[Footnote 25: From _Green Trails and Upland Pastures_, by Walter Prichard
Eaton. Copyright, 1917, by Doubleday, Page & Co. By permission of the
author and of the publishers.]
Anything which man has hewn from stone or shaped from wood, put to the uses
of his pleasure or his toil, and then at length abandoned to crumble slowly
back into its elements of soil or metal, is fraught for the beholder with a
wistful appeal, whether it be the pyramids of Egyptian kings, or an
abandoned farmhouse on the road to Moosilauke, or only a rusty hay-rake in
a field now overgrown with golden-rod and Queen Anne's lace, and fast
surrendering to the returning tide of the forest. A pyramid may thrill us
by its tremendousness; we may dream how once the legions of Mark Antony
encamped below it, how the eagles of Napoleon went tossing past. But in the
end we shall reflect on the toiling slaves who built it, block upon heavy
block, to be a monarch's tomb, and on the monarch who now lies beneath (if
his mummy has not been transferred to the British Museum). The old gray
house by the roadside, abandoned, desolate, with a bittersweet vine
entwined around the chimney and a raspberry bush pushing up through the
rotted doorsill, takes us back to the days when the pioneer's axe rang in
this clearing, hewing the timbers for beam and rafter, and the smoke of the
first fire went up that ample flue. How many a time have I paused in my
tramping to poke around such a ruin, reconstructing the vanished life of a
day when the cities had not sucked our hill towns dry and this scrubby
wilderness was a productive farm!
The motor cars go through the Berkshires in steady procession by the valley
highways, past great estates betokening our changed civilization. But the
back roads of Berkshire are known to few, and you may tramp all the morning
over the Beartown Mountain plateau, by a road where the green grass grows
between the ruts, without meeting a motor, or indeed, a vehicle of any
sort. A century ago Beartown was a thriving community, producing many
thousand dollars' worth of grain, maple sugar, wool, and mutton. To-day
there are less than half a dozen families left, and they survive by cutting
cord wood from the sheep pastures! We must haul our wool from the
Argentine, and our mutton from Montana, while our own land goes back to
unproductive wilderness. As the road draws near the long hill down into
Monterey, there stands a ruined house beside it, one of many ruins you will
have passed, the plaster in heaps on the floor, the windows gone, the door
half fallen from its long, hand-wrought hinges. It is a house built around
a huge central chimney, which seems still as solid as on the day it was
completed. The rotted mantels were simply wrought, but with perfect lines,
and the panelling above them was extremely good. So was the delicate
fanlight over the door, in which a bit of glass still clings, iridescent
now like oil on water. Under the eaves the carpenter had indulged in a
Greek border, and over the woodshed opening behind he had spanned a
keystone arch. Peering into this shed, under the collapsing roof, you see
what is left of an axe embedded in a pile of reddish vegetable mould, which
was once the chopping block. Peering through the windows of the house, you
see a few bits of simple furniture still inhabiting the ruined rooms. Just
outside, in the door-yard, the day lilies, run wild in the grass, speak to
you of a housewife's hand across the vanished years. The barn has gone
completely, overthrown and wiped out by the advancing forest edge. Enough
of the clearing still remains, however, to show where the cornfields and
the pastures lay. They are wild with berry stalks and flowers now, still
and vacant under the Summer sun.
The ruins of war are melancholy, and raise our bitter resentment. Yet how
often we pass such an abandoned farm as this without any realization that
it, too, is a ruin of war, the ceaseless war of commercial greed. No less
surely than in stricken Belgium has there been a deportation here.
Factories and cities have swallowed up a whole population, indeed, along
the Beartown road. It is easy to say that they went willingly, that they
preferred the life of cities; that the dreary tenement under factory grime,
with a "movie" theatre around the corner, is an acceptable substitute to
them for the ample fireplaces, the fanlight door, the rolling fields and
roadside brook. We hear much discussion in New England to-day of "how to
keep the young folks on the farm." But why should they stay on the farm, to
toil and starve, in body and mind? We have so organized our whole society
on a competitive commercial basis that they can now do nothing else. Those
ancient apple trees beside the ruined house once grew fruit superior in
taste to any apple which ever came from Hood River or Wenatchee, and could
grow it again; but greed has determined that our cities shall pay five
cents apiece for the showy western product, and the small individual grower
of the East is helpless. We have raised individualism to a creed, and
killed the individual. We have exalted "business," and depopulated our
farms. The old gray ruin on the back road to Monterey is an epitome of our
history for a hundred years.
