Summer cont'd

BEGINNING OF THE CHAPTER

Of course, I couldn't count on being seconded to Mr. Stowe and Jimmy every morning. There were all my father's projects, which rose and fell with his summer travel between Philadelphia and Maine and which varied from the fascinating to the tedious.

Tasks included hauling ice from under the sawdust in the big barn back to the icebox, hauling trash to the dump, helping to dig wells, stacking lumber and taking care of the tennis court, which had been reclaimed from a miniature forest and each night issued a protest against its re-civilization by growing weeds, rocks, gullies and small hillocks of dirt. Tending the court was the children's "responsibility," a task complicated by the fact that the surface never had been improved much beyond that acceptable for a dirt driveway. I became intensely and sweatily knowledgeable about that small tract and to this day sometimes hear the cold, grating sound the pebbles made as they climbed the roller and bounced off the scraper blade.

I never took much to tennis, though, which was just as well since actually playing tennis was the largely the adults' responsibility. I didn't think adults looked good in those funny white shorts and silly hats and tennis certainly didn't improve their disposition. They became serious, pompous, overly-competitive and boastful, not to mention intolerant of any youthful noise or exuberance.

My own efforts at the game were hindered by the fact that no one bothered to teach me and my arm, fore or backhanded, tended to function as a mortar, regularly propelling the ball over the sagging chicken wire fence into the alders beyond.

Since I could develop no skill and since the adults could summon up no appreciation for the hot morning I had spent preparing their dueling ground, I developed an inchoate class consciousness about the sport that would leave me amazed when Arthur Ashe appeared at Wimbledon even before we had elected a black president.

Far more enjoyable were the tasks that emerged from my parents' new interest in tree farming, which, among other things, brought to Maine its first wood chipper. This boisterous device, made in Fitchburg, Mass., was so novel that the Soil & Conservation Service held a field day just to show it off.

My major tree farming task was to stack the lumber randomly dumped by the trucks from the sawmill. Pieces of kindling were placed crosswise on each level of wood, so the boards could dry on both sides. There was a lot of lumber, especially after hurricanes Carol and Edna. When Carol hit, my parents became worried about a pregnant tenant renting the Crate House, so when the calm eye of the storm arrived, my father and I headed up the road to clear a path to town. The deep woods concealed what was happening above and it was not until trees began suddenly toppling that we realized the storm had resumed. We got out just before the way back was blocked. It was a pointless task anyway. Before it was over, Carol blew down a couple of hundred trees. It would be two days before the road to town would be cleared.

Stacking the windfall was hard work but I liked walking past the barn and seeing just how much I had done that summer. Unlike the tennis court, the lumber piles didn't regress each evening. My father seemed pleased as well, and began to regard me as a useful adjunct to his enterprises, so much so that by the age of 14 he let Jimmy teach me how to drive the army surplus personnel carrier with the front-end winch and A-frame. I was double-clutching and shifting into six-wheel drive and using a winch to haul things out of places long before I was able to drive legally on Maine roads beyond the farm.

My brother recalls, "You couldn't go directly from one gear to another but had to go into neutral first, let the clutch all the way out and accelerate or brake the motor before shifting again, depending on the direction of the shift. The maneuver also required one to take into account the load on the truck, its speed and the grade of the road."

The six wheel drive Army surplus truck in which the author learned to drive

The truck was a marvelous machine that lasted for decades. It withstood all punishment including my father's attempt to launch a boat by towing it out on to the mudflats. The truck, of course, became deeply mired, but the winch eventually pulled the vehicle back to dry land.

The Army truck was just one of a fleet of amazing vehicles that kept the farm going, ranging from the practical to the insane. For example. my father obtained the local Railway Express truck from Clarence Bolster, a familiar figure at the local railroad station. It was, however, short on brakes. Asked how one operated such a vehicle, Jim Degrandpre, son of the farm manager, explained, "You planned ahead." Jim's brothers, Richard and David, converted the family 1952 DeSoto station wagon into a monster tractor, one of several such homemade vehicles.

None of this surprised me much. After all, when I accompanied my parents to France as a college student, our rented Simca had broken down some miles from the nearest village. It turned out to be a broken accelerator rod. My father had me stand on the front bumper with the car's hood up adjusting the speed of the car by hand as he stuck his head out the window and steered it.

Home made tractor and trailer
[Vehicle photos from the archives of Charles DeGrandpre]

The truck was a marvelous machine that lasted for decades. It withstood all punishment including my father's attempt to launch a boat by towing it out on to the mudflats. The truck, of course, became deeply mired, but the winch eventually pulled the vehicle back to dry land.

In the course of their constant search for productive uses of the land, my parents one summer stumbled upon the idea of growing cucumbers for pickling. Growing cucumbers is easy; growing an acre and a eighth of them for pickling is not. The pickling factory bought them at prices that varied in inverse ratio to their size. The best price by far were for those barely larger than one's finger. The ordinary cucumber of the magnitude one would find in a grocery store was well past its pickling prime and brought the least per pound. The time between the former and latter state often appeared to require less than a day. Despite one's certainty that all of the smaller cucumbers -- or A grade -- had been discovered underneath the long lines of vines, the mere existence of the larger -- or C grade -- cuke provided evidence that the search had been inadequate. There were always an embarrassing number of C grade cukes.

Fortunately, the task was so great, and required so many pickers, that my parents could not discover individual responsiblity for careless plucking. After all, it could easily have been one of the numerous house guests dragooned into the operation in order to stay ahead of the life cycle of the common cuke On one occasion, even my grandfather appeared in the field in his black tie and black suit to pick for awhile.

At the end of the morning, my brother and I would load 1,000 pounds of cucumbers into the 1941 Plymouth station wagon and haul them to Portland 20 miles distant where they would be weighed and then dumped into huge, malodorous vats. I learned that summer that loading things and driving them some place was fun. Picking them was not. On the way back we would pass five widely spaced small red signs with white lettering. They read:

Big new tube
Just like Louise
You get a lot
In every squeeze
Burma Shave

There was also a growing need for water, which was met in part by a full day visit by the famous dowser, Henry Gross, his friend, the novelist Kenneth Roberts and their friend, the actress Bette Davis. Some of the wells that were dug at Henry Gross' suggestion are still faithfully providing water today.

