Tag: 1947 Page 1 of 5
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, November 1, 1947.
“I’ll take a…” paused Jimmie Frise, studying the menu, “… I’ll take a Spanish omelette.”
“Aw, take scrambled eggs,” I protested. “Good old plain scrambled eggs.”
“Make it,” said Jimmie to the waitress, “a Creole omelette. That’s got more goo and peppers and stuff, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s hotter than the Spanish,” agreed the waitress.
“Jim!” I pleaded. “Why ruin good eggs with a lot of guck? There’s nothing in the world as good as old-fashioned scrambled eggs.”
“Creole omelette,” smiled Jim resolutely at the waitress. And she went away.
“I can’t understand,” I submitted, “why you, who were born and raised on the farm, should prefer your eggs all smothered up with tomatoes and peppers and sauces…”
“Ah,” responded Jim, “if I could get good rich country eggs, good old barnyard eggs, I’d eat ’em scrambled. I’d eat them fried, boiled, shirred or even raw. But these poor, anaemic, pallid, sissy city eggs you get – these factory eggs – these chicken ranch eggs! Why, there’s no flavor to them! I’ve got to have them doctored up.”
I laughed.
“Jim,” I scoffed, “there’s no comparison between barnyard eggs and the product of efficient and scientific modern chicken farms.”
“That’s just what I said,” agreed Jim calmly. “No comparison. The yolk in a chicken farm egg is so pale a yellow that you can hardly distinguish it from the white. The white is so fragile and jelly-like, you might as well be eating air: Neither the white nor the yellow has any flavor whatever.”
“If you call flavor,” I cried, “that heavy, cloying, gamey taste you get in the orange-colored yolk of a barnyard egg.”
Our waitress returned with our lunch. Jim’s was a plate on which a small leather-colored omelette, like an old wallet, lay floating in a sea of squishy red tomato, green peppers, red peppers, onions and dark speckles of spice.
My plate held a delicious little mound of feathery scrambled eggs, the color of palest daffodils, a sort of delicate canary.
“There!” I announced triumphantly.
“Taste them!” suggested Jim.
I tasted them.
“Taste any egg?” inquired Jim sarcastically.
As a matter of fact, they tasted slightly sweet. I sprinkled salt on them generously, and biffed the pepper shaker with my fist.
“It won’t do any good,” assured Jim, scooping up a forkful of his florid omelette. “Those are, mass production eggs. Those are factory eggs. Egg factory eggs. There isn’t anything in them but what the egg factory put in them. The mothers of those eggs were spinsters. Old maids. They lived in a chicken nunnery, hundreds of them, thousands of them. They were born in an incubator, and from the day of their birth, never ate anything but horrid artificial foods, concocted in test tubes by spectacled professors. Robot chickens, living in white-washed prisons, with artificial heat and artificial light, force-fed, pushed and shoved from within and without, toward their tragic fate. Never, never did one of those little mothers ever chase a grasshopper or pull a worm from the manure pile with glad young cries. Never did they race one another for a tidbit across the steaming barnyard. Never did they hear a rooster crow, save a mile away on some vulgar neighboring farm.”
I toyed with my scrambled eggs.
“How,” demanded Jimmie, wiping a little Creole sauce off his chin with his paper napkin, “how could the eggs of such chickens have any character, any quality, any savor? Penned in their hard, clean prison yard, they have been stuffed with scientific food, glutted with vitamins blown up with chemicals, proteins, carbohydrates.”
I took the ketchup bottle and slurped a goodly portion over my scrambled eggs.
“The only egg,” propounded Jim, “fit to eat, is a natural egg from a natural barnyard fowl. A good, round, rich egg, with a deep yellow yolk and a fine creamy white.”
I stirred the ketchup into my scrambled eggs and tasted them. They did taste better. At least, they tasted.
“I’m beginning to think,” ruminated Jim, “that science is the real enemy of mankind. A man IS What he eats. A nation IS what it eats. Look at the British and roast beef – that is, until recently. Why did they call him John Bull? Look at the Germans, who ate cabbage and fat sausages and pumpernickel! Look at the French, who ate complex, strangely-seasoned and delicate food! Look at the Italians, who ate spaghetti that was so slippery you could hardly…”
“Science,” I reminded him.
“Science,” returned Jim, “has given us force-fed beef, called baby beef, beautiful to look at but without flavor or quality. And look at those eggs! I tell you, science is stealing away the character and the quality of the human race. We are becoming anaemic, debilitated, without flavor and without character, just like what we eat. One fine day, some race of men that has escaped science will come down on us, full of blubber and beetroot, and conquer the whole earth!”
I finished my scrambled eggs and ketchup and washed it all away with a glass of tall, cold-scientific milk.
“I disagree with you,” I announced, “on every point. Most of the trouble and uneasiness in the world today is due to the rise of a better-fed, healthier, stronger and more intelligent mass of mankind. In the olden days, when the masses were kept half-starved, so they hadn’t enough energy to demand anything, the world was a cosy spot for the well-fed. But now, everybody is well fed…”
Jim detests politics, especially recent politics. He pushed back his chair and we sauntered out into the noonday streets to mingle with the downtown crowds for a few minutes’ walk in the autumn air.
“We ought,” he announced, “to have a National Hen Day, celebrated from coast to coast. A national holiday dedicated to man’s most generous friend, the chicken. In the big cities, there ought to be festivals and parades, with large floats showing giant chickens flapping their wings to greet the cheering and grateful multitudes of city slickers lining the streets. In the country, every village and every township should hold fairs on that national holiday to show, not the dead corpses of the chickens nor the heaps of pearly eggs, the vain fruits of all their labors but the living beauties, with ribbons round their necks and gilded cages in which to display the famous champions.”
“National Hen Day!” I agreed triumphantly.
“I saw some figures in the paper the other day,” said Jim. “Last year, do you know how many billion eggs Canadian hens produced?”
“Billions?” I protested. “Aw, not billions!”
“I tell you,” assured Jim, “last year the hens of Canada produced 350,000,000 DOZEN eggs!1“
“Holy…!” I gasped.
“Three hundred and fifty million DOZEN,” calculated Jimmie, “is getting on to 4,000,000,000 eggs. In Canada alone.”
“I had no idea,” I said reverently and wished I couldn’t taste the ketchup in my mouth.
“The funny part,” said Jim, “was that while 250,000,000 dozen eggs were sold off the farms to be eaten elsewhere, nearly 90,000,000 dozen were eaten right on the farms.”
“Or kept for hatching,” I suggested.”
“Not at all,” corrected Jim. “They sold 12,000,000 dozen off the farms for hatching for the egg factories. And kept only 6,000,000 dozen for hatching on the farms.”
“Those are staggering figures,” I confessed. “Did they give any figures about the chickens themselves – the poultry?”