But to pursue such reflections too curiously would take our mind from the
road, our eyes from the wild flower gardens lining the way--the banks of
blueberries fragrant in the sun, the stately borders of meadow rue where
the grassy track dips down through a moist hollow. And to pursue such
reflections too curiously would take us far afield from the spot we planned
to reach when we took up our pen for this particular journey. That spot was
the bit of sandy lane, just in front of Cap'n Bradley's house in old South
County, Rhode Island. The lane leads down from the colonial Post Road to
the shore of the Salt Pond, and the Cap'n's house is the first one on the
left after you leave the road. The second house on the left is inhabited by
Miss Maria Mills. The third house on the left is the Big House, where they
take boarders. The Big House is on the shore of the Salt Pond. There are no
houses on the right of the lane, only fields full of bay and huckleberries.
The lane runs right out on a small pier and apparently jumps off the end
into whatever boat is moored there, where it hides away in the hold,
waiting to be taken on a far journey to the yellow line of the ocean beach,
or the flag-marked reaches of the oyster bars. It is a delightful,
leisurely little lane, a byway into another order from the modernized
macadam Post Road where the motors whiz. You go down a slight incline to
the Cap'n's house, and the motors are shut out from your vision. From here
you can glimpse the dancing water of the Salt Pond, and smell it too, when
the wind is south, carrying the odour of gasolene the other way. The
Cap'n's house is painted brown, a little, brown dwelling with a blue-legged
sailor man on poles in the dooryard, revolving in the breeze. The Cap'n is
a little brown man, for that matter. He is reconciled to a life ashore by
his pipe and his pension, and by his lookout built of weathered timber on a
grass-covered sand drift just abaft the kitchen door, whither he betakes
himself with his spy glass on clear days to see whether it is his old
friend Cap'n Perry down there on number two oyster bar, or how heavy the
traffic is to-day far out beyond the yellow beach line, where Block Island
rises like a blue mirage.
Cap'n Bradley boasts a garden, too. It is just across the lane from his
front door. There are three varieties of flowers in it--nasturtiums,
portulacas, and bright red geraniums. The portulacas grow around the
border, then come the nasturtiums, and finally the taller geraniums in the
centre. The Cap'n has never seen nor heard of those ridiculous wooden birds
on green shafts which it is now the fashion to stick up in flower beds, but
he has something quite appropriate, and, all things considered, quite as
"artistic." In the bow of his garden, astride a spar, is a blue-legged
sailor man ten inches tall, keeping perpetual lookout up the lane. For this
flower bed is planted in an old dory filled with earth. She had outlived
her usefulness down there in the Salt Pond, or even, it may be, out on the
blue sea itself, but no vandal hands were laid upon her to stave her up for
kindling wood. Instead, the Captain himself painted her a bright yellow,
set her down in front of his dwelling, and filled her full of flowers. She
is disintegrating slowly; already, after a rain, the muddy water trickles
through her side and stains the yellow paint. But what a pretty and
peaceful process! She might not strike you as a happy touch set down in one
of those formal gardens depicted in _The House Beautiful_ or _Country
Life_, but here beside the salty lane past Cap'n Bradley's door, gaudy in
colour, with her load of homely flowers and her quaint little sailor man
astride his spar above the bright geraniums, she is perfect. No boat could
come to a better end. She's taking portulacas to the Islands of the Blest!
