, most of what the books say should be done does not get done in our garden.

Nevertheless, we have had a pretty good garden, year after year, comparing favorably with those of several of our more energetic neighbors; we have had a lot of good eating, and, on occasion, a lot of fun out of it—as well as frequent sore backs. We have learned by experiment what is easy to grow, what we like, and—the toughest lesson of all—what we can use.

Year after year we used to set off for town on Sunday nights laden down with excess provender from the garden, to be presented, rather wilted, to the elevator man and other friends who may or may not have wanted it, but certainly did not want it enough to justify the extra labor involved in growing it and dragging it into town for them. Year after year, for years, our garden expanded. We added a big corn patch in the hollow and another unfenced patch—still known as the squash patch because it once, but only once, had squash in it—and we grew more and more abundant crops. During the war Ruth, albeit protestingly, canned. After the war Ruth went on strike. Now our vegetable garden is smaller, and our backs might be less sore if Ruth had not gone on expanding the flower gardens, her major interest. Nothing we have read in years, I may note, has given Ruth as much pleasure as Betty MacDonald’s glowing account in The Egg and I of her sense of cosmic relief when the pressure canner blew up. Our canner has not yet blown up, but Ruth’s patience with canning has.

It was the second summer that we put in our asparagus bed, and nothing we have ever done in our garden has given a greater reward in proportion to the effort involved. You aren’t supposed to cut asparagus until the third year after you plant the roots, which some beginning gardeners find discouraging. If you want quick returns, grow radishes. They produce edible rootlets in from six to eight weeks, and it is a great satisfaction to munch one’s own radish when all the other crops still look dismally embryonic. Still, a radish is only a radish, and when it’s gone it’s gone. Asparagus goes on year after year.

Asparagus instructions in books are forbidding. They advise digging trenches two feet deep, laying six inches of crushed rock in the bottom for drainage, dumping six inches of well-rotted manure atop the stones, and six inches of the best top soil above the manure, then spreading the roots carefully and covering them with another six inches of top soil. After that, keep the plants well weeded, and don’t cut stalks for two years. Each autumn, clean and cultivate the beds and add fresh manure, and repeat in the spring. After twenty years, put in a new bed.

We dug two-foot trenches. It was terrific labor, for our soil is thickly populated with New England boulders and stones of all sizes. We carpeted the trenches with small stones, covered these with manure, added top soil, and set in about half our fifty asparagus roots in mid-April. That was all we had room for. I planned digging more two-foot trenches but naturally never got around to it. Two months later I came on the somewhat desiccated surplus asparagus roots on a shelf in the cellar and decided that it would do no harm to stick them in the ground, on the chance that one or two of them might survive. All of them survived, and some of them became our very choicest and most prolific plants.

When the stalks came up the second year, somewhat spindly but looking almost edible, we couldn’t wait to cut a few. They tasted good. Presumably we thereby sapped the vitality of our plants, but that was 1927 and this is 1949, and the plants are still doing well. Later in that spring of 1927 I bought a lush bunch of asparagus from my neighbor, Charles Gold, and, while he was cutting the bunch for me, I asked him how long an asparagus bed could last.

“The books say twenty years, but I don’t know,” said he. Then he straightened up and looked reminiscently toward the far hills. “Let’s see,” he continued. “My father and I put in this bed—well, I think it was my sophomore year in college. Must have been 1881, possibly 1882. That makes this bed about forty-five years old. The plants have wandered round so you can’t tell what’s a row and you can’t cultivate it with a horse nowadays, but it’s still a good bed.” About fifteen years after that, Charles Gold’s son told me that he had decided that particular asparagus bed was beginning to peter out, and that he was going to plow it up and replant. The bed was then sixty years old.

Charles Gold had abundant manure, and fertilized his asparagus freely. I don’t suppose our bed has had manure more often than one year in three, but from late April to the Fourth of July it still gives us as much asparagus as we can eat. In fact, in June it grows too lushly for a weekend gardener; we cut everything that shows above the ground before we go to town Sunday night, and by Friday evening half the bed is too tall, already trying to go to seed. As for weeding, we don’t bother. You sprinkle rock salt on the bed once or twice a summer; it doesn’t hurt—or help, despite the superstition—the asparagus, but it discourages the weeds. Asparagus is the perfect crop for the lazy gardener.

The only thing that touches it is rhubarb. That first year I tried to dig up a big rhubarb plant that was going to waste in Carl Van Doren’s orchard, and, after excavating approximately halfway to China, got tired and merely mattocked off some large and ragged chunks of root. They made me a dozen plants, which is more than any one family can use. We have dug up some of them and given them away and thrown others on the dump-heap, where they flourish amid broken bottles and old tin cans; we still have plenty. You just can’t kill rhubarb. The only question about rhubarb is whether you can eat it. Ruth says that rhubarb gives her mumps. Sometimes I persuade her to make me a couple of messes in the spring. She thinks it a gross waste of sugar, and in wartime she had an effective argument there. The fact is that she just doesn’t like rhubarb, despite its sterling qualities, and who wants to cook anything he detests?

5
The Education of a Vegetable Gardener

Farmers in our neighborhood like to wait until Memorial Day and then put in their entire garden in one day’s work. It may be a sound principle for a farmer to whom field crops mean far more than an early bit of greens, but it is no rule for a weekend gardener. By Memorial Day, as the farmer knows, all danger of frost is past and there is no chance that he will have to replant; but also by Memorial Day a forehanded weekend gardener is eating fresh spinach, leeks, and lettuce—as well, of course, as the blessedly quick-growing and undemanding radish.

Next to learning to plant a small enough garden, we found it most difficult to learn to plant in succession. A fever seizes the city man when he puts in his first garden; he loves the sight of a well-raked patch filled from rim to rim with stakes and strings and burgeoning rows of pale green. When he has the garden full he stands back in admiration, but his back aches—and by midsummer he won’t have much left worth eating.

We have learned painfully to take it easy. In April, as a rule, we spade a little and plant a little; later we spade more and plant more. The garden isn’t really full until we put in the last lettuce and transplant the late cabbage, in August.

As early in the spring as the ground is dry enough to work—which, some years, may be the end of March and, other springs, is not until May, we put in our first seeds: a little lettuce, a bit of radish, a crop of early spinach, a few carrots and beets, about a foot each of cabbage and broccoli seed, and as many peas as we hopefully feel we can venture.

There is nothing which tastes better than peas fresh from the garden. And there is nothing which takes up more room in proportion to yield, comes out at a less useful season, requires more work, or creates more heartbreak.

The woodchucks are our major heartbreakers; the chipmunks run them a close second. One woodchuck, slipping into the garden one night, can ruin a whole crop of peas. He may nibble at carrots and beets, but carrots and beets will come back from the root. He may spoil a bit of lettuce and discourage a few beans. But when he has bitten the heads off the young pea shoots, they are done for the season. They don’t come back. And the country about us, growing up to sprouts, is a woodchuck’s paradise.

The chipmunks wait until the peas are ripe. Then they scramble up the vines in their pretty way, tearing them down as they scramble, and bite the peas right out of the pod. The ground beneath our pea rows is always littered with peapods, all bearing the trademark of the chipmunks’ teeth.

Seed catalogues always report low-growing peas which do not require “brushing”; we have never discovered a variety which does not grow better with a little birch brush stuck between the rows. The books suggest that you cut your birch brush in late winter. It is a nice idea, but who ever finds time and energy to do it? We usually cut the brush at the last moment, just when the sap is strongest in the twigs, and half the time the silly birch twigs take root and put out leaves.

Still, we always grow a few peas. Sometimes the first peas are ripe in late June and sweet beyond belief. And always some of them straggle along through July. And long before the end of July we need the space the straggling peas are occupying.

We need it, for one thing, to transplant our cabbages and broccoli. Many of our neighbors buy cabbage plants from some industrious soul who has started them in cold frames. That way they get cabbages about two weeks sooner than if they sowed the seed in the open ground—and that way their cabbages are oversized and cracking before they have had time to eat them. We plant very little seed, and transplant; a foot of seed-row gives dozens of cabbage or broccoli plants, and a dozen plants mean thirty-six feet of row in midsummer, incredible as that seems in spring when the plants are tiny. A full-grown cabbage or broccoli plant is a handsome thing, but it likes three feet or more of elbow room.

There is a legend that broccoli is difficult. In our experience, there isn’t an easier vegetable that can be grown, nor a more rewarding one. We get our first big lush heads of broccoli toward the end of July; and when you cut out the big head the energetic plant goes on producing smaller heads, and then still smaller clusters, until long after frost has killed everything else in the garden. In fact, before the end of October we are downright sick of broccoli, and some years we have cut broccoli into December.

We proved to ourselves years ago that it wasn’t difficult to raise snowy heads of cauliflower, but also we long ago ceased to bother. Raw cauliflower is a pleasant cocktail canapé, but for that purpose a bought cauliflower is as good as a garden-grown one, and one good-sized cauliflower will take care of an army. We just don’t think cauliflower is a very good vegetable. Tastes differ. Ruth, who grew up in California, which is a long way from New England, also has a theory, despite her admiration for Thomas Jefferson, who introduced them to America, that Brussels sprouts are fit only for cattle. How Ruth would survive a summer in England is a mystery to me; she not only despises Brussels sprouts but thinks that cabbage cooked more than five minutes is spoiled, which about rules out the English dinner.

Early in May we usually put in three or four poles of string beans—Kentucky Wonder. The seeds often rot, but one year in three we have string beans weeks before our neighbors, and it takes about five minutes to replant them, late in May, if the first planting doesn’t come up. We also plant, toward the end of May, when the ground is warm, four poles of lima beans, and seldom get more than a cupful of crop. Bush limas ripen earlier than pole limas but they use up a lot of ground, require a lot more work, and don’t taste as good. They just aren’t worth it. About one year in three the pole limas ripen abundantly. They are never any trouble to plant, weed, or pick, and when they come in they are the garden’s greatest joy. The fresh-grown lima, like the fresh-picked pea, is a delicacy that the market buyer never has a chance to taste.

We plant lettuce five times in a season, transplant a couple of dozen plants from each sowing, and have abundant salad greens from June first into November. Sometimes we plant the Belgian endive, dig it up in October, cut off the tops, and reset it in the cellar. But we never get as fat white heads as you can buy at the grocer’s, possibly because the temperature of a weekender’s cellar is so erratic.

We plant beets and carrots twice—once at the very beginning of the season, again in mid-July. Some of the first crop always gets left to rot in the ground; we just don’t believe that beets and carrots of the size that wins prizes at county fairs are worth eating. We usually put in a pound of onion sets, which are ready to eat before June ends, and a row of seed onions, which we proudly carry through the winter in the cellar.

Yellow squash we plant twice, to make sure of a late crop; and off and on we experiment with zucchini, cocozelli, patty-pan, and the various new varieties which are hailed in each season’s seed catalogues. We have never found any novelty which seemed to us better than old-fashioned crookneck. We have grown Hubbard squash, but after the children went away to school and college and summer jobs we found that one Hubbard squash would feed our family about six meals, and we like variety. Instead, we grow a few hills of the little Des Moines Table Queen, sometimes prosaically called acorn or sweet-potato squash. One squash feeds two, and you can adjust your ration to your company. Baked with brown sugar and an extravagant amount of butter, they are as good as Hubbard, and they keep in the cellar all winter.

When turnips are radish-size we consider them worth eating but not exciting; moreover, they don’t stay that size, so we long ago ceased planting turnips. It never occurred to either of us that parsnips could be worth growing. Parsnips and mangelwurzel—nowadays generally admitted to be fit only for cattle—are the only vegetables on Timothy Dwight’s list that we have never tried.

We’ve tried artichoke, without success. We’ve tried Jerusalem artichoke, which has pretty flowers and produces tubers tasting like inferior potatoes. Some years we grow a little kohlrabi, which is good when young but soon lapses into a woody old age. We grew sweet potatoes one year and proved it possible—but they don’t keep. We don’t want to eat sweet potatoes every night for two weeks, and anyway the Des Moines Table Queen squash is about as good.

One vegetable on Timothy’s list taught me a lesson. Oyster plant is one of the prettiest vegetables in the garden; it is easy to grow, delicious when properly cooked, and has the rare advantage that it lasts through the winter and (like parsnips and leeks) can be dug up and eaten even before the asparagus pokes its snouts through the ground.

You plant the seeds individually, three inches apart, and thin later. The plant comes up in handsome green rosettes. Underground its roots thicken and spread beyond belief; a demonologist with imagination could do a lot with oyster-plant roots. It is easy to cultivate, and frost does not bother it. You can dig it up as late in the fall as the ground is soft and as early in spring as your fork will lift it.

We owe our acquaintance with oyster plant in the green to Judge Thurman Arnold. Thurman used to come up to Cream Hill on occasion when his son was at a near-by boys’ school, and one night when Thurman was visiting some of his swankier friends in New York the Gannetts were invited too. It was before the war. Thurman’s friends had a marvelous cook, and with the roast beef came a vegetable luscious beyond belief. I guessed that it was hearts of artichoke transmogrified by kitchen magic. It turned out to be oyster plant.

Now I had never fancied oyster plant at home in Rochester, but then, as a boy, I had hated all vegetables except corn, string beans, canned peas, and potatoes. It was when I went shyly out to dinner in college days and feared making myself conspicuous by idiosyncratic tastes and distastes that I first really permitted myself to savor other vegetables and learned that they weren’t bad at all.

That night with Thurman I thought that oyster plant was another discovery. But it never tasted quite the same at our house. Ruth thought it was the sauce, but I know better now. One spring when I dug the last of the oyster plant to make room for peas I broke off some of the small tips in the garden, and what I’d read came true before my eyes. I’d read that oyster plant discolors rapidly if you don’t plunge it in vinegar. It was true. Ruth was busy, and when Ruth gets busy at one job it takes a better man than I to divert her to other tasks. Well, no gardener wants the product of his own sweat and toil to be wasted, so I set out to clean that oyster plant myself. It was a half-day’s task. Oyster-plant roots, I learned, are covered with hairs that stick to your fingers and get in your hair. About nine-tenths of the handsome large roots are woody rind, and you clean approximately a bushel to get a pint or two of usable product. If you don’t get all the woody rind out, the table serving is tough. When you’ve grown it yourself, of course, you hate to waste it; inevitably, you leave too much rind in.

Oyster plant, I learned that day, is not for people who do their own work. Grow it, if you like, to look at; think of it fondly in the spring as the earliest garden product. But don’t bother about trying to eat oyster plant. We don’t grow it at Cream Hill any more.

A garden is a bore any year that you don’t try something new. We have done a lot of experimenting, and most of the experiments turn out so-so. Some day I’d like to grow really succulent pois mange-tout, and also to persuade an artichoke to weather a New England winter. I’d like to grow better melons than I’ve ever had in my garden; I’ve tried and shall try again. We tried kale—but kale is greens, and greens are for spring eating; after the peas and beans and squash, and particularly the corn and tomatoes, come in, greens pall. I learned about leeks from watching the Dutch farmers when I was a correspondent with the Ninth Army in 1944. The Dutch perform elaborate ceremonies with their sugar beets, which they grow in abundance, but they just let their leeks alone all winter. The tops wither, but in early spring they turn green again, and you have something fresh out of the garden before you can even say “spinach.” Since then we have always had a corner of the garden for leeks, and, except for a bit of flavoring, save them for spring eating.

Ruth usually grows some odd herbs. But a little thyme and sage for stuffing, dill for pickles (if you like pickles; I don’t), some basil and chives, chervil and tarragon for salad flummery, are more than enough herbs for me. Whole libraries of books are being written these days about herb gardening and herb cookery, but according to my conviction the fact of the matter is that most herbs are beneath the notice of a man with a real outdoor appetite.

Chinese cabbage is another matter. Ruth has odd ways of using bak toi, which usually tastes, whatever she does with it, like grass; but the pei chi-li is a distinguished vegetable, with a salad heart and a flavor all its own. Moreover, you can plant it late, after you take the pea vines out; it withstands mild frost and keeps in the cellar almost as well as the big round cabbages—which don’t keep too well, at that. A cellar-stored cabbage is edible but little more; it just isn’t the same thing as honest green cabbage, fresh from the garden.

I admire the Reverend Timothy Dwight’s gourmet-like ardor in putting out twelve successive crops of sweet corn at ten-day intervals, but I think that Timothy sometimes carried good things to excess. In an access of zeaphilic (that means corn-loving) enthusiasm I one year put in eight plantings, but it wasn’t worth the effort. They ripened too close together.

It isn’t safe to plant corn on May first hereabouts—it sometimes rots in the wet ground—but I like to try it, and two years out of three it comes up and produces early corn. Such early corn once earned me fifty cents. Mr. Yutzler, our enterprising grocer, had a stack of rather withered-looking corn in his store that year. One of his city customers asked if it were local. “Local?” said Mr. Yutzler, with vast scorn. “Why, nobody has corn in this town yet, and won’t for two weeks.”

I interrupted. “I have,” I said with quiet pride.

Mr. Yutzler, a positive man, opined that it was probably about as big as squirrel’s teeth. I begged to differ. Mr. Yutzler said he’d give me fifty cents a dozen if I could produce home-grown corn big enough to be fit to eat. I never enjoyed earning fifty cents more.

It doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes the first planting rots, and sometimes the second and third plantings, though put in at three-week intervals, ripen simultaneously. The fifth planting, which goes in toward the end of July, and which I call “gamble corn,” doesn’t always ripen before a heavy frost. But when it does, corn in October is a treat.

When Ruth is energetic, she cans a lot of corn. There is no crop more worth canning. Canned corn isn’t the same vegetable as fresh corn, but it is the best of the canned vegetables. Canned little beets are just as good as fresh beets, but, canned or fresh, beets are still beets, virtuous and reliable but on the prosy side. Canned beans are never more than canned beans. I don’t know about home-canned peas; we have never had more peas than we could eat without canning. Canned tomatoes are said to be full of vitamins, and I always feel somewhat gloomily virtuous when eating them.

Corn is pure poetry—the American epic. You can munch corn and imagine yourself at one with the whole pre-Columbian past. You roll the cob in your fingers, and your mind may range from the Mohawks who used to hunt in our hills to the Senecas of the land where I grew up, and out across the plains of the Sioux to the pueblos of New Mexico, and on down into South America—through all the aboriginal corn-eaters. Corn, first bred from some mysterious grass of the Central or South American highlands, is the great American invention. If I were in charge of naturalization ceremonies, I would give up silly questions about the Constitution and the name of the President. I would ask one question, the sure test of fitness for American citizenship: “Do you like corn on the cob?”

6
The Mystery of the Poison Tomato

The Indians worshiped corn gods. Nobody ever heard of a tomato god.

Every schoolboy knows that corn is America’s gift to the world. Today the black Kaffirs of South Africa eat “mealies,” the Italians love their polenta, even the Chinese and the Russians grow corn. Though the scientists still argue about whether the lost ancestor of corn grew in the Guatemalan or the Colombian highlands, and whether it was the Maya or some less renowned race of South American Indians who first achieved the miracle of its domestication, they all agree that corn is American. Nobody argues about the tomato; it just gets eaten.

The Indians of Central America ate and liked tomatoes before Cortes and Alvarado climbed in their heavy armor from the hot lowlands to the cool high country. Historians agree that the conquistadores took the tomato from America to Europe, and that Europeans ate it. But for some three centuries after that Northern people distrusted the scarlet fruit.

My great-great-grandfather Ezra Stiles did not grow tomatoes in his garden. I doubt that he ever heard of tomatoes, and I am sure that he never tasted one. The tomato had to wait for the nineteenth century to come into its own, and for the twentieth century to become a great national industry. It had to overcome a powerful and passionate prejudice: the tradition that the tomato, like its relative the “deadly nightshade,” was poisonous. The tomato, though it is as native American as corn, has never been a god; for some centuries it was, rather, a devil.

Yet, oddly, no one can say precisely when or how this satanic superstition arose, or how it died. Seeking an answer, I have had the aid of such diverse institutions of learning as the Library of Congress, the Library of the Department of Agriculture, the New York Public Library, and the research department of the American Can Company, yet despite their erudite efforts and my own amateur research, the mystery of the poison tomato remains.

Everybody has had a grandmother, and for a generation at least it has been the common understanding that all respectably aged grandmothers used to say, “When I was a girl we never ate tomatoes, and we didn’t call them that. We called them love apples, and folks said they were poison. We didn’t eat them; we just grew them in the garden because they were pretty.”

My grandmother, who was born in 1823, used to tell me that. All sound novelists are aware of the tradition. John P. Marquand, for instance, noted in Wickford Point that his Brill family grew tomatoes in their flower gardens. When queried on the point, he replied, “Once, when I was twelve years old, a lady in her late sixties told me that her mother spoke of tomatoes when she was young as being planted as ornaments in the front yard and called love apples. She said that the neighbors admired them as novelties, but that they never ate them.”

Mr. Marquand was twelve in 1905; if the old lady was in her sixties she must have been born about 1840, and her mother been “young” in the 1830’s.

Archie Binns, another careful historical novelist, in The Land Was Bright reported the Oregon trekkers of 1852 taking with them tomato plants to grow as flowers in their Western gardens. Mr. Binns told me that he heard the story from Tom Greenfield’s daughter, who heard it from her Aunt Chloe Ann, who made the Oregon trek in 1852. Mr. Binns has an Irish mother; he said that his mother recalled a similar belief that love apples were deemed poisonous in the old days in Ireland; and he also had a Hungarian stepmother-in-law, who told the same story of old-time folk beliefs in Hungary.

Now this is curious, for the tomato was introduced into Europe for the purpose of eating. The very word “tomato” is derived from the Aztec tomatl, and the Aztecs ate it.

In the tomato gospel preached by the American Can Company, it was a Jesuit priest, Hieronymus Cardon, who, landing in Mexico with Cortes in 1519, saw tomatoes growing in Aztec gardens and sent seeds of them to his brother in Cadiz. Hieronymus’s brother, however, had moved to Tangier, and the seeds followed him there. So it was that the first tomatoes grown in the old world were planted in Morocco, and thereby hangs another pretty tale.

The Italians imported the American fruit from Morocco, and, quite naturally, named it pomo di Mori, the apple of the Moors. A Frenchman heard the phrase and, as naturally, misunderstood it, assuming that the Italians were saying pomo d’amore, apple of love, as any Frenchman would. That is the story told by the American Can Company and repeated in many books, and I hope it is true—but I have never found a competent etymologist to authenticate it! Moreover, as my learned friend Clifton Kroeber of the University of California assures me, there is no Hieronymus Cardon on the roster of Cortes’s men, and the Jesuit order was not founded until twenty years later, so the tomato doctrine preached by the American Can Company is subject to serious doubts.

All that is certain is that since the sixteenth century the common French name for tomato (and sometimes also for eggplant) has been pomme d’amour, that the Germans also call the tomato Liebesapfel, and that the Dutch, to this day, affectionately term it appeltje der liefde, little apple of love; also that Italians were eating tomatoes and liking them long before Captain John Smith explored the coast of Virginia or the Pilgrims settled in New England, and that at the same period some Englishmen knew of them.

It was in 1597 that John Gerard, in his magnificent book The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, recorded what may have been the first planting of this American vegetable in England, and he too called it the apple of love:

John Gerard was a true Englishman: he did not trust foreign vegetables. Still, in 1597 he knew that tomatoes were liked by the Latins, and how the Latins ate them. And he was well in advance of the man from whom he borrowed some of the words for his description of the tomato, as for those of many other plants, old Rembert Dodoens of Antwerp, whose Herbal or Kruydeboeck had been printed in Dutch in Antwerp in 1554 (only thirty-five years after Cortes and Cardon landed in Mexico), and translated into French in 1557, into Latin in 1566, and English in 1578. The “Amorus Apple,” as Henry Leyte translated Dodoens’ name for it, was to Dodoens “a strange plant, and not found in this Countrey, except in the gardens of some Herboristes. . . . The complexion, nature and working of this plant is not yet knowne, but by what I can gather of the taste, it should be colde of nature, especially the leaves, somewhat like Mandrake, and therefore also it is dangerous to be used.”

There, so far as I can discover, is the first hint that the tomato is poisonous: from a silly Dutchman who tasted the leaves and found them “cold,” a sinister word in the vocabulary of the old herbalists.

