We Took to the Woods: How We Make a Living
I
I ALWAYS like to know what people do for a living. This is probably just plain nosiness, but I like to call it a scientific interest. Consequently I consider ‘But how can you make a living up there in the woods?’ a perfectly legitimate question. By no stretch of the imagination could our two acres be rated as a farm. There is no place of business within a day’s hard journey of us. We don’t like to kill things, so our trapping activities are confined to a trap line for mice and rats run by Gerrish and Rufus in the kitchen and corn patch. How we keep body and soul together is a mystery to the uninitiated. At times it’s a mystery to us as well.
We make a living in a variety of ways. For one thing, there’s the taxi and transport service from Middle Dam to Sunday Cove and way stations. The rates are a little bit flexible, depending on a number of things. Very often, in winter, woodsmen who are leaving the lumber camps call on us to take them and their ‘turkeys’ (woods for ‘knapsacks’) up to Middle Dam. If all goes well, the charge is a dollar. After Thanksgiving the road gets more and more treacherous as the snow gets deeper and deeper, and it becomes easier and easier to slide off into the ditch. The passenger then is obliged to help get the car back onto the road. If this is a matter of a few shoves, the rate goes down to seventy-five cents. If it requires a lot of snow shoveling and strenuous heaving, the fare decreases accordingly. Sometimes it vanishes utterly. You can’t charge a man for spending half the morning with his shoulder to the tailboard of a 1929 Essex truck, getting his clothes plastered with flying snow. When that happens, Ralph just decides to make a social occasion of it and spends the rest of the morning visiting with Larry Parsons. So far the situation has never seemed to demand that he pay the passenger for riding.
I always feel a little apologetic about our being a four-car family. After all, with only five miles of road available, it seems a little ostentatious, in view of our faded denim pants and patched work shirts, to be discussing which car to take to get the mail.
I shall not regret the passing of the Marmon, known locally as the Riches’ Big Green Mormon, at all. It is a 1924 sports touring model, at least half a block long. Because of its tremendous power, Ralph uses it for hauling, and I have to ride in back and watch through the rear window that we don’t lose our load. I hate the thing. There is no place to brace my feet, and the frame of the car is so long that a twig in a rut turns it into a catapult that tosses me helplessly into the air. The Carry Road is nothing but bumps, so it’s like riding in a corn popper. And besides, I have a sneaking notion that Ralph is fonder of the Mormon than he is of me.
I’d better make it clear at once that we didn’t buy any of our four present cars. We came by them through a series of deals — all except the Essex, which was given to us by a friend who had become too attached to it to be able to bear the thought of selling it down the river for the twenty dollars the dealer would allow him on a trade-in. He wanted to know that it would have a good home with kind people. Men get so emotional about machinery. And the Marmon was a leftover from the days when Ralph lived on The Outside.
The Model T used to belong to Larry Parsons. Larry is very sensible about cars. When they take to swooning in crises he says ‘To hell with it,’ waits until the ice is safe, tows them out into the middle of the lake, and leaves them to go down into a hundred feet of water during the spring breakup. That’s what he was doing to this Model T one winter day when Ralph showed up. Gerrish is unhappy driving anything but a Model T — and I might add that anything but a Model T is apt to be unhappy after Gerrish has been driving it. So Ralph ground the valves on the Parsons snowboat, did something or other about the Parsons lighting plant, fixed the plug in the Parsons bathtub, which had had to be held up with the bather’s toe while the water ran out, in return for the Model T. That is what is known as a deal.
The Model A, vintage of 1930, used to belong to Jim Barnett, the local lumber baron. He had it in here one summer when he was getting out hurricane pine for the government. Under the ægis of several non-mechanical-minded straw bosses, clerks, and government scalers, it developed all the ailments that motors are heir to. During its periods of hospitalization, Ralph did Jim’s errands for him, and when Jim moved his camp out, he left the Model A in payment. Ralph spent a happy fifty-nine-hour week investigating its innards, with frequent summons for me to come out and view with horror what some idiot butcher had perpetrated on the wiring, the pistons, or the timing, — I was always properly horrified, as a good wife should be, but I never knew quite at what, — and now the thing runs.
