Going Back To Town

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Title:     Going Back To Town
Author: Dallas Lore Sharp [More Titles by Sharp]

"Labor Day, and school lunches begin to-morrow," She said, carefully drying one of the "Home Comforts" that had been growing dusty on an upper shelf since the middle of June.

She set the three tin lunch-boxes (two for the four boys and one for me) on the back of the stove and stood looking a moment at them.

"Are you getting tired of spreading us bread and butter?" I asked.

She made no reply.

"If you don't put us up our comforts this year, how are we going to dispose of all that strawberry jam and currant jelly?"

"I am not tired of putting up lunches," she answered. "I was just wondering if this year we ought not to go back to town. Four miles each way for the boys to school, and twenty each way for you. Are n't we paying a pretty high price for the hens and the pleasures of being snowed in?"

"An enormous price," I affirmed solemnly.

"And we 've paid it now these dozen winters running. Let's go into Boston and take that suite of wedge-shaped rooms we looked at last fall in Hotel Huntington, at the intersection of the Avenue and the railroad tracks. The boys can count freight cars until they are exhausted, and watch engines from their windows night and day."

"It isn't a light matter," she went on. "And we can't settle it by making it a joke. You need to be near your work; I need to be nearer human beings; the children need much more rest and freedom than these long miles to school and these many chores allow them."

"You 're entirely right, my dear, and this time we 'll do it. Our good neighbor here will take the cow; I 'll give the cabbages away, and send for 'Honest Wash' Curtis to come for the hens."

"But look at all this wild-grape jelly!" she exclaimed, turning to an array of forty-four little garnet jars which she had just covered with hot paraffin against the coming winter.

"And the thirteen bushels of potatoes," I broke in. "And the apples--there are going to be eight or ten barrels of prime Baldwins this year. And--"

But it never comes to an end--it never has yet, for as soon as we determine to do it, we feel that we can or not, just as we please. Simply deciding that we will move in yields us such an instant and actual city sojourn that we seem already to have been and are now gladly getting back to the country again.

So here we have stayed summer and winter, knowing that we ought to go back nearer my work so that I can do more of it; and nearer the center of social life so we can get more of it--life being pretty much lost that is not spent in working, or going, or talking! Here we have stayed even through the winters, exempt from public benefits, blessing ourselves, every time it snows on Saturday, that we are here and not there for our week ends, here within the "tumultuous privacy" of the storm and our own roaring fireplace, with our own apples and popcorn and books and selves; and when it snows on Monday wishing the weather would always temper itself and time itself to the peculiar needs of Mullein Hill--its length of back country road and automobile.

For an automobile is not a snow-plough, however much gasoline you give it. Time was when I rode a snow-plough and enjoyed it, as my Neighbor Jonas rides and enjoys his, feeling that he is plenty fast enough, as indeed he is, his sense of safety on the way, the absolute certainty (so far as there can be human certainty) of his arriving sometime, being compensation enough for the loss of those sensations of speed induced across one's diaphragm and over one's epidermis by the automobile.

Speeding is a disease of the hair follicles, I think, and the great hallucination of haste under which we move and try to have a being is seated in the muscles of the diaphragm. Have I not found myself rushing for a hundred places by automobile that I never should have started for at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had saved myself that time wholly? Space is Time's tail and we can't catch it. The most we can catch, with the speediest car, is a sight of its tip going around the corner ahead.

Speed is contagious, and I fear that I have it. I moved away here into Hingham to escape it, but life in the Hingham hills is not far enough away to save a man from all that passes along the road. The wind, too, bloweth where it listeth, and when there is infection on it, you can't escape by hiding in Hingham--not entirely. And once the sporulating speed germs get into your system, it is as if Anopheles had bitten you, their multiplying and bursting into the blood occurring regularly, accompanied by a chill at two cylinders and followed by a fever for four; a chill at four and a fever for six--eight--twelve, just like malaria!