Dr. Harry M. Lydenberg, who was director of the New York Public Library when I was beginning my endless research into the history of the tomato, and shared my futile hope of solving the mysteries, observed that a nineteenth-century French encyclopedia claimed that tomatoes had been considered poisonous in Northern France until the time of the French Revolution, when the tomato-eating men of Marseilles introduced the red fruit to the North. Dr. Lydenberg also egged the Department of Agriculture into action, whereupon Miss Marjorie F. Warner of the Department’s library quickly proved the encyclopedist’s story a legend, as so many stories about tomatoes, on investigation, turn out to be. A pair of French writers, Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault had in 1582, it is true, set down the heresy that “this plant is more agreeable to the sight than to the smell or taste, for the fruit when eaten causes nausea and vomiting.” But many French garden books printed in Paris well before the storming of the Bastille discuss the tomato as a common Paris vegetable. The tomato may be red, but it was not the Revolutionaries who made it popular.

One can almost spot the date when England changed its tomato-mind. One Philip Miller, in the 1748 edition of his Gardener’s Dictionary, observed that “the Italians and Spaniards eat these apples as we do cucumbers, with pepper, oil and salt; and some eat them stewed in sawces, etc., but considering their great moisture and coldness the nourishment they afford must be bad.” In his 1754 edition, however, he announced that “in soups they are now much used in England . . . though there are persons who think them not wholesome.” The citadel of England was beginning to yield.

But what was soup for an Englishman was not yet good soup to an American.

Who introduced the tomato to the United States is a moot question, though the American Can Company has a candidate for the honor, recognized as such by the Rhode Island Tercentenary Commission, which in 1936 placed upon a house in Newport the inscription “Corné House: home of the artist Michel Felix Corné who introduced the tomato into this country.” But the Tercentenary historians, like the can company, were wrong. Corné first sighted the coast of New England in 1799, and eighteen years before that Thomas Jefferson, writing his “Notes on Virginia” in 1781, had recorded the tomato among the vegetables commonly grown in that state. Any Yankee claim to introducing the tomato is sheer vainglory.

It is true that while Thomas Jefferson recorded that tomatoes were commonly grown in Virginia in 1781, in his own garden book he never mentioned planting them until 1809. He kept abundant garden notes all through the 1770’s, despite the fact that other portions of his time were occupied with serving as Governor of Virginia and such minor tasks as drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. In 1773 an Italian friend of Jefferson’s, Philip Mazzei, moved into a neighboring estate, Colle, bringing with him Italian workmen and Italian seeds, many of which he gave to his ardent neighbor. Jefferson, in his enthusiasm, took to Italian in his garden book, referring to onion seed received from a friend north of New York City as “cipolle bianche di Tuckahoe,” and to his parsley as “prezzemolo.”

But Jefferson’s manuscripts of the period, carefully searched for me by the minions of Archibald MacLeish, sometime Librarian of Congress, bear no mention either of pomo d’amore or of pomo di Mori. So there is no proof for my theory that Philip Mazzei the Italian introduced the tomato to the United States through Thomas Jefferson. Mazzei must have been familiar with tomatoes in Italy, and he brought Italian grapes, figs, olive trees, and a host of odd garden seeds with him. Jefferson was a born experimenter, and also a crusader; he was always sending seeds and plants of novelties to his friends. Nothing could be more natural than that, with Mazzei established on the two thousand acres that Jefferson gave him, and Jefferson next door, the two friends would soon have had half of Albemarle County eating tomatoes.

Nothing, I say, could be more natural. And yet none of the biographers of Jefferson and of Mazzei, to whom I have written abundant and eager letters of inquiry, has been able to turn up a scintilla of evidence on the subject. It remains a pleasant hypothesis.

It is no hypothesis, however, that Jefferson knew of tomato cultivation in Virginia in 1781, or that, during all the eight years of his presidency, from 1801 to 1809, he jotted in his notebooks the dates on which fresh tomatoes, as well as other vegetables, first came into the market of Washington. With those two points established, the whole cycle of stories that nobody ate tomatoes in America before this or that culinary hero, some time between 1800 and 1840, boldly and publicly ate a tomato—all this tomato saga becomes a kind of folklore.

Some of the saga has the authenticity of local record. All over the Northern United States in those decades people apparently still had a fear of tomatoes, and dozens, possibly hundreds, of communities boasted their own daring tomato pioneers. Michel Felix Corné was not first to introduce the tomato to the United States, but the diary of the Reverend Dr. William Bentley of the East Church of Salem, Massachusetts, recorded in good faith, on October 1, 1802, that “Mr. Corné is endeavoring to introduce the Tomatoes, love apples, pomme d’amour, or his favorite pomo d’oro. He finds it difficult to persuade us even to taste of it, after all his praise of it.” New Englanders, evidently, were already beginning to acquire that conservatism so foreign to their early history, of which they are nowadays so proud.

New Jersey has a story that Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, of New Jersey’s own southerly Salem, stood on the courthouse steps in 1823 and publicly ate a tomato, thereby persuading South Jersey that the vegetable which would one day become its richest cash crop was actually edible.

I have heard a similar story told of a tomato eating on the steps of an Indiana courthouse. The Virginia volume in the “American Guide Series” recounts that in 1819 Thomas Jefferson demonstrated to the Owens children in Lynchburg that tomatoes were not poisonous—a little late, it would seem. . . . The Rhode Island volume in the same series claims that a South Carolinian introduced love apples to Newport, also in 1819, but that our old friend Michel Felix Corné first taught Rhode Islanders to eat them in 1833. . . . The Pomona, California, State Fair in 1937 paid tribute to one Charles Dendril as, in 1837, the pioneer tomato eater of New England; Pomona believed it was celebrating a sort of tomato centenary. . . . The D. Landreth Company of Bristol, Pennsylvania, “the oldest seed house in America,” claims to have introduced the tomato to the United States in 1820. . . . The old Shaker village of Mount Lebanon, New York, has a tradition that in 1819 an impetuous girl-bride saw the luscious-looking fruits in a garden, heard that they were poisonous, but, saying “I don’t believe it,” bit into one, refused her doctor-husband’s advice to take an emetic, and had no ill effects, thereby inaugurating tomato eating in this republic. . . . My own Connecticut Cream Hill has records showing that Theodore Sedgewick Gold, who fifteen years later would found the first agricultural school in New England, had in 1830 planted tomato seeds on this hill. He did not then eat them, although he knew that Frenchmen ate them, along with snails, frogs’ legs, and other dubious foods.

Up in Rochester, New York, the autobiography of Thurlow Weed sets the date of 1825 for the local introduction of the tomato. In the spring of that year Mr. Tousey, an old gentleman retired from business, who wintered in Virginia and summered in Rochester, brought seed north with him. When Mr. Tousey believed his tomatoes ready for eating, he invited a group of adventurous cronies to dine with him at Christopher’s Hotel. “At first,” Thurlow Weed wrote, “the tomato was palatable to none of the party. This surprised and annoyed our host, who ate them with great gusto; but subsequently, when Mr. Tousey sent fully ripened tomatoes to his friends, our tastes changed and before the season was over we became very fond of them.” When Weed subsequently moved to Albany, and could not find tomatoes in the local markets, he had them sent up to him from New York.

Here we have the first real clue to the mystery of how tomatoes became “poisonous.” Mr. Tousey’s guests didn’t like unripe tomatoes. Rochester in 1825 was unfamiliar with hothouses and cold frames. Without such aids, as every countryman knows today, it is difficult to ripen tomatoes in New York State and New England latitudes. Can it be that the slow northward spread of hothouses and cold-frame culture explains the laggard adoption of the tomato in Northern Europe and in the Northern United States? If so, it would be natural enough that Jefferson’s Virginia should know the tomato in 1781, that Philadelphia and Charleston garden-writers should be mentioning them as common garden food (as they did) in 1806 and 1813, but that the poison legend should persist in more northerly climes for some decades longer.

By the middle of the nineteenth century tomatoes had somehow become a familiar food all over the Northeast. On June 28, 1838, without suggesting that he was doing anything unusual, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to his bluestocking friend, Margaret Fuller: “I am working hard in the garden. My Tomatos, rhubarb and potatoes do excellently, but the bugs eat up my vines if I do not watch the young entomologies.” And in 1843 that standard guide for dwellers along back roads, Robert B. Thomas’s Farmer’s Almanack, published in Boston, devoted its first article to the tomato, thus establishing for all time the orthodoxy of the tomato as a North American food.

“The tomato has long been known and used for culinary purposes in many portions of Europe, in France, Italy, Germany, Holland, and within a few years has been a general favorite in this country,” the 1843 Farmer’s Almanack began. “Various are the methods which have been instituted for preparing the article for diet, which adds to the variety of taste, and renders it in some of its forms agreeable to every individual.” Thereupon Mr. Thomas suggested eating tomatoes “as you do cucumbers,” with salt, vinegar, and pepper (he was not gourmet enough to add oil), “and eat away as fast as you can.” He also gave recipes for stewed tomatoes, tomato omelet, tomato preserves with orange, lemon, and sugar added; for “tomato figs,” cooked with sugar, then “taken out, dried on dishes, flattened and dried in the sun,” and for skinned tomatoes, made into a paste an eighth of an inch thick, dried three or four days in the sun, packed in bags, and hung away in a dry room.

In 1847 tomatoes were first canned commercially, at Jamesburg, New Jersey, by a process developed at near-by Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania—on this I accept the authority of the enterprising researchers of the American Can Company. By 1855 the firm of Rummery & Burnham was busily canning tomatoes at Astoria, Long Island; before the Civil War commercial tomato canning was under way in Baltimore and Cincinnati also; by 1868 the industry was established in California. (Not until the 1870’s, however, did the farm almanacs begin to include recipes for home canning of tomatoes, and the process then still involved calling in “a tinman” to solder the cans, for glass jars had not yet been publicized.)

The story of tomato juice is an epic all by itself. Ernest Byfield of Chicago’s Hotel Sherman sold sixty thousand cases of “College Inn Tomato Juice Cocktail” in glass jars in 1928; that was the first commercial canning of tomato juice on record. The cocktail tag soon dropped away, but tomato juice was launched on a triumphal career. The 1930 pack was about a million cases. The 1935 pack was eleven million cases; in 1940 the figure was fifteen million; and in 1946, thirty-five million. The nation’s commercial pack of tomatoes—whole or in juice—that year was fifty-eight and three-quarters million cases—more than a billion cans; and to this figure an unreckonable number of million quarts canned in American homes should be added.

The tomato devil has been exorcised. The poison legend, even if mysteries remain about both its birth and its death, has been soundly laid in its grave. If the tomato is not, like corn, a major American god, it at least shares in the current deification of the vitamin. It is generally accepted that tomatoes are the richest in vitamins of all vegetables, and that vitamins, even more than sleep, are what makes mankind healthy, wealthy, and wise. Who would dare suggest today that a time will ever come when men will class our vitamin cult with Ezra’s eighteenth-century silk craze as a picturesque example of credulous American fanaticism?

7
Wild Gardening

Our first summer on Cream Hill we thought we’d be too busy to have a flower garden. But we couldn’t help ourselves. Friends with overflowing gardens of their own proudly showered us with their surplus iris, hollyhocks, and chrysanthemums. Whenever we admired a plant in a neighbor’s beds, the instant response was a hunt for a trowel, and we would find our car loaded, whether we wanted it or not. So our flower gardens began, and they have been growing ever since.

That first year we had a superhumanly sensible dream. We wouldn’t have any formal beds; we would merely naturalize a few native flowers and ferns. We wouldn’t have much lawn to cut; we wouldn’t have large beds to weed.

It was a good idea. I have known other people who have had it, and among them some who have clung to it for as long as two years after they bought a country place. But each spring (and sometimes in Indian summer too) a gardening instinct, sure as the sap rising in the trees, stirs within us. We look about and decide to tame another little bit of ground. After twenty-odd years of such spring-surging instincts, we have tamed far too much ground. By the end of August, discouraged by the in-pressing jungle, we resolve to restrict our tended acreage. And again in spring, and sometimes in autumn, after the first frost, when the jungle begins to wither, we violate our good resolutions.

Yet the wild-garden idea persisted. The first wild-flower bed we nursed was an extension of a somewhat fern-grown waste area on the north side of the big barn. We began moving hepatica and bloodroot and columbine into it that first spring. They made themselves at home and multiplied, and we have been moving them elsewhere ever since.

The ferns took over. There were lady ferns and hay-scented ferns in the patch before we began calling it a garden. Both are beautiful and fresh in spring, and blowsy and pestiferous weeds by midsummer. I added some handsomer wood ferns. I had spent a teen-age summer in a White Mountain boardinghouse long before, and had learned from a visiting fern specialist the names of many of the commoner ferns, and soon I had something like a “collection.”

Ferns are a comfortable garden specialty. They seem a bit difficult to the tyro. They have the great and solacing advantage that there are few of them. Possibly forty species may lurk somewhere within a ten-mile radius of Cream Hill—but I doubt it. I have found fewer than thirty-five, and we usually have thirty growing in our garden. To keep limestone ferns we have to do a little work, but most of the thirty thrive all but untended, and a few actually have to be weeded out.

Most people know more ferns than they know they know. Everyone knows bracken, the coarse three-parted fern of dry pasture lands. Everyone also knows the delicate maidenhair. Everyone knows the evergreen Christmas fern, even if they miscall it Boston fern. Once you have identified the interrupted fern, its green fronds interrupted for a few pairs of brown fruiting “pinnae,” you cannot fail to recognize it again. Nor can you mistake the tall handsome ostrich fern, which looks more like ostrich plumes than any fern has a right to do. (But beware of it in your garden; it will put out runners and invade everything within range, crowding out and eventually shading to death any little wild flowers you may have planted near by.) You probably also recognize at sight the boulder or hay-scented fern that is so abundant about the rocks in cow pastures, the coarse pale green fern, misnamed sensitive, which springs up in the meadows after midsummer mowings, and the spinulose wood fern, which you very likely call the florist’s fern. That’s eight species of fern, a good beginning.

It is easy also to identify the tall cinnamon fern, which looks like the interrupted but bears its cinnamon spores on separate stalks; the flowering fern of the swamps, which flaunts its spores at the tip, as if it were trying to be a flower; and the common evergreen wood or leather fern, whose spores crowd the margins of every subdivision of the fronds. And there is the stubby polypody, which some people call thumb fern, growing in the crevices of boulders, sometimes in great mats. If, peering under some moss-grown limestone cliff, you have ever seen the exquisite rosettes of the tiny maidenhair spleenwort, you have not forgotten its beauty, though you may not have known its name. Its cousin, the ebony spleenwort, aptly called ladder fern, which also has mahogany maidenhair-like stalks, is as easily recognizable. And once you have recognized it as a fern, you can never mistake the walking fern, another limestone addict, which bends the tips of its fronds to the mossy ground and takes root, “walking.” That’s seven more, and you are already halfway through our fern garden. You can take your time hunting out and identifying the rest.

We planted most of them by the barn, more than twenty years ago, and they are still there. In the spring, bloodroot and toothwort, columbine, Dutchman’s breeches, and squirrel corn come up ahead of the ferns; the hepaticas which we planted there long ago succumbed to competition or were moved. The limestone ferns died out, as I should have known they would unless I remembered to give them fresh lime each year, which, of course, I didn’t. The big ferns do their own weeding; they just crowd out the weeds. Once or twice a year, sometimes not even that, I pull out a few wild aster and sarsaparilla plants and some of the young maples which hopefully take root. That is all the care the fern bed requires. Of course, we do not rake the autumn leaves off it. The ferns take care of the leaves and relish the leaf mold, as their woodland neighbors do.

Eventually we built our own limestone ledges. I brought home as big weathered limestone boulders as I could carry and cleared a shaded spot for them. The boulders looked woefully small when we had them planted. I went back and got more, but they still looked small. I spaded the ground, added some mulch and a lot of powdered lime. Then we tucked maidenhair spleenwort, purple cliff brake, walking fern, and even a bit of the rare wall rue from the limestone hills north of us, into the crannies of our boulders. We watered them for a month. They liked it. Now we merely keep the goldenrod and wood asters, the sorrel and clover, from invading, and add more lime every year. And, I should confess, every few years we add new limestone ferns, for a limestone bed in a sub-acid patch of woodland is never quite the same thing as a piece of limestone cliff.

We have read of bog gardens and dreamed of a bog garden of our own. But weekend gardeners who do their own work are likely to continue merely dreaming of bog gardens. Besides, the brook that should feed our dream bog garden is usually an arroyo seco before July is out. And anyway the marsh fern, which we dubiously set in the moistest corner of the fern bed by the barn, at once made itself at home, belying its name, and soon became a spreading weed which, like the so-called sensitive fern, the bracken, the hay-scented, the lady, and the ostrich ferns, has to be yanked out to give other ferns a chance. The royal or flowering fern, another native of the swamps, seems equally at home by the barn; and we found our crested fern, another reputed swamp-lover, when scything about boulders in the dry old orchard below the house. The books sometimes make things unnecessarily hard for the amateur gardener.

There are those who conscientiously test their soil for acidity and eruditely compound their compost piles with chemicals. We have always intended to do so, but have not yet found the time for it. We lime our vegetable garden when it looks sour, lime the limestone-fern bed each spring and fall if we remember it, and annually feed a few bushels of rotted pine needles to our laurel—which never does very well, probably because we don’t give it enough acid—and also feed pine needles to our pink lady’s slippers, arbutus, and painted trilliums. That is about as far as we ever get, and yet we have a pretty good garden.

The art of gardening is various. Some like to twist Nature to their wills. Our theory is to adapt ourselves to Nature. We must have experimented with hundreds of plants; we continue to cultivate those which amiably demonstrate that they like our neighborhood.

“Cultivate” is perhaps hardly the word for our kind of gardening. Some twenty years ago I brought in a couple of wild red columbine plants. They multiplied and in time spread all over the place. In May they are a glorious sight. In July they are a scraggly mess, but enough have reseeded themselves so that we can afford to weed out the scraggliest. “How do you grow such beautiful columbine?” people ask us. The answer is that the columbine grows itself; it likes Cream Hill almost as well as we do ourselves.

When the CCC was excavating a parking place by the Dean’s Ravine park some years ago, we noticed that the bulldozer had ripped up a whole plantation of mandrakes or May apples. We planted a few under the plum tree. Within a few years we had a whole forest of mandrake umbrellas; each, in May, with a waxy blossom safe from the rain, and in June full of May apples, which small boys—no gourmets—consider good eating. But soon the mandrakes were crowding out the hepaticas, which had been one of our first transplantations, and invading the asparagus bed. We moved the hepatica; we still dig mandrake out of the asparagus bed off and on all summer.

Wild ginger is another savage invader. Why the hills about us are not all carpeted with wild ginger is as deep a mystery as that of the poison tomato. Three small plants which we set out fifteen years ago have each spread over square yards; one of them reached down through a stone wall and reappeared rods away from its base of operations. We like wild ginger. Its rusty hidden flower makes a lovely design, though you have to stoop to see it, even lower than to see the mandrake’s hidden blossom; and it blooms, in its modest way, almost as early as bloodroot and arbutus. But enough is enough. For years now we have been weeding wild ginger and trying to give it away to friends who complain that nothing will grow in their dry soil.

We don’t yet claim as complete success with arbutus. The wild-flower preservation societies strenuously object to digging up arbutus. But what should a conservationist do when he finds a CCC tractor in the state forest smashing down patches of this best-loved of spring flowers? We regarded it as our duty to save the arbutus. We dug up a few mats of it, carefully keeping the gritty soil in which it had been born, and set it in our wild garden. Knowing that it preferred a more acid soil than ours, we diligently bedded it in pine needles and oak leaves for a year or two. Then we forgot it. And we cut some of the trees that shaded it, to give more light to Ruth’s barn studio.

The arbutus resented the neglect. It died. But we had kept it for five or six years; and it is a pleasant thing to have a patch of arbutus in your yard to remind you when to go off to the woods to smell its perfume where it grows in mass. . . . It may even be that we shall have masses of it in our own yard. For one year we found a mountain road in a neighboring town where the grader had undercut a whole bank of arbutus, so that it was falling into the ditch. With an eager sense of duty, we rescued it—quite a lot of it. We planted it with care. We acidified the soil with ammonium sulphate, with pine needles, and with oak leaves. I hope it lives. It may—if we continue to remember to do our duty by it.^[2]

Bloodroot stands any kind of abuse and seems to thrive in any soil—in full sun or in shade, beneath the ferns, and even on an open ledge—and bloodroot in sunlight is one of the loveliest of spring sights. Hepatica is choosier; it does not seem to reseed itself with us, though many of our clumps have spread and are a shy joy in May. We performed another task of liberation some years ago with Dutchman’s breeches. We rescued it from beside a roadside—and rescue was a truer word than we knew. When we went back for more a year later, the whole patch where it had grown in masses had been plowed. There wasn’t a sign of Dutchman’s breeches anywhere, except in our wild garden at home. There, after twenty years, it still thrives untended and multiplies.

About lady’s slippers, members of the orchid tribe, I speak with diffidence. The stemless pink lady’s slipper is said to be common in our woods. In my first years on Cream Hill I found plenty of it. When I wanted it for my wild garden, it seemed to have disappeared. I hunted hillside after hillside, year after year, in lady’s-slipper time, which is about Memorial Day. I found the yellow lady’s slipper, both the large and the small varieties, which are supposed to be rare in our town, and for years they flourished in our garden. The three plants I brought home multiplied in ten years to eighteen; then the colony began to decline. It had seven flowers in the spring of 1947, and that autumn I dug it up and separated the individual root stocks. Whether it will accept such treatment, which is certainly not that followed by Nature in the woods, I am not yet sure. In 1948 it seemed to be working.

Eventually I found a rich colony of the “common” pink lady’s slipper; for some odd reason it prefers the remote south end of town to our northern hillsides. We gave it a fine rich bed of pine needles. It stood the winter well and flowered again, but in its second spring only the leaves came up, and then it disappeared. Ruth noticed that in the woods the pink lady’s slipper often had its root stocks snuggled against bare rock, and accordingly she made a pine-needle bed for it on a rock ledge. I said it wouldn’t work, the rock would be too hot and dry. So far—and five years have passed—it has worked. Away from the rock ledge, other pink lady’s slippers which I have transplanted have also survived, though they have an odd habit of emigrating a yard or two each year. (You can trace the route of migration in long, pale, underground roots.) But the pink lady’s slippers do not yet multiply for us; they just hold their own. I have not tried to transplant the tall Regina lady’s slippers, and I won’t until I get a reliable bog.

Nor can I report the faintest success at seeding fringed gentian. That late autumn beauty is notorious for its willful ways. When we first came to Cream Hill it grew in abundance by our meadow spring, the kind of wet spot a fringed gentian should prefer. Then it disappeared from the neighborhood of the meadow spring. For a few years we found it in a dry clearing that was growing up to young pine, a spot no self-respecting fringed gentian should endure. It was so abundant there that we actually committed the criminal act of picking it; it closes when picked, but will come out again in full sun. And then it began to thin out and disappear.

We next found our gentians growing on a still drier and sunnier hillside, an even more unlikely spot, and there they still flourish. I have tried to restore them by the meadow spring, but in vain. Pitcher plants, brought from Chocorua a dozen years ago, still grow there, though the meadow spring dries up in a year of bad drought, and dryness is accounted even worse for pitcher plant than for gentian. Grass of Parnassus flourishes there, and grass of Parnassus is normally the fringed gentian’s closest friend. I have tried scattering ripe seed from the hillside plants. I have tried planting the seed in a sandy patch. When a farmer-neighbor told me that he was going to mow a marshy field that was blue with gentian, I went, with his permission, and dug up two bushel basketloads of gentians from his field and set them by my spring. The plant is a biennial, which accounts for part of its mystery, but I thought that if the plants went to seed normally in a spot which others of their tribe had once accepted as a happy homeland, a new colony might become established. I had no luck at all. Wild gardening, and above all gentian gardening, is a gamble.

On the other hand the tall nodding Canada or meadow lilies have responded warmly to the mildest gesture of friendship. I try to scythe an acre or two of open grassland to keep us from utter claustrophobia as the woods close in on us, and in our early years we always had one or two Canada lily plants in this patch. I scythed around them and let them scatter their own seeds. I have continued to scythe around them. Now we have scores of lilies, and we love them.

