Seeking Beauty and Solace in the Familiar: Three Books by Walter Prichard Eaton (1920, 1930, 1933)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Jan 072024
 

My Berkshire house sits at the head of an ancient orchard and looks, on one side, up a steep, high, densely wooded mountain shoulder; on the other, over rolling fields plumed with maples and sentineled with little cedears, to the pines on a hill and the wall of tamaracks edging the great swamp. Trees are my cloud of witnesses. Ever they surround me, and from the once contemptibly familiar they have become, to eyes grown wiser in seeking beauty and solace in the familiar, a constant source of charm and wonder and delight…

Last night, I finished the last few essays in In Berkshire Fields (1920) by Walter Prichard Eaton (1878-1957), and closing the book was a bittersweet moment. It was my last book by Eaton, and this post is my farewell to an author I have grown to know as a companion and friend. As an author, his prose is generally more effective than soaring, and more informative than inspirational. While I finish some books with pages of notes of favorite passages to share, that generally does not happen with Eaton’s writing. Eaton was by no means a scientist of nature; rather, he was a fairly wealthy theater critic with a penchant for wandering the woods and fields around his Berkshire home, punctuated by occasional camping and hiking treks to the West. After living for several years in a home on just five acres in a western Massachusetts town, he purchased 200 acres on the slopes of Mt. Everett (the second most prominent peak in Massachusetts, after Greylock, although only the eighth tallest). Wandering his property, he would occasionally encounter hired help, pruning a tree in his orchard. Writing during the Depression, he observed that he had several friends who had gone golfing in Bermuda for the winter, and half-wished he could join them — indicating, in passing, that the cost did not hold him back. He was a golf aficionado, in fact — he mentions a local golf course or aspects of the game a few times in his writing. Despite these things, I find his writing sincere and his sense of place in the Berkshire hills sufficiently robust that I feel transported there with him as I read his work. His inspiration was chiefly Henry David Thoreau, though he dedicated In Berkshire Fields to William Hamilton Gibson. He did not advance the cause of science with discoveries or insights, although his essay on why we shouldn’t rake leaves (more anon) at least shows that the idea dates back at least to pre-1933. His writing is pleasant, and I am grateful to have shared his world over five volumes. In particular, I find him noteworthy because his nature essays are the first that I have read that refer to World War I and the Great Depression. Indeed, his 1930 and 1933 titles are practically the only ones I have found by nature authors published in those years.

First, though, a few words about Eaton’s substantial work, In Berkshire Fields. By substantial, I mean that it weighs 2 1/2 pounds, although it is just over 300 pages. The paper is exceedingly thick, and the illustrations are numerous. The artist, Walter King Stone (1875-1949), makes multiple appearances in Eaton’s essays, including sharing tales of his own animal encounters. A gifted illustrator and Cornell University art professor, Stone provided artwork for many publications and collaborated with Eaton both here and in Eaton’s Skyline Camps. Based on his excellent images in this volume, Stone also had a predilection for chickadees.

In Berkshire Fields is a deep investigation of nature in the Berkshires at the time — a region transitioning from agriculture back to woodland. Although no evident attempt was made to unify the work, the essay collection covers a range of natural history topics, from birds (obviously a favorite subject of Eaton’s) to mammals to trees and orchids to the landscape as a whole. Mostly, the essays themselves are workmanlike, making their way through aspects of a chosen topic (a particular bird species or group of birds, foxes and their kin, etc.). They become most engaging when given over to brief narratives, such as tales about the behaviors exhibited by various semi-tamed crows. (Evidently, it was a rural pastime in 1920 to capture a juvenile crow and rear it in the home for amusement.) One essay that stands out is “From a Berkshire Cabin: An Essay in War-Time”. Writing from a small cabin high on the slopes of Mount Everett, Eaton grapples with the paradox of being surrounded by nature’s calm beauty while a war was raging in Europe:

I am aware with a pang of almost intolerable sorrow of the peacefulness about me. How strange, how bitter the very word sounds! Even here, where I have come to forget for a day, I cannot forget. Dear friends, youngsters I have watched grow up, relatives, a myriad unknown brothers of every creed and color, are to-day plunged in bloody battle killing and being killed, and man has made of peace a mockery… What I try to realize right now with a care never before exercised in what was essentially a care-free enjoyment what it is exactly in my surroundings that gives me so much pleasure, and from that to realize, if possible, what strange duality in our natures must be explained in order to understand even a little the terrible facts of armed conflict.

Ultimately, Eaton realizes the extent to which he, and all humanity, are complicit in the world war. In a passage eerily appropriate today, Eaton recognizes the selfishness that comes from taking individual rights for granted without recognizing that democracy requires the dedicated participation of everyone:

We must descend from our mountain cabins, from our towers of ivory; we must come out of our gardens and up from our slums, forgetting our beautiful enjoyments, or our precarious jobs which carry no attendant enjoyments, and remembering only the ideal of beauty in our hearts, the ideal of beauty which means, too, the ideal of justice and mercy and peace and happiness for each and all, demand of what rulers we shall find that they give over to us the machinery which controls our destinies, and the destinies of all our fellows. The world to-day is fighting for democracy. I see my crime to have been that I considered democracy a condition wherein I was let alone, not wherein I was an active participant three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, fighting to write my best personal ideals into the whole. That, I believe, has been the crime of the entire world, and in this sense it was not the Kaiser who made the war, but Goethe and Schumann and Beethoven. It was not “‘secret diplomacy,” trade jealousy, and all the rest, that kept the nations apart, straining at one another’s throats; it was the selfish complaisance of all the people who had the love of right and beauty in their hearts—and locked it there for their private enjoyment. The fight for democracy is only just beginning, for only now are we beginning to comprehend what democracy means, to glimpse the depths of its sacrifices, the glory of its creative spirit, the beauty of opportunity that it may be made to hold for common men. Had I the eloquence, I would write a new manifesto, and its slogan would not be, ‘‘ Workers of the world, unite!’ but, ‘‘Lovers of beauty in the world, unite! and capture the machinery by which we have been ruled in ugliness and cruelty.”” There would be no need of a union of the workers, then, for we should all be workers for the common weal. …

Making his way back down the mountain slope to home, Eaton loses much of his fervor, observing that “It is hard to come down from a mountain cabin, from an ivory tower, to give up a solitary possession or resign a comfortable privilege! If I owned a factory would I consent without a bitter struggle to industrial democracy? I ask myself as I pass the foxglove plant and touch its trumpet with my fingers. No—probably not. Undoubtedly not, I decide as I reach the clearing. Having determined what would be necessary to prevent future wars, Eaton realizes with bitter honesty just how difficult such a path would be. I am at once smitten with his integrity and disappointed with his lack of commitment. It is as if he glimpsed the entrance gate to Utopia, only to turn away.

