Month: July 2022 Page 1 of 2

Two philosophers are now certain of their theory “the greater civilization becomes, the noisier it gets”

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 29, 1939.

“I’m getting jumpy,” announced Jimmie Frise, “with all the racket that’s going on.”

“Summer is a noisy time,” I submitted.

“Just listen to it,” sighed Jim. “That dull roar of traffic. Street cars, motor cars, horses, wheels, horns tooting, bells ringing, engines grinding in gear, trucks rumbling, exhausts coughing.”

“And that hissing sound?” I mentioned.

“That’s a steam shovel a couple of blocks away,” said Jim. “I traced it down at noon. You should see the great noisy thing, grabbing a ton of rocks and junk at a grab and slamming it into a truck.”

“Those are rivetting hammers,” I interrupted, as a far insistent rat-rat shrilled above the dull thunder of universal sound.

“Doors slamming,” intoned Jim, “windows banging, boxes falling, things being chucked about, men with shovels scraping them on the pavement, boys whistling, men shouting, people gabbling, feet tapping, machines making 700 different kinds of screeches, hums, clicks, toots, bangs, thuds.”

He buried his head in his hands.

“Maybe you should take a couple of brown pills,” I suggested gently. “When you’re well, you don’t notice the noise of modern life.”

“You’re wrong,” said Jim. “I never was better in my life than I am right now. It is when you are perfectly well and healthy that you resent the unnatural racket of modern society. When you are ill, full of bad food, not getting your regular sleep, your nerves on edge from driving too much in your car, listening too much on the radio and going to too many movies, you are in tune with modern civilization and you never notice its evils. Like noise.”

“Puh,” I retorted.

“Mark my words,” said Jim strongly, “we’re heading for disaster. And it isn’t political either. We’re doing everything nature does not want us to do. We’re organizing. Nature hates organization.”

“Look at bees,” I countered. “Is there anything in human affairs as well organized as a hive of bees?”

“Okay, then,” said Jim bitterly, “we’re headed back to the bee-hive. Nature made us strange and strong, with brains and adventure in us, and gave us the chance to be as free as lions. But we decided to organize instead. And in about 100 years, we will be bees instead of lions.”

“Lions are nearly extinct,” I pointed out. “What is left of them are either in zoos or slinking in the desert, avoiding big game hunters.”

“And where are bees?” inquired Jim sweetly. “In hives, being robbed and smoked and dinned with tin pans. I would rather be a lion, slinking in the desert, than the head bee in the hives of the best honey producer in the buckwheat belt.”

Noise Will Drive Us Nuts

“Man is a swell creature,” I agreed. “He has conquered everything. What he can’t enslave or use, he kills. If he can’t eat it or harness it, he shoots it for sport.”

“Yes,” said Jim, “and in the case of song birds, wild song birds, no matter how beautiful they were, nor how sweet to hear, they were slowly being obliterated until somebody discovered that they were valuable to the farmer for eating injurious insects and weed seeds. All their beauty availed them nothing. But the minute they had a commercial value to man, they were saved.”

“We’re a pretty swell species,” I admitted.

“I have a feeling,” said Jim, “that we’ve been so cruel and ruthless in the five or ten thousand years we have got organized and conquered the whole world, that some special fate is being planned for us.”

“We’ve certainly wiped everything else off the earth,” I confessed. “Animal, vegetable. We just took the whole show and made it ours, as if we were the only thing that counted.”

“And the point is,” said Jim, “nature doesn’t care any more for a man than she does for a bug. Some day, somehow, nature will correct the balance.”

“Some big plague will take us,” I suggested.

“Science has pretty well mastered plagues,” said Jim. “I think it will be a more humorous finish than that. I think the just and reason able end of us will be the result of our own actions. For instance, we’re getting noisier and noisier. The greater civilization becomes, the noisier it gets. We’ll finally drive ourselves nuts with noise.”

“Won’t we grow immune to noise?” I cautioned.