We do not have to do anything about Jack-in-the-pulpit, one of the oddest and most endearing of spring flowers, for it seeds itself and comes up throughout the fern beds and in all our wild gardens according to its own strong will. So do the dainty Solomon’s seal, the foamy-flowered false Solomon’s seal, the graceful miterwort, and the baneberries, which our children, for obvious reasons, used to call “doll’s eyes.” Both red and white baneberries flourish of themselves in our wild garden, though the books say that the one prefers acid soil and the other alkaline. With us they are at home regardless of soil, and we have a special affection for flowers which make themselves at home without demanding attention.

It doesn’t pay to give too much attention to a wild flower. “More California flowers have been killed by coddling than by neglect,” a California gardener once informed me. Such Western wild flowers as still grow in our garden arrived belatedly one cold December, when our Cream Hill soil was frozen. I shoveled a patch of earth clear, built a bonfire to thaw the surface, planted my “Westerns,” watered them, and re-covered them with snow. Back in New York, my expert friends assured me that I had sadly misbehaved. The rootlets would absorb the water, freeze, and die. . . . They didn’t. They all came up next spring, and some still thrive, reminding us each year of “Ma” Arens, who sent them to us just before she passed away in Oregon.

We used to admire the tall wild thistles—not the stingy-flowered little Canada thistle but the proud plant for which the botanical flower-christeners could think up no better name than “common thistle.” We decided that actually this thistle was handsomer than most cultivated flowers, and we would accordingly give it a place of honor in our garden. We did. We mulched it and fertilized it, and our thistle plant became a magnificent giant indeed, a glorious mass of purple bloom. And the purple flowers turned to thistledown and scattered thistle seeds all over our tended areas, and ever since that summer we have been digging thistles out of the grass and painfully weeding them out of the asparagus bed, the vegetable garden, the wild gardens, the rock garden, and every other one of our most cherished plant-homes.

We concluded that it was wiser to adopt a modified version of Emerson’s counsel. “Hast thou . . . loved the wood-rose and left it on its stalk?” he asked sternly. We have learned to love the thistle and leave it in its far-away roadside or pasture.

8
Let Nature Grow Her Own

According to popular superstition the Indians were lazy folk. They planted corn in virgin soil, sometimes thrusting a dead fish into the hills, and otherwise let Nature thrust her bounty upon them. But after a very slight experience with the business of letting Nature grow her crops for us, we have come to the conclusion that the Indians must have been a neurotically over-busy people.

It is a pretty theory: that the woods are God’s own garden, and that one may find nourishment by walking the hillsides without the weary pother of planting, hoeing, weeding, and cultivating. In twenty years of book reviewing I have read a lot about the bounty of the wayside and living off the wild. But it sounds better in books than it proves to be when one works at it; and even in books, when one reads between the lines, it is a bit of a hoax.

Take acorns, for instance. Our woods are full of oak trees, and in good years the ground is littered with acorns. It seems a shame to waste them. “Although bitter and somewhat astringent when raw,” the learned Dr. M. L. Fernald says in his Edible Wild Plants of North America, the most erudite as well as the saltiest of the let-Nature-grow-it-for-you books, “acorns lose these properties by being leached and there is left a nutty meat rich in oil and starch.”

So far, so good. And we all know that some of the Indian tribes almost lived on acorn meal. They mixed the meats with hardwood ashes and water, according to Dr. Fernald, or powdered the dried kernels and either poured boiling water through the flour, thus removing the tannin, or placed the powdered mass in a basket or in a hollow pocket of sand and allowed the running water to trickle through the mass. This, some authorities say, explains why the Indians had such bad teeth.

But, Dr. Fernald continues, it is unnecessary to mix sand with acorn flour and thus sandpaper the teeth. All that is necessary is to dry the kernels thoroughly, boil them for two hours, pour off the darkened water, soak the blackened kernels in cold water, with occasional changes, for a few days, then grind them into a paste. Acorn flour, Dr. Fernald holds, makes good muffins when mixed with wheat flour in the fifty-fifty conventional recipe for corn bread. But it sounds to us as if someone about the tepees had to work for days to get a little acorn meal, and someone else had to gather the acorns.

We have never tried it. We have never had that much time.

We have tried candied wild ginger, nettle greens, creamed milkweed shoots, and boiled fiddle fronds of assorted varieties of ferns, and, of course, the far less esoteric nourishment of wild strawberries, wild raspberries, wild blackberries, hickory nuts, and butternuts. We have even tried the groundnuts—actually a kind of tuberous-rooted wild bean—on which the Pilgrims are said to have lived in large part during their first winter in New England. These, the books say, were so cherished that plants were exported to France, and one Yankee town is alleged to have passed a law forbidding Indians to dig groundnuts on English land, on pain of being whipped.

Groundnuts are as easily cooked as potatoes, though not as easily pared, and they taste like fair turnips. The trouble is to find enough of them. The only place I know where they could be dug in sufficient quantity to make them really worth gathering is beneath my neighbor Ted Gold’s porch trellis. His grandfather planted them there, and they flourish. Their fragrant chocolate-colored flowers in midsummer are almost as handsome as the trumpet vines that screen our own south porch. But my neighbor Ted has never encouraged my hints that it might be well to thin his groundnut patch, and I have never found any comparable masses of them in the wild. My experience with groundnuts—I spent half a day spotting and digging a small mess for two—added to my conviction that the Indians worked overtime.

Nettles and milkweed, on the other hand, are among the most abundant crops on Cream Hill. From May until October our hands habitually sting from misencounters with nettles, and only since we learned of the miraculous selective murder accomplished by the chemical known as 2.4D have we begun to get our nettles under control. (2.4D is the herbicide which spares narrow-leaved grasses and day lilies while working foul vengeance on assorted broad-leaved weeds—also, as we learned by painful experience, on the broad-leaved flowers which you accidentally spray when on a nettle-slaughtering campaign.)

Nettles, the books say, made Pliny’s favorite pudding in old Roman days. Sir Walter Scott celebrated their virtues in Rob Roy, and Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. They are still eaten with pleasure by the peasants of France and Scotland, but seldom in America. And in these days when Americans are boasting so constantly about the superiority of our ways of life, it is curious that no one has ever pointed, as another sign of the superiority of American civilization, to the fact that we Americans don’t eat nettles. The Gannetts have tried them. We know.

Perhaps I should say that I have tried them. Ruth, generally a gastronomical experimenter, willing to try anything once and usually three times, has never evinced the slightest interest in boiled nettles, and Michael and Ruthy both had the normal child’s “I-call-it-spinach-and-to-hell-with-it” attitude toward any greens. The three times that we tried nettles Ruth graciously permitted me to gather, wash, and cook them myself. She watched me with a distant air; and for her, each time, one spoonful of boiled nettles was enough—it was for me, too, though I didn’t admit it. I tried them straight the first time; they were unpleasantly bitter. I added sugar the second time; the resulting taste was terrible. I changed the water repeatedly on the third experiment. The nettles still weren’t worth eating—let alone picking and washing.

Milkweed is different, and we have one of the finest fields of volunteer milkweed in all New England. During the war, when the newspapers were full of propaganda about the potentialities of milkweed as a source of a rubber substitute, we used to gaze speculatively on our milkweed crop and discuss our chances of wealth. We never cashed in on it; neither, so far as we learned, did anyone else. But, for a week or two in May, young milkweed stalks make good eating.

We have sampled a variety of field greens—mustard greens, young dock, certain varieties of pigweed, “pussley,” and others. We have always intended to sample marsh marigold greens, which are said to be good, if a trifle mucilaginous, just before the flower buds break into gold. But it seems something of a crime to boil marsh marigold for greens just before it comes into its golden glory, and we have never been able to steel ourselves to the offense. Milkweed is something else. The root stalks run deep and horizontal underground. When you pull a young stalk you do no more harm to the plant than when you cut asparagus; it soon replaces itself. Besides, it tastes good. It has a tang of its own. It doesn’t just have a generic flavor of vitamins and “greens”; it tastes, in fact, almost precisely like asparagus.

You pull it before the leaf buds separate from the stem. I hesitate to correct the great botanical gastronomer Dr. Fernald, but the illustration in his Edible Wild Plants of North America is of a milkweed with the leaves already expanded. At that stage the milk has begun to form, and the taste is bitter. It is not milkweed in its prime.

Sometimes we eat milkweed by itself, with drawn butter or a cream sauce. (Ruth disapproves of cream sauces, but I like them on almost anything.) Sometimes, when guests turn up beyond the capacities of our asparagus patch, we add milkweed to our asparagus, and we have yet to find a guest who detected the difference until told of it. Milkweed is one of the few wild crops which are easy to harvest and worth the effort.

Fiddle fronds are another. Of late years fiddleheads have received extensive newspaper publicity; a firm in Maine cans them. We first heard of them from Charlie, the famous chef of the Rapids Hotel in Analomink, Pennsylvania. Charlie, a Frenchman and an epicure, insisted that bracken made the most appetizing fiddleheads, and bracken are usually mentioned in the newspaper stories. Professor Fernald recommends cinnamon fern, and we agree with him that cinnamon fern is preferable to the rather stringy bracken. But ostrich ferns are best. Picked before the fiddleheads uncoil, boiled, and served with salt and butter, they are a noble dish, and it is almost as easy to pick a mess of them as to pull a bunch of carrots. All you have to do is to know where they grow.

As to dandelion greens, or, even more, dandelion salad, anyone liking them is welcome to them. You can find plenty on any roadside, and that, in our judgment, is where dandelions belong. We feel the same way about dock, wild mustard, the slippery purslane, and Good King Henry.

Woods gourmets find all manner of foods in the forests. Oliver Perry Medsger, for instance, author of Edible Wild Plants, tells with enthusiasm of the thrice boiled and thrice strained skunk cabbage, which he eats with relish. We read of his experiments with interest; we have not imitated him. Dr. Fernald has proved that while the raw root of the Jack-in-the-pulpit puckers the mouth worse than a green persimmon, the same root stock boiled, drained, baked, and mellowed—apparently with more effort than is required to make crepes suzette—is quite edible. He may be right; we have not tried. Why should anyone?

Dr. Fernald, indeed, is a glutton for work. I cherish with particular delight his account of a meal he once served to a group of visiting botanists; indeed, it is such an impressive evidence of botanical and gastronomic zeal that I venture to quote it in full:

Dr. Fernald, obviously, is an outdoors cook who really cares.

The woods and fields about us are full of butternuts and shagbark hickories. Each autumn we pick up a bushel or two. Sometimes we crack a few. They are good, but somehow we usually find other ways to spend our long winter evenings. In fact, without electricity, we usually go to bed.

Ruth is a fanatic for berries of all kinds. I like wild strawberries, but to me it seems rather gluttonish to eat a lot of them at table. Eaten as they are picked, one by one, one gets the full individual flavor. Other berries, I feel, clutter up the teeth with seeds beyond all real enjoyment. I am willing to pick as many quarts of raspberries or blackberries as Ruth and her friends will eat, but I prefer not to be asked to eat them in the raw. Cooked and strained, the juices make delicious jelly. It is Ruth’s contention that jelly is a lot of work.

We have tried choke-cherry jelly, which is an interesting effort, though not one to be indulged in when sugar is short; and Ruth regularly puts up a little elderberry jelly. The elderberry is one of the most neglected of Nature’s gifts. Even Dr. Fernald, who is almost omnivorous, casts a slur upon its flavor. We like it. And the birds, notably the cedar waxwings, which gather about the ripening elderberries in great flocks, agree with us.

But in general, it is our tested opinion that the man who tries to let Nature do his gardening for him works harder than the man who grows his own. There are a lot of things in life which are not as simple as they sound.

9
From Bed to Bed

Our house was tenant-occupied for a quarter of a century before we took possession, and tenants don’t plant many flowers. The great lilac bushes in the yard obviously dated back to Reed days, and so, I suspect, did the flourishing bed of tawny day lilies that ran down the hill from the yard. So, probably, did the hollyhocks that lined the pigpen, a rather lovely old-fashioned variety with rose petals and deep carmine, almost black, centers; they still seed themselves along the fence that guards the vegetable garden. I presume the bed of myrtle which has been enlarging its glossy carpet in the open patch of woodland north of the house through all our years of occupancy, also dates back at least half a century. If we inherited any other flowers from previous tenants, they were the hesitant Star of Jerusalem, which blooms off and on below the front stone wall, and a rather shabby variety of bluebell which makes itself at home all over the place.

We weren’t going to kill ourselves gardening. Just a vegetable garden the first year and a few ferns was our motto. But the flat stones about the water barrel outside the door, after the barrel had been removed and the water turned into the house, looked even shabbier than they had before. We decided that it might be a good idea to plant a few nasturtiums between the stones. When we went to Mr. Yutzler’s to buy nasturtium seeds, we noticed a few other packets that looked interesting. . . . That was the beginning, and there has never been an end.

The nasturtiums—and the marigold and sweet alyssum—bloomed prettily, about the time we were leaving to get the children back for school. It was obvious that we hadn’t planted early enough. It was also obvious that those flat stones, laid about the dead well into which the water-barrel had overflowed, needed rearranging.

That first summer I had the assistance of a former national Negro shot-put champion. We cut rollers from dead chestnuts in the woods, and we rolled—I say “we” rolled, but of course Scotty did most of the work—some of the largest flat slabs of rock from the hillock north of the house to the water-barrel site. One of them we laid over the top of the dead well. Another we carefully placed in a spot from which I have ever since wanted to remove it; but without the aid of a shot-put champion, that rock stays put. Scotty now lives in Texas.

Out of this rock arranging grew two beds—one under the south windows against the house, hereinafter known as the “house bed,” and another, separated from it by an unfortunately uneven walk of flat stones, known as the “well bed.” That was what the packet of nasturtium seeds began.

The house bed and the well bed change shape every few years, whenever Ruth, weeding a corner, decides that it would look better just a little mite extended, and, after making a thorough mess, calls on me to help move “just one stone.” It is amazing how “just one stone” can grow and multiply.

Another bed assumed a permanent shape that same year, though it didn’t become a garden until we’d looked at it through another summer. Smack in the middle of the yard, blocking the view toward the big oaks on the south hill, stood a granary, a corncrib. It rested on four square-cut upright rocks, which might have been hitching posts, or Druid ruins, or miniature Washington Monuments in a country cemetery.

The Van Dorens’ barns had all blown down the previous winter, and Carl’s car was without shelter. We thought we’d prefer a hillside view to a granary view from our windows, and out of the corncrib’s sound timbers Carl thought that he could set up a viable garage. Some time, I thought, I would dig out those corner pillars, use them for a retaining wall somewhere, and smooth out the site for more lawn. All over the place are sites where I have meditated building retaining walls.

The crib came down; Carl built his garage. Next spring, when the ground was soft, I thought I’d dig out those dolmens. I worked at one of them through two weekends. Apparently it had its base in China. I tried another. I never got deep enough to budge even one of those pillars of rock.

Obviously, the answer was to feature our posts. I decided to dig up the square beneath what had once been the granary, and grow a few flowers there. It turned out that the granary had been built over four or five boulders, which, like the corner pillars, reached approximately to China, and that, wedged in among these, was a magnificent collection of assorted shapes of rocks. I spent a considerable portion of our second summer repiling these into what turned out to be a rather ramshackle low stone wall, connecting the corner posts and outlining what we have ever since called the “square bed.”

In the square bed we planned to have a “blue-and-white garden.” But larkspur didn’t like the spot. Forget-me-nots refused to grow there. Japanese bell-flowers flourished for a year or two, then reseeded themselves elsewhere. A few spikes of globe thistle remain, as memories of the “blue-and-white garden.” (I have forgotten what we put in as “white.” At any rate, it isn’t there now.)

A clump of wild sunflower appeared of itself at one corner; a tiny patch of low primroses, set in on the west side, has been resolutely advancing ever since. A couple of tiger lilies, planted at a far corner for accent, liked the spot and have sent their descendants rambling all over the bed. Coreopsis, heeled in “temporarily,” also adopted this square bed as its own. Michael, who never liked planting seeds in any of the neat little beds we laid out for the children, tucked a few calliopsis seeds beside one of the stone posts, and they have been reseeding themselves for twenty years. All on its own, our “blue-and-white garden” converted itself into a yellow-and-orange garden. It’s nice, too, though some of our guests ask if it is the old family burying ground. The corner posts do suggest a cemetery.

Our house, as I have said, is built upon a ridge, and the yard is the flat summit of the ridge. On the north side the woods creep close to the house. The barns and sheds used to cut off the uphill view to the south, but we now have a pretty vista through the gap once closed by the corncrib. The road runs below the west side of the house, separated from it by such a retaining wall as only old-time farmers, fortified with applejack and aided by oxen, could ever have built. To the east, the land used to have no definition. The “lawn”—it became lawn merely through the constant mowing of its assorted varieties of field grasses—sloped down toward a superannuated orchard. One fine morning my wife, gazing reflectively and imaginatively out of an east window, suggested that it might be nice to have a narrow strip of flower garden separating the trimmed lawn from the unkempt orchard grass.

I thought it would be nice too, but I had no idea how long and how deep a bed she had in mind, or to what it would lead. I think it was in our second year that the idea was born, and in the third year the “long bed” took shape. In the intervening winter my wife studied seed catalogues, and the next spring, when I was about to spade the vegetable garden, she mildly inquired where she should plant the twenty-one varieties of flower seeds she had purchased. So, before digging the long bed, I spaded up a sunny patch behind the woodshed for a seed bed. Add “seed bed” to the list of our gardens. Some day we will have a cold frame there, but that is one tribulation that, so far, I have been spared.

The long bed, as I dug, seemed rather deeper and wider than I had foreseen. I decided that it might be prettier to have two long beds, with a strip of grass between. This would involve less digging. We planted strawberries in the rear strip. Caring for the front strip exhausted our energies, however; what few strawberries we had were enjoyed by the chipmunks. Mowing the narrow patch of grass between the two beds proved a practical impossibility. By the next spring it was clear that the sensible thing to do was to dig up the grass strip and unite the two long beds. The united, widened long bed is still the major feature of our establishment, as seen from the porch.

The long bed used to have a rear border of iris, but Ruth eventually decided that the iris blocked the downhill vista, and dug out great hunks of it, casually suggesting that I find some other place to put them. The long bed is also her favorite larkspur garden, her favorite phlox bed, the preferred home for her biggest and brightest zinnias, as well as for Oriental poppies and butterfly weed, and one end of it, in July, is a mass of scarlet bee balm, haunted by hummingbirds. In fact, the long bed, despite our most earnest mid-winter plans, is a little bit of everything.

Seen from the porch, this hodgepodge was eminently satisfactory, but inevitably anyone looking at it from the porch was moved to walk closer. In a more intimate view, it became obvious that while the ground generally sloped downhill, at one point the slope was uneven. A little digging, my wife suggested, would even this off and improve the prospect.

I did a little digging. My first impression was that the obtrusive hummock was a pile of clamshells. The old Reed family must have loved clams. Though Cream Hill is eighty miles from the sea, clamshells form an important part of the subsoil, no matter in what direction from the house you dig. The slope behind the long bed, however, must have been the Reeds’ favorite clamshell dump. And, to make the clamshells sleep quietly, they also dumped there broken scythe blades and knives, bits of old harness, bottles, tin cans, cracked horseshoes, and a variety of other antiques which have revealed themselves to us across the years and are still revealing themselves.

I did not at first appreciate the depth of this archaeological deposit, because I discovered that the real reason for the hummock behind the long bed was a ledge. The ledge had crannies obviously adapted for rock gardening. Further probing revealed beneath the ledge a bit of precipice—a three-foot palisade. That was the beginning of our rock garden, which has since become our greatest pride and our greatest woe.

For the rock garden grew, and, I fear, is still growing. It had, and has, no clearly defined natural limits. It began as a ledge a few yards square, slipped downhill over the miniature precipice, crept out in both directions along the base of the long bed, leaped across to an obviously landscapable boulder which turned out to be another bit of bedrock, and on to other boulders and ledges. The earth excavated from these rock surfaces formed into a sort of terrace at the foot, which has widened as the rock garden has expanded, and is nowadays, in dreamy moments, referred to as our ultimate croquet court. The rock garden is now, in a rough way, more than sixty feet square, with natural stone steps and stairs, and it is constantly expanding. In late April, May, and early June it is a magnificent sight. In July and August it becomes seedy, and in September it is just another impossible chore. In winter, when the snow is deep, it makes a good start for a bobsled run.

So there you have the house bed, the well bed, the square bed, the seed bed, the long bed, and the rock garden. I have already referred to the fern bed against the east barn, the wild garden in the woodside patch below it, and, of course, the vegetable gardens—two of them, since Ruth invaded the older vegetable garden with her zinnias and forced the corn into a new plantation. The shaded patch against the west barn used to be rather shabby-looking, for the barn had and has no gutters, and the drip made a waste land in front of it until Ruth decided to conceal it by spading up a bit of garden in front of it. That’s the “barn bed.”

Some of the iris Ruth dug from the long bed I set in below the retaining wall in front of the house, where it could be seen from the road. Ruth liked it there so much that she decided to enlarge the bed and add to the vision of beauty for passers-by. That became the “wall bed.” And now that the highway has been relocated, leaving us a potential walled garden between the stone walls that hedged the old roadway, Ruth thinks it would be nice to garden that whole area and to plant climbing roses beyond the farther stone wall, to clamber over it and, again, to delight the passers-by.

There is virtually no limit to Ruth’s creative imagination.

10
Cream Hill Calendar

January

Until 1946, when our town, with state aid, rebuilt the Cream Hill road as an all-season highway, ours was a hazardous road at any time of year, and an all but impassable road from New Year’s until well into June. The snow sometimes drifted ten or fifteen feet high at the top of the hill; and when the drifts melted in the spring the resultant freshet ran off half the road with it, leaving a series of awesome canyons and some of the muddiest mud through which I have ever waded.

Cop O’Donnell, long our town’s first selectman, believed that all that was necessary to restore a road like ours was to scoop up the silt from the gutters and redeposit it atop the road. Such loose silt naturally washed out in the next heavy thunderstorm, leaving the road a mess again. Our road was good only for a brief season of midsummer drought. I have in my files a letter from Cop, dated June 17, 1931, in which he cheerfully assured me that “the weather controls your road. Roads are very wet at present. I think you better not try to get home at present.”

That was in June; in January our road was as lonely as the Greenland icecap. When we walked in, as we occasionally did in January even in those early years, we knew that no wheel had turned on that road since the snow came. Our lumbering boot tracks mingled with the daintier prints of deer, fox, rabbit, squirrel, mice, an occasional skunk or coon, and nothing else. To walk a mile and a half through the snow and to land wet-footed in a cold house; to build the fires and then lie down in the snow outside to reach a bucket down into the dead well into which the winter water flowed in those days, was an arduous adventure for soft city desk workers, but a curiously thrilling one.

Times have changed. The town plows our road now, though it is still a bit risky to come up after a fresh snowfall, for the selectmen naturally plow out the farmers’ milk routes before they get around to luxury roads like ours. The water runs all winter in our cellar; you can bring up pails of it without getting your stomach, or even your feet, wet, and it isn’t a very complicated plumbing maneuver to turn water into the ground floor. I have learned something of the art of quick fires, too; we can heat three rooms from zero to seventy in less than two hours; a special bin of dry chestnut, dead for twenty years, accomplishes that miracle. But it is still a venture into another world to come from New York City to Cream Hill in mid-winter.

Not that it is always a snowy world. I have seen the pussy willows and alder catkins come out in a January thaw; and one year we dug leeks and oyster plant out of our garden in January, as fresh as in October or April. I have even seen a chickweed, hardiest of all the flowers, wild or cultivated, bloom in January, as, sometime in our quarter-century of Cream Hill, it has bloomed in every month of the calendar—a weed in midsummer, a thing of minute and mysterious beauty when matching itself, off season, against snowflakes.

But, snow or thaw, January is a lonely and silent month. One seldom hears the sound of running water; no frogs peep or croak, no insects hum or rasp; often one listens in vain even for the note of a chickadee or a blue jay. Sometimes at night the big barred owl sounds his resonant hoo-hoo-whoo-hoo-oo from the woods below us; the silence seems only deeper for his interruption. It is an exciting—and rare—event when a flock of pine grosbeaks flies chattering into the big maples in front of the house; the faint peep of a brown creeper, hardly audible amid the din of April, is startlingly clear. Even the crows desert us in mid-winter. Cream Hill in January is a return to the primeval, and we nurse our fires.