Throughout the book, Eaton evidences appreciation for most wildlife, and particularly songbirds. However, in keeping with the time, he tends to emphasize the benefits of animals for humans, rather than advocating that other living beings ought to be protected for their own sake. Porcupines, for instance, “appear to serve no useful purpose”, while certain hawk species are “cruel” because they hunt farmers’ chickens. Ultimately, though, Eaton recognizes that calling for the outright extinction of certain species would likely be most unwise:

“…we are slowly learning that the balance of nature is something which should not be too rudely disturbed without careful investigation. We have learned the lesson—a costly one— with regard to our slaughtered forests and shrunken water-powers. We are learning it with regard to our birds. And it is certainly not beyond the range of possibility that the varmints—the flesh-eating animals like foxes, weasels, ’coons, and skunks—perform their useful functions, too, in their ceaseless preying upon rodents, rabbits, and the like, more ‘ than atoning for their occasional predatory visits to the chicken-roost. At any rate, who that loves the woods and streams does not love them the more when the patient wait or the silent approach is rewarded by the sight of some wild inhabitant about his secret business, or when the telltale snows of winter reveal the story of last night’s hunt, or when the still, cold air of the winter evenings is startled by the cry of a fox, as he sits, perhaps, on a knoll above the dry weed-tops in the field and bays the moon? To me, at least, the woods untenanted by their natural inhabitants are as melancholy as a deserted village, an abandoned farm, and I would readily sacrifice twenty chickens a year to know that I maintained thereby a family of foxes under my wall, living their sly, shrewd life in frisky happiness, against all the odds of man.

While the 1920 volume is rich with splendid artwork and lavish with thick paper and a decorated cover, the other two volumes of Eaton that I recently read are far more plain in appearance. The paper is browned and of much poorer quality, and the covers are undecorated apart from labels identifying the title and the author (albeit embossed in gold). There are no illustrations apart from a lovely pair of frontispieces by Walter King Stone and photographer Edwin Hale Lincoln, respectively (see below), and the books are about 130 pages each. New England Vista dates to 1930, and On Yankee Hilltops to 1933. Both works contain more essays about the landscape of the Berkshire hills and its wildlife, along with rambles in search of the cellar holes of long-abandoned settlers’ homes and reflections on home gardening. Published in the early days of the Great Depression, New England Vista is most noteworthy for its essay about leaf raking. “Burning Wealth” argues that fallen leaves ought either to be left where they lie or else gathered for composting and reuse. “Every leaf that falls represents nourishment taken out of the ground,” Eaton patiently explains to the reader. “Left to rot, it puts this nourishment back into the soil. Burned up, the nourishment is forever lost, and if it is not supplied artificially, the soil is gradually impoverished and dried up. Every pile of leaves that is composted is rescued wealth. Every pile of leaves burned up is wealth destroyed.” I suspect this recommendation aligned well with the concerns of thrifty readers struggling to keep afloat financially in the aftermath of Black Tuesday.

Speaking of Black Tuesday, the Depression itself (with a small “d”, though) puts in an appearance in On Yankee Hilltops. In “Sweets for Squirrels”, he mentions how “Two of my friends, appararently unaffected by the depression, are in Bermuda playing golf.” While working on building a new garden path along a limestone ledge, Eaton observes how his mind keeps trying to argue that he is better off for not having joined them (a decision that does not appear to reflect any financial hardship on his own account). Ultimately, Eaton concludes that “…I was better employed than if I had been playing golf.” Fortunately, he does not end his musing there. He shares about a visit from a struggling poet, living “up in the hills” in a shack on a small strip of ground, who walked ten miles just to call on Eaton.

When he sits in my study, and we talk of night sounds, and winter colors, and the long tramps the pheasants take, or discuss poetry, I am always a little ashamed of the litter of possessions which surround me–books, prints, tobacco jars, Dresden figures, overstuffed chairs, telephones, golf clubs, mirrors, goodness knows what all, accumulated to minister to the supposed needs of one unimportant human being who can hardly be considered an individual unless he can stand alone, free of such truck, and find his happiness in the creative power of his spirit, or, at the very least, of his own two hands.

Eaton then lists some of the “material comforts” of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age — motorcars, radios, tiled bathrooms, macadam highways, and the like. “We organized ourselves into a vast society to produce them, entirely based for its stability on our desire and ability to consume them. Then something went wrong.” After the stock market crashed, people lost the ability to pay for all these things. Once there is an economic upturn, though, Eaton predicts that the seemingly endless whirl of production and consumption will automatically resume. Under those conditions, most people work hard, but to no avail — living empty lives creating nothing truly meaningful. The better path, he suggests, would be to find contentment with simple things:

To rediscover the world of simplicities, the joys of creating with one’s own hands, the profound satisfactions of expressing an inner sense of beauty through the manipulation of visible forms,–trees, plants, paints, notes of music, or what not,–the relief of a slackened quest for Things, is to rediscover, perhaps, one’s self.

If only we could, collectively, make a better choice. Again, Eaton maps out the way for humanity to follow, only to stumble against the realities of the human condition. “I’m not overly hopeful,” he confesses.

To Hobnob with the Clouds: “Green Trails and Upland Pastures” by Walter Prichard Eaton (1925)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Landscape History, Native Plants, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Aug 082023
 

In these softer modern days, when we all desire the valley warmth, the nervous companionship of our kind, the handy motion-picture theatre, many an upland pasture is going back to wildness, invaded by birch and pine upon the borders, overrun with the hosts of the shrubby cinquefoil, most provocative of plants because it refuses to blossom unanimously, putting forth its yellow flowers a few at a time here and there on the sturdy bush. Such a pasture I know upon a hilltop eighteen hundred feet above the sea, where now few cattle browse, and seldom enough save at blueberry season does a human foot pass through the rotted bars or straddle the tumbling, lichen-covered stone wall, where sentinel mulleins guard the gaps. It is not easy now even to reach this pasture, for the old logging roads are choked and the cattle tracks, eroded deep into the soil like dry irrigation ditches, sometimes plunge through tangles of hemlock, crossing and criss-crossing to reach little green lawns where long ago the huts of charcoal burners stood, and only at the very summit converging into parallels that are plain to follow. Some of them, too, will lead you far astray, to a rocky shoulder of the hill guarded by cedars, where you will suddenly view the true pasture a mile away, over a ravine of forest. Yet once you have reached the true summit pasture, there bursts upon you a prospect the Lake country of England cannot excel; here the northbound [white-throated sparrows] rest in May to tune their voices for their mating song, here the everlasting flower sheds its subtle perfume on the upland air, the sweet fern contends in fragrance, and here the world is all below you with naught above but Omar’s inverted bowl and a drifting cloud.

It is good now and then to hobnob with the clouds, to be intimate with the sky. “The world is too much with us” down below; every house and tree is taller than we are, and discourages the upward glance. But here in the hilltop pasture nothing is higher than the vision save the blue zenith and the white flotilla of the clouds. Climbing over the tumbled wall, to be sure, the grass-line is above your eye; and over it, but not resting upon it, is a great Denali of a cumulus. It is not resting upon the pasture ridge, because the imagination senses with the acuteness of a stereoscope the great drop of space between, and feels the thrill of aerial perspective. Your feet hasten to the summit, and, once upon it, your hat comes off, while the mountain wind lifts through your hair and you feel yourself at the apex and zenith of the universe. Far below lie the blue eyes of Twin Lakes, and beyond them rises the beautiful dome of the Taconics, ethereal blue in colour, yet solid and eternal. Lift your face ever so little, and the green world begins to fall from sight, the great cloud-ships, sailing in the summer sky, begin to be the one thing prominent. How softly they billow as they ride! How exquisite they are with curve and shadow and puffs of silver light! Even as you watch, one sweeps across the sun, and trails a shadow anchor over the pasture, over your feet. You almost hold your breath as it passes, for it seems in some subtle way as if the cloud had touched you, had spoken you on its passage.

