A Summer of Strange Wanderings: “The Open Spaces” by John C. Van Dyke (1922)

 book review, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  1 Response »
Dec 222023
 

I knew the desert at first hand, and wrote about it with intimate knowledge… That was a summer of strange wanderings. The memory of them comes back to me now mingled with half-obliterated impressions of white light, lilac air, heliotrope mountains, blue sky. I cannot well remember the exact route of the Odyssey, for I kept no record of my movements. I was not traveling by map.

There is something suspect here, when I contrast these words, from John C. Van Dyke’s book The Open Spaces, with the photograph that adorns the frontispiece (in fact, the only image in the book). The Mojave (as the desert is now spelled) extends nearly 48,000 square miles, sprawling from California and Nevada down into Mexico. Van Dyke could have selected any image that would capture its immensity, the vastness of its sky, and the stark majesty of its landscapes. Instead, we have a photograph of a saguaro cactus against a backdrop of yuccas and a distant mesa. Unfortunately, saguaros do not grow in the Mojave Desert. They are restricted to the warmer, wetter climate of the adjacent Sonoran Desert. In his masterpiece, The Desert (stay tuned for a review), Van Dyke reports on wandering both deserts. Only his descriptions of the Sonoran Desert include multiple obvious observational errors. For instance, the saguaro blossom is white, not purple. That is because he most likely never visited the Sonoran Desert.

This post is, of course, not a review of The Desert, but rather, The Open Spaces: Incidents of Nights and Days Under the Blue Sky. Nonetheless, this book is considerably overshadowed by the former work. Abundant research (particularly the work of the late Professor Peter Wild of the University of Arizona) now shows that Van Dyke did not wander about through the desert on his own as he claims here. Instead, he sat on the porch of his brother’s Mojave Desert ranch and wrote most of the book from there. He was an East Coast aesthete, a friend to rich financiers like Andrew Carnegie, and fond of a posh upper-class lifestyle. An art historian who taught at Rutgers, Van Dyke conducted early research on Rembrandt, then explored the beauty of natural settings — including the desert — over a series of six books. The final volume of the six, The Meadows, was previously reviewed in this blog. The other five await their turn on my bookshelf. What I find challenging — a difficulty quite germane to the present volume and review task — is that I simply cannot trust Van Dyke. Am I to read his reminiscences as fiction, rather like The Education of Little Tree? Can I believe him if the same account appears in his autobiography (also on my TBR list)? I know he traveled extensively — to the West Indies and the East Indies, both documented in other books of his. But am I to believe he canoed the Mississippi as a child or ranched in the wilds of eastern Montana as a young man? What am I to make of his memories? How embellished are they?

It is certainly true that, at his best, John C. Van Dyke was a superb craftsman with language. The Desert, despite its flaws and sketchy origins, is still published today. Heck, no less than Ed Abbey referred to it as one of the most important books to read about the desert Southwest. It singlehandedly shifted American views about deserts from avoidance to desire. The vast populations of Tucson, Phoenix, and Las Vegas are testimony to what he accomplished. It is the progenitor to a thousand volumes of nature essays exploring and celebrating the American desert regions. Now, that said, it is tempting to refer to Van Dyke as a “one-hit wonder”, like the singer Don McLean, whose “American Pie” catapulted him to stardom (OK, “Vincent” is a lovely song, too — and is even about an artist — I would like to think Van Dyke would have enjoyed it also.) Peter Wild worked to get other Van Dyke books back into print in affordable paperback editions, including the other five nature volumes and The Open Spaces. (Since his death, all but The Desert are out of print again.)

But The Open Spaces is certainly not the equal of The Desert. Ironically, my favorite passages in the book are probably the few reflecting on his time in (or near, at least) the desert. The rest rambles through memories of camping outdoors as a rancher in Montana, boating the Mississippi as a child growing up in Minnesota, and hunting and fishing in various places. Two threads run through the work, loosely tying it together. First, there is a nostalgia for what has been lost. By 1922, many birds and large mammals had been radically reduced in number. The American buffalo could be written off as a goner. The passenger pigeon was extinct, though Van Dyke recalled how its numbers once darkened the skies:

…in 1870, or perhaps it was 1872, the sky was darkened with flocks of wild passenger-pigeons. Again and again, day after day, I saw passing up the Mississippi Valley cloud-flocks of pigeons that extended from the Wisconsin to the Minnesota bluffs, a distance of five miles. The flocks continued daily and all day long for several weeks. Everybody shot into the nearer and smaller flocks, until the pigeon became a nuisance in the kitchen and an unappetizing article of food on the table. In that year the passenger pigeons had a monster roost in the Mississippi bottoms near the mouth of the Chippewa River, where the birds swarmed like bees, where every litde tree was loaded down with nests, and eggs, crowded out of the nests, were lying on the ground so thick that one could hardly step without crushing them. When the young pigeons were half-grown and could not yet fly, some “sportsmen” went there with clubs, shook and beat the trees until the young birds fluttered out and fell to the ground, and then the “sportsmen” tore their breasts off with their forefingers, flung the breasts into a bag, and threw the carcasses on the ground. That is the wretched kind of thing that one does not like to write about or think about, and yet it was perhaps just such butchery that was responsible for the absolute extinction of this bird. There were such numbers of them then that scarcity seemed a word to laugh at. The roar of that pigeon-roost — a roar like a distant waterfall — could be heard at Wabasha eight miles away. The roar came from the “knac-a” call of the birds, mingled with the flutter and beat of countless wings.

Elsewhere, John C. Van Dyke reflects on how “automobilists” have contributed to despoiling the West — in this case, the stunning mountain meadows of the California Sierras:

Unfortunately, these wonderful places are now being desecrated, if not destroyed, by the automobilist — the same genius that has invaded the Yosemite and made that beautiful spot almost a byword and a cursing. No landscape can stand up against the tramp automobile that dispenses old newspapers, empty cans and bottles, with fire and destruction, in its wake. The crew of that craft burn the timber and grasses, muddy up the streams and kill the trout, tear up the flowers, and paint their names on the face-walls of the mountains. They are worse than the plagues of Egypt because their destruction is mere wantonness.

