The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  They rented their cabin from a local farmer who also provided meals. Twice a day the family strolled up to the farmhouse, choosing on the dirt road one of its three avenues—the wheel track on each side or the middle path worn down by generations of horses. Elwyn liked strolling along surrounded by the buzz of grasshoppers and sparrows in the fields, amid scattered dark juniper saplings and boy-height shrubs with toothy fernlike leaves (aptly named, he soon learned, sweet fern). In good weather indoor tables and chairs were carried out under the trees and a French-looking alfresco lunch set up, complete with white linen tablecloth and glassware. Laughter and the clink of silverware could be heard a long way off. Even at the camp, at least for meals and other social occasions, men and boys usually wore their ties, and women and girls wore ankle-length dresses. Energetic Albert, now a tanned and handsome young man, occasionally would appear for lunch without tie and even collar. Samuel would sit at the head of the table, smiling, his gray mustache tilted as he surveyed the clan, and Jessie would smile back in her serious way.

  Elwyn loved coming indoors at dark and falling into bed upstairs beside the rusty-screened window, gloriously tired in all his muscles after a long day outdoors, then lying there listening to the night sounds, the crickets and frogs, the haunting plaint of a surprisingly nearby owl. He also loved waking up at dawn, ahead of everyone else. He lay in bed smelling the old lumber of the walls and the fresh woodland scent coming in through the screen, hearing a bird chorus start up, the gentle lap of waves nearby, the scutter of a red squirrel on the roof. The cabin walls were partitions that didn’t quite reach the ceiling, so he had to step quietly to keep from waking the others. He wanted the new day to himself.

  Downstairs, gently closing the door behind him, he would cross the wooden porch and walk softly down the steps and out to where his cherished canoe was moored, with ELWYN in white block letters on the green bow. It was a fine wooden Old Town canoe, built by a company founded around the turn of the century in Maine; bringing it to Belgrade Lakes meant bringing it home, to within a hundred miles of where it had been built. With his skinny, bare knees in the air, he paddled away from shore. Even though he was now too far away to wake his family, the lake’s cathedral hush kept him moving as quietly as possible, carefully holding up the paddle so it wouldn’t bump the gunwale as he aimed the bow toward the primeval mist rising from the water. Later, when he approached the shore, the cabin looked wonderfully inviting in dappled shade behind the birch whose joined white trunks glowed in the low-angled sunlight.

  Elwyn wasn’t the only one who loved boats. Sometimes the family fished from silent rowboats—bass were plentiful, as well as perch—while at their feet waited bait worms in tin cans lidded with damp green moss. There were always other canoes as well; once Samuel, fully dressed, capsized his and came home drenched. They plied the lake waters in the small motor launch that Albert and Stanley had built in the stable back home. Samuel had had to call in a boatbuilder to help them finish the job, but the boat was finally lakeworthy. The boys christened it after their mother, and Samuel shipped the Jessie northward to await the family’s arrival in Maine. As if her name stenciled on the hull wasn’t enough, they added a triangular white pennant in the bow that also read JESSIE. With Stanley or Albert commanding the three-horsepower, one-cylinder engine, Jessie rode in her namesake, clutching a stylish parasol to protect her from the sun. Despite her fear of water and inability to swim, she kept smiling her anxious smile. At the stern a yachting flag leaned back, trailing a corner in the water. Sometimes they all traveled together in the boat across the lake to visit Bean’s store near the mills on Belgrade Stream. Everyone piled out of the rocking boat for a welcome cold birch beer or Moxie soda, while admiring the prettified postcard scenes and the miniature birchbark canoes. Sometimes Samuel would tempt the gods by loading a heavy case of Moxie into the boat.

  Over the years, as the family vacationed at Belgrade throughout Elwyn’s childhood, the sound of boat engines grew ever more common in the lake region. The inboard oil engine for small boats had been developed in the last decade of the 1800s, a few years before Elwyn’s birth. Both one-cylinder and two-cylinder versions—the stutter and choke of the former, the more reliable purr of the latter—contributed a background sound to Elwyn’s drowsy summers. Despite his dreamy air, Elwyn was practical in a hands-on way. During these family holidays, he learned the nuances of the one-stroke engine until he could cut the motor at the right moment for the boat’s momentum to carry it smoothly to dock or shore. He developed this technique only after humiliating occasions on which the engine sputtered out and left him adrift or raced the boat ahead to slam the hull into pilings.