“Yes, but only in pounds,” explained Jim. “And you can’t visualize a pound of chicken the way you can a dozen eggs. I think it was 200,000,000 pounds of chicken sold off the farm, and 65,000,000 pounds of chicken eaten on the farm…”
“Hmmm,” I submitted. “They eat pretty well on the farms!”
“Eat?” cried Jim, exhaling Creole sauce into the crisp autumn air. “You don’t know the half… Say! Do you know what I’m going to do tomorrow?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I muttered.
“I’m going to drive down,” he exclaimed, “to Uncle Abe’s farm and get a six-quart basket full of barnyard eggs! Do you want to come?”
Naturally, I went. Every time we go to Uncle Abe’s, if it isn’t a barrel of northern spies, it’s a lame back; if it isn’t a car trunk full of squash and pumpkins, it’s the hay fever from helping thresh the barley. But I went.
Uncle Abe has no use for science. He doesn’t even own a tractor. His implements all have that well-weathered, rusty and Victorian appearance that you associate with your earliest boyhood memories of farms.
And the table Aunt Hetty spreads belongs to the oldest and best tradition. We arrived at the farm just in time to be too late for the evening chores and also without any warning. But this makes difference to Aunt Hetty. She merely set two more places at the big kitchen table and went to the cupboard and put 12 tea biscuits on the plate instead of six, and added a pumpkin pie to the apple pie and the gooseberry pie that already graced the central pyramid of bounty that rose in the middle of the huge round table.
The main dish for the meal was lamb stew, with new boiled potatoes rolling in the gravy, whole carrots and whole small onions. On the side were baked squash, stewed tomatoes, baked beans, green beans and more small round potatoes to put in the stew when you ran short.
From the central pyramid, you could select sour pickles, sweet pickles, silver onions, green tomato pickles, pickled melon, pickled baby corn cobb suckers and home-made tomato butter that would lift you six inches off your chair with the first taste, it was so hot.
After we got the first famish dulled and, is the custom at farm tables, conversation started to bloom gently, Jim opened the discussion on eggs.
“We’ve come,” he announced, “for about six dozen real farm eggs. I want to show this poor, anaemic little guy what an egg should taste like.”
“Six dozen,” said Aunt Hetty, “will be just about what I’ve got in the back kitchen.”
Uncle Abe finished chewing what he had in his mouth and then sat back a little and cleared his vocal chords.
“Eggs,” he enunciated, “are the fundamental food of mankind. It may well be that while the other monkeys stuck to nuts, spiders and beetles, the man-monkey discovered that eggs were good to eat. And the whole story of the rise of man from the lower orders is due, to eggs.”
“I mean,” put in Jim, “natural, WILD eggs!”
Uncle Abe ladled another scoop of lamb stew on my plate, while the conversation rolled and rambled far and wide over the whole field of eggs. The dishes and the plates passed. The pickles went from hand to hand. At Aunt Hetty’s table, there is plenty of exercise in just passing; because if you pick anything up, there is no place to set it down again except the place it came from.
“Het,” said Uncle Abe, when all our lamb plates were polished and the pie was next in order. “All this talk about eggs has got my appetite stirred up. Before we assault the pie, how about a platter of nice light scrambled eggs?”
“Oh, no, NO, NOOOO!” I groaned.
But Aunt Hetty skipped to the stove, whisked a skillet out and cracked a dozen eggs.
Yes: I had to try them. I begged off. But Jim pushed me aside with his elbow and ladled the scrambled eggs off the platter on to my plate.
And pie. You can’t offend a woman like Aunt Hetty.
It was toward 10 o’clock when Jimmie and I, slightly bowlegged, walked out of Uncle Abe’s kitchen door into the lighted door yard where our car was parked.
Jim had a goodly pumpkin in his arms. I had the basket with six dozen eggs, as well as a handsome Hubbard squash under the other elbow.
I tossed the Hubbard squash through the open window of the car on to the back seat, and reached for the door handle.
At the same instant, with a fiendish sound, something large, wild and furious came screeching through the open window and batted me on the head as it passed. Within the car, a mad pandemonium had broken. I leaped backward, slipped and hurled the basket of eggs in a wide arc of self-defence…
“Those dang chickens!” cried Uncle Abe, bounding to my aid tip-toe through six dozen burst eggs all around …”They always roost in anybody’s car!”
Editor’s Note:
- Out of curiosity, Canada produced 915.0 million dozen eggs in 2024, up 260% since 1947. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, April 5, 1947.
“Hasn’t this,” yawned Jimmie Frise, “been a perfect evening!”
“We ought to have them oftener,” I agreed, glancing at my watch.
It was 10.30.
“Just sitting here in front of a fire,” sighed Jim, gangling himself deeper and wider in his easy chair. “I suppose we have to be middle-aged before we really appreciate an evening like this. When we were younger, we had to be on the go. We had to have something to do. An evening was considered wasted, if we just sat like this, chatting.”
“Not in the good old days,” I pointed out. “Jim, before the invention of the motor car, or the movie, or the radio, the vast majority of men spent nearly all their evenings like this, not only the middle-aged, but even the young men.”
“Of course, they entertained,” put in Jim. “In the good, old days, people visited around with one another more than we do now.”
“Not any more than you having me over here tonight,” I countered. “This is the way men spent their evenings, fifty, a hundred years ago. Invite a neighbor over to sit and converse.”
“Just look at that fire,” gloated Jimmie.
We sat drowsily gazing at the fire, in the wide fireplace. It had burned down to a slumbering bed of ruby embers. Little lazy fingers of flame waved up, and then vanished. The fire was like us; warm and content and quiet, after a pleasant evening.
“Men would live longer,” I submitted, “if they so arranged their lives that they could have three nights a week like this.”
“It’s impossible,” sighed Jim. “How many nights a week could we get our families ALL out? Somebody is bound to be home; and even if there’s only the one at home, then the radio is going, doors are opening and shutting, footsteps tramping around, telephone conversations going yakety-yakety…”
“Probably the idea,” I suggested, “of gentlemen’s clubs arose out of this problem, Jim. As a man gets past his youth, he yearns for a little peace and quiet and the fellowship of other men his own age. So they found a club, where they sit around a fire in the evenings, just the way we’ve been doing.”
“We’d live longer,” agreed Jim.
“With all the wonderful discoveries of medical science in the past fifty years,” I propounded, “men don’t live any longer, really. In fact, I sometimes think men don’t live as long as they did in our grandfather’s time. Why? Because we don’t get enough of this sort of complete relaxation, this snoozing. I think all men should snooze so many hours a day. Sleep isn’t enough. Snoozing is in the very nature of man.”
“Well, then,” suggested Jim half-heartedly from the depths of his chair, “how about us trying to join one of these exclusive men’s clubs?”
“Aw, no, Jim,” I explained, “they’ve all gone to pot. The old-fashioned snoozing club has vanished, just the way the old-fashioned home has. And for the same reason. Men’s clubs are just business organizations now. They’re an extension of modern industry and commerce. Do you see the members snoozing now? No, sir. They’re all gathered in nasty little groups, talking furiously. Selling.”
