Essays of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  First you bought a Ruby Safety Reflector for the rear, so that your posterior would glow in another’s car’s brilliance. Then you invested thirty-nine cents in some radiator Moto Wings, a popular ornament which gave the Pegasus touch to the machine and did something godlike to the owner. For nine cents you bought a fanbelt guide to keep the belt from slipping off the pulley.

  You bought a radiator compound to stop leaks. This was as much a part of everybody’s equipment as aspirin tablets are of a medicine cabinet. You bought special oil to prevent chattering, a clamp-on dash light, a patching outfit, a tool box which you bolted to the running board, a sun visor, a steering-column brace to keep the column rigid, and a set of emergency containers for gas, oil, and water—three thin, disc-like cans which reposed in a case on the running board during long, important journeys—red for gas, gray for water, green for oil. It was only a beginning. After the car was about a year old, steps were taken to check the alarming disintegration. (Model T was full of tumors, but they were benign.) A set of anti-rattlers (ninety-eight cents) was a popular panacea. You hooked them on to the gas and spark rods, to the brake pull rod, and to the steering-rod connections. Hood silencers, of black rubber, were applied to the fluttering hood. Shock-absorbers and snubbers gave “complete relaxation.” Some people bought rubber pedal pads, to fit over the standard metal pedals. (I didn’t like these, I remember.) Persons of a suspicious or pugnacious turn of mind bought a rear-view mirror; but most Model T owners weren’t worried by what was coming from behind because they would soon enough see it out in front. They rode in a state of cheerful catalepsy. Quite a large mutinous clique among Ford owners went over to a foot accelerator (you could buy one and screw it to the floor board), but there was a certain madness in these people, because the Model T, just as she stood, had a choice of three foot pedals to push, and there were plenty of moments when both feet were occupied in the routine performance of duty and when the only way to speed up the engine was with the hand throttle.

  Gadget bred gadget. Owners not only bought ready-made gadgets, they invented gadgets to meet special needs. I myself drove my car directly from the agency to the blacksmith’s, and had the smith affix two enormous iron brackets to the port running board to support an army trunk.

  People who owned closed models builded along different lines: they bought ball grip handles for opening doors, window antirattlers, and deluxe flower vases of the cut-glass antisplash type. People with delicate sensibilities garnished their car with a device called the Donna Lee Automobile Disseminator—a porous vase guaranteed, according to Sears, to fill the car with a “faint clean odor of lavender.” The gap between open cars and closed cars was not as great then as it is now: for $11.95, Sears Roebuck converted your touring car into a sedan and you went forth renewed. One agreeable quality of the old Fords was that they had no bumpers, and their fenders softened and wilted with the years and permitted the driver to squeeze in and out of tight places.

  Tires were 30 × 3½, cost about $12, and punctured readily. Everybody carried a Jiffy patching set, with a nutmeg grater to roughen the tube before the goo was spread on. Everybody was capable of putting on a patch, expected to have to, and did have to.

  During my association with Model T’s, self-starters were not a prevalent accessory. They were expensive and under suspicion. Your car came equipped with a serviceable crank, and the first thing you learned was how to Get Results. It was a special trick, and until you learned it (usually from another Ford owner, but sometimes by a period of appalling experimentation) you might as well have been winding up an awning. The trick was to leave the ignition switch off, proceed to the animal’s head, pull the choke (which was a little wire protruding through the radiator) and give the crank two or three nonchalant upward lifts. Then, whistling as though thinking about something else, you would saunter back to the driver’s cabin, turn the ignition on, return to the crank, and this time, catching it on the down stroke, give it a quick spin with plenty of that. If this procedure was followed, the engine almost always responded—first with a few scattered explosions, then with a tumultuous gunfire, which you checked by racing around to the driver’s seat and retarding the throttle. Often, if the emergency brake hadn’t been pulled all the way back, the car advanced on you the instant the fire explosion occurred and you would hold it back by leaning your weight against it. I can still feel my old Ford nuzzling me at the curb, as though looking for an apple in my pocket.

