A Squire's Complaint
I
THE other day, with a start of surprise, I came upon a reference to an English book written in 1895, containing a chapter entitled ‘Is Country Life Still Possible?’ Unfortunately the book was not available, so I could n’t discover why anybody in 1895 doubted the possibility of country life, in England of all places. Certainly we in America did not doubt it in 1895, nor even as late as 1910. But many of us, from bitter experience, doubt it to-day. Certainly it is becoming increasingly difficult of realization, and unless we, as communities, take carefully planned and elaborate steps to conserve what opportunities are left, country life in America will in a few years become indubitably impossible.
It is essential, of course, that I define at once what I mean by country life. I do not mean merely dwelling in some region outside a metropolitan area, and I do not mean living on a farm in the middle of the Dakota prairie, or on a melon ranch by the Rio Virgin. I mean a style of life which is urbane without being urban when enjoyed by people of leisure, and pleasantly and consciously at one with the natural surroundings when lived by those whom necessity compels. I mean a life which is free from urban distractions, sights, and sounds, and which is at all times conscious of the unspoiled native landscape, of the close proximity of country things and of Nature; and is, at the same time, not so far removed from urban centres that it is devoid of cultural interest and is bitter or harsh. I mean, in short, a rather highly civilized thing, long characteristic of old England, and certainly familiar in New England, as well as the Hudson Valley, Pennsylvania, and conspicuously parts of the South — Virginia in particular. It could be a matter of broad acres and mile-long drives, or it could be a matter of a dwelling on a village street, or a farmhouse by the highway. Emerson knew country life in Concord no less than the Virginians on their plantations by the James.
Let me illustrate with three stages of my own residence in New England. My boyhood was spent in a town of four thousand souls about twelve miles north of Boston. It was even then in part a suburb, but it was on the extreme outer fringe of the metropolitan district, and our house, which was a half mile beyond the centre, was backed by country. I certainly lived a country boyhood, grew up to know country sights and sounds, and to hold in my memory, above all else, the picture of woods, fields, farmhouses with long roofs behind, cows at pasture, huckleberries on a rocky hill, a lazy river winding through meadows flanked with high-bush blueberries and sweet swamp azalea. In other words, when the suburban area ended, the country began.
Three miles from our house was the village where my father was born, centred around a common, a white church, a sawmill. The water power had established the site, and the village clustered as a focal point of the meadow landscape, and seemed as much a part of it as the trees themselves. To walk or drive to Grandfather’s was to pass between natural hedgerows, or stone walls, or wild-flower gardens, and also by white farmhouses and their great gray barns as indigenous to the pastoral scene as boulders in a New Hampshire pasture. The life of that village, and of the surrounding country, was selfcentred and self-sufficient, and among my happiest memories are those of its humorous independence and oddities of character and mellowness of spirit.
Directly north from our house the highway led, after three miles, into a country of almost unbroken pine forest, containing two or three glacial ponds, and then rising to the elmshaded dignity of Andover Hill. This isolating belt of pine woods made Andover a place apart, with its own life, so different from ours.
A scant thirty years has completely changed this entire region, converting it into something truly awful to contemplate. It was to be expected, of course, that with the growth of Boston the suburban area would extend its boundaries, but the actual extension here has been only for two or three miles. Instead, however, of finding country again at the new outer edge, you now find motor slums going on indefinitely. You can no longer stand on the outer fringe of suburbia and look into an unspoiled land, where country living can be enjoyed. My grandfather’s village is no longer the focal point in a pastoral landscape, but simply a closer huddle of filling stations, bungalows, hot-dog stands, and their like. The belt of pine woods which isolated Andover has vanished. There are great, ugly cutbanks of sand through which a fourlane highway pours its traffic, and every sort of shack and shanty squatting between the billboards.
Go east, or go west, and you soon come upon some other radial highway on which the same conditions are repeated. These radial highways, or spokes of ‘the Hub,’ come so close together that little country is left between which is not penetrated by the ugly backwash from the main arteries. Even if one were to find a country place in between them where he could secure an unspoiled outlook, where he could enjoy the natural landscape and find therein only such man-made structures as pertain to country living, he would still be unable to get to his home, or to leave it, without driving through squalor and noise and ugliness; nor could he find the life of his section centred in any homogeneous and self-sufficient community, set with landscape charm.
Such conditions more or less prevail for an indefinite distance out of Boston, in every direction, as they now prevail out of every large American city— from coast to coast — for fifty, even a hundred miles, or quite beyond the limits of year-round country residence by those who wish also to keep in touch with urban affairs.
