The Kampong
by THOMAS BARBOUR
1
MY FRIEND David Fairchild, for years Chief Agricultural Explorer for the Department of Agriculture, is one of the most romantic figures I have ever known. Thousands of people know of David from having read Exploring for Plants and The World Was My Garden; thousands more are indebted to him every day of their lives for the foods with which he has enriched this country. This is no exaggeration, for his durum wheat makes our daily bread.
David’s life has been a combination of triumphs and disappointments. Triumphs came, among other reasons, because of his discoveries as an explorer of plants—because that very durum wheat crop I have mentioned is now worth some fifty million dollars a year. The Japanese rices, which he introduced, represent another five million. Sudan grass is now a fifteen-million-dollar crop, and the felerita sorghum, which he brought from Egypt to our Southwest, has grown to the worth of several millions of dollars. The same is true of Peruvian hairy alfalfa. He has been instrumental in the introduction of the numberless varieties of soy beans; still other varieties derived from these by hybridization now promise to be among the most important of all American crops. That soy bean serves a hundred uses, from acidophilus soy bean milk, which David and I both enjoy, to the plastics that are essential to the airplanes of today.
It is difficult to tell of David’s accomplishments in brief: he did wonders with sugar canes; the innumerable bamboos, edible and ornamental; the Chinese jujubes and persimmons; tung oil; the Japanese flowering cherries: Chinese cabbage; and the dasheen, one of the elephant, ears, which has an edible root better flavored, to my way of thinking, than any potato. He has applied his skill to the introduction of the papaya, the Sarawak bean, the yam bean, to such fruits as the Quetta nectarines which are grown so extensively in California today, and a list of dates, mangoes, persimmons, and alligator pears ns long as my arm.
But David is a disappointed man. His disappointment comes from the fact that the American people are the most conservative, unchanging, and completely disinclined to gastronomic adventure of any people in the entire world except, perhaps, the Irish.
Every traveler has had this fact brought home to him. Each autumn, I shoot deer and elk, and the meat I bring back is about as welcome at home as rattlesnake meat would be. Some members of my family will not eat veal, I think entirely because it is light in color. They will not eat tripe. “Oh, I wouldn’t taste that — it’s so disgusting-looking.” “Who would eat an eel? It looks like a snake.” (Think of the jellied cels of Denmark and Germany in the days past.) “I don’t like the consistency of sweetbreads. Besides, they’re innards.” All heads of calves, swine, or sheep are eschewed, without exploratory tasting, because of their appearance. And so it goes, with even rice being disliked by one, chicken livers by another, or pork, or kidneys — indeed, pretty much everything except the good old Anglo-Saxon stand-bys of beef, lamb, mutton, ham, and domestic poultry.
David has experienced this same difficulty, but many times multiplied. Now he finds the public learning — very, very slowly, but finally learning — that some of his fruits, say the best of the mangoes, and such alligator pears as the Trapp and the Lula, are really something to rave over. I think the thing which David and I, and his wife Marian too, really enjoy most about our visits together is the fact that all three of us are adventurous feeders. We will take a chance on anything, from conch croquettes to the fat, white grubs which are the larvae of the pestiferous weevils that bore into palm trees.
The story of David Fairchild’s coming to Florida and his activities there has been well told in his own books. But he has never described his home, so well known as The Kampong. “Kampong” is a Malay word meaning “a little village” or a cluster of houses enclosed by a wall. His place is a strip of about eight acres, running from the shore of Biscayne Bay to the Ingraham Highway in the only old community in Southeastern Florida, one which, for a long time, has attracted writers, scientists, and men of affairs who love the quiet life. Kirk Munroe, Dr. L. H. Baekeland, Arthur Curtiss James, W. J. Matheson, and David himself are representative examples. While many of their neighbors have built formal gardens, David and Marian Fairchild have let their precincts grow up informally; there must be a hundred different types of fruit within the confines of The Kampong. The house looks out over the bay. In the foreground royal palms, coconut palms, and a noble native pine rise from a mat of untouched vegetation extending from the terrace to the mangroves fringing the shore.
The house is rambling, with an outdoor dining room and an open porch on one side. Separating the victualing part of the house from the rest of it is an arch, serving for what in Florida is called “ the breeze-way.” The view through this arch as one comes up the drive makes every newcomer pause a moment to drink in the beauty of the scene.
The old, original house stands near-by, silvery gray, of Dade County pine. No timber of that house has ever yet been bored by a termite. Where would you get such wood today?