“In 100 years,” said Jim, “we will have organized everything. The human race will be like a hive of bees. All our individuality will be gone. We will be helpless items in a giant whole. Each of us will know only the one thing, the turning of a nut, the tending of a machine, the turning on and off of a switch. We will all be living robots. Safe and secure, all our political troubles ended, all our social problems solved, no more crime, no more poverty, like bees we will hum at our work, each of us trained to do our little job expertly, each of us trained to use our leisure for our own best interests and the good of the whole. Meanwhile, we will have got noisier and noisier. You can’t organize anything without noise. The greater the organization, the more stupendous the sound. All of a sudden, a giant jitters will smite the human race. All of a sudden, a sort of overwhelming lunacy will sweep like a storm across the world. Screaming and running and hiding and burying our heads, we will leave all our precious tasks, to escape from the awful jitters of noise. And before we can get organized again, in the silence that will fall, we will all have starved to death, died of thirst, of exposure. Because being units of a vast organization, we will be helpless to survive without the organization.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said devoutly.

“I can see my great-grandchild,” mused Jim, “gnawing at a steel gear.”

“I don’t suppose,” I supposed, “that we could start some anti-noise campaign?”

“There have been several,” said Jim, “and they didn’t get anywhere. All they did was add a little more racket to the rumpus. No. It isn’t industry we have to change. It is the human heart. We must try to persuade humanity that it isn’t science they want, but nature. The human heart must desire differently.”

“But maybe,” I suggested, “this desire in the human heart for bigger and greater splendors of science and industry is only a sort of lunacy that nature has planted in us to avenge the buffalo and the tigers and the forests and the bees and the hens and cattle and all the things we have enslaved or destroyed?”

“Ah,” said Jim darkly. “Aaaahaaaa.”

“Up till this minute,” I professed, “the noise didn’t seem to worry me. But since you have been talking. I’ve suddenly become conscious of the racket. Isn’t it terrible?”

We sat in Jim’s high studio on the top of The Star building and listened. The summer afternoon heaved and groaned with a vast sound. Sounds near, sounds far. Traffic ebbing, flowing, cars, wheels, horns and blasts. A hundred factories around gave out their varied roars, buzzes, clacks. From distant works of majesty and power came the sound of steam shovels, rivetters, giant hammers, great drills.

“I’ve got to get away,” shouted Jim loudly, as if to make me hear above the tumult. “If only for a day or two, I tell you I’ve got to get away.”

He leaped up excitedly and began throwing the papers on his desk about violently, stuffing them in drawers. He grabbed his coat and vest and hat.

“Where are you going?” I demanded.

“My Uncle Abe,” said Jim, “has a farm. I spent my boyhood holidays there. It was so quiet. I used to think I’d scream when I was a kid. Silent as death. The trees never rustle. No wind stirs the pond beyond the barnyard. Only the faint lowing of cows, the soft patter of rain …”

“Jim,” I butted in, “let’s go. We owe ourselves a couple of days’ rest. Will your Uncle Abe have room for me too? Just for a couple of days?”

And like fugitives, we fled from the city of dreadful sound, driving like refugees to our homes to pick up pyjamas and fishing rods – there being bass, Jim said, in the pond beyond the farm yard – and out into the peaceful country.

“Of course,” said Jim, as we drove madly along the crowded highway, “you can’t get any impression of peace from the country, just driving through it, because the noise of the car and the rush and hoot of cars passing us, and the necessary strain and tension of driving in traffic …”

Down a darkening side road we drove, and the lights were lit in Uncle Abe’s farm house when we turned in the gate.

In fact, electric lights. And they were burning brightly not only in the house, upstairs and down, but out in the barnyard and at the side door and a specially livid light was burning part way up the lane to light the scene for at least 20 motor cars.

“What’s going on here?” demanded Jim sternly.

But when we found a little place to park and turned off our engine, we could hear music loudly braying.

“A dance,” gasped Jim. “Good grief.”

