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.
Our log opens with the farm locked up with the bolts and hinges of winter's ice and snow, locked up hard and white. Some of its acres are sealed under the bay ice. The crows have buried themselves deep in the frosted hemlocks, and the gulls are hibernating along the frozen furrows of plowland. digging for roots and drowsy snails. The farm has shrunken and dwindled in size. The boats are all under boards or brush at the coves, and the farm's lanterns go no more to sea at night. Cut off from the tides under the bay ice. this farm, you would swear, has become just a usual farm, with boys bedding down big-eyed cows or piling up cordwood their father has cut in the echoing woods, with his axe sounding like four axes in the deep quiet of the afternoons. You would swear this farm is an ordinary farm with lights at its windows at four o'clock and girls of the ordinary farm kind playing with dolls or learning to crinkle up the crust at the edge of a pie under mother's watchful eye. So you would swear.
Yet you would he swearing a lot of lies, For this little farm is lots bigger than its breeches even when the year is bitter cold and blinding white. You look again, you look sharp, and you will see that there are more farmhouses than just the single old white one, hardly to be told from the drifted snow, on the hill.
There is housekeeping going on warmly elsewhere on this farm. There are two tiny houses full of life down on the wide creek where it empties into the sea. Uncle Timothy is in one house, and he fills it full with his vast body and his vast cloud of pipe smoke. The other house holds the well built father of this farm and four well-built boys, named after older but not keener fishermen than they are—Peter. Andrew, James, and John. The house is small, the man is large, and the four plump boys have hard work fitting into into it, but they do fit, as small excited boys can fit in together, when they have to.
Inside the house housekeeping is going full steam ahead—crackling twigs of spruce sending out sparkling heat, stories that bring the deep blue into a boy's eyes and make his wide ears wag, a bottle of bourbon that brings summer to .a stout man's cheeks and good nature to his mind in spite of small boys' knees and elbows in his back and sides, and acrid adventure is cooking on the tiny stove which is cooking the lot of them on only one side at a time.
The floor of the house is a funny one. One floorboard is up, five to six fishlines are hanging on a stick there, and lines go down into the deep green gloom of the cellar. That cellar is water, sweet at the ebb, salt at the flood, and good provisions are down there if you can hook them.
Every so often Peter straightens up like a spring, his arm goes up, and into the cozy twilight of the small house comes a silver sliver, curling and rankling with life. The father twitches at his mustache and twinkles with his eyes, and greases up the frying pan with a hunk of salt pork. Andrew bobs up with another smelt puffed out with golden spawn that shows through the delicate scales of the slender fish. James bobs up, another smelt. John bobs up, another. Like clockwork. Peter, Andrew, James, and John.
Don't think a farmer on such a lean little farm as this is incapable of four such spry sons so close together. He is often capable of six or seven. This farmer has still another son, just crawling, up at the house, and three daughters that fit fair in between the four young fishermen here. For this man is fed by a good portion of the ocean as well as by seven acres of corn and beans and potatoes and ten to twelve acres of hay.
The boys bob up continuously. The man tosses the smelts alive and curling in crescents into his hot fat, eyes. fins, innards, and all. The farmer smiles and tosses each son a smelt singed brown in pork fat. Peter. Andrew, James, and J0I1 Eanch boy downs his fish, head first, and returns to his line.
These male housekeepers are feasting themselves on the first fresh fish of the new year, caught through the ice, plump with the eggs of millions of would-be citizens of the sea Hut they are generous males; they take a basket full of the most delicate of all ocean's harvests to mother, the girls, at Uncle Timothy. For Uncle Timothy comes home with , his smelts in him. fried, and two hours before father and the boys. For Uncle Timothy, the uncle of January, is much too heavy for such light work as hand-lining fish that are only the length and breadth of his middle finger for anybody but himself. He is the hogshead of uncles, not much given motion in the winter save with his jaws. He is the hibernating, house uncle, and goes out only on the fairest of days when smelts are running or when he scents eels. He is the perennial bachelor among uncles, though widowed Aunt Ell has been hoping for years and has worried about Uncle Timothy's loneliness.
Mother makes a Scottish plaid of these fish that father and the boys bring home, crisscrossing them with strips of fat pork and baking them in a hot oven forty minutes till they come out in sheets and no one can say where land-nectar of pork leaves off and sea-nectar of fish begins. Uncle Timothy has to have one spiderful done in , butter for himself, as baking aggravates his loneliness, and he delicately downs each lost mother of smelts, holding her aloft by her tail and swallowing her down, head first, fins, guts, and all, until he has the whole spiderful safe under his generous belt—which he wears for looks only, since his voluminous pants are held up in the ancient tradition, by purple silk galluses with tucks in them.
Crops of fire arc being gathered outdoors on this white farm so seemingly quiet. Each morning the high woods ring with axes. White birches shiver and totter, spruces and popples thunder down. Piles of cord wood line the wood road, and the woodshed loses its light as the tiers rise above the windows, The back of the small boy John aches, and his mind grows blisters as he thinks of filling the wood box under the Old Farmer's Almanac, and under Uncle Timothy, all winter long. For the wood box is Untie Timothy's throne.
Inside, the kitchen hums. Mother is roasting the venison that ran among the family's hills last fall, battening the wild lean meat with blankets of salt pork as she turns it on the spit in the fireplace great-great-great-grind father built out of the farm's own clay. Ann and Jane and Molly, the girls of the house, are molding popcorn into balls, with hot butter and hot molasses, balls large enough to keep Uncle Timothy quiet for a half hour as he works them over under his awning of a mustache, tawny with molasses and the sunshine of fifty years and whitened by fifty January snows.