Farther down, in a bower of jasmine vines, beside a wampee tree, is another little wooden building which was used as a music room by the Fairchilds’ daughter, Nancy Bell, before she married and went to live in Albania, then in Egypt, and now in Colombia, where her husband is making far-reaching discoveries concerning the etiology of yellow fever for the Rockefeller Foundation.
South of this little house, which is called The Wamperi, is a small bit of woodland, a cluster of old live oaks, their branches laden with native orchids and bromeliads. Here Roxburgh’s strange fig from the Himalayas, shade-loving palms from the Philippines and Guatemala, and heaven knows what else, grow happily together. This section is called The Hammock.
Next to The Hammock stands one of the oldest buildings in all Southern Florida — a potting shed below, and upstairs David’s study, his library, his microscopes, his collection of photographs, and a little of everything else. A superficial catalogue of its contents would call for a separate article. The great window of David’s study is twenty feet long and looks directly into the branches of a live oak. Right where you could touch them if it were not for the glass are the flowering orchids, the migrating warblers, the squirrels, and the little squabbling lizards, who seize one another with their puny jaws, fall to the leaves on the ground, scamper about, and then climb the tree to do it all over again.
2
THE house in The Kampong where I stay during my visits consists of a room, a bath, and a porch glassed in around two of its sides, with sliding plates on the north and the east. The end of the long north side is sot off as a kitchenette, and the balance is occupied by a table and some chairs. It is a pleasant place to sit in the morning when the sun is hot across the cast end of the building. The house is level with the ground, the windows look straight into the shrubbery, and the fit of the front door permits some of my small reptilian neighbors to pass in and out at will.
There are a pair of very pretty, brilliantly shiny, striped skink lizards which visit me almost every day. They pick up the odd pill bugs or isopods that are spurned by my giant house spiders, and so serve a useful purpose. About half past eight a beam of light comes through the huge hibiscus bush which shades part of the porch. It comes to rest right in the middle of the seat of a big armchair, and when these two little rascals have finished their morning foraging they frequently creep up and curl up side by side in the spot of sunlight. These skink lizards can’t climb, but they police the concrete floors and the cracks in the masonry where the walls join the floors.
Chameleons creep all over the place, too, but are not so intelligent as the skinks at finding their way in and out. The big house spiders are my especial pets. There is not a chance for a cockroach or a water bug to step inside the premises; one of them would have him in a jiffy. I love to see their eyes shine like tiny emeralds when I turn on the light to go to bed. The other morning before daylight, I stepped out to see what the weather prospects were, and felt something cool under my bare toes. I had pinched a little ring-necked snake, which is the most beautiful species in this part of the world to my way of thinking. The back of this little reptile is gun-metal blue with a narrow golden ring about its neck. The belly is golden yellow with black markings prettily and symmetrically arranged. This snake is not only harmless but completely a noncombatant.
Last year I found on my wall a green snake of the Southern variety, with the keeled scales, all of forty inches long. This species is a clear, brilliant, grass green, almost lighter than the green of the young cypress shoots when they first come out. This critter was long and slender and so unusually large that I saved him for the Museum. I took hold of him as he was creeping up the rock wall of the house just inside the front door as I came to open it. He opened his mouth partly in terror and partly in anger, and the inside of his mouth and throat was a most lovely rosy pink.
Only a week ago I was sitting in the little east porch which serves me as library and writing room, when a largo black snake emerged from beneath the house. He had something in his mouth and soon I could see that it was a mouse or young rat. The snake moved out about eight feot to where there is a little patch of open grass, and then proceeded to give a most inept and inefficient display of mouse eating. Why black snakes have not learned to coil about their prey, hold it conveniently, and kill it promptly, the way the constricting snakes in this region do, is a wonder to me. I suppose their musculature and backbone are conditioned and specialized for high-speed locomotion. The constrictors are slow movers. This snake used much clumsy effort in pressing the mouse against a stone with a section of its body and working it around for a long time until finally the victim was held nose on in its jaws. When, at long last, it had the mouse held just as it wished it to be, the snake slipped it down as easily as a child, trying to be funny, will suck in a piece of macaroni.
The motor traffic not far away, gardeners at work on the place, and the fact that there are a good many red-shouldered hawks in the neighborhood, all mean that I have fewer opportunities to watch reptiles than I could wish for. But I have found that it pays to keep my eyes open and to be thankful for small favors. This I was the other day, when one of our neighbors was thoughtful enough to bring me alive a beautiful coral snake which he had taken in his mango grove near Homestead, about thirty miles south of here. It was an interesting find because coral snakes are burrowers, and are rare down here where most of the land is solid rock. Moreover, it was quite typical of the Southern form, which by a curious coincidence bears the name of Micrurus fulvius barbouri.
