alone. It is the story of the whole of New England, inland as well as
coast. The New England farm was cleared, worked, exhausted, and
abandoned. The farmer was as exhausted as his farm, and preferring the
hazard of new fortunes to the certain tragedy of the old, went West.
But that tale is told. The tide from New England to the West is at
slack ebb. There is still a stream flowing out into the extreme West;
rising in the Middle Western States, however, not in the East. The
present New England farmers are staying on their farms, except where
the city buyer wants an abandoned farm, and insists upon its being
abandoned at any price. So will the clammer stay on his shore acres,
for his clams shall no more run out, causing him to turn cod-fisher,
or cranberry-picker, or to make worse shift. The New England
clam-digger of to-day shall be a clam-farmer a dozen years hence; and
his exhausted acres along shore, planted, cultivated, and protected by
law, shall yield him a good living. A living for him and clams for
us; and not the long-neck clams of the Providence River and Duxbury
flats only: they shall yield also the little-neck clams and the
quahaug, the scallop, too, the oyster, and, from farther off shore,
the green-clawed lobster in abundance, and of a length the law allows.
Our children’s children may run short of coal and kerosene; but they
need never want for clams. We are going to try to save them some coal,
for there are mighty bins of it still in the earth, while here,
besides, are the peat-bogs--bunkers of fuel beyond the fires of our
imaginations to burn up. We may, who knows? save them a little
kerosene. No one has measured the capacity of the tank; it has been
tapped only here and there; the plant that manufactured it, moreover,
is still in operation, and is doubtless making more. But whether so or
not, we still may trust in future oil, for the saving spirit of our
new movement watches the pipes that carry it to our cans. There is no
brand of economy known to us at present that is more assuring than our
kerosene economy. The Standard Oil Company, begotten by Destiny, it
would seem, as distributor of oil, is not one to burn even its
paraffine candles at both ends. There was, perhaps, a wise and
beneficent Providence in its organization, that we might have five
gallons for fifty-five cents for our children’s sake--a price to
preserve the precious fluid for the lamps of coming generations.
But should the coal and kerosene give out, the clam, I say, need not.
The making of Franklin coal and Standard Oil, like the making of
perfect human character, may be a process requiring all
eternity,--longer than we can wait,--so that the present deposits may
some time fail; whereas the clam comes to perfection within a summer
or two. The coal is a dead deposit; the clam is like the herb,
yielding seed, and the fruit tree, yielding fruit after its kind,
whose seed is in itself upon the earth. All that the clam requires for
an endless and an abundant existence is planting and protection,
is--conservation.
Except for my doubts about a real North Pole, my wrath at the
Payne-Aldrich Tariff, my dreadful fears at the vast smallness of our
navy (I have a Japanese student in a class of mine!), “and one thing
more that may not be” (which, probably, is the “woman question” or
the roundness of the “Square Deal”)--except, I say, for a few of such
things, I were wholly glad that my lines have fallen unto me in these
days, when there are so many long-distant movements on foot; glad
though I can only sit at the roadside and watch the show go by. I can
applaud from the roadside. I can watch and dream. To this procession
of Conservators, however (and to the anti-tariff crowd), I shall join
myself, shall take a hand in saving things by helping to bury every
high protectionist and planting a willow sapling on his grave, or by
sowing a few “spats” in a garden of clams. For here in the opposite
direction moves another procession, an endless, countless number that
go tramping away toward the desert Future without a bag of needments
at their backs, without a staff to stay them in their hands.
The day of the abandoned farm is past; the time of the adopted, of the
_adapted_, farm has come. We are not going to abandon anything any
more, because we are not going to work anything to death any more. We
shall not abandon even the empty coal mines hereafter, but turn them
into mushroom cellars, or to uses yet undreamed. We have found a way
to utilize the arid land of the West--a hundred and fifty thousand
acres of it at a single stroke, as President Taft turns the waters of
the Gunnison River from their ancient channel into a man-made tunnel,
and sends them spreading out
Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the lowlying
lanes,
And the _desert_ is meshed with a million veins,--
in order that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet,
saying, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them;
and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”
We are utilizing these arid lands, reclaiming the desert for a garden,
with an effort of hands and a daring of soul, that fall hardly short
of the original creative work which made the world--as if the divine
fiat had been: “In our image, to have dominion; to subdue the earth;
and to finish the work we leave undone.” And while we are finishing
these acres and planting them with fruit at so lavish a cost, shall we
continue stupidly and criminally to rob, despoil, and leave for dead
these eleven thousand acres of natural clam garden on the
Massachusetts coast? If a vast irrigating work is the divine in man,
by the same token are the barren mountain slopes, the polluted and
shrunken rivers, the ravished and abandoned plough-lands, and these
lifeless flats of the shore the devils in him--here where no
reclaiming is necessary, where the rain cometh down from heaven, and
twice a day the tides flow in from the hills of the sea!