We all have it, all but Neighbor Jonas. He has instead a "stavin'" good mare by the name of Bill. Bill is speedy. She sprang, years ago, from fast stock, as you would know if you held the cultivator behind her. When she comes to harrow the garden, Jonas must needs come with her to say "Whoa!" all the way, and otherwise admonish and exhort her into remembering that the cultivator is not a trotting-sulky, and that a row of beets is not a half-mile track. But the hard highways hurt Bill's feet, so that Jonas nowadays takes every automobile's dust, and none too sweetly either.

"Jonas," I said, as Bill was cooling off at the end of a row, "why don't you get an automobile?"

"I take the eggs down to the store every two weeks and get a shave; but I don't need a car much, havin' Bill," he replied, smashing a vicious greenhead on Bill's withers that was keeping her mixed up with the traces and the teeth of the harrow. "Besides, they 're skittish, nervous things compared with a hoss. What I 'd like is something neither one nor t'other--a sort of cross between an auto and Bill."

"Why not get a Ford car, then," I asked, "with a cultivator attachment? It would n't step on as many hills in the row as Bill does, and I think it would beat Bill on the road."

There was a cluck, a jump, and we were off down another row, with Jonas saying:--

"Not yet. Bill is still fast enough for me."

And for me, too; yet there is no denying that conditions have changed, that a multitude of new ills have been introduced into the social organism by the automobile, and except in the deep drifts of winter, the Ford car comes nearer curing those ills than any other anti-toxin yet discovered.

But here are the drifts still; and here is the old question of going back to the city to escape them. I shall sometimes wish we had gone back as I start out on a snowy, blowy morning; but never at night as I turn back--there is that difference between going to the city and going home. I often think the trip in is worth while for the sake of the trip out, such joy is it to pull in from the black, soughing woods to the cheer of the house, stamping the powdery snow off your boots and greatcoat to the sweet din of welcomes that drown the howling of the wind outside.

Once last winter I had to walk from the station. The snow was deep and falling steadily when I left the house in the morning, with increasing wind and thickening storm all day, so that my afternoon train out was delayed and dropped me at the station long after dark. The roads were blocked, the snow was knee-deep, the driving wind was horizontal, and the whirling ice particles like sharp sand, stinging, blinding as I bent to the road.

I went forward leaning, the drag in my feet overcome by the pull of the level wind on my slant body. Once through the long stretch of woods I tried to cut across the fields. Here I lost my bearings, stumbled into a ditch, and for a moment got utterly confused with the black of the night, the bite of the cold, and the smothering hand of the wind on my mouth.

Then I sat down where I was to pull myself together. There might be danger in such a situation, but I was not really cold--not cool enough. I had been forcing the fight foolishly, head-on, by a frontal attack instead of on the enemy's flank.

Here in the meadow I was exposed to the full force of the sweeping gale, and here I realized for the first time that this was the great storm of the winter, one of the supreme passages of the year, and one of the glorious physical fights of a lifetime.

On a prairie, or in the treeless barrens and tundras of the vast, frozen North, a fight like this could have but one end. What must the wild polar night be like! What the will, the thrill of men like Scott and Peary who have fought these forces to a standstill at the very poles! Their craft, their cunning, their daring, their imagination! The sway, the drive, the divine madness of such a purpose! A living atom creeping across the ice-cap over the top of the world! A human mote, so smothered in the Arctic dark and storm, so wide of the utmost shore of men, by a trail so far and filled and faint that only God can follow!

It is not what a man does, but what he lives through doing it. Life may be safer, easier, longer, and fuller of possessions in one place than another. But possessions do not measure life, nor years, nor ease, nor safety. Life in the Hingham hills in winter is wretchedly remote at times, but nothing happens to me all day long in Boston to be compared for a moment with this experience here in the night and snow. I never feel the largeness of the sky there, nor the wideness of the world, nor the loveliness of night, nor the fearful majesty of such a winter storm.

As the far-flung lines swept down upon me and bore me back into the drift, I knew somewhat the fierce delight of berg and floe and that primordial dark about the poles, and springing from my trench, I flung myself single-handed and exultant against the double fronts of night and storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victorious, I dragged myself to the door of a neighboring farmhouse, the voice of the storm a mighty song within my soul.