II
My next New England residence was on a village street in the Berkshires — a village of proud traditions and exceptional beauty. Its main street is arched with magnificent elms, the largest set out by Timothy Edwards, son of Jonathan. It has never permitted poles on this street, it did not permit trolley tracks in the days when we were going trolley mad, the wide turf between pavement and curb is mowed like a lawn, and backing the street, or close by on the hills, are many summer homes of considerable pretentiousness. But when I went there to live in 1910, in a house directly in the village, my back-yard garden was the same bit of soil cultivated by Jonathan Edwards, the street boasted no macadam, the snow was packed upon it for a hundred days in winter by the runners of the sleighs, and every afternoon we could walk, in ten or fifteen minutes, into the unspoiled Berkshire landscape, and slip into woods where the pheasants ran and the pileated woodpeckers sounded their ringing tattoo. In summer, the life was that of a resort peopled by men and women who came to their own homes, for country living. In winter, it was that of a self-centred and sufficient New England community, calmly dwelling on its beautiful street along the bank of the meadows, ringed with woods and mountains.
To-day, twenty-two years later, that proud and beautiful village is fighting for its life. Its enemies, for the most part, are not within, for the majority of its citizens have foresight and pride. To the limits of the township, their pride and foresight have prevented the erection of disfiguring signs and cheap commercial establishments on the highways, and have maintained the integrity of the landscape even to the extent of creating public reservations to preserve the mountain forests. Its enemies are from without, and chief among them is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. North and south through the town runs a state highway, for a quarter of a mile utilizing the main street in the very town centre. East and west through the town runs another highway, utilizing the main street for its entire length. Into the construction of highways the State has poured, and is pouring, millions and millions of money.
These highways have for the most part followed existing carriage roads, and for a time it was considered a boon to have them coming into your town or village. But the last decade has changed all that. Woe, now, to the peaceful, quiet town, if it chances to be on a through, or arterial, highway! It might better have a railroad down its main street. The village I speak of had at first but one arterial highway passing through. But within recent months the east-west road, traversing the entire length of its elm-arched main street, has also been ‘improved’ and widened by the State, and now constitutes an arterial way from the east to the Hudson River. Great trucks go banging and rattling through the village all night long. The hotel and the houses shake. Unfortunate householders whose dwellings are not set well back have begun to erect high, solid fences in an effort to achieve a bit of privacy. On week-ends, too, and holidays, an endless stream of pleasure cars ceaselessly passes, east and west, north and south. To dwell in that village, or even near it, save on the few side roads, is no longer to enjoy country life. Unless those highways can be removed, its fate as a distinguished centre of such life seems dubious indeed.
III
Before this state of affairs was reached, however, I moved, driven perhaps by a dim ghost of the urge that sent my Yankee ancestors out into the Western Reserve. I moved to an old farm fifteen miles away, three miles from the nearest village, and directly under a mountain wall so steep that it seemed to defy any exploitation. Part of this wall I owned, in fact, and a hundred acres of more level, arable land at its foot. From my farmhouse, a century old, not another habitation can be seen. Of course, a road ran past the house, and a crossroad, at the foot of my orchard, led to the nearest village; but in 1917, when I bought the farm, there was little macadam on the main road, and that little ended at the Connecticut State line. The crossroad was chiefly mud in spring, dust in summer, and ruts in winter, when it was n’t impassable with snowdrifts. I had the unspoiled Berkshire landscape, I had peace and quiet and the kind of country living I desired; I was but three miles from a self-sufficient village, with white church and tall elms and farmers coming in of a morning with their milk; and of a summer night I could lie in a sleepy drowse and hear the tinkle of my cowbells come drifting down from the pasture.
Well, I am still a good bit better off than many people I know who have sought country life. I still see no human habitation from my dwelling, though if I go around the barn I can see a hot-dog stand up the road. But to lead the cows from the pasture across the road to the barn has become a daily peril, and I have had to erect a hemlock hedge, and back it with a dense shrubbery, to get any privacy for the lawn and garden. The main highway has been improved by the kindly Commonwealth, and the improvement has been continued below the State line. All night long the cars go tearing by, faster and faster each year, and the trucks shake the house. You do not hear the cowbells any more; you hear explosions dying away in the distance. You listen in a kind of fascinated agony till the sound has thinned to silence, so you can at last try to sleep again — and then comes the faint far-off machine-gun sputter of another truck, bound in the other direction, and it is all to be gone through with again.