There are none of us here along the Atlantic coast who do not think
with joy of that two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-acre garden new-made
yonder in the distant West. It means more, and cheaper, and still
fairer fruit for us of the East; more musk-melons, too, we hope; but
we know that it cannot mean more clams. Yet the clam, also, is good.
Man cannot live on irrigated fruit alone. He craves clams--clams as
juicy as a Redlands Bartlett, but fresh with the salty savor of
wind-blown spray.
And he shall have them, for the clam farm--the restocked, restored
flat of earlier times--has passed the stage of theory and experiment,
being now in operation on the New England shore, a producing and very
paying property.
The clam farm is not strictly a new venture, however, but up to the
present it has been a failure, because, in the first place, the times
were not ripe for it; the public mind lacked the necessary education.
Even yet the state, and the local town authorities, give the
clam-farmer no protection. He can obtain the state’s written grant to
plant the land to clams, but he can get no legal protection against
his neighbor’s digging the clams he plants. And the farm has failed,
because, in the second place, the clam-farmer has lacked the necessary
energy and imagination. A man who for years has made his bread and
butter and rubber boots out of land belonging to everybody and to
nobody, by simply digging in it, is the last man to build a fence
about a piece of land and _work_ it. Digging is only half as hard as
“working”; besides, in promiscuous digging one is getting clams that
one’s neighbor might have got, and there is something better than mere
clams in that.
But who will plant and wait for a crop that anybody, when one’s back
is turned, and, indeed, when one’s back isn’t turned, can harvest as
his own? Yet this the fishing laws of Massachusetts still allow.
Twenty years ago, in 1889, grants were made for clam farms in and
around the town of Essex, but no legal rights were given with the
grants. Any native of Essex, by these old barnacled laws, is free to
help himself to clams from any town flat. Of course the farm failed.
Meantime the cry for clams has grown louder; the specialists in the
new national college of conservators have been studying the subject;
“extension courses,” inter-flat conventions, and laboratory
demonstrations have been had up and down the coast; and as a result,
the clam farm in Essex, since the reissue of the grants in 1906, has
been put upon a hopeful, upon a safe and paying basis.
It is an interesting example of education,--a local public sentiment
refined into an actual, dependable public conscience; in this case
largely through the efforts of a state’s Fish and Game Commission,
whose biologists, working with the accuracy, patience, and
disinterestedness of the scientist, and with the practical good sense
of the farmer, made their trial clam gardens pay, demonstrating
convincingly that a clam-flat will respond to scientific care as
readily and as profitably as a Danvers onion-bed or the cantaloupe
fields at Rocky Ford.
This must be the direction of the new movement for the saving of our
natural resources--this roundabout road of education. Few laws can be
enacted, fewer still enforced, without the help of an awakened public
conscience; and a public conscience, for legislative purposes, is
nothing more than a thorough understanding of the facts. As a nation,
we need a popular and a thorough education in ornithology, entomology,
forestry, and farming, and in the science and morality of corporation
rights in public lands. We want sectionally, by belts or states, a
scientific training for our specialty, as the shell-fish farmer of the
Massachusetts coast is being scientifically trained in clams. These
state biologists have brought the clam men from the ends of the shore
together; they have plotted and mapped the mollusk territory; they
have made a science of clam-culture; they have made an industry of
clam-digging; and to the clam-digger they are giving dignity and a
sense of security that make him respect himself and his neighbor’s
clams--this last item being a most important change in the clam-farm
outlook.
