by E. B. White
We had a good week at the camp. The bass were biting well and the sun shone endlessly, day after day. We would be tired at night and lie down in the accumulated heat of the little bedrooms after the long hot day and the breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside and the smell of the swamp drift in through the rusty screens. Sleep would come easily and in the morning the red squirrel would be on the roof, tapping out his gay routine. I kept remembering everything, lying in bed in the mornings—the small steamboat that had a long rounded stern like the lip of a Ubangi, and how quietly she ran on the moonlight sails, when the older boys played their mandolins and the girls sang and we at doughnuts dipped in sugar, and how sweet the music was on the water in the shining night, and what it had felt like to think about girls then. After breakfast we would go up to the store and the things were in the same place—the minnows in a bottle, the plugs and spinners disarranged and pawed over by the youngsters from the boys’ camp, the Fig Newtons and the Beeman’s gum. Outside, the road was tarred and cars stood in front of the store. Inside, all was just as it had always been, except there was more Coca-Cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and birch beer and sarsaparilla. We would walk out with the bottle of pop apiece and sometimes the pop would backfire up our noses and hurt. We explored the streams, quietly, where the turtles slid off the sunny logs and dug their way into the soft bottom; and we lay on the town wharf and fed worms to the tame bass. Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.
One afternoon while we were there at that lake a thunderstorm came up. It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago with childish awe. The second-act climax of the drama of the electrical disturbance over a lake in America had not changed in any important respect. This was the big scene, still the big scene. The whole thing was so familiar, the first feeling of oppression and heat and a general air around camp of not wanting to go very far away. In mid-afternoon (it was all the same) a curious darkening of the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick; and then the way the boats suddenly swung the other way at their moorings with the coming of a breeze out of the new quarter, and the premonitory rumble. Then the kettle drum, then the snare, then the bass drum and cymbals, then crackling light against the dark, and the gods grinning and licking their chops in the hills. Afterward the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain. And the comedian who waded in carrying an umbrella.
When the others went swimming, my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.
VI
DIVERSIONS AND OBSESSIONS
The Sea and the Wind That Blows
Waking or sleeping, I dream of boats—usually of rather small boats under a slight press of sail. When I think how great a part of my life has been spent dreaming the hours away and how much of this total dream life has concerned small craft, I wonder about the state of my health, for I am told that it is not a good sign to be always voyaging into unreality, driven by imaginary breezes.
I have noticed that most men, when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wandering, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended. There is hardly a waiting room in the East that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or the drill begins to whine.
If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble. If it happens to be an auxiliary cruising boat, it is without question the most compact and ingenious arrangement for living ever devised by the restless mind of man—a home that is stable without being stationary, shaped less like a box than like a fish or a bird or a girl, and in which the homeowner can remove his daily affairs as far from shore as he has the nerve to take them, close-hauled or running free—parlor, bedroom, and bath, suspended and alive.
Men who ache all over for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find relief for their pain in the cabin of a thirty-foot sailboat at anchor in a sheltered cove. Here the sprawling panoply of The Home is compressed in orderly miniature and liquid delirium, suspended between the bottom of the sea and the top of the sky, ready to move on in the morning by the miracle of canvas and the witchcraft of rope. It is small wonder that men hold boats in the secret place of their mind, almost from the cradle to the grave.
Along with my dream of boats has gone the ownership of boats, a long succession of them upon the surface of the sea, many of them makeshift and crank. Since childhood I have managed to have some sort of sailing craft and to raise a sail in fear. Now, in my seventies, I still own a boat, still raise my sail in fear in answer to the summons of the unforgiving sea. Why does the sea attract me in the way it does? Whence comes this compulsion to hoist a sail, actually or in dream? My first encounter with the sea was a case of hate at first sight. I was taken, at the age of four, to a bathing beach in New Rochelle. Everything about the experience frightened and repelled me: the taste of salt in my mouth, the foul chill of the wooden bathhouse, the littered sand, the stench of the tide flats. I came away hating and fearing the sea. Later, I found that what I had feared and hated, I now feared and loved.
I returned to the sea of necessity, because it would support a boat; and although I knew little of boats, I could not get them out of my thoughts. I became a pelagic boy. The sea became my unspoken challenge: the wind, the tide, the fog, the ledge, the bell, the gull that cried help, the never-ending threat and bluff of weather. Once having permitted the wind to enter the belly of my sail, I was not able to quit the helm; it was as though I had seized hold of a high-tension wire and could not let go.
