subject: A Guest' S Impression Of New England [print this page] It is not the country which impressed this one. It is the people the men and women themselves so individual, who hold individual integration and privacy as high and dear as they do liberty and freedom; holding these so high that they take it for granted that all other men and women are individuals, too, and treat them as such, doing this simply by letting them alone with absolute and complete dignity and courtesy.
Like this. One afternoon (it was October, the matchless Indian summer of New England), Malcolm Cowley and I were driving through back roads in western Connecticut and Massachusetts. We got lost. We were in what a Mississippian would call mountains but which New Englanders call hills; the road was not getting worse yet: just hillier and lonelier and apparently going nowhere save upward, toward a range of hills. At last, just as we were about to turn back, we found a house, a mailbox, two men, farmers or in the costume of farmers-sheep-lined coats and caps with earfiaps tied over the crown standing beside the mailbox, and watching us quietly and with perfect courtesy as we drove up and stopped.
"Good afternoon/'Cowley said."Good afternoon," one of the men said."Does this road cross the mountain?" Cowley said."Yes," the man said, still with that perfect courtesy."Thank you, "Cowley said and drove on, the two men still watching us quietly for perhaps fifty yards, when Cowley braked suddenly and said, "Wait," and backed the car down to the mailbox again where the two men still watched us. "Can Iget over it in this ear?" Cowley said."No," the same man said. "I don't think you can." So we turned around and went back the way we came.
That's what I mean. In the West, the Californian would have been a farmer only by hobby, his true dedication and calling being that of a car trader, who would assure us that our car could not possibly make the crossing but that he had not only a car that could make it, but the only car west of the Rocky Mountains that could do it; in the Central States and the Fast we would have been given directions to circumvent the mountain, based on obscure third -count road forks and distant houses with lightning rods on the northeast chimney and creek crossings wherefrom looked carefully you could discern the remains of bridges vanished these forty years ago, which Gabriel himself could not have followed; in my own South the two Mississippians would have adopted us before Cowley could have closed his mouth and put the car in motion again, saying one of them (the other would already be getting into the car):"Why sure, it won't be no trouble at all; Jim here will go with you and I'll telephone across the mountain for my nephew to meet you with Us truck where you are stuck; it'll pull you right on through and he'll even have a mechanic waiting with a new crankcase1."
But not the New Englander, who respects your right to privacy and free will by telling, giving you only and exactly what you asked for, and no more. If yoo want to try to take your car over that road, that's your business and not his to ask you why. If you want to wreck it and spend the night on foot to the nearest lighted wiarfew or disturbed watchdog, that's your business, too, since it's your car and your legs, and if you had wanted to know if the car could cross the mountain, you would have asked that. Because he is free, private, not made so by the stem and rockbound land - the poor thin soil and the hard long winters on which his lot was cast, but 0 the contrary: having elected deliberately of his own volition2 that stem tend and weather because he knew he was tough enough to cope with them; having been bod by the long tradition which sent him from old worn-out Europe so he could be free; taught him to believe that there is no valid reason why life should be soft and docile and amenable, that to be individual and private is the thing and that the man who cannot cope with any environment anywhere had better not clutter the earth to begin with.
To stand out3 against that environment which has done its worst to him, and failed, leaving him not only superior to it but its master, too. He quits it occasion-ally4 of course, but he takes it with him, too. You will find him in the Middle West, you will find him in Burbank and Glendale and Santa Monica in sunglasses and straw sandals and his shirt-tail outside his pants. But open the aloha bed-jacket and scratch him a little and you will find the thin soil and the rocks and the long snow and the man who hadn't at all been driven from his birthplace because it had beaten him at last, but who had left it because he himself was the victor and the spirit was gone with his cooling and slowing blood, and now is simply using that never-never land of mystics5 and astrologers6 and fire-worshippers and raw-carrot fiends as a hobby for his declining years.
