Читать книгу An Explorer Comes Home - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 5

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My wife and I were driving over a Connecticut road, each absorbed in thought. Suddenly Billie looked up. "Have you," she asked, "the remotest idea where the farm we have just bought is located?"

"No, I haven't," I answered. "You're the navigator. Don't you know?"

Billie giggled. "Only vaguely. Were there ever two such complete idiots? We've purchased a hundred and fifty acres of land, a house, a pond, and a forest, and neither of us knows where it is. I only followed the route numbers Louise gave me. Let's stop at the next filling station and get a map."

We did. Parking beside the road, we traced our expedition from New York and discovered that our newly acquired property was in the extreme northwest corner of Connecticut, bordering the Massachusetts line.

"We're idiots all right," I said, "but I wouldn't have cared whether it was in Connecticut or Canada after I saw that pond. By the way, the owner said she called it Seven Hills Farm. That's silly. There are lots of hills and it doesn't mean a thing."

Billie had an inspiration. "Let's name it Pondwood. We've got a pond and it's in the woods."

So our farm was discovered, bought, and christened in one day. It all came about because of a sign we saw on a Long Island wood lot the Monday after Memorial Day, 1937.

"Acre for sale." Just those three little words on a white wooden board. The man who nailed that sign to a tree probably never imagined it would vitally affect two human lives. Of course he might have been a psychologist. Even as we passed, he may have been sitting behind a bush charting the effect of his startling announcement on the traveling public. Probably he was an unimaginative individual who had an acre of woodland for sale. He hoped to get a good price for his acre. Just that. Because it happened to be the detour sign that turned my wife and me off the low road of cities into the highroad of the Berkshire Hills would not have interested him in the slightest, for we didn't buy his acre. We often wonder who did.

For four years I had been Director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I loved the Museum, but after more than a quarter of a century of exploration I felt like an animal in the zoo which, captured late in life, could not adjust itself to crowds and people. In spite of interesting work, the longing for woods and fields, the smell of fresh grass, and the songs of birds, instead of carbon monoxide and the blare of motor horns, was an insistent call.

"Wouldn't it be wonderful," I said, "to buy an acre, put up a prefabricated house, and go there week ends? Not let a soul know where we were. Just disappear from Friday to Monday and roam the woods."

Billie thought a moment.

"Yes, it's a good idea, but not Long Island—Connecticut. I've heard there are abandoned farms one can buy very cheap. We might get a little one."

My wife lets no grass grow under her feet once she has made up her mind. The next day she called a friend, Louise Lundy, of New Canaan, Connecticut, who deals in real estate.

"I think," Louise said, "I know just the kind of a place you want. It's in Colebrook. It has a lovely pond and a trout stream. But it's more than one acre and there's a house. I'm coming to town tomorrow. Let's lunch together and I'll tell you about it."

Lunch they did, and Billie came home excited. The fact that instead of the one acre we had visualized there were one hundred and fifty acres didn't disturb her in the least. We are both accustomed to having an idea expand in our minds like the proverbial oak tree growing from a tiny acorn. Billie had a pencil sketch of the house drawn by Louise on the back of a menu card. Letting her imagination run riot, she spent a delightful two hours deciding how she would furnish the cottage. That we might not like it never entered her mind.

As I look back upon our naïve enthusiasm I realize that we had a cardinal advantage over all country-place hunters I have ever known. Our salvation lay in the fact that no preconceived ideas cluttered our brains. It required no mental struggle to fit what we were about to see to what we believed we wanted. The idea had been born too suddenly for us to create an image of our future home. As a matter of fact, we were not looking for a home; only some spot where there was water, trees, birds, and flowers, to which we could escape for week ends. Had anyone prophesied, at that time, that I would retire and settle on a Connecticut farm I would have said he needed immediate examination by a brain specialist.

It makes me shudder now, when I realize that had our search been conducted in the orthodox manner, we probably never would have purchased Pondwood Farm. But we seldom do anything in the orthodox manner and were blissfully unaware that finding a satisfactory place in the country may become almost a lifetime job; that the pathway is beset by thorns and often ends in disillusionment. We were exposed to none of the insidious propaganda of realtors, ready to addle the minds of prospective clients, induce a state of hypnosis, and sell them something they don't want. Our only real-estate agent was Louise Lundy, and she happened to be a friend. She did not try to sell us anything. She merely said:

"I know a place I think you'd like. You'd better go and see it."

