Essays of E. B. White (7 page)

There are two sides to a raccoon—the arboreal and the terrestrial. When a female coon is in the tree, caring for young, she is one thing. When she descends and steps off onto solid earth to prowl and hunt, she is quite another. In the tree she seems dainty and charming; the circles under her eyes make her look slightly dissipated and deserving of sympathy. The moment she hits the ground, all this changes; she seems predatory, sinister, and as close to evil as anything in Nature (which contains no evil) can be. If I were an Indian, naming animals, I would call the raccoon He Who Has the Perpetual Hangover. This morning, conditions inside the hole are probably unbearable. The kittens are quite big now, the sun is hot, and the hole is none too roomy anyway—it's nothing but a flicker hole that time has enlarged. So she has emerged, to lie in full view on the horizontal limb just under her doorway. Three of her four legs are draped lifelessly over the limb, the fourth being held in reserve to hang on with. Her coat is rough, after the night of hunting. In this state she presents a picture of utter exhaustion and misery, unaccompanied by remorse. On the rare occasions when I have done a little hunting myself at night, we sleep it off together, she on her pallet, I on mine, and I take comfort in her nearness and in our common suffering.

I guess I have watched my coon descend the tree a hundred times; even so, I never miss a performance if I can help it. It has a ritualistic quality, and I know every motion, as a ballet enthusiast knows every motion of his favorite dance. The secret of its enchantment is the way it employs the failing light, so that when the descent begins, the performer is clearly visible and is a part of day, and when, ten or fifteen minutes later, the descent is complete and the coon removes the last paw from the tree and takes the first step away, groundborne, she is almost indecipherable and is a part of the shadows and the night. The going down of the sun and the going down of the coon are interrelated phenomena: a man is lucky indeed who lives where sunset and coonset are visible from the same window.

The descent is prefaced by a thorough scrub-up. The coon sits on her high perch, undisturbed by motorcars passing on the road below, and gives herself a complete going over. This is catlike in its movements. She works at the tail until it is well bushed out and all six rings show to advantage. She washes leg and foot and claw, sometimes grabbing a hind paw with a front paw and pulling it closer. She washes her face the way a cat does, and she rinses and sterilizes her nipples. The whole operation takes five to fifteen minutes, according to how hungry she is and according to the strength of the light, the state of the world below the tree, and the mood and age of the kittens within the hole. If the kittens are young and quiet, and the world is young and still, she finishes her bath without delay and begins her downward journey. If the kittens are restless, she may return and give them another feeding. If they are well grown and anxious to escape (as they are at this point in June), she hangs around in an agony of indecision. When a small head appears in the opening, she seizes it in her jaws and rams it back inside. Finally, like a mother with no baby-sitter and a firm date at the theater, she takes her leave, regretfully, hesitantly. Sometimes, after she has made it halfway down the tree, if she hears a stirring in the nursery she hustles back up to have another look around.

A coon comes down a tree headfirst for most of the way. When she gets within about six feet of the ground, she reverses herself, allowing her hind end to swing slowly downward. She then finishes the descent tailfirst; when, at last, she comes to earth, it is a hind foot that touches down. It touches down as cautiously as though this were the first contact ever made by a mammal with the flat world. The coon doesn't just let go of the tree and drop to the ground, as a monkey or a boy might. She steps off onto my lawn as though in slow motion—first one hind paw, then the other hind paw, then a second's delay when she stands erect, her two front paws still in place, as though the tree were her partner in the dance. Finally, she goes down on all fours and strides slowly off, her slender front paws reaching ahead of her to the limit, like the hands of an experienced swimmer.

I have often wondered why the coon reverses herself, starting headfirst, ending tailfirst. I believe it is because although it comes naturally to her to descend headfirst, she doesn't want to arrive on the ground in that posture, lest an enemy appear suddenly and catch her at a disadvantage. As it is, she can dodge back up without unwinding herself if a dog or a man should appear.

Because she is a lover of sweet corn, the economic status of my raccoon is precarious. I could shoot her dead with a .22 any time I cared to. She will take my corn in season, and for every ear she eats she will ruin five others, testing them for flavor and ripeness. But in the country a man has to weigh everything against everything else, balance his pleasures and indulgences one against another. I find that I can't shoot this coon, and I continue to plant corn—some for her, what's left for me and mine—surrounding the patch with all sorts of coon baffles. It is an arrangement that works out well enough. I am sure of one thing: I like the taste of corn, but I like the nearness of coon even better, and I cannot recall ever getting the satisfaction from eating an ear of corn that I get from watching a raccoon come down a tree just at the edge of dark.

Today I've been rereading a cheerful forecast for the coming century, prepared by some farsighted professors at the California Institute of Technology, and published not long ago in the
Times.
Man, it would appear, is standing at the gateway to a new era of civilization. Technology will be king. Everything man needs (the report says) is at hand. All we require is air, sea water, ordinary rock, and sunlight. The population of the earth will increase and multiply, but that'll be no problem—the granite of the earth's crust contains enough uranium and thorium to supply an abundance of power for everybody. If we just pound rock, we're sitting pretty.