John Burroughs, the Sage of Slabsides himself, loved his Model T, a gift from his friend Henry Ford. And I am sure Van Dyke traveled considerably by automobile in his later years. Such are the contradictions of many a nature writer — stretching way back to Thoreau, walking home from Walden Pond on the weekend to dine with his parents.

A second thread, less pronounced but more intriguing, is a celebration of wild open spaces. Given Van Dyke’s preference for comfort, there is abundant irony here. But I do think there is still a note of sincerity to his musings in the opening chapter:

What a strange feeling, sleeping under the wide sky, that you belong only to the universe. You are back to your habitat, to your original environment, to your native heritage. With that feeling you snuggle down in your blankets content to let ambitions slip and the glory of the world pass you by. The honk of the wild goose, calling from the upper space, has for you more understanding, and the stars of the sky depth more lure. At last, you are free. You are at home in the infinite, and your possessions, your government, and your people dwindle away into needle points of insignificance. Danger? Sleep on serenely! Danger lies within the pale of civilization, not in the wilderness.

Similarly, Van Dyke closes off the final chapter with these musings:

Had man always lived in the open and maintained a healthy animalism, he would perhaps have been better advised. He was bom and equipped as an excellent animal, but he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage called culture and took on fear and a whimper as a part of the bargain.

Will he always be able to live up to his bargain, holding himself above and superior to nature? Culture is something that requires teaching anew to each generation. Nature will not perpetuate it by inheritance. On the contrary, animalism is her initial endowment; it has been bom and bred in the bone since the world began. Man cannot escape it if he would. Will not Nature in her own time and way bring man back to the earth?

It is tempting to read these lines as a celebration of living close to nature, and maybe Van Dyke wanted to believe that himself. But they are not matched by his somewhat disparaging treatment of native people throughout the book. More than once, he emphasizes that their minds are constantly occupied with meeting material needs (particularly food) and therefore they lack a more spiritual sensibility. I suspect this was a mindset of the time. And for all he writes about encounters with Indians, I am skeptical as to whether they even happened.

As an aside, I found this book enlightening in helping me make connections between John C. Van Dyke and other Van Dykes, as well as John Muir. From this book, I learned that Henry Van Dyke (encountered elsewhere in this blog) was a cousin, while Theodore Strong (T. S.) Van Dyke, owner of a Mojave Desert ranch and advocate for western settlement and development, was his older brother. (T. S. wrote a few books of his own about Southern California, but the parts on nature tended to emphasize the opportunities for fishing and hunting.) And John C. Van Dyke even met John Muir! Sometime in the last seven years of Muir’s life, he showed up at the ranch of T. S. Van Dyke, accompanied by his ailing daughter who was seeking a better climate to aid recovery. Unlike Enos Mills (who encountered Muir on a California beach), Van Dyke was less overwhelmed by the encounter. He tells the tale this way in The Open Spaces:

For several days on the Silver Valley Ranch in the Mohave Desert, with John Muir, I kept bothering him with questions about flower and weed and shrub. What was the name of this or the variety of that ? Learned botanist that he was, his usual answer was: “I don’t know.” The desert growths puzzled him and some of them were wholly incomprehensible to him. He was not afraid to say, “I don’t know,” because there were so many things he did know. When Muir gave it up, no one else ventured a further guess.

The prospect that all was not warm between the two is further hinted at in Van Dyke’s autobiography, in which he remarks that “He liked my book on the desert, he liked my brother who lived in the desert, and he thought he might like me. Well, at any rate, I liked him.” Indeed, Dix Van Dyke (son of T.S.) described in print in 1953 (according to an essay by Peter Wild) how the two “wrangled incessantly” and that sometimes Muir would even stomp off in outrage.

A few words about my copy of this book. It has a nondescript army-green cloth cover. The title is in gold at the top, and below that is an image evoking a Western landscape. The book has a history as a loaner. At one point, it was book 814 of the Indiana Traveling Library. I am guessing that it eventually settled down in Vevay, Indiana, as a guest of the Switzerland County Library. From 1919 until 1992, the library was in the building above, which is now Town Hall. In a delightful twist of fate, the building above was constructed with funds from the Carnegie Corporation, and was the last Carnegie library constructed in Indiana. Andrew Carnegie, a close friend of John C. Van Dyke, would have been delighted to know that his library held some of John C. Van Dyke’s books. It is entirely possible that the book was discarded around 1992, when the library shifted to its current building across the street.

The Complicated Dependence of All the Life about Us: “Two Bird-Lovers in Mexico” by C. William Beebe (1905)

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Jul 212023
 

Every walk about our camp revealed new flowers or seed pods of beautiful colours and strange shapes. We longed for the key to the interrelations of plants and insects, for hints concerning the complicated dependence of all the life about us, — bird on insect, insect on plant, plant on both, which ever links even the extremes of nature.

When William Beebe published Two Bird-Lovers in Mexico in 1905, he was 28 years old and nly three-years married to someone as fascinated by nature as he was., Mary Blair Rice. Though they had honeymooned in Nova Scotia after the wedding, their trip to Mexico together from December, 1903 until April of 1904 was a second honeymoon for the two. The stated purpose of the expedition was to study and collect birds for the New York Zoological Park, where Beebe had recently become Curator of Ornithology. Much of Mexico was still wilderness at the time, and the two traveled mostly by horseback through a variety of tropical ecosystems, from desert scrub to lush rainforest, staying in tents at base camps for weeks at a time. Everywhere he went, Beebe was impressed by the rich bird life and the vast number of birds he encountered. For example, on a visit to the marshes surrounding Lake Chapala, he gushed that

…the feelings we experienced cannot be put into words; such one feels at a fist glance through a great telescope, or perhaps when one gazes in wonder upon the distant earth from a balloon. At these tims, one is for an instant outside of his petty personality and a part of, a realizer of, the cosmos. Here on these marshes and waters we saw, not individuals or flocks, but a world of birds! Never before had a realization of the untold solid bulk in numbers of the birds of our continent been impressed so vividly upon us.