In that wholly delightful book A Home in the Country, Frederick Van de Water tells pathetically of the trials and tribulations he and his wife, Althea, experienced in finding a place to suit them. Real-estate agents became their bête noir. They knew the patter by heart and began to shudder when the familiar phrases dripped from fluent tongues. The Van de Waters saw house after house, only to reap bitter disappointment. For two long years they traveled the highways and byways of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and eastern New York. Their minds became so confused that when, at last, they found their place, Mr. Van de Water frankly admits they didn't know it. Only by degrees was it borne in upon their weary brains that this was the spot where they were destined to end their journey. Unlike us, they had pictured the home of their dreams and deliberately set out to find it.

When Billie lunched with Louise Lundy on Wednesday she made arrangements for us to visit the place on Saturday and listed the automobile route numbers to Colebrook. Louise said it was a hundred and twenty-five miles from New York—about three hours' drive. Carried away by our enthusiasm, we never thought to ask where Colebrook was located. It was in Connecticut—whether east or west didn't seem important.

So off we went Saturday morning up the Saw Mill River Parkway and by devious paths reached the Housatonic River. It was a brilliant day, the trees had donned their new dresses of variegated green, and the scent of flowers drifted into the car window as we sped along winding roads beside the stream. The Housatonic foams over great boulders between steep wooded banks or widens into placid stretches, like secluded ponds, where the hills roll back, wide and gracious, under the sky. I was enjoying the drive with an indefinable sense of pleasure. The day was lovely, to be sure, and the scenery superb, yet it was not only that—there was something else. Suddenly I knew.

"Billie, do you realize we haven't seen a roadside advertisement for miles and miles? Not a single one!"

What a blessing! We had not been apprised of the merits of a particular shaving cream; no flaring atrocity had urged us to stop at Dad's Dandy Diner for a super-duper hamburger; neither had we been informed that Jones's Clothing Emporium would be delighted to outfit us from top to toe at an amazingly low figure. Lord, how I hate those road placards! I don't know why they irritate me so unduly, but it seems like an intrusion on my personal privacy. To be exhorted to buy some mundane product right in the middle of beautiful natural scenery is like a blob of mud on a lovely painting. I can't avoid reading the darned things and this mental weakness makes me furious. My only satisfaction is to vow that I will never use the shave cream; neither will I eat one of Dad's hamburgers if I starve by the wayside, or visit Jones's Clothing Emporium were I to walk naked through the streets. The extraordinary psychology of advertising by irritation certainly backfires with me. I am sure there is no Connecticut law prohibiting road signs. It is a matter of sentiment in each particular community.

Just before one o'clock we reached a tiny village. We were not certain it was Colebrook, but we hoped so, for it couldn't have been more charming. A farmer of whom I inquired said laconically, "You're here." It amused us immensely, for we thought of the answer given a couple driving through Maine who propounded a similar question to a man in a rocking chair on a hotel porch. "Can you tell us how to get to Twin Pines?" The rockee spat. "Don't you move one god-damned inch," he replied.

Colebrook might be the picture of a village out of a Revolutionary chronicle. On a triangle of green lawn, surrounded by a white wooden fence, stands the church—a colonial church with pillars and steeple complete. At one side is an inn built in 1790; opposite it rises a pillared general store and post office with a wide porch. Four or five houses, all dating from the late seventeen hundreds, rest sleepily under immense trees. Wrapped in their mantles of history, they placidly watch the ebb and flow of life about their doors as they have done for almost two centuries.

"Billie," I said, "it doesn't seem possible there could be anything like this left in America. Isn't it delightful?"

Doubtless there are many other villages in New England just as unspoiled, but I had not seen them. So finding this living image of the past was for me like discovering a lost civilization.

After luncheon at the inn we drove away with the lady who owned the property we had come to see. Three miles from Colebrook Center, at the entrance to a dirt road rising steeply up a hill, stood a lovely little white church in a grove of magnificent pines. "First Baptist Church established 1790," read a small sign. Nearly a mile up the road the owner exclaimed:

"There's the house; there's Seven Hills Farm."

