Part 19

This must be the direction of the new movement for the saving of our natural resources--this roundabout road of education. Few laws can be enacted, fewer still enforced, without the help of an awakened public conscience; and a public conscience, for legislative purposes, is nothing more than a thorough understanding of the facts. As a nation, we need a popular and a thorough education in ornithology, entomology, forestry, and farming, and in the science and morality of corporation rights in public lands. We want sectionally, by belts or states, a scientific training for our specialty, as the shell-fish farmer of the Massachusetts coast is being scientifically trained in clams. These state biologists have brought the clam men from the ends of the shore together; they have plotted and mapped the mollusk territory; they have made a science of clam-culture; they have made an industry of clam-digging; and to the clam-digger they are giving dignity and a sense of security that make him respect himself and his neighbor’s clams--this last item being a most important change in the clam-farm outlook.

With so much done, the next work--framing new laws to take the place of the old fishing laws--should be a simple matter. Such a procedure will be slow, yet it is still the only logical and effective one. Let the clam-digger know that he can raise clams; let New England know that the forests on her mountains must be saved, and within a twelvemonth the necessary bills would be passed. So with the birds, the fish, the coal of Alaska, and every other asset of our national wealth. The nation-wide work of this saving movement will first be educative, even by way of scandals in the Cabinet. We shall hasten very slowly to Congress and the legislatures with our laws. The clam-flat is typical of all our multitudinous wealth; the clam-digger is typical of all of us who cut, or mine, or reap, or take our livings, in any way, directly from the hands of Nature; and the lesson of the clam farm will apply the country over.

We have been a nation of wasters, spoiled and made prodigal by over-easy riches; we have demanded our inheritance all at once, spent it, and as a result we are already beginning to want--at least for clams. At this moment there are not enough clams to go round, so that the market-man sticks the end of a rubber hose into his tub of dark, salty, fresh-shucked clams, and soaks them; soaks them with fresh water out of rusty iron pipes, soaks them, and swells them, whitens them, bloats them, sells them--ghastly corpses, husks, that we would fain fill our soup-bowls with; for we are hungry, and must be fed, and there are not enough of the unsoaked clams for a bowl around.

But there shall be. With the coming of the clam farm there shall be clams enough, and oysters and scallops; for the whole mollusk industry, in every flat and bar and cove of the country, shall take to itself a new interest, and vastly larger proportions. Then shall a measure of scallops be sold for a quarter, and two measures of clams for a quarter, and nothing, any more, be soaked.

For there is nothing difficult about growing clams, nothing half so difficult and expensive as growing corn or cabbage. In fact, the clam farm offers most remarkable opportunities, although the bid, it must be confessed, is pretty plainly to one’s love of ease and one’s willing dependence. To begin with, the clam farm is self-working, ploughed, harrowed, rolled, and fertilized by the tides of the sea; the farmer only sowing the seed and digging the crop. Sometimes even the seed is sown for him by the hands of the tide; but only on those flats that lie close to some natural breeding-bar, where the currents, gathering up the tiny floating “spats,” and carrying them swiftly on the flood, broadcast them over the sand as the tide recedes. While this cannot happen generally, still the clam-farmer has a second distinct advantage in having his seed, if not actually sown for him, at least grown, and caught for him on these natural breeding-bars, in such quantities that he need only sweep it up and cradle it, as he might winnow grain from a threshing floor. In Plum Island Sound there is such a bar, where it seems that Nature, in expectation of the coming clam farm, had arranged the soil of the bar and the tidal currents for a natural set of clam-spats to supply the entire state with its yearly stock of seed.

With all of this there is little of romance about a clam farm, and nothing at all spectacular about its financial returns. For clams are clams, whereas cobalt and rubber and wheat, and even squabs and ginseng roots, are different,--according to the advertisements. The inducements of the clam farm are not sufficient to cause the prosperous Middle-West farmer to sell out and come East, as he has been selling out and going on to the farther West, for its larger, cheaper farms, and bigger crops. Farming, mining, lumbering, whatever we have had to do, in fact, directly with Nature, has been for us, thus far, a speculation and a gamble. Earnings have been out of all proportion to investments, excessive, abnormal. We do not earn, we strike it rich; and we have struck it rich so long in this vast rich land, that the strike has lost its element of luck, being now the expected thing, which, failing to happen, we sell out and move on to the farthest West, where there is still a land of chance. But that land is passing, and with it is passing the lucky strike. The day is approaching when a man will pay for a western farm what he now pays for an eastern farm--the actual market value, based upon what the land, in expert hands, can be made yearly to yield. Values will rise to an even, normal level; earnings will settle to the same level; and the clam farm of the coast and the stock farm of the prairie will yield alike--a living; and if, when that day comes, there is no more “Promised Land” for the American, it will be because we have crossed over, and possessed the land, and divided it among us for an inheritance.