There is a youthful vigor to this book. While Beebe would later be famous for his vast number of global expeditions, particularly to the topics, at the time of his trip to Mexico he had never been so far from his home in New York City. He brought with him a zest for seeing wildlife, though his desire to learn all the ways of the local wildlife did not extend to the human cultures of the region, as this whimsical tale of his daily encounters with a local villager makes plain:

Every day about noon, an old, old man drove several forlorn cows down the trail and up past our camp, for a drink and an hour’s feed of fresh green grass. A ragged shirt, a breech-clout, and a pair of dilapidated sandals formed the whole of his outfit. He knew not a word of Spanish, but jabbered cheerfully away to us in some strange Indian tongue, — Aztec, we pleased ourselves by calling it, — as if we understood every word. When he learned that we were afraid to have his half-wild cattle roaming at will about our provision tent, he took great pains, by means of liandfuls of gravel and a torrent of “Aztec” expletives, to banish them to the opposite side of the stream. His greeting was always ”Ping-pong racket!” This may seem absurdly trivial and irrelevant, yet these syllables exactly represent his utterance. “Ping-pong racket!” I shouted to liim as he appeared with his wild charges. “Ping-pong racket!” he answered joyfully, and patted me on the back with an outburst of incoherent gutturals, doubtless expressing his pleasure at my ready grasp of his mother tongue!

He showed us where the purest and coldest spring was to be found, for which we were extremelv grateful. A bowl of frijoles drew expressions of extravagant delight from him. But he seemed most pleased if only we would talk to him, although the words could convey not a particle of meaning. I would converse for a while in my choicest German, then harangue him with all the Latin I could recall and perhaps end witli an AEsop’s Fable, or part of tlie multiplication table. Whether I gravely informed him that Artemia salina could be converted into Artemia muhlenhausii by adding fresh water and stirring, or whether I chanted the troubles of AEneas, the venerable “Aztec” courteously listened with the greatest interest!

His final greeting was tremulous and sincere, and, as we repeated the phrase which sounded so ridiculous to our ears, we felt a strong pity for this poor ignorant man, whose speech was that of long-gone centuries. And yet he had no need of our sympathy. Day after day for years (so we gathered from his sign language) he had driven his cattle back and forth from some tiny village miles away. He was faithful in this and his happiness was full. It was overflowing when, at parting, we gave him some little trinkets and our spare change.

I found this charming and whimsical tale (albeit a bit disdainful on the part of a white American scientist) to be a highlight of the book. Beyond it, the prose was pleasant enough, though lackluster. Beebe was still developing as a writer, and the fact that the book reflected a first journey into uncharted territory meant that he came way from the trip with far more questions than answers. Still, while so much of the narrative was consumed with descriptions of the birds he saw, Beebe also offered glimpses of a more inclusive vision of nature, one that would emerge into the mainstream as the discipline of ecology over the coming decades. While 19th Century writers like Badford Torrey would go for woodland rambls seeking to identify and observe birds and plants just like Beebe in Mexico, Beebe was consumed by the questions of how they related to each other, and how they fit together into a larger whole — a “complicated dependence of all the life”.

His Lot Is Cast in Poetic Places: “In Beaver World” with Enos Mills (1913)

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Jul 082023
 

Beaver works are of economical and educational value besides adding a charm to the wilds. The beaver is a persistent practicer of conservation and should not perish from the hills and mountains of this land. Altogether the beaver has so many interesting ways, is so useful, skilled, practical, and picturesque that his life and his deeds deserve a larger place in literature and in our hearts.

This was not my first visit with Enos Mills. The self-styled “John Muir of the Rockies”, Mills lived for many years in a cabin in Estes Park, and was a staunch advocate for the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park. Over several decades, he rambled through the mountains, often serving as a guide for tourists to the region. I have read a couple of his books already, with considerable relish. A consummate storyteller, Mills had a tendency to end up in backcountry predicaments (such as getting caught in a blizzard or falling down a slope) and then managing to emerge hale and hearty as ever. I have several more of his books that will appear in this blog in the future, including a book on geology — a topic near and dear to my heart

But given the relatively recent (past year) arrival of a family of beavers to a local park near my home, I decided to embark on a reading campaign to get to know them better. I am slowly working my way through Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why they Matter, by Roy Goldfarb (2018). I purchased it on Kindle, unfortuately, and I rarely am willing to view yet anther screen for my reading, so it is still half unfinished. About the same time, I pulled Mills’ volume off my shelf for a more historical take on the charming mammals.

Mills is nearly forgotten today, beyond his local hero status as father of Rocky Mountain National Park (established in 1915). A wannabe Muir, his writing (delightful though it is) never reached the mystical raptures of his hero of the Sierras. Still, I cannot help but feel amazement at his level of committment to observing beavers in the wild: by 1913, he had spent 27 years noticing them (which, admittedly, takes him back to the humble age of six) in every state of the US (at the time) and also Alaska, Mexico, and Canada. He had observed active beaver colonies in every season, and often for one or more weeks at a time.

The book is full of his accounts of what he saw — the extents of dams (the longest measuring 2140 feet, on the Jefferson River, near Three Forks, Montana), the number of active beavers in one place (over a dozen) and counts (quite precise) of how many aspen trees were taken down by a group of beavers in a certain amount of time. Again and again, he tells of his patient witnessing of beaver construction projects (dams and lodges) brought to an end by local trappers after their pelts. At the time, there was no protection whatsoever for beavers, who were largely viewed with a mix of amusement, disdain, and avarice (for their pelts) by most Americans encountering them.

