Republican Party Reptile(61)

Vegetable gardening is even more frustrating. The last hard frost in New England comes about July 10 and the first autumn frost comes about two weeks later. Then there are the raccoons. If anything does grow, the raccoons will take it and you’ll have to call the Pentagon Rapid Deployment Force to get it back. What I do is just say I have a vegetable garden. I dig up some of the lawn, put on a raccoon suit, make tracks in the dirt, and go buy my vegetables at the local garden stand.

I’ve adopted similar techniques for home renovation. At first I thought it would be relaxing and a fine hobby to fix up my own house. But visits to the hardware store proved too embarrassing. Whatever it is you need, you don’t know what it’s called. And they’ll laugh at you when you ask for “a large metal thing which is heavy at one end but a good deal heavier at the other.”

While being careful not to fix up your own house, be especially careful not to fix it up in real Colonial antiques. There’s one place where the honesty of rural New Englanders breaks down in a woeful fashion. This is the antique store. New England antique stores are dens of iniquity. If you ever do go into one, keep repeating this to yourself: “It’s not an authentic milk-paint pre-Revolutionary hanging cupboard. It’s a dirty old box out of somebody’s garage.”

Moving to the country is, in general, a splendid way of finding out how ignorant and unhandy you are. I knew I didn’t know much about gardening or fixing things around the house, but I thought even I could burn a pile of brush. It’s worth noting that practically everything in rural areas is flammable. So much for the lovely scenery.

Indeed, by the time I’d lived six months in New England, all my good reasons for moving there had disappeared. Pastoral serenity is elusive in a town where every man, woman, and child over five owns a chain saw and starts it promptly at dawn each day. And as for healthy living, the state motto of New Hampshire seems to be “Can I freshen that up for you?”

I was feeling quite glum about all this one day while I was helping another ex-city fellow pull stumps out of his pasture. My friend George, a former resident of San Diego, had rented a backhoe, and he and I had spent all morning cutting, digging, and yanking at tree roots while I wondered why I’d ever left Murray Hill. George and I were down in a trench hacking at one particularly recalcitrant oak carcass when a local farmer pulled up in his truck. The farmer stared out across the pasture, surveyed the dozen holes with uprooted stumps sitting next to each, looked down in the hole where George and I were, and said, “George, you’ll never make any money planting those.”

Then I realized why I’d moved to the country. Neighbors gather from miles around to see me try to light a wood stove. My sojourns at the town dump with my Volkswagen convertible buried to its hubs in mud are local legend. And the residents of Jaffrey consider it a better show than Return of the Jedi to see a New Yorker try to get a porcupine out of the barn with two oven mitts and a broom handle.

You move to the country for the same reason that underlies many great artistic endeavors. It’s done for the sake of entertainment. And what better thing is there in life than bringing mirth and merriment to the people all around you?





The King of Sandusky, Ohio





My grandfather was King of Sandusky, Ohio. His father, King Mike the First, had ruled a small farm ten miles from town. There was a period of great disorder in Sandusky then, due to the City Ordinance of Succession. The throne of Sandusky cannot pass through a female heir. King Jim, who ruled in the year of my grandfather’s birth, 1887, had no sons and no brothers, nor had he had any paternal uncles. So the question of inheritance fell among an array of quarreling cousins, one of whom (though, I believe, only by marriage) was my great-grandfather Mike. But Mike was good with a broadsword and had friends at the county courthouse. Eventually he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer at one of the local banks and conquered a lumber yard and a livery stable. King Jim was old and growing senile and my great-grandfather had himself declared Royal Protector by taking care of the old king’s house and yard and making sure he always had a carriage if he wanted to go for a ride in the country. When King Jim died in 1901 my great-grandfather knew where all the legal papers were, and, with the help of my young grandfather, the future Crown Prince Barney, he fought a pitched battle with the other claimants and cousins in an office downtown. He was greatly outnumbered by his rivals, but they were leaderless and quarreled among themselves, and while they were consulting a lawyer they had hired, King Mike set upon them with archers and most of them were slain. A few retired on pensions, however, and one moved to California.