Sam Smith, Idler, 1966 - About the time that the reader receives this issue, I expect to be enjoying a boiled Maine lobster no more than a couple miles from where it was hauled from the cool, island guarded waters of Casco Bay. Casco Bay is part of the ragged edge of Maine that would, if stretched out straight, reach all the way from Portland to the Panama Canal. So they say.
They also say that the bay has more islands than any other body of water in the United States: 365 by exact estimate. This calculation goes back a long way. An English document of 1700 called the islands the Calendar Isles and noted, “Sd bay is covered from storms that come from the sea by a multitude of islands, great and small, there being (if report be true) as many islands as there are Days in a Yr.” The State of Maine, however, claims just 222 “big enough for a man to get out and stand on.” And even this may include a touch of hyperbole. I pulled out a chart one stormy afternoon and only came up with 167. Still, that’s enough. I’ve visited Casco Bay many times and am still not familiar with all the isles that provide protection in storm and beauty in calm. Some are inhabited and some are not, but with rare exception they retain a tranquil primaeval quality as they lie off the long peninsulas of the upper side of the bay, like so many boats at anchor in a great harbor.
The nomenclature of the bay recalls an age when Americans spoke a less image-conscious language. There is no Leisure Village, Sunset Acres, or Tropicana Isle. There are, however, four Green Islands, three Ram and three Mark Islands, not to mention Lower and Upper Goose, the Goslings, Clapboard, Sow and Pigs, Punkin Knob, Pound of Tea, Junk of Pork, Little Bull Ledge, Burnt Coat, Crotch, ‘Broken Cave and Long No. 2.
There are Indian names, too. Like Harraseeket, the name of a short tidal river in which the waters rise and fall an average of nine feet and which quickly changes from a broad estuary to a narrow stream curling its way through salt marshes and under branches that shade its passage. If one picks the right time of the tide it is possible to follow the stream to where the asphalt road crosses at Mast Landing. It is a friendly little stream, and its banks shelter an amiable convention of bushes, birds and bugs. There was even, at one time, a hermit who lived in a decrepit wooden boat he pulled up under a great pine.
Once the salt marshes had not impinged upon the river and it had flowed from Mast Landing with unconstricted current. Then, in the years before the Revolution, Mast Landing had provided timbers for the spars of the King’s ships. Later, vessels as large as 90 tons were built here where today a sixteen foot boat can navigate only when the tide is right. Three and a half centuries ago, Captain John Smith wrote of the Maine coast: “Here are no hard landlords to racke us with high rents, or extracted fines” to consume us with their many years deputations for Justice; no multitudes to occasion such impediments to good order, as in the popular States. So freely hath God in his Majesty bestowed these blessings on them that will attempt to obtaine them as here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land: or the greatest part in a small time.”
Captain Smith was right: but there is more than mere relief from the unpleasant pressures of civilization to be found along this stream, out among the islands or in the rain-freshened woods of one cf the long peninsulas upon a July afternoon. There is solitude, beauty and freedom for the soul. But there is something else as well: a reminder that the magnitude and magnificence of the land has helped to propel the American idea through history.
A generous and noble land can inspire a generous and noble spirit; it can teach men to seek natural relationships with other men and with the land itself, relationships that transcend artificial ones forced upon them by political, economic and social institutions. “Never,” observed Juvenal, “does nature say one thing and wisdom another.” Yet increasingly we have moved away from the land, crowded into cities that shield us from any contact with that which has not been created by man or his machines, insulated from any source of inspiration other than that of our own manufacture.
To maintain our state of anti-nature, we have pillaged the natural outlands -scarring the forests, turning rivers into pestiferous open sewers, contaminating even the air itself And with this withdrawal from a natural environment has come a decline in the vigor of the American idea, which provides the individual a preeminent place in society and seeks, through law, to protect him in that position against the incursions of any form of despotism. The idea has worked fairly well against forces of political tyranny. But today it falters in facing a more subtle form of despotism: the random power of a mass societv that lacks philosophy or purpose, a scciety-in the words of Lewis kIumford-“that is no longer rooted in the complex realities of an organic and personal world; a society made in the image of machines, by machines, for machines.” Such a society has no requirement for the American idea. In fact, free and independent-minded men pursuing happiness can only foul up the works. They contribute nothing to the efficient production of progress. The American constitution encourages attitudes that the American economy seeks to repress. The former seeks a home for the free: the latter a land of the acquiescent.
There is thus a chasm between the philosophical traditions to which we still claim adherence and the reality in which we find ourselves, a reality that Mumford describes well : “An economy based not on organic needs, historic experience, human aptitudes, ecological complexity and variety, but upon a system of empty abstractions: money, power, speed, quantity, progress, vanguardism, expansion. The over-valuation of these abstractions, taken as goods in themselves, has produced the unbalanced, purposeless, sick-making, and ultimately suicidal existence we now confront.”
The American dream may remain the god we still worship, but is that god dead? I think not. For an American can still, if he chooses, ignore the depressing values around him and seek the friendship of other more compatible philosophical concepts. It is actually much less difficult to go one’s own way in this country than is sometimes suggested. Many (writers prlme among them) live highly successful lives because of, rather than in spite of, their alienation from society. I sometimes suspect writers of having a vested interest in making nonconformity appear difficult. They don’t wish to flood the market. Yet, while the remaining opportunity for choice has helped to keep the American idea alive, this is not enough. It should be flourishing. And it is not. Here is the source of much of our present discontent. Our inability, for example, to make the American dream operative for Negroes and the poor, or to reflect it in our foreign policy, leads inevitably to the sort of frustration that is finding bitter expression these days. The President and others miss the point when they call for consensus and patriotism. A consensus of the wrong, the mediocre and the inadequate is worth nothing. Far better that we engage in a lengthy, intense, deeply self-critical and even violent debate. We need to cleanse ourselves of false assumptions that cling to our skins like scaly growths, to examine closely our faults and to attempt new beginnings. This, in part, is what has been taking place to the distress of government leaders, the hyper-pious press and the stodgier elements of the public. That there is some disorder and misdirection in all this is not surprising: such is the environment of change. We can easily weather the disarrangement; it is less clear that we could tolerate the lack of change.