The book is a bit of a trudge to get through — the observations vastly outnumber his stories present in many of his other essays. But what emerges is a portrait of a beaver as actively shaping the ecosystem it inhabits — a holistic picture constructed decades before ecology hit the mainstream. He also celebrated the beaver in passages that occasionally touched the poetic, such as this one:

As animal life goes, that of the beaver stands among the best. His life is full of industry and is rich in repose. He is home-loving and avoids fighting. His lot is cast in poetic places.

The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primeval place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle. Around are the ever-changing and never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. Beaver grow up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the brilliant flowers and great boulders, in the piles of driftwood and among the fallen logs on the forest’s mysterious edge. They learn to swim and slide, to dive quickly and deeply from sight, to sleep, and to rest moveless in the sunshine; ever listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water, living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich autumn’s hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days.

In another delightful passage, Mills chronicles the many ways in which beavers’ supreme architectural achievements, their dams, influence the surrounding landscape and its myriad other inhabitants. It is quite an impressive list indeed!

The dam is the largest and in many respects the most influential beaver work. Across a stream it is an inviting thoroughfare for the folk of the wild. As soon as a dam is completed, it becomes a wilderness highway. It is used day and night. Across it go bears and lions, rabbits and wolves, mice and porcupines; chipmunks use it for a bridge, birds alight upon it, trout attempt to leap it, and in the evening the graceful deer cast their reflections with the willows in its quiet pond. Across it dash pursuer and pursued. Upon it take place battles and courtships. Often it is torn by hoof and claw. Death struggles stain it with blood. Many a drama, romantic and picturesque, fierce and wild, is staged upon the beaver dam.

The beaver dam gives new character to the landscape. It frequently alters the course of a stream and changes the topography. It introduces water into the scene. It nourishes new plant-life. It brings new birds. It provides a harbor and a home for fish throughout the changing seasons. It seizes sediment and soil from the rushing waters, and it sends water through subterranean ways to form and feed springs which give bloom to terraces below. It is a distributor of the waters; and on days when dark clouds are shaken with heavy thunder, the beaver dam silently breasts, breaks, and delays the down-rushing flood waters, saves and stores them; then, through all the rainless days that follow, it slowly releases them.

My copy of this book was never signed, so I can say little about its history. There is a small bookseller’s stamp affixed to the inside back cover: G. F. Warfield & Co. / Booksellers & Stationers / Hartford, Conn. After changing hands (and names) many times, Huntington’s Bookstore closed in 1993 after being in continuous operation for 158 years.

Go Out Under the Open Sky: “Wild Life on the Rockies” by Enos Mills, 1909

 book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Night, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 022020
 
Long’s Peak, Colorado from the east

This is a beautiful world, and all who go out under the open sky will feel the gentle, kindly influence of Nature and hear her good tidings. The forests of the earth are the flags of Nature. They appeal to all and awaken inspiring universal feelings. Enter the forest and the boundaries of nations are forgotten.

ENOS MILLS REMINDS ME VERY MUCH OF JOHN MUIR. The resemblance is far from accidental; in 1889, Mills chanced upon John Muir at a beach in San Francisco, and the experience left him seeking to emulate the master in his celebration of the western landscape. In fact, he even referred to himself as “John Muir of the Rockies” — popularizing the wild wonders of the Colorado Rockies and the joys of living a rugged life among them. From his cabin in Estes Park (now a museum), he led numerous trips into the Rockies, including hundreds of ascents up Long’s Peak. Like Muir, he had a charming, loyal, highly intelligent dog companion (Scotch); like Muir, he never carried a gun and respected all wildlife; like Muir, he played a vital role in the development of the National Park system and the preservation of wild mountains; like Muir, he had many dramatic adventures in the wild that he shared in his books; and like Muir, he saw encountering nature as a means of connecting with God. But unlike Muir, almost no one has heard of him nowadays. And I think that is a tragic loss.

I CURRENTLY HAVE TWO OF MILLS’ BOOKS; TWO MORE ARE ON THEIR WAY; I ALSO HAVE HIS BIOGRAPHY. In the coming months, I will revisit him many times in this blog. His writing is superb; it flows beautifully, evoking the splendors of the Rockies without being pedantic or flowery. If anything, Mills was remarkably humble about his exploits. And in so many ways, his perception of the environment was far ahead of its time (or at very least, on the leading edge of a new ecological awareness). Consider, for instance, his essay on The Story of a Thousand-Year Pine. I suspect it is one of the earliest essays ever written for a popular audience in the field of dendrochronology. He opens with an homage to Muir:

The peculiar charm and fascination that trees exert over many people I have always felt from childhood, but it was that great nature-lover John Muir, who first showed me how and where to learn their language. Few trees, however, ever held for me such an attraction as did a gigantic and venerable yellow pine which I discovered one autumn day several years ago while exploring the southern Rockies. It grew within sight of the Cliff-Dwellers’ Mesa Verde, which stands at the corner of four States, and as I came upon it one evening just as the sun was setting over that mysterious tableland, its character and heroic proportions made an impression upon me that I shall never forget, and which familiar acquaintance only served to deepen while it yet lived and before the axeman came. Many a time I returned to build my camp-fire by it and have a day or night in its solitary and noble company.

ALAS, THE LOGGERS CAME AT LAST. In an indescribable tragedy, when the tree was felled, it crashed to the ground with such a resounding blow that the trunk was shattered. The loggers abandoned it as being of little value. Withholding comment on the loss of such a noble tree, Mills reports how he set to work piecing together its past: “Receiving permission to do as I pleased with his remains, I at once began to cut and split both the trunk and the limbs and to describe their strange records.” Carefully counting its rings, he discovered the tree had been born in about 856, and was felled in 1903, having lived 147 years. Over the next ten pages, Mills told the story of the pine’s remarkable life, including periods of drought, possible earthquakes, encounters with Indians, and episodes of fire. All in all, it is a remarkable bit of detective work, decades before radiometric dating was developed.