What an exultant, rhapsodic love song to an upland pasture in the Berkshires of Massachusetts! One hundred years ago, the once-productive fields were slowly turning back to forest, and it was possible to gaze a great distance across the changing landscape. And in this passage, Walter Prichard Eaton captured the sublime vision in such flowing prose. He wrote about a place he new well, where he and his wife would escape the hustle and bustle of the East Coast cities. Clearly he treasured it deeply. Yet for all eight colored artworks illustrating the volume, only one is from his home, and it is a nondescript, practically black and white image of two deer drinking at the edge of a lake at twilight. The remainder of the images are from Pritchard’s extensive travels out west. Yet without doubt, this evolcation of a place he knew so well and frequented so often is the highlight of this volume. When he wrote of Western landscapes, he shared them as an outsider, identifying trails traversed and plants observed in flower. The poetic spirit infusing the lines above is missing. As it is, unfortunately, from most of the book.I am reading a biography of Mary Treat, author of Home Studies in Nature that I wrote about in this blog ages back. One might argue that Mary is unknown in large part because she was a woman in an age when only men were recognized for their scientific accomplishments. While women authored books, few of them from this period are remembered today. But what of Mr. Prichard Eaton, a white male and scholar, who published several books (stay tuned for more) yet is forgotten today. What excuse might we offer for him? I am beginning to realize that some forgotten authors may be forgotten for good reason. Yes, there are beautiful swathes of text. But was it worth the long journey across over 300 pages to encounter them? I am not so sure.

The major harvest of our pasture is undoubtedly the apple crop, and the major harvesters are the deer. The apples are small and bitter or else tasteless now. Encouraged by the optimism of Thoreau, I have bitten into many hundreds of wild apples since I first read his immortal psean in their praise, but I have yet to discover a second Baldwin, or even an equal of the poorest variety in our orchard crop. At any rate, I no longer pick the apples in this pasture. No one picks them. They fall to the ground on an autumn night, and no one hears the soft, startling thud in the silence of the forgotten clearing. But the squirrels and the deer know where they are.

True, Walter Prichard Eaton does have a (brief) Wikipedia entry, along with an obituary in the New York Times. He lived from 1878 until 1957. Born in Molden, Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard, he was a theater critic for various newspapers, and wrote a number of books on theater and nature. He was also a professor of play writing at Yale from 1933 until 1947. He was a staunch enemy of the movie industry, strongly preferring the theatrical stage. His obituary notes that Eaton’s “tales of woodland ramblings were not as recognized as they deserved to be, according to one critic.” Hmm…

As a casual observer of nature with a busy professional career writing about plays (and writing a few of his own), perhaps he can be forgiven for a focus on the scenery rather than diving more deeply into the landscape. He identifies some birds and some plants, but I suspect he did not spend many hours with a hand lens, deeply observing the minute worlds of a mossy log or a woodland pool along a stream. He did, at least, express some familiarity with Thoreau. Like James Buckham 22 years earlier, for instance, he experimented with winter apples, but with less successful results:

When not writing about the Berkshire landscape or his adventures out West, Eaton was also prone to Norman Rockwell moments — descriptions of old covered bridges, barns, and the like. There are definitely hints of long here for the rural America of his boyhood, complete with itinerant ragmen, tin peddlers, and rural mail carriers. These were passing away, replaced by automobiles and — heaven forbid! — movie theaters. I find it strangely comforting that, just as I often look back on my own past in the days before Internet and iPhone, Eaton looked back on a slower, gentler age in his youth.

But there are still those rare moments, moments where he captures a view in a particularly engaging way. Here is another one, this time describing a flowing stream, as seen from the bow of a canoe wending its way through the twists and turns with the current:

We enter a canoe — a canoe because it slips noiselessly through the water, and can go almost anywhere and examine the river bank more closely, with quite a new impression of its size here on the surface of the water, where it towers six feet above us and shuts out all but the tops of the mountains. It is composed of compact layers of loamy sand, with here and there a little slippery clay. The constant erosion of the water at freshet time has hollowed it out beneath the surface soil, and the grass and flowers, holding together the surface overhang by tenacious roots, curve out and droop along the top like peat thatching. Each Spring great chunks of this overhang break away and fall into the water, as the river continues to deepen the bend. Under this thatch, looking quaintly like a street of Upper West Side apartment houses, are the dark little holes of the bank swallows, row after row of them, neatly tunnelled into the damp brown earth. The swallows skim low over the surrounding fields, snapping up insects as they fly, or come home unerringly to their abodes and disappear with a flutter of tail. The nests are so exactly similar in appearance that one marvels at the birds’ discrimination. It is fortunate, certainly, that sobriety is one of their virtues. Now and then among the swallows’ cliff dwellings is a larger hole, where dog or woodchuck or predatory rat has burrowed, hunting, perhaps, for eggs.

The complementary tongue of land which is always formed by the river opposite one of these concave sweeps of exposed bank is no less interesting. Close to the water it is like a sand bar, forming an excellent shelving beach for bathing, and a playground for the sandpipers and the plovers. You may often come upon a flock of these birds on a bar, as your canoe rounds the bend, running back and forth and bobbing their heads up and down. “Tip ups,” some boys call them. But back a few feet from the new shelf of the bar, the receding waters have deposited soil and seeds, and last year’s deposit is already rank and green with swampy verdure. Then the willows begin. Almost every new tongue of land has its clump of willows, sown by the sweep of the stream on a curve as regular as any topiary artist could lay down, and trimmed to a uniform height. There is one long bend on our river, perhaps four hundred yards in extent, which is not a sharp but a gradual curve. The river was evidently nearly straight at this point a generation or two ago, but something deflected its current perhaps a tree which fell into the water and piled up a dam of roots and tangled flotsam. The current, swinging out from this new obstruction, ate into the farther bank and gradually channelled a great bend, depositing new land on the eastern side. Along high -water mark on this new land, following the new curve of the channel, it planted a hedge of willow possibly fifteen years ago. That hedge is now thirty feet high, as uniform along the top as though it were annually trimmed, and presenting an unbroken wall of shimmering, delicate green set on the sweeping curve of the stream, with a pink garden of Joe-pye-weed at its feet. There is no gardener like the river when you give him a chance!

Finally, in closing, I offer this passage on trees and their personalities. Could Eaton have read Royal Dixon’s book on the topic, “The Human Side of Trees” (1917), perhaps?