“Mmmmmm,” dozed Jim,
“We take vitamins,” I pursued, “we have annual checkups. We take carefully prescribed exercise, such as golf or bowling or trips to Florida. But we still die of hypertension. Ten, maybe 20 years younger than our grandfathers.”
“I’ve got an idea,” murmured Jim, rousing himself slightly. “How about us bribing our families to go out three nights a week? This has been too perfect an evening to be wasted in its lesson to us. We’ll take turns. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we’ll bribe our entire families to go out for the whole evening. Yours, Monday. Mine, Wednesday, and so on.”
“All it would cost us,” I agreed, “would be a few movie tickets, maybe a few concerts during the season, a few gallons of gas for the car…”
“Cheaper,” submitted Jim, “than joining an expensive men’s club.”
“Think,” I cried, “what a delight it would be to look forward to three evenings like this every week, where nobody can get at us. Nobody disturbs us. We just sit here, idly conversing about all the things that really interest us, all the events of our lives that have gone unnoticed, actually…”
The telephone rang.
“There,” grunted Jim, “Probably one of the kids wanting me to go and fetch them in the car…”
He got up heavily and slithered in his slippers out to the hall.
But it wasn’t one of the kids.
Jim’s voice was confused. It was a cross between agitation and politeness. Between warmth and chill.
“Why, certainly…” he said, “Why, of course, of course. What time is it..?”
I looked at my watch. It was 10.35.
“What time does the train leave?” asked Jim carefully. “Okay! I’ll be right there! No, no, don’t mention it. It’s nothing…”
He came bounding back into the living room.
“There!” he grated. “Peace, eh? Peace and quiet eh…!”
And he dashed upstairs for his shoes and coat.
“What is it?” I yelled up.
“Neighbor,” called Jim. “Old uncle from the country has to catch the 11 o’clock train. Car won’t start. Can’t get a taxi…”
I began putting my overcoat and hat on.
Jim came galloping down the stairs.
“They saw my car standing out in front,” groaned Jimmie. “So they… “
We nipped out the door and down the walk.
“You don’t have to come,” reminded Jim.
Three doors up, a party of agitated neighbors gathered on the lighted verandah. Jim swung the car into the side drive.
“No time to lose,” gasped an elderly gentleman with a suitcase in one hand, travelling bag in the other, charging down the steps.
“This is my Uncle Wesley,” introduced the agitated neighbor, his hands and elbows full of large packages and cartons, Five in number.
“How do you do, how do you do,” we greeted, stepping out while the valises and bundles were hurled into the back seat of the car.
“Are you going?” the neighbor enquired of me eagerly. “If so…”
“No, I’ll just walk home, around the corner,” I said, backing slightly.
“I was thinking,” suggested the neighbor, as he hoisted Uncle Wesley into the back seat,” that if there wasn’t any room for me, I’d just stay and try to get my car started. I don’t know what’s happened…”
“We tried all over for a taxi,” cried the lady neighbor from the verandah.
“We’ve got to get cracking,” said Jim pleasantly, racing the engine.
“Okay,” I said, springing in beside Jim.
And out we backed, while the neighbors waved thankfully, and Uncle Wesley waved in response and puffed.
“Whew!” he said. “Those people are always in some kind of a panic.”
“We’ll make it,” assured Jim, speeding out onto the night streets.
“Have you got far to travel?” I enquired, facing around chattily.
“No,” said Uncle Wesley, “only about 40 miles out. But I like this night train, because it gets me in around midnight. And my son is the station agent, and he drives me home, as he’s through for the night. It’s a nice arrangement.”
“Been shopping?” I supposed.
“I come down every spring,” explained Uncle Wesley, “for a couple of days visit with my nephew back there… drat the man! … he’s always in a tizzy like this! Yeah, I come down for a couple of days, and visit all the seed houses, and the implement dealers, and lay in a little stock of this and that. Some harness. A new bunch of felt for horse collars…”
Uncle Wesley, in the dark of the car, was feeling over his various packages, to see they were all there. Seven pieces in all.
“Yep,” he said. “All here.”
And we skimmed down deserted blocks, and whanged around corners, and I kept my eye on my wrist watch to see 10.45 come and go. And then 10.50. And at last, at 10.53, we came into the stretch and pulled up with a screech in front of the station. Jim slid into a vacant space, for once, and I leaped out to help bail Uncle Wesley free of his bundles.
“No red caps1,” breathed he heavily.
“Red cap!” I sang out, in the best big city fashion.
But no red caps were to be had.
We divvied up the luggage. Jim took three pieces and Uncle Wesley and I two each.
“What’s your car number?” I asked.
“Day coach,” whuffed Uncle Wesley.
It was 10.56 as we barged into the station rotunda. It was 10.57 as we rounded the buoy and showed Uncle Wesley’s ticket to the gateman. The gateman didn’t attempt to stop Jim and me with the bundles.
Up the stairs we hustled. It was 10.59 when we galloped along the platform, away to the head of the train where the day coaches were. And the conductor was chanting “board … boooaaarrrddd!”
“Take it easy!” gasped Jim at old Uncle Wesley’s heels. “Here!”
We had to jostle several other people scrambling at the car steps.
We boosted Uncle Wesley on.
We started to heave his bundles in after him.
“Hey!” commanded the conductor. “Don’t leave those bundles there! You can’t obstruct the vestibule.2“
Uncle Wesley glared wild-eyed back down over the heads of others scrambling on.
“Okay, just a minute,” cried Jim. And he leading and I following, we shoved into the group struggling up the steps.
“We’ll just,” cried Jim, “toss them up into a parcel rack.”
“Booaaarrrddd!” boomed a fateful voice behind us.
“Hey, Jim,” I shouted, trying to drop my two bundles. But somebody was shoving from behind, so that I couldn’t even drop them.
The air brakes gave that long, lazy hiss and the train creaked.
“Aw, here, wait a minute,” I groaned, as I was shoved ahead into the passageway alongside the drinking water tank.
I could see Jim struggling, two places ahead of me now, trying to chuck his bundles, a la basket ball, into parcel racks already full.
There was a jerk; and the train started.
Behind were a dozen heads, flushed and excited. Ahead, Jim pushed for all his might towards me, but in vain.
We were off.
By a species of wriggling, struggling and sidewinding, Jim and I got together at last on the vestibule. The brakeman had just slammed the doors.
“We’re carried off,” I cried.
“We’ll get off at a suburban station,” soothed Jim easily but loudly.
“No stop at any suburban station on this train,” said the trainman, picking up his lantern to go.
“But hold on,” exclaimed Jim.
“See the conductor,” advised the trainman briefly.
Well, it was far past the last suburban station when we found the conductor. And it was in defiance of all the rules, he explained, that he would arrange to stop the train, just for 20 seconds, at a village about 20 miles out.
“The first stop,” he said, “is 40 miles out.”
That would be Uncle Wesley’s.