  In Maine as in Mount Vernon, Elwyn spent time alone or in daydreams. Surrounded by his boisterous family but off in his own world, he would stare down through clear water to where pebbles and driftwood on the bottom were crossed by the shadows of water bugs and eclipsed by the boat’s own shade. He observed how schools of minnows seem twice as populous as they really are because of their own darting shadows. He noticed how animals that came down to the shore and fished for mussels during the night chose the most prominent spot they could find—the ends of logs jutting out of the water—to leave their droppings as a territorial signal. He listened to the sound of a cowbell drifting across the water. And he held the paddle motionless and let the canoe drift so that he could silently watch a tall, long-legged great blue heron rise squawking into mist over the lake.

  Often Samuel interrupted the family’s leisure to coax them into posing for a photo. The film’s long exposure times required absolute stillness—not a natural condition for children and teenagers, whose frozen expressions left them looking theatrically solemn when the photos were printed back home. Such poses were especially difficult for the dogs, who often wound up a vaguely canine blur in the final print. In Mount Vernon, mounted side by side a foot or so from the binocular lenses of a wooden-handled stereopticon, the pair of arched, duplicate photos achieved the illusion of three-dimensionality. Yet they never quite captured the magic of Maine—days so full and rich they instantly created in Elwyn an aching nostalgia that lasted for the next eleven months, until the family could return the following August. It was an ache he never lost.

  Chapter 4

  A WRITING FOOL

  In those days, my imagination was always immensely stirred by the thought of wildlife, of which I knew absolutely nothing but for which I felt a kind of awe.

  ELWYN SPENT AS much time as possible outdoors, and often his mind stayed outside even when his body was in the house. When he read a book, usually he chose one about animals, especially about animals in the wilderness instead of those he saw in the tame streets of Mount Vernon. His own moody, careening mind automatically invested the world around him with personality and character. He was drawn to writers who portray animals, or even the inanimate, with empathy that instills a sympathetic curiosity about the secret peering lives around us.

  Around the time of his birth at the end of the nineteenth century, nature writers were lining up on both sides of a controversial issue—how to respond emotionally to nature, especially to animals, while keeping a science-informed reality in mind. The two camps were represented by writers such as John Burroughs and John Muir, who advocated nature’s virtues in a lyrical way but did so within a rigorously factual approach, and William J. Long and Ernest Thompson Seton, who dramatized and fictionalized the natural world while claiming to be meticulously realistic. The question wasn’t about the role of personification in literature. No one argued that Black Beauty was a bad book because it portrayed animal characters from the inside, imbued with human thoughts and emotions. Such books were avowed fiction, even fantasy. The uproar was over narratives that tried to have it both ways, claiming to be realistic—presenting true-to-life animal behavior—despite their outrageous tales of cunning, vice, and derring-do.

  Elwyn gobbled up such tales. He enjoyed books by both Long and Seton. A Connecticut minister, Will
iam J. Long spent his summers in what he called “the wilderness” of Maine, until he found it too crowded with tourists—some of whom he may have drawn there with his own writings—and switched his allegiance to Nova Scotia. His first book was published in 1899, the year Elwyn was born. Many more followed, including Beasts of the Field, Fowls of the Air, and Following the Deer, and Elwyn read all of them. Some were published in the Wood Folk Series. Especially after Maine summers became a part of Elwyn’s life and imagination, Long’s first book, Ways of Wood Folk, could grab his attention even while lying around unopened. On the spine flew three wild ducks. The front of the green cloth cover showed a fox in silhouette on a lakeshore. Alert, its long brush almost touching the ground, it peered from under the low branches of an old pine, watching a canoe on a lake with behind it a sharp-edged northern mountain.

