There are big farms and little farms, flat farms and accordion-pleated farms, fat ones and hungry ones, wild and tame ones, high and low, hard and easy. But this is the log of the most peculiar farm on this earth, for it is all these different farms rolled into one, and wider than the sum of them all. It overflows both space and time. It has one foot in the past and the other in the future, and its present is the combination of the two.
The farmhouse on this farm dates back to the time when the farm was round in shape and girdled the globe in ships made out of its pasture pines, when its cows and pigs and hens had to be sailors on the seven seas and all the gulfs. Its mantels and doors were made by ships' carpenters copying Georgian models overseas; the cupola on its barn is out of China and the pagodas there; its portico is from London of the eighteenth century; its dishes and pictures and bric-a-brac are from the world's four corners. It is a house deeprooted in history, and its rooms hold two hundred years of American culture.
This farm is high hilts and deep valleys, coves and cliffs, a snug harbor and a high headland or two visible far out at sea. It is ledges and windy junipers and a few garden patches the size of a bed quilt. It is spruce and maple woods and a handful of steep hayfields where a horse has to be a good sailor to navigate a hayrack home. This farm is hawks as well as hens, deer and moose as well as cows and sheep. It has a bit of rich soil but more that only wild! roses can get nourishment from. It is hungry and lean as a rake, and singing with fatness. And it doesn't stop at the water's edge, but goes on out under the sea; and its gardens are cultivated not only by harrows and plows, but also by nets and clam hoes and hedges of weirs.
This is the kind of farm where apples come home in baskets made to carry clams, and the red fruit shines through Slats Where sometimes blue clams show their fluted shells. Us popcorn and potatoes often come home by boat, the farm is so indented by the tides. The plow is turned over on the beach at the furrow's end. It is the sort of farm where the barefoot boy has salt between his toes.
Find a farm where the bean rows end in high tide and Scalloped potato leaves hang over thatch where crinkled mussels show, where cornstalks in arch down to a lighthouse and the sea, and you will find this particular farm. There is only one place on earth where such farms grow, where men arc sailors as well as sowers, and the very boys and cows are amphibious. It is where a little farm swells twice its size at the ebb of the tide and takes in crabs and Quahaugs along with its garden “sass.” It is where boys mix swimming with sawing wood, where red clover and rockweed mix on highrun tides, and where wild geese, following the coasts of a spring world, honk above tame stay-at-home geese. It is where a slim fawn rubs noses with a spring lamb and a web horned moose comes home along a bay where web-footed farmers pull lobster traps between pickling a mess of green beans and a mess of peas.
This farm grows only in Maine, along an irregular coast twenty-five hundred miles long and scalloped deep enough by the sea so that the farm can multiply itself many times into big-small farms that face one another across long narrow reaches of salt water.
A great many different kinds of work go on here, and many dishes of wide flavors are served up at the table. There is that variety of food and occupation which is another name for the salt of the earth, for life.
So let's follow the salty, sweet life of this farm through a year's spicy length, from New Year's to the year's white end. And let's follow it in the book which this farm made famous for over a century, a book of wind and weather, of long voyages and dark departures and bright home-comings from the world's ends, the book of latitudes and longitudes, of sails, and sea legs and sagas of cargoes—a ship's log. For this farm is still in its ways of life a seagoing farm, and only a ship's log will do.
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