Essays of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  The war between me and the fox is as senseless as all wars. There is no way to rationalize it. The fox is not even the biggest and meanest killer here—I hold that distinction myself. I think nothing of sending half a dozen broilers to the guillotine. Come June, heads will be rolling behind my barn. Foxes are now carrying a disease called hardpad, but even that is insufficient reason for shooting a fox. My puppy, I presume, could pick up hardpad from sniffing around in the dooryard, and then I would have a dachshund that was not only hard-headed but hard-footed, too, which would try my patience. But if you were to solve the problem of disease by shooting the sick, you’d have to shoot Aunt Mollie when she got the flu. I have plenty of convictions but no real courage, and I find it hard to live in the country without slipping into the role of murderer. From where I sit I can see a piece of suet hanging on a crab-apple tree. A hairy woodpecker is digging away at it contentedly. The suet is from a steer we killed last fall—I gave the order for the hatchet job. Imagine killing a steer to feed a woodpecker! (We also got 367 pounds of beef for our freezer, but I can’t see that that changes the matter any. The fox and I are up to the same mischief; we differ only in technique.)

  Hunters in this state killed 40,142 deer during the 1957 season. It was the third-highest kill on record. Maine is a bit touchy about its deerslaying and prefers to break the record each year. In 1951 the hunters tagged 41,730 deer, and that figure still stands as the one to beat. I don’t know why people feel unhappy when the curve of a graph fails to keep going up, but they do. Even when we find something we’d like to reduce, such as highway fatalities, it doesn’t always sound as though we had our heart in it. On the eve of every holiday, the National Safety Council broadcasts its prediction that such-and-such a number of motorists are “expected” to die over the weekend, almost as though it were a man’s duty to go out and get killed in order to make the estimate come out right. I didn’t shoot a deer, but someone brought me a hindquarter and it was good. A moose came to town right in the middle of the battle, and somebody shot him and cut his head off, leaving the meat to spoil. Everybody was stirred up about the incident of the moose: there is a heavy fine for killing a moose nowadays, but there is an even heavier assessment against anyone’s wasting good meat.

  Shortly after the close of the deer season, there was a lead editorial in the paper complaining that there had been a drop in out-of-state hunting licenses and urging that Maine get busy and appropriate more money for development, to attract hunters to the state. The theory is that if you shoot forty thousand deer one year you aren’t getting ahead unless you shoot fifty thousand the next, but I suspect there comes a point where you have shot just exactly the right number of deer. Our whole economy hangs precariously on the assumption that the higher you go the better off you are, and that unless more stuff is produced in 1958 than was produced in 1957, more deer killed, more automatic dishwashers installed, more out-of-staters coming into the state, more heads aching so they can get the fast fast fast relief from a pill, more automobiles sold, you are headed for trouble, living in danger and maybe in squalor. If that theory is sound, Maine won’t be in a solid position until we kill at least forty million deer and with a good prospect of making it fifty million the following year. But that would be the end of the wilderness, and without its wilderness Maine would feel awfully naked.

  The editorial pointed to Florida as an example of a state that had sense enough to spend large sums on promotion. “Florida ads all but smother Maine’s,” said the editorial. I guess this is true. Another thing that is true is that Florida recently “developed” the beach where I used to swim, and as a result I no longer care about going there. Some fellow with strong promotional instincts put a bulldozer to work on the beach and leveled the sand dunes in order to improve the parking facilities and make a place for a hot-dog stand. Formerly it was very pleasant to prop yourself against a sand dune and look out at the beautiful sea, but now you have to lie perfectly flat and look out at the beautiful candy wrappers swirling in the eddies of the wind. The last time I gazed at the scene, I realized that I had lost interest in that particular strip of beach. (And if the surf hath lost its savor, wherewith shall we be surfeited?) So I am lingering in Maine this winter, to fight wolves and foxes. The sun here is less strong than Florida’s, but so is the spirit of development, and I can stare at the sea without peering through the wire mesh of a trash basket. Of course, it is conceivable that Florida will get along nicely without me. But if the various state development programs are to work properly a man would have to be in all forty-eight states at the same time.