I looked eagerly, and Billie looked eagerly, and then we looked at each other. Billie managed a sick little "Oh," but I didn't even attempt that. Nothing could be less charming, less colonial, or less inviting than what we saw. I suppose each of us had unconsciously formed some sort of a mind picture of the house. I know mine was a nebulous vision of a salt-box cottage set among rosebushes. Whatever Billie had envisioned couldn't have resembled, even remotely, what sat there so forlornly in the June sunshine, like a displaced person in a shabby dress trying her best to put on a good face. The house was tiny, badly in need of paint, and sagged distressingly in spots. Moreover, a recent chimney fire had left ugly black scars on the roof. It was, the owner said, a replacement built by the insurance company when the original building burned. It looked just that. My envisioned rosebushes were there but they were not pretty. Scraggly shrubs, adorned with sick-looking blossoms, swarmed over the front porch, which seemed to be the only redeeming feature of the place. What had obviously been a meadow years ago was a well-nigh impenetrable jungle of birch and poplar sapling and blueberry bushes that pressed in upon the uncut lawn. An unsightly hole filled with tin cans and garbage proved to be the cellar of the old colonial house. The owner sensed our disappointment. "Now we'll look at the land," she said brightly. "That's the real charm of the place."

From the front porch I had caught the gleam of water just across the road. We pushed through a screen of scrub birch and alder to a revelation. There was a perfect jewel of a pond. It was completely surrounded by heavy forest. Great pines towered above the shore and white birches, maples, and oak trees brushed the surface with their lower branches. I had visualized the usual sheet of water in an open meadow—just a pond—but nothing so lovely as this. A path carpeted with thick green moss led down an avenue of white birches along the shore; all through the woods were masses of laurel.

"A little later," said the owner, "when the blossoms are out, it will look as though the bushes were covered with pink and white snow. It is really beautiful."

Billie and I were entranced. From utter depression we leaped in one moment to the heights of excitement. It was simply too good to be true. Behind the house a wood road drifted down a gentle slope through a gorgeous mixed forest, as untouched as the wilderness of Canada. White, gray, black, and golden birches, maples, oak, beech, ash, hemlock, and pine. The place was alive with birds. Five wood thrushes were singing at one moment.

Back on the porch I whispered to Billie, "The place is heavenly. We've got to buy it. Of course the house is impossible but we'll pull it down and build a new one. What do you think?"

"You know what I think! We'd never find anything else as perfect for us. Of course we'll buy it. But about the house. I could do a lot with paper and paint and country furniture. It isn't so impossible as you imagine. We can't afford to put a lot of money into a place for week ends. The thing to do is to fix it up and live in it for a while. Then we will know what we want if we ever do rebuild. It would be just plain stupid to tear it down."

I had no answer to that. She was right, as usual.

In a decorator's trance, my wife prowled about the rooms. The owner and I talked. Half an hour later Billie returned and I left the two alone for a conference on price. I've learned that when it comes to discussing business I am best out of the way. I went down to the pond and prayed fervently that all was going well. I'd have paid the asking figure and more rather than lose the place. Pretty soon a toot of the auto horn called me back. Billie didn't say anything specific but I knew the answer from the satisfied look on her face.

I give you my word it all happened just as I have written it. On Sunday we had never even thought of buying a place in the country; by Saturday we owned a farm. At the bottom of the hill bordering our property was Sandy Brook—not just a trickle of water, but a rushing stream that foamed over rocks, slipped through bowers of dipping branches, and spread into quiet meadow pools—one of the best pieces of trout water in Connecticut.

Billie asked the owner to have a local lawyer, Mr. Manchester, draw up the necessary papers and "search the title." I wouldn't know what he was searching for but apparently he didn't find it. Billie spoke learnedly of "clouds on the title" when I asked her, but did not elaborate. It is my private opinion she was just repeating something she had heard. Anyway, when we drove up the following week to sign the papers, he said there wasn't a cloud in the sky. We certainly couldn't see any, even when we visited the place again and realized how completely overgrown and down at heel it was. But the pond was there and the glorious forest. What could be made of it was up to us.