“Men of your age,” said the conductor sternly, “ought to know better than get carried off. By rights, I should charge you the fare.”
Uncle Wesley was most indignant, when we passed him on our way to the vestibule where the trainman was to let us jump. “Coming to the city,” he declared hotly, “is getting worse all the time.”
At the dim little village, we jumped.
All was dark. It took us a good half hour to find anybody who would taxi us back 20 miles to town. And because it was after midnight, he charged us special rates – $10.
And, of course, when we reached Jim’s car, parked in front of the station, there was a ticket on it – for parking in a limited area.
“Well …” said Jim, in a high, patient voice, as he grasped the wheel and stepped on the starter, “maybe we’d better join an exclusive men’s club after all.”
“There’s no escape, Jim,” I countered darkly. “If it isn’t the family, it’s the neighbors. If it isn’t the neighbors, it’s somebody else. The truth of the matter is, society has just got too damn social!”
Editor’s Notes:
“Bill Thomas,” announced Jimmie Frise, “has got the sciatica.”
“It’s little wonder,” I reflected, “the life he leads. From the time the ice goes out in the spring until the ice comes again in the fall, he’s out in that boat of his…”
“It’s about the boat,” interrupted Jim, “that I want to speak to you. How’d you like to help me put it away for the winter?”
“You mean,” I protested, “pull it up?”
“It’s a very simple matter,” assured Jim. “All we do is skid it up on some rollers, on to the beach…”
“Nothing,” I declared emphatically, “doing!”
“It’s a small thing to do,” pleaded Jimmie, “for a guy like Bill. The poor chap laid up cold with the sciatica…”
“A small thing!” I cried. “To haul a great big motor boat up on to a beach? Why, it’s work for a gang of 10 men!”
“Not at all,” soothed Jim. “The two of us can handle it easily. Bill has got all the equipment organized for us, All we do is to lay some two-by-six timbers on the beach and down a little way into the water. Then, we hitch a rope from the axle of the car…”
“What car?” I demanded loudly.
“Well, your car,” explained Jim, patiently. “As you know, mine’s laid up.”
“I see,” I said bitterly. “Somebody’s car has got to have the rear end of it torn out hauling a great big power boat out of the water.”
“Listen,” pleaded Jimmie. “Greg, it isn’t a great big power boat. It’s just a little old runabout, a little gasoline launch. It’s only 20 feet long; and with rollers under it, laid on those two-by-six scantlings, a car can haul it up on the beach as easy as if it were a wheelbarrow.”
“I think boat owners,” I enunciated, “should attend to the job of putting their boats away themselves.”
“I’ve just told you,” riled Jimmie, “the poor guy has got the sciatica. His knees are all swollen up. He can hardly walk.”
“And how did he get the sciatica?” I persisted. “All through this same silly boat! He puts it in the water the minute the ice goes out. He rushes down to the waterfront every afternoon, the minute his office closes, and spends his time fiddling and pottering around that boat. Many a night he sleeps right on the boat instead of going home to bed like a Christian. Every week-end he goes on ridiculous cruises, a few miles east or a few miles west, bouncing and bumping over the waves.”
“You and I,” reminded Jim kindly, “have been on many a nice little cruise with Bill.”
“Not for six or seven years,” I countered. “I have no use for boats, except to sit in for fishing. I can’t see any sport in sitting in a boat, going no place, just for the pleasure of going!”
“Every man to his taste,” said Jim. “Lots of people have no use for fishing. Okay, you have no use for boating. But you must admit Bill gets a great deal of pleasure and joy out of his boat.”
“Also,” I pointed out, “the sciatica. Just at the time he has to go to the trouble of putting his boat away for the winter.”
“Well, maybe I can get somebody else,” sighed Jim wearily.
“Oh, I’ll do it,” I subsided. “But I think this is one of the occasions on which I am entitled to squawk a little bit.”
“You’ll probably enjoy yourself,” assured Jimmie. “Boats are a lot of fun.”
“Boats,” I retorted, “are clumsy, damp, cold, heavy, lifeless. They smell.”
“Boats,” corrected Jim, “have a longer association with mankind than any other vehicle or maybe any other tool. Ages before the first crude wheel was invented, men were travelling up and down the rivers of the world, and along the shores of the world, in boats. The first man who ever tried to escape from his tribe jumped on a floating log and travelled downstream to freedom and adventure. The waterways of the world were the first highways of the world. Thousands of years before, the first roads were built, commerce had been established by boats, even if they were only crude. dugouts, and rafts.”
“They served their purpose,” I admitted, “like the spinning wheel, until something better was devised.”
“I’m trying,” explained Jim, “to show you that boats are involved in the very nature of humanity. Since they were the only means of travel, exploration, adventure and commerce for countless centuries, they appealed to men of masculine and adventurous character. To this day, boats have a powerful fascination for manly men.”
“Oh, is that so?” I scoffed.
“Down through the ages,” pursued Jim, “has been handed this love of boats, from generation to generation. And Canadians, more than any other race on earth, should love boats. Because they have the Atlantic on one side of them, the Pacific on another, the Arctic ocean on the third side. And, for more than half the width of Canada, they have the Great Lakes as their fourth sea-girt boundary.”
“Well,” I said, “speaking for myself and the great majority of Canadians, I like to puddle around on a few rivers and some inside channels and plenty of small summer resort lakes. But as for the ocean or the wide open Great Lakes, they’re all very well to cool the air for me, and to supply a little commercial fish…”
“You’re right,” cut in Jim curiously. “There is something mighty funny about the attitude of the average Canadian toward the sea and the Great Lakes. By all odds we should be a maritime people, with love of the wide seas and boundless lakes very strong in our make up. But, except for a few small yacht clubs scattered along our waterfronts, and a couple of dowdy old excursion steamers plying a tenuous trade here and there, the Canadian attitude toward the great waters that surround us amounts almost to – fear!”
“That’s natural,” I submitted. “Big water is uncomfortable. And dangerous.”
“We come of a maritime race, the British,” reflected Jim.
“Maritime my eye!” I exclaimed. “There’s another of those myths! The British have been marooned on a small island for centuries. For centuries, the only way they could get off the island was in boats. For centuries they’ve been getting off the island as fast as boat could carry them. Generation by generation, the young Britons went to sea in order to escape from the sea. For one that remained at sea, hundreds escaped to far lands, deep lands, where you couldn’t even smell the sea: and there they stayed! The far-flung British empire was founded by Britishers escaping from the island and looking for dry land: the dryer the better – Canada, India, Australia, Africa – good inland land from which you can’t see the sea…”
“You are tampering,” interrupted Jim, “with a noble tradition.”
“The noblest service boats have rendered humanity,” I summed up, “is to have carried men to parts of the earth where boats aren’t necessary.”
“Poor old Bill Thomas,” smiled Jimmie. “I’m glad can’t hear these sentiments and him trusting you to haul his beloved boat out…”
My old car, as Jim pointed out, has new tires. And these, he explained, would bite into the sand and gravel when it came to the actual traction necessary to drag the boat up on to the beach.