February

February is the month of our deepest snow and often of our coldest temperatures. The thermometer sinks below zero regularly; it is a rare year when it rises, even in afternoon, above fifty. Yet this is a month of expectancy. The sun is visibly higher than in dark January. When the sun shines, the chickadees break into their plaintive-happy “phebe” whistle, which in February sounds like a spring song, even if one may hear it in any month of the year. It is time to prune the fruit trees and the grape vines, a cold task which nevertheless carries with it the thought of softer days to come.

In February the hungry deer come closer to the house; often they leap the garden fence and kick about in the snow until they locate a rotting cabbage or a few neglected carrot or beet roots. We seldom see them, but they leave their records in the snow, circling the garden to find a place to jump out, and there is an exciting companionship in the thought of so large an animal sharing our food.

One year the snowdrops pushed up through the snow and showed color in February, though it remains a mystery how, in the frozen soil beneath the snow, they knew that the calendar was marching toward spring. One year the wren which often winters in Frank Calhoun’s barnyard broke into February song—and, icy as a winter wren’s song sounds in the northern forests in midsummer, it is warm music in February. In February we eat the last squash and cabbage, onions and pumpkin, stored in the cellar; for the cellar of an unheated house, even when the house is boarded and banked, is no certain safeguard against eventual frosting.

And in February—unless the snow is too deep—I do my heaviest woodcutting. There is a satisfaction in cutting one’s own wood, and on Cream Hill one develops rather the pioneer’s fear of the vast forest than the suburbanite’s sentiment of “Woodman, spare that tree!” The forest invades us from every side. We cherish our big maples and ashes and oaks, and almost any pine or white birch, but we do not want to be totally shut in.

I make the work harder than is necessary. It would be easy to cut close to wood roads where a car could pick up the cut logs, but for years I have been opening vistas through the forest. I have what I call my “lane of light” to the northwest. Hough Mountain sits square in the middle of it, and if the sun does not, even in midsummer, set in my lane, it colors that patch of sky, and I love the black trunks of a few big trees and Hough Mountain framed like a Japanese print against the evening sky.

First I opened a mere notch of light, then moved downhill, cutting out trees whose tops—more tops each year—invade the precious lane of light. Latterly I have opened lateral panels of light outside the tall oaks that frame Hough Mountain. I sit by the fireside at dusk worshiping my lane of light and figuring out which trees, cut, would widen the lane.

In February I fell some of them, trim them, cut them into lengths, split the big logs, and, if the snow is not too deep, painfully lug or drag them out to the road. I love it, and it seems to me nowadays that I could never get through a winter of desk-sitting in New York without the antinomy of weekend woodcutting on Cream Hill. And, when I go to the woodbin to throw a new log on the fire, I recognize it. “That is a piece of the big hickory in which the flying squirrels nested,” I say. Or, “I wonder if the ground pine still grows thick beside the stump of that oak.” The wood burns better for the memories.

March

March is the desperate, disillusioning month of the year. The calendar says that spring begins in March; but most of the time the calendar lies. In New York City the March air may breathe of spring; but on Cream Hill winter still reigns. For most of the month the snow still lies deep; and, though Lawrence Stevens sets his sap buckets on the maples that line the road on the south side of Cream Hill, through most of March they freeze every night. Sub-zero temperatures are still common. But if there is disappointment, there is also promise. The streams are no longer icebound and still; mid-day thaws swell them, and the nights are no longer silent. The first spring song is the sound of running water.

March is the month for brush burning. The wood is wet, and a fire hard to start, but by the same token there is little danger of its spreading. Once you have distilled away the snow that tops the brushpiles, the well-trodden hole in the snow about the burning brushpile is a pleasant place. And toward the end of the month, the birds return.

Most spring flowers vary with the season; the silly snowdrop, which once poked its head out in a January thaw, often blooms in March, though usually, with us, it waits for early April. But the birds seem to have the calendar planted deep in their instincts. They arrive on time, almost regardless of the weather—first, early in March, the bluebirds, breathing the softest and most springlike of all bird songs; then the song sparrows and the robins, the guttural red-winged blackbirds and grackles, and, toward the end of the month, the twittering purple finches, the loud flickers, and the hoarse phoebe. A brush fire attracts early insects; and the insects attract the phoebes. Usually, in a late March brush burning, a phoebe keeps me company. My fire feeds his stomach; and his presence feeds my peace of mind.

It is an old debate as to which spring flower blooms first. Some plead for the hepatica, some for arbutus; garden-lovers claim the honor for the snowdrop or the little winter aconite. The skunk cabbage properly has a host of supporters; it pokes its red nose out of the swamp mud in early March thaws, and the bees are always on hand to welcome it. My father used to resent its aspersive name and try to call it “swamp angel,” a little too pretty a name for a flower which, despite its monklike beauty, has so solidly earthy and unheavenly an air. Ruth insists that she likes even its odor, and makes table bouquets of it; but Ruth is an artist, with an artist’s special tastes.

The lowly chickweed is actually the first spring flower on Cream Hill, hiding its tiny bloom between last year’s corn rows as soon as the snow melts away. And next to it come two other “weeds”—shepherd’s purse and dandelion. These are all immigrants from alien climes, with no sense of the proprieties of the American seasons. They have no calendar; they bloom at any time of year. One has one’s first full conviction that spring is here when the robins and the song sparrows sing at dawn and dusk, and the arbutus and hepatica open their delicate blossoms in the woods. In most years that happens in April; in a good year the softly purple hepaticas and the tiny pink arbutus open their eyes to the sky and announce that spring is here, before the end of March.

April

Half of our Cream Hill Aprils are dismally March; the other half are triumphantly May. The poet who asked, “What is so rare as a day in June?” might better have inquired, “What is so rare as ‘an April day’ in April?” In another mood Lowell complained that half New England’s Mays were dismally like “mayn’t,” until suddenly the world gave one leap from April into June. On Cream Hill the leap is from March into May.

Our April begins with mud and belated snowdrifts. The canny woodchucks stay snug in their holes until the month is half past. Meadowlarks and field sparrows arrive early to join the robins and song sparrows in their brave effort at a dawn chorus, and at dusk we hear woodcocks “peenting” in the upper pasture and rising into the dusky sky in their desperate effort at song. Spring peepers in the swamps make the nights shrill, and after the long silence of the winter their stridence is thrilling. But in April both birds and frogs are merely tuning up for May; the orchestra is rehearsing, and on a cold morning it is silent.

In the woods the shy windflower keeps the hepaticas and arbutus company; in open glades, on a sunny day, bloodroot opens its white faces to the sky. In the garden a few crocuses bloom toward midmonth; and the daffodils poke their noses through the earth. In a good year the ground thaws early, and we plant radish and salad and peas. But we know well that Nature is playing a game with us; April is not natural planting time on Cream Hill. One hot spring we ate asparagus and rhubarb before April was out. But we know well that the calendar was wrong; that year May began in April.

Almost always there is a miracle-week toward the end of April. We have returned to New York cold and discouraged; spring was late. Spring is always late, except for the young generation that has taken to skis. We are always too eager for it; we anticipate. Then comes the miracle-week. After five days in New York, we return to find Cream Hill transformed.

The phoebe is nesting on the porch, leaving a nasty mess below his nest, but we welcome it; there are eggs in the robins’ nests; the dawn is full of strange twitterings, of the achingly beautiful pipes of white-throated sparrows, of the ruby-crowned kinglet’s rhapsody, of mysterious warblers. Having arrived in the uncertain dark, we rise in the morning with an incommunicable excitement. This is the one time of year when early rising is a pleasure. We go out, even before coffee, to discover the new world.

The cherry trees show color; the lilac buds are big; the grass is turning green. Last year’s garden beds are full of hints of renaissance. All through the rock garden the columbine has lifted the brown leaves and is gravely hinting the fire to come. Carpets of dwarf phlox are about to burst into full bloom. In the wild garden, Dutchman’s breeches stand shyly but proudly white; blue, white, and yellow violets are rediscovering the sky; the white trillium we brought from my native Western New York shines like stars; fern fiddles have poked through the leaves, and if you look beneath the leaves you can see that the wild ginger has opened the exquisite ruddy geometry of its hidden flowers. The forsythia in front of the house is ablaze.

The world changes in a week. Spring at last becomes more than a promise. The calendar may still say April, but this is May.

May

In our Cream Hill calendar the year has two great months: October and May, and the greatest of these is May.

The only trouble with May is that there is not enough of it. May is always too short. The world changes too fast. There are not enough days in the month, not enough hours in the day, or minutes in the hour; neither enough for the ecstasy of the May woods and roadsides, nor enough for the back-breaking toil which May demands in the garden.

The grass needs raking; it is time to lift the leaves from the garden beds and to dig in the manure scattered in November; the vegetable gardens need spading, and even winter woodchopping does not maintain a city man’s back in condition for steady spading; the fruit trees should be sprayed; if that new patch of lawn where the old road ran is ever to be leveled, this is the time to do it. Spading the garden, one meets worms, reminder that the fishing season is open again. Every minute a mysterious warbler’s song demands investigation; at no other time of year is woods-walking more rewarding. The city man in the country on a May morning is like a child on Christmas Day: bewildered by the distracting abundance, he doesn’t know where to begin; the sudden richness of life is frustrating; he almost wants to cry.

May is the birds’ great month, and they show it in their song. The farmer’s day is no longer than a robin’s or a wood thrush’s. I have heard thrushes after nine at night and waked in gray half-light to hear them singing soon after three in the morning.

The woodcock notoriously prefers the half-light for his curious, heavy efforts at song; when the moon is full you can hear him at every hour of the night, struggling to overcome his handicap of being more like a chicken than a thrush. Field sparrows also sing to the moon; I know no more profoundly and utterly satisfying experience than awakening in bed at night to hear the piercingly beautiful trill of a field sparrow’s song. Ovenbirds, too, have wakeful nights. In the daytime you see them sedately walking the brown leaves of the woods floor, sometimes perching on a low limb to utter their prosaic “teacher, teacher, teacher” litany. At night they turn poets; they seem to toss themselves into the air, bursting into a wild tumble of unformed song, which crumbles into something of the daytime “teacher” prosody as they touch earth. (This, say the experts, must have been the “night warbler” that delighted and puzzled Thoreau at Walden Pond; it seems strange that so observant an ear did not hear the echoes of the familiar daytime prose.) In May, too, and seldom except in May, the cuckoos half waken and seem to stutter in their sleep. There is no hour in the twenty-four, in May, when one cannot listen to bird song.

Robins wake earliest, followed by the wood thrushes. Hermit thrushes and veeries stir later than the wood thrush. Then a song sparrow pipes up; the phoebe begins his busy stridence; the wrens start turning their music boxes; the catbirds and orioles awaken. It becomes impossible to lie abed. This is May; not a moment of it should be missed.

October is gaudier, but autumn’s palette is not as varied as May’s. May, to be sure, puts on its color for a briefer show; it is a less exhibitionist month. First the aspens and then the birches form emerald clouds against the solid gray-brown of Sharon Mountain across the river. The birch twigs turn red before their leaf-green shows, but at a distance the red is invisible. It is in the swamps that May is reddest. Not all the glory of autumn can match this palette for exquisiteness and variety of color, for pastel shades of opening leaf buds, soft greens, flecked with gold and bronze, russet and red, punctuated everywhere by the sharp outlines of the twigs. And late in May, when the maples already cast full shade, the oaks stir. “Young oak leaves mist the sidehill woods with pink,” Lowell put it. It is the white oak which opens in that downy baby pink, and on our hillsides, where red and black oaks predominate, the “mist” is seldom clear. But when you have once come close upon an oak tree in full pink, you have one of the great spring memories to live with.

In early May the birds are easy to see in the still bare treetops. By the end of the month they have vanished into jungles of solid green. But there is a moment in midmonth when the scarlet tanager is more than a raucous voice, and you see him wherever he sings. His plumage burns. And on a May day when a scarlet tanager, singing like a hoarse robin, is calling attention to himself in the big white ash; a rose-breasted grosbeak is caroling in the black cherry; indigo birds perch in the old butternut; orioles flash busily by, building their hang-nest in the elm; goldfinches flit everywhere; a pair of redstarts come out of the wood to investigate the vegetable garden; and the ruby-throated hummingbirds are hovering at the columbine—on such a day you know that the phrase “tropical color” is a misnomer. Ours is the land where the birds are bright.

In May our rock garden becomes a riot of color. Dwarf phlox begins the color parade (none of ours is that sharp pink beloved by suburbanites; Ruth has kept us devoutly to whites and softer pinks and lilacs). Purple and white grape hyacinths and dwarf iris follow; the basket-of-gold saxifrage opens its splashes of sunshine; and everywhere wild red columbine, which seeds itself and refuses to be “gardened,” paints in the background. At the beginning of the month the daffodils, naturalized along the path that leads to the maple spring, are a show; before the end of the month the lilacs and the apple blossoms have come and all but gone; the tall iris have begun to dominate the rock garden, and the great hot Oriental poppies are threatening to open.

The woods flowers are shyer. In our rock garden hepaticas and bloodroot fade before the middle of the month. Miterwort and foamflower mist the whole patch. The trillium begins to disappear beneath the rising ferns. Dutchman’s breeches and its cousin, squirrel corn, melt into a lacework of fine leaflets. By month’s end the lady’s slippers are out. It is orchid time.

Actually, it will be orchid time for three months. It is no more necessary to go to the tropics for orchids than for gay-plumaged birds. From the gay lady’s slippers and the so-called showy orchis of May to the shy lady-tresses of September, a parade of native orchids appears in the Cream Hill woods and swamps—though, for the weekend gardener, there is no time to hunt them. It is a satisfaction to have a few in one’s rock garden. First the smaller yellow lady’s slipper lifts its yellow shoe, framed with twisted brown bracts like miniature rams’ horns, and then the big yellow; and the stemless pink moccasin flower follows. In the pine woods the little showy orchis opens its even more delicate pink clusters of blossom. The florists’ shops produce nothing lovelier.

May is also the busy season for the more prosaic tasks of the vegetable garden. May is planting time for the whole garden, and first harvest time. All month the asparagus and rhubarb grow faster than weekenders can eat them. By the end of the month, with luck, you have your first radishes and baby lettuce and spinach, and a taste from your own garden in May is worth more than a whole market basket in August.

You plant and you watch the seeds sprout. Sometimes, when you have been rashly early and the season is recalcitrant, you replant. You weed and you cultivate. By the end of the month even the lima beans and the second corn are in the ground, and if it is dark when you arrive on Friday evening, you cannot wait until morning to see what is sprouting. You inspect the infinitesimal rows of baby green by flashlight.

There isn’t time for all the work. There isn’t time for all the ecstasy. May is overwhelming. You wonder why people who can choose take their country vacations at any other time of year.

June

June begins summer. The delicacy of spring is gone. Even the oaks cast heavy shade. The hillsides are no longer assemblies of individual trees, each with its own erratic shape and personality; they are solid masses of monotonous green. Individual trees are as lost in the crowd as human individuals are lost in Times Square on a New Year’s Eve.

One thinks of the year as divided into two roughly equal seasons: the brown and the green. Actually the green season is a scant third of our year. Not until the first week of June have the oaks turned from pink through gray to the universal green, and before August is done the sumachs and swamp maples are turning, and the butternuts and elms begin shedding; long before September is past our trees begin to emerge from the indiscriminateness of summer and to resume their individual outlines.

Early in June the first fireflies set our nights a-dancing. It is in June that the great shimmering green luna moths come tapping against our screens, making the night, if the stars had not already bewitched it, a land of mysterious otherworldly magic. In June the handsome black-and-yellow swallowtail butterflies come tiptoeing about the poppies, and they flit all summer, until even the tawny monarchs, who come late, have tired. And in June the insect chorus begins to accompany the nightly frog orchestra; it will have sole sway by August, when the katydids join the crickets. In June, too, arrive the mosquitoes, the black flies, the ubiquitous “no-see-’ums” and the striped-winged, sharp-stinging deerflies.

The hordes of migrant birds have moved on to their northern homes; the birds we see about us are our Cream Hill bird family, settled in for the summer. Robins, phoebes, chipping sparrows, and house wrens are the familiars of the lawn. Sleek catbirds and noisy scratching chewinks make themselves at home in the lilac hedge. Song sparrows and field sparrows keep to the pasture across the road, the plaintive-voiced pewee and the redstart to the woods behind the garden. The bright tanager and the saucy little chebec nest somewhere in the tall ashes below the rock garden, but in June we see them rather than hear them. Chestnut-sided warblers and Maryland yellow-throats make occasional forays from the willow clumps beside the meadow spring.

Although the hummingbird seems to live all day in our garden, hovering about the columbine in June, in July about the crimson bee balm, and until he leaves in September about the orange trumpet vine against the porch, he never nests close to the house. He sits, for quarter-hours at a time, in the dead branches of the Rousseau-like decaying butternut that neat-minded visitors urge us to cut, apparently resting—though does a bird need rest that can fly in one dash across the Gulf of Mexico? Yet when we try to trace the hummingbird’s swift homeward flight we invariably lose him, a speck in the air.

Only twice have we found hummingbird nests on Cream Hill. Once, in the winter, I cut a maple almost a quarter-mile from the house, and when trimming it came upon the tiny floss-lined, lichen-covered cup, still green in mid-winter and, accordingly, more visible than in midsummer. And once, when grubbing poison ivy under a big maple below the orchard—an over-modest guest had somewhat catastrophically selected that secluded spot for a sun bath—a hummingbird fairly attacked me, swooping in great, angry swirls about my head.

I abandoned the poison-ivy task, and sat down on a rock. After a few more wild barrel loops, the hummingbird darted straight into a low-hanging maple bough, and disappeared. I walked toward it; the hummingbird reappeared, again circling my head, but I could see no nest. Three times the performance was repeated; the third time I spotted the nest, looking like no more than a gnarl upon the bough. In it were two white eggs, no larger than immature beans. We revisited it for two weeks; then, one day, the nest was empty. There had been no time for hatching and fledging. Had a black snake found its way into the tree? Had a blue jay or a squirrel robbed it? We never learned. The hummingbird never returned to the empty nest—at least we never saw it, and in the autumn I cut the bough. The nest still hangs in our living room, but the lichens have lost their luster. It is no longer a living jewel; it is merely a curiosity.

Or could the barred owl have robbed a hummingbird’s nest? Hummingbird eggs would be no more than a snack to those big birds. We hear them in the valley below us all twelve months in the year; the night seems incomplete without the owls’ hooting. But we seldom see them, and then only as shadows flitting through the woods.

One June, when the owls seemed particularly noisy by day, Ruthy followed their hoots to the rotting dead maple bole, a hollow of which harbored their nest. One could hardly say they had built a nest; after the owlets had flown, we climbed to see; it was a mere platform of twigs. But while the owlets were growing we had abundant opportunity to see the big parent birds. They never came to the nest while we were near, but they sat close by, muttering at us and watching us more carefully than we watched them.

June opens with the “yawn of fire” of the poppies; the larkspur and Canterbury bells follow. The iris fades; petunias and bachelor’s buttons, first of the annuals, open. By the end of the month the lupines have come and gone; so, in the woods, have the pink wild azalea and the mountain laurel; and, in odd spots all about us, tawny day lilies, relics, we presume, of the Reeds, the builders of our house, open each morning a fresh blossom.

When we arrived, the day lilies were a lush clump about the privy, which was the most prominent feature of the yard. We moved the privy more than twenty years ago; soon afterward we began moving the day lilies. First we planted them carefully where, in due time, we developed our rock garden. Then, as the rock garden grew, we moved the lilies again, somewhat less carefully, to the slope which eventually became the terrace from which one has the best view of the rock garden. We did not want them there, but we had learned something of their hardiness. This time we merely lifted forkfuls and tossed them across the road. They had no difficulty in making themselves at home, and from almost precisely the twenty-fifth of June to the first of August—day lilies seem calendar-conscious in their dates of blooming—they make the roadside gay.

And they still come up wherever they once lived. We have pulled, dug, and excavated to get rid of them. You can’t kill a day lily. Even lilacs seem less long-lived and persistent. They are no travelers; once they have made themselves at home, they stick to a spot. But the old settlers, who had little time for tricks of gardening, must have loved them. The lilies demanded no attention; they just bloomed, year after year. They still bloom. There is no better way of locating old cellar holes than walking the woods in June or July. Invariably, a patch of day lilies means a cellar hole near by. And some of those cellar holes have been abandoned by their diggers for more than a century. But not by the day lilies. Day lilies never abandon their homes.

July and August

July and August are the dog days, the hot months, the season of “summer people” and visiting relatives. Cars hoot up and down the highway; airplanes peer down at us; our solitude is gone.

The birds understand the seasons better than men. They know that these are the dead months of the year. They stop singing; they skulk away to moult and lose the tropical gaiety of the plumage in which they arrived in triumphant spring. By mid-August the swallows have vanished from the farmers’ big barns and are perching in immense flocks on the telephone wires in the valley, preparing for their long southern trek. Swallows are the most gregarious of birds—but one year an over-industrious family started a belated second or third brood in Mark Van Doren’s barn so late that in mid-September, when the great flocks had disappeared, that pair was still feeding its young. One swallow family must have made the long journey to South America in unaccustomed loneliness.

The Dutchman’s breeches lose their filmy foliage and shrink into the ground. In the woods the ghostly Indian pipe rises, then blackens in the shadows. In hidden swamps the cardinal flower gleams; beside it, often, the purple-fringed orchid hides its exquisite lacework. And before the end of July, early goldenrod turns from green to gold, announcing the imminence of autumn. The burgeoning of spring is ended; the season’s decline has begun.

In the first week of August the katydids begin their racket—one in each of the big trees, as exclusive as barnyard chickens guarding “peck rights.” “Six weeks to frost,” the farmers gloomily announce. But in fact the katydids do not know one year from another—they tune up by a fixed calendar, while the frosts follow their unpredictable and eccentric pattern. We may have a frost in mid-September; it may hold off until well into October; the katydids neither know nor announce the difference. Katydids are as poor prophets as any human quacks.

Most of the summer flowers are as calendar-bound. Punctually within a day or two of the Fourth of July the first orange blossom opens on the great old trumpet vines that guard our doorway, and almost as punctually, three months later, the last blossom falls. Punctually on July 25 or 26, our quarter-century of records shows, the first tiger lily sultrily opens; almost precisely a month later, the last tiger petals fall. Phlox replaces larkspur as the garden’s main accent; the bee balm turns from living fire to dead hay. In Ruth’s corner of the vegetable garden the little calendulas and the big zinnias flame—if there is water enough for them.

On the Fourth of July we stop cutting asparagus and begin picking peas. By mid-July we are eating baby squash, baby beans, baby beets, and baby carrots, and in a hot season the first tomato reddens before July’s end, and corn swells sufficiently to tempt us to try a few immature ears. The strawberries pass, the raspberries come and go, the hot field across the road fills with blackberries—and nettles. In place of the peas, we plant late beans and salad, and in place of the spinach, late beets and carrots, but July plantings lack the excitement of April and May. This is lazy, drowsy midsummer.

Our water troubles begin. The hill spring merely trickles; we wash sparingly, warn our guests about dripping faucets and running toilets; we cease watering the garden, even when it needs it. The grass begins to brown. One day we admit that the time for pumping is at hand.

The Maple Spring is always full and always cold, but it lies well below the house, and, next to the repetitive futility of grass-cutting, nothing in country life is more exhausting than nursing an over-aged gasoline pump. Moreover, I grew up in an age when automobiles were a rich man’s luxury; I did not, like Michael, cut my eyeteeth on a carburetor. The internal-combustion engine is not an old family friend to me; it is a necessary but mysterious and vaguely inimical stranger.