  Charles Copeland’s black-and-white frontispiece drawing showed an encounter between fox and man on a snowy woodland path, the fox wary but surprisingly unafraid, the man—mustached like Elwyn’s father—simply standing and watching, with his hands in his pockets. Clearly this was no hunter. Long presented himself not as a scientist but as a gentle, admiring observer who frequently participated in the wild goings-on that he described. The book’s dedication read, “To Plato, the owl, who looks over my shoulder as I write, and who knows all about the woods.”

  Elwyn especially enjoyed Long’s book A Little Brother to the Bear. The cover explained the title by showing a bear, in silhouette and facing away from the viewer, looking up at a raccoon that sprawled across the curve of the cartouche surrounding the title. The first chapter, “The Point of View,” presented Long’s manifesto:

  Two things must be done by the modern nature writer who would first understand the animal world and then share his discovery with others. He must collect his facts, at first hand if possible, and then he must interpret the facts as they appeal to his own head and heart in the light of all the circumstances that surround them. The child will be content with his animal story, but the man will surely ask the why and the how of every fact of animal life that particularly appeals to him. For every fact is also a revelation, and is chiefly interesting, not for itself, but for the law or the life which lies behind it and which it in some way expresses.

  Elwyn loved Long’s habit of referring to many animals of the region by what he described as their Milicete names. The Algonquin-speaking native people known by European-American settlers as the Milicete or Maliseet originally called themselves the Wolastoqiyik after the Wolastoq (St. John) River in northern Maine, New Brunswick, and Quebec. Using an approximation of their terms, Long called a chickadee Ch’geegee-lokh-sis, a lynx Upweekis, a porcupine Unk Wunk. In Long’s vocabulary, a toad was always known by the onomatopoeic name K’dunk. A woodcock was Whitooweek and a bear Mooween. Long called a raccoon Mooweesuk, describing it as “a pocket edition of Mooween in all his habits,” a typical sweeping generalization. The animals’ names sounded like a North American version of The Jungle Book. Their adventures sparked Elwyn’s imagination in part because some of them he ran across on his own adventures and others lurked still in the wilderness of the north and of his mind.

  Ernest Thompson Seton, a prolific Scottish-Canadian naturalist, author, and illustrator, was even more explicit about his concentration on “the law or the life which lies behind” animal behavior. In his 1901 book Lives of the Hunted (dedicated “To the Preservation of Our Wild Creatures”), he wrote that in his stories he tried to “emphasise our kinship with the animals by showing that in them we can find the virtues most admired in Man.” A few years earlier, in Wild Animals I Have Known, he provided a legend for deciphering his morality plays: “Lobo stands for Dignity and Love-constancy; Silverspot, for Sagacity; Redruff, for Obedience; Bingo, for Fidelity; Vixen and Molly Cottontail for Mother-love; Wahb, for Physical Force; and the Pacing Mustang, for the Love of Liberty.” From any scientific point of view, this was bestiary turf. Yet Seton explicitly stated, “The material of the accounts is true,” even if he added a telling confession: “The chief liberty taken, is in ascribing to one animal the adventures of several.” Seton was a talented illustrator committed to accuracy; during his student days in Paris, he had been notorious for dissecting dog carcasses to better understand their anatomy. He was also an experienced outdoorsman. Yet his allegedly objective stories were steeped in old-fashioned Victorian romanticism.

  In 1903, when Elwyn was four, the American nature writer John Burroughs published in the Atlantic Monthly an essay, “Real and Sham Natural History,” in which he denounced Long, Seton, and their literary kin as “nature fakers.” Burroughs was no data-driven lab scientist; he promoted nature appreciation, not just the accumulation of facts. “To absorb a thing is better than to learn it,” he insisted, “and we absorb what we enjoy.” He believed passionately, however, that falsely dramatized or even unconsciously mythologized nature writing performed a disservice to readers and besmirched a noble calling. He dismissed this subgenre of supposedly fact-based nature fiction as “yellow journalism of the woods” and suggested retitling Seton’s best known book as Wild Animals I Alone Have Known. “Are we to believe,” Burroughs asked, “that Mr. Thompson Seton, in his few years of roaming in the West, has penetrated farther into the secrets of animal life than all the observers who have gone before him?” As early as his first book, 1871’s bird-oriented essay collection Wake-Robin, Burroughs had felt the need to assure his own readers, “I have reaped my harvest more in the woods than in the study; what I have to offer, in fact, is a careful and conscientious record of actual observations and experiences, and is true as it stands written, every word of it.”

