Work
January 16 2011
- In the Christmas cards and letters I received this year, as in those of the past couple of years, I noticed a theme throughout: work. Friends wrote of their concern about keeping their jobs or, if they are unemployed, their job search; other friends worried about their children’s jobs or inability to find any, and if the children are still in college there was the worry about what would await them upon graduation.
This Christmas Don’s brother, Kirk, gave him a 1936 calendar, the year Don was born. But it was also the year my father graduated from Dartmouth right smack into the Great Depression.
A digression, for clarity: My father’s name is Dan. One of the two pieces of marriage advice I gave my niece was: Never marry a man whose name is only one vowel away from your father’s; it can lead to utter confusion, with people suspecting Freudian slips. (My other piece of advice was: Never marry a man whose mother’s birthday is the same day as yours, making you obliged to get together to celebrate.)
When Dan graduated, jobs were scarce, needless to say. He did have numerous relatives, and there was a possibility of a job with an uncle, but it would have meant living in a city. He already knew that he wasn’t suited to cities, and he had a plan. As he later wrote:
“Literature was absorbing. Conrad’s Lord Jim impressed me tremendously. In English and American literature lectures I took voluminous notes for an ingestion that helped me years later when I quit industry and taught the two subjects in a temporary junior college whose existence was as brief as my teaching career. I hope the young people were made as thoughtful as I was by Conrad’s old butterfly collector, Stein. For an approach to life Stein counseled, ‘In the destructive element immerse.’
“There are innumerable ways to do so. I was aware that my fascination with the dream of a simple life, to seek plain living and high thinking, nature, tranquility, and all that stuff, was not immersing in the destructive element of standardized, practical ways. Yet life away from cities, businesses, professions, and society appealed to me. More than that, it possessed me. I could see no other route ahead for me. I formed the determination to settle in Orford [New Hampshire, where his grandmother was born and many members of the family lived] after graduation, to learn farming for food (some of it) and writing for money (just enough), thus perhaps following the effects of reading Walden at age seventeen. Thoreau’s different drummer is too often quoted. More importantly for youth he says of his experiment in the woods, ‘ . . . if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.’
“Living costs were low in 1936—twenty cents for a pound of hamburg. Magazines paid a relatively high price for stories and articles. As a way of life the whole prospect of farming and writing drew me like a magnet. I even thought the plan was sound.”
I can hear the humorous irony in his voice in that last sentence!
He continued, “Four years of raising chickens and sending out manuscripts that returned convinced me it wasn’t. I had a wife and two daughters to support, not to mention myself.”
That farm, by the way, was rented through an Orford relative. It was shared by another married couple, my father’s sister and my mother’s brother. As I have written about elsewhere, Dan liked to refer to this arrangement as “the first commune in New Hampshire.”
He went on, “But in retrospect I’m proud of two accomplishments while I was in the chicken business. They were buildings.
“One was a henhouse whose frame I constructed with an ax from pines standing on the farm in Orford. The second, an old barn, I remodeled into two-story apartments for my chickens, using timbers from a dismantled hotel. The hewing, sawing, hammering, and constructing were somehow necessary after academe. I think any young man can do worse than make chips and sawdust to put up a useful building after graduation. I’m not sure a chainsaw would today have the same effect as an ax and handsaw.
“As for writing, an article on hunting bears brought fifty dollars from Field and Stream. The sale was great for my wilting ego, but far from the beginning of a career. Those four years finally precipitated me into another destructive element.
“I had to find a job that paid money. By an intricate series of influences from Dartmouth alumni I went to work at a Laconia plant, Scott & Williams, in December 1940.
“I worked there twenty-four years and six months. The company manufactured circular hosiery machines. I began, however, drilling holes in compass bowls. Scott & Williams turned into a war plant making aircraft parts.
“I became a townsman. Walking to work! One of the advantages of Laconia, a good little mill town of about 17,000, center of a vacation land known as the Lakes Region. I’m sure those walks relieved the tensions of earning a living as a time study man and as foreman of the heat treating department. I also fled problems by taking to the woods and mountains. Every street out of Laconia could be an escape hatch. And there was the White Mountain National Forest only a few miles north of the lakes, 750,000 acres to roam, which I did, and after an early retirement learned enough about the mountains to write two hiking guides for them.
“So I stayed in New Hampshire.
“It’s a truism to point out that time slides by, perhaps because it’s a stream, as Thoreau said, to go a-fishing in. It may indeed be a continuum, but I often see human relationships as a hodgepodge. The lives of friends, relatives, mere acquaintances, over the years—births, deaths, illness, success and failure (as well as those of my own)—seem to me in absolute need of a background formed by the natural world—or as much natural as mankind has left it. That’s why after graduation I went to Orford, although I didn’t then understand it that way. The need was there, and I was lucky enough to accept it.”
© 2011 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved
