Essays of E. B. White (12 page)

Eventually, the pond opened up, the happy band wended its way down across the melting snows, and the breeding season was officially opened. My pond is visible from the house, but it is at quite a distance. I am not a voyeur and do not spend my time watching the sex antics of geese or anything else. But I try to keep reasonably well posted on all the creatures around the place, and it was apparent that the young gander was not allowed by his foster father to enjoy the privileges of the pond and that the old gander's attentions continued to be directed to just one of the young geese. I shall call her Liz to make this tale easier to tell.

Both geese were soon laying. Liz made her nest in the barn cellar; her sister, Apathy, made hers in the tie-ups on the main floor of the barn. It was the end of April or the beginning of May. Still awfully cold—a reluctant spring.

Apathy laid three eggs, then quit. I marked them with a pencil and left them for the time being in the nest she had constructed. I made a mental note that they were infertile. Liz, unlike her sister, went right on laying, and became a laying fool. She dallied each morning at the pond with her foster father, and she laid and laid and laid, like a commercial hen. I dutifully marked the eggs as they arrived—1, 2, 3, and so on. When she had accumulated a clutch of fifteen, I decided she had all she could cover. From then on, I took to removing the oldest egg from the nest each time a new egg was deposited. I also removed Apathy's three eggs from
her
nest, discarded them, and began substituting the purloined eggs from the barn cellar—the ones that rightfully belonged to Liz. Thus I gradually contrived to assemble a nest of fertile eggs for each bird, all of them laid by the fanatical Liz.

During the last week in May, Apathy, having produced only three eggs of her own but having acquired ten through the kind offices of her sister and me, became broody and began to sit. Liz, with a tally of twenty-five eggs, ten of them stolen, showed not the slightest desire to sit. Laying was her thing. She laid and laid, while the other goose sat and sat. The old gander, marveling at what he had wrought, showed a great deal of interest in both nests. The young gander was impressed but subdued. I continued to remove the early eggs from Liz's nest, holding her to a clutch of fifteen and discarding the extras. In late June, having produced forty-one eggs, ten of which were under Apathy, she at last sat down.

I had marked Apathy's hatching date on my desk calendar. On the night before the goslings were due to arrive, when I made my rounds before going to bed, I looked in on her. She hissed, as usual, and ran her neck out. When I shone my light at her, two tiny green heads were visible, thrusting their way through her feathers. The goslings were here—a few hours ahead of schedule. My heart leapt up. Outside, in the barnyard, both ganders stood vigil. They knew very well what was up: ganders take an enormous interest in family affairs and are deeply impressed by the miracle of the egg-that-becomes-goose. I shut the door against them and went to bed.

Next morning, Sunday, I rose early and went straight to the barn to see what the night had brought. Apathy was sitting quietly while five goslings teetered about on the slopes of the nest. One of them, as I watched, strayed from the others, and, not being able to find his way back, began sending out cries for help. They were the kind of distress signal any anxious father would instantly respond to. Suddenly, I heard sounds of a rumble outside in the barnyard where the ganders were—loud sounds of scuffling. I ran out. A fierce fight was in progress—it was no mere skirmish, it was the real thing. The young gander had grabbed the old one by the stern, his white head buried in feathers right where it would hurt the most, and was running him around the yard, punishing him at every turn—thrusting him on ahead and beating him unmercifully with his wings. It was an awesome sight, these two great male birds locked in combat, slugging it out—not for the favors of a female but for the dubious privilege of assuming the responsibilities of parenthood. The young male had suffered all spring the indignities of a restricted life at the pond; now he had turned, at last, against the old one, as though to get even. Round and round, over rocks and through weeds, they raced, struggling and tripping, the old one in full retreat and in apparent pain. It was a beautiful late–June morning, with fair-weather clouds and a light wind going, the grasses long in the orchard—the kind of morning that always carries for me overtones of summer sadness, I don't know why. Overhead, three swallows circled at low altitude, pursuing one white feather, the coveted trophy of nesting time. They were like three tiny fighter planes giving air support to the battle that raged below. For a moment, I thought of climbing the fence and trying to separate the combatants, but instead I just watched. The engagement was soon over. Plunging desperately down the lane, the old gander sank to the ground. The young one let go, turned, and walked back, screaming in triumph, to the door behind which his newly won family were waiting: a strange family indeed—the sister who was not even the mother of the babies, and the babies who were not even his own get.

