COUNTRY CHRONICLE
Beston, Henry
Country Chronicle The Supreme Wonder By HENRY BESTON Nobteboro, Maine IN SUCH a forest as ours, the cleared land must be continually defended against a return of the trees. Here at Chimney Farm...
...Behind • us was the barn wall, and across from us the headlights...
...The saw runs on a "mandrel set" adjusted to a jacked-up tire...
...All these intruders, together with the greedy juniper, must be held in check, and last summer our young neighbor and helper, Ellis Simmons, made it his business to give the farm land the tree-weeding which it had had to forego during the long years of the war...
...The rest, in one aspect, is but cosmic mechanics...
...As Christmas draws near, let us try to muse on his real nature and his divine—yes, it is the word—powers...
...While I worked in the corn, I could see and hear him working beyond in the farm sunshine, now trimming off an oak branch with a saw, now using the axe, and every now and then felling some young tree whose dying and leafy sigh and groaning fall brought a kind of classical melancholy into this American air...
...Suddenly we heard from the yard the hum of an arriving car, and a moment later an old truck with a circular saw rig loaded behind drove across the window's line of sight...
...By that time, I HENRY BESTON, noted naturalist and author, has contributed much to The Progressive in recent years, especially his "Country Chronicle" columns subsequently published in book form...
...Within this radiance and the tranquil descent of the flakes, the saw spun and screamed, Randall feeding it the weeded sticks and lengths, the boy with his quiet, serious look, helping at his father's side, and I gathering from the ground and sorting the sticks which were to be sawed...
...Here at Chimney Farm our most persistent intruders are the seedling white pines, children of the pine woods to the west, and these I am always pulling out by the hair when I find them in the fields...
...To provide more light, I had backed my own car out of the barn and turned the headlights on the saw...
...The wood had by then been about two-thirds sawed, and there was sawdust in a carpeted pile under the toothed cyclone of the steel, the hot sawdust, I thought, having something of a cooked smell...
...And so God's peace be with you all and with your house, and with the bright hearthfire...
...This household will have no truck with "percolators...
...What I shall remember is the coming of night, and the beginning of a quiet fall of snow in small, peaceful flakes...
...Even small wild apple trees, born of heaven knows what horticultural mis-alliance, manage to display their sour and useless fruits in some overlooked corner between the woods and the blue water of the pond...
...The smaller children and their mother came into the kitchen, and the youngest child, a baby girl, was presently being lulled to sleep in her mother's arms in a rocker by the fire...
...was in my own work clothes and ready to lend a hand...
...within the radiance were the human figures, and over everything was the nothingness and cloud of the cold and snow-laden November night...
...It was Ellis' brother Randall, and as usual he had his whole family with him, two boys and three girls, their mother and himself being somehow miraculously fitted together into the front seat of that ancient truck...
...Man is infinitely greater, greater than this abyss of splendor, stars, and every sort of spinning tee-to-tum we see...
...We have the red oak, too, to deal with, and its habit of growing in an obstinate hedge along stone walls...
...Out of his animal being and his temporal body, out of his tragic, ever uncertain life, he has created poetry and the arts, the splendor of music, and the Shakespearian line...
...let us have some thought of this greater meaning of man's humanity...
...And it was cold...
...Man is the supreme wonder and miracle of this fantastic universe...
...From outside rose a sputter of the truck exhaust, and then a first metallic scream of the saw...
...A former editor of The Atlantic Monthly and The Living Age, he Is the author of many books, including "Full Speed Ahead,8 "Starlight Wonder Book," "The Outermost House," 'The Book of Gallant Vagabonds," "Herbs and The Earth," and "The St...
...I shall long remember the sawing of this wood...
...Mind you, I do not say "dogma" or "belief...
...II Why are there so few of us today who see mankind in terms of the religious mood...
...We managed it on a grey and melancholy November afternoon, with a sky of cloud darkening now to trailing mist and now to something more like a fine rain...
...Lawrence" for the Rivers of America Series...
...mood" is what I mean...
...Beyond the windows and the cheerful, reflected flame, the out-of-doors looked even more cold and forlorn, but I could see Randall and his oldest son, 12-year-old Ordway, busy setting up their rig...
...How mercilessly the blackguard technicians of the nations advance today to his attack...
...The children within looked at us with their big, blue eyes, and thumbed the picture books Elizabeth had found for them...
...The farm household was indoors in the winter kitchen by the cheerful open fire— I had just come up from the pump-house—and Elizabeth had put a pot of coffee on to boil...
...Surely it is time to have some thought of his apart from politics...
Vol. 15 • January 1951 • No. 1
