Visiting E.B. White in Maine

Becky and her husband did some traveling this summer – here’s something she wrote from the road on a day that was all about a classic children’s story and a very beloved author.

 Today we went to Brooklin, Maine in search of E.B. White. Not him, exactly, but the places he loved and where he lived. His old saltwater farm on Penobscot Bay has been sold a couple of times since his death and is currently off limits, so I knew there would be no meandering through the barn that Charlotte and Wilbur once shared, no standing breathless in the little boathouse over the oyster flats where “Andy” would go to write when he needed a certain quality of quiet.  I’d have to be content with a surreptitious glance from the road, as (according to Reddit) the current owners don’t welcome looky-loos. Neither would have White himself, who was notoriously a private man and not particularly sociable. This “respectable distance” seemed appropriate.

So we gathered our Googled cartography and planned our approach. We even purchased copies of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little from a bookstore in nearby Blue Hill, as if they might act as a sort of homing device in helping us locate their creative source.

As we drove we listened to Martha White describing life with her grandfather when she was a child—his love of dogs and boats, the boxes of Blackwing pencils he left behind, and the way he was with his grandchildren.  

“He always kept that sense of wonder and amusement and appreciation of the natural world,” she remembered. “Children just gravitated to him. He didn’t talk down to a child, he didn’t think you were not smart enough or not polite enough. He was thrilled to hang out with a child and show us the first spring pullet egg of the season, [which] would be brought into the living room and put into a little black bowl… Or take us out to the barn when there new lambs cavorting around, or [take us] skating on the heart-shaped skating pond… That kind of thing.”

As we drove and listened, I wished for the hundredth time that Jenny was here to experience this little pilgrimage with me. We’ve shared our love of E.B. White and his world since we were kids, and have “LitWitted” his children’s books together for 15 years. She’d sent me off on this trip with a copy of Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship, a book of letters between White and fellow writer Edmund Ware Smith, which I have already greedily devoured. With its descriptions fresh in my mind I can easily imagine “Smithy” winding down these roads on his way to visit his friend “Whitey” and to inspect the innovative henhouse he (White) was so eager to show off.

The road to the old place, like all the roads in this part of the world, wanders through lush meadows and farmscapes, alongside bogs choked with wildflowers and ponds of deep agate green. We passed front yards piled with lobster traps, and handmade signs pointing down driveways to hidden farms named after brooks, bays, and old fishing families. According to this article by Mel Allen of NewEngland.com, people would often suggest that the White’s house too should have a name (e.g. “Will you be heading north to Musselthwaite Manor this weekend?”), but the couple thought this seemed pretentious. According to Henry Allen, who worked for the Whites for 37 years, White said if he had to he’d call the place “Two Big Chimneys and a Little One.” *

So we drove on, looking for the chimneys but trying not to look like we were, and holding our books at the ready, alert to any telltale quiver.

To be honest, I was feeling a little down – a notch below nostalgic – in the way one can when it seems like all the good stuff has already happened, and the good people have come and gone. So it didn’t take me by surprise that the house and barn that slipped suddenly into view, preceded briefly by a white board fence, seemed mostly ordinary.

Places we know only from books and stories often are that way, once we finally reach them. And after all, E.B. wasn’t in residence and hadn’t been for some forty years. But moving a copy of Charlotte’s Web into the frame did, for a moment, put things in their place, and the picture seemed temporarily complete.

Our next stop was an impromptu visit to the Brooklin Boat Yard, which was founded by White’s son Joel in 1960 and later passed on to Joel’s son (and Martha’s brother) Steve White. As anyone who has read the yachting scene in Stuart Little knows, E.B. had a deep love of all things nautical, made a few boats and owned several; one was an 18-foot daysailer named Fern which he bought with the proceeds from Charlotte’s Web (a book he never expected would do well at all).

Today the Brooklin Boat Yard continues to craft world class custom wooden boats and yachts and is now owned entirely by the employees who work there. We spoke with one of the owner-employees who pointed with pride to brand new yacht being prepared for launch and invited us to explore the private docks and buildings. Yes please!!

It was time for thank you’ and goodbyes, so we headed to the old Brooklin Cemetery. There, at the very back of the grounds, under the protection of a giant oak tree, two identical stones mark the resting places of E.B. White and Katharine Sargeant Angell White, Andy’s wife and life partner for some 50 years.  Katharine was a literary powerhouse in her own right, and I was struck all at once by the finality of this place and felt a deep sense of loss for two people I’ve never had the pleasure to meet.

Others had left tokens of remembrance on E.B.’s gravestone—a couple of pennies, some rocks. Wanting to leave something of my own, I quickly scrambled back to the car to search for an appropriate tribute. I felt a little like Templeton the rat at the county fair, on the hunt for a suitable collection of words with which Charlotte might describe and thus save the life of her friend Wilbur.

Eventually and after much rummaging I found a well-worn Ticonderoga pencil in the bottom of my backpack, the one I’d been using just this morning to describe the lake where we are staying, and the bliss of a sunrise spent alone in a canoe. It wasn’t the perfect word, and it’s not saving anyone’s life, but it’s my version of a Blackwing, so I propped it up on the little shelf of mementoes above his name. As if sensing an addition to the collection, a small pale spider climbed up the face of the gravestone to investigate.

Just then my phone gave a chime. It was a text from Jenny.

“Give EB my love,” she said, “and tell him we’re doing our best to resurrect him.”

I thought about our experiences exploring his books with kids, and about the lovely little pullet eggs set out in a bowl. And about how just like that, from one generation to the next, the wonder bubbles up and flows. New wells of imagination spring from old stories about spiders and pigs, mice, and swans.

And so I told him that we’re doing our best, that he is as much beloved now as he ever was, and that that his gifts of wonder to the world he loved remain unmatched.

I’m pretty sure the spider, who was also listening, thought so too.

What do YOU think? Is E.B. White beloved to you too? We'd love to hear your own experiences of reading or teaching his books. (If you'd like some free fun ideas for teaching them, see our Creative Teaching Ideas for Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan.)

*White did at one time need a dateline for the essays he was writing in Maine and sending to The New Yorker. “For convenience, then, I gave my home a name—I called it Wormwood, thinking this would sound enough like an English Manor house so that nobody would take it seriously. But some people did, and even some of my friends began referring to my place as Wormwood, and this was too much even for me.”  —rom the foreword to Points of My Compass, 1962