When the hill spring runs dry, Al Gagnier comes up to recondition his old friends, our gasoline motor and pump. They recognize him. He talks to them. “Pretty good for an old-timer,” Al shouts. (Al always shouts; he has the habit of talking against a buzz saw.) For him the motor purrs. Then Al departs. When I try to start the pump, it behaves like a balky horse with an unskilled driver. It seems to recognize an easy victim. It refuses to start—or it starts and waits until I have climbed the long, hot hill back to the house, then stops. I phone Al; he recommends oiling the fuel pump, cleaning the spark plug, or other processes which he says are “easy.” I toil back and labor. On a sunny day the motor may behave well; if it is raining, it delights in forcing me to make a dozen trips to the pump house. It seems to know that I can make the silliest mistakes—such as forgetting to swing the belt from the fly wheel to the working wheel, so that while the engine sings no water moves. This is the great curse of a Cream Hill midsummer: drought and a balky pump.

When the pump works—as it sometimes does—we rush to the hoses, three of them. While water pours into the attic tank, we water furiously, but never enough. There isn’t enough water in all Cream Hill Lake to quench our gardens in a dry year. So we give it up and go swimming, and return with appetite for a dozen ears of corn.

September

One day we wake up and the haze is gone. The valley is blanketed in soft white fog, but above it the hills stand crystal clear. It is what we call a “mountain day.” The air seems tangibly lighter. We suddenly notice that across the road the sumach candles are red and the leaves turning; the old pasture is aflame with goldenrod, here and there punctuated by the wild purple of the first New England asters. The drowsy season is ended; instead of resenting toil, I want to swing a scythe through the old orchard. I don’t even mind pumping. Summer is over. This is September, beginning of the second great season of the year.

Nature, they say, takes her time. But in September you discover that Nature is in a hurry. Every perennial weed in the garden puts out a rosette of ground leaves to hold it through the winter. Grass essays fiercely to go to seed. Even the trees, you discover, are preparing; the flower buds on the dogwoods are already formed. Somewhere in their mysterious, erratic, wandering way of life, fringed gentians open their perfect blue to the sky. In the woods witch hazel lights its ragged yellow torches, last wild flower of the year. And meanwhile, as if the pastures and roadsides were engaged in a tremendous effort to match the mass color about to clothe the hillsides, asters join goldenrod in a fierce competition of blossom. Little heath asters crouch by the highway; heart-leaved asters fringe the woods; tall white New York and umbrella asters, and the handsome purple-stemmed ones, light up the swamps; and, here, there, and everywhere, the richest color of the fields, the royal purple of the New England aster, accents all the rest.

Thanksgiving, by convention, comes late in November, when the gardens have succumbed to frost and the corn stands in brown dejection. But Thanksgiving should rather have been calendared for September, when the last corn of the season ripens, when a hint of moonlit frost gives excitement to the nights and the noon sun is still intense. This is the peak of the year. The weekend gardener staggers off to the city each Sunday night, his triumphant but weary arms full of excess provender to be proudly shared with his less fortunate city-tied friends. I come into the kitchen with a peck of tomatoes daily, and Ruth groans and cans them, while secretly sharing my sense of triumph. The eggplants hang heavy, and Ruth, who would much rather be outdoors, extending the wild garden, than in the kitchen, grudgingly bakes and fries. I begin to store acorn squash and to dry onions for the cellar. The plums are ripe for picking, the grapes begin to turn—and, in our latitude and exposure, may or may not ripen before frost.

Comes a cold night, and the sky is bright with northern lights. Another cold night, and we rush out to pick the tomatoes by flashlight, before they freeze—and, two out of three times, it doesn’t quite freeze after all. Then, one morning, the squash vines are black, the nasturtiums are sagging; first frost is here. And, looking about us, we discover that while we have had our eyes on near horizons, the distant prospect has been changing too. In the fields the goldenrod has faded gently into a dismal yellow-brown; the fire is gone. But on the hills the aspens are pale shimmering yellow; the cherries are mahogany-red; and one weak arm of the big maple below the old orchard has slowly turned to orange, heralding the fiery glory of October.

I call Al Gagnier and suggest a buzz-saw bee. It is time to get the wood in for the winter.

October

October is the time of year when this sober New England earth turns to wild melodrama. Europe has its golden beeches; California has the red-barked madrone tree; the tropics boast of their scarlet “flame of the forest”—but not any of these touted and be-poetized regions of earth can match, for sheer reckless extravagance of color, the maple-studded New England hillsides of October. They are as unpaintable as a sunset, because no artist’s imagination can approach the savage, lavish, exultant, flaming glory of the sugar maples.

Red maples in the swamps and sumach in the pastures open the festival and announce the season’s motif. Aspens and birches, ironwood and beech, join the dance in clear yellow; hickories and elms follow them when they don’t turn brown first. Ashes and wild cherries are a mahogany background. Oaks, like embarrassed elderly people, stay soberly green until the other trees have had their spree. Masters of the dance, harlequins of the autumn circus, are the sugar maples. Uninhibited and unashamed, they toss their great arms in wild ecstasies of gold and red and fiery orange. Like Puritans on a binge, they forget all restraints. And they are magnificent in their savagery. No other part of earth has such a show.

One year we drove up to Cream Hill on the eve of Columbus Day, and as we turned into the yard our headlights picked out nasturtiums and zinnias still gay and fresh, though there were snowflakes in the air. It snowed half the night, and the wind howled. We rose to such a world as I have seen but once. The sun was shining, but it was a cold sun. The nasturtiums and zinnias were pale and drooping. But the sparkling white ground was covered with fallen leaves which had had no time to lose their brilliance. The rainbow of the trees was reflected on the snow. . . . Before night the snow was melting, most of the limbs were bare, and the gorgeous carpet of fallen leaves was already browning. The melodrama had come to a sudden climax; the autumn dance was done. October had cavorted and collapsed. The hills looked wintry. But what a dance it had been!

More often the carnival moves slowly and erratically, an unorganized mob scene. A few maples blaze and fade ahead of the procession; others wait to flaunt themselves until their headier neighbors are done. The color fades so slowly that one is hardly aware that it is gone. Then we return on a late October weekend, to find only the oaks retaining their leaves. Maples and ashes stand gaunt. It is time to rake the leaves from the lawn, to blanket the flower beds, to bank the house against winter.

Yet October is an unpredictable month. Sometimes the black frosts come early, and the gardens turn bare. Sometimes white frosts follow one after another, yet when Indian summer intervenes one finds belated handfuls of fresh beans beneath the cloak of browning foliage on the beanpoles, and sweet nubbins of corn close to the ground. Squash vines which had seemed dead put out new life at the core; where the sun warms the stone retaining wall marigolds and snapdragons cling to life all month, and veterans of spring surprise with an unseasonable aftermath. In sheltered nooks one still finds fringed gentians.

The katydids resume their conversations; butterflies wander unseasonably about; great flocks of migrating autumn birds amid their twittering give half-hearted echoes of spring song. We feel a special affection for the song sparrow that sings in the last week of October, and for the poppy which defies the calendar.

November

In November the earth waits. Summer has gone; autumn has passed; winter is not yet here. The season seems uncertain of itself. It is a good chore-time.

We rake the leaves again; in industrious years we cover some of our more precious plants with salt hay; we bank the house; I put away the screen doors. With the grass brown and the trees bare, the rains sink into the earth, and the hill spring flows again; I drain the balky pump and motor at the Maple Spring. I finish stacking the wood in the cellar and begin to plan the winter’s cutting, and I fell a few sizable trees for working up in snowtime. We pull up the bean and squash vines and the cabbage and chard stumps, add them to the mulch pile in the corner of the vegetable garden, and store the root crops in the cellar. I cajole neighboring farmers for a load of manure—usually they begrudge their time more than their manure. We put away the porch furniture. The house ceases to be a part of the outdoors world; it becomes a refuge against dark and cold. Fewer cars roar up and down the road; Cream Hill once more is a world of its own, apart.

When the earth rests, man wants to rest too. It becomes possible once more to read on Cream Hill. My daily task has for twenty years been reading and reviewing books, and friends often ask why I cannot spend more than weekends in the country, doing my work there. But from March until November I find it all but impossible to read in the country. All outdoors seems to be shrieking for me to come out and share its excitements. I hear birds singing; my mind wanders off to a thousand beckoning chores and discoveries. To sit indoors and read a book in country daylight is a prison chore, and the summer light is long. Moreover, I find I read more slowly; the country has relaxed me. So I keep my Cream Hill weekends clean for Cream Hill chores and pleasures, and pack work night and day into as brief a city week as I can devise. But in November the days are short and chill; I rediscover the pleasure of sitting by a fire and reading.

November, too, is walking time. The gardens are asleep; they no longer snatch at you as soon as you poke your nose out of doors. The summer haze is gone; the far hills stand clear, bare ledges and hemlock gullies stripped of the massed foliage which in summer conceals them. The hills come closer; what was a mile in midsummer—and seems five miles when the snow is deep—feels like a mere half-mile in November.

One looks, wonders, and starts out to investigate. It was in November that I first found “Ketchall,” the great rock slide where Charles Gold told me he used to catch bobcat kittens sixty years ago, and the curious dry gulch, a waterless cleft in the rocky hill behind Hatcher Hughes’ place, where moosewood, usually a shrub, grows forty feet tall. In November I spotted the dry brown leaves of yellow lady’s slippers in Phil Palangio’s pines, and marked them for rediscovery in May when the ferns hide them. In November old cart tracks, invisible in midsummer, show up on the forest floor; it was in November that I first traced the old town road that crossed Cream Hill eastward, and was abandoned more than a hundred and twenty years ago, and, with Charles Gold’s aid, identified the cellar holes of families who deserted our town for newer frontiers when the Republic was young.

December

Of all months in the year, December is the most unpredictable. If we remember, we pack snow boots, ski pants, and a snow shovel in the car when the calendar spells Twelfth Month. But when November is mild, we forget what sudden changes December may have in store. The year our town doctor celebrated his fiftieth birthday, about December first, we came up from a rain-soaked New York to find the snow fifteen inches deep on the level and the Cream Hill Road unplowed; we spent the night in the village and slogged wet-ankled through the snow in the morning. But the first year we spent Christmas on Cream Hill, when Ruthy and Michael came eagerly laden with snowshoes, skates, and skis, pansies bloomed in the rock garden, and the grass was green.

December turns our minds to what we call the Great Northern Spruce Forest that the Civilian Conservation Corps put in for us in 1938—five hundred white spruce seedlings, averaging four inches tall. By the terms of our agreement with the CCC, we were to cut none for five years, and in fact we were little tempted; when, after five years we went out to cut our first home-grown Christmas tree, we had difficulty in locating the “trees” beneath the grass. But they had started sprouting, and now some of them reach well above our heads. We cut one each year, but when we go hunting for a household tree, we find our Great Northern Forest almost engulfed in southern maples and aspen and elm sprouts, and get out the bush hook to slash the interlopers. I hope to see a time when the spruces cast deep shade; so far, they are islands in a sea of deciduous vegetation. The man who wants to watch a forest grow in his pasture does well to plant red pines.

By December most of the straggling summer folk have passed their last shivering weekends and remain warmly in the city. This is the season when we come to know our neighbors, and to feel a part of our country community. The fires inside seem to warm the faces that come out of the houses; greetings are a little warmer than in midsummer. At the very time of year when we spend most hours snugly within doors, we feel most a part of Cream Hill. We become freshly aware of neighbors of all kinds; tracks in the snow tell us of fellow Cream Hillers of whom, all summer, we had no awareness. In summer one becomes dull to the abundance of bird song, but in December the mere twitter of a single chickadee, the hammer of a woodpecker, the chirp of a tree sparrow in the barnyard, is an experience, and a flock of grosbeaks or siskins, visitors from the north, is excitement. We put out bird seed. At night we listen to the barred owl with a sense of companionship. We plan Christmas. Despite its frostiness, December is the friendliest month of the year.

11
“Unchanging New England Town”

Even some of our all-year residents have the quaint illusion that ours is an unspoiled and unchanging New England hill town. They like to talk about its fine old families, its quaint old characters, its spacious old houses, its simple Yankee democracy, and its persistent traditions.

Yet the obvious fact is that our town started changing when it was settled and has been changing—fast—ever since, and one of the oddest changes in it is this development of the quaintly un-American notion that change is undesirable and that avoidance of change is possible.

Our town was settled in order to change what appeared at the time as waste wilderness. Waste or not, it was then a really rugged wilderness, and even those of us today who think we love the wild woods wouldn’t like to go back to it. Plenty of those first settlers didn’t like it either, as the town records make clear.

The “new lands” in four areas of Western Connecticut wilderness optimistically called “towns” were auctioned off at the capital, Hartford, on February 8, 1738. The colonial legislature had provided that each of these “western towns” should be divided into fifty-three “rights.” One of these rights was to be reserved for the first minister who should settle in the wilderness, another to be held for the permanent use of succeeding ministers, a third for the support of a school or schools, and the other fifty to be sold at auction.

Thirty-eight speculators bid in the lands in our town at that 1738 auction, at a price amounting to about seventeen cents an acre, on the condition that each one of them, or his agent, should clear six acres of land per right and build a house within two years and occupy it for three more. A few of the bidders bought two, or even three, rights; they were obligated to build two or three houses, each at least eighteen feet square, with a “seven-foot stud.”

The lands were surveyed, at least in part, that summer of 1738, and in November the thirty-eight right-holders drew lots, each “right” entitling its owner to select a hundred acres that year, and more later. Actually, as it turned out, each right-holder received one hundred acres in 1738, two hundred more acres in 1739, still another hundred acres in 1745, seventy acres in 1750, fourteen acres in 1796, and possibly a few more acres at a subsequent drawing about which the town records are vague.

But did these pioneers, these founding fathers of our “unchanging hill town,” themselves move into the wilderness? Not many of them! Most of the men who bid in the town lands at that Hartford auction were land speculators. They hired “agents” to do the required rough work for them, and began selling even before the first log cabins were up. By 1740 (the first deadline for right-owners) thirty-two houses had been built in our town, but only eight of them were occupied by original purchasers of rights.

It took a rugged man—and a rugged woman beside him—to weather the first winter of white settlement in our town. James Douglas, one of the right-purchasers, built a cabin in the woods on Cream Hill in the fall of 1739. He is supposed to have been the first to winter stock in our town—a horse and a yoke of oxen. The snow fell deep that winter, and James Douglas had no hay barns or silos. But deer were abundant. An old record says that he fed his cattle on venison soup, “which, with browse from the trees felled for the purpose, was their support.” His horses, the same chronicler records, refused both, “but ate hair from the skins, and moss from the trees, gathered in blankets.” From that reference to “moss from the trees” I deduce that Cream Hill, in James Douglas’s day, was covered with lichen-grown pines. There are few native pines on the hill today, though several of its landholders have, at various times within the last fifty years, set out young pine plantations.

Across the hill from James Douglas, Thomas Rugg of Woodbury built a cabin in that same late autumn of 1739. As winter set in, he left his wife and three children behind, and trekked out to Woodbury for supplies. A terrific snowstorm delayed him for a week. When James Douglas snowshoed over the hill to inquire after his new neighbors, he found one of the children dead from exposure and starvation, and he dragged the rest of the family to his own cabin by ox-sled. Next spring the Ruggs left our town, discouraged. There have been no Ruggs in town since. Rugg Mountain still recalls their suffering in that first winter, but no one lives on Rugg Mountain today. So far as I know, no one has tried it since the winter of 1739-40.

Times have changed.

Samuel Butler was another of those thirty-eight original rights-holders. The town records are full of his sales, though, apparently, he himself never ventured a winter in the wilderness. He began selling before the time limit for building a house was up; among others, he sold to one George Palmer, who in 1746 sold some of these lots to my great-great-great-grandfather Isaac Stiles, Ezra’s father, and in 1753 Isaac bought still more lots in our town.

My great-great-great-grandfather never settled in the wilderness. He was a down-state parson. Like many of his contemporary colleagues, he engaged not only in saving souls but in speculating in lands. He bought lands that he never saw in the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania and also in what later became Vermont. Whether he ever saw our town or not I do not know. He may have ridden up into the wilderness to look at it, for he is said to have described the town in a two-line verse:

Isaac’s lands in our town passed at his death in 1760 to his son Ezra, who in his old age sold some and gave others to his son Isaac, one parcel being conveyed in 1790, the town records say, “for the consideration of love and natural affection and of five shillings.” Isaac II promptly resold, apparently for cash without consideration of love or natural affection. And, a hundred and twenty-nine years after Isaac II sold his last acre in our town, I bought land close to what had once been his. I suppose it is a little “un-American” in me to cherish the link. The normal American pattern is to move on, to forget the past, to live in the Western future, and it is a pattern that has worked well.

In 1762, when my great-great-grandfather Ezra made his first pilgrimage to our town, he reckoned that there were 110 families there. Life must have been far easier and more sociable than in Thomas Rugg’s day, although the town “roads” were still mere horse-paths; its first wheeled vehicle, tradition says, arrived three or four decades later. By 1774, however, only thirty-five years after its first settlement, a census gave our town a population of 974, which is more than it has today.

Population boomed until 1800, leveled off for the next four decades, then, following the building of the railroad, boomed again. Our town’s peak year was 1850—population, 2,041. The boys and girls have been drifting away ever since, and the laboriously cleared fields returning to woodland.

The town’s first parson, the Reverend Solomon Palmer, had arrived in 1741, but in 1754 the Reverend Mr. Palmer announced that reflection had convinced him that he had never been properly ordained, and he resigned and returned to more civilized England, there to become a priest of the Church of England. Our town resentfully tried to keep him from selling the lands set aside for the use of the first minister to settle there, but the General Court decided in the parson’s favor, even if he had backslid from the true faith of the Colony of Connecticut.

In the eighteenth century our town took a deep interest in church affairs, though the records make clear that it was never dominated by its parsons. For almost a century our townsfolk engaged in almost continuous warfare with their parsons. But at least they cared. Nowadays, few argue with the parsons, and the pews remain pretty empty.

Our second parson, the Reverend Hezekiah Gold, was the richest man in town, a slaveholder, and, like his descendants after him, a shrewd and thrifty farmer. In the hard days of the Revolution, less opulent townsfolk saw no reason to contribute to a rich man’s salary. Hezekiah’s contract, however, called for sixty-five pounds a year and ten cords of firewood, and he stood on the letter of the law. So an irritated town meeting voted that it did not want Hezekiah at all and asked for his “dismission.” Hezekiah didn’t leave; instead, gathering the church members about him—town meeting in those days voted the parson’s salary, but the church membership was a separate body—persuaded them to uphold him. The next town meeting stopped payment on Hezekiah’s salary. Hezekiah started suit to collect it.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1779, the conflict reached its peak. The town had appointed three deacons “to take care of the meeting-house,” by which it meant to keep Mr. Gold out. Mr. Gold, a stout man, thrust aside Deacon Saunders, who was guarding the door, and reached the pulpit, where another battle was already raging. Deacon Steele had attempted to open the meeting on his own, but one of Mr. Gold’s feminine partisans knocked the deacon’s prayerbook out of his hands with her footstool. Rallying at the foot of the pulpit, however, the deacons and their followers rushed the Reverend Gold bodily out of the church and locked the door against him.

It is a long time since we have had such interesting Thanksgiving Days.

Mr. Gold sued Deacon Saunders. Saunders was “heavily fined.” The town grumbled at the statutory tax-exemption of its parson, then the custom and the law. Mr. Gold finally offered to pay a “fair share” of taxes, and the town appointed a committee to assess his property. But the committee and Mr. Gold couldn’t agree on what constituted a “fair” tax. Eventually an exasperated group of parishioners seceded, formed a “second church” a mile to the north, and tried to collect from the town funds for its support on the ground that they were a majority. They were the majority, the court held, but not the “first church,” and they didn’t get the church funds. And Mr. Gold did not finally resign until 1787.

Even our most impassioned don’t-change-the-dear-old-towners no longer argue quite as hotly about church matters. Today, after more than a century and a half of separation, there is renewed talk of reuniting the first and second churches. There was talk of it in the 1820’s, in the days of our first town historian, the Reverend Timothy Stone, but when it became clear that union would involve unemployment for Timothy, he stoutly and successfully opposed it. There was more talk in the days of our second town historian, a great-grandson of the redoubtable Hezekiah, and again during the long pastorate of our third and most human town historian, the Reverend Edward C. Starr, to whose pungent record, A Typical New England Town I owe most of my knowledge of town history.

By our town charter one-fifty-third of the town’s land had been set aside for the support of a school or schools, but the first schools, naturally, were set up in farmhouses. James Douglas kept the first Cream Hill school in his own house; he taught in the winter term, and in the summer, when James was busy in the fields, his wife took over. That pattern of men teachers in winter and women teachers in summer continued for more than a century.

The first schoolhouses, the town records say in characteristically vague language, were “built in the road.” Since a “road” was then assumed to be six rods, or about a hundred feet, wide, the schoolhouses can hardly have constituted serious traffic hazards, and it was natural that, with the whole wilderness about them, the first school-builders did not dream of providing playgrounds. There was some criticism, less than a century ago, when the Cream Hill schoolhouse—today used as a dwelling—was built, and the town recklessly bought a whole acre of land outside the highway for this school use.

Schools multiplied fast. Before the Revolution our town had been divided into six school districts; by 1800 it had seventeen of them, and each school district was self-supporting and self-taxing. Each had its own schoolhouse and its own teacher or teachers, of course; each also had its own school board. And school district meetings, tradition says, although few records survive of them, argued district issues as hotly as town meetings debated town projects.

But, as the town population declined—perhaps also as the roads improved—outlying school districts were consolidated. Twenty years ago we still had six districts—though not the original six, for the centers of population had come down off the hills into the valley, closer to the railroad. Finally, a dozen years ago, our town built a single, handsome, gray stone consolidated town schoolhouse. It is a good school, thanks in part to considerable state aid, and nowadays we have town buses to cart the kids to and from school. We also have a bus that takes our older pupils to the six-town regional high school just north of our town limits. You can call that “socialism” if you like; some do, and in a sense it is. But the more you study American history, or even town history, the more you discover that cusswords like “socialism,” and blessed phrases like “free enterprise,” do not really mean much. Americans try things out, and accept them if they work. We like public schools, public roads, public buses; we don’t even argue about them any more.

Until about 1860 our town was atomized into road as well as school districts. Each road district was in charge of an elected supervisor or “pathmaster,” who had the right to conscript his constituents to keep the roads in order. “Pathmaster” was a natural word in wheelless days. But apparently district conscription didn’t work out well. Some of the road repair was let out on contract as far back as the days of the War of 1812. Around the middle of the century our town, following the pattern of the rest of the country, tried out toll roads with toll gates, but that was a form of private enterprise that no one except the toll-gate keepers relished.

The first “state aid” for roads came in 1899, but even state-aid roads were then merely graveled. (In 1916 our town voted to post most of its roads as “unsafe for automobiles.”) Paving had to wait still another quarter-century. And, of course, no one thought of clearing the roads in winter until very recent days. If a man’s horse could not get him and his sleds and sleighs out of the farmyard, he was just out of luck. The first snowplow came to our town in the age of Calvin Coolidge, in the winter of 1922-23. It and its successors have revolutionized winter life.

Even when I first came to town, the Cream Hill Road in winter abandoned the summer highway route altogether and wandered off through the fences and across windswept patches which, experienced Cream Hillers had learned, were always almost snow-free. The snow used to drift ten feet deep in the straight-cut road, which had worn itself through the years into a sort of gully. Even with snow fences and a slight change of route, it was a tough job to plow our road in a winter like that of 1947-48. . . . We all like to sing “Jingle Bells” and to think back to the good old days of sleigh riding, but I doubt if there is a citizen left in our town who is not really glad of the “socialism” of our time which keeps the roads passable for wheeled vehicles the whole year around.

Our town stretches ten miles north and south along the river, and an uneven six east and west, and in the early days that was too big a unit for effective common government. The school and road districts, electing their own extremely local school boards and pathmasters, were the significant units. In those days there were nine so-called villages—some of them mere clusters of half a dozen houses with, perhaps, a blacksmith rather than a store—within our town boundaries, and besides these the region of scattered houses called Cream Hill, which, though it never had a store, had the proudest schoolhouse in town and usually had a blacksmith too. Some of the villages survive as place names—a few of them indicated by the surviving presence of long-closed buildings of dissident churches. One of the villages, Dudleytown, where Horace Greeley’s wife was born, has totally disappeared. Its last house burned down in 1901; its highroad has not been passable, even by a Model T, for more than twenty years, and the other road through the pines that led to Dudleytown, known as the Dark Entry, is today as faint as a charcoal-burner’s trace.