ANOTHER AMAZING ESSAY IN THIS BOOK IS ON THE BEAVER AND HIS WORKS. Based upon extensive observations of beavers in the Rockies and the surrounding region, Mills gave an account of the incredible engineering work beavers have accomplished — including a dam on the South Platte River that was over a thousand feet long! What makes the essay so impressive, however, is how he was able to extrapolate from what he witnessed beavers doing to a sense of the considerable role they had played in shaping the Western landscape:

[The beaver’s] engineering works are of great value to man. They not only help to distribute the water s and beneficially control the flow of the streams, but they also catch and save from loss enormous quantities of the earth’s best plant-food. In helping to do these two things — governing the rivers and fixing the soil — he plays an important part, and if he and the forest had their way with the water-supply, floods would be prevented, streams would never run dry, and a comparatively even flow of water would be maintained in the rivers every day of the year.

Later in the essay, he proposes that

An interesting and valuable book could be written concerning the earth as modified and benefitted by beaver action, and I have long thought that the beaver deserved at least a chapter in Marsh’s masterly book, “The Earth as modified by Human Action.” To “work like a beaver” is an almost universal expression for energetic persistence, but who realizes that the beaver has accomplished anything? Almost unread of and unknown are his monumental works.

In fact,

Beaver-dams have had much to do with the shaping and creating of a great deal of the richest agricultural land in America. To-day there are many peaceful and productive valleys the soil of which has been accumulated and fixed in place by ages of engineering activities on the part of the beaver before the white man came. On both mountain and plain you may still see much of the good work accomplished by them. In the mountains, deep and almost useless gulches have been filled by beaver-dams with sediment, and in course of time changed to meadows. As far as I know, the upper course of every river in the Rockies is through a number of beaver-meadows, some of them acres in extent.

Alas, the beavers were dying out, and that would lead inevitable to changes in the Western landscape:

Only a few beavers remain, and though much of their work will endure to serve mankind, in many places their old work is gone or is going to ruin for the want of attention. We are paying dearly for the thoughtless and almost complete destruction of the animal. A live baver is far more valuable to us than a dead one. Soil is eroding away, river-channels are filling, and most of the streams in the United States fluctuate between flood and low water. A beaver colony at the source of every stream would moderate these extremes and add to the picturesqueness and beauty of many scenes that are now growing ugly with erosion. We need to coöperate with the beaver. He would assist the work of reclamation, and be of great service in maintaining the deep-waterways. I trust he will be assisted in colonizing our National Forests, and allowed to cut timber there without a permit.

I WILL CLOSE WITH ONE MORE LOVELY PASSAGE CELEBRATING THE WESTERN WILDS. In this case, Mills is reminiscing about a trip into the Uncompahgre Mountains, where he spent many nights in solitude beside a campfire, miles from anyone:

The blaze of the camp-fire, moonlight, the music and movement of the winds, light and shade, and the eloquence of silence all impressed me more deeply here than anywhere else I have ever been. Every day there was a delightful play of light and shade, and this was especially effective on the summits; the ever-changing light upon the serrated mountain-crests kept constantly altering their tone and outline. Black and white they stood in madday glare, but a new grandeur was born when these tattered crags appeared above storm-clouds. Fleeting glimpses of the crests through s surging storm arouse strange feelings, and one is at bay, as though having just awakened amid the vast and vague on another planet. But when the long, white evening light streams from the west between the minarets, and the black buttressed crags wear the alpine glow, one’s feelings are too deep for words.

MY COPY OF MILLS’ BOOK IS A LIBRARY REBIND. On the one hand, that means that the binding is really sturdy; on the other hand, the pain forest green cloth is no replacement for the decorated cover with its image of a bear on a snow-blanketed rock. However, the interior is the original first edition of the book from 1909. For some time, it was evidently the property of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, not far from my home.

A Subtle Essence: “Days Out of Doors” by Charles C. Abbott, 1889

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 192020
 

In the forest, the sunlight softly stealing through the half-grown leaves gilds the dark mosses, warms the cold lichens, kisses the purple orchids, makes glad the gloomiest crannies of the wood. Scarcely a cave so dark, or ravine so deep, but the light reaches to its uttermost bounds, and, unlike the soulless glare of the midwinter sun, is life-inspiring. There is a subtle essence in an April Sun that quickens the seeming dead.

And while I have stood wondering at this strange resurrective force, at times almost led to listen to the bursting buds and steadily expanding leaves, a veil is suddenly drawn over the scene and the light shadows fade to nothingness. Falling as gently as the sunlight that preceded it, come the round, warm rain-drops from a passing cloud. Gathering on the half-clad branches overhead, they find crooked channels down the wrinkled bark. poise upon the unrolled leaves, globes of unrivaled light, or nestle in beds of moss, gems in a marvelous setting. Anon the cloud passes, and every raindrop drinks its fill of light. There is no longer a flood of mellow sunshine here, but a sparkling light — an all-pervading glitter. And it is thoroughly inspiring. Your enthusiasm prompts you to shout, if you can not sing, and the birds are always quickly moved by it. From out their hidden haunts, in which they have sat silently while it rained, come here and there the robins, and, perching where the world is best in view, extol the merits of the unclouded skies. Ernest sun-worshippers they, that watch his coming with impatient zeal and are ever the first to break the silence of the dawn; and all these April days their varying songs are tuneful records of the changing sky.