  The urge to solve a problem with a bulldozer or some other piece of heavy machinery is strong. I succumbed to it last fall when I hired a man to scoop out my pasture pond with a device called a back hoe. What I was trying to do was restore the pond to the condition it was in when I first laid eyes on it, many years ago. So far, all I have accomplished is to stir the pond up. The banks look like a place where enormous children have been making enormous mud pies. The pond has a clay bottom, and when this got agitated by the back hoe the water became cloudy. On certain days, when the light is right, it looks as though someone had poured milk into the pond. Every morning, I look out to see if the pond has cleared during the night, but it stays milky. When it froze, it made cloudy ice—which is just as good for skating as clear ice, but that is no solace, because for the first time in thirty-five years I can’t find my shoe hockeys. Everything points to the conclusion that when thieves entered our apartment in New York last summer they were so sore at me for not having stocked the place with mink coats they took my skates to get even.

  The winter has been mild so far, and excessively wet. Snow lies on the ground today, but for the most part we have had rain and wind. Everybody says he can’t remember any winter like it in all his life, but that’s what you always hear, no matter what the weather is like. The rains have been almost continuous; water stands everywhere. The barnyard is the consistency of oatmeal gruel, and my two Hereford heifers slide around like a couple of otters. The geese do not have to walk clear down to the pond; they just go as far as the bottom of the lane, where a pool has formed deep enough for their carnivals, which at this season include dalliance.

  Work is not plentiful here in town this winter. The Christmas-greens business, however, hit an all-time high last month. A good many people—men, women, and children—earn their Christmas-shopping money by cutting brush (spruce and fir) to be trucked to Boston for use in wreaths and other decorations. My best information is that the take was around $9,000.

  Scalloping was poor in December—too much wind. Lately it has improved a bit; there have been days when the sea was quiet enough for the boats to go out. Winter fishing, even under good conditions, is hazardous, and our town has just lost a man to the sea. He fell overboard last night from the slippery deck of a dragger tied up in Rockland and was drowned. Like many a fisherman, he couldn’t swim a stroke.

  I heard yesterday that the school-lunch program, which has been a fixture for a number of years, had been abruptly discontinued; no two people agree on which the reason is, but it seems to be partly a lessening of government support, partly a rise in the price of food. In a nearby town, the lunch program received a tremendous shot in the arm last fall when a couple of deer were run over by motorists. The alert school board soon had venison on the menu two or three times a week, at the going rate—twenty five cents a meal.

  Until yesterday’s snowfall the woods had been bare. We got out our year’s supply of firewood on wheels—two old wire wheels off a Model A Ford. Years ago, people depended on sleds for bringing wood out from the wood lots, but very few do it that way any more. They use scoots, which are a sort of drag, or they use a two-wheel trailer drawn by a tractor. My tractor is quite old now, and has faded to a pretty color—zinnia pink, like a red shirt that has been much washed. When I bought it, it was a fire-engine red, but now it can slink away into the woods and go out of sight as quickly as a little animal.
An hour or so later it reappears, dragging a load of wood to add to the pile. Arthur Cole arrived one blustery afternoon after work, trailing his sawing machine behind his coupé, and sawed almost all of our six and a half cords before dark. Arthur is seventy-six and dearly loves to saw wood. He still has all ten fingers. He is working on his twenty-three-thousandth cord, having been at it—mostly at odd moments, before or after work—for forty-nine years. He has a record of every stick of wood that has been through his machine, and can show it to you, in cords and in dollars—the plain accounting of a man who has never been able to leave work alone. When he started sawing, forty nine years ago, he used to get fifty cents a cord. Now he gets two dollars. “You handle a lot of big money now,” he said as I handed him thirteen dollars, “but you’re no better off.” He has had many accidents, and on a couple of occasions has had to be sewn together, so that he could be out early the next morning to saw more wood. Once, the saw threw a stick at him and caught his upper plate, driving it into his jaw. Dry wood is more treacherous than green wood, and sometimes Arthur wears a catcher’s mask when he finds the saw throwing knucklers at him. He does not always take money for his work—just swings in with his machine at the house of someone who is disabled, and starts sawing.