  In zero weather, ordinary cranking became an impossibility, except for giants. The oil thickened, and it became necessary to jack up the rear wheels, which, for some planetary reason, eased the throw.

  The lore and legend that governed the Ford were boundless. Owners had their own theories about everything; they discussed mutual problems in that wise, infinitely resourceful way old women discuss rheumatism. Exact knowledge was pretty scarce, and often proved less effective than superstition. Dropping a camphor ball into the gas tank was a popular expedient; it seemed to have a tonic effect on both man and machine. There wasn’t much to base exact knowledge on. The Ford driver flew blind. He didn’t know the temperature of his engine, the speed of his car, the amount of his fuel, or the pressure of his oil (the old Ford lubricated itself by what was amiably described as the “splash system”). A speedometer cost money and was an extra, like a windshield wiper. The dashboard of the early models was bare save for an ignition key; later models, grown effete, boasted an ammeter which pulsated alarmingly with the throbbing of the car. Under the dash was a box of coils, with vibrators which you adjusted, or thought you adjusted. Whatever the driver learned of his motor, he learned not through instruments but through sudden developments. I remember that the timer was one of the vital organs about which there was ample doctrine. When everything else had been checked, you “had a look” at the timer. It was an extravagantly odd little device, simple in construction, mysterious in function. It contained a roller, held by a spring, and there were four contact points on the inside of the case against which, many people believed, the roller rolled. I have had a timer apart on a sick Ford many times. But I never really knew what I was up to—I was just showing off before God. There were almost as many schools of thought as there were timers. Some people, when things went wrong, just clenched their teeth and gave the timer a smart crack with a wrench. Other people opened it up and blew on it. There was a school that held that the timer needed large amounts of oil; they fixed it by frequent baptism. And there was a school that was positive it was meant to run dry as a bone; these people were continually taking it off and wiping it. I remember once spitting into a timer; not in anger, but in a spirit of research. You see, the Model T driver moved in the realm of metaphysics. He believed his car could be hexed.

  One reason the Ford anatomy was never reduced to an exact science was that, having “fixed” it, the owner couldn’t honestly claim that the treatment had brought about the cure. There were too many authenticated cases of Fords fixing themselves—restored naturally to health after a short rest. Farmers soon discovered this, and it fitted nicely with their draft-horse philosophy: “Let ’er cool off and she’ll snap into it again.”

  A Ford owner had Number One Bearing constantly in mind. This bearing, being at the front end of the motor, was the one that always burned out, because the oil didn’t reach it when the car was climbing hills. (That’s what I was always told, anyway.) The oil used to recede and leave Number One dry as a clam flat; you had to watch that bearing like a hawk. It was like a weak heart—you could hear it start knocking, and that was when you stopped to let her cool off. Try as you would to keep the oil supply right, in the end Number One always went out. “Number One Bearing burned out on me and I had to have her replaced,” you would say, wisely; and your companions always had a lot to tell about how to protect and pamper Number One to keep her alive.

  Sprinkled not too liberally among the millions of amateur witch doctors who drove Fords and applied their own abominable cures were the heaven-s
ent mechanics who could really make the car talk. These professionals turned up in undreamed-of spots. One time, on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington, I heard the rear end go out of my Model T when I was trying to whip it up a steep incline onto the deck of a ferry. Something snapped; the car slid backward into the mud. It seemed to me like the end of the trail. But the captain of the ferry, observing the withered remnant, spoke up.

  “What’s got her?” he asked.

  “I guess it’s the rear end,” I replied, listlessly. The captain leaned over the rail and stared. Then I saw that there was a hunger in his eyes that set him off from other men.

  “Tell you what,” he said, carelessly, trying to cover up his eagerness, “Let’s pull the son of a bitch up onto the boat, and I’ll help you fix her while we’re going back and forth on the river.”