As the town historian wrote, a quarter-century ago, “here and there [in Dudleytown] are roses and fruit trees, clumps of lilac or bunches of bitter tansy, marking where once our fellow-humans lived and toiled, loved and sorrowed, in the years that are no more. The hunter sometimes finds a deer munching frosted apples at an untrimmed and leafless November tree; the berry picker acquires scratches with his fruit from the dense, rank thickets, but nobody lives in Dudleytown; the scurrying rabbit emphasizes the solitude, the whirring partridge startles the passer as it rises at his feet in the stillness. The name Dudleytown alone remains with the overgrown highways and fields, the far mountain views, nature willfully wild—and ‘long, long thoughts.’ ”

What “long, long thoughts”? Well, if you will, thoughts of change and one-world thoughts. The seven villages in our town long ago lost meaning; the district committees were superseded by town school boards, and the town selectmen took over the roads. Eventually, the town united with five neighboring hill towns to build the regional high school in the valley. Local isolationists at first, of course, opposed the regional high school, but their voices have long been still. Big state snowplows now push through the main highways in winter, and state road gangs maintain them in summer. We know at least that we are part of a state community. Our town’s representatives in the state legislature now drive to the state capital—once two days distant by horse—in less than an hour.

Our town, which in 1787, still thinking in terms of little local government, voted against ratification of the Federal Constitution by the state convention, today cannot remember that once it doubted the desirability of being a part of the United States of America. World government horizons still seem far away—but when one traces the historic process from the district pathmasters, the seventeen school districts, and the fierce church divisions of a century and a half ago to the highway world of today, it becomes clear that the idea of an “unchanging New England hill town” is sheer illusion, and always was. Fortunately for all of us, it pretty surely always will be.

12
Indians and Other Americans

Our town encountered the “race-relations problem” in the 1820’s. Obookiah, a Hawaiian, had been found on the steps of Yale College in New Haven in 1810, legend says, weeping for lack of an education. Accordingly, he was sent for schooling to Litchfield County, in those days a great breeding place for preachers and teachers. Other Hawaiians, hearing of his fortune, followed in his wake, and because of “the exceptional character of the young people” in our village, so the town historian says, a mission school was located here.

That was in 1817. In the first year the school’s pupils included seven Hawaiians, one Bengalese, one Hindu, two Anglo-Americans (would-be missionaries), and one American Indian. The second year the school had seven Indian students, two Chinese, one Malay, a Bengalese, six Hawaiians, two Marquesans, a Hindu, and three Americans. Later it had one or perhaps two Jewish students, probably the first Jews to live in our town.

The saintly Obookiah died in 1818, and was buried in the town cemetery. His pious memoirs became immensely popular; they were translated not only into his native tongue but also into Choctaw and Greek. Another Hawaiian, Tennooe, was less appreciated. Our village church first accepted him and then excommunicated him for intemperance and Sabbath-breaking, the first such action in its annals. Tennooe then became a bartender but later reformed and took to preaching in California, where he caught the gold fever, made and lost a fortune, and was found working as a bootblack in 1860. In old age he became blind and was returned to Hawaii, where, when he died, godly Americans erected a monument to his memory, declaring that in his life and death God’s Providence and Grace were wonderfully manifested.

God’s Providence and Grace were even more wonderfully manifested in the local experience of some of the Cherokee Indian students. Our rocky hill town had been an Indian hunting ground rather than an Indian home site, and the pioneer white settlers, who arrived after their predecessors had taken care, after their fashion, of most of the hunting tribes, had no “Indian troubles.” Indian troubles came with the mission school. The children of the pioneers had picked up an attitude toward Indians which was common along the frontier in early days. Or, rather, some of them had. But some of the girls fell in love.

The first to fall in love was Sarah Northrop, whose father kept the Mission School boarding house and whose mother took a few students into her home. Among these was John Ridge, son of a Cherokee chief, and probably richer in his own right than any of the farmers in the village. John was one of the few students who paid his own tuition. But John had a scrofula of the hip that sometimes confined him to bed, and Sarah Northrop carried meals to his room and stayed to talk. A wise doctor soon assured Mrs. Northrop that John had some deep trouble other than his hip, and suggested that she use her feminine wiles to discover it.

Mrs. Northrop, as a cousin later told the tale, took her stockings into John’s room to darn. “John,” she said, “you have some trouble. You have no mother here, and you should confide in me as in your own mother.”

John, startled, protested that he had no trouble.

Mrs. Northrop persisted. She said she would not leave the room until he told all.

John soon told all. “I love your Sarah,” said he.

“You must not,” Mrs. Northrop retorted.

“I know it, and that is the trouble,” John replied. He insisted that he had never said a word of love to Sarah, but could not help loving her.

Mrs. Northrop, going downstairs, asked Sarah, “Do you love John Ridge?”

“Yes, I do love John,” the girl answered.

One cynical legend says that Mrs. Northrop, knowing of John’s wealth, was pleased, but the orthodox story is that Mrs. Northrop sent Sarah off to New Haven, where Sarah, a pioneer in psychosomatic illness, refused to eat and visibly declined. Meanwhile Mrs. Northrop told John that her daughter could not marry an invalid, but that if he would go away for a year and return without crutches, and if Sarah still loved him, they might marry. At any rate, John went back to Georgia and returned in 1824 with his distinguished father, Major John Ridge, the tribal chief—and the Ridges arrived in the handsomest carriage ever seen in our town, accompanied by a group of liveried Negro slaves, possibly the first Negroes to look on our hills.

The sight of the carriage and the slaves wholly overcame any Northrop family prejudice against marriage to an Indian. So Sarah married her John and returned to Georgia, where, she wrote home, she dressed in silk and was waited on by thirty slaves. Sarah’s race prejudice was limited to African stock.

But in the county seat of Litchfield the peppery Isaiah Bunce, editor of The American Eagle, meditated and was outraged. Six weeks after the marriage his editorial eagle screamed.

“This subject of intermarriages with the Indians and blacks of the missionary school,” his quill pen scratched, “is not a subject for irony. The affliction, mortification and disgrace of the relatives of the young woman, who is only about sixteen years old, are too great for that. . . . To have her thus marry an Indian and taken into the wilderness among savages must be a heartrending pain which none can realize except those called to feel it. We forebear to mention their names, or the name of her who has thus made herself a squaw, and connected her ancestors to a race of Indians.”

Editor Bunce, hesitant about mentioning the names of the family involved, or even about inquiring into their actual sentiments, boldly named the trustees of the Mission School whom he held responsible: the Reverend Dr. Lyman Beecher (to be remembered by later generations chiefly as the father of Henry Ward Beecher and of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), the Reverend Timothy Stone, the Reverend Charles Prentice, the Reverend Joseph Harvey, and the Reverend Herman Daggett. “And the relatives of the girl,” he continued, “or the public at large, who feel indignant at the transaction, some of whom have said that the girl ought to be publicly whipped, the Indian hung and the mother drown’d, will do well to trace the thing to its true cause, and see whether the men above named, or their system, are not the authors of the transaction as a new kind of missionary machinery.”

The parsons trembled at Editor Bunce’s scream. They hastily proclaimed that they too disapproved miscegenation, and forbade further interracial marriages at the school. Editor Bunce was not satisfied. He returned to the attack, this time charging that the girls of our town were favoring the “colored and tawny” students as gallants, while the “poor white boys” of the village were cast into the shade.

This naturally anguished the eligible young whites of our town. They held a bachelors’ meeting, on June 26, 1824, and adopted stern resolutions which they forwarded to Editor Bunce.

The parents of our town also resented Editor Bunce’s charge that they permitted improper intercourse between native families and foreign scholars. Among the signers of their protest, which challenged Editor Bunce to produce evidence that other interracial marriages were “in treaty,” was Deacon Benjamin Gold, son of the town’s second and most rambunctious pastor and father of a whole bevy of marriageable girls.

Deacon Gold did not know the heart of his own youngest daughter Harriet. He knew that she planned to become a female missionary, and he had no objection to that. He knew that she corresponded with former students of the Mission School, to which he was himself a generous contributor. He did not know that she planned to marry Elias Boudinot, a cousin of John Ridge, three-quarters Cherokee, who had taken the name of his wealthy New Jersey benefactor. And though the deacon knew the temper of his own father, which had kept that reverend gentleman in constant hot water with his parishioners, he did not realize that Harriet had inherited her grandfather’s stubborn temperament.

When he discovered her plans, Deacon Gold told Harriet that the marriage would disgrace her family, including the two brothers-in-law who were Congregational clergymen, and another who was general of all the cavalry of Connecticut. The deacon didn’t budge Harriet. He then wrote to Boudinot, who had left the Mission School, its most promising pupil, for Andover Theological Seminary; and in the letter Deacon Gold forbade the marriage. Harriet thereupon, like her friend Sarah Northrop, took to the sickbed, which in those pre-suffragist days seems to have been woman’s strongest weapon.

Harriet did not stir from her four-poster bed. She was nineteen, the age at which her mother had married, and Elias was twenty-one. Harriet’s father had married at twenty-two. Harriet, like Sarah Northrop, visibly declined, and her frightened parents finally consented. Whereupon Harriet rapidly recovered.

But Harriet had more than her parents to convince. Her brother-in-law the general summoned the clergymen brothers-in-law to battle, and they responded with godly vigor. The general informed the board of the Mission School of Harriet’s plans, and, though the local clergyman rose from his seat, “white as a sheet,” and pronounced the story a lie, he was soon convinced. Another parson member of the board wrote Harriet that if she would give up her Indian the board would keep her secret; if not, they would publish banns in the manner which seemed to them most fitting.

Harriet’s favorite brother, Stephen, had already promised Harriet that if her Indian ever again showed his face in town, he, Stephen, would murder him. But Harriet believed that one with God is a majority. She prayed and stood firm. She calmly replied to the excited parson that she intended to carry on God’s work as a missionary and as the wife of Elias Boudinot.

Thereupon the board of the Mission School did as it had threatened. Lyman Beecher rode over from Litchfield to help compose the “banns.”

“We feel ourselves bound to say,” the four clergymen-agents of the school announced, “that, after the unequivocal disapprobation of such connexions, expressed by the Agents and by the Christian public universally; we regard those who have engaged in or accessory to this transaction, as criminal; as offering insult to the known feelings of the Christian community: and as sporting with the sacred interests of this charitable institution. For those who have been guilty of this outrage upon public feeling, we can offer no apology; all we have to request is that the Christian public will not condemn the innocent with the guilty: nor associate in their just censure, those who have been laboring to prevent this evil, with those who have induced it.”

The parsons thus washed their soft hands unctuously; they also published their “banns.” And our town seethed with excitement. Deacon Gold slipped Harriet off to the house of a neighbor, and from the neighbor’s window, looking down upon the village green, Harriet watched her fellow townsmen, including her own beloved brother Stephen, burn a crude painting of Harriet and Elias over a tar barrel, while the village church bell solemnly tolled. On the following Sunday Harriet did not, as usual, sing in choir, and her fellow choristers wore black crepe ribbons on their white dresses. They mourned for Harriet.

“Pen cannot describe nor language express the numerous and trying scenes through which I have passed since you left us,” Harriet wrote to a sister and brother-in-law who had confined their protests to letters. “Never before did I so much realize the worth of religion—and so much pity those who, in time of trouble, were without this inestimable treasure.” Harriet had a broad and tolerant spirit in some matters, but she was like many before her and since who cannot believe that those who disagree with them can be truly religious. Harriet added her observation that some of the heathen students at the school had never heard of “anything so bad, even among the heathen, as that of a brother burning a sister in effigy.”

On March 28, 1826, Harriet was married, at her father’s home, to Elias Boudinot. Two months later Harriet sat in a pew while her husband preached to the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia. Six months later she was writing from Georgia to Deacon Gold that her Cherokee father reminded her of her Yankee father in his amiable, kind, and affectionate disposition. A year later the pastor of the hill-town church who had battled against Harriet’s marriage was dismissed by his congregation; also, the Mission School was closed, the Reverend Lyman Beecher and others having decided that it was safer to educate the heathen in their own lands. And two years later the first number of the first American Indian newspaper ever published appeared at New Echota, Georgia, partly in English, partly in Sequoyah’s Cherokee alphabet. It bore the name of Harriet’s husband, Elias Boudinot, as editor. Next to Ethan Allen, who went to school here, he was probably the most distinguished resident our town has ever had.

Deacon Gold drove South to visit Harriet and Elias in Georgia in 1829. He was delighted with New Echota. He found some of the members of the Cherokee Council and Court “learned pollished & well Qualified Gentlemen fit to appear in any place in Connecticut.” He did not perceive that the Indians in Georgia were then in a position like that of the Jews in Germany on the eve of Hitler’s advent to power. They were fighting against removal. Elias Boudinot saw the handwriting on the wall and openly advocated emigration to the desert “promised land” of Oklahoma. The majority of his fellow Cherokees disapproved of his course, and a band of direct-actionists killed him in 1839.

Harriet had died three years earlier, but not before giving birth to a series of half-breed children. One of these became a successful engraver in Philadelphia. Another was fatally wounded, in the Union Army, in the Civil War. A third became the delegate from the Indian territory to the Confederate Congress in Richmond. Two daughters married white men in the North. And in 1941 the University of Oklahoma Press published a fine biography of Elias Boudinot by Ralph Henry Gabriel, from which I have pilfered many of the facts in this story.

Our town is proud today of its Mission School, and proud of the high-spirited girls who insisted on marrying their Indian lovers. It finds difficulty in believing that its young bloods could ever have burned Harriet and Elias in effigy on its pretty village green, or that its parsons could have thundered against an Indian marriage from the pulpit.

But there have been times, in recent years, when a new kind of race consciousness has raised its head in our town.

The first Jew to come here, apparently, was Judah Abrahams, English-born, though of German descent, who was made welcome at the Mission School in its early years. There was no “Jewish problem” in our town then. Whether or not there is today may be a matter of opinion.

A little lake, spring-fed and birch-girt, nestles against the southern slopes of Cream Hill, and there, since the town was settled, its children have gone to swim. There, half a century ago, a “club” was founded by three of the town families, some of whose members had remained to farm while their brothers and cousins strayed off to the lusher pastures of the cities, returning to the hills in summer. When the Gannetts came to Cream Hill the summer colony was still small enough so that there was little question about taking any newcomer. But as the summer colony grew and the boathouse became crowded, questions of limitation of membership arose, and some of the summer residents, expressing a desire that the club and the town should not “change” and a fear that the town might become “overcrowded,” felt that the club had no room for Jewish members. There was no such provision in the bylaws; there was never any public discussion of the question, but through two years private argument was vigorous. Then the doors opened; I think they are still open.

It was curious to hear in the 1940’s such echoes of the kind of bigotry which had flared in the columns of the Litchfield American Eagle and among the parsons and picture-burning townsfolk, more than a century before. It was still more curious, browsing in the diaries of my great-great-grandfather, to discover that, in a different form, a similar question had arisen in Rhode Island in 1762, the same year in which Ezra first visited his Connecticut farms. That year the Rhode Island Supreme Court proclaimed that the colony was so densely settled that some of His Majesty’s subjects had removed to Nova Scotia and other wilder places, and that it had no room for Jews. The court refused to permit Jews, or Catholics, to become voters.

Ezra copied the ruling into his diary. He called it “a mortifying sentence & Judg’t.” But in fact the court had erred in its history. It stated that according to an act of 1663 no one who did not profess the Christian religion could be admitted as a freeman. Rhode Island had had no such law in 1663; the gentle spirit of Roger Williams then still ruled the Providence Plantations. But a new code, adopted in 1719, had stated that “all men professing Christianity and of competent estates and of civil conversation who acknowledge and are obedient to the civil magistrate though of different judgments in Religious Affairs (Roman Catholicks only excepted) shall be admitted Freemen and shall have liberty to choose and be chosen Officers in the Colony both military and civil.”

This admitted Quakers, Baptists, and other troublesome brands of dissident Protestants, but it barred Jews and Catholics, and, if any should turn up, Buddhists and Mohammedans. Ezra, I fear, might have approved the ban against Catholics; he was very bitter against the Quebec Act which, when Canada came into the British Empire, continued the Catholic established church in the old French province. But he had good friends among the Newport Jews.

In any case, Rhode Island in 1783, in an expansive post-Revolutionary mood, abolished all religious qualifications for citizenship. Ezra by then had moved to Connecticut. But he approved.

There were fifteen families of Jews in Newport, Ezra noted in his diary, in 1762, and twenty-five families by 1769. In December 1763 Ezra attended the opening of their synagogue, which still stands, and began a friendship, to continue for twenty years, with its rabbi, Dr. Isaac de Abraham Touro, or Tauro. (Though in time Ezra became president of Yale College, he remained an erratic speller.) As long as he lived in Newport he, the leading Congregational clergyman in the city, regularly attended services at the synagogue once or twice a year, and sometimes oftener. Dr. Tauro brought visiting rabbis to call on Dr. Stiles, and with some of them Dr. Stiles carried on long and learned conversations, as he put it, upon “the things of God,” which seem to have included the question of the factuality of Lot’s wife’s being turned into a pillar of salt, the proper pronunciation of the Hebrew language (study of which Ezra later introduced at Yale), circumcision, and the relation of the lost tribes of Israel to the American Indians.

“The Rabbi,” Ezra noted after one service, “behaved modestly and reverently. Some part of the Singing in the Synagogue this day was exceeding fine and melodious.” At a Pentecostal service in 1773, Ezra had as company at the synagogue the Governor of the Colony and two judges, and frequently he dined at Rabbi Tauro’s home and welcomed Rabbi Tauro at his own board.

When a really learned rabbi, Isaac Karigal, born in Hebron in Palestine and widely traveled, visited Newport, Ezra wrote of him with a warmth hardly equaled in any of his other diary records. When, after some months in Newport, Dr. Karigal departed, Ezra composed an eight-page letter of farewell in Hebrew, and, after taking it to the rabbi, noted in his diary:

Ezra did not greet all the rabbis with equal affection. He made aspersive comments in his diary on one rabbi who seemed to him a man of little learning and considerable pretentiousness. Ezra did not adopt a whole people. Nor did he deny himself the company of a whole people. In the middle of the eighteenth century he met men as individuals, not as representatives of a people, and regulated his social relations accordingly. In the middle of the twentieth century Ezra’s seems to me still a sound rule.

13
The Parasitic City Folk

In summer our town roads are busier than in winter. Most of the hundred-odd families who belong to our lake club are “summer people,” and that’s a fat addition to a town whose census total is well under a thousand. Property owners who vote elsewhere are entitled to attend town meeting, and talk in it, even to vote upon certain fiscal matters, though not to ballot for town officials. Few of them do. Most of us city exiles are in effect parasites upon the essential life of the community. We don’t do our part; in a sense, we even tend to suck the old life out of it.

I saw it happen in Pennsylvania, where my mother joined a simple Quaker community in 1904. There were villages with independent life in the Poconos in those days. But the simple Quaker community mushroomed into a mammoth summer colony, and was followed by other hotels and colonies of all sizes, using local labor throughout the winter and importing extra help from outside in the summer. The villages at first seemed to have more cash in hand than before, but in time they discovered that they had become mere local tenements for a rural proletariat with no control over its own destiny. The townships, dependent upon largesse from the summer folk, lost their autonomy. The Quaker founders of the summer community tried, as good Quakers would, to build up local pride, but that just can’t be done from outside. Economically, the countryside prospered; spiritually, it rotted.

Something of that sort is happening in all the country playgrounds which city folk invade in masses, in summer or, in skiing regions, in winter. It is happening even, perhaps especially, in rock-ribbed Vermont and Maine, and it is also happening in Wisconsin and Missouri. We have heard a lot of talk about the parasitic suburbs, which draw away the cities’ lifeblood—in taxes, in responsible school parenthood, in civic responsibility—but not enough about the manner in which city folk, while seeming to feed them, sap the lifeblood of country communities.

“Summer colonies” are aptly named. They are colonies, outposts of city empires, which have no enduring interest in the communities they colonize—and ruin. The summer people make generous donations on occasion, but they remain summer people. They take no part in the twelve-month life of the community. They don’t provide selectmen, or man the town school boards and committees. They raise the country labor standards, which is fine in summer, but they don’t offer steady employment the year around, and seasonal work, even well paid, isn’t the Utopia it sounds. And they raise property values until honest dirt farmers feel compelled to sell out and move to “cheaper” regions—and then one day the communities discover that they haven’t the manpower to run themselves any longer, and the old independent country autonomy is gone.

That hasn’t happened in our town yet, though Cassandras see it coming. We have been fortunate in that by some accident or miracle we have no big summer-or winter—hotels, and, until lately, no millionaire “gentleman farmers” or even near-millionaire near-gentleman near-farmers. Our first summer visitors were escaped cousins of leading local farmers—clergymen, college professors, small businessmen, writers, and artists. Most of us still are such. In New York and New Haven we are definitely middle-class folk. But values have shifted in Eastern America. In the country we middle-class folk appear upper-class. We have more cash to spend—on artesian wells, inside plumbing, electricity, white paint, furniture, and gadgets—than the real cash-crop farmers, and every year the disparity is more striking.

When I first came to our town almost a quarter-century ago, it was clearly ruled by three old Romans—the town’s leading farmer, who was a Yale graduate and a descendant of the town’s second minister; a judge, also of local stock; and a classmate of the farmer, whose father, born, like his father before him, in the Connecticut hill country, had emigrated to New York, made money there, and returned. These three decided what the town needed and saw that it was done. I well remember the first town meeting I ever attended. The judge presided as moderator; the farmer moved, and the ex-New Yorker seconded, a series of motions, and the judge ruled dissenters out of order. Having read lovely literary tributes to town-meeting democracy, I was a little shocked. Yet it was clear that the triumvirate was accepted in our town because, if it was a dictatorship, it was a responsible one, in close touch with the needs and desires of every citizen. It had come into power a decade earlier, apparently in revolt against a less efficient and perhaps less responsible dictatorship of an opposite political faction, and, dictatorially as it acted, it was accepted because the townsfolk, who had gone to district schools with the three bosses, knew their leaders intimately and trusted them.

The three old Romans died, and we have no one of their caliber to take their places. The leading farmer’s son, after years of struggle with low milk prices and high farm wages, rented the old farm and took to the road, selling calf feed. The judge left no offspring. The New Yorker’s son is today, I suppose, the town’s leading citizen. He manages a string of farms, carries his own milk route (and spots the first birds and first blossoms in town as he drives), but has no inclination to manage the town, though in his mild and tolerant manner he quietly exerts a considerable and wise influence.

We have had a series of younger selectmen—one a native son of a sixth generation native son, who didn’t enjoy power, especially when it devolved upon him as chief selectman to solve such passionate problems as disposing of a dog who had probably killed a sheep; one a son of a well-to-do German immigrant; one an “alien” from down-state who sold a little real estate and was deemed too interested in what roads were to be rebuilt; still another, an able and conscientious bibliophile, who took so overwhelming an interest in local politics and problems that his fellow townsmen became deeply suspicious of him; the latest, and most satisfying to the town, is a competent and unambitious local citizen who is liked because nobody remotely suspects him of enjoying power. Latterly the town has had some difficulty in finding local talent willing to take on the underpaid functions of selectmen, and the totally unpaid functions of members of the town board of finance and of the school board.

More and more of the city folk each year establish themselves—or at least their wives and children—the year round in the country. But they still have their economic roots, and their major political interest, in the city. They lack the deep sense of community interest which made the old town-meeting system work. They will contribute to the town’s quota for the Red Cross drive, for the tuberculosis or infantile paralysis campaigns, even to the local Boy Scout troop. In doing so, I fear, they chiefly bribe their own consciences.

The fact is that we are developing in America a large class of folk who pay taxes in both city and country but give primary allegiance to the city. Many of us love the country precisely because we are not really a part of it. The country gives us a sense of isolation from the city’s noises, crowds, harassments; our cherished isolation is a kind of isolationism. To an increasing degree we evade our responsibilities as citizens of the city, grumblingly leaving the “bosses” in control, but we accept no new responsibilities as citizens of the country. So the cities remain in the hands of the machines, and the countryside gently loses its inner fiber. We lose something of our moral fiber ourselves.