People always ask how we got all these cars in here, there being no road from The Outside; and we always tell them that we took them apart, packed them in on our backs over the trail, and set them up again. Gratifyingly often we are believed. Of course we really brought them in over the ice, or rafted them in on scows.
II
The heyday of the transport business, with this assorted fleet of animated junk, is summer. That is when the canoe trips go through here. Some misguidebook of the lakes, which every camper in the world seems to have fallen afoul of, says that one gets from the Lower Richardson to Umbagog by way of the Rapid River. Anyone who can read a contour map can see that that is impossible. It has been accomplished only twice in history: once by mistake — Captain Coburn, when young, got caught in the current and was lucky; and once by design— some guides from up along the border wanted to make a record, but before they got through they wished they’d never started. Cluley Rips, a mile below us, is the most vicious piece of water I have ever seen. It’s frightening just to stand on the bank and look at it. The water pours into a narrow gut, overhung by rocks and dripping spruces, with such force that it has no time to level out. The middle of the river humps up, green and white and snarling, almost to eye level of the bank-stander. Cluley, whoever he may have been, was drowned there. That’s how you get things named after you in this country.
We profit by the guidebook’s error. Nobody wants to carry a canoe five miles. It would take all day. We can do it in half an hour, if we’re lucky.
Ralph has hauled all sorts of things across the carry. He has hauled anything that will float, from a rubber foldboat to a steel, Diesel-powered work boat. He has hauled woodsmen suffering from third-degree burns, all manner of cuts and fractures, pneumonia, and delirium tremens, known hereabouts as ‘the horrors.’ He has hauled a litter of pigs, bound for the garbage disposal department of a lumber camp. He has hauled newsreel men and their cameras, covering the National Championship White Water Races, and fire wardens covering a forest fire. But the ones I like best and he hates most are the girls’ camps.
He hates the girls’ camps because he claims that, in spite of the fact that the girls are always under the auspices of a guide and two or three counselors, you might as well try to organize a handful of quicksilver. I like them, because I like to see the old boy get his comeuppance. He gets them all packed in nicely around their canoes and duffel, and someone decides she has to have a picture of the outfit, but that Tessie’s skinned knee and Vera’s camp letter won’t show, so will everybody please rearrange themselves? Or Muggsy can’t find her sweater, so everything has to be unpacked. It drives him crazy, being, so he says, me raised to the nth degree.
The most recent invasion got even Gerrish down. Ralph went to Middle to get them — fifteen of them from some camp over in Vermont — and stopped here to refill his radiator. They swarmed into the yard like a pack of beagles, with an old and completely resigned guide making perfunctory motions of bringing them to heel. While his charges were posing for snapshots with Kyak, who makes local color to show the home folks, he came in to ask permission to build a lunch fire on our land. I asked him how he liked his job. He sighed wearily. ‘Wal, it ain’t no position,’ he said with feeling.
He could have saved his breath about the fire. Gerrish was tarring the seams of a boat and had the tarpot heating over a little fire between two rocks. According to his rather hysterical story, the first thing he knew he was smearing the boat with tomato soup, and then he realized he had somehow become embroiled in a mass culinary operation. He grabbed the tarpot, fought his way clear, and knocked off for dinner. He believes in coöperating with the inevitable.
I was charmed with that lunch, planned to fill the hollow brought on by ten miles of paddling since breakfast and to generate enough energy to get the whole assemblage to the nearest camp site, ten miles away, before supper. The menu: Tomato Purée, Cheese Dreams, Lemonade.
Once Ralph got a job with the Geodetic Survey, which was in here for the summer making a contour map of the country. To make a contour map, it seems, you first establish by some esoteric hocus-pocus with trigonometry the exact altitude of one point, in this case a stone in Coburn’s front yard (altitude 1462.27 feet above sea level). Then, working with surveying instruments, you run in circles from that point, sticking sticks with the new altitudes on them at convenient places along the circumference of the circle. If the reading when you get back to Coburn’s stone is 1462.27, you may assume that all points on the circle are correct. You then take any point on the circle and follow the same procedure from there. At the end of the summer the entire country is covered with imaginary circles and actual sticks. Then you start running straight lines across country, rechecking altitude with a barometer at any sticks you may come across — surveyors dignify these sticks by calling them Temporary Bench Marks — and attempting to come out at flags which have been tied — according to what system I never did find out — to various inaccessible trees. This is the last step before putting the map on paper, and this is where Ralph came into the picture.