With so much done, the next work--framing new laws to take the place
of the old fishing laws--should be a simple matter. Such a procedure
will be slow, yet it is still the only logical and effective one. Let
the clam-digger know that he can raise clams; let New England know
that the forests on her mountains must be saved, and within a
twelvemonth the necessary bills would be passed. So with the birds,
the fish, the coal of Alaska, and every other asset of our national
wealth. The nation-wide work of this saving movement will first be
educative, even by way of scandals in the Cabinet. We shall hasten
very slowly to Congress and the legislatures with our laws. The
clam-flat is typical of all our multitudinous wealth; the clam-digger
is typical of all of us who cut, or mine, or reap, or take our
livings, in any way, directly from the hands of Nature; and the lesson
of the clam farm will apply the country over.
We have been a nation of wasters, spoiled and made prodigal by
over-easy riches; we have demanded our inheritance all at once, spent
it, and as a result we are already beginning to want--at least for
clams. At this moment there are not enough clams to go round, so that
the market-man sticks the end of a rubber hose into his tub of dark,
salty, fresh-shucked clams, and soaks them; soaks them with fresh
water out of rusty iron pipes, soaks them, and swells them, whitens
them, bloats them, sells them--ghastly corpses, husks, that we would
fain fill our soup-bowls with; for we are hungry, and must be fed, and
there are not enough of the unsoaked clams for a bowl around.
But there shall be. With the coming of the clam farm there shall be
clams enough, and oysters and scallops; for the whole mollusk
industry, in every flat and bar and cove of the country, shall take to
itself a new interest, and vastly larger proportions. Then shall a
measure of scallops be sold for a quarter, and two measures of clams
for a quarter, and nothing, any more, be soaked.
For there is nothing difficult about growing clams, nothing half so
difficult and expensive as growing corn or cabbage. In fact, the clam
farm offers most remarkable opportunities, although the bid, it must
be confessed, is pretty plainly to one’s love of ease and one’s
willing dependence. To begin with, the clam farm is self-working,
ploughed, harrowed, rolled, and fertilized by the tides of the sea;
the farmer only sowing the seed and digging the crop. Sometimes even
the seed is sown for him by the hands of the tide; but only on those
flats that lie close to some natural breeding-bar, where the currents,
gathering up the tiny floating “spats,” and carrying them swiftly on
the flood, broadcast them over the sand as the tide recedes. While
this cannot happen generally, still the clam-farmer has a second
distinct advantage in having his seed, if not actually sown for him,
at least grown, and caught for him on these natural breeding-bars, in
such quantities that he need only sweep it up and cradle it, as he
might winnow grain from a threshing floor. In Plum Island Sound there
is such a bar, where it seems that Nature, in expectation of the
coming clam farm, had arranged the soil of the bar and the tidal
currents for a natural set of clam-spats to supply the entire state
with its yearly stock of seed.
With all of this there is little of romance about a clam farm, and
nothing at all spectacular about its financial returns. For clams are
clams, whereas cobalt and rubber and wheat, and even squabs and
ginseng roots, are different,--according to the advertisements. The
inducements of the clam farm are not sufficient to cause the
prosperous Middle-West farmer to sell out and come East, as he has
been selling out and going on to the farther West, for its larger,
cheaper farms, and bigger crops. Farming, mining, lumbering, whatever
we have had to do, in fact, directly with Nature, has been for us,
thus far, a speculation and a gamble. Earnings have been out of all
proportion to investments, excessive, abnormal. We do not earn, we
_strike_ it rich; and we have struck it rich so long in this vast rich
land, that the strike has lost its element of luck, being now the
expected thing, which, failing to happen, we sell out and move on to
the farthest West, where there is still a land of chance. But that
land is passing, and with it is passing the lucky strike. The day is
approaching when a man will pay for a western farm what he now pays
for an eastern farm--the actual market value, based upon what the
land, in expert hands, can be made yearly to yield. Values will rise
to an even, normal level; earnings will settle to the same level; and
the clam farm of the coast and the stock farm of the prairie will
yield alike--a living; and if, when that day comes, there is no more
“Promised Land” for the American, it will be because we have crossed
over, and possessed the land, and divided it among us for an
inheritance.
When life shall mean a living, and not a dress-parade, or an
automobile, or a flying-machine, then the clam farm, with its two or
three acres of flats, will be farm enough, and its average maximum
yield, of four hundred and fifty dollars an acre, will be profits
enough. For the clammer’s outfit is simple,--a small boat, two
clam-diggers, four clam-baskets, and his hip-boots, the total costing
thirty dollars.