When life shall mean a living, and not a dress-parade, or an automobile, or a flying-machine, then the clam farm, with its two or three acres of flats, will be farm enough, and its average maximum yield, of four hundred and fifty dollars an acre, will be profits enough. For the clammer’s outfit is simple,--a small boat, two clam-diggers, four clam-baskets, and his hip-boots, the total costing thirty dollars.

The old milk farm here under the hill below me, with its tumbling barn and its ninety acres of desolation, was sold not long ago for six thousand dollars. The milkman will make more money than the clam man, but he will have no more. The milk farm is a larger undertaking, calling for a larger type of man, and developing larger qualities of soul, perhaps, than could ever be dug up with a piddling clam-hoe out of the soft sea-fattened flats. But that is a question of men, not of farms. We must have clams; somebody must dig clams; and matters of the spirit all aside, reckoned simply as a small business, clam-farming offers a sure living, a free, independent, healthful, outdoor living--and hence an ample living--to thousands of men who may lack the capital, or the capabilities, or, indeed, the time for the larger undertakings. And viewed as the least part of the coming shell-fish industry, and this in turn as a smallest part of the coming national industry, due to our reclaiming, restocking, and conserving, and wise leasing, the clam farm becomes a type, a promise; it becomes the shore of a new country, a larger, richer, longer-lasting country than our pioneer fathers found here.

For behold the clam crop how it grows!--precisely like any other crop, in the summer, or more exactly, from about the first of May to the first of December; and the growth is very rapid, a seed-clam an inch long at the May planting, developing in some localities (as in the Essex and Ipswich rivers) into a marketable clam, three inches long by December. This is an increase in volume of about nine hundred per cent. The little spats, scattered broadcast over the flat, burrow with the first tide into the sand, where with each returning tide they open their mouths, like young birds, for their meal of diatoms brought in by the never-failing sea. Thus they feed twice a day, with never too much water, with never a fear of drouth, until they are grown fat for the clammer’s basket.

If, heretofore, John Burroughs among the uncertainties of his vineyard could sing,--

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,--

surely now the clammer in his cottage by the sea can sing, and all of us with him,--

The stars come nightly to the sky; The tidal wave comes to the sea; Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my own away from me.

THE COMMUTER’S THANKSGIVING

THE COMMUTER’S THANKSGIVING

The cottages are closed; the summer people have gone back to the city; only the farmers and the commuters--barnacled folk--remain as the summer tide recedes, fixed to the rocks of winter because they have grown fast. To live is to have two houses: a country house for the summer, a city house for the winter; to close one, and open the other; to change, to flit!

How different it used to be when I was a boy--away yonder in the days of farms and old-fashioned homes and old-time winters! Things were prepared for, were made something of, and enjoyed in those days--the “quiltings,” the “raisings,” the Thanksgivings! What getting ready there used to be--especially for the winter! for what wasn’t there to get ready! and how much of everything to get ready there used to be!

It began along in late October, continuing with more speed as the days shortened and hurried us into November. It must all be done by Thanksgiving Day--everything brought in, everything housed and battened down tight. The gray lowering clouds, the cold snap, the first flurry of snow, how they hastened and heartened the work! Thanksgiving found us ready for winter, indoors and out.

The hay-mows were full to the beams where the swallows built; the north and west sides of the barnyard were flanked with a deep wind-break of corn-fodder that ran on down the old worm-fence each side of the lane in yellow zigzag walls; the big wooden pump under the turn-o’-lane tree by the barn was bundled up and buttoned to the tip of its dripping nose; the bees by the currant bushes were double-hived, the strawberries mulched, the wood all split and piled, the cellar windows packed, and the storm-doors put on. The very cows had put on an extra coat, and turned their collars up about their ears; the turkeys had changed their roost from the ridge-pole of the corn-crib to the pearmain tree on the sunny side of the wagon-house; the squirrels had finished their bulky nests in the oaks; the muskrats of the lower pasture had completed their lodges; the whole farm--house, barn, fields, and wood-lot--had shuffled into its greatcoat, its muffler and muffetees, and settled comfortably down for the winter.