One of the rodmen was taken ill, the appropriation for the survey was almost gone, and the head surveyor was loath to lose time and money waiting for his man to recover. So he appealed to Ralph to help him out, assuring him that all he had to do was stroll through the woods with a string tied to his arm, stop when shouted to, and blaze the nearest tree. He didn’t say that they would be working in the B Pond territory.
There is nothing the matter with the pond. It lies to the south of us, over a beech-covered ridge, and it is lovely and placid and wild. But Ralph loathes B Pond, because the trail over is rough and steep. He’d rather be dead than take a trip over the B Pond trail.
Nevertheless, he went to B Pond every day that he worked for the Survey, and he didn’t go by trail. That isn’t the way the Survey does things. They pick out a point at random, consult their notes, and learn that somewhere a mile off to the SSW is a white cloth tied to a yellow birch; then they take out their compasses, tighten their belts, and start looking for it. The rodman — Ralph — goes ahead, trailing a hundred-yard piece of string. When the end of the string comes abreast of the surveyor, he puts up a shout and the rodman stops and makes his blaze. As soon as the surveyor overtakes him, he sets out again, letting nothing, in theory at least, turn him aside from a perfectly straight line. This would be easy enough on the plains of the West, but this is rough country, and we had a hurricane in 1938.
The results of the hurricane here would have to be seen to be believed. Acres of trees are piled up like jackstraws in windrows forty feet high and half a mile long. A rodman doesn’t go around these. He goes over and through them. Ralph insists that one whole day he never had his feet on the ground except when he came down for lunch. The despised B Pond trail began to look like a boulevard, especially as he knew it was only a hundred yards off to the west, running parallel to their course. It might as well have been a hundred miles off. It might better have been, because he could have forgotten it. He tore his clothes to ribbons, and then did the same to his skin. He put a vicious blaze on a little sapling and a porcupine fell out of it, missing him by inches. That’s the same as being missed by a twenty-pound ball stuck full of red-hot needles. He got three and a half dollars a day and whatever satisfaction went with the chief surveyor’s affidavit that Ralph was the best rodman he’d ever had, and that this is the most hellish country he’s seen in a career covering every state in the Union.
But I know better than ever again to try to persuade Ralph to take a nice little walk over to B Pond with me.
III
I have my difficulties, too. I don’t like to cook. I like the results of a morning’s hard labor to last more than ten minutes. But once in a while I have to take boarders. This usually happens when I am in the worst possible position to do so. Last spring is a good example.
All three families in Middle Dam had enough food to last, with care, over the breakup and until a load of supplies could be brought in from The Outside. We were feeling pretty good about it, because sometimes we aren’t so lucky. Nobody, we fondly thought, could get in to eat up our carefully counted potatoes and beans. I was even entertaining the extravagant idea of making a oneegg chocolate cake instead of a no-egg gingerbread, when the telephone rang. It was Alice Miller, and she was in a dither.
She said, ‘Louise, how much food have you got? I got a crew of five walked in here along the shore from the Arm to stay over the breakup and do some work on the dam. I ain’t got a thing to feed them.’
The Millers had helped us out in more pinches than I can remember, and it wasn’t often that I had a chance to do much for them. This was a God-given opportunity to lend a hand. I’d peel the larder down to the last bone, and be glad of the chance. If I saved out a dozen eggs and a couple of cans of corned beef, and beans and salt pork and split peas and flour and corn meal, we could eat for the few days until the lake was clear, even if it wasn’t a balanced diet. We had plenty of canned milk and potatoes. I told her what I could let her have.
‘Swell! I’ll send someone down with a packsackl’
She hung up and in due time her emissary arrived. I gave him everything I could spare, and he staggered off up the Carry Road under the load.