When I was sure the fight was over, I climbed the fence and closed the barnyard gate, effectively separating victor from vanquished. The old gander had risen to his feet. He was in almost the same spot in the lane where his first wife had died mysteriously more than a year ago. I watched as he threaded his way slowly down the narrow path between clumps of thistles and daisies. His head was barely visible above the grasses, but his broken spirit was plain to any eye. When he reached the pasture bars, he hesitated, then painfully squatted and eased himself under the bottom bar and into the pasture, where he sat down on the cropped sward in the bright sun. I felt very deeply his sorrow and his defeat. As things go in the animal kingdom, he is about my age, and when he lowered himself to creep under the bar, I could feel in my own bones his pain at bending down so far. Two hours later, he was still sitting there, the sun by this time quite hot. I had seen his likes often enough on the benches of the treeless main street of a Florida city—spent old males, motionless in the glare of the day.

Toward the end of the morning, he walked back up the lane as far as the gate, and there he stood all afternoon, his head and orange bill looking like the head of a great snake. The goose and her goslings had emerged into the barnyard. Through the space between the boards of the gate, the old fellow watched the enchanting scene: the goslings taking their frequent drinks of water, climbing in and out of the shallow pan for their first swim, closely guarded by the handsome young gander, shepherded by the pretty young goose.

After supper, I went into the tie-ups and pulled the five remaining, unhatched eggs from the nest and thought about the five lifeless chicks inside the eggs—the unlucky ones, the ones that lacked what it takes to break out of an egg into the light of a fine June morning. I put the eggs in a basket and set the basket with some other miscellany consigned to the dump. I don't know anything sadder than a summer's day.

A
LLEN
C
OVE
, F
EBRUARY
8, 1975

On an afternoon in the spring of 1938, foreseeing a change in my life
, I rode the subway down to Cortlandt Street, visited Peter Henderson's seed store, and came away with a mixed order of flower and vegetable seeds. The bill was $19. Peter Henderson is long gone, and times have changed—but not the warm, receptive earth, yielding to the advances of the sun. Today, with so much wrong with the planet, with everyone discouraged and uneasy and some desperate, almost the only things that can dispel the gloom for me are the bright and fraudulent pictures in a seed catalogue and the glad cry that issues from a box of day-old chicks arriving on an April morning from the hatchery. Our 1975 orders went off in the mail three weeks ago. The seeds came to $67, up from $19. A baby chick this spring will cost me thirty-three cents, up five cents from the 1974 chick. Even so, there is hardly a better buy around: the seed, the exploded egg, the perennial promise that they hold. In the years that have intervened since 1938, we have not missed a springtime of this wild dreaming and scheming. We are hooked and are making no attempt to kick the habit.

I'm behind on my correspondence, and this letter is overdue. Quite aside from the mess my desk is in, everything else here in the East is in a mess, just as it is in other parts of the nation, and in all parts of the world. The strain has begun to show in people's faces. Events and portents swirl around all our heads in dazzling array and in great numbers. Oil. Unemployment. Nuclear power plants. The spruce budworm. The SST. Land use and zoning. The plight of the small hospital. Pollution. The supertanker. Windmills. Lead poisoning in the pottery. Passamaquoddy. Food stamps. The price of gas at the pump. The price of doughnuts in the store. The power of the Federal Government. The long shadow of the state. The fuel-adjustment additive. Breaking and entering. Drug abuse. Centralization. The disappearance of haddock. Russian trawlers. Arab sheikhs. It is all very confusing, makes one's head swim. Last November, the voters became so confused they forgot to elect a Republican or a Democrat for governor and elected instead an independent insurance man, James Longley, who is said to sleep only four hours a night, jogs at daylight, and summons people to his office at seven o'clock in the morning to start putting the state on a sound business basis. I met my pharmacist on the street the other day—he is a freshman member of the legislature. And when I asked him how he liked being up in Augusta he replied, “Love it.” Then, in a sentence that followed along naturally, he used the phrase “viable alternative,” and I marveled at how quickly he had learned the language of government. Longley likes the word “input” and on taking office accepted a $15,000 input to his salary. He has since declared his willingness to cancel it. It is all quite confusing, and sometimes scary.

But in many ways things are the same as they've always been, hereabouts. The February days lengthen, the light strengthens, the plow goes by in the night. Our woodpile, thanks to Henry Allen, who keeps disappearing into the woods mounted on a Cub tractor and towing a small trailer, has built to nine cords—mostly birch this year. When one of my hens prepares to lay an egg, she picks up a few shreds of nesting material and tosses them onto her back, as hens have been doing ever since the egg was invented. On subzero mornings, the vapor rises from the bay, obscuring Herriman Point. If the day is quiet and the sea calm, the scallop draggers move out to the fishing grounds to make their sweeps. The price of scallops is down from what it was a year ago. We get ours direct from Lawrence Cole, right off his boat. We buy a gallon, eat a mess, and freeze the rest. I'm not supposed to eat scallops, but I love the taste of cholesterol and can't leave them alone. Lawrence told me this is his forty-sixth year at it.