I have seen more of our town in winter than many of my fellow city-country in-betweeners. I have attended a good many October town meetings, but rather as a curious outside observer than as a participant. As a weekender, I cannot be useful in the town’s volunteer fire company, and I don’t understand the town’s school and finance problems. I like to think that I have real friends in our town, but in fact I no longer quite belong either in the country or the city. I accept no deep responsibility anywhere. And there are dangerously many like me in the United States. The tide of city-dwellers flowing to the country has its sinister, irresponsible, isolationist aspects. The future of our town, and of the countryside, depends upon a kind of integration between country- and city-dwellers that has hardly been begun. This is a national problem, worth more exploration than it has yet had.

The only civic function I have ever performed in our town consisted in writing a letter to help save the covered bridge. We had a very positive moderator at town meeting that year, who was sure that nothing could be done about it. A natural rebel, and a romantic covered-bridge lover, I spoke up in dissent—and got myself appointed to a committee of three to do something about it, if possible. So I wrote a letter, as follows:

The Courant printed the letter. The state highway commissioner arrived in our town a day later accompanied by engineers, who promptly reported that our bridge was dangerous. (Some townsfolk blamed me when it stayed officially closed for a year thereafter, though most of them, not believing in signs, just drove through the dangerous bridge anyway.) Connecticut law says that the cost of a bridge between towns is to be shared by the adjoining towns in proportion to their population, which meant that the west town, across the river from us, would have to bear two-thirds of the cost of reconstruction. The west town has twice as large a population as our town, but most of its citizens live on the other side of the mountain, and were profoundly uninterested in a bridge that primarily served us. Some of the west town’s cisalpine residents thereupon suggested that they might secede and join our town. The governor then called the two bodies of selectmen to his office, read the riot act, and the bridge was sturdily rebuilt, and, unfortunately, painted a dismal gray. Still, whenever I look at it, I feel a warm sense of personal involvement in it; it is my one step away from isolationism. And, with steel T-beams under it, the bridge was strong enough the next summer to support the prettiest square dance I ever saw.

Still, one letter for a bridge isn’t a very effective demonstration of civic responsibility.

14
There Are Always “Characters”

A quaint superstition is abroad that Maine and Vermont are populated exclusively by ancient granite characters; that the rest of New England, and the Southern mountains, teem with them; and that while a few characters survive in the cow country of the West, the remainder of the United States, hog-tied to chain groceries, red-fronted dime stores, yellow cabs, neon-lit hot spots, and assiduous attention to movies and the radio, is dismally “normal.”

I would not belittle the malign influence of the radio. We have a radio; we use it principally to check the accuracy of our clocks, and sometimes to hear the news. Even these minor uses of the radio involve us in such a lugubrious lot of commercials proclaiming that all hundred-per-cent Americans have sour stomachs, acid breaths, and dirty faces, that I wonder at the statistical popularity of this advertisement-ridden medium of so-called entertainment. The motto of the radio seems to be “Nature spelled backwards.” As far as I observe its trend, it is all backwards, and if we ever become a nation of people who sit at home listening to its canned idiocies—or looking at the Klieg-light vapidities of television—when the sun is shining out of doors, the moaners and groaners will surely be justified.

But I doubt the statistics. The people I meet, on the sidewalks of New York and in filling stations along the highways, don’t seem to have been stamped by the radio and the movies. They have minds, and quirks, all their own. Most of them are “characters.” At least, the older ones are “characters.” I sometimes suspect that all of us appear as “characters” to those who are younger than we.

“We have no characters in the town nowadays,” said a woman who was born close to Cream Hill, who had gone out to the world of New York, Schenectady, and Erie, and come home in late middle age. She recalled Elder Brewster, and the Indian who built the stone wall that rounds a corner so neatly by Miner Rogers’ place.

“Well,” I said, “in the eyes of the kids you’re a character yourself. I sometimes suspect that I’m becoming a character too. I rather hope so.”

Then we talked about Loren, and Joe, and old Jay Rowe. Rose admitted that Jay Rowe was a character. A hermit aged eighty-odd, who lived alone on a mountain with his dog and his bees, had to be a character; and besides, Fred Scoville said that Jay Rowe’s way of life proved that there were no such things as “mickrobes.”

Jay Rowe was the best man with a scythe in town. His father broke a snath when he was eight, Jay once told me, and Jay began practicing with the stub handle at that age. By the time he was twelve he could scythe a lawn as smoothly as any gadgeteer can with a power lawn mower. But, along toward eighty-five, Jay began to complain about mowing Rob Cochrane’s hillside pasture. “The Lord gave me two legs of the same size,” he said, “and you need one short leg to mow that hill comfortably. I’ll stick to mowing on the level.”

Jay, all the years I knew him, lived by himself in a cabin on the abandoned road up Dibble Hill. When he was eighty-seven Jay got tired of spading his garden. “You know what they wanted to plow that little patch?” he asked me and when I said I couldn’t guess, Jay confided, “Twenty dollars! Twenty goddam dollars!” he continued. “I wouldn’t pay it. No, sir. Bought me that tractor there for eighty and plowed it myself. Saved twenty dollars this year—three more years and I’ll be clear. I’ll still have the tractor. After that ’twon’t cost me a cent.” But Jay used his tractor only one spring. The next winter pneumonia caught up with him, and they took him down to the hospital.

I don’t know how Jay got on in that hospital, but it couldn’t have been quite the revelation a previous experience had been. Our town problem, who became possessor of a truck shortly after his release from the Army, had taken Jay for a ride and rammed the truck into a tree. Jay told me he remembered waking up sitting by the roadside, and the next he knew he was in a hospital. “Opened my eyes and saw two women coming at me,” Jay said.

“What ye goin’ to do?” he asked.

“Undress ye,” the women said.

“Ye are?” said Jay. “And, by God,” he assured me, “they did.”

“Next time I woke up,” said Jay, “I saw them two women coming back at me.”

“What ye goin’ to do now?” he asked.

“Goin’ to wash ye,” they said. “And,” Jay added, his eyes popping, “by God, they did—all over!”

It must have been a shock to Jay, and it may have been a shock to the nurses. Jay cut his own firewood and economized on water. He never washed dishes. In cold weather he kept warm by sleeping curled up in bed with his dog. Jay sort of hibernated in winter. But in summer he put in one of the best gardens in the Litchfield hills, grew melons when nobody else could ripen them, and talked to his bees as other old men talk to their grandchildren, affectionately and understandingly. And when anyone in town found bees in a barn wall, they sent for Jay, and Jay would go and talk to the bees, gently remove the boards, and take bees and honey home to keep him company. Bees didn’t sting him, and “mickrobes” didn’t harass him. Jay had no fears; he never listened to the radio.

Loren Palmer wasn’t old, but there’s no doubt that Loren was a character. He was, by general report, a drunk, though I never saw him in any state but sober. He had driven into a roadside walker years before with fatal results, had served time in jail and been debarred from a driver’s license, so he had to walk over the hill to our place.

He knew we usually had a drop somewhere in the house; for years we shared drinks with Loren after a Saturday’s work, until we found that, again and again, our small drinks had started Loren on three-day benders. Sometimes when we came into the house on a cold Friday night we’d find a note from Loren: “Had a terrible job finding your bottle this time, but I finally located it. The A. & P. store didn’t have your brand in stock, but it’s on order and will be here next week.” And it always was. Loren didn’t have a sniggin of dishonesty in him, but he just couldn’t leave liquor alone. At his mother’s request I once tried to lecture Loren on the perils of overdrinking, without the slightest effect. Loren, by that time, had drunk himself out of every job in town except with us, and neighbors told me that he began sobering up Thursday night for his weekend with the Gannetts. But he lost us too the summer we went west, leaving the old Ford in the barn for Michael to use when he came home from college. Loren and a group of his drinking friends got the demounted tires out of the attic and reset them, put a new battery in the car, drove it off, wrecked it twenty miles away, and lost the papers. That made a dent in our friendship.

But Loren was our friend for a decade, and after his mother’s cancer operation he owed us more than he could repay in cash and so did work for us that left me spoiled. Loren liked to scythe and to cut wood. I never told him to leave the meadow lilies when he scythed the orchard below us (it is far too rough for any machine); of his own volition, he’d mow neatly around them, and around the clumps of ferns. And, along with accounts, he’d leave us notes on the state of the world: “Feb. 27, bluebirds twittering as I passed Gold’s today. Apr. 4, first spring peepers in the spring marsh. Heard them in the valley a week ago.”

Loren was nearly forty when the war came, but he joined the medical corps, served at the front in Italy, came home with a heart condition, and died. He wasn’t cut out to be a leading citizen, and a good many sound citizens rated him a useless drunk. But we still miss Loren’s wide smile.

Then there’s Joe.

For years Joe has been, in the literal sense of all three words, our guide, philosopher, and friend. By profession Joe is, more or less, a plumber, and a good one. But Joe is that unique thing, a plumber not interested in money. Joe doesn’t care to work for people he doesn’t like, and he doesn’t like to take money from friends. Joe refuses to have a telephone in his house.

“If I had a telephone,” Joe says, “I’d answer it. And then, no matter who it was, I’d be caught. People who know me know my neighbors, and my neighbors will always take a message for me. Then I know who’s calling before I answer. If it’s M—— who wants those damned copper gutters put up on his house, I never get the message. If it’s you, or Ellie, or Ed Dodd, or Ned Bourne, or the Erharts, I can call back and find out what your trouble is. It saves argument and makes more sense that way.”

Joe plants the largest vegetable garden in the village, and gets least direct good out of it. He lives alone and doesn’t care much for vegetables. He gardens for half a dozen families. He just likes to grow vegetables and share them. In fact Joe, though he never joined a “movement” in his life, is something of a share-the-wealther.

Once, when we needed a piece of pipe in our cellar, Joe ruminated. “I hate to go all the way to Canaan for a bit of pipe,” he said. “You know, Will Scoville has had a piece of pipe just the right size lying on his bench for ten years. I’ll bet he doesn’t know it’s there, and, if he did, he’d be glad to let you have it.” We used Will Scoville’s pipe, and I’m sure he didn’t object. In fact, none of Joe’s friends would ever object to anything Joe did; and Joe would never do anything they’d object to. More than once while we were working together, Joe has remarked, in effect, “You remember that T-joint we took out of your hot-water tank a year ago? Did you ever miss it?” I hadn’t missed it. But someone had needed a T-joint in his cellar, and Joe had shared my wealth.

Joe is embarrassing. He won’t take money from us. Sometimes you realize that Joe could use a new pair of boots, or a sweater, and mail him a replacement from New York. That’s a gift, not a payment. Joe stoutly refuses cash money. He carries the mail from the railroad station to the post office, and that, with a few odd jobs for strangers, gives Joe all he needs. He has a house. He could rent half of it, but he’d rather work at improving it. For five years he has been tearing up one end of it, putting in a new fireplace, new windows, and new partitions. He loves tinkering with it; I think he’d feel lonely if he ever finished the job.

Sometimes Joe announces that he’s tired of the crowded life in the village (population, 180) and would like to spend a “weekend in the country,” on Cream Hill. He knows Ruth will lay in extra supplies to feed him, and, like as not, he’ll bring with him a couple of stray lads from the village who aren’t quite sure what to do with their lives. We all work, and all eat, together, and have fun. When the end of the day comes, I try to pay Joe’s crew. Joe refuses. Once, after a long argument (they had done a lot of hard work), I tossed a small bill in the back of Joe’s truck as he drove away. Next weekend we found the bill in the mail, together with a note, signed by Joe and his friends: “We value the Gannetts’ friendship more than their money.” I think I value that note more than any other I ever got.

Joe is gregarious; he hates to work alone, and will not work at all for anyone who expects to give him orders and go away. But he knows the value of life in the country. He loves it. He listens to us weekend folk who dream of one day retiring to the country and living there all year around. “Why don’t you go ahead and do it?” Joe asks. “You know, you don’t have to work so hard. There are only so many years in any man’s life, and it’s no use killing yourself before you’ve begun to have a good time. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had, just sitting still.”

Once, when Joe visited me in New York, he walked all over town. He spent one day working at the Fulton Fish Market—for nothing—and returned with his head happily full of precise fishman’s lore. Another day he walked up Park Avenue.

“You know, Lewis, there are some pretty fancy apartment houses on that street,” Joe said.

“Sure are,” I agreed.

Joe was lost in thought for a moment.

“It must cost a hell of a lot to live in some of those houses,” he remarked.

“I guess it costs plenty,” said I.

“I just can’t understand it.”

“Well,” I said, “the ground rent is heavy, and they have a lot of service, and it all adds up.”

“Oh,” said Joe, “I didn’t mean that. I just meant: why on earth, if a man has all that money already, does he have to live in the city?”

Joe meant it, too. He believes in, and practices, the good life. I suppose that makes a “character.”

15
The Chins of the Nation

There were no beards in our town in those mid-eighteenth-century days when my great-great-grandfather Ezra rode across the Colony of Connecticut to visit it. I doubt that Ezra ever saw a real American beard; they just didn’t have them in his day. Ezra sometimes wore a wig; but, to judge from the various silhouettes and portraits of him which exist, he must have worked his razor every day of his adult life.

And so do the men of our town today. Except for one summer visitor from Bridgeport, the town has become completely beardless. Yet when I first came to Cream Hill in the middle nineteen-twenties, the old-timers still wore very fine beards indeed. And on the walls of our town’s homes still hang pictures proving that the fathers of the present and the last generations also wore long hair on their faces. Some of our citizens cherish the illusion that back in our craggy hills our townsmen have maintained a sturdy aloofness from the tides that sweep the more gregarious parts of the nation, that this Yankee community thinks things over by itself and makes up its own mind. Our voting record is sometimes cited in support of this stubborn belief; when the rest of the country voted for Roosevelt (or Truman), our town still turned out its customary three-to-one Republican majority, out-Vermonting even Vermont. But the history of male hair in our town proves that, after all, it stodgily follows the pattern of the nation.

The rises and falls of the American beard and of the American mustache, which are part of the mysterious tides of our national history, have been sadly neglected by historians. They may be chronicled; the time is hardly yet ripe for full interpretation.

The facts are clear. This continent was discovered and settled by men of many races, almost all wearing whiskers and plenty of them. What Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci wore is uncertain, since there are no authenticated contemporary portraits of them, but Balboa and Magellan and Sebastian Cabot, Cortes, Pizarro, Ponce de Leon and De Soto, Champlain and Cartier, Hawkins and Drake, Captain John Smith, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Winthrop, and the first Lord Baltimore—all were bearded men. In the late 1600’s, following the Puritan revolution, beards were first pared down to goatees, then shaved off entirely. The eighteenth century, when our town was settled, saw the triumph of clean cheeks and clean chins on both sides of the Atlantic (and also of dirty wigs). Not one of the signers of the American Constitution wore a beard or even a mustache.

Benjamin Franklin, writing in his Autobiography of a certain Mr. Keimer, his first Philadelphia employer, who was a French Protestant émigré, comments on the gentleman’s eccentricity because, in 1723, he insisted on wearing a beard. Elizabeth Drinker, also of Philadelphia, noted in her journal in 1794 that she had seen on the streets an elephant and two bearded men; apparently the beards were as rare a phenomenon as the elephant.

The wig gave way, in the days of the French Revolution, to natural hair, at first worn long and powdered. George Washington, as President, wore his pigtail, or queue, in a black silk bag pinned up with a solitaire-diamond brooch; in 1793 he paid $1.38 for such a bag. But the fashion was soon to change, and by 1801 Democratic dandies, followers of Thomas Jefferson, boldly turned up on the New York streets wearing neither wig nor pigtail, though the practice was regarded as hardly decent.

Sideburns began to appear during the War of 1812; the cheeks of John Quincy Adams and several of his successors in the White House show a pre-auricular hairiness suggestive of the beards that were to come after the middle of the century, but no President before Abraham Lincoln ever wore a full beard or a mustache. In 1852 the New York Lantern printed what is called the first picture of Uncle Sam. That “typical American figure” wore the close-fitting striped trousers looped around his shoes, the long-tailed coat, and the tall hat of today’s cartoons, but Uncle Sam in 1852 was clean-shaven. It was not until the late 1850’s that America went hairy-faced on a national scale.

In the 1840’s, to be sure, a few distinguished Americans let the hair grow under their chins in the fashion which the Germans call a Kranzbart, a wreath beard. Among them was Hamilton Fish, the grandfather of our contemporary Ham. The few beards of the 1840’s were eccentric jobs. Walt Whitman wore one in 1840, but he was obviously deliberately “different.” So was James Russell Lowell, who in 1842, aged twenty-three, wore hair wherever it would grow on his face and let his chestnut locks fall curling on his shoulders. Old Sam Houston grew beards three times in his life, always (so Marquis James, his biographer, tells me) in periods of emotional stress. In 1829 he resigned as governor of Tennessee, left his wife, and went off to join the Indians—and grew a beard. He shaved it a year later when he returned to Washington in Indian regalia as an Indian envoy. He grew a beard again during the hard campaign for Texan independence in 1836, and a third time in 1848 or 1849, when his second wife was insisting that he join the church.

Lincoln, it is well known, was clean-shaven when elected, bearded when inaugurated. In October 1860, just before his election, a little girl from New York, Grace Bedell, disturbed by comment on her candidate’s appearance, wrote Mr. Lincoln a letter suggesting that he would look better with more hair.

“My dear little Miss,” Lincoln took time to reply. “Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received. I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughter. I have three sons—one seventeen, one nine, and one seven years of age. They, with their mother, constitute my whole family. As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?”

It was only two months later, however, that a newspaper paragrapher remarked: “Our English friends say that President Lincoln is putting on ‘airs.’ They think so, we suppose, because Mr. Lincoln is raising a pair of whiskers.”

It wasn’t a pair. Lincoln never affected the parted beard, or “Piccadilly weepers,” which were becoming the vogue in England. He wore his beard rounded and of varying length, according to his mood, and he always shaved his upper lip and a patch beneath his mouth. That combination, so strange today, of ample nether whiskers, and a hairless upper lip, was a part of the great American tradition in the mid-century. Not only Lincoln but three other bearded members of his cabinet—Stanton, Fessenden, and Welles—saved time on their chins but shaved their upper lips with care. You can see the same style in contemporary pictures of California gold miners, New York businessmen, and the solons of Washington. When Currier and Ives depicted the stirring championship baseball match at Hoboken in 1862, the catcher, though he had no modern mask, gloves, or belly pad, had a woolly chin-covering of the same pattern as old Abe’s.

Now, Abraham Lincoln would not have grown a beard simply because a New York miss suggested it. Carl Sandburg observes that five of Lincoln’s biographer-friends—Herndon, Whitney, Lamon, Nicolay, and Hay—agree that they never heard him explain why at fifty-two he changed his face. Neither they nor Sandburg offer an explanation. Obviously it was chiefly that Lincoln followed the fashion, as our Connecticut hill folk also do. When Lincoln and Douglas debated, both were clean-shaven. But in an 1860 cartoon Douglas appeared with a fine full beard. Pictures of John Brown taken in 1857 or 1858 show no beard, and when he was hanged in 1859 he had magnificent long whiskers. Beards were in the air.

Four post-mid-century cabinets pretty well mirror the progress of tonsorial fashion. Franklin Pierce’s cabinet (1853) lacked so much as the ghost of a beard. President Buchanan’s (1857) included two pretty good cases of under-chin whiskers. Lincoln’s had four full beards. Grant’s was the hairiest in American history; Hamilton Fish, Grant’s Secretary of State, stuck to his wreath beard of the forties, but he was the only man in the cabinet who did not wear a complete outfit of whiskers on chin, cheeks, and upper and lower lips. The late fifties were obviously the turning point, and Lincoln’s beard may have helped establish a national fashion that was to endure till the last decade of the century.

Harper’s Weekly in 1857 was full of comments on male hair. In late April of that year Harper’s hailed the solid English mutton chop, the delicate tracery of the French mustache, the well-waxed, pert blackness of the Italian beard, and the long, irregular, silky German affair; and it lamented the undistinguished appearance of the American face. “The only character which is unmistakably American,” the writer complained, “and peculiar to America alone—the Bowery boy—is close-shaven, with the exception of a brief mustache, from which the original color is invariably eradicated.” (Just how or why that was done is today a mystery.) The Harper’s commentator suspected that New York ways discouraged hair. “Bad brandy, unlimited cigars, late suppers, and no exercise from the age of ten years upward,” he remarked, “leave Nature very little extra strength.”

That was the year of a pest of worms, to combat which the equally pestiferous English sparrows are said to have been introduced. A June 1857 cartoon in Harper’s suggested that the worms dropping from the trees were a menace to long, waxed mustaches. In October 1857 one of Henry Adams’ classmates commented in the Harvard Magazine on “The astounding fact that at least two-thirds of the Class of ’58 have hirsute appendages of some sort.”

Pictures of 1858 show whiskers everywhere triumphant. Currier & Ives’ “American Fireman” of that year has a full beard. The mayors elected in Chicago and New York, the governor of Kansas, congressmen from Illinois and Tennessee, all wore beards. A drawing in Leslie’s of the stirring reception during which Mayor Tiemann of New York congratulated Cyrus Field on the successful laying of the Atlantic cable shows that of the assembled notables fourteen had full beards, four had mustaches, and only five were clean-shaven. A still more interesting revelation is the drawing of the stout sailors who that year hauled the cable up onto the Newfoundland shore. Every one of them was full-bearded.

There are two schools of thought about the origin of the American beard. The cosmopolitans hold that it came from Europe; the isolationists hold, and, as a staunch patriot, I hope and believe that they are right, that it was an indigenous development, working its way back East from the gold diggings of California. Certain it is that the Currier & Ives lithographs of the Forty-niners and their successors indicate that an unshaven way of life was current on the West Coast at a time when no self-respecting Easterner would let hair grow anywhere but on his upper cheeks and perhaps well under his chin.

This under-chin wreath beard, however, was probably European in origin. Queen Victoria’s beloved Prince Albert began connecting his sideburns under the chin as early as 1841, but his was a gentle, carefully curbed fringe of hair, nothing like the wild, free beards of the American West.

The imperial, named after Louis Napoleon—a fine, pointed tuft on the chin, usually worn with full mustache—first turned up in this country in the fifties and was common throughout the Civil War. But it was an effeminate mode compared to the California fashion or to the beards adopted by Abraham Lincoln and John Brown.

It was during the Civil War that the full-fashioned beard, covering upper and lower lip, chin, and cheeks, really came into its own. Robert E. Lee went to war smooth-shaven, though professional Southerners today find that hard to believe. Jefferson Davis was inaugurated clean-cut, but soon grew a beard longer than Lincoln’s. A Currier & Ives of the Northern generals, drawn in 1861, when Winfield Scott was still Commander-in-Chief, shows the lingering influence of the razor age. Scott himself had no beard. Of the twenty-five generals pictured, only four had a full complement of whiskers, three had mustache and under-chin fringe, one the fringe alone, two had goatees with mustache, two had beards without mustache, four had mustaches alone, and nine were clean-shaven. Yet by the end of the war virtually every general in either army, and a large proportion of the privates, wore full beards and hair almost wherever it would grow. Our town’s only Civil War general, commemorated by a monument in the Hollow, came back from the war well fuzzed.

My father, born in 1840, came to the razor age just when the nation was going hirsute, and my father never shaved in his life. The album of his Harvard class of 1860 shows a bewildering variety of facial adornments. Eighteen wore full beards, four had the under-chin fur, twenty-five wore mustaches, fourteen had sideburns alone, and fifty-eight were clean-shaven. That year before the Civil War was the peak for Harvard beards. They held up well through the class of 1868; then collapse began. The class of 1870 had only four beards—five, counting a timid goatee; the class of 1880 had seven. Most of the Brown-decade classes showed a good majority wearing mustaches and a fair sprinkling of sideburns. Theodore Roosevelt entered college in 1872 with magnificently precocious sideburns floating in the winds a good three inches off his cheeks.

Photographs of early Harvard crews show only two bearded men, in the boats of 1857 and 1859. About a third of the oarsmen of the sixties, however, wore mustaches; and in the seventies and eighties pictures of baseball nines and football elevens show mustaches adorning a good half of the players. In 1890 mustaches decorated about half of the graduating class. As 1860 had been the peak year for beards, so 1890 was the banner year for mustaches. Decline followed swiftly. The class of 1900 distinguished itself as the first since the Mexican War to graduate without a single beard in its ranks. The last Harvard football mustache appeared in 1901, the last baseball mustache in 1905.