Barely was he out of sight when the telephone rang again. A man’s voice said pleasantly, ‘Mis’ Rich? This is Ban Barnett. I’m down at Sunday Cove, with a crew of three. We walked in over the old Magalloway trail to fix the Carry Road before the drive comes in, and we’ll be right up. We’ll stay at your place for two-three days, like always.’
‘Did you bring any food?’ I asked with regrettable lack of hospitality.
‘Food? Holy God, Mis’ Rich, we had all we could do to get ourselves through that swamp!’
‘Ban,’ I said desperately, ‘I can’t board you. I’ve hardly got enough food in the house to feed the family. You’ll have to — ‘
He’d have to what? The Millers couldn’t feed four more. Al Parsons wasn’t any better off than I was. The men couldn’t go home, nine miles through the swamp and over a mountain, with nothing under their belts.
‘You can feed us,’ Ban assured me with touching faith. ‘You got potatoes and salt, ain’t you?’
I fed them for three days, and ever since I have had implicit belief in the miracle of the loaves and fishes. We had pea soup, which is very filling. We had baked beans. I sent Gerrish fishing. You can never catch fish when you need them, but he did. We had trout and salmon. We had corn-meal mush and molasses. The butter ran out, but we had johnnycake and the last of the jam I had made the fall before. We had dandelion greens and fiddleheads, those strange, furry fern fronds that taste something like asparagus and something like swamp water. You boil them and serve them with butter, if you have any butter. My two cans of corned beef made two meals. There are ways of stretching meat enough for three to feed seven, other than Divine multiplication. One can I cut up in cream sauce — a lot of cream sauce — and served on toast. The other I cut up with cold potato — a lot of potato — and browned into hash. Mrs. Parsons let me have three cans of tomatoes. One made tomato soup, one went into scalloped tomatoes with bread crumbs, — lots of bread crumbs, — and the last I strained for Rufus to drink, in lieu of orange juice. You can make one egg take the place of two in scrambled eggs by using too much milk and thickening it with flour. It’s not very good, but it’s something to eat.
Oh, I fed them. It wasn’t according to any known dietetics, but we all survived. And when the ice went out and the first boat came in with supplies, I had left a cup of sugar, five potatoes, three cans of milk, a quart of flour, and one egg.
While I was peeling potatoes paperthin, diluting canned milk with too much water, — we did have plenty of water, — and measuring out lard by the quarter teaspoon, Ralph and Gerrish were working with the crew on the road. That’s another annual source of income, the reimbursement for which just about covers the taxes. Working out your taxes on the road is routine procedure hereabouts. You spend a week filling in washouts, rebuilding caved-in culverts, and leveling out the worst ruts, and the tax sale is forestalled for another twelve months. Oh, you can get along with very little cash money in this country if you know the ropes and are sufficiently adaptable.
I still take boarders when I have to, but I’d rather knit. I’m a good knitter, and I’m proud of it. I see no point in being modest about things you know you do well. It doesn’t indicate humility so much as hypocrisy or lack of perception. So, then, I am a very good knitter. I even won first prize at the Andover Fair once for a pair of gloves. Fifty cents it was, and a blue ribbon. I spent the money, but the ribbon I wouldn’t part with for pearls. I can knit while I read, thus staying off boredom and creating an illusion of great efficiency. I can make up my own directions or I can follow printed directions, which apparently is the harder thing to do, although I don’t see why it should be.
I think the difficulty with people who can’t follow printed directions for knitting or anything else is that they try to understand them. They read the whole thing through and it doesn’t make sense to them, so they start with a defeatist attitude. They try to relate the first few steps to the whole, and there is no obvious relation, so they get discouraged and say, ‘Oh, I can’t learn things out of books. But if you’ll just show me — ’
You don’t have to understand directions. All you have to do is follow them; and you can follow them only one step at a time. What you need is not intelligence but a blind faith. I never read directions through. I never read beyond the operation I am engaged in, having a simple trust that the person who wrote them knew what he was doing. That trust is usually justified. Oh, there’s no trick to following directions, and if I don’t teach Sally and Rufus one other thing, I’m going to teach them that. I think it’s important.
