COUNTRY CHRONICLE
Beston, Henry
Country Chronicle By HENRY BESTON Nobleboro, Maine AND still it rains, and for the seventh consecutive day. A low sky, all one monotony of sodden cloud, now drips for hours down on the sodden...
...I am used to seeing our young people in their working clothes, and it always pleases me to see them "dolled up" a bit for I am proud of them and touched by the friendly goodwill with which they have always met me...
...Man needs the reassurance of his human world even as he needs-the awareness of the world of naHENRY BESTON, noted naturalist and author, has intermittently written "Country Chronicle" columns for The Progressive, many oi which were included in a book entitled "Northern Farm...
...It was raining again when we said goodby, and began our walk home...
...Many of the town and village churches of Maine are helped to stay alive and retain the support of the community by what we call a "young couples club...
...A few more days of this, and I shall be working on an ark, and advertising for animals by pairs...
...Elizabeth says that the ceiling of a clothes-closet is beginning to leak, and a neighbor tells us that at night she can hear the drainage channel across the concrete floor of the cellar murmuring below the bedroom floor like an indoor brook...
...I forbear to be lyrical about the homemade ice cream, but it was very, very good...
...Seaward they all turn, out of this region of forest and ancient granites, making their way to the ancient waters of the North Atlantic and its smother of coastal breakers tumbling and thundering in the immense loneliness of the rain...
...The Androscoggin at Brunswick affords perhaps the wildest scene...
...That beautiful sense of form and pattern in nature which is one of the mysteries of the ocean wave had no parallel in the spectacle of the stream...
...There is such a club at Damariscotta, there is another here in Nobleboro, and I imagine that the custom may be widespread throughout America...
...One gets increase of faith and courage from being a little with friends whose age happily protects them from taking the national tension so seriously...
...ture: the equilibrium between the worlds being his ever to seek, ever to re-make...
...II It had stopped raining, and we walked down to the meeting from our own farm up the road...
...Turbid, yellow-muddy, and deep, hurling stray logs about like straws, the water rushed below the bridges and past the brick walls of gigantic mills standing by contrast in a kind of monumental passivity...
...Lawrence" for the Rivers of America Series...
...But neither Elizabeth nor I gave a snap of the fingers...
...Pouring out of the farm and forest country to the inland north, at Brunswick it makes a plunging, rocky turn northerly to Merrymeet-ing Bay and to the huge waters of the greater Kennebec...
...All of us here who are not too deeply mired on country roads, have been breaking away to see the flooded rivers pouring over their mill dams and down the steep gorges which give New England her wealth of water power...
...As the name implies, such a group is a social one, the members being young married folk who have some connection with the village church, and wish to see it continue as part of the village way of life...
...Our pleasant young neighbors, Fred and Elaine French, son-in-law and daughter of the next farm, had asked me to speak to the local group meeting that night in the farm parlor...
...The sound of rain is the last thing we hear at night and the first thing we are aware of in the morning, and though the weather vane turns and drips on the barn, the rain falls no matter whence blows the dreary air...
...As I happen to consider "the conquest of nature" the most poisonous phrase of an age which has lost its sense of the meaning of "nature," I find it stirring to have a glimpse of nature on a rampage though I take no pleasure in scenes of devastation...
...It was still a good world for such as kept their faith in the human spirit...
...Every trickle is now a rill, every rill a brook, and every brook something aspiring to be a minor river...
...Somewhere in the background are a lot of little folk...
...A former editor of The Atlantic Monthly and The Living Age, he is the author of many books, includ--k ^^BW ing "The" Outermost House," "The Book of Gallant Vagabonds," and "The St...
...What one saw, and was invited to contemplate, was force, gigantic force seeking somewhere its ultimate equilibrium and rest...
...There were no subleties in that field of motion...
...It was good to reach home again and open the door of the quiet farm, and put fresh wood in the kitchen stove...
...The past winter having been a fantastically snowless one, even such a winter as not even the oldest inhabitant can remember, it is cloud water and not snow water which is finding its way down into the hidden springs of earth and down the brooks to the sea...
...Arriving the other day in a heavy shower, I could hear the patter of the rain becoming one natural music with the roar of the stream...
...Meetings are held at members' houses, and they sometimes take place at a farm, sometimes at a house in the village...
...A low sky, all one monotony of sodden cloud, now drips for hours down on the sodden earth, now unburdens itself in seemingly unceasing showers...
...I was glad that Elizabeth and I were going out that evening to a neighborhood good time...
...There were about twelve couples waiting in the cheerful parlor-living room, all wholesome, good-looking youngsters, in their mid-twenties, and each young pair dressed in its "go-to-meeting" best...
Vol. 17 • May 1953 • No. 5