I have planted cowslips and flags by the spring brook along the highway — and spend most of my time in blossom season defending them from vandals. When I am not doing that, I am picking up lunch boxes, Sunday newspapers, empty cigarette packs, and other litter which has been thrown out of the cars. On a summer Saturday and Sunday, or on a holiday, the dull roar of passing traffic is almost without a break, and leaves us, at day’s end, unconsciously weary and nerve-fagged. Now the crossroad to the village is being improved, trucks are discovering it as a short cut, and our troubles increase. Our traffic, to be sure, is as nothing to that down the main street of the old village, which is on a chief arterial highway. But it is sufficient to make the old-time standard of country life quite impossible.
IV
I have used these examples from my own experience with country life because they are ones with which I am most familiar. Almost any reader sufficiently interested in the subject to have progressed to this point can supply his own. I think at once of a friend of mine who knew and loved the old South County of Rhode Island, where from the rocky glacial moraine and the Post Road the low level outwash plains, sparkling with great salt ponds, stretch southward to the yellow line of the beach and its white-maned chargers. Here was a peculiar landscape, and a peculiar life. The indigenous settlements along the road,and the scattered dwellings out over the flat plane, were all of a piece, salt-gray and simple, and one with the gray stone walls, the silvered bayberries, the jack pines on the pond headlands, the great sweep of the sky. No less surely here than in Southern California had Man hit upon the one right style for his structures.
The life was a quaint combination of agriculture and marine interests, and consisted chiefly in growing white corn for Rhode Island johnnycake meal and ‘ ketching ’ oysters. (You always ‘caught’ an oyster in South County.) The dialect was highly flavored, the people slow, calm, and almighty selfsufficient. Here was possibly a unique country life, not far removed from the railroad, but via tracks where the wagon wheels poured sand, and one in which there was a peculiar awareness, always, of the intimate and supremely happy union of Man and his environment. And it was here my friend established his country home.
He was fortunate in securing an old house two hundred or three hundred yards from the Post Road, and set in a little hollow, so that his boundary walls cut against the sky. To enter his drive to-day is as much of a perilous adventure as crossing Fifth Avenue against the traffic, but, once in, you slip back through the years to an island of peace. Climb to a high point of the boundary walls, however, and you see only too plainly what the last decade has done. It is not alone that the Post Road, conspicuous at the foot of the moraine, is a river of roaring traffic, lined mile after mile with billboards, gas pumps, hot-dog stands, and the usual commercial slum; but the whole outwash plain, once such a beautiful thing between the sea and the land, is disfigured everywhere with cottages and shacks, 75 per cent of which are glaringly out of key with the landscape, out of harmony with the indigenous country architecture of the region, and in many instances huddled close together in ugly lines along some strip of beach or pond shore. They are summer-resort slums. The whole region has become only too typically a summer resort, and offers no longer any opportunity for country living in the sense we use the term.
It is quite possible, I am aware, to argue that the term cannot be so used any more; that the automobile is a fixture of modern life, in country as well as city, and we must accept it, get used to it till we no longer hear it or notice the squalor it brings in its wake, and make the most of what rural charm is left. But this seems to me a counsel of despair, one which England, at least, seems loath to accept, for Great Britain boasts a lively society called the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. The trouble has been in America that we have spent billions of money on the surface of our highways and almost nothing at all on their environment, and we have put them where the old roads went, as if they were still to carry wagon traffic, instead of engineering them as trackless railroads, which is exactly what the arterial highways have become.
By our failure to control the environment of the highways, a failure due both to our ignorance of the need and to our lack of enabling laws, the terrible ribbon growth has taken place, with low-grade residence and commercialism stretched out along the main roads for miles upon miles, destroying landscape beauty and rural charm every foot of the way and yet never resulting in the creation of a community. (Socially, the latter may well be the gravest charge against them.) By our failure to engineer the highways properly, taking the easy way of utilizing the old carriage roads from town to town, we have destroyed the individuality, shattered the quiet, and depreciated the countrylife residential values (if not in many cases all values) of most of the towns and villages through which the highways pass.
The damage is, of course, tremendous. But it is not beyond the bounds of correction, and certainly it should be possible so to plan in future that it will not be so recklessly extended as to destroy all that is left of rural America. Whether we do thus plan, I suppose, will depend upon whether enough of us think rural America worth saving, care enough about it. If a majority are indifferent, or indeed actively prefer to see filling stations take the place of white meetinghouses and fried-clam stands blot out the native landscape, and if they also continue docile as taxpayers, footing the enormous bills to enable our freight to move anywhere, everywhere, over the highways, then the prospect would seem to be dark.