It is a splendid vision: technology the king, Jayne Mansfield the queen. (It is also the same old conflict.) Right in the middle of the forecast, the professors paused long enough to let drop a footnote. Their prediction, they said, applies
only
if world catastrophe is avoided. At any rate, the civilization at whose gateway I am said to be standing will pose one rather acute problem for me:
What position am I going to take in the matter of rock?
I have taken my stand on raccoon; now I have to take my stand on rock. These acres on which I live are well supplied and underlaid with rock. The pasture is full of granite, the vegetable garden has some splendid rocks in it, the foundation of the house is granite, the doorstone is granite, there is a granite outcropping in the lawn where the whippoorwill comes to sit and repeat himself in the hour before daybreak, several of the fields are ledgy in places, and if you wander into the woods, you come on old stone walls made of tons and tons of rock. A ton of granite, according to my advices, contains about four grams of uranium and twelve grams of thorium. Is my next move to extract this stuff, or can I leave my stones be? I assume that if I am to dwell contentedly and adjust to the new era, I must pick the uranium and thorium from my rocks and convert them into power, but I'm not sure I am ready to fall in with any such harebrained scheme. The only time I ever fooled with rocks in a big way on this place, I simply made a lot of noise, created a memorable era of confusion, and ended up about where I started. (I got fooling with rocks because I had bought a cow, and in the country one thing leads to another.) The only place for a nuclear reactor here would be the brooder house, and I need the brooder house for my chicks. If the modern way to get electric power to run my brooder stove is to tap the energy in my pasture rocks, I may very well consider returning to the old natural method of raising chicks, using a couple of broody hens—in which case I am standing at the gateway to the long past rather than the long future. There is one big boulder down in the pasture woods where I sometimes go to sit when I am lonely or sick or melancholy or disenchanted or frightened, and in combination with sweet fern, juniper, and bayberry this old rock has a remarkably restorative effect on me. I'm not sure but that this is the true energy, the real source of man's strength. I'm not sure rocks would work out so well for me if I were to drag them up out of the pasture and pry the fissionable materials out of them.

I am not convinced that atomic energy, which is currently said to be man's best hope for a better life, is his best hope at all, or even a good bet. I am not sure energy is his basic problem, although the weight of opinion is against me. I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority. Almost every bulletin I receive from my county agent is full of wild schemes for boxing Nature's ears and throwing dust in her eyes, and the last issue of the
Rural New-Yorker
contained a tiny item saying that poultrymen had “volunteered” to quit feeding diphenyl-para-phenylene-diamine to chickens, because it can cause illness in “persons”—one of the tardiest pieces of volunteer activity I ever heard of. Yesterday, it was reported in the news that atomic radiation is cumulative and that no matter how small the dose, it harms the person receiving it and all his descendants. Thus, a lifetime of dental X-rays and other familiar bombardments and fallouts may finally spell not better teeth and better medicine but no teeth and no medicine and a chicken dinner may become just another word for bellyache. The raccoon, for all her limitations, seems to me better adjusted to life on earth than men are: she has never taken a tranquilizing pill, has never been X-rayed to see whether she is going to have twins, has never added DPPD to the broiler mash, and is not out at night looking for thorium in rocks. She is out looking for frogs in the pond.

Dr. Fritz Zwicky, the astrophysicist, has examined the confused situation on this planet, and his suggestion is that we create one hundred
new
planets. Zwicky wants to scoop up portions of Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter and graft them onto smaller planets, then change the orbits of these enlarged bodies to make their course around the sun roughly comparable to that of our earth. This is a bold, plucky move, but I would prefer to wait until the inhabitants of
this
planet have learned to live in political units that are not secret societies and until the pens on the writing desks in banks are not chained to the counter. Here we are, busily preparing ourselves for a war already described as “unthinkable,” bombarding our bodies with gamma rays that everybody admits are a genetical hazard, spying on each other, rewarding people on quiz programs with a hundred thousand dollars for knowing how to spell “cat,” and Zwicky wants to make a hundred
new
worlds. Maybe he gained confidence to go ahead when he heard that in Florida they had succeeded in putting an elephant on water skis. Any race of creatures that can put an elephant on water skis is presumably ready to construct new worlds.

Dr. Vannervar Bush, who is in a far better position to discuss science and progress than I am, once said, “Man may, indeed, have evolved from the primordial ooze, and this may be accepted as good if we assume that it is good to have complex life on earth, but this again is an arbitrary assumption.” Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions.

I have made a few private tests of my own, and my findings differ somewhat from those of the Cal Tech men. We have two stoves in our kitchen here in Maine—a big black iron stove that burns wood and a small white electric stove that draws its strength from the Bangor Hydro-Electric Company. We use both. One represents the past, the other represents the future. If we had to give up one in favor of the other and cook on just one stove, there isn't the slightest question in anybody's mind in my household which is the one we'd keep. It would be the big black Home Crawford 8–20, made by Walker & Pratt, with its woodbox that has to be filled with wood, its water tank that has to be replenished with water, its ashpan that has to be emptied of ashes, its flue pipe that has to be renewed when it gets rusty, its grates that need freeing when they get clogged, and all its other foibles and deficiencies. We would choose this stove because of the quality of its heat, the scope of its talents, the warmth of its nature (the place where you dry the sneakers, the place where the small dog crawls underneath to take the chill off, the companionable sounds it gives forth on cool nights in fall and on zero mornings in winter). The electric stove is useful in its own way, and makes a good complementary unit, but it is as cold and aseptic as a doctor's examining table, and I can't imagine our kitchen if it were the core of our activity.

The American kitchen has come a long way, and it has a long way to return before it gets to be a good room again. Last fall, the American Society of Industrial Designers met in Washington and kicked the kitchen around a bit. One of the speakers, I remember, said that we will soon get to the point of eating “simply and fast.” He said we would push a button and peas would appear on a paper plate. No preparation at all.

It really comes down to what a man wants from a plate of peas, and to what peas have it in their power to give. I'm not much of an eater, but I get a certain amount of nourishment out of a seed catalogue on a winter's evening, and I like to help stretch the hen wire along the rows of young peas on a fine morning in June, and I feel better if I set around and help with the shelling of peas in July. This is all a part of the pageantry of peas, if you happen to like peas. Our peas didn't get planted until May 9 this spring—about three weeks later than the normal planting time. I shall hardly know what day in July to push the button and watch them roll out onto the paper plate.