The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Sea and The Forest Smuggler's Cove, Maine The Greeks called it "the sounding sea." But it seems to me that any epithet applied to the ocean should imply...
...So we threw twice as many things as we needed into the car and started for the Northeast...
...A lobsterman standing in his dinghy, rowing forward with slow, dignified motion, is precisely right as a feature of the ocean's surface...
...The sea, on the other hand, cannot be destroyed...
...It was easy to cover the distance of some 500 miles in a single day...
...In fact, state and Federal governments have made things too smooth and easy...
...My host explained, however, that it was not Lon...
...Tiny pines, spruces and firs were sprouting like lovely flowers...
...This summer, the great decision was made...
...The tops, limbs and stumps were left in a hopeless, endless mess...
...But the stately forest which had ornamented the shore had been ravished by a ruthless lumber company...
...Drivers are likely to doze at the wheel...
...To be sure, we saw evidences of new life...
...Lumber is a crop like any other product which grows out of the earth...
...But out West the companies which harvest the forests do it reasonably and with foresight...
...When we visited this cove a long time ago, the first sight and sound of the morning was a lobster-man named Lon Lowell, slowly pulling up his lobsterpots...
...We were invited to drive at 60 miles an hour through a green world of trees, shrubs and flowers...
...And, rolling along highways which avoid settled areas, the tourist also misses the picturesque New England villages which were formerly among the journey's major charms...
...On shore, seemingly endless forests of pine, spruce and fir and the massive ledges of Maine guaranteed the solidity and reliability of the landscape...
...Dream-recollections of this union of land and sea persistently haunted us...
...On the first morning of this visit, I saw the same man going through the same motions...
...But thoughtless human beings have created what for years will be a world of ugliness...
...Often since then we thought of returning...
...About it all there was something which we could not forget...
...We thought of quiet or turbulent waters...
...Twenty-five years ago, Edith and I spent a number of summers at the edge of this enchanting inlet on Casco Bay...
...it can hardly be changed in any way...
...In former days we had to find our way from town to town over such roads as had been provided by the local authorities...
...Now we motored almost the entire distance on beautifully engineered and landscaped parkways...
...The puny, man-made cottages on the shore have little effect...
...The chance was too good to be missed...
...The ocean was just as lovely as it had always been, just as romantic, dangerous and threatening...
...But he was pursuing the same business, going through the same motions and maintaining the same subtle relation to the waters from which he drew his sustenance...
...Friends, with a cottage looking down upon this uniquely enchanting cove, invited us...
...Since our earlier journeys from Delaware to Maine there has been a vast improvement in the highways...
...They remove the trees of the proper size and leave the smaller ones to grow...
...We could, at last, measure our memories beside the realities...
...The tiny boat landings can hardly be noticed in the total design...
...The men who live along the coastline and make their living from the sea seem to have some of the saltwater qualities...
...We remembered sunsets across gleaming expanses which stretched to the horizon...
...The great, gray, granite ledges which line the shores are affected so little by the continuously dashing water or the impact of winter's slowly-operating frost that the change which is wrought in the course of a man's life is scarcely perceptible...
...Now, in genera], I have no quarrel with tree-cutters and sawmill operators...
...But in Maine the lumbermen had destroyed the whole woodland world in which we had been happy...
...When we reached our enchanted summer cove, I was instantly struck by a contrast between land and sea which I had never before observed...
...But it seems to me that any epithet applied to the ocean should imply permanence, steadiness, stability rather than noise...
...We recalled views down into pellucid depths with mysterious masses of seaweed rising and falling in endless rhythm—with fish, crabs or now and then a lobster adding animation to the under-sea view...
...Every now and then a great storm rips and tears away the most sturdy of human devices and reasserts the domination of the waves over the solid old coast...
...In time, Nature will restore what has been destroyed...
...And when you look down into the world of slowly rising and falling waters, you have a sense of partaking in something which has been going on from the beginning and will continue forever...
...It will take longer, but it will be more fun...
...We shall seek again the little old roads that creep in and out, up and down along the crags and beaches...
...They, too, are steady and permanent—at least comparatively so...
...The next time we go to Maine, we shall simply ignore the smooth creations of the parkway planners...
...It was his son...
Vol. 41 • September 1958 • No. 31