  At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream. A new house has been built about twenty miles from here by a man who has plenty of money to spend, and he has equipped it with an automotic light-boosting system, so that as soon as the sun begins losing its strength in the afternoon, electric lights come on all through the place, maintaining an even intensity of illumination at all times. I wouldn’t care for that one bit. I like to come in from chores and find the early dark in the rooms, when the only gleam is a single lamp over an amaryllis bulb on which my wife is practicing some sort of deception. I like groping my way into the barn cellar at six, where my two whiteface heifers are feeding at the rack, their great white heads visible, their dark bodies invisible—just two heads suspended in air, as neatly as John the Baptist’s. I should think a house in which the light never varies would be as dull as a woman in whom the emotions were always the same. I am reasonably sure, however, that the trick lighting system will go on the blink every once in a while, and that the owner will creep around with a flashlight, the way all the rest of us do, to find the seat of darkness.

  It’s been fifteen years since we last wintered in this house. Settling in again to live steadily right around the year, as we used to do, has been full of excitement and the sense of our changed condition. (Anybody who is fifteen years older is in a changed condition, no matter what his condition.) There is no schoolboy in the house now to keep the air stirred up. The room he once occupied now contains a television set; we sit there in stupefaction, listening to “April Love” and learning how to set our hair. Other gadgets have crept in, most of them in the back kitchen.

  The days ahead unroll in the mind, a scroll of blessed events in garden and in barn. Wherever you look, you see something that advertises the future: in the heifer’s sagging sides you see the calf, in the cock’s shrill crow you hear the pipping egg, in the cache of warm topsoil down cellar next to the furnace you see the seedling, and even on the darkest day the seed catalogue gives off a gleam from some tomato of the first magnitude. The brightness of the dream is exceeded only by its complexity. Farming, even my kind, is infinitely complex, and it grows more so with every year. A few days after I had mailed my order for fifty day-old Silver Cross chicks, I received a long letter from the hatcheryman. (My order amounted to $9.50—nineteen cents a chick—and must have been one of the smallest orders received by that hatchery, so there was no obligation to write anything but a postcard of acknowledgment.) The letter said my chicks would be shipped on Monday, March 31, and would probably arrive the following morning. Then it went on:

  As you perhaps know, our Silver Cross is made by top-crossing a Rhode Island Red female with a Schoonmaker White Rock male which is pure for Silver and Restricted Black. The reciprocal of this cross breed is the Golden (or Buff) Sex Link, which looks not unlike the Rhode Island Red. Of the two, the Buff lays the larger egg. Cockerel chicks in both crosses are identical in color (Columbian). For what it is worth we have developed a Silver Rhode Island Red from four generations of backcrosses to the Rhode Island Red. Bird looks like a Silver Cross, but breeds true for its plumage pattern. We also have a Canadian Columbian Rock (a yellow-skinned Sussex segregate), which produce a remarkably pure Columbian pattern in crosses with the Rhode Island Red female. The alleles of Silver and Gold fascinate the geneticist, for any number of multiple crosses can be made, using the linkage of color and sex. We are, for example, testing three three-way crosses, made from top-crossing a “synthetic” Rhode Island Red (unrelated to our own strain) with different Silver cockerels. We then top-cross the Silver Cross females (derived from this original two-way cross) with Parmenter Red cockerels. All females come Gold (or Buff) like the sire. We expect considerable hybrid vigor, probably expressed as good livability. . . .

  This struck me as a real chatty letter. It is clear from its contents that to run a hatchery these days a man must know something more than how to carry a pail of water to a thirsty hen. Even though I got lost in the tangle of those backcrosses, I liked getting the letter. Livability is what I am after: I greatly admire a live bird. But my program is to simplify, and I am not much interested in the space-hen, which will probably be the next cross. The other day I read a piece in the New England Homestead saying that of Cornell’s 268 agricultural graduates last year only twenty-five went into farming. Young people, the article said, hesitate to go into farming because of the low income. I think some of them may be more worried about the high complexity than the low income.