This happened, as I say, _once_ last winter, and of course she said we simply ought _not_ to live in such a place in winter; and of course, if anything exactly like that should occur every winter night, I should have to move into the city whether I liked city storms or not. One's life is, to be sure, a consideration, but fortunately for life all the winter days out here are not so magnificently ordered as this, except at dawn each morning, and at dusk, and at midnight when the skies are set with stars.

But there is a largeness to the quality of country life, a freshness and splendor as constant as the horizon and a very part of it.

Take a day anywhere in the year: that day in March--the day of the first frogs, when spring and winter meet; or that day in the fall--the day of the first frost, when autumn and winter meet; or that day in August--the day of the full-blown goldenrod, when summer and autumn meet--_these_, together with the days of June, and more especially that particular day in June when you can't tell earth from heaven, when everything is life and love and song, and the very turtles of the pond are moved from their lily-pads to wander the upland slopes to lay--the day when spring and summer meet!

Or if these seem rare days, try again anywhere in the calendar from the rainy day in February when the thaw begins to Indian summer and the day of floating thistledown, and the cruising fleets of wild lettuce and silky-sailed fireweed on the golden air. The big soft clouds are sailing their wider sea; the sweet sunshine, the lesser winds, the chickadees and kinglets linger with you in your sheltered hollow against the hill--you and they for yet a little slumber, a little sleep before there breaks upon you the wrath of the North.

But is this sweet, slumberous, half-melancholy day any nearer perfect than that day when

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky
Arrives the snow"--

or the blizzard?

But going back to town, as she intimated, concerns the children quite as much as me. They travel eight miles a day to get to school, part of it on foot and part of it by street car--and were absent one day last year when the telephone wires were down and we thought there would be no school because of the snow. They might not have missed that one day had we been in the city, and I must think of that when it comes time to go back. There is room for them in the city to improve in spelling and penmanship too, vastly to improve. But they could n't have half so much fun there as here, nor half so many things to do, simple, healthful, homely, interesting things to do, as good for them as books and food and sleep--these last things to be had here, too, in great abundance.

What could take the place of the cow and hens in the city? The hens are Mansie's (he is the oldest) and the cow is mine. But night after night last winter I would climb the Hill to see the barn lighted, and in the shadowy stall two little human figures--one squat on an upturned bucket milking, his milk-pail, too large to be held between his knees, lodged perilously under the cow upon a half-peck measure; the other little human figure quietly holding the cow's tail.

No head is turned; not a squeeze is missed--this is _business_ here in the stall,--but as the car stops behind the scene, Babe calls--

"Hello, Father!"

"Hello, Babe!"

"Three teats done," calls Mansie, his head down, butting into the old cow's flank. "You go right in, we 'll be there. She has n't kicked but once!"

Perhaps that is n't a good thing for those two little boys to do--watering, feeding, brushing, milking the cow on a winter night in order to save me--and loving to! Perhaps that is n't a good thing for me to see them doing, as I get home from the city on a winter night!

But I am a sentimentalist and not proof at all against two little boys milking, who are liable to fall into the pail.

Meantime the two middlers had shoveled out the road down to the mail-box on the street so that I ran up on bare earth, the very wheels of the car conscious of the love behind the shovels, of the speed and energy it took to get the long job done before I should arrive.

"How did she come up?" calls Beebum as he opens the house door for me, his cheeks still glowing with the cold and exercise.

"Did we give you wide enough swing at the bend?" cries Bitsie, seizing the bag of bananas.

"Oh, we sailed up--took that curve like a bird--didn't need chains--just like a boulevard right into the barn!"

"It's a fearful night out, is n't it?" she says, taking both of my hands in hers, a touch of awe, a note of thankfulness in her voice.

"Bad night in Boston!" I exclaim. "Trains late, cars stalled--streets blocked with snow. I 'm mighty glad to be out here a night like this."

"Woof! Woof!"--And Babe and Pup are at the kitchen door with the pail of milk, shaking themselves free from snow.