We drove down to the waterfront area where Bill keeps his boat moored out to a mooring buoy. It is a 20 foot launch with a small plywood cabin over the forward part. It isn’t quite a cabin cruiser, though you can sleep in it.
Bill had left, at a small boathouse nearby, some 12 foot scantlings of two-by-six, and half a dozen large rollers, like oversize tent poles. These, with a length heavy rope, were to be used in very simply hauling the boat ashore.
“I don’t see Bill’s boat,” I exclaimed as we drove out on to the shingle of the beach.
“There she is, the black one,” pointed Jim.
“I thought she was white,” I apologized.
“Bill painted her black two years ago,” said Jim.
With a canvas tarpaulin buttoned over her after end the little boat swung, among a dozen other assorted sail and engined craft, at her mooring buoy.
We carried the two-by-six planks from the boathouse down to the beach. The heavy rope I carried to the car and made an end fast to my axle. From the boathouse, Jim carried eight heavy billets of wood which, he explained, were to prop the launch in an upright position on the sand when we got her beached.
“We leave her,” he explained, “resting on the rollers and planks. But securely propped on both sides, so as to prevent her becoming what they call ‘hogged.’ That sagging at the bow and stern.”
“I’ll do the hauling,” I replied. “You do the propping. I’ll leave all the nautical stuff to you.”
We laid tracks, as it were, of the two-by-six scantlings. On them, at handy intervals, we laid the rollers which Jimmie, as I hauled, would lay under the keel, as she rolled. Last of all, we laid a couple of the two-by-sixes down the sloping beach right into the water.
Jim borrowed a small skiff from the old boy who minded the boathouse, and rowed out and released the launch from the mooring buoy. He towed the launch in while I, with my boots and socks off and my pants rolled up, waited on shore to waggle the two submerged planks neatly under the prow of the incoming launch.
“Neatly done,” admitted Jim, as he shoved the launch’s nose my way. I waded into the chilly lake water and drew the nose of the craft in between the two planks.
Jim beached the skiff and, removing his boots and socks and rolling up his pants, came-with the first roller, which he shoved and wedged down under the launch’s nose, against the planks.
“Heave-ho, my hearty,” he commanded. “Now pass me the end of the line, and when I give you the signal – get your car in low gear and gently haul.”
I paid the line away from my axle down to Jim, and he made it fast to the bow of the launch, passing it rough the two little metal rope guides on each side of the bow.
“Okay, now,” he called. “Take it easy and steady. As you haul, I’ve got to nip along and tuck these rollers under her keel.”
I started the engine, let her into low and, watching at the rear-view mirror, eased up the clutch. My tires bit into the sand and shingle. I felt the strain take hold. I felt the car edge forward and in the mirror I saw the nose of the launch rise slightly as she started to crawl ashore on top of the rollers.
“Slow!” rang Jim’s voice.
And I could see him nimbly jumping and ducking, as he grabbed up the rollers and laid them, one after the other, under the nose of the boat, as it slowly progressed up the beach.
We got it up the four lengths of two-by-six. Then Jim decreed that we ought to pull it still farther up. As he went back and got the two-by-sixes we had passed and laid fresh track. And on these, with the rollers, we succeeded in dragging the launch a good 60 feet from shore, well above the winter storm and ice line, and safe and snug against tempest, gale and blizzard.
While I undid the rope, Jim set the heavy billets up, as props, all around the bow and stern of the launch, to hold her steady and to bear some of the weight of the upper structure that otherwise would fall in the bilges and keel.
When all was snug and shipshape, a man in a yachting cap and turtleneck sweater came striding from the direction of the old boathouse, and he roared:
“What is the name of blazes are you characters up to?”
Jim looked him up and down.
“We’re pulling out Bill Thomas’s boat,” he stated.
“That isn’t Bill Thomas’s boat,” roared the mariner.
“That’s MY boat! And I want it this afternoon. I want it NOW!”
“Well, uh, how,” inquired Jim, weakly, “how do you pull a boat BACK into the water?”
He showed us.
He went and got block and tackle. And he got another yachtsman to come and drop a heavy anchor well out in the water, to fasten one end of the tackle to.
And with my poor little car shaking and trembling and scraping on the other end of the block and tackle, we rolled the launch back down the two-by-sixes, with Jim very nimbly slipping the rollers under the stern.
By which time it was getting dusk.
So tomorrow, or maybe the day after, at any rate, the next nice day we have, we will come down again and haul Bill Thomas’s launch out.
It’s a WHITE one. He repainted it this year.
We’ll come, that is, providing I don’t get the sciatica. For I feel slight twinges of something at the moment.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, August 23, 1947.
“Meet,” cried Jimmie Frise, “High-rigger’s Axman!”
The most beautiful dog I ever saw stood before us in the farmyard.
He was noble. He was a creamy golden color, and was about the size of a good hound, but heavier-built, with a deep chest and powerful legs. His coat was dense and slightly wavy, and of an indescribable tawny hue. He was a Golden Retriever.
“Jim,” I said, “I never saw a nobler expression in a dog’s face.”
“Next to a cocker spaniel,” informed Jim, “the golden retriever, of all dogs, tries hardest to be a human being.”
“Hi, Axman!” I greeted, bending.
And the beautiful creature lowered his head and with heavily wagging tail stepped a couple of paces forward so I could fondle his skull.
Mrs. McGinniss, the farmer, came to her kitchen door and viewed us.
“Did you ever see a more beautiful animal?” she demanded. “You’ll have fun with him the next three days.”
“I can’t see anything we can do for him,” I replied. “He looks to be in the very peak of condition.”
“Just his runs over the fields,” said Mrs. McGinniss.
Our friend, Horace Parkhouse, who owns High-rigger’s Axman, had to go to Minneapolis on urgent business there on the very eve of the Canadian National Exhibition dog show. All summer, he has been grooming and exercising and conditioning Axman for the big show -the first after all the years of war.
And at the psychological moment, the very last week before the Ex opens, he had, in the interests of finance, to run away off to Minneapolis.
So he had asked Jimmie and me to go out to Mrs. McGinniss’s farm, where Axman is boarded, for the three days he had to be away, and give the beautiful dog our personal and loving care.
Runs over the fields. Brushings night and morning. Daily routines of making Axman stand steady and cool, while we pretended we were showing him in the ring before the multitudes of the dog show.
“The fact that we’re strangers to him,” explained Jimmie, kneeling down beside Axman and setting his feet just so, to reveal his fine build, “is all the better. Because it will accustom him to all the strangers he’s going to meet next week…”
Axman, who had already been thoroughly schooled since puppyhood to take up this show-ring stance when requested, stood before us in all his beauty: head up, ears alert, front legs set straight, and hind-legs stretched I well back to show the fine slope of his back.
“He’s a winner!” declared Jim.
“Come to lunch!” called Mrs. McGinniss from the kitchen door.