When I get my own family’s sweaters and mittens and socks done for the winter, I knit for whoever will pay me — neighbors, lumberjacks, anyone. Also I sew on buttons and patch clothes for woodsmen, whenever there are lumbering operations in here. I don’t like to sew, and I don’t sew very well, but I do better than most lumberjacks. Ralph, coming across an article about Father Hubbard, the Glacier Priest, took to calling me Mother Hubbard the winter I started acting as housemother to the woodsmen. It applied, but not as he meant it to. I’m not a snappy model; I really don’t wear Mother Hubbards, but the effect is about the same.
IV
Had Ralph been born a little earlier, he would have been a Yankee horsetrader. As it is, he doesn’t do badly with his car trading, in a country where trading is a religion. Albert Allen, a friend from Upton who has lived all his life in this vicinity, covered the general attitude one day. ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘I’d be ashamed to give it to anybody. ‘T aint good enough. But maybe I can find someone who’ll make a trade.’ No matter what you start with, here, if you stick with it long enough, you’ll get what you want. All you need is something to start with. Will Morton, who lives on Rifle Point, off Middle Dam, and who is the oldest working guide in the state — being eighty-two — and one of the best, started out with an electric razor, which one of his sports gave him for Christmas. He ended with a boat, which was what he had in mind all the time. I’ve forgotten, unfortunately, the intermediate steps.
Ralph’s most remarkable operation was the trading of the old Model T touring car. There was a lumber camp over on Sunday Pond three miles north of us then, and one gray November day the clerk of the camp called up and announced that he’d heard Ralph had a lot of cars and would maybe sell one. He wanted it to run up and down Umbagog, now that the ice was safe and the snow hadn’t come yet, so he could go out and see his girl.
We’d just acquired the Essex, so Ralph was open to bids on the Model T. The clerk — Mac, his name was — said he’d be over next day to take a look. Ralph spent the intervening time pacing up and down and muttering to himself, trying to decide what price he ought to ask. He concluded finally that he’d ask twenty-five dollars, but would be glad to get fifteen.
The trial run was a huge success. They went everywhere — down to Sunday Cove, across Umbagog to Sturtevant Cove, and up through the woods to the Brown Farm, where they called on Joe Mooney and had a good game of ping-pong with the company doctor. Mac was impressed twenty-five dollars’ worth, all right, only he didn’t have twenty-five dollars to spare. Just as Ralph was about to come big-heartedly down to twenty, Mac advanced a proposition.
‘Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you fifteen dollars and return the car when the camp moves out.’
Every woman occasionally wonders what manner of man she has married. No matter how long she has been living with her husband, once in a while he presents a new face. It’s all nonsense about women being enigmas and men being just transparent little boys at heart. Or else I’m gullible. I had Ralph down as good old honest, outspoken Rich, the guy with the heart of gold; the guy who, offered his price in that frank and open manner, would say, ‘Oh, hell, fifteen dollars is plenty. She’s yours.’
And did he? He hemmed and hawed while I bit my tongue in an effort not to interfere. Finally he gave in, with the perfectly maddening appearance of granting a favor. ‘That’ll be all right,’ he said graciously. ‘When you get through with her, be sure to leave her on this side of the Cove, so I can get her without any trouble.’ Just like that. And then I swear he went out and measured gas into the tank with a teaspoon, so that Mac could get to the nearest source of supply, but not much farther.
That night Mac went to Errol to see his girl. The next day it snowed eighteen inches. The rest of the winter the Ford sat under a drift at Sunday Cove — on this side of the Cove, as requested — and never turned a wheel. In the spring Ralph drove it home. I should think he’d lie awake nights, but he doesn’t. He has the horse-trader conscience, I guess.
I haven’t. But I did do one deal that gives me perennial satisfaction. I think I came out all right, but even if I didn’t, even if I got ‘gypped out of my eyeteeth’ as Ralph says I did, I’m very happy about the whole thing.
