The Peripatetic Reviewer

My neighbor, the owner of the duck pond, is a gentleman farmer whose sheep and w hite Plymouth Hocks are the best. lie loved hunting when young, and spent much of the autumn in his duck blinds; the’ Canadian Geese which migrate over this part of the coast were his prize beauties, and he once had two hundred of them as his live decoys. Hut as the fever of hunt ing burned away he came to prize 1 hem Ibr their individuality, and so he has kept some of the old mated pairs on the place. Kaeh year they have raised their young, and occasionally in the late autumn they have called down from the sky as many as fifty migrants who pause to feed with them on his pond for a day or two.

lie dug the pond fifteen years ago. Originally it w as a marsh too wet to mow. He was pret ty sure of at least one good spring hole and there might be more, so he went to work with a steam shovel, scooped out the half-moon I have described, let the water seep into the good sandy bottom, and dammed up t he overflow by the road. Except where the spring hole has been enlarged, ihe pond is nowhere deeper than three and one-half feet.

After the geese came the lish. lie first stocked it with six-inch rainbow trout, and after waiting for two years tried to raise some with a fly, but there was no response and he concluded that they had either been killed by the heat or eaten by the sunnies. Then eight years ago he introduced four hundred smallmouthed bass. Again after a decent interval he tried the lure and again he drew’ a blank. Hut the geese were there, and their grace and antics were so rewarding that he soon forgot about t he poor invest ment.

The oblivion continued until early this July. Then In’ telephoned me as the light was fading after dusk. “’Thought you might be interested to know,” he said, “that I have just weighed with mv own hands a 1 lirec-and-a-hall-pound bass taken out of my duck pond. I’lie boys tell me that, they got a five-pounder earlier in the week. Why don’t you come over and see w hat you can do.J”

Since i wake at six on summer mornings, it was easy and tempting to step into an old pair of flannels and Wellingtons and drive OUT for a few casts before breakfast. The first morning, I was not sufficiently cautious about my tread on the bank. The bass were* on their beds close to shore and I made just enough reverberation to send them like arrows toward the spring hole in the center. I could see ihe llighl their (ins made on the surface. i was more cautious as I made for the northern cove, and lliere my Gray Ghost hooked into a good lish. Meantime the geese had become interested, The one who directs traffic stalked down, launched himself, and honked that I move. By this time I was casting backhand in my effort to keep the fly out of 1 lie apple trees and I had no time to argue. So he called up the squad, and the first thing I knew four drakes, wings outstretched, hi 1 that water like Hying boats. The lishing in that part of the pond was over, and at the other end the ducklings were bobbing for breakfast. So I went home and eaughl the train for the office.

Since then the neighborhood, old and young, have been over to lish in the duck pond. I he owner makes only two requests: that lish under twelve inches be released, and that beer cans and picnic papers belong to the consumer. So far the amenities have been observed. It is curious to think of those lish growing and multiplying in privacy until today. It is curious to reflect that the transformation of that marsh is typical of what is happening in many other parts of New England. II New England has been running dry, it is not so much because of lack of water as because there are so many more of us, especially in the summertime, and we are using water more extravagantly than our ancestors. The solution for the farmer lies in just such farm ponds as this: deep enough for pan fish, pretty enough to look at, and full enough for irrigation.

If you love water, it is no jump from a duck pond to the Pacific. The most audacious story of seafaring since the war is told and well told in Kon-Tiki (Rand-McNally, $4.00) by Thor Heyerdahl. Heyerdahl, a Norwegian zoologist, had been prospecting for the origins of the Polynesian race in the late 1930s, and at the first opportunity alter the war, in 1947, he gathered together a ship‘s compainy of six Scandinavians: war veterans, explorers, and a meteorologist — men who had learned to operate radio in the Resistance, parachutists who were not afraid of the unknown. Thor‘s matter-of-fact invitation was this: “Am going to cross Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. will you corned You will find good use for your technical abilities. . . . Reply at once.”They accepted to a man, and in December Heyerdahl, their young captain, flew down to Peru to launch the expedition.

In the Ecuadorian jungle he found the huge green logs of balsa wood which is lighler than cork and the very timber he believed the natives used for their rafts centuries ago. Nine of these big fellows, three feet thick, weighing a ton apiece, the longest fortyfive feet, were fastened together with three hundred different lengths of hemp rope. Through the crevices were five centerboards of solid fir planks. There was a deck of split bamboo and a small open cabin of bamboo cane with tiles of banana leaves. They had a big rectangular sail and a long steering oar set in tholepins. It was a faithful copy of a raft more primitive than Ulysses , and the Peruvien Navy, when they saw it, thought the whole thing was suicidal.