Miss Maria Mills, in the next house, never followed the sea, and her idea
of a garden is more conventional. She grows hollyhocks beside the house,
and sweet peas on her wire fence. But at the lane's end, where the water of
the Salt Pond laps the pier, you may see another old boat put to humbler
uses, now that its seafaring days are over, and uses sometimes no less
romantic than the Cap'n's garden. It is a flat-bottomed boat, and lies
bottom side up just above the little beach made by the lap of the waves,
for the tide does not affect the Salt Pond back here three miles from the
outlet. The paint has nearly gone from this aged craft, though a few flakes
of green still cling under the gunwales. But in place of paint there have
appeared an incredible number of initials, carved with every degree of
skill or clumsiness, over bottom and sides. This boat is the bench whereon
you wait for the launch to carry you down the Pond, for the catboat or
thirty-footer to be brought in from her moorings, for Cap'n Perry to land
with a load of oysters; or it is the bench you sit upon to watch the sunset
glow behind the pines on the opposite headland, the pines where the blue
herons roost, or to see the moon track on the dancing water. The Post Road
is alive with motors now, far into the evening. You get your mail from the
little post office beside it as quickly as possible--which isn't very
quickly, to be sure, for we do not hurry in South County, even when we are
employed by Uncle Sam--and then you turn down the quiet lane, past the
Cap'n's garden, toward the lap of quiet water and the salty smell. Affairs
of State are now discussed, of a summer evening, upon the bottom of this
upturned boat, while a case knife dulled by oyster shells picks out a new
initial. And when the fate of the nation is settled, or to-morrow's weather
thoroughly discussed (the two are of about equal importance to us in South
County, with the balance in favour of the weather), and the debaters have
departed to bed, some of them leaving by water with a rattle of tackle or,
more often in these degenerate days, the _put, put_ of an unmuffled
exhaust, then other figures come to the upturned boat, speaking softly or
not at all, and in the morning you may, perhaps, find double initials
freshly cut, with a circle sentimentally enclosing them. So the old craft
passes her last days beside the lapping water, a pleasant and useful end.
On the other side of the Big House from the pier, at the head of a tiny
dredged inlet, there is an old boathouse. It seems but yesterday that we
used to warp the _Idler_ in there when summer was over, get the chains
under her, and block her up for the winter. She spent the winter on one
side of the slip; the _Sea Mist_, a clumsy craft that couldn't stir short
of a half gale, spent the winter on the other side. Over them, on racks,
the rowboats were slung. There was a larger boathouse for the big fellows.
What busy days we spent in May or June, caulking and scraping and painting,
splicing and repairing, making the little _Idler_ ready for the sea again!
She was an eighteen-foot cat, a bit of a tub, I fear, but the best on the
Pond in her day, eating up close into the wind, sensitive, alert, with a
pair of white heels she had shown to many a larger craft. Surely it was but
yesterday that I rowed out to her where she was moored a hundred feet from
shore, climbed aboard, hoisted sail, and, with my pipe drawing sweetly, sat
down beside the tiller and played out the sheet till the sail filled; there
was a crack and snaffle of straining tackle, the boat leaped forward, the
tiller batted my ribs, the _Idler_ heeled over, and then quietly, softly,
as rhythmic as a song, the water raced hissing along her rail, the little
waves slapped beneath her bow--and the world was good to be alive in!
Surely it was but yesterday that the white sail of the _Idler_ was like a
gull's wing on the Pond!
But the white sail wings are few on the Pond to-day, and the _Idler_ lies
on her side in the weeds behind the boathouse. She had to make room for the
motor craft. She is too bulky for a flower bed, too convex for a bench. Her
paint is nearly gone now, both the yellow body colour and the pretty green
and white stripe along her rail that we used to put on with such care. Her
seams are yawning, and the rain water pool that at first settled on the low
side of her cockpit has now seeped through, and a little deposit of soil
has accumulated, in which a sickly weed is growing. Poor old _Idler_! One
day I got an axe, resolved to break her up, but when it came to the point
of burying the first blow my resolution failed. I thought of all the hours
of enthusiastic labour I had spent upon those eighteen feet of oak ribs and
planking; I thought of all the thrilling hours of the race, when we had
squeezed her into the wind past Perry's Point and saved a precious tack; I
thought of the dreamy hours when she had borne us down the Pond in the
summer sunshine, or through the gray, mysterious fog, or under the stars
above the black water. So instead, I laid my hand gently on her rotting
tiller, and then took the axe back to the woodshed. She will never ride the
waves again, but she shall dissolve into her elements peacefully, in sight
of the salt water, in the quiet grass behind the boathouse.
It seems to me that all my life I have had memories of old boats. One of my
earliest recollections is of _Old Ironsides_, in the Charlestown Navy Yard,
dismantled and decked over, but saved from destruction by Dr. Holmes's
poem. What thrilling visions it awoke to climb aboard her and tread her
decks! Acres of spinnaker and topgallants broke out aloft, cannon boomed,
smoke rolled, "grape and canister" flew through the air, chain shot came
hurtling, and the Stars and Stripes waved through it all, triumphant. The
white ironclads out in the channel (for in those days they were white)
evoked no such visions. Another memory is of a childhood trip to New
Bedford and a long walk for hours by the water front, out on green and
rotting piers where chunky, square-rigged whalers, green and rotting, too,
were moored alongside. The life of the whaler was in those days something
infinitely fascinating to us boys. We read of the chase, the hurling of the
harpoon, the mad ride over the waves towed by the plunging monster. And
here were the very ships which had taken the brave whalers to the hunting
grounds, here on their decks were some of the whale boats which had been
towed over the churned and blood-flecked sea! Why should they be green and
rotting now? They produced upon me an impression of infinite sadness. It
seemed as if a great hand had suddenly wiped a romantic bloom off my vision
of the world.