And some were dug by my hapless friends and me. As my brother Lewis tells it, "Some of our wells were dug rather than drilled and were actually a combination of a well and cistern. They consisted of a hole about five or six feet in diameter, dug by hand in wet clay down about ten or 12 feet, and then lined with stones but no mortar, so the water could seep into the well. The clay was hauled up in buckets by hand, and the water pumped out until the well was finished. . . In this matter of wells, Sam and the friends who visited him were really unlucky. They just happened to be the right size for well work during the summers that my father decided to dig. I think digging wells was the hardest job that any of us kids ever had to do on Wolfe's Neck."

The morning work routine ended at noon, at which point everyone was expected to gather at the beach for a swim before lunch. Children and my parents found the cold Casco Bay water refreshing; guests often did not. My mother continued swimming in the bay -- always wearing her broad brimmed hat -- until her seventies. She gave no quarter to those who found the temperature daunting. She actually stopped inviting one of her elderly friends to Maine when the poor woman was discovered to have sneaked off to a local sports club for a dip in its heated pool. Only a doctor's order brought an end to my mother's bay swimming, at which point she constructed a solar-heated pool just four-feet in depth in a vain attempt to discourage those younger than herself from using it rather than the ocean. Shortly after it was built, a cousin called and asked for my mother. "She's at the pool," I said. "What pool?' he asked astonished. I explained the doctor's dictum and my cousin grumbled, "Why didn't the doctor tell her that years ago?"

Lunch followed and, with its normal delays and extensions, much of the afternoon simply disappeared and one found oneself confronted with a dinner hour seemingly only moments after leaving the table for lunch.

Dinner was usually the most interesting and enjoyable meal. After cocktails and a few glasses of wine, formality and seriousness quickly deteriorated into loud exuberance. My parents enjoyed guests as willing to argue and discuss as they were and I enjoyed watching my father under political attack from Harry Parker or Abbott Smith, rock-ribbed Republicans who pursued their conservatism with the high spirits of Chicago ward heelers. As the evening progressed, at the candlelit dinner table or with lobsters in the dark on the deck, voices escalated, chasms in philosophy opened, and funny stories were told that saved argument from turning into ugly disputation.

Guests and booze brought out the best in my parents. When there were no guests around, I would excuse myself to visit my friend Charlie, whose mother regularly rented the River House, or to go the end of the point, where there were always at least a half dozen kids gathered on the stone pier or in the boathouse of the Rhoades' cottage.

The afternoon, what there was of it, was mostly free time, and when it rained we were allowed to go to the attic. The attic ran the full 120' length of the house and much of it was taken up with a Lionel train layout that ran not in a loop but to and from the play towns that each sibling established. The towns were built of play houses and cardboard containers that had formerly held small cereal boxes and were decorated with the facades of commercial and residential buildings just for the purpose to which we put them. For people we used the counters from a board game called Peggity. We had enough Peggity pieces to form armies, which together with various militaristic toys of the immediate post-war era, lent a combative strain to our attic activities. These would have gone unnoticed had I not decided to launch an A-bomb attack on one of my sister's villages. My first strike capability consisted of a large bucket of water. The water, of course, leaked like radiation through the ceiling below, which happened to be right above my parent's bed. We were thereafter banned from the attic, even on rainy days.

There was one sure way to be excused early from the mid-day meal and that was to go sailing. I had taken to the water easily. My first summer, while sailing with our college student-guardian, we became marooned on Bustins Island during a thunderstorm. A lady gave us shelter and cookies and fresh clothes and Archie towed us back. I was scared and exhilarated and ready for more because I knew that Horatio Hornblower got scared too, and even sea sick. That was just part of what being a man of the sea was all about.

I soon found a more immediate model. Harry Parker was a genial man with a hearty laugh who ran the boatyard in South Freeport and had a workboat called the Can Do, the motto of the Seabees. Harry Parker was a survior of Pearl Harbor and a former PT boat skipper. He was still in the reserves, and was considered one of the best sailors in the state. Once, while commanding a destroyer escort on a reserve cruise, Harry had brought the vessel into South Freeport harbor, the largest ship ever to squeeze through the tiny gap guarded by Pound of Tea Island. Along with my father and others, Harry founded the Harraseeket Yacht Club. The HYC met in the loft of a decrepit wharf building and long had the distinction of having the lowest dues of any yacht club in America: 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for juniors - a fact dryly recorded in the national guide to yacht clubs along with more expensive instituions such as those in New York and Bermuda.

Since it was nearly impossible to find two boats of the same class in the harbor, the early races were handicapped, a practice that led to endless heated controversy and eventually to Harry convincing the club's members to buy from his yard the first in a succession of same-class boats. The initial class was little more than a sailing dory with no decking, and thus abundantly prone to capsizing. The next was a poorly performing fiberglass day-sailer, the Explorer, which while perfectly safe, was not up to beating out of the narrow entrance of the harbor against a four-knot current.

Further, ours was the slowest in the fleet. After my mother died, I took the day sailer out of the barn and fixed it up, discovering in the process why it had been so slow. A hairline crack had started letting water slip between its two hulls; even decades later hundreds of gallons remained.

After renovating the vessel, I called up the United Services Automobile Association to insure it. USAA's headquarters were in Houston, Texas, where boating is a bit different than in Maine. Upon hearing of the vessel's age the agent said it would have to be inspected by a marine surveyor. I pointed out that it was made of fiberglass and only 16 feet long and after discussing it with her manager she relented. Then she asked me whether I locked the boat when I wasn't using it. I explained that the boat was moored in the water and that it was difficult to lock a boat to an anchor. Then I said, "And I also want to insure my dinghy." "Your what?" came the shocked reply. George O'Day eventually bought the Explorer company, improved the design and created one of the more successful day sailers ever built, the O'Day Sailer.