The old milk farm here under the hill below me, with its tumbling barn
and its ninety acres of desolation, was sold not long ago for six
thousand dollars. The milkman will make more money than the clam man,
but he will have no more. The milk farm is a larger undertaking,
calling for a larger type of man, and developing larger qualities of
soul, perhaps, than could ever be dug up with a piddling clam-hoe out
of the soft sea-fattened flats. But that is a question of men, not of
farms. We must have clams; somebody must dig clams; and matters of the
spirit all aside, reckoned simply as a small business, clam-farming
offers a sure living, a free, independent, healthful, outdoor
living--and hence an ample living--to thousands of men who may lack
the capital, or the capabilities, or, indeed, the time for the larger
undertakings. And viewed as the least part of the coming shell-fish
industry, and this in turn as a smallest part of the coming national
industry, due to our reclaiming, restocking, and conserving, and wise
leasing, the clam farm becomes a type, a promise; it becomes the shore
of a new country, a larger, richer, longer-lasting country than our
pioneer fathers found here.
For behold the clam crop how it grows!--precisely like any other crop,
in the summer, or more exactly, from about the first of May to the
first of December; and the growth is very rapid, a seed-clam an inch
long at the May planting, developing in some localities (as in the
Essex and Ipswich rivers) into a marketable clam, three inches long by
December. This is an increase in volume of about nine hundred per
cent. The little spats, scattered broadcast over the flat, burrow
with the first tide into the sand, where with each returning tide they
open their mouths, like young birds, for their meal of diatoms brought
in by the never-failing sea. Thus they feed twice a day, with never
too much water, with never a fear of drouth, until they are grown fat
for the clammer’s basket.
If, heretofore, John Burroughs among the uncertainties of his vineyard
could sing,--
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,--
surely now the clammer in his cottage by the sea can sing, and all of
us with him,--
The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave comes to the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.
IX
THE COMMUTER’S THANKSGIVING
THE COMMUTER’S THANKSGIVING
The cottages are closed; the summer people have gone back to the city;
only the farmers and the commuters--barnacled folk--remain as the
summer tide recedes, fixed to the rocks of winter because they have
grown fast. To live is to have two houses: a country house for the
summer, a city house for the winter; to close one, and open the other;
to change, to flit!
How different it used to be when I was a boy--away yonder in the days
of farms and old-fashioned homes and old-time winters! Things were
prepared for, were made something of, and enjoyed in those days--the
“quiltings,” the “raisings,” the Thanksgivings! What getting ready
there used to be--especially for the winter! for what wasn’t there to
get ready! and how much of everything to get ready there used to be!
It began along in late October, continuing with more speed as the days
shortened and hurried us into November. It must all be done by
Thanksgiving Day--everything brought in, everything housed and
battened down tight. The gray lowering clouds, the cold snap, the
first flurry of snow, how they hastened and heartened the work!
Thanksgiving found us ready for winter, indoors and out.
The hay-mows were full to the beams where the swallows built; the
north and west sides of the barnyard were flanked with a deep
wind-break of corn-fodder that ran on down the old worm-fence each
side of the lane in yellow zigzag walls; the big wooden pump under the
turn-o’-lane tree by the barn was bundled up and buttoned to the tip
of its dripping nose; the bees by the currant bushes were
double-hived, the strawberries mulched, the wood all split and piled,
the cellar windows packed, and the storm-doors put on. The very cows
had put on an extra coat, and turned their collars up about their
ears; the turkeys had changed their roost from the ridge-pole of the
corn-crib to the pearmain tree on the sunny side of the wagon-house;
the squirrels had finished their bulky nests in the oaks; the muskrats
of the lower pasture had completed their lodges; the whole
farm--house, barn, fields, and wood-lot--had shuffled into its
greatcoat, its muffler and muffetees, and settled comfortably down for
the winter.
The old farmhouse was an invitation to winter. It looked its joy at
the prospect of the coming cold. Low, weather-worn, mossy-shingled,
secluded in its wayward garden of box and bleeding-hearts, sheltered
by its tall pines, grape-vined, hop-vined, clung to by creeper and
honeysuckle, it stood where the roads divided, halfway between
everywhere, unpainted, unpretentious, as much a part of the landscape
as the muskrat-lodge; and, like the lodge, roomy, warm, and
hospitable.