  We did just this. All that day I plied between the towns of Pasco and Kennewick, while the skipper (who had once worked in a Ford garage) directed the amazing work of resetting the bones of my car.

  Springtime in the heyday of the Model T was a delirious season. Owning a car was still a major excitement, roads were still wonderful and bad. The Fords were obviously conceived in madness: any car which was capable of going from forward into reverse without any perceptible mechanical hiatus was bound to be a mighty challenging thing to the human imagination. Boys used to veer them off the highway into a level pasture and run wild with them, as though they were cutting up with a girl. Most everybody used the reverse pedal quite as much as the regular foot brake—it distributed the wear over the bands and wore them all down evenly. That was the big trick, to wear all the bands down evenly, so that the final chattering would be total and the whole unit scream for renewal.

  The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange. I still recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal crises when you drew up to a signpost and raced the engine so the lights would be bright enough to read destinations by. I have never been really planetary since. I suppose it’s time to say good-bye. Farewell, my lovely!

  The Years of Wonder

  BY THE SEA, MARCH 13, 1961

  Russia’s foolish suggestion that a dam be thrown across Bering Strait brings back happy memories of that body of water and of certain youthful schemes and follies of my own. I passed through the Strait and on into the Arctic many years ago, searching for a longer route to where I didn’t want to be. I was also in search of walrus. A dam, I am sure, would have been an annoyance.

  I was rather young to be so far north, but there is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place. This period in my life lasted about eight years, and I spent the summer of one of those years in and around Alaska. It was the summer of 1923. In those days, I kept a diary, entering in it whatever was uppermost in my mind. I called it my journal; the word “journal,” I felt, lent a literary and manly flavor to the thing. Diaries were what girls kept. A couple of years ago, when Alaska achieved statehood, I began digging into my journal for the year 1923, hoping to discover in its faded pages something instructive about the new state. This account, then, is a delayed account—some thirty-seven years late. I doubt that the reader will be able to put together a picture of Alaska from reading it, but he may catch a glimpse of the young diarist. And of the 1920s, that notorious decade that was almost a delirium.

  My trip to Alaska, like practically everything else that happened to me in those busy years, was pure accident. I was living in Seattle; I was unemployed, my job on a newspaper having blown up in mid-June; and although I had no reason for going to Alaska, I had no reason for staying away, either. The entries in my journal covering the four-week period between the loss of my job and the start of my trip to the north reveal a young man living a life of exalted footlessness. I was a literary man in the highest sense of the term, a poet who met every train. No splendor appeared in the sky without my celebrating it, nothing mean or unjust took place but felt the harmless edge of my wildly swinging sword. I walked in the paths of righteousness, studying girls. In particular, I studied a waitress in a restaurant called the Chantecler. I subscribed to two New York dailies, the World and the Evening Post. I swam alone at night in the canal that connects Lake Union and Lake Washington. I seldom went to bed before two or three o’clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night. Daytimes, I hung around my room in Mrs. Donohue’s boarding house, reading the “Bowling Green” and the “Conning Tower,” wondering what to do next, and writing.

  My entry for June 15, 1923, begins, “A man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.” Obviously, I was all asprawl, clinging to Beauty, which is a very restless trellis. My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H. L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a “bless the mark” at any spot, and to begin a sentence with “Lord” comma.

  On June 19, I recorded my discharge from the Times and noted that the city editor said it was “no reflection on my ability.” I didn’t believe then, and do not believe now, that it was no reflection on my ability. As a newspaper reporter, I was almost useless, and it came as no surprise when one more trellis collapsed on me. When I left the Times office with my final pay check in my pocket, I “sauntered” down Pine Street. I can still recall experiencing an inner relief—the feeling of again being adrift on life’s sea, an element I felt more at home in than in a city room. On June 25, I clipped a sonnet sequence by Morley from the “Bowling Green” and pasted it in the journal. The second sonnet began, “So put your trust in poets.” As though I needed to be told that!

