Essays of E. B. White Read Free Page A

motor court right next door to the pure geometry of an early-nineteenth-century clapboard house with barn attached. You can certainly learn to spell “moccasin” while driving into Maine, and there is often little else to do, except steer and avoid death. Woods and fields encroach everywhere, creeping to within a few feet of the neon and the court, and the experienced traveler into this land is always conscious that just behind the garish roadside stand, in its thicket of birch and spruce, stands the delicate and well-proportioned deer; just beyond the overnight cabin, in the pasture of granite and juniper, trots the perfectly designed fox. This is still our triumphant architecture, and the Maine man does not have to penetrate in depth to be excited by his coastal run; its flavor steals into his consciousness with the first ragged glimpse of properly textured woodland, the first whiff of punctually drained cove.
    Probably a man’s destination (which is ever in the motorist’s thoughts) colors the highway, enlarges or diminishes its defects. Gliding over the tar, I was on my way home. DeVoto, traveling the same route, was on his way to what he described rather warily as “professional commitments,” by which he probably meant that he was on his way somewhere to make a speech or get a degree. Steering a car toward home is a very different experience from steering a car toward a rostrum, and if our findings differ, it is not that we differed greatly in powers of observation but that we were headed in different emotional directions. I sometimes suspect that when I am headed east, my critical faculties are retarded almost to the vanishing point, like a frog’s heartbeat in winter.
    What happens to me when I cross the Piscataqua and plunge rapidly into Maine at a cost of seventy-five cents in tolls? I cannot describe it. I do not ordinarily spy a partridge in a pear tree, or three French hens, but I do have the sensation of having received a gift from a true love. And when, five hours later, I dip down across the Narramissic and look back at the tiny town of Orland, the white spire of its church against the pale-red sky stirs me in a way that Chartres could never do. It was the Narramissic that once received as fine a lyrical tribute as was ever paid to a river—a line in a poem by a schoolboy, who wrote of it, “It flows through Orland every day.” I never cross that mild stream without thinking of his testimonial to the constancy, the dependability of small, familiar rivers.
    Familiarity is the thing—the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness. A farmer pauses in the doorway of his barn and he is wearing the right boots. A sheep stands under an apple tree and it wears the right look, and the tree is hung with puckered frozen fruit of the right color. The spruce boughs that bank the foundations of the homes keep out the only true winter wind, and the light that leaves the sky at four o’clock automatically turns on the yellow lamps within, revealing to the soft-minded motorist interiors of perfect security, kitchens full of a just and lasting peace. (Or so it seems to the homing traveler.)
    Even journalism in Maine has an antic quality that gives me the feeling of being home. The editorial in our weekly paper, after taking DeVoto to task for his disparaging remarks, ended on a note of delirious maladroitness. The editorialist strongly urged DeVoto to return—come back and take a second look, see the real Maine. Then he added, “Note: DeVoto has died since this article was written.”
    Benny DeVoto, a good fighter in all good causes, would enjoy that one thoroughly if he could indeed return for one more look around.
    The deer season is all over for 1955. One day last week, half the hunters in town converged on the swamp south of here, between the road and the shore, for a final drive. As I rode into the village that afternoon, there was a