Trees, of course, are the most beautiful as well as the most useful of growing things, not because they are the largest but because they attain often to the finest symmetry and because they have the most decided and appealing personalities. Any one who has not felt the personality of trees is oddly insensitive. I cannot, indeed, imagine a person wholly incapable of such feeling, though the man who plants a Colorado blue spruce on a trimmed lawn east of the Alleghanies, where it is obliged to comport itself with elms and trolley cars, is admittedly pretty callous. Trees are peculiarly the product of their environment, and their personalities, in a natural state, have invariably a beautiful fitness.

No, haven’t given up on Walter Prichard Eaton, not quite yet. In fact, I have four more volumes of his waiting on my shelf, three of which I tracked down after finishing this one. But I think I will save them for later.

Addendum: When I first wrote this post, I neglected to mention a bit of side path I ended up following as a result of a passage early on in Eaton’s book. Describing a New Hampshire landscape, he noted that “Behind the oak looms the great north peak of Kinsman, which can now be climbed, thanks to a trail recently cut by the son of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, whose collected poems, published in 1860, have been quite unjustly forgotten.” Taking up the challenges, I looked up Frederick Tuckerman, and discovered that his complete poems were republished in 1965, in a volume edited by no other than N. Scott Momaday! I have since tracked down the work (which is long out of print), and will be sharing my gleanings from it in a future blog post.

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

 book review, Books, Landscape History, Natural History, Uncategorized  No Responses »
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.

A Pleasant Bit of Natural History: “Knocking About the Rockies” by Ernest Ingersoll (1883)

 book review, Books, Landscape History, Natural History, Prehistory, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Sep 192022
 

The next fortnight was not productive of many adventures or noteworthy incidents, though it contained plenty of hard work. Our track led across into the head of the San Luis Park, and so on down to Saguache — a Mexican town near the Rio Grande. There was a pleasant bit of natural history picked up along here, though.

The plover of these interior valleys does not seem to care for marshes, like the most of his race, but haunts the dry uplands. It is closely related to the golden plover, and is named in books Aegialitis montanus. A flock of these plovers dropped down on the plain one day, and I determined to get them for dinner, if possible. Jumping off my horse — who would stand stock-still wherever I left him— I approached to where they had dropped, and finally caught sight of one by distinguishing the dark dot of its eye against the light-tinted surface of the ground. Even then I really could not follow with my eye the outline of the bird’s body, so closely did the colors of the plumage agree with the white sand and dry grass. I shot it ; then found another, shot that; and so on until all were killed, none of them flying away, because their ” instinct,” or habit of thought, had taught them that when danger threatened they must invariably keep quiet ; movement would be exposure, and exposure would be fatal. I and my gun formed a danger they had had no experience of, and here their inherited “instinct” was at fault. When I had shot them I was unable, with he most careful searching, to find all the dead birds.

Ernest Ingersol’s early book, Knocking About the Rockies, chronicles two trips he took into the Rockies (1874 and 1877), accompanying scientific and surveying expeditions. His flair for natural history (he would go on to write a dozen works in the “nature” realm, one previously covered in this blog, with several more awaiting reading) led me to this book and his subsequent one about travels by train through the Rockies (The Crest of the Continent, 1885). I eagerly anticipated observations and reflections on the wildlife of the region. And he delivered well, including several allusions to Thoreau. What I had not reckoned on was that many of them would take a culinary turn. Here, “a pleasant bit of natural history” includes identifying a new bird species and then shooting it for dinner. Or not even dinner. Maybe just as a specimen to observe more closely, or possibly just because his gun is handy?

Climbing a high point back of our tents, which were in the midst of a sage-brush flat, close to the river, I had a queer little bit of good luck one evening. It was just at nightfall, and as I reached the top a large owl came swooping down and perched on a crag some distance off. Drawing my revolver, I held it up and walked slowly nearer, expecting neither to get within range nor hit the bird if I fired; but he let me get so near that at last, about thirty yards off, I blazed away, and down came the owl. Rushing up, I could see him lying in the brush a little way below; but it was some time before I got courage enough to reach down and take hold of him, for a bite or talon-grasp from a wounded owl is no joke. He proved to be stone-dead, and it was a long time before I found out the bloodless wound, the bullet having gone in at the base of the skull and out of the open mouth, without tearing any of the feathers. He was a fine barred or “cat” owl, about two feet long.

I am sure the owl did not appreciate this “queer little bit of good luck”.

It is easy, in hindsight, to condemn this behavior in a would-be naturalist. Of course, the great bird illustrator John James Audubon shot all his bird specimens, too, attaching their lifeless bodies to branches in order to draw them. While one or more cameras accompanied these expeditions — several of the illustrations in the book are engravings from photographs — photography had not advanced enough yet to make close-up images of wildlife possible. The understood technique for close study of animals was to shoot them first. This was slowly changing, as birders began carrying opera glasses into the field instead. And Ingersoll, himself, would rein in his hunting proclivities in his later volumes. Finally, it is to be noted that, in order to travel light and save money, the expeditions carried little food, intending that protein needs be satisfied with hunting and trapping.

Now that we have gotten that aspect of this book out of the way, we can sit back and enjoy some lovely late 19th Century prose about the wilds of the Colorado Rockies (including some delightful geological terms). Here is Grand Lake as seen (more like imagined, actually) from a mountaintop, sounding truly grand indeed:

From this pinnacle, in daylight, there is visible a picture of blue mountains whose sharp, serrated outline indicates a portion of the main range in front of Long’s Peak. Among those immutable yet ever-changing bulwarks lies a lake in a circle of guardian peaks whose heads tower thousands of feet above it, and whose bases meet no one knows how far below the surface of its dark waters. It is Grand Lake, a spot taboo among Indians and mysterious to white men. The scenery is primeval and wild beyond description: Roundtop is one mountain at least that has suffered no desecration since the ice ploughed its furrowed sides. The lake itself lies in the trough of a glacier basin, and its western barrier is an old terminal moraine, striking evidences of glacial action occurring on all sides in the scored cliffs and lateral moraines that hem it in. Its extent is about two miles by three, and its greatest depth unfathomable with a line six hundred feet in length. The water is cold, and clear near the shore, but of inky blackness in the middle. In the reflection usually pictured upon its calm bosom all the cloud-crowned heads about it meet in solemn conclave; but not seldom, and with little warning, furious winds sweep down and lash its lazy waters till the waves vie with each other in terrible energy.

Ingersoll clearly had a passion for climbing peaks and gazing out upon the landscape from their heights. Here, he waxes religious in extolling the glories of just such an experience:

However interesting it might prove, time forbids even to suggest all that meets the eye and is implanted in the memory while one is sitting for two or three hours on a peak of the Rocky Mountains — the surprising clearness of the air, so that your vision penetrates a hundred and fifty miles; the steady gale of wind sucked up from the heated valleys ; the frost and lightning shattered fragments of rock incrusted with lichens, orange and green and drab and white; the miniature mountains and scheme of drainage spread before you; the bright blue and yellow mats of moss-blossoms ; the herds of big-horned sheep, unconscious of your watching; the hawks leisurely sailing their vast aerial circles level with your eye ; the shadows of the clouds chasing each other across the landscape; the clouds and the azure dome itself; the purple, snow-embroidered horizon of mountains, “upholding heaven, holding down earth.” I can no more express with leaden types the ineffable, intangible ghost and grace of such an experience than I can weigh out to you the ozone that empurples the dust raised by the play of the antelopes in yonder amethyst valley. Moses need have chosen no particular mountain whereon to receive his inspiration. The divine Heaven approaches very near all these peaks.