Uncle Abe was at the door, welcoming the guests. He welcomed us joyously.

“My gosh, Jimmie,” he bellowed. “I’m glad you come. This’ll make up for those awful quiet days you used to bellyache about when you was a kid.”

“What is it?” asked Jim.

“The youngsters are putting on a dance,” said Uncle Abe. “They give a dance each week at the different homes. Hear that band?”

We heard it all right.

“All local boys,” cried Uncle Abe. “The best dance band in seven counties.”

Uncle Abe showed us up to our room and we met Aunt Emily and the kids, and were introduced to the company so far assembled, about 30 in number, more to follow. Jim and I got chairs and sat in the parlor to watch.

Countrymen have better wind than city musicians. They can go seven days without coming up for breath.

After an hour, Jim whispered: “Let’s go out and walk around a bit.”

And we sought the peace of night. But half way between the house and the pond beyond the barnyard, the roar of the bullfrogs collided with the fading boompah on the band. The crickets shrilled, the mosquitoes nagged around our heads, and a whip-poorwill came and yelled from a tree beside the road.

“What time is it?” gritted Jim.

“It’s just 11,” I said.

So we walked up the road a way, but after having to leap the ditch several times in the blinding glare of headlights of cars careering madly along the narrow gravel, we decided to go back and make the best of it.

We went back with clamped teeth and watched and listened, and the young people, full of abiding fire, danced to the rumpus of the seven-man band, and sandwiches were passed and it was a quarter to two before Jim and I went up to bed and the last of the cars roared and backed and twisted out of the barnyard.

“I doubt if I can ever get to sleep,” said Jim gauntly.

But in five minutes, Jim’s snores were harmonizing with the ever increasing band concert of the bullfrogs. One measly mosquito with a baby voice, far worse than six, came and fidgetted around my head, teasing me awake every time I nearly dropped off. I jabbed Jim to stop his snores, only to have him start again just as I thought I had disposed of the mosquito.

Dawn Comes Like Thunder

Then, all of a sudden, a rooster crowed.

“Jim,” I hissed. “Jim.”

“Whaaa,” said Jim.

“Listen to that.”

The rooster crowed and Jim snuggled back to sleep as though he had heard a command.

Seven times the rooster crowed, and then, like a bugle, a cow bellowed.

I sat up. It was still pitch dark. I tiptoed to the window. A sickly pallor lay in the east.

“Jim,” I said, shaking him. “Wake up.”

He sat up.

“Listen,” I hissed.

The rooster crowed. The cow bellowed. A door slammed. Feet crunched on the gravel. A herd of pigs suddenly began to scream.

A horse kicked the barn well enough to knock it down and a pump handle began to thud and squeak.

With a blissful sigh, Jimmie rolled back and in an instant was asleep.

Daylight came like a fire horse. With every degree of daylight, the thunderous racket of the barnyard increased. Fifteen cows began bawling and five horses joined the choir with whinnies. The pigs seemed to go mad and begin murdering each other. Three roosters, a hoarse one, a short one and a long drawn one, went into competition, and a sort of din arose of hens, ducks and the silly yodelling of geese. Right under our window, the awful roar of an engine began, backfiring, spluttering, banging, slackening and accelerating by turn. I leaped out of bed.

Under the window, the hired man was working on the tractor. He twiddled and tinkered at the engine, the sounds rending the morning, the tractor shivering in fury. Suddenly it died.

“Hello,” I called down.

“Hello, there,” said the hired man looking up.

“Doing a bit of mending?” I inquired pleasantly.

“She’s been acting up lately,” said the hired man. “I thought I’d tune her up.”

“You weren’t at the dance last night?” I queried.

“Not me,” said the hired man. “I like my sleep.”

“Uhuh?” I said.

And he cranked her and started the terrible roar again.