  Over the next few years, while Elwyn was happily reading Long and Seton and their colleagues such as Charles G. D. Roberts, these authors defended themselves in what the New York Times called “the War of the Naturalists.” Finally President Theodore Roosevelt entered the fray. Taking time out from declaring Oklahoma the forty-sixth state and inventing the presidential press briefing and posing for photographs advertising his manliness, Roosevelt loudly sided with Burroughs in an essay titled “Nature Fakers” in Everybody’s Magazine. “We don’t in the least mind impossibilities in avowed fairy tales,” wrote Roosevelt; “and Bagheera and Baloo and Kaa are simply delightful variants of Prince Charming and Jack the Slayer of Giants. But when such fables are written by a make-believe realist, the matter assumes an entirely different complexion.” He called the writings of Jack London and these other authors “unnatural history.”

  Meanwhile Elwyn reveled in the exploits of Upweekis and Wahb and Bingo and began to create his own stories about nature, not in the least worried about his habit of attributing human emotions to animals.

  I was a writing fool when I was eleven years old and have been tapering off ever since.

  EVERY FIRST OF September, while the family sat on the southbound train and looked past their own reflected sunburns as Maine’s dense dark pines slowly gave way to the softer-looking and more varied deciduous woods of New Hampshire, Elwyn thought about his glorious summer. Back in Mount Vernon, he daydreamed about Maine. As he grew up, he felt an ever stronger urge to preserve the memories. When he was in his midteens, Elwyn designed, handwrote, and illustrated a pamphlet, carefully titled in capitals BELGRADE LAKE AND SNUG HARBOR CAMPS, for his friend Freddie Schuler. Handwritten text surrounded pasted-in photos of the White family members cavorting outdoors—Stanley in the stern of the Jessie, Elwyn in his own canoe, Albert with a flock of sheep from a nearby farm.

  “Maine,” wrote Elwyn ecstatically,

  is one of the most beautiful states in the union, and Belgrade is one of the most beautiful of the lakes of Maine … The beauty of the surrounding country makes tramping a pleasure, and the well packed country roads are fine for bicycling or horseback riding. The lake is large enough to make the conditions ideal for all kinds of small boats. The bathing also is a feature, for the days grow very warm at noontime and make a good swim feel fine.
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  As a result, Freddie came along one summer to the camp. Other writing efforts proved equally encouraging. Elwyn’s tribute to Maine was part of an already long-standing tradition in his young life—the conservation of beauty in prose. Early on he began distilling his memories by writing down his response to the world. By the age of eight, he was consciously looking at a blank sheet of paper and thinking, “This is where I belong.” Soon afterward he began writing his thoughts in a diary. Many of the entries concerned his questions about the natural world, such as how animals get along in their private lives, how birds hatch already knowing how to build a nest, or what a fox is trying to communicate when it barks in the night. “I wonder,” he often wrote to himself, “what I’m going to be when I grow up?”

  Often he felt lonely amid the bustle at home, distant from the noise even while surrounded by it. When he could be persuaded to come indoors, he spent a lot of time by himself, writing down his day or imagining wild adventures, achieving uneasy accord with life only by laboriously translating his response to it into words on paper. He borrowed the big, heavy Oliver typewriter from Stan’s room to type up his thoughts, enjoying the labor of carrying it to his own desk, the zipping sound of the platen rolling until it caught the sheet of paper and pulled it down, and the bold ruckus of hammering the keys. When he wondered how to spell a word, he would run down the hall to Albert’s room and consult the fat Webster’s dictionary that sprawled on an iron tripod, sagging with the weight of its knowledge. This was the family source of information to which Samuel referred all questions about words.