Not that Ingersoll found every experience on his travels filled him with awe and wonder. Here, he expresses quite different sentiments in a dark spruce forest in the mountains:

What a sombre world that of the pine-woods is! None of the cheerfulness of the ash and maple groves — the alternation of sunlight and changing shadow, rustling leaves and fragrant shrubbery underneath, variety of foliage and bark on which to rest the jaded eye, exciting curiosity and delight: only the straight, upright trunks; the colorless, dusty ground; the dense masses of dead green, each mass a repetition of another; the scraggy skeletons of dead trees, all their bare limbs drooping in lamentation. The sound of the wind in the pines is equally grewsome. If the breeze be light, you hear a low, melancholy monody; if stronger, a hushed kind of sighing; when the hurricane lays his hand upon them the groaning trees wail out in awful agony, and, racked beyond endurance, cast themselves headlong to the stony ground. At such times each particular fibre of the pine’s body seems resonant with pain, and the straining branches literally shriek. This is not mere fancy, but something quite different from anything to be observed in hardwood forests. There the tempest roars; here it howls. I do not think the idea of the Banshee spirits could have arisen elsewhere than among the pines ; nor that any mythology growing up among people inhabiting these forests could have omitted such supernatural beings from its theogony.

But do not conclude that the gloom of the pine-woods clouded our spirits. So many trees had fallen where our tents were pitched that the sunshine peered down there, and at night the moon looked in upon us, rising weirdly over a vista of dead and lonely tree-tops. Then, too, the brook was always singing in our ears — absolutely singing! The sound of the incessant tumble of the water and boiling of the eddies made a heavy undertone, like the surf of the sea; but the breaking of the current over the higher rocks and the leaping of the foam down the cataracts produced a distinctly musical sound — a mystical ringing of sweet-toned bells. There is no mistaking this metallic melody, this clashing of tiny cymbals, and it must be this miniature blithe harmony that fine ears have heard on the beach in summer where the surf breaks gently.

While Ingersoll viewed these mountains, forests, and grasslands with rapture, he also saw what would soon be. Observing extensive grasslands at the feet of the mountain peaks, Ingersoll remarked that “Here are the future pastures for millions of cattle, and they are sure to be occupied.” I find it strange that for all the natural beauty he witnessed, he seemed resigned to (or even somewhat enthusiastic about) a future in which the Rockies would be dramatically modified — and the bison would nearly go extinct.

New Powers of Vision: “Locusts and Wild Honey” by John Burroughs (1879)

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Sep 182022
 

We open another eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of things–whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision.

Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes were added.

Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees. The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key.

Here, in what is undoubtedly the finest essay in this volume (“Sharp Eyes”), Burroughs hints at possessing an ecological vision, half a century before the term “ecosystem” was coined in 1935. (Although Ernest Haeckel came up with “ecology” in 1866, that concept, too, awaited the 20th century to develop much further.) Yet here, in this passage, lies the beginnings of a transition from merely identifying living things (birds, plants, etc.) to seeing living things in relationship to each other and the landscape. The more naturalists enhance their base of knowledge, the more “words” they can glimpse, and the better authors they can become, assembling the words into meaningful sentences that can tell wonderful tales: “Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes, are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them.” Wonder emerges when we look beyond the name of the bird, to begin exploring its behaviors at a particular moment.

Later in the same essay, Burroughs offers further guidance on seeing the natural world deeply:

…the habit of observation is the habit of clear and decisive gazing. Not by a first casual glance, but by a steady deliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic things discovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The sharp-shooter picks out his man and knows him with fatal certainty from a stump, or a rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to locate, not only form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but also a faculty which they call individuality–that which separates, discriminates, and sees in every object its essential character. This is just as necessary to the naturalist as to the artist or the poet. The sharp eye notes specific points and differences,–it seizes upon and preserves the individuality of the thing.

These insights (in a literal and figurative sense) comprise the highlight of this volume. I think of this work as one of transition; he moved to a farm in the Hudson Valley in 1873, so these essays mark his first encounters with a landscape he would grow to know even more deeply over the next 48 years. Many of his delightful works deeply rooted in the Hudson landscape and adjacent regions of New York State (such as the Catskills) were yet to be penned in 1879. I found these writings pleasant enough, I suppose, and certainly diverse; they covered beekeeping, trout fishing, weather prognostication, wild strawberries, traveling, an expedition to Canada, and, of course, birds of all kinds. (One essay, comparing British birds to American ones, is even entitled, “Birds and Birds”. Cue Monty Python’s infamous “Spam Song”.)

A couple more passages will suffice, I think, to offer a satisfactory sampling of Locusts and Wild Honey. In his “Birds and Birds” essay, Burroughs reminds us of how long ago the book was written. In 1879, passenger pigeons were still fairly abundant. This led Burroughs to wonder, “The pigeon lays but two eggs, and is preyed upon by both man and beast, millions of them meeting a murderous death every year; yet always some part of the country is swarming with untold numbers of them.” A tragic footnote, dated 1895, adds that “This is no longer the case. The passenger pigeon now seems on the verge of extinction.” Even Burroughs didn’t see that coming.

Next, a lovely, rich description of Rondout Brook in the Catskills, complete with some 19th century geological terms:

If there ever was a stream cradled in the rocks, detained lovingly by them, held and fondled in a rocky lap or tossed in rocky arms, that.stream is the Rondout. Its course for several miles from its head is over the stratified rock, and into this it has worn a channel that presents most striking and peculiar features. Now it comes silently along on the top of the rock, spread out and flowing over that thick, dark green moss that is found only in the coldest streams; then drawn into a narrow canal only four or five feet wide, through which it shoots, black and rigid, to be presently caught in a deep basin with shelving, overhanging rocks, beneath which the pheebe-bird builds in security, and upon which the fisherman stands and casts his twenty or thirty feet of line without fear of being thwarted by the brush ; then into a black, well-like pool, ten or fifteen feet deep, with a smooth, circular wall of rock on one side worn by the water through long ages; or else into a deep, oblong pocket, into which and out of which the water glides without a ripple.

The surface rock is a coarse sandstone superincumbent upon a lighter-colored conglomerate that looked like Shawangunk grits, and when this latter is reached by the water it seems to be rapidly disintegrated by it, thus forming the deep excavations alluded to.