So I got back into bed with the fly swatter and listened to Jim’s boastful snores, and to the cows and the pigs and the roosters and all the ancient din of the farm until a quarter to seven, at which time I kicked Jimmie awake, packed my pyjamas, and after a hasty breakfast got Jim to drive me down to the highway to catch the 8.30 bus back to the decay of civilization.

Editor’s Notes: I’m not sure what he meant by “brown pills”. There is reference that it could be heroin, but from what I can tell, though it could still be obtained legally in Canada until 1955, it was still tightly controlled. The drug scares of the first decades of the 20th century restricted many drugs, but perhaps people of Greg and Jim’s age still used the term for other medicine?

To older readers, a steam shovel, might be recognized as a generic term for an excavator, but at this time it was really powered by a steam engine. Actual steam powered machines were being replaced by diesel ones by the time this story was written.

Greg seems a little surprised by the electric lights at the farm? Maybe just because it was late, but maybe because rural electrification was slow in Canada? Household electrification came late to rural Canada. In the census year of 1951, when almost all urban homes in Canada had electricity, a third of rural households were still without electric lighting, and three out of four were cooking over a wood-and-coal range. In the 1950s and 1960s, most of the country’s ten provincial governments subsidised and otherwise supported rural electrification for the first time, and by the 1970s almost all rural households had electricity and running water.

“No more fooling,” said Jimmie Frise; “you’ve got to come down with me this week-end to visit Uncle Jake and Aunt Minnie on the farm.”

“What crop are they gathering this week?” I inquired bitterly.

“I picked this week specially,” said Jim, “because there are no crops. The hay is in. The farm is at rest for a little while now. You will see the farm at its best. The cattle fat and clean. The fields bright and heavy.”

“Three times,” I stated firmly. “I have visited the farm with you. Once there was threshing. Once there was haying. And the third time Uncle Jake had the lumbago.”

“That was in my mind,” said Jim apologetically. “My idea in going down this week is that there is nothing whatever doing on the farm. I haven’t heard from Uncle Jake since Christmas. That means he is in good health. The only time he writes is when he is in pain. It relieves him to write a letter when he has something wrong with him.”

“I’ve never visited a farm in summer,” I confessed. “In summer we’re always summer resorting. We visit farms in autumn, when they are forlorn.”

“Exactly,” said Jim. “More than three-quarters of the people of the world live on farms. The whole basis of human civilization is the farm, not the shop or the factory or the town. I think we owe it to ourselves, as seekers after the truth, however silly it turns out to be in the end, to know something about farms other than what we can see jazzing along highways at fifty miles an hour.”

“You’re quite right,” I agreed.

“Sometimes,” said Jim a little wistfully, “I sort of half regret having left the farm to become a cartoonist. There is a false glamor to town and city life. It doesn’t pay, in the end. You run away from the farm to escape manual labor, driving horses, handling forks, steering plows. You imagine it is a far better thing to be a mechanic in a factory, standing beside a machine. Or sitting on a stool in an office. You see a city’s street cars, its pavements, its lights and conveniences, its gaiety, its endless activity. And what do you give away in exchange?”

“I don’t like getting up at 5 am,” I pointed out.

“Pah,” said Jim bitterly. “It isn’t that. It is the peace and freedom you lose. It is the quiet and the gentleness. The patience and the kindly waiting. You plow, you plant and you tend and watch. All things come home. The wheat ripens in due season. The calves are born to the very day. Morning comes and night drops down. It is a life of order and beauty, and it is ordered not by the will of man but by the serene and eternal laws of nature. We are a long step nearer to Heaven on the farm; and in cities it’s a long, long step the other way.”

Chicken and Rhubarb Pie

“When a city man comes into my office to see me,” I confided, “he sits down on the edge of the chair and is half risen to go all in the same movement. But when a friend from the farm comes in, he enters slowly, waiting to see the impression of pleasure and delight on my face, reflecting his own. He looks about to see where to hang his hat. He selects a chair and draws it forward to a pleasant and comfortable position. He relaxes. He is there for an hour. And I, who love him, must sit, all strangely and uneasily relaxed, wondering how I can tell him I must hurry, that work is pressing, that I am a squirrel in a cage and must run, run, run round and round. I dare not relax. In cities it is fatal, it is terrible, it is painful, physically painful, to relax.”