Since the period of the nineties, indeed, American hair has been in unceasing retreat. In recent Harvard graduating classes only six or eight can be found wearing mustaches. Through the years the faculty has followed the student trend, but more slowly. In 1895 three-fifths of Harvard’s professorial staff wore full beards and most of the rest wore mustaches or ample sideburns. By 1910 only a third of the faculty was bearded, and by 1948 a faculty beard was an antique.

Among the politicos the fashions followed the same course. From Lincoln’s day to Woodrow Wilson’s first election, in 1912, only one man without at least a mustache was elected President. Johnson was clean-shaven, to be sure, but he was not elected to the presidency; Ulysses S. Grant, of course, had a first-class beaver, Hayes had an even fuller beard, and President Garfield’s positively flowed. Arthur, the Vice-President who succeeded him, had plenty of hair on most of his face but kept a small patch on the point of his chin neatly mowed. Cleveland broke the succession of beards, but at least he had a mustache. Harrison returned to the bearded tradition for his four years; then followed Cleveland’s second term, and, after McKinley, a lone smooth-shaven exception, came Theodore Roosevelt and Taft, both mustached.

But since March 4, 1913, not so much as a mustache has been tolerated in the presidential chair, and only once has a bewhiskered man got so far as a major nomination. That, of course, was in the election of 1916. The bearded age was closer then than now; even so, astute Republican politicians persuaded Mr. Hughes to prune his flowing whiskers a bit. Some urged him to shave, but Mr. Hughes refused, and he lost the election. Two thousand votes turned in California would have changed American history. Is it a fair argument that Mr. Hughes’ beard defeated him? Certainly beards, by 1916, were definitely suspected of being un-American—although it was not until the Russian Revolution of 1917 that the new and fearsome adjective “bolshevik” was associated with them.

Today the cabinet is unanimously clean—not a single mustache lingers.^[3] Every cabinet from 1857 to 1931 had at least some shavable hair on the face. (Hughes’ was the last beard; Mellon’s and Stimson’s the last mustaches.) Today the cabinet chins are as clean as in the first sixty-eight years of the nation’s history. On the Supreme Court, Mr. Hughes’ beard wagged in solitary splendor until his retirement in 1941, with not one mustache to keep it company, and since his retirement the Court’s chins have all been clean.

We are not yet quite as fanatic about clean-shaving as we were a century ago. In Greenwood Cemetery, in Leominster, Massachusetts, a stone marks the grave of Joseph Palmer, buried in 1875 at the age of eighty-four. Near the base of the stone are the words “Persecuted for wearing the beard.” As a young man Palmer had studied the Bible and come to the conclusion that good Christians, like good Jews, should wear beards. In Worcester, in 1830, his beard got him into trouble. When some hoodlums attempted to clip his flowing pride Palmer attacked them in turn. Thereupon he was thrust into jail. The jailer tried to shave him; Palmer, unarmed, defended himself with stout kicks. His fellow prisoners joined with the jailer; Palmer beat them off, too. When his sentence expired this virile citizen refused to leave, saying that he had been obliged to pay for his own food and fuel and should be reimbursed. The sheriffs and keepers carried him out in a chair and set him in the street, still bearded. Never again was Joseph Palmer’s beard attacked.

Why these tides in the history of American hair? It is easy to say that, far from home, the fighting men of the Civil War took to beards, or that wars make for virility. But the trend to the beard, as we have seen, became strong in the fifties, years before the clean-shaven Edmund Ruffin fired the first shot at old Fort Sumter. The decline of the mustache began a decade before the mustachioed Mr. King C. Gillette put his safety razor on the market in 1901. Not even the excitements of World Wars I and II caused a revival of the fashion for hair on the face. Such mustaches as are worn today are preponderantly small and frugally trimmed. Even women today trim their tresses. Ours is an anti-hair age, and even in the remotest hill towns of Connecticut or Vermont young men and old devoutly follow the mysterious rites of hirsute fashion.

16
“Pimping for a Pumpkin”

Gardening can become a kind of disease. It infects you; you cannot escape from it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking by an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed. And Ruth and I have become such hopelessly infected gardeners that, though when in the city we live in what was once the janitor’s apartment on the roof of a corset factory, even there we have a garden. It began with a wagonload of Union Square.

Mr. Moses was lifting the face of the old square and removing a good deal of its body as waste material. Egmont, my predecessor in the penthouse, arranged a private deal with a willing truckman to dump one of his loads at the freight entrance to our loft building; Egmont and the night watchman moved the rubble to the roof.

Egmont began his planting in butter tubs and wooden boxes, which promptly rotted. Ruth and I replaced them with creosote-painted boxes and conscientiously equipped them with drainage holes. Our boxes may have lasted a little longer than the uncreosoted ones, but they rotted too. So we just spread the earth on the roof between two skylights, and the garden prospered. The skylights didn’t. One autumn the factory tenant beneath us complained of leakage, and we had to shovel the earth away from the skylights and, at considerable expense, build a brick retaining wall about a more restricted roof garden.

We needed to restrict it, in any case, because our earth was washing away. We had improved the Union Square subsoil with an almost indefinite number of sacks of finely rotted humus from the Cream Hill mulch pile, but as one grows older one finds that the charm of moving hundred-pound sacks of soil tends to wane.

However, in the course of nearly twenty years of roof gardening, we discovered a lot of primary facts which do not jibe with the rosy prognostications of the garden pages, with the extravagances of the plusher penthouse-garden advertisements, or even with our Cream Hill experiences. Some of our discoveries make things easier, and some vice versa.

What we grow on the roof today is essentially a residue. We’ve tried a little of almost everything, mostly by accident. I have a strange passion for ferns, and have lugged in from the country an extraordinary number of cartons full of them. I prefer maidenhair, but it doesn’t like the sooty city. In the city, maidenhair looks beautiful the first May and June, turns brown come midsummer, pokes its nose up bravely the second year, and never amounts to anything again. The true fiddle ferns—what filicophiles call cinnamon ferns and interrupted ferns—seem actually to like the city. They do too well, in fact, the first year, and grow so tall that the wind breaks them. They tend to be a bit smaller the second year, and last for a good five or six years. Probably they would last longer still with expert attention, which ours don’t get. Lady ferns prosper in spring and turn brown in midsummer, but if you cut the fronds, they come back nicely. We learned that it doesn’t pay to import ferns in midsummer. The time to bring them in is when the fiddle fronds are just showing above ground.

In the clumps of ferns we also imported, by accident, a variety of other flora, and possibly some fauna. When we rearranged our roof garden last year, we dug out our proud shade tree, a white ash which had started, unbeknownst to us, under the shade of a fern frond seven or eight years ago and was waving its top ten feet above ground when it had to be moved. A bit of sumach also came in with the ferns and spread both below ground and above, apparently intending to monopolize the entire garden. We dug it all out. Wild asters and goldenrod also appeared and spread. Goldenrod looks a bit shabby in the city smoke, but the asters, blooming for about a month in September, make quite a show. I tried fertilizing them one year, which wasn’t what they wanted at all; they ran to leaf, and I had to cut them back twice. What they like is the equivalent of an old-fashioned, dust-covered roadside, and a normal city roof gives a very fair imitation of that.

Another of our accidents was the vines that cover our trellises. The corset factory died years ago and was replaced by assorted and less interesting business firms, but it had built trellises as background for its corset fashion shows before it departed for Queens, and we inherited the trellises. In recent springs they have been covered, until June, with luxuriant masses of Virginia creeper and wild grapevines, both of which immigrated as stowaways with the ferns. One year we even ate two roof-grown wild grapes.

In June the bugs arrive. Many plants won’t grow on a city roof, but I doubt if there is any variety of insect pest which won’t flourish there. Some of them, of course, blow in from New Jersey. Others apparently go through their life cycles in our thin roof soil. We have had swallowtail butterflies and praying mantises—I kept a mantis for a month, one autumn, tethered to a trellis—and we have lots of a lovely orange-nosed, white-spotted black moth. I learned its name last year, when I finally got around to sending to the Botanical Garden a sample of the caterpillars which every year have devastated our vines. It’s the eight-spotted forester, if you’re interested. The Botanical Garden also told me what to use to destroy it, but I’ve lost the memorandum.

The Japanese beetles are clearly Jersey immigrants. On the west side of our roof we have wistaria, which never bloomed on Cream Hill and so was brought into the city. It has never bloomed there, either, and we’ve had it, altogether, more than twenty years. But it makes a pretty pattern of foliage and in good years manifests a vague disposition to climb. On it the Japanese beetles land. They don’t eat wistaria; they just land on the west coast of the wistaria bush and rest. Then they move to more succulent pastures.

The Japs like Virginia creeper and marigold and adore roses. They have no interest in sunflowers, petunias, zinnias, ferns, and iris, which are among our city stand-bys. Or in nicotiana, the tobacco plant’s garden cousin, which is our penthouse pet because it sends out its fragrance in the evening and shines white in the city dusk.

In fact, as all gardeners know, nicotine is a powerful insect deterrent. When the corsets moved out from below us, cosmetics replaced them, and then we had cigars—cheap cigars—for a few years. The odor of the cigars filtered up through the skylights and kept the insect pests away. In the cigar years our roof gardening was easy. We regretted it, as gardeners, when the cigars moved down the street, giving way to zippers.

The Cream Hill season begins three weeks later than New York’s, which is a disadvantage from the point of view of starting plants for city use in the country. In the course of the years we have discovered that certain plants seed themselves in the city. We never have to buy nicotiana, or marigold, or calliopsis, or sunflowers. The three or four stalks of sunflower which we allow to grow at the back of the roof garden each year would, if permitted to do so, seed a city acre. They seem to need no nourishment at all. I have found sunflowers sprouting and even, in a stunted way, blooming, in the gravel in the gutter on the roof, which was probably enriched somewhat by the wash from our garden. Marigold and calliopsis seldom reseed themselves on Cream Hill, but each spring in the city I find several plants starting bravely under the garden litter, and they do well. Nicotiana will grow anywhere.

Petunias and zinnias don’t seed themselves in the city, but they flourish. Calendulas, which sprout like weeds in our Cream Hill vegetable garden, won’t grow in the city at all. For years my theory was that their sticky leaves got clogged with deposits from the city smoke, but one day a friend pointed out that the petunia leaves were sticky too and that they didn’t suffer. It’s another mystery.

We’ve tried bulbs, and they don’t do badly. Every year at least one snowdrop blooms in February, which is an encouraging phenomenon. We never remember to lift tulips in summer, as the books advise, and so they peter out. So do daffodils.

We have a lawn too. It is, I think, the feature of our roof garden most admired by visitors. It is roughly ten feet long and six feet wide, and we cut it with a regular lawn mower. We used shears for years, but that’s a slow job. The soil under our lawn cannot be more than three inches deep; the grass needs constant watering and also, we have discovered, a scattering of fertilizer once every month or so through the summer. But it grows. I doubt if any putting green has more cherished grass.

The victory-garden experts, I understand, advised against vegetable gardening on city roofs. In the general contagion of wartime, however, we couldn’t avoid a few vitamin experiments. We had always had chives (it, too, seeds itself all over the roof), we’ve had parsley, and we brought in mint with the ferns some years ago. The mint, if encouraged, would take most of the garden. You don’t need much mint, however, for an occasional julep. For reasons which the Botanical Garden could doubtless explain, our city mint gets pretty seedy before September. We had grown city radishes on occasion, simply because radishes grow quickly, and there’s a time in the spring when you want something to show for your efforts.

In 1943 we succumbed to the martial atmosphere and grew a few other vegetables on the roof. We had at least one good mess of beans—I contend we had two, but Ruth doesn’t remember it that way—and we had several messes of oak-leaf lettuce. Also, we had tomatoes.

As a matter of fact, we had peppers too. But we didn’t have eggplants. We bought three plants of tomatoes, three of peppers, and three of eggplants in May and set them in. They grew very nicely. They put out leaves and in due time put out flowers too. But the flowers wilted and dropped, and there was never any suggestion of actual tomatoes or peppers. The tomato plants began to get tall, so I tied them to the trellises. The pepper plants were covered with waxy little white flowers, and the eggplants put out their sultry purple bloom. But no fruit.

It was an office associate, the garden editor of the Herald Tribune, who solved my problem. He was writing weekly articles explaining that one should not over-fertilize or under-fertilize, or over-water or under-water tomatoes, and I told him I’d tried all those things and none of them worked.

“Have you any bees up there?” Jack asked.

I looked that evening when I got home. We hadn’t. It was, I think, about the only category of insect missing. We had flies, aphids, butterflies, moths, centipedes, beetles, and lady-bugs—once we had even had a grasshopper—but we had no bees.

“Well, then,” Jack said the next time I saw him, “you’ve got to act like a bee. Pimp ’em.”

He told me then the story of the man who, when his pumpkins wouldn’t set, wrote to his congressman, who referred his letter to the Department of Agriculture. The Department replied, suggesting to him that perhaps his pumpkin flowers were not being properly fertilized and that, if he had no bees, he could substitute for them by brushing the pollen off some of the flowers and onto others with a camel’s-hair paintbrush.

The man refused. “I grew up on a farm,” he said, “and as a boy I led the stallion to the mare and the boar to the sow, but I’ll be doggoned if I’ll pimp for a pumpkin.”

I pimped for my tomatoes. I brushed the pollen one Friday afternoon, departed for Cream Hill, and when I looked again on Monday morning I could already see the little green tomatoes forming. It was miraculous. I didn’t begin pimping until mid-July, but even so we had a good tomato harvest. The peppers succumbed to my mediation too, but the eggplants refused. Apparently they insist on their own private sex life.

17
Weekend World

The weekend world is a modern invention.

You didn’t need a weekend to get to the country in Ezra’s day; the country then reached right into the back yards of the cities—the cities, indeed, were mere villages. Cream Hill was sixty miles from Ezra’s New Haven, but it was a three-day horseback ride—an expedition, not a weekend jaunt.

Nor was the modern weekend possible in the horse-and-buggy age. You couldn’t park a horse and buggy in a shed beside the railroad station and expect to find them safe and sound if you returned five or six days later.

Summer vacations in my boyhood hadn’t changed much since my father’s boyhood fifty years before. They were middle-class affairs. All New England was spotted in those days with overgrown farmhouses converted into summer boarding houses. The farmer met you at the train, some time after the Fourth of July, and took you back to it, at the latest, just before Labor Day. In the intervening vacation time you used your legs if you wanted to get away from the croquet game on the lawn. Only rich people like Clarence Day’s father, with money enough to maintain their own horses and coachmen, in those days had individual “places in the country.”

The automobile has changed all that. It has made possible the itinerant vacations of today, the middle-class summer home, the workman’s shack, the whole still-evolving weekend pattern. First it spilled the cities into the suburbs, and latterly it has been stretching the suburbs into the hinterlands. It is changing the American way of life. There must be millions of us in America today who live more or less on a weekend pattern.

Meanwhile, though the airplane has spanned the oceans and the poles, it has not yet learned to span the suburbs. The airplane is a convenient way to get to Los Angeles or Ireland, but for a man who just wants to get out of the city, it is no help at all. As a pattern of everyday living the air age is not yet here.

We didn’t dream of a weekend world when we first went to Cream Hill. We were thinking, I suppose, in terms of my father’s long ministerial vacations. Cream Hill was a place for the children during the City and Country School’s long vacations. My wife and I both had full-time jobs; we took our vacations separately to space out the parent-child vacation period, and left Michael and Ruthy the rest of the time with the incomparable Lucille, who is now superintendent of a city play center. We used to drive to the city only twice in a season, and every trip was an ordeal. The roads were poorer, the Model T slower; what is today a two-and-a-half-hour drive then consumed at least five hours—often, with a meal or a flat tire on the way, six. Usually we traveled by train.

The all-year weekend pattern grew on us gradually. Small children are not natural weekenders. The same old drive, week after week, bores them. Curvy New England roads are hard on small stomachs; I shall not soon forget the time when Ruthy gurgled a signal to stop, and I didn’t stop quite in time. It took weeks for the lower frame of that car window to dry out, and for months a good rain would remind us of it. And when Michael and Ruthy became bored in the back seat, they opened stimulating arguments which tended to develop into active physical combat. We racked our heads for games to keep them amused. It was Michael, however, who invented the sport which solved the problem of the weekend drive.

“Betcha I can make my Lifesaver last longer than yours,” said Michael to Ruthy. I clocked them on the speedometer. Ruthy, of a more impatient nature, could hardly keep a Pep-o-Mint intact for three miles. Michael first set a par of five miles. Then he raised it to ten. Within two years of active training he worked up to a record of seventy miles. He would refuse to answer questions, lest speech jar his tongue and hasten the dissolution of his lozenge. For two full hours he would sit silent—and happy!—on the back seat, his dry tongue thrust out to keep the juices of his mouth from hastening dissolution. It was a triumph. Ruthy could never equal that record—nor could Ruth or I. And while Michael and Ruthy were developing techniques for making a Lifesaver last, Ruth and I were able to sit peacefully on the front seat, quietly talking to each other with no fear of combat in the rear.

Neither Michael nor Ruthy was a natural weekend gardener. In fact, I doubt that any child is. I have always suspected books that tell of “children’s gardens.” Gardening requires long-term imagination—months, often years, of waiting to see. Children want immediate results. Michael and Ruthy were willing to plant, but they never had much interest in any of the subsequent gardening processes until it came to harvesting. So, while Ruth and I spent our weekends gardening, Michael became a tree-house builder. Ruthy became a barn builder.

Michael’s tree-house enterprise centered in a big wild black-cherry tree which grew out of an old stone wall. If he had fallen, he would have tumbled onto some of the snaggiest rocks in the wall, but no other tree interested him in the least. He began by nailing cleats against the trunk. We helped by reinforcing the cleats with stouter spikes, but beyond that Michael had no assistance. The cleats were soundly attached and some of them are still there; the rest of the house has been slowly dissolving for years. It began with a few small boards. But Michael’s imagination was expansive. He lugged bigger and bigger boards, torn from the older barns, down to his cherry tree. With painful effort he saved money to buy a big pulley which he hung high in the tree, and with its aid he made the treetop look like a lumber yard. He began with a precarious floor, reinforced the second summer. As years passed, he began a second story and projected a roof. Of course the house was never finished; at thirteen Michael went away to school, and his weekend structural activities ceased. Visitors today catch sight of the ruins thirty feet above ground and ask, “What on earth are those boards doing away up in that tree?”

Ruthy’s building operations began less ambitiously, and have proved more enduring. A packing case in the biggest and oldest barn grew into what we call Midget Village.

Ruthy was nine when Michael went away to school, and already, as most City and Country School children are, an energetic carpenter. We used to take classmates of hers along for weekends. Through the Midget Village years we seldom saw them between meals, except when they came to ask for more nails—or for Band-Aids.

They cut windows in the original packing box; they added an annex; they constructed a ramp and dragged another immense packing box onto the original structure, and added a gabled roof. This, for reasons that were always mysterious to me, in due time was christened the “Forester’s Hut.” The next structure, because Ruthy was then immersed in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s incomparable “Tish” stories, became “Maggie Pilkington’s House.”

Furnishing the houses was easy, due to a slight mistake made by the Hindman Settlement School in the mountains of Kentucky. The Hindman School makes hickory-splint chairs. We had bought a few when we began our Cream Hill life, and some years later (the house badly needed more chairs) we ordered a dozen—armchairs, straight chairs, and settees. We looked forward to having enough places to sit down. But unfortunately, when ordering, we referred to the Hindman chairs as “small.” When the lot arrived, they were all children’s size—and one can hardly return chairs, even children’s chairs, to a settlement school reached by horseback from the railroad in Kentucky. So we put a few small chairs in the children’s bedrooms, gave others to friends with offspring of the appropriate age, and stored the rest in the barn. Ruthy and her friends simply built houses around them. It would be impossible to get them out today without a fundamental house-wrecking operation.

In time a church, complete with belfry and curious swinging side doors, kept the Forester’s Hut and Maggie Pilkington’s House company. Indeed, if I had not insisted on leaving gangway for storage of a car, the whole barn floor would have been cluttered with midget houses. Ruthy and two imaginative friends, Dotty and Sally, invented wooden horses and dogs and other animals to give the village life. They made shingle-birds, and strung them on wires between the rafters. They performed prodigious feats of strength dragging basic timbers from a fallen barn into what had been the big barn’s floorless hayloft. This they floored, and on the floor they built a dry well, complete with superstructure, a primitive windlass, and a substitute for the old oaken bucket in the form of a considerably decayed ice-cream freezer.

All this time the children were growing up. They went away to school and college; they had summer jobs, and, eventually, all-year jobs of their own. Occasionally they would bring gangs of their friends to Cream Hill, but our weekends became increasingly childless. The house ceased to be a “summer place” for children; without our quite realizing the change it became an all-year-round weekend home. Weekends long ago became more important to us than summers. The “summer place” idea is obsolete.

We grew older, too—it happens in the best of families—and the house seemed not only empty, but, to Ruth, the housekeeper, dismally big. At times Ruth wonders if some modern architect could not invent a collapsible house. She would like to wheel half our house off into the woods and fold and pack it away where it would not need dusting, but remain available when children and grandchildren arrive in mass.

Ruthy is herself a mother now, and Michael is a father, but Michael is in the Foreign Service and visits home are rare, and Ruthy’s baby is not yet old enough to appreciate Midget Village. We hope—one can’t help hoping—for a few summers of grandchildren. Sometimes, when Ruth isn’t dreaming of collapsing the back wing of the house, she talks of building a little house for grandparents up the hill, leaving the big house to Michael or Ruthy and their growing tribe. It might happen. It probably won’t. It isn’t the American pattern. Americans move on, generation after generation. Americans seldom stay put.

My father was born on a street called Bumstead Place, in the heart of old Boston. Few who walk Tremont Street today know that Boston ever had a Bumstead Place; an office building covers its entire area. My mother was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a city she has not seen for more than sixty years. A garage stands on the site in Rochester, New York, where I was born. And the old New England summer boarding houses have given way to “hotels” and cabin clusters. Ruth’s family is even more typical: her grandparents came from Kentucky, her mother was born in Indiana, her father in Missouri, she in California. The idea of a family home, persistent through the generations, despite the Currier and Ives calendars, is not a living, authentic part of the American tradition.

The old Reed place on Cream Hill, in which, after the Reeds moved out, the Bierces lived for twenty years, may, in another decade or two, come to be known as the old Gannett place. But the likelihood is that before many decades pass someone else will buy the old Gannett place, put in new bathrooms and shift the whole arrangement of the house, let the rock garden go to pot, and start a new pattern of Cream Hill life. The only thing I am sure about is that no one can foresee what Cream Hill will look like in 2050, or even in 1975.

Meanwhile, through a quarter-century of summer vacations and all-year weekends, Cream Hill has sustained, in many senses of the word, the Gannetts. Ruth and I had both drifted to New York City almost as instinctively as hummingbirds fly south in autumn, and we still love the big city. But it exhausts us. Puttering in the Cream Hill garden, cutting firewood, scything, are tiring too, but they tire different nerve-ends, and meanwhile they restore what the city frazzles. It is weekend country living which makes our mid-week city living feasible. The old fable of Antaeus and Mother Earth has modern meaning in our Cream Hill weekends. A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives.

We are no Thoreaus, seeking to escape the “slave economy” of the cities; we depend on the city for our livelihood. We are not escaping neighbors; we see more of our country neighbors, though they live miles from us, than we ever see of the mysterious non-neighbors who live in other houses on our city street. We are not fanatics of the homemade; we like fresh frozen peas in the winter better than home-canned string beans or slightly desiccated carrots from our own cellar. We have never made a cost accounting of our garden, and never will; we know it pays in deeper satisfactions than any profit or loss that could be reckoned in dollars and cents. We like to grow things, and to watch them grow. We also like the city’s theaters; but we have never seen a play on Broadway more durably exciting than the drama of a robin’s family growing up in a nest behind the bedroom shutter, a lady’s slipper unfolding from a bed of pine needles, or the calendar of flowers, from arbutus to fringed gentian.

Ours is a hybrid and ever-changing life pattern of city work and country weekends. We argue about it sometimes, and wonder if our weekend world is really mere escapism. We aren’t sure. What we are sure about is that it works, and that we love it.

THE END

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