“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.
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