I liked to sail alone. The sea was the same as a girl to me—I did not want anyone else along. Lacking instruction, I invented ways of getting things done, and usually ended by doing them in a rather queer fashion, and so did not learn to sail properly, and still cannot sail well, although I have been at it all my life. I was twenty before I discovered that charts existed; all my navigating up to that time was done with the wariness and the ignorance of the early explorers. I was thirty before I learned to hang a coiled halyard on its cleat as it should be done. Until then I simply coiled it down on deck and dumped the coil. I was always in trouble and always returned, seeking more trouble. Sailing became a compulsion: there lay the boat, swinging to her mooring, there blew the wind; I had no choice but to go. My earliest boats were so small that when the wind failed, or when I failed, I could switch to manual control—I could paddle or row home. But then I graduated to boats that only the wind was strong enough to move. When I first dropped off my mooring in such a boat, I was an hour getting up the nerve to cast off the pennant. Even now, with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt, I feel a memorial chill on casting off, as the gulls jeer and the empty mainsail claps.
Of late years, I have noticed that my sailing has increasingly become a compulsive activity rather than a simple source of pleasure. There lies the boat, there blows the morning breeze—it is a point of honor, now, to go. I am like an alcoholic who cannot put his bottle out of his life. With me, I cannot not sail.
Yet I know well enough that I have lost touch with the wind and, in fact, do not like the wind anymore. It jiggles me up, the wind does, and what I really love are windless days, when all is peace. There is a great question in my mind whether a man who is against wind should longer try to sail a boat. But this is an intellectual response—the old yearning is still in me, belonging to the past, to youth, and so I am torn between past and present, a common disease of later fife.
When does a man quit the sea? How dizzy, how bumbling must he be? Does he quit while he’s ahead, or wait till he makes some major mistake, like falling overboard or being flattened by an accidental jibe? This past winter I spent hours arguing the question with myself. Finally, deciding that I had come to the end of the road, I wrote a note to the boatyard, putting my boat up for sale. I said I was “coming off the water.” But as I typed the sentence, I doubted that I meant a word of it.
If no buyer turns up, I know what will happen: I will instruct the yard to put her in again—“just till somebody comes along.” And then there will be the old uneasiness, the old uncertainty, as the mild southeast breeze ruffles the cove, a gentle, steady, morning breeze, bringing the taint of the distant wet world, the smell that takes a man back to the very beginning of time, linking him to all that has gone before. There will lie the sloop, there will blow the wind, once more I will get under way. And as I reach across to the red nun off the Torry Islands, dodging the trap buoys and toggles, the shags gathered on the ledge will note my passage. “There goes the old boy again,” they will say. “One more rounding of his little Horn, one more conquest of his Roaring Forties.” And with the tiller in my hand, I’ll feel again the wind imparting life to a boat, will smell again the old menace, the one that imparts life to me: the cruel beauty of the salt world, the barnacle’s tiny knives, the sharp spine of the urchin, the stinger of the sun jelly, the claw of the crab.
The Railroad
ALLEN COVE, JANUARY 28,1960
What’s the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing.
Henry Thoreau, who wrote those lines, was a student of railroading. He was a devotee, though seldom a passenger. He lived, of course, in the morningtime of America’s railroads. He was less concerned with where the railroad ended than with what the railroad meant, and his remarks on the Fitchburg seem fadeproof in the strong light of this century, their liturgical quality still intact.
And what’s the railroad to me? I have to admit that it means a great deal to me. It fills more than a few hollows. It is the link with my past, for one thing, and with the city, for another—two connections I would not like to see broken. The railroads of Maine are eager to break these connections, having found them to be unprofitable, and are already at work on the problem. They hope to discontinue all passenger service within the state, and although they failed in their first try, in 1959, they may do better in the year ahead.
Bangor is the second-oldest railroad town in New England; a steam train pulled out of Bangor, bound upriver for Old Town, on November 6, 1836. The running time for the twelve-mile trip was two and a half hours, the conductor’s name was Sawyer, passengers were aboard, and the fare was thirty-seven and a half cents. That was the first steam train to roll in Maine, and the second to roll in New England. Soon Bangor may set another mark in rail history; it may watch the departure of the last train, and as this sad hulk moves off down the track (if it ever does), Maine will become the first state in the Union, except for Hawaii, to have no rail passenger service between its major cities.
What’s the railroad to me? It is a lingering pain in the heart, an old friend who has tired of me and my antics. Unlike Thoreau, whose rail adventures were largely intellectual, I do go to see where the railroad ends. On some occasions—as on next Monday, for instance—I have no choice but to go; I will pay the tariff cheerfully and stare at the bare blackberry vines with affection. But the sleeper I had planned to take, the sleeper out of Bangor, has been pulled off, and I will have to find another one, a hundred and forty miles to the westward. (The distance to the depot gets longer and longer.) I live in the twilight of railroading, the going down of its sun. For the past few months I’ve been well aware that I am the Unwanted Passenger, one of the last survivors of a vanishing and ugly breed. Indeed, if I am to believe the statements I see in the papers, I am all that stands between the Maine railroads and a bright future of hauling fast freight at a profit. It makes me feel like a spoilsport.