Every kind of fish is laid down in the cellar. This ice-locked, landbound, boatless farm still lives out of the deep cupboard of the sea. Folios of slack-salted cod and hake arc brought up now, soaked, steamed, boiled, and garnished with the traditional Coast white sauce, made of ten tablespoons of (lour worked into a half pound of melted butter, thickened with a quart of milk, sprinkled full of sections of three hard-boiled eggs. The soft ivory sauce is poured over the transfigured fish. Or folios of salt cod arc shredded up fine and chopped into equal parts of cold, boiled potatoes to make the Sabbath morning fish cakes, fried in pork fat, which are one of the foundations of New England virtue and an iron shield against the cold.
Down-cellar, too, there are big crocks of potted herring, laid down with cloves in vinegar, after being baked in a slow oven half a September day last year. And mackerel are salted away by the barrel, to come upstairs now, be soaked out, and make a fine meal.
Peter and Andrew make fine feather-stitching on the deep snow as they go to the smokehouse and bring back long sticks of smoked red herring, fitted open mouth to open mouth and spawny belly to belly, backtracking to the kitchen. Uncle Timothy dangles these “Kennebec turkeys” by their dried tails pinched under the stove cover, and pulls them out all aflame and filling the night with festive odors of herring flesh and popple wood, and he starts eating their filets with the fire and smoke still on them. and ignites his patriarchal mustache and has to extinguish it with his hands. And the scent of Uncle Timothy mingles with the scent of herring in the smoky room.
Out in the barn, between the high mows of hay, the keel of this year's Hampton dory is gleaming, and every minute the menfolks can spare from their eating they are fining the oak ribs to this backbone. Peter runs with the latest rib steaming hot from his mother's kettle and plumps it in Uncle Timothy's surprised lap, and his uncle has to do a Highland fling to cool his mid-section off.
Of course, a small farm like this one. so large in boys and girls, cannot be kept in by the snow that has drifted deep. Children run over the hills with their sleds hugged to them, thump down bellybunt on the crust, and go flashing down their steep farm and out a whole mile On the while Atlantic. They take their play hard, as country children do, they slide and skate serious-eyed and breathe out their breaths like pale scarves about their cheeks. They tunnel the drift back of the barn, make an igloo of it, build a fire under the translucent dome, and the smoke goes out over the white world and the smooth white sea.
The oldest boy gets up starry-eyed and has to be coaxed to cat his fried mush with maple sugar at breakfast, for he has fallen head over heels into his first love affair, and such things COOK hard at twelve. She is the daughter of the neighboring seagoing farm. Her name is Lucy. Peter has to haul her sled, with her on it, up all the hills on the coast and steer her down on all of them. He has callouses on his bands and where he sits. for his corduroys have scorched him there from miles on miles of tugging and walking.
School days, Peter has to go ahead over the reach of the Atlantic Ocean with his axe and try the ice to see if it is safe. The rest of the school children come after him, Indian file, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, in sequence of age, the pint sized youngest scholar at the tail, on their way to culture and the country school. All the children carry poles twice their height, to hold them up in the dark Atlantic in case they break through. And they all use the poles to vault over the evil, dark tide-rips of open water when they come to the edge of the mainland.
And for all the salt and smoked and frozen fish and flesh of deer, pig, and sreer, there is another fresh meat from the ocean. Uncle Timothy leads the boys out on the marsh that slants towards the deep. He is master magician at this harvesting. The boys follow the convex importance of his swinging seat. Timothy is outfitted like old Neptune himself, not only with the nine-inch mustache that rattles with icicles under his red nose, but with Neptune's trident, and one longer than the Greek god bore, with seven tines, nut three, and each barbed. Mow he knows where to poke his spear into the soggy, frozen mud is a mystery only he and Clod understand. He makes one or two trial pokes, but two are enough. At the second he trembles as he rams his barbed pole home and hisses through his fringe of icicles. “That feels good!” And when he comes up with his spear, two cels, surprised in an underground summer, squirm like mad in the cold air. The boys open the sack, and Uncle Timothy just pours aggrieved eels into it, thrust after thrust, until the sack bulges.
That night the supper is a fresh piece of the kingdom of heaven. It is the supper of the month and a supper in a million. Mother runs up both a kettleful of eels smothered in thick pork gravy and a frying pan of them, cut into sections and browned in deep pork fat, showing creamy at all their hatch marks. Uncle Timothy presides at the table and stows away seven of the biggest eels, section by section, with one of mother's cream o' tartar biscuits making a buffer between the sections of chevroned eel in his ample interior. The lengths of smothered eels suspended in the rich cream of pork gravy melt away in the boys' mouths, and they have only to blow out the bones. And the light of great joy outshines the evening's high lamp.
So under a small roof, the great crops of ocean, meats that run wild on the coast mountains, join the tame staples of potatoes and turnips and corn and pork and veal. Peter lies his young length and reads his book of January, Andersen's Tales, and loves the wind that mourns around the eaves of the house. The goose hangs high. Uncle Timothy sings fragile love songs to his sturdy guitar. Father bursts into stories that are like something out of Homer, for seagoing farmers are often this world's best storytellers. Boys sun their backs to the fire on the hearth where the birchwood crackles and explodes. Girls drift off to sleep in mother's arms. The windows are spattered all over with panting January stars.
And Uncle Timothy, between love songs and eels, rocks right across the room, brings up at the wall in surprise, gets up with his chair clasped CO bis person, goes back to his point of origin, spanks himself down, and starts right over again.