COUNTRY CHRONICLE
Beston, Henry
Country Chronicle By HENRY BESTON Nobleboro, Maine WE have been clearing the wood-roads leading down into the older growth. These roads are as old as anything on the farm. Year after year, along...
...It was a strange sight to see the great animal heads, still yoked, breasting together the deep water while the tousled yellow hair and cheerful grin of their owner bobbed to one side...
...Something very unusual for this country...
...We had one such visiting pair who had been trained by their young master to go for a midsummer swim...
...Amos and Andy and the wagon were in charge of Ellis Simmons, brother to the owner of the steers...
...Unyoked from the cart, and contentedly munching, the great black and white pair were pleasant to look at in the dappled sunshine and shadow of the woods...
...We cleared about a mile of the road most used, lopping off the web of dead twigs and trimming back such new growth as might bar the way...
...The purpose of living is the keeping of the temple of the human spirit, and the form of life which produces the finest men and women is the best form of life...
...She likes the woods and doesn't mind pitch and small ragged tears in old clothes...
...Does Science ever really have this in mind...
...When the political mind insists on unity, let him remember awhile that nature is everywhere a diversity, and that at all times that diversity is in multitudinous and incessant change...
...It has been a day of work gloves lost and found again, of pitchy hands, twig scratches, and hemlock leaves down one's collar, a day of the sound of the small axe and the swishing sound of white pine branches dragged behind by somebody walking...
...Last Summer and in a field by a lighthouse, I came upon a high school youngster training a pair he had named Thunder and Lightning...
...AMOS is a quiet soul, but Andy is an "impetuous cuss" and has already jammed my little finger between his right horn and a board...
...came with us, which was one of the best things of the day...
...TT has been a pleasant day in the woods...
...The corner of living together is a realization of things as they are and a healthy perception and toler-anee of difference...
...The deer tribe like to follow their own established paths, and the next village has recently had to put up a sign on the main road, "Moose Crossing...
...Year after year, along these branching tracks, the farm has sought its firewood—its hardwood for Winter and its pine for Summer fires...
...One has to work to keep them open, and this means that I am now taking care of an old farm cart—hired for a week—and a yoke of Holstein steers with the untraditional names of Amos and Andy...
...Last week two boys on a motorcycle, going to a nearby town in the middle of the afternoon, collided with a bull moose and were both badly shaken...
...The Mrs...
...Farm Diary...
...The kitchen range is rather a weather prophet...
...year after year a farm sledge has hauled out the loads on some last March snow...
...Let man for his part remember the earth and the bond between it and his humanity, keeping in awareness the character of the world in which he lives, and finding his content within its patterns and limitations...
...Back and forth they went, harrowing a mere pocketful of earth, and behind them lay the North Atlantic on a blue and windy day...
...When I water them in the afternoon, I drive them over to the spigot by the big tank, and give them pail after pail...
...they do not shine as they do by sunlight, but they glow...
...Now that he has Science at his elbow—a Victorian angel of light who is beginning to look uncommonly like a devil—he may, indeed, achieve what still seem lunatic dreams, but having achieved them, is he any further along his road...
...Or is its dream, insofar as it touches the mass populations, merely a phantasmagoria of violence and inertia ? Science would do well to pause and consider the values...
...In the old days such steers would have been named Broad and Bright or Star and Line, this last sometimes changed to Lion...
...and I meanwhile got a fire going and coffee boiling, and some hamburg cakes frying in the spider...
...The rain has deepened the colors of field and thicket...
...A small, grey rain falls on a wind from the north...
...It foretells a fine day by an enthusiastic roar from the wood box and doubt-fuJ weather by a sluggish half-willingness to catch...
...I shall have to wait now, for a rainy and windless morning on which to burn the wagon loads of slash...
...They know me already, lowing from their stalls as I go to the barn across the dew-drenched grass, and rolling their great cow-eyes at me as I bring them their feed...
...At noon Ellis fed the steers...
...It was all an adventure and a good time as well as work, as farm work often can be and often ought to be...
...Before I installed the pump at the lake, visiting steers were driven down to a little clayey beach beyond the alders, there to splash and lumber about and lower their heads and drink...
...I suspect that he had better take less thought of his possibilities and more of his limitations...
...The moose, too, got knocked over, but picked himself up, and disappeared into the woods...
...AS the prophets of the atomic age fill the ears of the world with a din of words as to what man can do, I begin to wonder a little if it isn't time rather to consider what man can not do...
...The boy had them not under a yoke but in horse-harness complete from bit to breeching...
...Yesterday's oak leaves which were yesterday dry, varnished paper are today textures and colors of old Spanish leathers...
...We have known him since boyhood, a big, friendly country lad who now wears the glasses the Army gave him and dresses in a rig half military, half agricultural...
...In go two very ancient wooden boxes, their breakfast plates, and the barn presently fills with a sound of eating and a deep sense of animal content...
...The Mrs...
...I shall carry a small and honorable scar...
...No, the destructionists shall not have our world, the world they have never known...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 51