The old farmhouse was an invitation to winter. It looked its joy at the prospect of the coming cold. Low, weather-worn, mossy-shingled, secluded in its wayward garden of box and bleeding-hearts, sheltered by its tall pines, grape-vined, hop-vined, clung to by creeper and honeysuckle, it stood where the roads divided, halfway between everywhere, unpainted, unpretentious, as much a part of the landscape as the muskrat-lodge; and, like the lodge, roomy, warm, and hospitable.

Round at the back, under the wide, open shed, a door led into the kitchen, another led into the living-room, another into the storeroom, and two big, slanting double-doors, scoured and slippery with four generations of sliders, covered the cavernous way into the cellar. But they let the smell of apples up, as the garret door let the smell of sage and thyme come down; while from the door of the storeroom, mingling with the odor of apples and herbs, filling the whole house and all my early memories, came the smell of broom-corn, came the sound of grandfather’s loom.

Behind the stove in the kitchen, fresh-papered like the walls, stood the sweet-potato box (a sweet potato must be kept dry and warm), an ample, ten-barrel box, full of Jersey sweets that were sweet,--long, golden, syrupy potatoes, grown in the warm sandy soil of the “Jethro Piece.” Against the box stood the sea-chest, fresh with the same paper and piled with wood. There was another such chest in the living-room near the old fireplace, and still another in grandfather’s work-room behind the “tem-plate” stove.

But wood and warmth and sweet smells were not all. There was music also, the music of life, of young life and of old life--grandparents, grandchildren (about twenty-eight of the latter). There were seven of us alone--a girl at each end of the seven and one in the middle, which is Heaven’s own mystic number and divine arrangement. Thanksgiving always found us all at grandfather’s and brimming full of thanks.

That, of course, was long, long ago. Things are different nowadays. There are as many grandfathers, I suppose, as ever; but they don’t make brooms in the winter any more, and live on farms. They live in flats. The old farm with its open acres has become a city street; the generous old farmhouse has become a speaking-tube, kitchenette and bath--all the “modern conveniences”; the cows have evaporated into convenient cans of condensed “milk”; the ten-barrel box of potatoes has changed into a convenient ten-pound bag, the wood-pile into a convenient five-cent bundle of blocks tied up with a tarred string, the fireplace into a convenient moss-and-flame-painted gas-log, the seven children into one, or none, or into a convenient bull-terrier pup. Still, we may give thanks, for convenient as life has become to-day, it has not yet all gone to the dogs.

It is true, however, that there might be fewer dogs and more children, possibly; fewer flats and more farms; less canned milk (or whatever the paste is) and more real cream. Surely we might buy less and raise more, hire less and make more, travel less and see more, hear less and think more. Life might be quieter for some of us; profounder, perhaps, for others of us,--more inconvenient indeed, for all of us, and yet a thing to be thankful for.

It might, but most of us doubt it. It is not for the things we possess, but only for the things we have not, for the things we are relieved of, the things we escape,--for our conveniences,--that we are thankful nowadays. Life is summed up with us in negations. We tally our conveniences only, quick-detachable-tired, six-cylindered, seventy-horse-powered conveniences. To construct eighteen-million dollars’ worth of destruction in the shape of a gunboat! to lay out a beautiful road and then build a machine to “eat it”! to be allotted a span of time and study how to annihilate it! O Lord, we thank Thee that we have all the modern conveniences, from cucumbers at Christmas to a Celestial Crêche! Heaven is such a nice, fit, convenient place for our unborn children! God is their home. The angels take such gentle care of them! Besides, they are not so in the way there; and, if need be, we have the charity children and other people’s children; or we have the darling little sweet-faced bull-terrier pup.

For myself, I have never had a little cherub-faced bull-pup, but at this present writing I am helping to bring up our fourth baby, and I think I see the convenience of the pup. And I am only the father of the baby at that!

To begin with, you can buy a pup. You can send the stable-man after it. But not a baby. Not even the doctor can fetch it. The mother must go herself after her baby--to Heaven it may be; but she will carry it all the way through Hell before she brings it to the earth, this earth of sunlit fields and stormy skies, so evidently designed to make men of babies. A long perilous journey this, across a whole social season.