There was a wedding in town this winter. Walter Crockett, our master carpenter and cabinetmaker, got married at the age of ninety-three. He met his bride—a younger woman—in the nursing home where they had both gone to die: and, such is the power of love, they sprang from the home and are happily settled in Penobscot, keeping house. This, it seems to me, pretty well takes the wind out of Barbara Walters' sails. I heard her say on television that marriage, as we know it, is on the way out and will be gone by the year 2000. I didn't take much stock in that. Many of the remarks you hear on television are questionable, except on the Tarzan hour, which I never miss if I can help it. In the jungle world men have managed to create for themselves, with its gloomy wars, its smashed atom, its hair sprays that threaten the ozone layer, its balance of power, and its absence of any sensible and orderly way (except Kissinger) to settle the myriad things that need to be settled, Tarzan in his loincloth is the one person who seems at home in the environment, as he utters his wild cry and swings along on those old moss-covered docking lines. His speech nowadays is immaculate, and his rapport with animals has always been good. There is a little five-year-old girl in our town who can't tell time by the clock but knows instinctively when the hour of Tarzan is at hand. She runs to her grandmother and insists that the set be turned on so she can partake of the Weintraub delicatessen.

All sorts of queer and unexpected events have taken place since my last report from the East. In the nearby town of Blue Hill, ordinarily a quiet village, heavy machinery arrived three summers ago and began ripping the town to pieces, to make room for a new steel-and-concrete wing for the hospital and a sewage-treatment plant for the town, at the head of the harbor. The noise was awful. Month after month, a giant crane swept the sky, and ten-wheel trucks bearing the legend
WE MOVE THE EARTH
banged through the streets, hauling gravel and rubble from one spot and dumping them into another spot. The hospital was in a survival situation: unless its bed patients were moved from the original wooden building into fireproof quarters, Medicare payments would be cut off, and this would spell certain doom. The operation cost more than $2 million—a tremendous tab for so small a community. People baked pies, knit sweaters, put on auction sales, staged variety shows in the town hall, and dug into sagging pocketbooks. It was a near thing for a while, but it's over now: the wing is occupied. We have wall-to-wall carpeting in the corridors, parking space outside for a hundred cars, telephones by every bed, air conditioning, and a nurses' station that goes beep beep. Patients have a view of the harbor and a view of the sewage-treatment facility.

Meantime, over at Harborside on Cape Rosier, just above the beautiful little reversing falls of Goose Cove, a mining company called Callahan was busy. They dammed the falls, shutting out the tide, and dug a pit so deep you could look down and see China. The excavation greatly altered the appearance of Goose Cove without greatly enriching the community. The mining company soon milked the place dry of copper and zinc and got out, the way mining companies do. But nothing ever stands still around here: someone at Callahan must have taken a long last look at the salt water entering the abandoned pit from the open gate in the dam and thought, What a place to raise fish! In no time at all, the company banished minerals from its thoughts and stocked the pool with salmon. This enterprise promises to be a success. A young fellow named Bob Mant bought out Callahan in 1973, procured 800,000 Coho salmon eggs from the State of Washington, hatched the eggs in freshwater tanks, and then transferred the fingerlings into the pool, where they are now confined in large nylon nets, feeding on shrimp. Mant began to harvest his first crop last fall—100,000 Coho salmon. He cleans them and, with the help of another fellow, sells them for about a dollar and a quarter apiece to restaurants and markets around the state and as far west as Boston. One would assume that a salmon raised in a mine pit might easily contain as much mercury as a small thermometer. But the Goose Cove salmon have been studied by the University of Maine and by the State Department of Marine Resources and have been given a clean bill—“all metals negligible.” I ate two of the fish when I dined at a friend's house recently and they were delicious—delicate, like a brook trout. I'm a believer in mercury, anyway, and am curing my arthritis on a diet of fish and rice, on the advice of a Chinese doctor named Dong, who wrote a cookbook for arthritics. Many fish contain mercury, and I am proceeding on the assumption that it is the mercury, not the fish, that knocks the arthritis. A man has to have a few firm beliefs to cling to in these chancy times. A New York waiter once told me I should eat the skins of fishes in order to stay healthy, and he may have been right. (You eat grapes to ward off cancer.)