Harry and the club eventually moved to Lightnings, which despite their flat-bottomed pounding in the bay chop, kept local sailors content for a number of years. Despite being of one class, however, there were, in fact, considerable differences in the boats, as was demonstrated regularly as we attempted to move ours -- the oldest and with a double-planked bottom -- against a fleet that included lighter wood vessels and, eventually, fiberglass ones. No one seemed to mind that much, and the season would end with a skipper's race in which everyone got to sail everyone else's boat. This event tended to confirm that the best boats also were owned by best sailors.

There came a day, however, when everything changed. Gardner Brown had towed his fiberglass Lightning with new Racelite fittings down from Taylor Pond, won the race, and immediately hauled the boat from the water. For those of us who took for granted that a boat would gain several hundred pounds of moisture over a season, it was a astounding sight. After that, racing became much more serious.

I proved only a moderate racer, but a good sailor and happy to be that. Even the Dauntless - the heavy 14-foot cat in which I spent countless hours trying to beat out of the harbor, nudging towards a possible vesper or slamming against waves that splashed easily into its broad cockpit - provided more than adequate satisfaction. Once, during a blowy interclub regatta, my friend Charlie Saltzman and I were still making our way around the course at 6:30 pm when the committee boat came out to make a deal: if we would accept a tow, they would give us third place in the race. All the other boats in our class but two had given up or capsized.

With the currents, tides, mudflats, ledges and unaccommodating winds, sailing in our part of Casco Bay was far more than a straight challenge of the sea. There were races when the whole fleet would anchor in the calm so as to not lose ground against an unfavorable current. Sometimes the fog was so thick that you didn't know where you were. Sometimes during these fogs someone would try kedging, throwing your anchor as far forward as possible and gaining ground as you pulled it back in until someone yelled, "Stop kedging!" Sometimes it was rough. Sometimes it was cold. And sometimes it was wet.

Sometimes a thunderhead would build up to leeward over the course of a long afternoon. On such a day -- I think I was about fifteen at the time -- I was out with several friends who had never sailed before. The previous week I had successfully beached my boat on Moshiers Island during a thunder squall, and so I eyed the thunderhead with confidence, glibly telling my companions that we would be home easy before the storm.

I was wrong by about a hundred yards. We got the sails down and life jackets on just before it hit. For twenty minutes or so the wind blew at hurricane strength. As I was wondering whether we would capsize, get struck by lightning or smash on the rocks, a lobster boat appeared like a ghostly angel through the horizontal sheets of rain, threw us a line and held us into the wind. As quickly as the storm had arrived it was over. "Wind before the rain, you'll soon set sail again," I thought. The rain finally turned vertical again and I sat on the fantail by the tiller, chastened, awed, cold and wet. The sea, I learned irrevocably that day, had little tolerance for hubris.

Eventually I would sail beyond Casco Bay, crewing for a teacher at St. Marks school who took students along the Maine coast -- and racing at Harvard. In 1958 I sailed along the Brittany coast, where boats carry a sturdy post to use as a prop when the forty-foot tide goes out. Some of my letters home remain:

Upon my arrival here in St. Briac, the du Bels immediately made me feel right at home. The first day I was here I went out for a sail with Jean-Claude on the boat of a friend of his, Jean-Pierre Alyar. The two of us and another friend took off the next day for a three day cruise to the Isles of Chaussey which are France's answer to the Channel Islands. The boat was a 36' sloop that sleeps four very comfortably. Chaussey is a place that is very striking with wonderful rocks, great expanses of sand and crevettes by the millions. There is a hotel, so to speak, on the Grand Ile, but on the whole it has a very isolated atmosphere.

The curate appeared from time to time complete in beard and high boots to go fishing in his boat. His church stands high on a hill and on the night of the 15th of August it was an extraordinary experience to sit in the cockpit of our boat and watch the religious procession move slowly from the church down among the rocks to the dock where a brightly lit fishing smack waited. All the time, the members of the procession were singing or chanting and when they reached the dock, the smack moved out into the harbor, fired off a red and a green flare, and then the procession headed back to the dock.

The next night there was dancing as someone on one of the boats had brought a portable phonograph. There must have been a dozen or more cruisers in that weekend and only one motorboat among them. . .

When we left for Chaussey, Jean-Claude and Jean-Pierre had lent their 20-foot sloop (the boat belongs to Jean-Pierre but was loaned to Jean-Claude for the summer) to a friend. The day after we returned, the boat had not come back from the sail the day before. It was not to be found at any of the ports along the coast. On board were a Swedish girl and the son of the owner of a store at Dinard. It was not late in that day that a report came over the radio that a boat answering perfectly to the description of the Derby had been found under full sail by Jersey with no one aboard. In the cabin were found the clothes of the boy and the girl and a watch.

The answer was obvious but astonishing. During the flat calm of the day before the two must have decided to go swimming, leaving the boat unattended. The boat than departed, leaving them to drown.

The Derby was taken as a prize of the sea and will have to be retrieved by legal proceedings. Both Jean-Pierre and Jean-Claude are desolate, the more because they are both excellent sailors and such an accident seems so unnecessary. . .

One day, Jean-Claude, his cousin Alain and myself went to visit Fort de la Laffe near Cape Frehal. This old structure, which has guarded the coast for 300 years, sits on an incredibly lonely and windy point. The guide spoke a patois that was difficult even for Jean-Claude and Alain to understand. He was one of those types who gives a tone of urgent credibility to his voice. At the end of spiel, he was rapidly punctured by an old woman who passed by just as he was finishing. "Bon jour, monsieur," she said. "Quelles sortes des batises vous faites aujourd'hui?"

The fort was used in the making of the film, The Vikings, and it couldn't have been designed better for the purpose. There were two moats to fall into, two doors to batter down, tiny stairs to have sword fights on, gaping rock crevasses with a raging sea to drown in. And the fort is rugged enough so it managed to withstand both the English and Kirk Douglas.

The evenings have been spent in part at a very pleasant dancing place near the du Bels. The atmosphere is perfect and everyone has been very friendly to me. I also went to a surprise party for a girl who Alain and Jean-Claude knew. Her parents raise chickens and we drank, ate chicken, danced, ate chicken, talked, and ate chicken until 3 am.