With alacrity, Jimmie and I wheeled and made for the kitchen door, for, in the little while we had been in the McGinniss door-yard, the most ravishing odors had been wafting out to us.
“We eat,” explained Mrs. McGinniss, “right here in in the kitchen, the old-fashioned way….”
It was old-fashioned, all right. I have never seen a farm table more abundantly burdened than the one standing before us.
In the city, there is an affected fashion of putting one course at a time on the table. But in the country, the whole business is set on the table so that a man has a fair idea of what is ahead of him. A man can pause, reverently, for a minute, before seating himself at a farm table, and take a quick survey of the whole situation. And plot his course.
In front of Mrs. McGinnis, was a large tureen of vegetable soup. To one side, a platter heaped with golden scrambled eggs, with a sort of ruching or frill of bacon all round.
On the other side, a bowl of what are properly called home-fried potatoes. These are not the battered and mushy things that go by the name of home-fried potatoes in cities. Mrs. McGinniss had sliced good large potatoes in whole, sound slices of a reasonable thickness. And they were fried dark brown on one side only. There is the secret: one side of each good wholesome slice a crisp dark brown: the other side creamy from the butter in which it was fried.
Now, there was also cole slaw and a side dish of stewed corn by each plate. And sundry scattered saucers of large snappy radishes and old-fashioned tangy leaf lettuce. But what caught and held the eye of the speculator on beholding Mrs. McGinniss’s table was a sort of fortress, or turreted and battlemented tower, in the midst of the table, consisting of pies, warm in their original pie plates; low dishes of preserved peaches in the foreground, tall dishes of preserved cherries of extraordinary rich color in the background. And, as a sort of core or heart of the architectural design, a chocolate cake about fourteen inches in diameter and four inches in thickness, from which the deep, rich coiling dark icing seemed ready to drip; but just didn’t.
“Aaaaahhhh!” said Jimmie, for want of something better to say as he sidled into his chair.
High-rigger’s Axman, who had come in the door with us, sat down midway between Jim and me and thumped the floor heartily with his tail. I looked at him pityingly, for his mouth was open, and his noble eyes were filled with a dreamy look, and he appeared to be smiling….
“None of this for you, boy!” I consoled. “You’re in training…”
And Mrs. McGinniss handed me the soup.
For my sake, as well as the reader’s, I must not dwell on that meal. Mrs. McGinniss coached us hurriedly through the soup, scrambled eggs, bacon, home-fried potatoes and so forth.
“Save some space,” she cautioned, “I want you to taste these pies…”
Taste! In city restaurants, they have discovered a way of cutting a pie into seven. Anybody with a little practise, can cut a pie into six. But Mrs. McGinniss was poor at mathematics. She just cut her pies into four.
First on the program was green apple pie.
“It’s not so filling,” explained Mrs. McGinniss. “I want you to compare it with the combined cherry and gooseberry…”
From out that central fortress or tower in the centre of the table, she drew forth, after the combined cherry-gooseberry pie had been voted the equal of the green apple, a pumpkin pie.
“Preserved pumpkin,” apologized Mrs. McGinniss. “But my own recipe…”
We each had a quarter. Then after a large wedge of chocolate cake, to top off, Mrs. McGinniss prevailed upon us to sample a little plum conserve she was very proud of, buttered on a small tea biscuit; and to test its tang as compared with some rhubarb marmalade she was equally partial to, a little dab of it on another tea biscuit…
Poor old High-rigger’s Axman had, long before the scrambled eggs were gone, given up all hope and had laid down, his beautiful head across his forepaws. About the time I sighed down the last morsel of tea biscuit with rhubarb marmalade, he raised his eyes reproachfully from under his noble brow, smacked and readjusted his lips comfortably, and closed his eyes as though in pain.
“Jim,” I asked, shoving the table away, “how about the dog…?”
“We’ll take him for a run…” agreed Jim.
Outside the kitchen door, under the porch roof, was a weatherbeaten old sofa. I got to it first, and sat on it.
“Now, now,” protested Jim, “don’t let’s forget Horace…
And I thought, guiltily, of poor old Horace Parkhouse away off there in Minneapolis, trying to attend to finance while his heart was back here with Axman and the big Canadian National Exhibition show in which he had high hopes for Axman.
“Jim,” I suggested, “you take Axman this afternoon and I’ll take him after supper…. eh?”
But Jim declined on the ground that we were equally uncomfortable from food, and equally responsible, in our promises to Horace, for Axman getting his exercise under our watchful eyes over the fields.
So I heaved myself off the sofa and, after bidding Mrs. McGinniss adieu for an hour, we headed down the lane past the barn and out over the pasture.
Axman was beautiful to behold in action. He ranged eagerly along the fences, into every covert and through each weed patch, with the tireless air of the hunting dog.
“He’ll win something,” I huffed, as we climbed the slope. “Maybe best in show, eh?”
He’s got tough competition, don’t forget,” said Jim, breathless. “This is the first Canadian National Exhibition in six long years. The dog breeders have been busy all through the war, despite everything. They’ve had a breathing space to weed out and choose only the best of their fancy. This will probably be the greatest dog show in the history of the CNE.”
“Wouldn’t it be something,” I gloated, “if Horace were to take best in show with Axman?”
“And we,” added Jim, “could feel some share of the glory, even if only three days of this…”
“It’s the last few days,” I pointed out, “that puts the final show finish on a dog.”
At which moment we came to a grassy knoll, with sumach bushes, where, as if by common assent, we both sat down for a moment.
“We can watch him from here,” sighed Jim.
And while Axman explored and exercised far and wide, Jimmie and I talked about the dog show, and the CNE which had been suspended for six years after its long and famous history, so that the troops could use its great buildings and park for training. And I lay back to rest my torso…
The sun was setting when I waked. And there was Jim sprawled out beside me.
And Axman nowhere to be seen!
“Hey, Jim!”
We found Axman comfortably asleep on the sofa under the porch roof by the kitchen door. And Mrs. McGinniss in the throes of preparing supper.
Supper? Well: there were pies again; new ones. And tea biscuits and various assorted jams, jellies, conserves; and a new cake, this time a maple walnut cake, with icing the color of Axman’s golden coat.
Mrs. McGinniss egged us on and watched our every bite.
“Now, how does that cake compare,” she demanded, “with the chocolate cake we had for lunch?”
And we confessed that maybe it had a slight edge. “That raspberry jelly; now?” she queried, thrusting the jar under our noses. “Take a bit of that cottage cheese and a dab of the raspberry jelly…”
So that it was full dark by the time we withdrew from the kitchen table. And too late to take Axman for any romp in the night, when he might get lost or tangled in a wire fence.
“We’ll take him,” yawned Jim, as we prepared for bed up in Mrs. McGinniss’s spare room under the sloping gables, “for a good sharp run before breakfast. Let’s get up at six.”
And as we pulled the covers over, we could hear busy sounds from below, in the kitchen.