But it was not long after that I knew the romance of a launching. It was at
Kennebunkport in Maine. All summer the ship yards on either side of the
river, close to the little town and under the very shadow of the white
meeting house steeple, had rung with the blows of axe and hammer. The great
ribs rose into place, the sheathing went on, the decks were laid, the masts
stepped; finally the first rigging was adjusted. After the workmen left in
the late afternoon, we boys swarmed over the ships--three-masters, smelling
deliciously of new wood and caulking, and played we were sailors. When the
rope ladders were finally in place, we raced up and down them, sitting in
the crow's nest on a line with the church weather vane, and pretending to
reef the sails. It was an event when the ships were launched. The tide was
at the flood, gay canoes filled the stream along both banks, hundreds of
people massed on the shore. A little girl stood in the bow with a bottle of
wine on a string. An engine tooted, cables creaked, and down the greased
way slid the ship, with a dip and a heave when she hit the water that made
big waves on either side and set the canoes to rocking madly, while the
crowd cheered and shouted. After the launching, the schooners were towed
out to sea, and down the coast, to be fitted elsewhere. We boys followed
them in canoes as far as the breakwater, and watched them disappear. Soon
their sails would be set, and they would join the white adventurers out
there on the world rim.
Where are they now, I wonder? Are they still buffeting the seas, or do they
lie moored and outmoded beside some green wharf, their days of usefulness
over? I remember hoping, as I watched them pass out to sea, that they would
not share the fate of the unknown craft which lay buried in the sands a
mile down the coast. It was said that she came ashore in the "Great Storm"
of 1814 (or thereabouts). Nothing was left of her in our day but her sturdy
ribs, which thrust up a few feet above the sand, outlining her shape, and
were only visible at low water. On a stormy day, when the seas were high, I
used to stand at the head of the beach and try to picture how she drove up
on the shore, shuddering deliciously as each great wave came pounding down
on all that was left of her oaken frame. When I read in the newspaper of a
wreck I thought of her, and I think of her to this day on such occasions,
thrusting up black and dripping ribs above the wet sands at low water, or
vanishing beneath the pounding foam of the breakers.
If you take the shore line train from Boston to New York, you pass through
a sleepy old town in Connecticut where a spur track with rusty rails runs
out to the wharves, and moored to these wharves are side-wheel steamers
which once plied the Sound. It served somebody's purpose or pocket better
to discontinue the line, and with its cessation and the cessation of work
in the ship yards close by, the old town passed into a state of salty
somnolence. The harbour is glassy and still, opening out to the blue waters
of the Sound. Still are the white steamers by the wharves, where once the
gang planks shook with the tread of feet and the rumble of baggage trucks.
Many a time, as the train paused at the station, I have watched the black
stacks for some hint of smoke, hoping against hope that I should see the
old ship move, and turn, and go about her rightful seafaring. But it was
never to be. There were only ghosts in engine room and pilot house. Like
the abandoned dwelling on the upland road to Monterey, these steamers were
mute witnesses to a vanished order. But always as the train pulled out from
the station I sat on the rear platform and watched the white town and the
white steamers and the glassy harbour slip backward into the haze--and it
seemed as if that haze was the gentle breath of oblivion.
I live inland now, far from the smell of salt water and the sight of sails.
Yet sometimes there comes over me a longing for the sea as irresistible as
the lust for salt which stampedes the reindeer of the north. I must gaze on
the unbroken world-rim, I must feel the sting of spray, I must hear the
rhythmic crash and roar of breakers and watch the sea-weed rise and fall
where the green waves lift against the rocks. Once in so often I must ride
those waves with cleated sheet and tugging tiller, and hear the soft
hissing song of the water on the rail. And "my day of mercy" is not
complete till I have seen some old boat, her seafaring done, heeled over on
the beach or amid the fragrant sedges, a mute and wistful witness to the
romance of the deep, the blue and restless deep where man has adventured in
craft his hands have made since the earliest sun of history, and whereon he
will adventure, ardently and insecure, till the last syllable of recorded
time.