I've manage to read about 200 pages in French since I've been at St. Briac which is slightly better than what my summer average would be in English. Tuesday morning when I arrived at the du Bels, Jean-Claude said that Jean-Pierre Allard had invited us to go again on a cruise. This time, the itinerary extended out as far as Guernsey, and I had my gear ready in a little under five minutes. Besides Jean-Pierre, Jean--Claude and myself were two older guys, both who had been the in the merchant marine, so it was as good a combination as you could want. Their wives accompanied us while we bought such items as one dozen bottles of red wine (only a French boat of 36' would have three wine cellars), huge loaves of bread etc.

We got under sail around six in the evening. Moving down the Rance to Dinard we stopped by a friend's boat to borrow a jib to use as an extra sail. Fortunately, the wind was in the right direction and we could hoist the jib as a head sail mounted high on the forestay as well as the spinnaker (known as a spi here), jib, and mainsail. Every sail carried well and by 10:30-11 pm we arrived safely at Chaussey. Being nighttime and low tide we couldn't put the ship to ground and had to remain in the channel which was quite a roll hole.

The next morning we set sail for the northern exit of the island which becomes a desert of sand at low tide. The wind dead behind us, fresh all day, we raised Jersey by early afternoon. Since we were entering English soil, we hoisted a British flag on our starboard yardarm, the yellow "all the crew is in good health" flag on the port, and sailed into the harbor. As we entered we were hailed by the question "Ou devenez-vous?" in a strong British accent that greatly amused my French ship mates. The pleasant equality of the law forces HM Customs to greet 36-footers as well 36-thousand tonners and after their inspection we were ready for a somewhat late lunch and visit aboard the Crazy Cloud, which lay in tandem with us, two boats in towards the dock.

On board were M. & Mde Burseaux plus Phillip Anselle among others. Their boat is extremely spacious and well fitted out, besides being quite fast. Along about 7 pm, a 70' British yawl came into port and made fast between us and the dock. As she came in complete with a paid crew of three, a motorboat started in reverse from nearby. Before the yawl could do anything, they had collided. Fortunately damage was slight and from the yawl came the gruff voice of the owner: "A bit of a damned fool, aren't you, old chap?"

I was happy to turn the tables for a change and do some translating. I was well used, as the guys wanted sweaters, cigarettes and whiskey, all things that bring Frenchmen to Jersey.
When we returned, the Jersey lifeboat had pulled alongside of us and the mechanic invited us aboard for a look-see. It was very impressive to see a piece of machinery so beautifully designed for one purpose. There in a piece of wood and steel scarcely more than 30' long was the potential of saving up to 120 lives. And being a British lifeboat it even had a tea cooker under one of the thwarts.

We left the interesting island of Jersey for the even more interesting island of Guernsey. More interesting because of a more pleasant harbor, more curious streets and more interesting places to see. It was not long after we left Jersey that all the heavens opened up with tons of rain, but only a slight wind. On top of this we had a wonderful display of nature's own son et lumiere until mid-day. The storm passed, the sun came out, and the wind dropped even further. But the English Channel was living up to its reputation, and the sea rolled the boat up and down a good ten feet making it impossible to hold what wind there was in the sails. A short distance off to port a small English sloop would ride high for a moment and then disappear in the trough leaving only the mast in view like the periscope of a gigantic submarine. Two miles astern a large boat sported a blue spinnaker as it edged up on us, riding with some breeze we could not find. One by one we took in the sails -- the headsail, the jib and finally the main -- leaving only the spinnaker to carry us inch by inch towards Guernsey. With a heavy roll, the heavy sails are worthless, the boom just slats from side to side. Only the spinnaker would carry well and we moved with the silence that a calm at sea brings. But after an hour or so, even that wouldn't hold and we were forced to enter Guernsey under power. . .

We were due at the French isle of Bréhat at 8 pm the next evening. A quick computing of the current situation told us that we would never make it if we left the next morning. So at 1 am we hoisted our anchor, cleared the harbor and headed for France. The sea was dead calm and it was necessary once again to use the motor. Jean-Claude and I sacked out first, and a little after four the others woke us so we could take over. Topside there was nothing to see but the tall light off les Roches Douves, beckoning with that quiet insistence that is part of the character of lighthouses. The dull monotone of our motor answered the beckoning, and there being nothing that we could add to this dialogue, we sat silently awaiting for dawn. It arrived as les Roches Douves pass quietly off our port beam. By coincidence, almost immediately after we had passed, the light was turned off for the day as if to say, "I've done all I can for you, stranger."

With no landmarks to guide us, we turned to the compass and the rest of our trick was spent steering towards that ever distant line where gray sky meet gray sea. By 9 am it was time to go back to the sack. When I woke at noon, both the mainsail and jib were up and drawing. The gray sky and see had disappeared and in their place the island of Bréhat, with the mainland close behind, relaxed in a sunlit sea.

The entrance to Bréhat is far from simple, but the effort it required is well worth it. Bréhat is what [anthropologist] Robert Redfield would call a part-society, connected to civilization by such thin threads as a post office, telephone, a sole representative of the gendarmarie nationale and regular vedettes to the mainland. Culturally speaking, Bréhat is like a little diamond, seen, perhaps rubbed, but still inert and unpolished by the Cartiers' of the world.

During these years, Harry Parker set the sailing standard towards which I strove. So it was with alacrity that I accepted his invitation to crew in the New England men's sailing championships. Harry, Grubby Douglass and Gardner Brown -- the three best sailors I had ever known -- had won the Maine championship, but the New England races were in boats that required a four man crew.

We went to Nantucket and lost every race. Our competition included Ted Hood and George O'Day, the famous sail maker and the equally famouse boat builder. Both would go on to be America's Cup champions. I measured the distance between Harry Parker and Ted Hood and George O'Day and then the distance between Harry Parker and me, added the two together and figured that it was too far to sail.

Which was okay because as I reached the mid-teens, sailing had become just a weekend activity anyway. My parents were reading Malabar Farm by Louis Bromfield, in which Bromfield described his experiments in organic agriculture, and my mother had become something of a health food fanatic, personally blending carrot juice in the kitchen (Rosetta recused herself from these bizarre activities) and popping pills from the Adelle Davis prescribed bottles of vitamins that took up increasing space on the lazy susan on the dining room table. Long before Silent Spring, long before the word ecology was in general use, my parents became organic farmers. And I, while initially skeptical of some of the principles that underlay the effort, was more than willing to earn money and escape the regimentation of the Big House by working all day on their farm.