IN THIS BIT OF FLOWERY PROSE, CHARLES CONRAD ABBOTT OFFERS UP HIS EASTERTIDE PAEAN TO A SPRING DAY IN THE FOREST. It is easy to dismiss the text as purple prose, or a thinly-veiled Christian allegory (though it might easily be seen as pantheistic, as well). Yes, it is perhaps overwrought. And yet, reading it, I am transported into the forest glade dripping in the light April rain, and it is a forest alive with color and light. It is an everyday landscape, probably somewhere on Abbott’s land (a blend of tidal marsh and upland on the edge of Trenton, New Jersey), and yet it is also a place of wonder and magic. Indeed, many past readers have evidently found fault with this; the Friends of the Abbott Marshlands (Abbott’s property is now a park) note that “Abbott’s writing about Natural History have sometimes been criticized for being more romantic than scientific.” For my part, though, I appreciate Abbott’s sincere, I think, efforts to combine scientific observation with a sense of aesthetic, affective, and perhaps even spiritual engagement with the landscape.

ABBOTT ALSO CELEBRATED NOT KNOWING. In an age rich with scientific and technological progress, Abbott was quick to point out what we still do not know (though now, more than one hundred years on, some of those things are indeed known). For instance, he wondered frequently about birds — the why behind their seasonal migration, their degree of intelligence, their individuality, their pair bonding, and the intention behind their behaviors:

Although there may be many who assume to know, it were, in truth, as idle to question the Sphinx as to attempt to unravel the mystery of bird ways. Again and again, as the year rolls by, the rambler must be content t merely witness., not to unfathom the whys and wherefores of a bird’s doing; but still this unpleasant experience does not go for naught. It very soon teaches him that birds are something beyond what those who should know better have asserted them to be. To learn this is a great gain. It is well to give heed to him or her who carries a spy-glass; but as to him who merely carries a shot-gun, and robs birds’ nests in the name of science, faugh!

(AND TO MAURICE THOMPSON I SAY, “FAUGH!”)

FOR THE MOST PART, ABBOTT WAS CONSISTENT IN ADVOCATING THE STUDY OF NATURE WITHOUT HARMING ANY LIVING BEINGS. If we ignore a troubling passage in which Abbott apparently put a lizard to sleep with chloroform gas and removed its eyes in an experiment about the sense capacities of reptiles, Abbott generally wrote, and acted, in ways that reflect a respect for all life. In that way, he put himself at odds with many contemporary scientists, amateur or professional. For instance, in this passage he defines natural history in ecological terms that seem rather ahead of its time (particularly in the notion of perceiving the world through the senses of another animal, experiencing its umwelt (nearly half a century before Jacob von Uexküll first coined the term).

To place stuffed birds and beasts in glass cages, to arrange insects in cabinets, and dried plants in drawers, is merely the drudgery and preliminary of study; to watch their habits, to understand their relations to one another, to study their instincts and intelligence, to ascertain their adaptations and their relations to the forces of nature, to realize what the world appears to them — these constitute, as it seems to me at. least, the true interest of natural history, and may even give us the clew to senses and perceptions of which at present we have no conception.

ANOTHER NOTEWORTHY FEATURE OF ABBOTT’S ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WAS HIS DESIRE TO EXPERIENCE IT IN NOVEL WAYS. Consider, for instance, his suggestion that the nature enthusiast ought to consider looking up into the treetops while lying upon the ground:

It may not have occurred to ramblers generally, but to lie upon one’s back and study a tree-top, and particularly an old oak while in this position, has many advantages. If not so markedly so in October as in June, still the average tree-top is a busy place, though you might not expect it, judged by the ordinary methods of observation. If you simply stand beneath the branches of a tree or climb into them, you are too apt to be looked upon as an intruder. If you lie down and watch the play — often a tragedy — with a good glass, you will certainly be rewarded; and, not least of all, you can take your departure without some one or more of your muscles being painful from too long use. If the tree-top life deigns to consider you at all when you are flat upon your back, it will count you merely as a harmless freak of Nature.

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, CHARLES ABBOTT REFERS TO HIMSELF AS A “RAMBLER”; IN DOING SO, HE IS INTENTIONALLY PLACING HIMSELF IN THE COMPANY OF BURROUGHS, TORREY, FLAGG, AND THOREAU. Unlike Thoreau, but like all the others, Abbott writes in a consciously rambling style; his book is a collection of adventures, loosely strung together by the seasons of the year. Having read more than 30 books from this time period now, it is a format I have come to recognize readily. On the one hand, it is a style that was easier to write (not requiring much underlying structure) and pleasant to read (relating various encounters with plants, animals, and the weather). At the same time, it puts some limit on the overall quality of Abbott’s book. Without structure, it is ultimately without direction. While most of the book is set in and around his home acres in New Jersey, on a few occasions mid-chapter he would jump to another part of the state, or eastern Massachusetts, or even central Ohio (where Abbott, an archaeologist, spent some time at Serpent Mound). He didn’t even always stick to the month the chapter was about; at one point, he jumped from September back to May. I can see why the rambling nature essay format (a favorite with Torrey and Burroughs) eventually fell out of favor. Abbott is a fine writer, and this book has some charming passages; but the volume does not come close, in power or profundity, to Beston’s Outermost House.

TO CLOSE, I OFFER ONE MORE CHARMING PARAGRAPH OF ABBOTT’S WORK. Here, Abbott called for protecting old trees, an action I vigorously second:

Why, when such trees as are perfect specimens of their kind stand near public roads, can they not e held — well, semi-sacred, at least? Should not their owners be induced to let them stand? Indeed, could a community do better with a portion of the public funds than to purchase all such trees for the common good? Particularly is it true of a level country that the only bit of nature held in common is the sky. I would that here and there a perfect tree could be added to the list. I have known enormous oaks to be felled because they shaded too much ground and only grass could be made to grow beneath them. It is sad to think that trees, respected even by the Indians, should have no value now. The forest must inevitably disappear, but do our necessities require that no monuments to it shall remain?

AS AN AFTERWARD, A FEW REMARKS ON THE STORIED BUT WEATHERBEATEN VOLUME I READ FOR THIS POST. The cloth at the spine is torn and loose, spine cocked, and part of edge of the front cover is missing. It is stained and tanned and the binding is loose. A collector’s copy it is not. In terms of history, as of 1890, it was owned by a Carrie Lucile Barton.

