Backyard and Beyond

Two of my favorite things.

The blurb on Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s The Winter Beach (1966) says it’s “timeless,” but no, it’s very much a piece of its era. Ogburn traveled down the east coast in the early 1960s and he was mostly bummed out at what he found of the post-war boom. The environmental movement, although there were clarions in the wilderness like Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring was published in 1962, was only just beginning; the Cuyahoga River didn’t burn its way into the nation’s consciousness until 1969; most of the landmark clean air and water legislation wouldn’t come until the 1970s. Ogburn is marvelously descriptive about the natural world and philosophic about the human one – rightly wondering why the Middle Eastern monotheisms have such animas towards nature, this world as opposed to some wishful-thinking about another.

Recommended to me by a friend, I tracked the book down at Brooklyn Public because I am a great fan of the spare, elemental beaches of wintertime. I’ve done a lot of my winter beaching on Nantucket, and it turned out Ogburn went to the island on the old slow ferry from Woods Hole, probably not too long before I first went there as a toddler. This passage is worth quoting at length, particularly if like me you’ve seen the crazed growth what I call “SUV-houses” on the island: ridiculously over-scaled behemoths trouncing the island’s compact architectural heritage. (The average size of the American house has doubled since the 1950s, while the average family size has shrunk; while Nantucket, trophy-house location for our economic masters, has probably seen a quadrupling of the average house size – many of these monstrosities, known so quaintly as “compounds,” are empty most of the year.)

“It was the past that Nantucket preserved that was home – a past that was of human scale, for which, indeed, perhaps most of us are in one way or another homesick. The industrialists and big-time panderers to human weakness and greed – the advertisers, the entertainment-mongers, the commercial land-developers and their like – have not found Nantucket a fruitful field or have been restrained by law. Nantucket is of a time before we were dwarfed and denigrated by the hugeness of a machine-built civilization having for its standards the common denominators of a mass market. Its character is of the days when it was the natural world that was vast and overpowering, when the communities into which men and women drew together in their common interests, out of necessity, had, it is evident, some of the intimate quality of a gathering around a campfire. One need not be enamored of the past as such to feel the appeal of an order of things that was essentially human, to which a person’s relationships were primarily human, not institutionalized and mechanical, when even material objects, being the product of human hands, had a warmth and life.”

Nantucket still has some eight hundred homes built before the Civil War. This is one of the richest concentrations of such historic buildings in the country. One of my favorites is 23 Milk Street.The place was built in 1750 and just re-shingled this past winter. Family friend Kenneth Duprey lived here for many years, and the house is the star of his 1959 book Old Houses on Nantucket (it’s been reprinted several times). It is absolutely dominated by the massive chimney, a density of brick that makes a small house even smaller inside. According to a couple of real estate sites, it’s 1,566 square feet. The chimney is fed by five fireplaces, including the kitchen (I remember Ken’s cat in the bread oven nook of the kitchen fireplace.) The phrase that leaps to my mind about such 18th century places is that they are “ship shape,” built small both because of the lack of resources and a mentality of modesty.
*
Interesting life, Ogburn’s: a WWII vet, he wrote a memoir of the Burma Campaign, which was turned into a movie. He worked for the State Department and was an early critic of the Vietnam insanity. He was a big time “Oxfordian,” those damn fool fantasists who like to think no-account aristo Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare.The “lights” over the door; perhaps my favorite of all architectural details.