My eyes had never before beheld such beauty in a mountain stream. The water was almost as trans- parent as the air, — was, indeed, like liquid air; and as it lay in these wells and pits enveloped in shadow, or lit up by a chance ray of the vertical sun, it was a perpetual feast to the eye, —so cool, so deep, so pure; every reach and pool like a vast spring. You lay down and drank or dipped the water up in your cup, and found it just the right degree of refreshing coldness. One is never prepared for the clearness of the water in these streams. It is always a surprise… Absolutely without stain or hint of impurity, it seems to magnify like a lens, so that the bed of the stream and the fish in it appear deceptively near. It is rare to find even a trout stream that is not a little “off color,” as they say of diamonds, but the waters in the section of which I am writing have the genuine ray; it is the undimmed and untarnished diamond.

If I were a trout, I should ascend every stream till I found the Rondout. It is the ideal brook. What homes these fish have, what retreats under the rocks, what paved or flagged courts and areas, what crystal depths where no net or snare can reach them!—no mud, no sediment, but here and there in the clefts and seams of the rock patches of white gravel, — spawning beds ready-made.

The finishing touch is given by the moss with which the rock is everywhere carpeted. Even in the narrow grooves or channels where the water runs the swiftest, the green lining is unbroken. It sweeps down under the stream and up again on the other side, like some firmly-woven texture. It softens every outline and cushions every stone.

Oh, for the days when naturalists out in the wilds would drink the waters of mountain streams with delight (and impunity)!

I close with this marvelous quote, from the same essay as above (“A Bed of Boughs”), on the virtues of immersing oneself in wild nature: “It is our partial isolation from Nature that is dangerous; throw yourself unreservedly upon her and she rarely betrays you.”

Three volumes of my 23-volume Burroughs collection down, and 20 more to go. Stay tuned…

Go Out into the Night: “Notes of the Night” by Charles C. Abbott (1896)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Night  No Responses »
Jul 142022
 

Though you may have been familiar with the locality by day for all of your life, it is another world now. Go out into the night with no disturbing thoughts. Gaze awhile at the stars and lose in a measure your earthiness, and a song of a dreaming bird will arouse you to a quicker sympathy with the creatures to which it is now day.

I return again to the indomitable and highly prolific author Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D. (1843-1919). Again I wend my way through the thickets of his prose, hoping to glean a few literary morsels like the lovely bit above to record in my notebook and share with my readers. It is slow going. Abbott is not easy on the reader. He rambles interminably, and his sentences, while not quite labyrinthine, rarely capture my attention. As a resident of the Trenton area, the flora and fauna he describes are quite similar to that of my own native home in Horsham, Pennsylvania. The Delaware River at his doorstep runs through my own childhood by way of canoe trips (well upstream) and many visits to its banks. His interest in the past — both prehistory and colonial days — mirrors my own. And yet I struggle to keep moving forward. The challenge, I think, lies in his tendency toward prolix description. Nothing happens. Rarely does he lead you from his doorstep, out into the meadows and woods around his home, then back again. In the moments when he offers a narrative thread to bind his observations and thoughts together, the result almost works. Abbott is capable of applying an endearing humorous tone to his prose, though he does that all too rarely.

My favorite part of the book is set in the brutal heat and humidity of midsummer in the Delaware Valley. I will quote it in full if only for my own future enjoyment looking back through these past posts:

Liquify brass by heat and then reduce the liquid to a yellow gas, and you will have what did duty for atmosphere at high noon recently. It was 95o in the shade, on the north porch, and away above 100o out in the fields. For this reason, I took to the fields, and finding only crickets equal to the occasion, kept on, and soon plunged into a ferny thicket with three big oaks and a bubbling spring. Here the thermometer showed but 88o, so I had found a cool spot and concluded to tarry. It was all very well to let enthusiasm suggest examining the animal life of a field at noon, but to carry out such suggestions does not pay for the danger involved. It was hot enough to melt your brain, and I shall never forget the languid look of one poor toad that by some cause had been ousted from his day-time retreat and found it too hot to go hunt up another. That toad would not hop, but let me roll him over with the toe of my shoe. The rattling creak of the crickets sounded precisely like the crisp crackling of dry twigs in a fire. What is to be known of open fields at mid-day in summer, let others tell me.

The scene continues with Abbott remaining in the shade by the spring, watching the birds. Eventually, he disturbs a cloud of mosquitoes which drives him back out into the sun-baked field. After a few moments of contemplating the absurdity of being forced out of a relatively pleasant retreat and back into the hot sun, he screws up his courage and returns to the spring and the calling birds. This time, the mosquitoes stay away. It may not be the makings of a movie or even a short story, but it is the closest to high drama that Abbott allows himself to get.

As I read through the book, I did extract some odds and ends of interest. With regard to the literary influences on Abbott, Thoreau is undoubtedly first. Abbott references Thoreau several times and ends his book with a brief and rather lackluster essay on him. The only other writer mentioned, interestingly enough, is John Muir; in his first essay, Abbott remarks that “I had been reading that day Muir’s volume, and the mountains of California seem to have settled over the Jersey meadows.” Another aspect of the book that I appreciated was that Abbott approached nature without fear, urging others to do the same. While recognizing that people tend to have an innate fear of being outdoors at night, Abbott encouraged his readers to overcome that fear and explore the “night country” (as Loren Eisley would later call it). In a later essay in which Abbott dedicated several pages to local reptiles, he remarked on how “utterly unreasonable it is to be afraid of snakes.” Indeed, he urged readers to get out into nature and observe animals with an open mind, letting go of preconceptions and seeking to know the purpose that animal serves in nature. Of course, this outlook did not preclude him from determining the whereabouts of a snapping turtle’s nest and gathering all the eggs to eat.

Finally, throughout the book are passages that speak to the human impacts on nature at the time. For the most part, Abbott seems to recognize that humans have been rather destructive to their environment, yet he generally stops short of advocating a solution. At one point, he observes that “the stream that has a factory on its banks too often has nothing in its waters.” Elsewhere, he notes that “we are doing so little to preserve what remains of our forests.” In yet another essay, Abbott complains about the dwindling number of bluebirds in New Jersey due to egg collectors and invasive sparrows. Here, he goes so far as to call for more protective laws to safeguard songbird numbers. In another passage, he acknowledges human impacts on natural systems, observing that “We should remember that the so-called balance of nature is necessarily disturbed by men’s interference.” Yet he is not willing to discard the possibility that humans have been a positive influence on some species. In particular, thanks to humans, many small birds have more nesting sites and an abundant food supply. This argument has been noted in the writings of others at this time and appears to have been a general belief. Of course, this was also a time in which many Americans were convinced that “rain follows the plow.”

No Less than an Inspiration: “In the Open” by Stanton Davis Kirkham, 1908

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Oct 052020
 

What familiarity with the elements and with natural features of the earth the migrating birds must acquire — with winds and clouds, with mountain chains and rivers and coast lines! They know the landmarks and guide-posts of two continents and can find their own way. The whistle of curlew, or the honk of wild geese high in the air, seems a greeting out of the clouds from these cosmopolites, to us, sitting rooted to the earth beneath. A flock of wild geese on the wing is no less than an inspiration. When the strong-voiced, stout-hearted company of pioneers pass overhead, our thoughts ascend and sail with them over the roofs of the world. As band after band come into the field of vision — minute glittering specks in the distant blue — to cross the golden sea of the sunset and disappear in the northern twilight, their faint melodious honk is an Orphean strain drawing irresistibly.