But I have other sensations, too. I bought this house almost thirty years ago, confident that whatever else happened to me, the railroad would always pick me up and carry me here and there, to and fro. This morning our village lies under several thicknesses of snow. Snow has fallen almost without interruption for a week, beginning with a northeast storm, tapering off to dull weather in which the low clouds spat snow day and night, and today another storm from the northeast. The highway is a ready cake mix of snow, ice, sand, salt, and trouble. Within the fortnight there has been the greatest rash of air disasters in my memory. And on top of everything the railroad, which is my old love, is sick of me and the likes of me, and I feel that my connections have been broken, as sharply as by the man in coveralls who crawls between the cars and knocks apart the steam line with his hammer. My thoughts, as they sometimes do on sad occasions, revert to Concord and another railroad in another century.
“On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance,” wrote Thoreau, “which is still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England north-east snowstorm. . . .” How different my village from his village, my century from his century! The only bell that is audible to me in this snowstorm is the one that rings inside my head, which announces that the cars are going—soon, perhaps, to be gone for good. For although the passengers’ dilemma here in Maine is still unresolved, there is a strong suspicion that we are living on borrowed time; the railroads would like to chop my head off instanter and be done, but the Public Utilities Commission, after looking at all sides of the matter, has given me a stay of execution, on good behavior. It stipulates that I must travel more often and that I must not go first class.
Maine has two railroads—the Bangor & Aroostook and the Maine Central. One serves the north country, hauling potatoes and newsprint from field and forest; the other serves the midsection, hauling mail and packages of bonbons between Portland and Bangor, with an occasional sortie to Vanceboro. Both roads carry passengers when any show up. A third road, the Boston & Maine, dips into the state as far as Portland. A fourth, the Canadian Pacific, comes in briefly across the border.
Several months ago, the two principal railroads petitioned the commission to be allowed to quit carrying passengers and thus free their talents for the exciting and rewarding task of moving freight and mail. Public hearings were held; for the most part they were poorly attended. While the commissioners listened, the railroad men told grim tales of ruin and utter desolation. At one hearing in Portland, a lawyer for the Maine Central summed up the disjointed times when he said, “We are right now engaged in the diagnosis of a very sick patient.” At another hearing, a man speaking for a cat-food factory in Lubec—makers of Puss ’n Boots cat food—rose to say that unless the Maine Central could wriggle free from the stifling grip of its passengers, Puss ’n Boots might have to move on to a happier and more progressive territory. The future of America’s cats seemed suddenly at stake.
All in all, the year 1959 was a schizophrenic time for Maine’s railroads. On Monday you would open your morning paper and find a display ad seeking your patronage and describing the rapturous experience of riding the rails. On Tuesday you would open the same paper and get a tongue-
lashing from an impatient spokesman for the fine, pointing out that the railroad would be bringing prosperity right this minute if only you, the passenger, would stand to one side and allow the freights to roll. “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me,” wrote Thoreau. So, without any question, is E. Spencer Miller, president of the Maine Central. And so, for that matter, are all of us refreshed, though for a different reason, when, after a long wait in a motionless car on a silent siding, we hear a freight train at last rattle past us, hauling its cartons of food to faraway cats and releasing us hungry passengers for the continuance of our journey.
To the lay passenger, or to the traveling layman, the bookkeeping of railroads is as mysterious as the backing up of a train in the night. Even to a public-utilities commission the account books of railroads are something less than perfectly transparent. The Maine railroads’ books were, of course, opened to the commission, and some of the figures got into the papers. Every railroad, I gather, keeps two sets of books, one on its freight operation, the other on its passenger operation; and every once in a while the books themselves manage to draw close together and a sort of seepage takes place from one set to the other, so that to the unpracticed eye, it is hard to tell how deeply a profitable sack of potatoes is being eaten into by those rats, the passengers. But there is no question that we passengers, of late years, have been gnawing away at the potatoes. Some of us do it in desperation, because we are starving to death between station stops. No food is carried on the train that brings me up the Kennebec, and a passenger must live by his wits off the land. At Waterville, on the eastbound run of the State of Maine, there is a midmorning pause, and while mail sacks are being tossed about in the genial and relaxed way that has characterized the handling of mail since the beginning of time, the engineer and the passengers (all six of us) gather at the snack counter in the depot, where we huddle over coffee and doughnuts, some of us passengers breaking a thirteen-hour fast that began 456.6 miles to the westward in the cornucopia civilization of Grand Central. These late breakfasts in Waterville come to an end as ritualistically as does the President’s press conference in Washington when one of the reporters rises and says “Thank you, Mr. President.” In Waterville, it is the engine driver himself who breaks up the party. He simply steps down from his stool, adjusts his cap, and walks away, which is the signal for us passengers to climb back into our places behind him in the train.