I have been able to find out very little about her online, but it is surprising there is anything at all. According to the National Register, in 1879 Carrie Lucile Barton was living in Washington, D.C., employed by the Coast Survey as a copyist. She had taken the position after living in Nebraska, though she was born in New York State. As confirmation that this is the same Carrie Barton as signed this book, I also found a Google links to a post mentioning that a Carrie Lucile Barton signed a copy of Les Misérables with her name and “Washington, D.C.” on December 3, 1888. Since my copy does not specify the location, did she move between 1888 and 1890? I also know a bit about her taste in poetry, if the two glued-in additions to the volume were her doing. Using Google again, I tracked the poem on the title page to Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford, a highly published author of novels, poems, and detective stories. The other poem is by Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician, scientist, novelist, and poet. If I were asked to indicate a preference between the two, I think Mitchell is a bit more enticing, despite the “lilies languidly afloat”.

A Seaward Brook: “From Blomidon to Smoky and Other Papers” by Frank Bolles, 1894 (1856-1893)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Day Hikes, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 182020
 
Frank Bolles, photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons

Far up the cliff a brook, which had worked patiently downard from the soil on the summit of the mountain, appeared in a circular opening, and dashed its small spray seaward. Most brooks must fight their way over boulders and fallen trees, through dark ravines, by hot waysides and sleepy meadows, at last to win only a right to merge their lives in the greater life of the river. This brook had gone straight to its mother ocean, unchecked, unturned, and when its clear, cool drops fell towards the sea they were as pure as when they left the sky. The brook seemed symbolic of some lives, which, though living out their appointed time, go back to the source of life without ever having been polluted by society, or lost in its sullen and ill-regulated current.

I FOUND FRANK BOWLES’ LAST BOOK A DIFFICULT ONE TO READ. It was not specifically that the book was assembled posthumously from four essays about a vacation trip to Nova Scotia augmented by all Bowles’ essays (on birds) that had previously appeared in periodicals. Though I am not tremendously keen on birds and bird behavior (I am working on this, considering how prominently birds figure in early nature writing.), that was not the primary obstacle. I had already read two volumes of Frank Bolles’ work and therefore knew what to expect, but while Bolles’ work lacks the stunning mysticism of Henry Beston, he had become a familiar friend over the previous two volumes of his I had read, and his occasional gems of insight are a joy to encounter. No, what I found most difficult was that the book contained essays written mostly in the last year or so of an all-too-short life, chronicling Bolles’ summer adventures before the winter of his death by pneumonia. I experienced at once both the bittersweet appreciation of how fully he invested himself in engaging with nature (particularly birds), and also the realization that his gifts as a writer and scientist have been mostly lost to the world, thanks in good part, I suspect, to his early death. And I thought, naturally, of my late father, and our summer outing together to Nova Scotia many years ago to some of the very same places Bolles visited. I also thought back to the summer in Maine that Dad felt compelled to document in his tidy black ink handwriting; I have that work now, though have only read it once.

TO THOSE NOT FAMILIAR WITH BOWLES LIFE, THERE IS LITTLE TO FOSTER INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY IN THE READER. The only direct indications that this book was Bolles’ last are in the form of a brief opening note about the book’s contents by EQB, and the fact that it is copyrighted Elizabeth Quincy Bowles instead of the author himself. Elizabeth is mentioned only a couple of times in Bolles’ essays; readers learn that she paints watercolor scenes of Chocorua Lake, and that, clearly, she has an inordinate level of patience for Bolles’ menagerie of pet owls. Reading this book, I could not help but wonder what became of her. I know they had children, and one daughter donated the family’s White Mountain land (or at least a good portion of it) to the Nature Conservancy in 1969. Still, I wish Elizabeth had illustrated this volume (at least the frontispiece) with her artwork, so that readers might get to know her better.

THIS BOOK MAY HAVE A CLUNKY TITLE, AND MAY BE UNEVEN, BUT IT STILL CONTAINS A FEW INSPIRING PASSAGES. One of my favorites describes Frank’s experience rowing a small boat in a bay near Ingonish with his family, and encountering a marvelous phosphorescence in the water. It leads him quickly on a cosmic path:

In the sky, bright masses ploughed their way through our air, impelled by an unknown force, driven from an unknown distance, and aiming for an unknown fate. In the sea, bright atoms ploughed their way through the water and glowed in soft splendor. The meteors are inorganic, dead mysteries. The phosphorescence is an organic, living mystery. Yet it is not more impossible to imagine the history and future of a body perpetually traveling through endless space than to try to count the numbers of these phosphorescent myriads. Generally I have the feeling that science is bringing us nearer to a perception of what the vast creation is which surrounds us, but at times the greater truth flashes before my eyes — that what we are really learning is not more than a drop in the limitless ocean of fact.

In another section, describing a forested gorge not far from Ingonish, Bolles speaks of the spiritual beauty of wilderness in a way that seems almost to mirror John Muir. Was Bolles acquainted with Muir’s writing? I cannot imagine otherwise:

Since leaving the open meadow by the sea and entering the dark forest, I had felt the spell of the wilderness resting upon me, the sense of age, beauty, purity, persistent force; all existing or working without man’s knowledge or approval, yet being the very essence of this dewy land of twilight. On coming to this grotto of rushing waters, Nature seemed for the moment to find a voice with which to tell of her wonderful power….

The spell of the wilderness grew stronger upon me, and when, suddenly, I thought how many wearied souls there were in great cities who would love to see this beautiful, hidden spot, something akin to shame for my own race came also into my mind. If man came here, would he not destroy? His foot would trample, his hand deface, and finally he would cut down the firs, blast out the rock, choke the salmon with sawdust, and leave the glen to fire and the briers which follow flame. It is always so; those of us who love nature and the beautiful are only the few, soon to be thrust aside by the many who value bread or riches higher than the fair earth’s bloom.