There was a dearth of information in those days for those of organic inclinations. The university agricultural schools -- heavy into teaching farmers the virtue of pesticides and huge expenditures on the tractors and equipment manufactured by academia's benefactors -- thought little of the idea. The extension service was of no use.

My mother, who operated on reading, instinct and faith and from a lifetime interest in conservation, and my father, who was convinced that he could come up with a better way of doing anything, slowly and methodically began to create their farm.

According to my father's analysis, farming and conservation were interlocked. If you couldn't save the farms, you couldn't save the land. Further, he figured that Maine, with its rocky soil and short growing season, was best suited for grazing cattle.

Key to the operation was getting the cattle over the winter. This led to a variety of silage experiments. I spent some of one summer driving a tractor back and forth over a 75-foot long box built of railroad ties, compacting the silage underneath. It was called a trench silo even though it wasn't really in a trench. The first summer Kathy came to Maine, she was taken immediately to view my father's latest silos, which were huge mounds of hay covered with black plastic. The air was sucked out of these mounds by one of my mother's vacuum cleaners. The vacuum cleaner didn't survive the summer and the silos lasted not much longer.

Sometimes even worse happened. One summer, Kathy and I arrived for a vacation to find my mother, then a widow, in a small frenzy. Fourteen of her cows had died that morning. There was no explanation, although there was an immediate suspicion that planes from the Brunswick Naval Air Station had dumped something on the land. The next morning, my family, including our two small sons, were dispatched to the animal morgue at the University of Maine in Orono with cow parts in a picnic cooler and samples of their feed. We arrived before breakfast and in our search for the right office ended up in a room occupied primarily by a large table on which lay a dead and partially deconstructed horse. I moved quickly and queasily on, but my sons lingered, eyes unblinking, thinking whatever thoughts the young have when they first see death up close.

The cause, the university reported some days later, was, Sudax, the experimental feed the farm was using. Sudax, which is basically corn without the cob, is rich in nutrients. But little known at the time, it can -- under extremely moist conditions -- generate arsenic. This, in the wake of an extremely wet few weeks, is what it had done.

My father reasoned that he would save on fencing if feed was brought to the cattle rather than letting them forage all the time. He called it cafeteria feeding. When he read that there was a new machine that would store hay in great round bails that would eventually replace the tedious cubes, he brought the first one to Maine.

Slowly, my father developed a macro-economics and macro-politics that connected his efforts to the solution of the whole world's food supply. He would discourse on agricultural matters to the fifty or more overnight guests who showed up during a summer and he would drag them on field trips. Many a lawyer, politician, accountant or church organist learned more about farming than they ever imagined they wanted to know.

My father was a lawyer, but from the end of the war on, only practiced law as a one-man public interest litigant. He had sued a major corporation that had purchased WGMS in Washington on the grounds that it had violated his rights as a minority stockholder. The resulting case, which he won, ended up in law school textbooks. And in 1960, two years before the publication of 'Silent Spring,' he decided to sue the Central Maine Power Company.

CMP not only provided most of the power in Maine, it enjoyed much of the power as well. But my parents were trying to run an organic beef farm and CMP had come right through their property spraying the vegetation around the power lines with pesticides. My father was incensed.

I was home in Philadelphia the evening that my father tried to find a Maine lawyer to take the case. He started with the most famous and was shunted over the course of the evening to five others. Each declined to get involved; for each was on retainer to CMP.

Somewhat in desperation, my father turned to the town lawyer, Paul Powers, whose stock in trade was land sales and wills. Together they forced an agreement from CMP four years later in which the company promised not to spray anyone's property anywhere in the state if they were not agreeable. The Brunswick Times Record ran an editorial stressing the environmental significance to the state; it was headlined "Mr. Smith and You." And CMP paid my father $1,000 for his troubles. Paul Powers told me several times that it was the most important case of his career, eclipsing, presumably, even the DWI case in which his client was found passed out in a car with the motor running in the middle of the main intersection in Yarmouth. Powers got the case dismissed by getting the police officer to admit that no one had been operating the vehicle , so no one could have been operating it under the influence.

I had little to do with such matters, which was fine by me. I got to fill a big cooler with ice and juice made from Zarex syrup and head for the farm. There I would mount the big green John Deere tractor and pull whatever was behind it in great loops around hundreds of acres of fields. One day my tow was a manure spreader, another day a hay rake, another a wagon.

As the day warmed up, I would take off my shirt and adjust my baseball cap and try to be as cool and imperturbable as Clyde Johnson, my usual partner in the fields, who wore the same T-shirt and hat every day and drove his tractor standing up with a pipe that never left his mouth, which didn't matter because he never said much.

Sometimes something would break and we would head back to the barn, talk about it, weld it or replace it and get it going again so we could continue circling those fields with their constant views of the bay, with every foot we moved leaving unmistakable evidence -- mown hay, manure dropping, lime or windrows -- that we had at that moment of our lives actually done something good.

The farm eventually grew to about 900 acres -- nobody ever seemed to know for sure. My parents added a hundred campsites and gave two hundred acres of the woods for a state park. They became noted figures in the state, not only for the organic beef farm and the campsites, but for my father's creative ways of preserving land before it was too late. He bought one of the few great beaches in that part of Maine, Popham, and kept it until the state could afford to buy it from him at the price he had paid. He did the same thing with an historic boatyard. And when rumors arose that oil companies were thinking of building a deep water oil port, using an uninhabited island far down east, he organized a group of purchasers to buy the island, effectively blocking the whole scheme.

As he reached his seventies, my father started to slow down. He had a heart attack, and he began worry excessively about his estate, tax consequences and so forth. One morning, as he laid our a rasher of problems to me in his office, I suggested that he just enjoy life and not worry so much about the tax consequences of it. He didn't argue and I thought afterwards that was the only time I had ever given him personal advice.