“Do you know,” said Jim sleepily but with wonder, “I believe that woman is at the oven again!”
Well, it was a quarter to eight before we waked. And when we got down to breakfast, Mrs. McGinniss had a johnny cake and maple syrup, tea biscuits and still another serried array of jars of new and fresh jellies and conserves, preserves and marmalades.
And though she had finished her breakfast long ago, she sat with us at the table, and watched our every bite, and questioned us close and narrow on the merits of the preserved melon over the acid tang of the thimbleberry jelly; or the aroma of the spiced peach jam over the grape conserve.
So that after breakfast, we took Axman down the road a few hundred yards, until our fears of him being hit by a passing motor car – although there were none – caused us to take him back to the farm. By which time, lunch was in preparation.
We arrived here at Mrs. McGinniss’s on Thursday, before noon. It is now Saturday afternoon. And Horace Parkhouse arrives back here tonight from Minneapolis.
We have combed and brushed Axman both night and morning. We have, to the best of our ability, given him several runs over the meadows and pastures. But Axman has decidedly put on weight since Thursday. You can see it. It is obvious.
We also had a very unfortunate experience.
We caught Mrs. McGinniss giving Axman a large hunk of chocolate cake.
And when I inspected his feeding pan, I discovered traces of what could not be anything else but the loganberry pie which we had had for lunch a little time before.
“Mrs. McGinniss,” I accused hollowly, “do you mean to say you have been feeding Axman pastry… and… and… CAKE!”
Aw, I can’t see it go to waste…” protested the dear old lady.
“But… but Mrs. McGinniss!” cried Jimmie, “You seem to have gone crazy over cooking! Surely you don’t cook like this all the time…”
“No indeed,” said Mrs. McGinniss. “But it’s six years now since I showed any pies, cakes, jellies and preserves in the Exhibition. And I have been just testing out my recipes so as to pick the sure fire winners…”
“Testing them on us!” I ejaculated. “And on Axman…!”
“You’ll all thrive,” scoffed Mrs. McGinniss joyously.
Horace will be here in a few minutes. He telephoned from the village. But before he gets here, may I suggest that if you go to the Canadian National Exhibition dog show and see a particularly well-fed Golden Retriever with a dreamy expression in his eyes, that will be Axman.
And DO go and see the women’s home cooking exhibits. Look for Mrs. McGinniss’s entries.
They will explain all.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, August 9, 1947.
“When all’s said and done, a houseboat,” said Jimmie Frise expansively, “is the ideal home for the people of this country.”
We were sitting on the stern deck, or piazza, of as nifty a little houseboat as ever was designed.
Ahead, a local launch was towing us slowly up one of the prettiest lakes in the summer resort district. We were progressing at a rate of about five miles an hour, and the shores slowly unfolded in beauty before our astern-gazing view.
“You mean summer homes,” I suggested.
“Not at all,” declared Jimmie. “I mean all-the-year-round homes! What more does the average man want than we’ve got right here in Bill Sparra’s houseboat?”
Our friend Bill Sparra, who has always scoffed at the idea of having a summer cottage stuck down on some inhospitable rock somewhere, had given us the loan of his houseboat for the week.
“Look,” said Jim, “it’s simply a cottage built on a scow. A good sturdy scow. In front, there’s a little verandah. Then, the bedrooms, with good wide windows looking ahead. Two little bedrooms, about the size of ship’s cabins, with upper and lower bunks. Next, amidships, the living room. And astern here, the combined kitchen and dining room. And out here, a lovely covered piazza, with these easy chairs.”
“It’s just about the ideal summer home,” I admitted. “Isn’t it a wonder more people don’t go in for houseboats in this country?”
“I see by the papers,” said Jim, “that an old fellow of over 70 is right now completing a canoe trip across North America, from Vancouver to New York City. Nothing I can think of illustrates better the nautical character of the North American continent.”
“It’s got several deserts,” I pointed out, “and the prairies. I wouldn’t want a houseboat in Saskatchewan.”
“For the most part,” countered Jim, “both in the east and the west, a man who owned a houseboat would probably be the most independent character in the community.”
“Think of taxes,” I suggested. “Just before the tax bill comes around, you loosen the ropes and move to another part of the country.”
“I mean,” pursued Jim, “that there are thousands of miles of connected waterways in North America – the Great Lakes, the numerous canals associated with the Great Lakes – thousands of miles of rivers – all connecting.”
“There’s portages,” I protested.
“Look: if they can ferry a railroad train across a river,” asserted Jim, “they can ferry a houseboat across a few miles of land. I tell you, we’ve got something here. Why should a man devote his entire energies and fortune into building a house in one spot? Most jobs, nowadays, aren’t fixed, as they were a few years ago. Our industrial situation has entirely altered in the past couple of decades. A man gets a job in one part of the country and keeps it two or three years. Then he gets an offer – or else sees a bigger opportunity – in another part of the country altogether. As the situation is now, the poor guy has devoted most of his earnings, in the past two or three years, to buying a little house. So, when his job gives out, or he sees an opportunity in a distant city, what happens? He has to sell his little home for less than it cost him, and he loses all the money he put into it…”
“Whereas, if he had built a houseboat…?” I agreed.
“He’d simply hire somebody,” elucidated Jim, “the way we have up front here, to tow his home off to the city of his choice.”
“It wouldn’t cost too much?” I queried.
“It’s only costing us,” scoffed Jim, “four bucks to be towed all the way up this lake. And it’s the summer tourist season, at that. No: I bet if there were large floating populations in this country, there would be reasonable competition in the houseboat-towing traffic. You’d see a floating population on the move, coming and going.”
“Think of the neighbor problem!” I enthused. “You’d have houseboat villages all over the country. And instead of trailer camp suburbs of the big cities, you would have houseboat suburbs. AND, if you didn’t like your neighbors, why, all you’d do be pull up anchor and move to a more agreeable neighborhood. Look: how about the winter?”
“Okay,” said Jim. “What about the winter? What does Bill Sparra do with this houseboat in winter? Why, he just leaves it wherever it happens to be when winter comes, and it freezes in. If you were living in it in Toronto Bay or Montreal harbor, or Fort William or any of the thousand miles of canals connecting dozens of the country’s biggest towns and cities, you’d simply let it freeze up wherever it was. And instead of having to commute 10 miles, through the winter blizzards, away out to some bungalow suburb of the city of your choice, you’d simply have to go a few blocks from the downtown business district and there would be your bungalow frozen in the ice!”
“Ah, but maybe not a very savory neighborhood!” I pointed out.
“You can move in spring!” triumphed Jimmie, “which is something you can’t do when you buy a bungalow on solid land, when you discover you’re stuck in an unsavory neighborhood. Let me tell you something: in the province of Kashmir, in India, white men aren’t allowed to own any land whatever. Either for houses or for business, no white man can own or occupy any land. So, in Kashmir – which has less connected water than this country, by a long shot – the white population lives in floating communities of houseboats. Small villages, big towns, of houseboats. They have homes, offices, shops – all afloat!”