Later in the same essay, standing beside a flowing stream within the gorge, Bolles returns to this subject. In the passage below, he seems to reject , the dominant anthropocentrism of his era for an appreciation of how humans are only one facet of Earth’s life, and the recognition that nature can have value in and of itself.

This sense of beauty is a focus of nature’s deepest and purest life; and though in it man has no place, it does not on that account lack meaning or significance. Man is a masterful figure in the drama of creation, but he is not all, nor even half, what the world has long been taught to consider him. Perhaps he has been studied too much; certainly Nature, unspoiled by his greed, has not been studied enough or loved enough. Standing alone in that fair solitude, as much alone as on some atoll in a distant sea, I felt as though I might know man better, see him in stronger contrasts and clearer lights, if I could live apart from him longer in such still, calm, holy places as Indian Brook cañon.

THE FINAL TWO-THIRDS OF THE BOOK CONSISTS OF BOLLES’ PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ESSAYS. These were tougher slogging (for me, at least), because they were all concerned with birds, either wild or tamed. Bolles tamed a number of owls (obtained partly by shooting the parents and partly as gifts from others who had presumably done the same), and also raised three yellow-bellied sapsuckers (again, after dispatching the parents). Accompanied by one of the owls, Puffy (named by his children), Bolles found himself able to get wild birds come to him out of curiosity. Thus, he was able to include still more lists of birds observed. In terms of particular observations, Bolles played the role of the amateur scientist; particular interests included the diet of yellow-bellied sapsuckers (tree sap, insects, or a combination of the two) and the personalities of owl species.

FROM WHAT I HAVE READ, I WOULD PROPOSE THAT BOWLES’ GREATEST CONTRIBUTION TO CONSERVATION EMERGED FROM HIS OBSERVATIONS ON INDIVIDUALITY IN BIRDS. Strange as it may seem to the modern reader, there clearly was a time post-Descartes when animals were viewed as machines, incapable of developing unique personalities. As such, they could be freely shot without remorse. And Bolles did quite a bit of that, early on.

With me, belief in the individuality of birds is a powerful influence against their destruction. Like most men familiar with out of door life, I have the hunting instinct strongly developed. If a game bird is merely one of an abundant species, killing it is only reducing the supply of that species by one; if, on the contrary, it is possessed of novel powers, or a unique combination of powers, and can be distinguished from all its fellows, killing it is destroying something which cannot be replaced. No one with a conscience would extinguish a species, yet I already feel towards certain races that their individuals are as different from one another as I formerly supposed one species of bird to be from another. At one time I should have shot a barred owl without a twinge of conscience; now I should as soon shoot my neighbor’s Skye terrier as kill one of these singularly attractive birds.

In his next paragraph, Bolles considers his own work in the light of biological investigations at the time, and puts out a prescient plea for early citizen science to address the deficit:

Sentiment aside, bird individuality, if real, is of deep scientific interest. If we knew more of the influence of individuals, we might have a clearer perception of the forces governing evolution. Serious science is now so fully given up to laboratory as distinguished from field study that but little thought is given to problems of this kind. This fact makes it all the more possible for amateurs to work happily in the woods and fields, encouraged by the belief that they have innumerable discoveries still to make, countless secrets of nature still to fathom.

Like Christopher Robin leaving Pooh at the edge of the Hundred Acre Wood, it is in the wooded patches around his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I will leave him — observing birds and recording their behaviors. As we part company, Bolles reminds me to keep observing nature and making discoveries:

A Sunday afternoon in May spent in the groves and fields of suburbs gives acquaintance with more species than there are hours in a day, and close watch for an hour of any one bird may yield a fact which no naturalist has ever recorded.

Maple Tree in Bloom…in January?

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Jan 152017
 

Lest anyone wonder about global climate change, the warming is quite real, and is manifesting itself in earlier and earlier bloom times for spring flowers around the world.  Still, it was a bit of a surprise to see my backyard maple tree coming into bloom — and aswarm with pollinating flies — in the middle of January.  I took these photographs about a dozen steps from my back door, using my iPhone (and, for three of the four, my Ztylus macro lens).  It took a wee bit of patience to find a cooperative bee mimic fly; the task was made more difficult by the fact that nearly every branch was well above my head.  My efforts were, at last, rewarded with a couple of images.

 

 

 

Geologic Landscapes of Snow Canyon

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Jan 102017
 

Today brings another collection of images from my time in Utah in October.  These feature the geologic landscapes of Snow Canyon State Park, outside St. George.  I was most struck by a hillside in the park that evoked Checkerboard Mesa in nearby Zion National Park.  The geometric pattern in the rock is most likely the result of both bedding planes in the desert sandstone and perpendicular expansion joints caused by removal of overlying rock (through erosion) and freeze-thaw events caused by water getting into the rock.

 

 

 

Snow Canyon Petroglyphs

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Jan 092017
 

There is something soothing about viewing ancient petroglyphs after a stressful day of racing about.  So here are some images from my October trip to St. George, Utah.  These petroglyphs are found in and around a couple of slot canyons in Snow Canyon State Park, just outside the lovely community of St. George.

 

 

 

 

Falling Man Petroglyphs, Gold Butte National Monument, Nevada

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Jan 062017
 

As we prepare for snow here in Georgia (and I eagerly await a photography outing to capture the southern landscape robed with white), I will pause to share another set of images from late 2016, on my same trip out to St. George, Utah as the images from yesterday. These are from the desert of far southern Nevada,

It was to protect the petroglyphs at this Nevada site (just a few miles from the edge of the Arizona Strip) that Gold Butte National Monument was established by President Obama just one week ago.  Back in October, when my brother and I went hiking there, the site was just a much-visited patch of BLM land, home to the mysterious Falling Man petroglyph along with many others.

 

 

 

 

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