“How,” demanded Jim, “can we ever solve the troubles of the world while the human race is so divided into two races? Two species as distinct as hawks and chickens? Three-quarters of the human race look upon life from the sweet reality of the farm. The other quarter, the deadly, scheming, clever, achieving quarter, look upon life from the dread artificiality of the city?”

“The way it is going now,” I suggested, “we are slowly starving a pretty big percentage of people out of the cities. Unemployed. If we keep up the present tendencies the number of people in cities is going to grow less and less until presently the control, the direction of human affairs, will pass out of the hands of lawyers and promoters and get back into the hands of the majority, the people on the farms.”

“Uncle Jake,” said Jim, “will be glad to see us. Aunt Minnie will give us a rousing welcome and fly to the kitchen to get some of those famous rhubarb pies of hers into the oven and a chicken on.”

“Fried chicken?” I offered.

“Roast chicken,” cried Jim, “boiled chicken, fried chicken, young chicken fried American style, chicken fricassee, chicken hash. The times I’ve been at Uncle Jake’s and Aunt Minnie’s I eat chicken till I bust, yet I never tire of it. Nobody knows how many ways there are of doing chicken until he has visited a farm in July.”

“Cold roast chicken,” I gloated.

“Chicken jellied,” said Jim, “with thick green lettuce, not the pale kind, but the rich dark green kind with a tang.”

“Will we leave Friday night or Saturday morning?” I asked.

And in due time we were headed out the highways for Uncle Jake’s, amidst the city-fleeing throng of week-enders.

“Just look at them,” cried Jimmie, as the cars filed away ahead of us and honked their horns wildly to pass us from the long stream behind, “rushing away from the city for just a few hours’ taste of what they might have forever on the farm.”

“Don’t they look silly,” I agreed.

“I picked up an Englishman,” related Jimmie, “on the Lake Shore road the other morning. Do you know how he spends his week-ends? There are some of these dinky tourist camps right on the outskirts of Toronto. They are meant to accommodate tourists coming to or passing through Toronto, in lieu of hotels. This Englishman, on Saturday afternoons, goes out to one of these suburban tourist camps, hires a cabin for Saturday and Sunday nights, $1 a night, and gets into his bathing suit.”

“I can see him,” I admitted, “tall and knobby.”

The Gipsy in Human Nature

“And there he is, ten minutes outside of the city,” continued Jim, “in the green country, with a beach nearby, with people in holiday mood all around him. He bathes in the sun and the lake. He has the camp owner bring him tea and toast Sunday morning, while he lies in bed in the little cubby. He has a swell time for about $2.50, counting car tickets. And he wants to know why people have to rush off a hundred miles for a week-end?”

“Not a tourist camp, Jim,” I begged. “Don’t suggest that we forego a lovely week-end visit to the Muskoka Lakes in favor of a visit to a tourist camp.”

“They say they’re not half bad,” submitted Jim.

“My dear man.” I protested, “ridiculous as all these cars look, streaming in all directions madly from the city at this hour, they look far less ridiculous than people going 10 miles from a comfortable bed to cramp themselves into a tourist cubby.”

“Think it over,” advised Jim. “This tourist cabin business is on the increase. This whole trailer cabin idea is growing by leaps and bounds. We are just seeing the beginning of it now. In winter, all over the southern part of the states, there are whole cities of trailers and tourist cabins. Mark my words, in the summer, we are going to see whole cities of them up here.”

“It isn’t human nature,” I informed him, “to live in a shack. Human nature craves property, space, room.”

“Wrong,” cried Jimmie. “Like so many other ideas about human nature, that one is utterly wrong. Human nature is tired of property, tired of possessions that anchor them down. Men are discovering that to be anchored to a house is like being anchored to a mountain.”

