Leaves from Lantern Lane

YOU CAN'T MAKE IT PAY

YOU CAN'T MAKE IT PAYLife in this lovely corner of the world is so full of beautiful, generous and kindly things, that I cannot keep from telling about them. From the time the dawn rolls down the day like a golden scroll until the sun sets in a saffron glow behind the tall evergreens, powdered here and there with whitened cherry trees, the whole day is full of interest, and beauty, and surprises.

Just at first, when we moved in, all eager and radiant over our good fortune in having at last a parcel of good land, near a city, with a view of the sea, our enthusiasm was dampened a little by what we heard from the neighbors about the economic conditions in the basic industry of agriculture in this Province.

"You cannot possibly make any money on a farm in B.C.", they said, "not even here in the finest part of the Island; you can work long hours, hoe and rake, pull weeds and fertilize, but you won't make any money. It's a long time since the farmer could even make wages. Now he loses on every crop."

Then followed stories of actual cases with names and dates,—loganberries that only paid the pickers, gooseberries for which the owners got one-half cent a pound, pears left rotting on the ground.

The stories had a familiar sound. We came from a Province where stories like this abound, authenticated and documented. We knew people who owed a bill to the railway company that carried their grain, which the price of the grain would not cover. We knew a woman who could prove to you that she lost money every time she milked the cow. We knew—we knew plenty!

But we had come to a place now, with a more diversified list of products, a longer season, a milder climate, where, it seemed, honest toil must bring a reward. But from all we could hear, these smiling fields, if we let them, might lure us on to financial disintegration. The only safe thing to do, it seemed, was to do nothing. It would cost thirty-five dollars to spray the cherry trees, and the robins would eat the cherries just the same, and even if they left any, there would be no sale for them. Life suddenly sank into a mire of negation, as complete as the schoolboy's definition of pins, when he wrote—"Pins are things which save people's lives by not swallowing them!"

One ray of comfort and hope lightened these depressing bulletins and that was the genial, friendly, well-favored faces of the people who brought them. Not one person in this neighborhood have I seen, who appeared to be in want, nor have I heard anyone say he would like to live elsewhere.

There was another ameliorating factor, too, in the hearing of so much grief concerning economic conditions. The information was often accompanied by gifts of flowers, and shrubs and seeds, and generous invitations to help ourselves to anything else we wanted. It is impossible to keep one's spirits from rising, when presented with a basket of forget-me-nots ready for planting and all knotted to blossom, even if you do hear, at the same time, that someone is digging out his cherry trees and will rent his land at seven dollars per acre.

Still, one wonders what these friendly, genial, good-humored people are using for money. How do they run their cars, and paint their houses, and go to picture shows? Are they all pensioners or beneficiaries under the wills of old estates? Some of them are, I know, but surely not all!

Yesterday afternoon I went down the woodland path to the beach, thinking heavily of these things, and wondering why the economic prospects of this delightful place were not brighter. "Surely," I thought, "it is an ill world and needs to be made over!" But though my mind was clogged with perplexities, my feet soon began to feel the comfort of the soft, springing soil of the deep woods, and the trees above me whispered happily in the sunshine. I sat on a fallen log, covered with moss, a great giant of a log that had fallen maybe fifty years ago, and listened to the muted voices of the woods, the syncopated notes of an axe and its echo, the rustle of leaves, and the wash of the waves frilling on the gravelly beach below.

Beside me, infinitely cheerful and heartening, a cricket with his tiny castanets seemed to snap his fingers at every kind of problem. I looked through a dappled tangle of green branches, out to sea, and saw the Vancouver boat noiselessly treading the water on its way to the big city; and over the jutting rocks, the sea-gulls circled and screamed, dropping clam shells, then swept down to get the meat set free by the fall, letting gravitation solve their problem. Sometimes another gull was there ahead of the lawful owner, but the process went on.

Gulls are a low form of bird life, with few admirers, atrocious manners and fallen arches, but they have a core of good hard sense, and know enough to work with nature. I wondered if there were any gulls who kept books, and so knew that the percentage of failure was heavy from three causes—(1) the intervention of other gulls—(2) some clam shells not breaking—(3) some clams being poor, ill-nourished things. I wonder if any of the hunters, after making a careful survey, become convinced that there is nothing in clam-fishing, for a self-respecting young gull, anxious to get along.

And as I sat there on the fallen tree, looking out to sea, with the sunlight falling around me and the cool, green, free essence of the wild coming to me in the tang of the forest, I began to feel that the centre of gravity in my life was shifting and very pleasantly too.

Here were riches—beauty, silence, peace so deep it was entering into the very marrow of my soul. How very little, after all, we need to make us happy—a woody path to the sea, the scent of wild flowers, the flash of a bluebird's wing, a few friends, books by the fire on a winter's night and a plate of apples, a good conscience, space in which to work—going tired to bed—and then another day, rolling down like a scroll!

Money! Enough to keep stamps in the house and the milkman coming! I could see how people can be very happy, even with small profits. I began to see what Emerson meant when someone told him the world was coming to an end and he replied that that was all right with him; he could get along without it!