A few days later he asked me to join him on an inspection trip of the farm. We went to the farm shop where he found two of the DeGrandpre sons, Richard and David, working on a piece of machinery. They were meant to have had something done and it wasn't and my father was upset.

I drifted to a corner of the shop and stood behind a post staring at the floor. I hated my father yelling at me, but it was even more embarrassing when he yelled at someone else.

Soon it was over and we returned home for lunch. It was a bright day and conversation went as usual. At one point my mother gazed out to sea and said, "Oh look, there's the ghost ship of Harspwell." But that wasn't really odd, because my mother was given to such figments. Later that afternoon my mother and father went swimming. Kathy was in the garden nearby picking flowers. Suddenly I heard Kathy screaming. When I reached the garden with my son Nathaniel, she told me that my father had had a heart attack and that she was going to the Big House to call the ambulance and get some nitroglycerine.

Nathaniel was only seven, but I told him to stand right where he was and direct the rescue squad to the beach house. I then tore down to beach where I found my mother attempting CPR on my father who was lying on the first floor of the beach house in his bathing suit looking purple and cold. While the rescue squad came the six winding miles from Freeport, my mother and I tried to revive my father. She continued pressing while I gave mouth to mouth resuscitation. For those long minutes I did nothing but try to blow life into my father. It was, I would think later, the closest I had ever come to him.

When the rescue squad arrived, we followed my father to the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Brunswick, eleven miles away. I noticed as we crossed the rickety bridge over Little River that the tide was all the way out, the mud flats extending the half mile to Googins Island.

My father was dead. After awhile my mother came out from the room where he lay and we just stood in the lobby uncertain what to do next. Finally, I said, "Let's go home and get a drink." My mother put her finger to her mouth, gave a short giggle and whispered, "Shh, these are 7th Day Adventists." We drove home. It was dark now and a full moon had risen and it shone down as we crossed the bridge at Little River. The tide had also risen its ten feet and was gently lapping at the timbers of the bridge. The moon and the tide made what had happened seem strangely natural, even inexorable.

Back at the house, my mother suddenly remembered. "The ghost ship of Harpswell," she cried. "You're right," I said, because I remembered, too. I had been sitting next to her and had looked out and seen nothing.

We pulled out a volume of John Greenleaf Whittier's poems and found it. The ghost ship of Harpswell had been the privateer Dash, built in South Freeport and lost on its maiden cruise. It was later said that women saw the vessel just before their husbands died, but would make nothing of it. Whittier called it The Dead Ship of Harpswell:

 

From Wolf Neck and from Flying Point

From island and from main,

From sheltered cove and tided creek

Shall glide the funeral train...

And men shall sigh, and women weep,

Whose dear ones pale and pine,

And sadly over sunset seas

Await the ghostly sign.

They know not that its sails are filled

By pity's tender breath

Nor see the Angel at the Helm

Who steers the Ship of Death.

 

Later, my mother wrote about that day:

In the late afternoon sun, we talked of ther many things that have developed here in Maine, and then he turned to his new 'project,' seaweed and its great potential uses. Leaving to dress before I did, his last words were "I'll leave the glasses for you" (as we always liked to watch the birds and the boats.)

And then - he was gone. . . .

If it had to be, it couldn't have been a more perfect way. . . He often spoke of these last few years as his happiest. .. and for a year and a half, we had both been prepared for this moment.

My mother took over my father's affairs with the confidence of a small shopkeeper. While he would agonize, lawyerlike, over every implication of an action, she made decisions based on fact and instinct as they carried equal weight. She would sit in a hours-long meeting with a half dozen lawyers and accountants quietly doing her needlepoint and then, when the discussion was over, just say something like, "Now, here is what we are going to do." Once at a real estate closing, two lawyers were arguing over who was to pay a $45 inspection bill. While they disputed, she rummaged in her enormous pocketbook, fished out $45 and placed it on the table, asking mildly whether this would resolve the matter.

She also prolifically defended her views whenever an opportunity arose. Once she spotted a news story about a city councilor from Hallowell who had introduced an ordinance that would allow cows to be detained as illegal aliens if they invaded one of the city's swankiest subdivisions. Using a skill she had taught herself during the war in order to correspond with my father, my mother promptly typed a poorly proofed missive to the city councilor:

Dear Sir; The problems of roaming cows is very familiar to me. Alas, the fault is not always that of the owner.

May I suggest that you look into what made the cattle stray. I find that suburban life and that of the farmer do not mesh very well.

Joggers, some who leave open gates, wandering dogs that chase the cows, and those, as one woman said to our farm Manager, "my dogs don't chase them, they just bark at them!"

All this adds up to very unhappy cows and so they brake out, with disastrous results.

She knew whereof she spoke. Some of her own cows were pastured on rented land near the Brunswick Naval Air Station, then key to our strategic defenses against the Soviet Union. It had around 40 planes and two dozen atom bombs. One day the commanding officer called heatedly to say that 17 of her cows were blocking the main runway of the air station. His tone and rhetoric implied that if America were to lose the Cold War, my mother would bear major responsibility.

My mother was too well-mannered to ask the captain what sort of national security he was providing if 17 cows could break through his perimeter. Instead, she promptly dispatched the farm manager, Charlie Degrandpre, to retrieve the strays.

The captain, however, forgot to tell the guards at the main gate that a farmer in a pickup would be by to get his cows off the runway. The guards were thoroughly skeptical of Charlie's story, and thus Charlie, unlike the 17 cows, was denied immediate access.

The impatient captain took command in the best heavy-handed naval tradition. He ordered the base fire trucks to the runway with sirens blaring. The cows, quite naturally, took to the 3,000 acres that surrounded the airstrip and were not seen again for a week, when, early on the Sunday morning of the officers invitational golf tournament, they turned up en masse on the 9th green.