“Jim, that’s heresy,” I stated, “What would real estate men and trust companies say to that?”

“You can’t change human nature,” insisted Jim. “You can twist it out of shape for a century or two, maybe, but it works itself back to normal in time. And I tell you the natural man likes a shanty, a shack, a cubby, a cave, one room, just enough to keep him warm and dry and space to store his hunting tools. That is the natural man, not this queer jackdaw, this collector of trinkets and baubles that is supposed to be the normal man today.”

“You’re subversive, Jim,” I warned him.

“We must try one of those tourist camps some time,” said Jim.

“Not me,” I assured him. “Not me. With people jammed in all around you, people you don’t know, never saw before and never will see again, yet your most intimate neighbors for a night. And kids yelling and snores from both sides shaking the flimsy walls. No, sirree! And early birds on their way at daybreak and people coming in late stumbling and banging against your cabin at three a.m. No, sirree!”

“I’d like to have a try at it,” repeated Jimmie, and we both craned our necks to look at a handsome array of brand new tourist cabins at a road corner as we sailed along. There were merry groups of people amidst the aisles of the cabins, and cars half unloaded and children romping and women doing washing and hanging clothes on tiny lines.

“It’s the gipsy in human nature coming out,” said Jim.

“Ah,” I cried, pointing to a farm all lush and green, the white farm house bowered with bending trees, aloof, serene. “But look at that. There’s the real thing.”

“Plus chicken,” admitted Jim. “Plus chicken hash on toast.”

“Cold roast chicken,” I corrected, “broken apart by hand. Not sliced. Just broken into gobbets.”

“Mmmmmm,” we harmonized. I pushed down a little on the gas and joined with the endless streams of those escaping from Nineveh and Tyre, nor ever looking back.

And in a couple of hours of this stewing and grinding, we left the beaten path and took the second-class road that led to Uncle Jake’s. It was still a beaten path, however, for few and far between are the roads nowadays that are not beaten.

“Hurray,” we yelled when we topped the last hill and saw ahead the cluster of elms and maples that are the symbol of the peace and plenty amidst which Uncle Jake resides.

“There’s somebody there,” exclaimed Jim. “See the cars in the lane.”

“Maybe he’s holding a sale of stock,” I offered.

“There’s nobody to be married,” muttered Jim. “I hope it isn’t a funeral.”

Startling Changes

And with every yard we grew nearer to Uncle Jake’s lane, the more anxious we felt. Because there was certainly something going on at Uncle Jake’s. We could see cars parked not only in the lane but around the house.

“Good heavens,” shouted Jim, so suddenly that I took my foot off the gas and coasted. “Tourist camp.”

And now we could see the back of the house behind which was a bright array. A vivid and bright avenue of little tourist shacks, amidst which a quiet population moved in the supper time light.

“Are you sure it’s Uncle Jake’s place?” I enquired.

“Did I never spend my happy boyhood here?” said Jim brokenly.

As we turned in the lane, we could see Uncle Jake politely and ceremoniously waving us onward, a true greeter.

“Oh, ho, ho,” cried Jim, tragically.

I drove slowly in. Children romped and leaped, a man with a banjo played whanging tunes, folks were at supper and Aunt Minnie greeted us in a great swither of excitement and joy.

“Chicken dinner, 50 cents,” said a sign on the gate as we rolled funereally through.

“Welcome, strangers,” cried Uncle Jake, stepping on the running board. “You’re just in the nick of time. Only one cabin left. And a dandy at that. Turn left.”

We turned left and drove along the turf.

“Here you are,” said Uncle Jake swinging athletically off and waving a hand at just another of the gaudy little shanties.

“Uncle Jake,” said Jim, “my friend here is troubled with hay fever and asthma. He isn’t allowed to sleep in cabins. How about that room I used to be in, when I was a kid? The one with the sloping ceiling and the big red flowers on the wallpaper?”