There are three boats and a canoe that go with the place, and of course everybody uses them. But they really were Ralph’s boats. I wanted a boat of my own, to use and possibly abuse as I chose. I wanted a boat I could put into a pool down river and not be asked, ‘ When are you going to bring that boat back to the Pond? I want to use it.’ So when the Bernier boat — Bernier was a famous builder of the type of boat called the Rangeley boat — began to go to pieces from neglect, Ralph gave it to me. The idea was that I would fix it up myself and it would be mine.
Well, I just didn’t get around to it, somehow, and it continued to lie on the shore of the Pond, with the paint flaking off, the wood drying out, and the caulking falling from the seams. And that’s where Gerrish enters the picture.
He said to me casually, ‘Ralph tells me that Bernier boat belongs to you.’
I thought I felt a deal coming on, and I’d observed Ralph long enough to have learned some rudiments of the technique. So I just said, ‘Yeah.’
‘You ain’t going to have no boat if you don’t tend to it.’
I said, ‘Yeah,’ again, and we sat in companionable silence.
Finally he said, ‘What’ll you take for it?’
‘I don’t know. What’ll you give for it?’
‘It ain’t worth much. Needs a lot done on it..’
‘To tell you the truth,’ I said frankly, ‘I don’t want to get rid of it. I want to cut the stern off square, when I get the price of an outboard motor, and make a kicker boat out of it. What’ll you take for fixing it up for me?’ That was in the classic tradition. I’d registered reluctance to part with my property and made a counter offer.
‘Half the boat,’ he said promptly. ‘I’ll do the work and you furnish the materials and we’ll own it together. There’s places I’d go if I had a kicker boat.’
‘Where, for instance?’ I asked. I didn’t want my half of the boat hauled down to Mount Desert Island along with his.
‘Upper Dam. Or the West Arm. I wouldn’t take it off the lakes.’
So it was a deal. He scraped the boat, caulked the seams, replaced a broken gunwale, and put in a new stem and keel. That took a month. Then he gave it two coats of oil and two coats of paint, and it’s the best boat on the place. I don’t see why Ralph thinks it was a skin deal. I didn’t pay anything for the boat in the first place.
I didn’t pay anything for it in the last place, either, and that might be what annoys him. He seems to have a feeling that I should have paid for the paint and oil and steel wool and marine caulking and nails and copper sheathing. But he has a whole shop full of that kind of stuff.
I should think he’d be glad — but he doesn’t seem to be. It would bother me a lot more if I didn’t remember Mac and the Model T.
V
Ralph’s a guide, too. Just as soon as the ice starts softening up in the spring, he sends to Augusta for his guide’s license. His actual guiding consists chiefly of taking out fishing parties by the day. His prize party was an outfit of politicians from a medium-sized Massachusetts city. At home they were elaborately teetotal; the W.C.T.U. is a force in that city. But they brought fourteen quarts of Scotch and a case of beer — snakebite precautions — for their threeday stay in the woods. They managed to get rid of it, and I don’t think they dumped it in the river. That would argue a little training somewhere along the line, I should think. They’d never been fly-fishing before, but they’d seen pictures of fly-fishermen. So they had the paraphernalia: waders, creels, canvas jackets, tapered lines, collapsible landing nets, everything. Everything, that is, except the ability to cast a fly. Ralph spent the day climbing trees to retrieve flies caught in branches, and diving into the river to unsnag them from the bottom. Between times he hauled his sports out of the water — they were great fallers-in — and dodged erratic backcasts. He had a very active day. Along about dusk a great outcry went up. Someone had caught a fish. An enormous salmon, so he said. Ralph netted it. It was a small chub. The chub is a poor relation of the carp family, and we natives look down our noses at them. Even the cats won’t eat them. The politician wasn’t so choosy. Probably he has it mounted over his desk now.
Ralph finally got three of his party put to bed. The fourth — he of the chub — refused to go. He’d tasted blood and he wasn’t going to waste time sleeping. Ralph left him sitting on the bank of the river with a quart of Scotch conveniently at hand. It was pitch-dark, which not only put him in the legal position of being a breaker of the half-hour-aftersunset law, but also in the impractical position of not being able to see his line. The first consideration didn’t bother him. The second he got around by using a powerful flashlight trained on his fly. He caught no fish, but he had fun.