When such matters didn't intervene, my mother kept busy running the normal affairs of the farm and the radio station, asking her gardener why the seeds were late, entertaining guests, driving to Brunswick to get more fish when some of the latter arrived unexpectedly, dealing with the wasp next in the garage, getting new tunes for the warning device on her golf cart, going to see the fire chief, getting more liquor, seeing "that stupid Yamouth man," fidning a different color blue, keeping copious notebooks on her garden and other matters, including volcanos, that caught her fancy, and helping to get things started, like the Nature Conservancy, the American Farmland Trust and the Institute for Alternative Agriculture. Her random blend of simplicity and imperiousness, combined with her ubiquitous broad brimmed hat that sat upon a frame slowly being compressed down and out by the trash compactor of time made her a well-known character throughout the town and the state. My father had been respected, and because he used all four of his initials -- LMCS -- he had become known as Alphabet Smith, but he inspired more awe than affection. My mother, on the other hand, shared the dedication of a Freeport town annual report with long-term town employee Kenneth "Bud" Fournier. Their photos were on the cover: my mother wearing one of her excessive hats and Fournier in sunglasses and a baseball cap. A Freeporter once told me, "Your mother is a sweethaht."

As my mother grew older so did her friends, relatives and retainers. I began thinking of the Big House as my mother's geriatric commune. Nannie had hit ninety, Rosetta was closing fast and canes and walkers began littering the house for use by aged visitors. My mother was often the youngest person in residence. Nothing really changed but it had slowed down a lot.

On one morning about eleven, after I had arrived at the Big House, concern was expressed that an elderly cousin had not yet appeared for breakfast. I went to the door of her room and heard a groan. Upon entering, I found her lying on the floor. "Are you all right?" I asked stupidly. "Of course not" not she said in elegant disgust. "I've been here all night."

She was deaccessioned on the afternoon plane to Philadelphia. The half - hour trip to the Portland airport to pick up or delivered wheel-chaired visitors became so frequent that on the third journey in one day, a Skycap asked me whether I worked for a nursing home.

Twelve years after my father's death, my mother also had a heart attack. It turned out not to have been her first one; she had lied to us about the nature of an earlier hospitalization. This time she was in the midst of constructing her "beginage," a French word for a little home where wealthy widows lived in the shadow and protection of a convent. She wanted no help from her children or in-laws even though there were four architects in the family.

When the blueprints were finally shown us, I heard a sharp intake of breath from the four architects. It turned out that the beginage was an 10,000-square feet home on three and a half acres at the end of the point.

There was plenty that was strange about the house: the design, the use of Drivet (a contemporary and usually commercial version of stucco) for the exterior walls, the idiosyncratic rooms and materials. When I first saw it it reminded me of a Great Western Motel. Katherine Hepburn thought the high back deck with its cinderblock wall looked suitable for a speech by Mussolini. But strangest of all were the letters ES permanently molded over the front door in Drivet. She had always used EHS before. Perhaps this house, I thought, was to have nothing more to do with the Houstons. Perhaps my mother was finally escaping something.

She couldn't explain. She would occasionally scribble notes from her bed. "So stupid," said one. She would revive and then sink back. And finally, the last morning, the doctor, who had acceded to her living will and taken no extraordinary steps to keep her alive, came out and gave us a full medical report on her condition. Then he added, in words that seemed both so right and so Maine, "Basically, she's shuttin' down."

At the funeral, I asked Bill Maybury, the undertaker who had first driven my parents to the great stone house at the end of the point forty-one years earlier, how he wanted the pallbearers arranged.

"How many you got?" he asked pleasantly.

"Six," I replied

"Three on a side."

Before she died, my mother gave the farm and her home to the University of Southern Maine. The USM president, who had cajoled my mother into the deal, was soon selected as chancellor of the state university system and his successor, an English professor from Baltimore, would tell friends that she was embarrassed to have cattle under her.

After my mother died, the farm deteriorated despite the efforts of a small foundation that she had established to help its work and which I came to head. Charlie DeGrandpre, who had raised four sons on the farm, was about the most respected man in Freeport, and had worked for my parents for more than twenty years, became increasingly frustrated in the mindless, memo-rampant world of a large academic bureaucracy.

The farm belonged to another world, which the university neither understood nor respected. It could not understand, for example, why Jimmy DeGrandpre would come from his real estate office and, tieless but still in his white shirt, help his father load bales of hay late in a hot summer afternoon. The main job of an administrator at USM was to keep his or her job. Doing something that wasn't your job was beyond comprehension.

Charlie eventually retired. He was replaced, with no little prodding by my siblings and myself, by his son David. David co-owned R & D Automotive with his brother Rich. He had learned business and computers at the University of Maine and farming from his father.

David was in his mid-thirties, intensely serious and scrupulous in his affairs. The university was managing the farm badly and the deficit was soaring. In one year David reduced the deficit by two-thirds. If the university ever thanked him I never heard it. The university did, however, check its personnel manual and found that having the wife of the farm manager work on what had always been a family farm was in violation of its nepotism rules. I suggested a slight modification of the rules to indicate that they did not apply to family farms. After a couple of hours arguing the point with the university chancellor, vice president and the dean, however, I realized they would never see what was wrong, let alone the irony involved.

David would call me regularly and I would occasionally fly to Maine and sit for hours as he went through the pages of the yellow pad on which he wrote every problem and every idea. As I sat in the cramped farm office, I would sense the silent bond that had grown between us, two sons trying as best they could to continue their parents' dream. It would be just a moment, because there was too much work to do, too much to being a farmer and too many interruptions. Joe, a bearded survivor of the sixties with his red pickup and his faith that animals were better than people, needed help birthing a calf. David's brother Chuck, the fire chief, drove up in his yellow car and wanted to know if the state could land a helicopter on one of the fields. The recycling truck had a load of newspapers that David had found could be shredded into cattle bedding that was far better and cheaper than sawdust. They especially liked the comic section, he maintained.

Then one May morning, while I was in Massachusetts for a meeting, I got a call saying that David had been killed falling from a ladder while pruning a limb for a neighbor.

The university would later claim that David was not doing his job -- that it had been merely a favor -- and thus his wife Gloria was not entitled to any compensation. The court rejected the claim. The university reluctantly rehired Charlie and David's sister-in-law Linda to get through haying season. But when that was over, it moved quickly to employ a permanent farm manager who had the sort of credentials it understood, a product of Cornell long on published papers and short on calluses.