AND SO, TOO, WITH THIS STUNNING IMAGE AS ITS FRONTISPIECE, KIRKHAM’S “IN THE OPEN” DREW ME IRRESISTIBLY IN. My excitement about the book mounted as I read the opening lines of the first essay, The Point of View, poetically celebrating the opportunities to engage with the exuberant energy and vitality of nature around us:

Nature is in herself a perpetual invitation: the birds call, the trees beckon and the winds whisper to us. After the unfeeling pavements, the yielding springy turf of the fields has a sympathy with the feet and invites us to walk, It is good to hear again the fine long-drawn note of the meadow-lark — voice of the early year, — the first blue-bird’s warble, the field-sparrow’s trill, the untamed melody of the kinglet — a magic flute in the wilderness — and to see the ruby crown of the beloved sprite. It is good to inhale the mint crushed underfoot and to roll between the fingers the new leaves of the sweetbrier; to see again the first anemones — the wind-children, — the mandrake’s canopies, the nestling erythronium and the spring beauty, like a delicate carpet; or to seek the clintonia in its secluded haunts, and to feel the old childlike joy of lady’s-slippers.

ALAS, POOR KIRKHAM. Having read close to forty works of natural history now, I have to recognize that this book opens with two strikes against it. Firstly, it is set in New England — what is worse, Massachusetts — just like practically half of the nature books from its day. And then it relies heavily on the round-of-the-seasons motif, a tired structure for natural history accounts of the time. What is more, there is no reference to places; I suppose Kirkham’s idea was that his book encounters with nature might be anyone’s, and particularities of locale did not matter. Only in two essays near the close of the book — The Mountains and The Forest — does the author stray further afield, to the Rockies and the Sierras, respectively. (Even then, if not for brief name-dropping of the two mountain ranges midway through each chapter, I would not know where they were set.) Oh — and in a bit of bait-and-switch, the frontispiece painting is the only color image in the book, and Luis Agassiz Fuertes’ only contribution to it.

THE THIRD STRIKE, THOUGH, IS ITS RATHER FORMULAIC PROSE AND OVERLY FAMILIAR NATURE ENCOUNTERS. His writing is poetic and aesthetically rich, yet somehow falls mostly flat in the long run. Kirkham makes abundant mention of mythological figures, and fills his pages with names of plants and birds — clearly he knew his Greek and Roman legends and his New England natural history in abundant measure. But somehow, he rarely manages to bring something new to the genre of nature writing. He offers the reader vivid sensorial descriptions — the book does not want for adjectives. He shares many facets of the natural world, but they are ones I have encountered elsewhere — cowbirds laying their eggs in the nests of other species, caterpillars falling prey to ichneumon wasps, squirrels gathering acorns. He even includes several pages of observations of red and black ants fighting each other in a barn — the red ants evidently attempting to enslave the black ones (which he disturbingly refers to again and again as “negroes” — but we will leave that faux pas — or perhaps even bit of intentional racism — alone for the time being). But he brings no new realization to the story — Thoreau beat him to it with an ant battle scene in “Walden” several decades earlier.

OCCASIONALLY, THOUGH, KIRKHAM SUCCEEDS — AT LEAST, FOR THIS PARTICULAR READER. Kirkham devotes an essay to Pasture Stones. Perhaps it is the geologist in me that enjoyed his appreciation of them and his invocation of the last Ice Age. They infuse the New England pasture landscape with a sense of deep time, and Kirkham explores this here:

There is a rustic notion that boulders somehow grow, in some inexplicable manner enlarging like puffballs and drawing sustenance from the earth — and what could be more puzzling to the uninitiated than the presence of these pasture stones? His was an ingenious mind who conjured up that remote ice age from this fragmentary evidence and derived a history from these scattered letters and elliptical sentences. It was like tracing the stars in their origin.

It takes a bold imagination, indeed, to see these familiar fields and woods overlaid with a mile’s thickness of ice; to recognize here in this present landscape a very Greenland, redeemed and made hospitable. There was need of a solid foundation of fact, patiently garnered, before such an arch of fancy could be sprung. What chaos and desolation once reigned here, only these boulders can tell. Here was a frozen waste as barren as the face of the moon. But beneath lay the soil that was to nurture the violet and the hepatica. There was a fine satisfaction in riding a miracle like this to earth, to corner it and see it resolve itself into the working of natural laws.

Here is another passage I enjoyed, in which Kirkham muses on a bit of driftwood he found on an ocean beach. Again, he writes about the power of imagination, imbuing natural objects like pasture stones and pieces of wood with rich stories steeped in the magic of time’s long passage:

I take home a piece of driftwood, for no ordinary fire but to kindle the imagination, for it is saturated with memories and carries with it the enchantment of the sea. To light this is to set in motion a sort of magic-play. True driftwood has been seasoned by the waters and mellowed by the years. Not any piece of a lobster-pot, or pleasure yacht, or, for that matter, of any modern craft at all is driftwood. It must have come from the timber of a vessel built in the olden time when copper bolts were used, so that the wood is impregnated with copper salts. That is merely the chemistry of it. The wood is saturated with sunshine and moonlight as well, with the storms and calms of the sea — its passions, its subtle moods; more than this, it absorbed of the human life whose destiny was involved with the vessel — the tragedy, the woe. It had two lives — a forest life and a sea life. By force of tragedy alone it became driftwood. Winter and summer the sea sang its brave songs over the boat and chanted her requiem at last as she lay on the ledge. This fragment drifted ashore out of the wreck of a vessel, out of the wreck of great hopes, out of the passion of the sea.

AT TIMES OVERWROUGHT, AT TIMES TEDIOUS, AT TIMES NEARLY ELOQUENT, KIRKHAM’S BOOK LEAVES ME WITH A SENSE OF MISSED POTENTIAL. Perhaps, if he had chosen as a theme a collection of brief musings and impressions of natural objects and scenes, along the line of the pasture stones and driftwood, the book would have been more engaging. Like nearly every nature writer I have encountered so far, Kirkham clearly had moments of insight that he successfully transferred to the page. Yet his work, collectively, does not (in this volume, at least) sustain the wonder and intensity that it occasionally manages to convey so well. My favorite page, without question, is the stunning frontispiece painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

MY COPY OF THIS BOOK IS A FIRST (ONLY?) EDITION. Unlike the pasture stones Kirkham wrote about, this volume has no marks showing its journey. It is a lovely book, visually; the cover is so enticing in its simplicity (in an age of sometimes ornate gilded cover art), and the pages so thick and robust, with deckled edges on bottom and side and gold along the top. It would have made a fine gift for a discerning lover of nature — ideally, one who had not previously read half a dozen other books about Massachusetts through the seasons.