One morning as I was at breakfast (I get up early and cook my own in order to have it just as daylight is coming, so that I can watch the sun rise across the bay from David’s front porch), I saw, in addition to the usual pelicans, gulls, and grebes which frequent the mangrove inlet; at the bottom of his front yard, a snowy egret perched in the mangrove and a pileated woodpecker on the pine tree directly before me. The only white pelican which I have ever seen in this neighborhood flew by just as I sat down to breakfast.
3
BEHIND my house there is a high stone wall which affords complete privacy in that direction. On the back stoop outside my bathroom door are my ice box and an outdoor shower. While standing under the shower, I can reach out and pick a delicious loquat plum from a tree that shades the southeast corner of the house. In front of the house there is a tiny cleared lawn, with space for a table and a few chairs, where David and I often meet to spin yarns when the day is done and it is not quite time to go to his house for supper. We are shut off from his driveway by a tangled mass of attractive vegetation, an old mulberry tree and a row of Murraya bushes eight or ten feet tall, a garcinia, and a khat plant with metallic, lustrous green leaves, overtopped by Ficus trees of several species.
Khat leaves are chewed by the Bedouin of Southern Arabia in much the same way that coca is chewed by the Indians of High Peru and Bolivia. I haven’t seen the Murray a in bloom. During my visits there, the high shrubs have always been laden with tiny red berries; if you cut one through with your penknife, you see it is actually a minute orange. By April, every one of these has disappeared and the bushes have been the scene of innumerable rows and bickerings as the mockingbirds squabbled over which one had the right to pick fruit. The catbirds arrive in time to help gather the last of the crop. It is rare that a mulberry reaches the stage when it is ripe enough for me to eat.
Just to the right of the doorway, scarcely fifteen feet away, is the only semblance of a boulder that I have ever seen in this vicinity. After hitting it with my shins a few times in the dark, I came to remember its position accurately. It doesn’t sit down very tight against the ground, and the two skink lizards who visit my house live beneath it, and the little silver palms which surround it haven’t grown an inch since David made The Kampong. They always look to me as if they were fashioned out of some flexible metal. The effect of silver is very real, especially when the sun shines on them.
Other palms are scattered all about, including a beautiful specimen of Adonidia Merrillii, named for an old and valued mutual friend, Professor E. D. Merrill, the master of Oriental botany. This always seems to me the most stylish of all palms. There is a spruce, clean-cut look to its stiff, curved fronds. It bears the same relation to the Dictyosperma on the other side of my front door that a Shetland pony does to a little hackney. There are coconut trees all about, and the wind rustling their leaves at night often makes me think that it is raining, as many times as I have heard the sound. The coconut is the queen of the palm world if it is grown where it is happy and where the soil is suitable; no specimen is ever unsightly, and no two are ever alike.
Farther away are some spiny thickets composed of Carissas, pandans, and the like. They shelter our rabbits during the daytime. At the moment, there are four of these which come out at evening and browse about. One has a special fondness for the occasional leaf which drops from a Ficus tree. Two of the rabbits are so tame that I can walk within six feet of them before they hop away, and even then they don’t, go far. They are still out and about when I finish breakfast in the morning.
The Carissa clumps are shared by mockingbirds also, the great long spines giving just the protection which they favor for a nesting place. I wonder sometimes how much birds see through glass or a mosquito screen, for as I sit at my desk with the windows open and nothing but the screen between me and the giant hibiscus bush, the birds frequently sit quietly or scratch in the leaves on the ground beneath it, only a couple of feet from my chair. The ovenbirds scratch like hens, while the jorees or chewinks, as we call them in the North, jump up and scratch, using both feet at the same time.
The thing I like about the hibiscus is that the giant blood-red flowers are not only individually superb, but last only one day. Tomorrow there will be a new set of fresh blooms in a different setting. So there is eternal variety day in and day out through the year. Hibiscus flowers are not especially favored by butterflies, but in sunny weather there are always a lot of insects bumbling about; giant metallic flies which drone noisily occur here in remarkable variety. The butterflies are particularly numerous and are represented by a great many species, from the tiny little blues to an enormous black and yellow Papilio, which I suspect is the largest species in North America. The Heliconius butterflies, velvet black striped with golden yellow, are always flitting about; they seldom rest, and give the appearance, from the character of their flight, of being always on an important errand.
I only wish that you could sit here beside my front door with me in the shade of the afternoon and hear the great leaves from the Hooker’s fig tree clatter as they fall to the ground, hear the mockingbirds sing and the woodpeckers call to one another. Then you would not wonder that I hate to leave this spot.