"Where is Mansie?" his mother asks.

"He just ran down to have a last look at his chickens."

We sit down to dinner, but Mansie does n't come. The wind whistles outside, the snow sweeps up against the windows,--the night grows wilder and fiercer.

"Why doesn't Mansie come?" his mother asks, looking at me.

"Oh, he can't shut the hen-house doors, for the snow. He 'll be here in a moment."

The meal goes on.

"Will you go out and see what is the matter with the child?" she asks, the look of anxiety changing to one of alarm on her face.

As I am rising there is a racket in the cellar and the child soon comes blinking into the lighted dining-room, his hair dusty with snow, his cheeks blazing, his eyes afire. He slips into his place with just a hint of apology about him and reaches for his cup of fresh, warm milk.

He is twelve years old.

"What does this mean, Mansie?" she says.

"Nothing."

"You are late for dinner. And who knows what had happened to you out there in the trees a night like this. What were you doing?"

"Shutting up the chickens."

"But you did shut them up early in the afternoon."

"Yes, mother."

"Well?"

"It's awful cold, mother!"

"Yes?"

"They might freeze!"

"Yes?"

"Specially those little ones."

"Yes, I know, but what took you so long?"

"I did n't want 'em to freeze."

"Yes?"

"So I took a little one and put it on the roost in between two big hens--a little one and a big one, a little one and a big one, to keep the little ones warm; and it took a lot of time."

"Will you have another cup of warm milk?" she asks, pouring him more from the pitcher, doing very well with her lips and eyes, it seemed to me, considering how she ran the cup over.

Shall I take them back to the city for the winter--away from their chickens, and cow and dog and pig and work-bench and haymow and fireside, and the open air and their wild neighbors and the wilder nights that I remember as a child?

"There it a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea--and music in its roar."

Once they have known all of this I can take them into town and not spoil the poet in them.

"Make our boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better than games. Keep him in the open air. Above all, you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. The great God has called me. Take comfort in that I die in peace with the world and myself and not afraid"--from the last letter of Captain Scott to his wife, as he lay watching the approach of death in the Antarctic cold. His own end was nigh, but the infant son, in whose life he should never take a father's part, what should be his last word for him?

"Make our boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better than games. Keep him in the open air."

Those are solemn words, and they carry a message of deep significance. I have watched my own boys; I recall my own boyhood; and I believe the words are true. So thoroughly do I believe in the physical and moral value of the outdoors for children, the open fields and woods, that before my children were all born I brought them here into the country. Here they shall grow as the weeds and flowers grow, and in the same fields with them; here they shall play as the young foxes and woodchucks play, and on the same bushy hillsides with them--summer and winter.

Games are natural and good. It is a stick of a boy who won't be "it." But there are better things than games, more lasting, more developing, more educating. Kittens and puppies and children play; but children should have, and may have, other and better things to do than puppies and kittens can do; for they are not going to grow up into dogs and cats.

Once awaken a love for the woods in the heart of a child, and something has passed into him that the evil days, when they come, shall have to reckon with. Let me take my children into the country to live, if I can. Or if I cannot, then let me take them on holidays, or, if it must be, on Sunday mornings with me, for a tramp.

I bless those Sunday-morning tramps to the Tumbling Dam Woods, to Sheppard's Mills, to Cubby Hollow, to Cohansey Creek Meadows, that I was taken upon as a lad of twelve. We would start out early, and deep in the woods, or by some pond or stream, or out upon the wide meadows, we would wait, and watch the ways of wild things--the little marsh wrens bubbling in the calamus and cattails, the young minks at play, the big pond turtles on their sunning logs--these and more, a multitude more. Here we would eat our crackers and the wild berries or buds that we could find, and with the sunset turn back toward home.

We saw this and that, single deep impressions, that I shall always remember. But better than any single sight, any sweet sound or smell, was the sense of companionship with my human guide, and the sense that I loved

"not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews."

If we _do_ move into town this winter, it won't be because the boys wish to go.

[The end]
Dallas Lore Sharp's essay: Going Back To Town

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