  In one respect my henpen in the barn is ahead of the most modern egg-producing plant: from it come eggs that are 98 percent clean-shelled, with no trace of dirt. Today many commercial egg raisers have quit worrying about dirty eggs; they simply install a washing machine and run every egg through. I stood in the laundry room of a large egg factory not long ago and watched the eggs come off the assembly line by the hundred. Each wire basket of eggs (clean and dirty mixed) was immediately placed in the washing machine that was standing there throbbing its heart out. Here, in a detergent bath at a temperature of 120 degrees, the eggs remained for three minutes. When they were removed from their hot tub, the shells had the fine patina of a cheap plastic toy. If that’s an egg, I’m a rabbit.

  The Winter of the Great Snows

  ALLEN COVE, MARCH 27, 1971

  Somebody told me the other day that a seagull won’t eat a smelt. Even if the gull takes the smelt by mistake, he will disgorge it. I find this hard to believe, but I haven’t had a chance to experiment with a smelt and a live gull. I’ve always supposed a gull would eat anything. If Herbert Tapley were alive, I would put the question to him and be sure of a straight answer. But Herbert is dead, and I find people quite evasive when I ask them if a gull will eat a smelt. I raised a gull chick once, and it never refused anything I handed it. And once, years ago, when I worked in a ship, I used to empty garbage into a chute that discharged overboard. Gulls attended this rite in great numbers, screaming their appreciation. I can’t recall ever seeing a gull reject anything that came out of that chute. There were never any smelts in the garbage, though, and this leaves the question wide open. A smelt has rather a sweet taste—there seems to be nothing of the salt sea in its flesh. Perhaps that’s why a gull won’t eat a smelt, if indeed it is true.

  This has not been an ideal winter for pure experimentation here in the East—to see if a gull will eat a smelt. It has been more a time of simple survival, to see if a man can stay alive in the cold. The snows arrived early, before the ground froze. Storm followed storm, each depositing its load and rousing the plowman in the night. And then the cold set in, steady and hard. The ponds froze, then the saltwater coves and harbors, then the bay itself. As far as I know, the grou
nd, despite the deep cold, remains unfrozen: snow is a buffer against the frost, an almost perfect insulating material. A fellow recently reported driving a stake into a snowbank, and when the point of the stake reached ground level it kept right on going. I haven’t tested this—it’s like the gull and the smelt, a matter of hearsay. But I would have to have a pretty long stake, so remote is the ground.

  When snow accumulates week after week, month after month, it works curious miracles. Familiar objects simply disappear, like my pig house and the welltop near the barn door, and one tends to forget that they are there. Our cedar hedge (about five feet high) disappeared months ago, along with the pink snow fences that are set to hold the drifts. My two small guard dogs, Jones and Susy, enjoy the change in elevation and the excitement of patrol duty along the crusted top of the hedge, where they had never been before. They have lookout posts made of snow that the plow has thrown high in the air, giving them a chance to take the long view of things. For a while, the barnyard fence was buried under a magnificent drift. This delighted the geese, who promptly walked to freedom on their orange-colored snowshoes. They then took off into the air, snowshoes and all, freedom having gone to their heads, and visited the trout pond, where they spent an enjoyable morning on the ice. On several occasions this winter, we had to shovel a path for the geese, to make it possible for them to get from their pen in the barn to their favorite loitering spot in the barn cellar. Imagine a man’s shoveling a path for a goose! So the goose can loiter!

  The door of the woodshed hasn’t been open since early in December, the snows having sealed it shut. The house, which always gets banked with spruce brush against the winter, never got banked. The flower beds never got covered. We were simply caught short: the snow arrived ahead of schedule and. in large amounts. (I think we’ve had something like one hundred inches, all told.) We did manage to give the rosebushes decent burial; they are not only out of sight but almost out of mind. It takes an effort of the imagination to conjure up a rose. Only an inch or two of the tall stakes that mark the grave is visible. For most of the winter, the highway has resembled an enormous bobsled run: the passage of the plow builds towering walls of snow higher than the roof of your car, so that you travel through a great white trough, sealed against disaster. (Last summer, my car went off the road and I hit a pole and broke it. The accident was six months too soon—I should have waited till January, when a soft cushion of snow surrounded all poles. I passed my pole the other day and noticed that it had recovered fully from the blow, but I haven’t.)