Heyerdahl figured on a voyage of four months at the outside. Beneath the bamboo floor they stowed away enough fresh water for a quart per man daily. Fish was to be their main staple. Within fortyeight hours of their departure, they were experiencing the worst of what was ahead. They were riding through the rough Humboldt Gurrenl on a cork steam roller, self-bailing, saturating, and a wild bull to steer. While they were in the current, it took two men on the oar, and a one-hour watch was all they could stand. But when at last they had left the Humboldt, the dulcet days began. Their evening light shining through the cracks of their latticed, malleable vessel attracted to them the monsters of the deep. They captured the snake mackerel never seen by men in centuries. The whale shark, a floating sinister reef of some sixty feet, played around

them but did not bite even when harpooned. Whales came foaming up to them and then dove under the raft. Each morning they breakfasted on the flying fish which landed on the deck during the night and tasted like troutlings.

The raft covered 4300 miles in 101 days, and following the life aboard is an astonishing adventure for readers of any age. The voyage did not necessarily prove the captain s theory, but it. did prove the character of the six men, and that’s why the book is so good.

The hero of Ernest Hemingway’s new novel, 4cross the River and Into the Trees (Scribner‘s, $3.00), is a truculent American Colonel who in December, 1946, goes to Venice on a short leave to scc his nineteen-year-old mistress and to shoot ducks on the icy marshes. He enjoys both pleasures to the full; he keeps going on drugs with the realization that he has had three heart attacks and that the next excess may kill him. It is a mordant story, and the title of it. which is taken from Stonewall Jackson‘s dying words, sets the key.

Colonel Richard Cantwell with his “wild boar blood" and his habit of command, with his attempts to be just despite his brusque and brutal talk, with his love of people who had fought and been mutilated like himself, and with the self-disparagement which never lets him forget that he is a busted general− to me he is a consistent and an exciting character. I see him in his deceptive toughness — deceptive because of his wounds, his concussions, and his leaking pump. T attribute the bitterness with which he condemns Eisenhower, Patton, Monty, and LeClerc to his own xvords: “I wished to be, and was, a General Officer in the Army of the United States. I have failed and I speak badly of all who have succeeded.” And even if he could drink half as much and make love half as well as the novelist tells it, he would still be quite a man.

But there are a good many blanks in the Colonel’s career which the author has not clearly accounted for, and because of these blanks Richard’s character does not blend or fit together in all places. lie solved as a lieutenant with the Italian Army in the First World War and received his first wounds and his lifelong admiration of the Italians at that time. (But why did he sign up with the Italians and not with us?) he has an intimate knowledge of the Far West, a quotable love of Shakespeare, a decided taste for art, which suggest not a career in the regular Army but a civilian life. (What was he doing between the wars?) He married and is now paying alimony to an American war correspondent.. (Why would a great lover wail until his late forties for that?) It is because of these blanks that the burly and sensitive sides of the Colonel are not well seamed.

Not unnaturally the dialogue is peppered with the Colonel‘s Army talk, coarse, unbridled, offensive to some In its repetition. This is an expected ingredient, and there are times when it is used with an air of bravado. “The Colonel woke before daylight and checked that there was no one sleeping with him.” I call that bravado and I don’t believe it, not with Renata possessing his thoughts as she did. Again when, in answer to the Contessa‘s question, “How many have you killed?" Richard replies, “One hundred and twenty-two sures. Not counting possibles,” he commits a boast which I don’t believe a really tough soldier would have bothered with.

What‘s best in this story is ils love: its heartfelt love of the Infantry, its bantering, affectionate love of Venice and the Venetians, its gusty love of sea food and wine, and its love of gondolas with Renata in the lee.

In The Egg and I Betty MacDonald told of her hilarious problems in trying to raise daughters and chickens on a farm in Washington. In The Plague and I she described how she almost lost her life in a swift attack of TB, and of what it felt like to recuperate in a sanatorium. Her new book, Anybody Can Do Anything (Lippincott, $2.75), is a family comedy which throws the spotlight on Betty‘s oldest sister, Mary. When Betty’s first marriage collapsed and she limped home from the chicken farm with her two children and no bank account, it was Mary who roused her to fresh conquests.

So that you will understand the working relationship between the two sisters — Mary was just two years Betty’s senior Betty takes you back to her childhood in the mining country of Montana and in a series of vignettes illustrates how even then Mary was confident that her brothers and sisters could do the impossible if only they would follow her advice. These are very funny stories with just enough exaggeration to flavor the juvenilia. In their family vaudeville it was Betty, the Human Bird, The Greatest Jumper of All Time, who was coaxed to fly out of the barn loft. (“Come on, Betsy darling,” Mary called, “I‘ll count for you and when I get to 10 yon jump.”) So Betty jumped and landed hard on a pile of straw and two tines of a hidden rake.

Twenty years later Mary‘s coaxing was just as irresistible and often as hazardous. Betty’s assets were her looks, her willingness, and a sketchy know ledge of stenography, and with these she was made to jump into job after job. Her mistakes were real enough and never the same, and since both girls were attractive and still on the man hunt, the element of adventure is never absent. Only the longsuffering patience of Betty’s bosses sounds implausible. Perhaps they did not4 quite know how to get rid of such a redhead.