The new manager quickly fired the two farm workers, put triple locks on the farm dumpsters, cut off profitable snow plowing services to neighbors a few weeks before the first winter storm, and told David's widow to make an appointment with his secretary to discuss a project she had in mind.

My career as a journalist and author had insulated me from some of the recent developments in the business world, so I was unprepared for meetings with Power Point presentations and three page memos citing Francis Bacon, Paul Valery, Agnes Allen, Marilyn Ferguson, Antonio Gramsci, Andre Gide, Cesare Pavese, and Irene Peter to support the farm manager's contention that "I am taking comfort in the fact that people have expressed their feelings that the transition process is 'crazy'. . . This reassures me that mourning over the old is reaching a feverish pitch and we are on the right course toward the new." Wolfe's Neck Farm had collided with the corporate gobblygook of the 1990s.

The university also had a new president, Richard Pattenaude, a 1980s style manager relentlessly abstract in rhetoric and action. Once when I pleaded with him to find someone at the university who really cared about the farm, he said, "Oh I know what you want. You want a product champion." I said I guessed so, although what I really wanted was someone who gave a damn.

Meanwhile, the dean quietly went to Augusta with a plan to turn the Big House into a center that, reading between the lines, would be little more than a place where corporations could plot evasion of environmental regulations. A state legislator, Jim Mitchell, called to warn me and together we rewrote the resolution so it would endorse something in keeping with the spirit and the letter of my mother's gift. When our substitute was found in the hopper, the whole scheme was dropped.

I tried to advise President Pattenaude of what was happening, ranging from violations of the deed of gift to practical problems. His response was that I was micromanaging. I had learned on the farm and on the sea that rhetoric wouldn't help if you didn't know what was happening. And I imagined the look on the face of the captain of the Coast Guard Cutter Spar if I had told him that I didn't really have an answer to his question because I didn't want to micromanage the bridge crew but that I would try to come up with a vital vision statement in the near future.

I became increasingly angry, not just because the deed of gift was being blatantly ignored, not just because I was being lied to, not just because the farm was being badly mismanaged, not just because what David and I had tried to do was being dismantled, but because over nearly fifty years almost everyone who had anything to do with the farm or the neck upon which it sat regarded the place as something to care for, to respect and treat kindly, if not, in fact, almost sacred.

To the university it was just another facility. And the people who cared about it were intrusions on orderly management. When I proposed a modest summer ecology project on a couple of acres of farm land, a dozen local people quickly began meeting to organize, including the director of the state park, the head of Freeport Community Services and of Freeport Community Education. A contractor not only offered a 12'x30' shed but the free use of his crew one day a month.

When we took the proposal before the university, the new president, the vice president, the dean, the farm manager and the university lawyer sat stony faced as it was described by the project's leader.

The first reaction was from the lawyer. There were, she said, serious liability problems. Funny, I thought, there hadn't been any "serious liability problems" when the university had instituted a far more risky Outward Bound-type program on a couple of acres on the farm.

"Let's cut to the chase," I said. "we've already looked into that and we can get, and have money for, insurance for $750."

The dean then gave the real reason. "It's the camel's nose under the tent," he said. The real issue, it turned out, was control. I had designed the project specifically to have it not screwed up by the university and all they really wanted was the power to screw it up. Finally, we had to give them the power to screw it up and they did.

After a hostile exchange of op ed articles in the Portland Press Herald by Pattenaude and myself, I resigned as president of the farm foundation.

Even teaching a great bureaucracy how to make picnic tables could be trying. Every year, during the winter the farm had made some new picnic tables for the campsites. Under the new administration, this item got overlooked until August. Then one day a pile of lumber appeared by the farm shop.

A neighbor driving by in the morning spotted a group of USM maintenance workers sitting on the pile of lumber viewing blueprints. On her return, the blueprints were laid aside and the workers were having lunch. In mid-afternoon she passed again. The crew had returned to the blue prints.

It turned out that the only person even remotely familiar with the picnic tables was the farm secretary; she at least had watched Joe and Alan make them. She suggested that perhaps if she called Joe -- laid off the previous day and soon to become manager of a major farm in southern Maine -- he might agree to come over. Joe wasn't happy, it was no longer his job, but the farm and all it had meant still pulled at him. He said, "Watch me. I'm going to make one and that's it." He did and the rest of the picnic tables were constructed.

A few days later I noticed on a far steep hill pasture a herd of picnic tables randomly placed, close to a road and far from the nearest tree, with not one table level to the horizontal nor parallel to another. It looked like a scene out of a Richard Scarry book. By this time the farm manager and I had little to say to each other, so I just quietly wondered. Temporary storage? Getting weathered?

A few months later a report arrived from the farm manager. In it the manager noted that a new picnic area had been tried out but had not proved popular.

Maine was changing fast. Of its thousands of miles of coastline, only 25 were left as working watefront. In a few months, even Maggie's would be sold. Maggie's was a combination gas station and convenience store at the edge of town marked for nearly 30 years by a large sign advertising coffee, donuts, propane fuel, travel info and "Fresh Gas and Corn Flakes." The first thing the oil company did when it bought the place was to take down the sign.

I feared the whole experience with the university and the farm would sour me. But the restorative powers of the land and the water soon took hold. Your problems -- the fields, the trees and the bay kept saying as they always had -- are trivial. After you've been here as long as we have, after you've been through as many blizzards, hurricanes and soggy springs, this will seem like nothing.

I stopped wondering about scattered picnic benches and skewed budgets and began again examining closely the field pine near the place where the road to our house turns. It had changed as it did every time I noticed it and yet it, as always, was exactly the same.

Both my parents had died here. My 25-year-old nephew had been killed in an accident four miles up the road. David DeGrandpre, my brother in failed chase to a dream, had fallen to his death from a ladder a mile the other way. And yet it still seemed all right, still beautiful.

And so when I left Maine, I did what I had done each time since the end of that first summer. I went to the shore and for a long, long time stared out to Bustins and Moshiers and Eagle and Jewell and Chebeague, Whaleboat and Lower Goose and the ledge where the seals rest at low tide as I tried to fix in my mind every pixel of what I saw, to keep and to hold until I could come back.

Copyright 2005 Sam Smith