Round at the back, under the wide, open shed, a door led into the
kitchen, another led into the living-room, another into the storeroom,
and two big, slanting double-doors, scoured and slippery with four
generations of sliders, covered the cavernous way into the cellar. But
they let the smell of apples up, as the garret door let the smell of
sage and thyme come down; while from the door of the storeroom,
mingling with the odor of apples and herbs, filling the whole house
and all my early memories, came the smell of broom-corn, came the
sound of grandfather’s loom.
Behind the stove in the kitchen, fresh-papered like the walls, stood
the sweet-potato box (a sweet potato must be kept dry and warm), an
ample, ten-barrel box, full of Jersey sweets that _were_ sweet,--long,
golden, syrupy potatoes, grown in the warm sandy soil of the “Jethro
Piece.” Against the box stood the sea-chest, fresh with the same paper
and piled with wood. There was another such chest in the living-room
near the old fireplace, and still another in grandfather’s work-room
behind the “tem-plate” stove.
But wood and warmth and sweet smells were not all. There was music
also, the music of life, of young life and of old life--grandparents,
grandchildren (about twenty-eight of the latter). There were seven of
us alone--a girl at each end of the seven and one in the middle, which
is Heaven’s own mystic number and divine arrangement. Thanksgiving
always found us all at grandfather’s and brimming full of thanks.
That, of course, was long, long ago. Things are different nowadays.
There are as many grandfathers, I suppose, as ever; but they don’t
make brooms in the winter any more, and live on farms. They live in
flats. The old farm with its open acres has become a city street; the
generous old farmhouse has become a speaking-tube, kitchenette and
bath--all the “modern conveniences”; the cows have evaporated into
convenient cans of condensed “milk”; the ten-barrel box of potatoes
has changed into a convenient ten-pound bag, the wood-pile into a
convenient five-cent bundle of blocks tied up with a tarred string,
the fireplace into a convenient moss-and-flame-painted gas-log, the
seven children into one, or none, or into a convenient bull-terrier
pup. Still, we may give thanks, for convenient as life has become
to-day, it has not yet all gone to the dogs.
It is true, however, that there might be fewer dogs and more children,
possibly; fewer flats and more farms; less canned milk (or whatever
the paste is) and more real cream. Surely we might buy less and raise
more, hire less and make more, travel less and see more, hear less and
think more. Life might be quieter for some of us; profounder, perhaps,
for others of us,--more inconvenient indeed, for all of us, and yet a
thing to be thankful for.
It might, but most of us doubt it. It is not for the things we
possess, but only for the things we have not, for the things we are
relieved of, the things we escape,--for our conveniences,--that we are
thankful nowadays. Life is summed up with us in negations. We tally
our conveniences only, quick-detachable-tired, six-cylindered,
seventy-horse-powered conveniences. To construct eighteen-million
dollars’ worth of destruction in the shape of a gunboat! to lay out a
beautiful road and then build a machine to “eat it”! to be allotted a
span of time and study how to annihilate it! O Lord, we thank Thee
that we have all the modern conveniences, from cucumbers at Christmas
to a Celestial Crêche! Heaven is such a nice, fit, convenient place
for our unborn children! God is their home. The angels take such
gentle care of them! Besides, they are not so in the way there; and,
if need be, we have the charity children and other people’s children;
or we have the darling little sweet-faced bull-terrier pup.
For myself, I have never had a little cherub-faced bull-pup, but at
this present writing I am helping to bring up our fourth baby, and I
think I see the convenience of the pup. And I am only the _father_ of
the baby at that!
To begin with, you can buy a pup. You can send the stable-man after
it. But not a baby. Not even the doctor can fetch it. The mother must
go herself after her baby--to Heaven it may be; but she will carry it
all the way through Hell before she brings it to the earth, this earth
of sunlit fields and stormy skies, so evidently designed to make men
of babies. A long perilous journey this, across a whole social season.
Certainly the little dog is a great convenience, and as certainly he
is a great negation,--the substitution, as with most conveniences, of
a thing for a self.