“Aw, Jimmie,” said Uncle Jake, “that’s let. We’ve got some semi-permanent guests up in that room.”

“There’s nothing but these?” asked Jim earnestly, as a nephew to an uncle.

“Why, what’s the matter with these?” cried Uncle Jake. “A dollar a night? Paid in advance? A dry, well-built, cosy little kumfy kabin like this?”

“How about it?” asked Jim turning to me.

“Where else would we go?” I retorted grimly.

We got out and Uncle Jake helped us with our stuff.

“I hate to charge you boys,” said he, confidentially when we got inside. It was hot and smelt of new wood. “I hate to charge my own kinfolks, but you see how it is. I’m in business. I got to get my income from the investment. Now, if you had come during the week, I might have let you off. But the week-end is my busy time…”

“It’s all right,” said Jim, “what’s a dollar between relatives?”

“Well, it’s quite exciting,” said Uncle Jake, patting the walls and door admiringly. “Farming is no good any more. This is the line of business everybody ought to be in on the farm. I figure I won’t be doing any plowing or sowing next spring at all, at the rate it’s coming in now.”

‘We’re Living At Last”

“Well, one thing.” said Jim, sitting down on the narrow stretcher on the side of the cabin, “we’ll have a chicken dinner. And has Aunt Minnie got any rhubarb pies.”

“Oh, shoot,” said Uncle Jake, snapping his fingers, “we’re just out of chickens. This crowd ate up the whole supply we had ready and I haven’t another on the place that ain’t laying.”

“No chicken?” I said. “No cold bits left over?”

“Not a scrap of chicken,” said Uncle Jake. “I only got a few layers left. I got to buy my chickens in town now, the whole neighborhood is fresh out of chickens due to this kind of business.”

“How about rhubarb pie?” asked Jim. “One of Aunt Min’s famous brown-top rhubarb pies?”

“Jimmie,” said Uncle Jake, part way out the door and all ready to fly in answer to a car horn tooting in the distance, “Minnie is that busy looking after the place we’ve had to get a girl in specially to do the cooking. She’ll put you up a nice feed, though. When you’re set, come to the kitchen and see her. Fifty cents only, for supper.”

He vanished, his boots crunching hurriedly.

Jim leaned his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. He sat a long time so, while I arranged my belongings around the camp stretcher on my side of the cubby.

After awhile, he sat up and we went to the kitchen where a large strange girl laid us out a nice meal of potted meat and mashed potatoes, pickles and buns. But it seemed as if neither thought nor imagination had been given to the meal. The girl just took the stuff off the pantry shelves as her hand found them. They were not viands aimed at us, as individuals. They were food for anybody.

Aunt Minnie swept furiously through the kitchen several times, all flushed and full of vim. She embraced Jim heartily.

“Oh, Jim,” she said, “we’re having the grandest time!”

“The old place is all changed,” said Jim.

“And wasn’t it time?” cried Aunt Minnie. “Why, we’re living at last.”

After supper, Uncle Jake told us to walk around and look the old place over. In the barn were three cows and a horse. A couple of pigs had the look of being fed on chocolate bars and sandwiches. Jim showed me where there used to be 15 cows that he had helped milk. He walked me over fields where he had hunted wary groundhogs as a boy: and now the groundhogs whistled at us scornfully.

We came back at dusk and found two trailer cabins had joined the community, just for company. We sat on the step of our cubby and watched the strange phenomenon of neighbors for a night, this weird society based on hours instead of years. There was music and singing and children yelling to bed and banging and engines and a game of horse shoes. There was advancing night and a gathering quiet. There were snores and mutters and the going out of lights.

“When it is all quiet,” whispered Jim, under the stars that were over the brooding elms, “we’ll get the heck out of here.”

Which we did.

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on July 15, 1944, as well as appearing in Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise Outdoors, 1979.

Nineveh and Tyre are both described in the Bible as capitals of mighty empires. Both were reportedly wicked places and had their destruction foretold by prophets.

Viand is an archaic term for food.