A more concentrated expenditure of the billions poured into highways would, of course, be the first step toward redemption — concentrated upon a few carefully planned arterial highways which would avoid all towns and which, by legislative enactment, would limit the rights of abutter entrance to definite points. These highways would condemn a right of way wide enough to put a belt of shrubs and woods between them and the sides, and no doubt in certain places wide enough to create a parkway, thus developing valuable residential properties on the bounds. But that would not be their main purpose, save near large terminal cities. Their main purpose would be to concentrate through traffic, especially freight traffic, on a few arteries, where it could flow freely and rapidly, and where it would not destroy the charm of towns. The object of the protecting strips of controlled land, of course, would be to prevent the ribbon growth now characteristic of all our main roads, as well as the danger and confusion of frequent abutter entrance. Such arterial highways, rightly designed and placed, would carry so large a proportion of the most destructive of the present traffic now distributed over our roads that the relief would be astonishing; and a great deal of the worst ribbon growth now existing would shrivel up and die of economic starvation.
It is that ribbon growth, of course, which has done so much to destroy the landscape charm of our country, and to break down the unity of towns and villages. Save in the immediate vicinity of large centres, it cannot thrive on local patronage. It derives its excuse, as the billboards do, from the through traffic. It is parasitic on the highways, and of no more social value than any other parasite. But because in the past all our through highways have followed the old roads, and the old roads invariably led through the old towns, we have strung out our highway slums, east and west and north and south, from town to town, and thus destroyed in hundreds, in thousands of cases the economic security of the village and the rural setting to the village, the sense that it has grown up, through the generations, as the natural focal point of the region; and, above all, the opportunities in or near the village for a clean, attractive, civilized country life.
Wise town planning, and regional planning, in the future will not only seek to remove the through traffic from these towns and town roads, but will also seek to ring each town with reservations, at least upon the borders of the most used highways, so that between towns or villages there may be a belt of insulating Nature, forest or meadow or a common pasture land, or whatever the situation may dictate so long as it cannot be exploited and belongs to the native scene. Such isolating strips, treated as town forests and adjoining on the two town boundaries, could be economically managed and become in numerous ways a great asset. But the chief asset would always be, of course, the protection of the town’s individuality and the assurance that behind it lies a little hinterland of unspoiled country, fit for living in as well as for looking at.
V
My memory often pictures a certain road in southern New Hampshire which leads from one town to another, a distance of six miles (about the average distance between towns in New England). This road rises and dips between stone walls and granite boulders and a few farmhouses under huge sugar maples, narrow and not too good if all you think of is riding ease, but fascinating if you love unspoiled New England. After five miles it comes into a long, narrow meadow, through which a brown brook wanders, and as you look up the foreground of this meadow you see the village on a slight hill at the end — the beautiful white spire rising clean against the blue sky, the hints of lower roofs and houses among the billowing domes of the village trees. You pass along the meadow, perhaps with the fragrance of hay in your nostrils, and glide up the slope to the church, which faces you serene, a simple but beautiful example of that meetinghouse style characteristic of the early Republic.
Here, too, you come into the village street, with its nave of elms, its various houses, some of late eighteenth-century design as fine in their way as the church, and its centre of trade. There are, of course, a garage and gas pumps, but they are properly placed with the other essential commercial establishments. You may stand on the church steps and look back down the meadow, over the loaded hay carts, over the wooded hills or the farms, to the blue pyramid of Monadnock. You may turn your head a bit, and look down the village street, flecked with elm shade, flanked with beautiful or comfortable houses, neat, self-respecting, charming.
Here is a bit of our American civilization which has come to lovely flower. Here is a landscape unspoiled and alluring, and set within it is a village which derives its being from the soil of that landscape, and which has added to it, without a jarring note, the flavor of humanity. There may be people — alas! I am sure there are — who would think it a service to that village to straighten and widen the road up which we have driven, to reduce the hills to cut-banks, to lay a thirty-foot ruled strip of cement beside the little curving meadow stream, to hew down the hemlocks and maples, the blueberries and asters, which line the present narrow road, and finally, of course, to install several red and bilious green and nauseating orange gas pumps along the way, not to mention a few signboards and refreshment booths. But to do that, of course, would be to destroy at one blow the perfection of the place, the accumulated charm of almost two hundred years of self-respecting and self-sufficient country living.
The salvation of all such villages to-day, if they are to remain the centres of true country life and to remain examples in America of harmonious relation between Man and the native landscape, is to keep the modern type of wide, straight motor highway out of them, to plan in such a fashion that they are off the roaring tracks of through traffic. They are our last frontier of country life. Once they have gone, there will be no choice but between a constantly more noisy suburbia and timber line in the Rocky Mountains.