  On July 2, I entered in my journal a copy of a poem I had written and mailed anonymously to the Reverend Mark A. Matthews, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, who had preached a sermon I found offensive. A résumé of the sermon had appeared in the Monday morning paper. Dr. Matthews had attacked non-churchgoers, of whom I was one. On the following Sunday, I departed from my usual stance and became a churchgoer, attending the morning service at the First Presbyterian to make a routine check on my man. “The smugness of his doctrine,” I wrote in my journal, “made the air stifling.” Probably what really made the air stifling for me was that in his sermon the minister made no mention of having received my stinging communication.

  For one week I worked on Hearst’s Post-Intelligencer, commonly called the P.I., substituting for a reporter on vacation. My entry for July 18 (1:30 A.M.) begins, “A man scarce realizes what a terrible thing scorn is until he begins to despise himself.” I doubt that I found myself despicable; I simply found life perplexing. I did not know where to go. On Friday, July 20 (3 A.M.), appears the abrupt entry, “I sail Monday on S.S. Buford for Skagway.” No explanation or amplification follows, only an account of an evening spent with a girl who lived on Lake Union. (She fed me bread and apple jelly.)

  I did, however, clip from the P.I. and paste into my journal the item that started me on my way to Alaska. The story was headed

  S. F. CHAMBER

  TO SEE ALASKA

  and began:

  The resources and trade conditions of Alaska will be studied by a delegation from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which will leave San Francisco today on the steamer Buford for an 8,300 mile trip to Alaska and Siberia, via Seattle. The group will also include citizens of other cities, among them ten Boston capitalists, and the trip will be in charge of B. S. Hubbard, vice president of the Schwabacher-Frey Stationery Company.

  A number of things must have attracted me to this item in the news. First, the ship was to call at Seattle. I was a dockside regular at this period, and any ship at all was of interest to me. Second, Alaska was in the opposite direction from home, where I consider
ed it unsuitable to be at my age. Third, a Chamber of Commerce was involved, and this opened up familiar vistas. As a reporter, I had spent many a lunch hour covering the noonday gatherings of fraternal and civic groups; Seattle was a hotbed of Elks, Eagles, Moose, Lions, Kiwanians, Rotarians, and members of the Young Men’s Business Association. I had broken the hard roll countless times with Chamber of Commerce people, had laughed courteously at their jokes and listened patiently to their tales of industrial growth. I was under the influence of Mencken and Lewis, and felt proud disdain for business and for businessmen. It was important to me at that time to move among people toward whom I felt aloof and superior, even though I secretly envied their ability to earn a living.

  Perhaps the clincher in the news story of the Buford was the list of the ports of call, names that were music to the ear of youth: Ketchikan, Taku Glacier, Juneau, Skagway, Sitka, Cordova, Seward, Kodiak, Cold Bay, Lighthouse Rocks, Dutch Harbor, Bogoslof Island, the Pribilof Islands, Cape Chaplin, Anadir. “From Nome, they [the voyagers] will pass the ice pack, proceeding to East Cape, Siberia, and then return to Nome. On the home trip they will stop at St. Michael, Akutan and Seattle, the entire trip requiring forty days.”

  Forty days! To me, forty days was a mere siesta in time’s long afternoon, and I could cling, for lack of anything else, to the ship. The Pribilof Islands with ten Boston capitalists—sheer enchantment! All I needed was a job on the ship, and this I determined to get. The Buford arrived in due course and tied up to Pier 7. Every day while she was there, I sneaked aboard and hung about the corridors, waylaying ship’s officers and offering my services in any capacity. When, after three days, I found no taker, I made inquiries and learned that for $40 I could sail as a first-class passenger as far as Skagway, which is at the head of the Inside Passage. This enabled me to shift my strategy; I had $40 and I decided to launch myself in the direction of the Arctic by the sheer power of money. Once firmly entrenched in the ship, I could from that vantage point pursue my job-hunting. The second steward gave me a bit of encouragement. “Anything can happen in a ship,” he said. And he turned out to be right.