Encounters with the Archdruid by McPhee John

Author:McPhee, John [McPhee, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1977-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Sleep was not all that easy, in part because the bunks folded out and were cantilevered from either end of the mobile unit. Fraser and I were balanced on a kind of rubber-tired seesaw. Every time he rolled to his right, I went up a little, and every time he rolled to his left I went down. I lay there long into the night thinking mainly about the peculiar pattern of the relationship developing between him and Brower.

A beach is for children, Fraser had said. I didn’t think he was just groping for a key to a bank vault. I had seen swings of various kinds all over Sea Pines Plantation—swings hanging from the eaves of covered walkways, swings hanging from the limbs of trees. He had bought tricycles and scattered them around. He had strung hammocks at the height of children. Walking among the fresh foundations of his new town, he had once said to me, “Landscape architects won’t hang swings. They say swings are not a strong enough design statement. I’ll wait until the landscape architects are finished, and then I’ll hang a hundred swings from the live oaks. I’ll have a vender selling watermelon, too—roasted oysters in the winter, ice-cold slices of watermelon in the summer.” Fraser and his wife, Mary, lived in a glass-and-cypress Sea Pines house. Gardeners took care of the environment. The Frasers had two daughters, aged four and two. The Frasers believed that the direction of a life was established almost at the beginning—that no years were as telling as the earliest ones. Hence, among other things, the Montessori School (where Mary Fraser worked) and the swings all over the plantation.

Brower was reverent toward the young. His faith had told him that the young would do better with the earth. He did not associate lumber companies, motor companies, chemical companies, or mining companies with youth. He admired Young Turks while he attacked Old Philistines. By his ready admission, he had learned a great deal from his own children, all of whom were college age or older. Brower himself looked almost unnaturally young, his white hair notwithstanding. He sometimes seemed to trust young people’s judgment over his own. He often said, “I’m impressed with what young people can do before older people tell them it’s impossible.” Any number of times since we had come to Cumberland Island, he had commented on the youth of Charles Fraser. “I didn’t know he was so young … . What energy! I didn’t expect so young a man.”

Out through a picket fence and down a deeply shaded street Fraser, as a boy, had walked every day to school. He was blond then, and had curly hair. His mother and father used to buy athletic equipment for him, but he would give it all away and sit on the porch reading books while his friends—endangering the camellias—played football or baseball on his family’s lawn. His family owned nearly half of Hinesville. Their house had been the first in Liberty County to have running water, inside toilets, and two pianos.

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