“And they can get a change of scenery,” I remarked, “or neighbors, by simply being towed anywhere. Jim, it’s a wonderful idea.”
So we sat in our deck chairs, on the stern piazza of Bill Sparra’s travelling summer home, admiring the ever-changing view slowly passing.
When Bill offered his houseboat for the week, we decided to hire some local character to tow us north up through the chain of lakes, and, in skiffs or canoes floated wherever we happened to tie up, fish new country it had never been our good fortune to have visited. I got up and walked through the kitchen, living room and bedrooms of the little floating cottage and looked through the front windows. The launch which had us in tow was heading leisurely into the summer breeze, and I could make out the wharves and roofs of the little hamlet where we were going to moor for a couple days, as long as our fancy dictated, before pushing on. What a sense of freedom and liberation it gave to be in a portable home – portable in the sense that you transported it whole!
I hailed Jim forward and we watched while our launch slowed and brought us alongside a nice rushy point of one of the wharves of the village. We stood on the small bow deck of the houseboat and lowered the anchor.
Do you want somebody to fetch a canoe now?” our man inquired, as we paid him the $4 towing fee.
“No,” said Jim, who was captain, “just arrange for somebody to bring us a canoe at 8 AM tomorrow, please.”
Swinging on our anchor rope in the soft evening breeze, we prepared supper of steak and tomatoes, and then sat out on the cool after deck or piazza, while curious tourists and villagers came in launches and small craft to view us at close range. Jim and I returned their salutations with the casual air of men who have come a long way from the Gulf of Mexico, maybe – up the Mississippi, through the heart of the continent, past Chicago, up through the great canals: though we had, as a matter of fact, only come nine miles.
During the night, a lively breeze built up, and I was awakened by the complaining of the anchor rope and the slap of the waves on our scow hull.
Again, at dawn, I was awakened again by a slight scraping noise. The wind had fallen, and I supposed the scraping was the sound of our anchor rope rubbing against the hull.
But finally, in broad morning sunlight streaming in our windows, I was brought wide awake and out of the bunk onto my feet by a loud and commanding voice roaring:
“Hulloooo!”
“Hulloooo to you!” I replied, thinking it was the canoe fellow we had ordered for 8 AM.
“All right, all right!” the voice outside bellowed haughtily. “Come, you’ve got to get this thing out of here….!”
Jim, who was half awake, sat up sharply.
“Do you hear, in there?” continued the important voice, more loudly. “Come out here till I have a look at you!”
“The town constable?” suggested Jim.
I went out through the living room and kitchen onto the rear piazza. And an astonishing sight met my gaze. We were not beside the marshy point. We were not moored near the village. We were beached on a large curving sandy beach. Ornamental stone benches and terraces graced it. Above the beach, partly screened by cedars and other artificially planted, trees, stood a handsome and elaborate summer cottage. One of those cottages that gets five pages in “Homes and Gardens”. And there, standing on the nearest terrace, was the gentleman with the commanding voice.
“Do you know this is a private beach?” he inquired icily, when I appeared.
“We must have drifted here,” I replied weakly.
“What’s the world coming to?” the aristocrat demanded wearily. “A man can’t have any privacy anywhere, what with riffraff coming and camping on one’s private beach. This is an island, sir! An ISLAND! And there are no public conveniences or privileges on it whatever. Do you understand?”
“I say,” I repeated, in a little better voice, “we must have drifted here. We must have dragged our anchor. We have no desire whatever to intrude on your beach.”
“Very well, very, well,” commanded the gent, who must have been at least a brigadier in the home forces, “don’t stand there talking. Get it off! Get it off, immediately, before my guests rise and see this monstrosity.”
“Excuse me,” I cut in, and Jim was now at the piazza door, backing me up. “But we have no power. This is a houseboat. It has to be towed. And we have no launch.”
The gentleman tightened his jaws and glared.
“A fine thing,” he declared. “A fine thing, when rudderless, powerless individuals can come drifting about at random, invading private rights and property… I don’t know what the world is coming to.”
“Look,” said Jim, stepping forward to the piazza rail, “can you call a launch for us? Have you got a telephone? Would you be so good as to assist us off your very unpleasant beach?”
The gentleman stiffened and swung on his sandalled heel. He walked elegantly along his terraces to a large boat house. There he shouted commands until a sleepy character named Joe – probably the gentleman’s old batman in the home forces – came forth and received his instructions.
This man backed a large speedboat out of the boathouse and came slowly alongside us.
Jim and I, in the meantime, had explored and discovered that we had not merely dragged our anchor. We had lost it.
The hired man in the launch took our anchor rope and made it fast to the stern of his craft. And with hardly a scrape, we were drawn off the beach and towed free.
On shore, the gentleman, the king of his island, watched us intently. And when we were free, we waved a grateful greeting to him.
“I wonder,” said Jim, “is he anybody important, or has he just got money?”
The launch man was turned, watching to see how we towed. We shouted to him, and he turned his engine low and came aft to hear us.
“How far can you tow us?” we hailed.
“Just around the point,” he replied.
“Where to?” we bellowed.
“Just around the point,” he repeated, and went forward and speeded up his engine.
“He means to turn us adrift!” gasped Jim.
“He can’t….” I expostulated.
But that is precisely what he did.
A couple of hundred yards along the island shore was a point past which the early morning breeze was blowing.
Past this point was the wide open lake.
Sure enough, after we cleared the point, the launch man slowed down, and came aft and started to cast our rope free.
“Look,” said Jim, “won’t you tow us across to the mainland? It’s only a couple of miles. Two bucks?”
“Sorry,” said the launch man, “but I work for him. He told me what to do. I gotta do it.”
“Five bucks?” wheedled Jim.
“He’ll be watching,” said the launch man.
“What a stinker he must be!” I declared.
“Aw, no he’s not so bad,” said the launch man, “when you get to know him. He’s been worrying a lot lately about the Communists and stuff. He’s always being invaded.”
He waved and buzzed off.
And here we are, in our houseboat, really independent! Independent even of ropes, of anchors, of moorings, of the land itself. We are adrift in the largest sense of the word.
I am writing this on the dining room table. Jim is working at the cartoon on the living room table. We have hailed all craft in sight, but they just wave back. One old boy in a fishing boat passed quite close, and when we signalled frantically, he shouted back, above the racket of his engine, “sorry, boys, I’m a teetotaller!”
So we gave up trying to hail help. We have a week’s supply of pork and beans, luncheon tongue in tins, bread, two steaks and a basket of tomatoes.
The lake is about 17 miles long. The wind is light and variable. We are drifting about half a mile an hour. We have changed direction twice. If anybody comes to us, we will give them this story and cartoon to mail for us. Meanwhile, we will just enjoy houseboating at its best.
PS. – Two girls in a dinghy have just come alongside. We are giving them this to mail.
Toodle-oo!