Between Bend and Burns: “Where Rolls the Oregon” by Dallas Lore Sharp, 1914

 Birds, book review, Books, Landscape History, Native Plants, Ocean, Sense of Place  2 Responses »
Oct 032020
 
In the sagebrush near Burns

The utter nowhereness of that desert trail! Of its very start and finish! I had been used to starting from Hingham [Massachusetts] and arriving — and I am two whole miles from the station at that. Here at Mullein Hill I can see South, East, and North Weymouth, plain Weymouth, and Weymouth Heights, with Queen Anne’s Corner only a mile away; Hanover Four Corners, Assinippi, Egypt, Cohasset, and Nantasket are hardly five miles off; and Boston itself is but sixty minutes distant by automobile, Eastern time.

It is not so between Bend and Burns. Time and space are different concepts there. Here in Hingham you are never without the impression of somewhere. If you stop, you are in Hingham; if you go on you are in Cohasset, perhaps. You are somewhere always. But between Bend and Burns you are always in the sagebrush and right on the distant edge of time and space, which seems by contrast with Hingham the very middle of nowhere. Massachusetts time and space, and doubtless European time and space, as Kant and Schopenhauer maintained, are not world elements independent of myself, at all, but only a priori forms of perceiving. That will not do from Bend to Burns. They are independent things out there. You can whittle them and shovel them. They are sagebrush and sand, respectively. Nor do they function there as here in the East, determining, according to the metaphysicians, the sequence of conditions, and positions of objects toward each other; for the desert will not admit of it. The Vedanta well describes “the-thing-in-itself” between Bend and Burns in what it says of Brahman: that “it is not split by time and space and is free from all change.”

That, however, does not describe the journey; there was plenty of change in that, at the rate we went, and according to the exceeding great number of sagebushes we passed. It was all change; though all sage. We never really tarried by the side of any sagebush. It was impossible to do that and keep the car shying rhythmically — now on its two right wheels, now on its two left wheels — past the sagebush next ahead. Not the journey, I say; it is only the concept, the impression of the journey, that can be likened to Brahman. But that single, unmitigated impression of sage and sand, of nowhereness, was so entirely unlike all former impressions that I am glad I made the journey from Boston in order to go from Bend to Burns.

AT ITS BEST, “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON” REVEALS THE REFLECTIONS OF AN EASTERN NATURALIST COMING TO GRIPS WITH THE ARID AND IMMENSE LANDSCAPES OF THE WEST. He is the archetypal Outsider, struggling to relate his experiences in the woodlands and fields of New England to the canyons, mountains, and empty country of Oregon. Here, Dallas Lore Sharp writes of his glimpse of a raven soaring over Deschutes Canyon, against a vast backdrop of emptiness and silence:

As our train clung to its narrow footing and crept slowly up the wild cañon of the Deschutes, I followed from the rear platform the windings of the milk-white river through its carved course, We had climbed along some sixty miles to where the folding walls were shearest and the towering treeless buttes rolled, fold upon fold, behinds us on the sky, when, of from one of the rim-rock ledges, far above, flapped a mere blot of a bird, black, and strong of wing, flying out into midair between the cliffs to watch us, and sailing back upon the ledge as we crawled round a jutting point in the wall and passed from his bight of the deep wild gorge.

…And I knew, though this was my first far-off sight of the bird, that I was watching a raven. Beside him on the ledge was a gray blur that I made out to be a nest — an ancient nest, I should say, from the stains below it on the face of the rock…..

Or did I imagine it all? This is a treeless country, green with grass, yet, as for animal life, an almost uninhabited country…. Such lack of wild life had seemed incredible; but no longer after entering the cañon of the Deschutes. A deep, unnatural silence filled the vast spaces between the beetling walls and smothered the roar of the rumbling train. The river, one of the best trout streams in the world, broke white and loud over a hundred stony shallows, but what wild creature, besides the osprey, was here to listen? The softly rounded buttes, towering above the river, and running back beyond the cliffs, were greenish gold against the sky, with what seemed clipped grass, like to some golf-links of the gods; but no creature of any kind moved over them. Bend after bend, mile after mile, and still no life, except a few small birds in the narrow willow edging where the river made some sandy cove. That was all — until out from his eyrie in the overhanging rim-rock flapped the raven.

FOR SHARP, THE WESTERN LANDSCAPE WAS FUNDAMENTALLY FOREIGN TO HIS EXPERIENCE. Spaces were so immense and so desolate and so unfamiliar to a New Englander. Not always able to appreciate the monumentality of the West, on at least this one occasion he gave up, turning his focus instead on a more familiar sight, reminiscent of what he might encounter back home:

How often one becomes the victim of one’s special interests! I climbed to the peak of Hood, looked down upon Oregon and into her neighbor states, saw Shasta far off to the south, and Rainier far off to the north, and then descended, thinking and wondering more about a flock of little butterflies that were wavering about the summit than about the overpowering panorama of river and plain and mountain-range that had been spread so far beneath me. Or was I the victim, rather, of my inheritance? Was it because I happened to be born, not on a mountain-peak eleven thousand two hundred and twenty-five feet above the sea, but in a sandy field at sea-level? I was born in a field bordering a meadow whose grasses ran soon into sedges and then into the reeds of a river that flowed into the bay; and I found myself on the summit of Hood dazed and almost incapable of great emotion. So I watched the butterflies.

THIS BOOK HAD BEEN A RARE FIND FOR ME: a natural history study of the Pacific Northwest, written between 1862 and 1942. And several of its essays, particularly the ones quoted above, lived up to the expectation. But after reading Enos Mills’ accounts of his adventures in the Rockies, I also came to recognize that there is a considerable difference between the West as portrayed by a deep inhabitant of its wilds, and the West as encountered by an Eastern nature rambler visiting for a couple of months one summer. That difference continues to fascinate me. Alas, however, the book as a whole is highly uneven and its structure rather baffling. It opens with a visit to the seabird-covered crags of Three-Arch Rocks Reservation, just offshore west of Portland. The next section of the book is the most coherent, covering Sharp’s time in eastern Oregon, including the epic drive from Bend to Burns. He visits desert wetlands filled with birds (except for the white heron, driven nearly extinct at the time by the brutal millinery trade). Then he inserts a lengthy consideration of herd behavior, which begins with cows in the pastures of Hingham and ends with a cattle stampede in eastern Oregon. After the butterflies of Mt. Hood he shares about his encounter with a cony (pica) in the Wallowa Mountains. Then back to Shag Rock in Three Arch Rocks Reservation (on the same visit as began the book), then a long essay on animal mothers that again started in New England and ended back on Three Arch Rocks again. Then a final appreciation of Mt. Hood as seen from Portland (with some ponderings on Portland’s economic and cultural potential. And then the book closed.

THE FINAL RESULT IS A SERIES OF VIGNETTES, SNAPSHOTS FROM A PLEASANT RAMBLE THROUGH THE WESTERN WILDS. To his credit, Sharp advertises it as such in the Preface, where he explains that “…this volume is…a group of impressions, deep, indelible impressions of the vast outdoors of Oregon. Still, the reader is left longing he would develop his impressions of the West into a more coherent, richer, more extensive volume. The editor, too, might have encouraged him to save essays on animal behavior (mothering and herd instincts) for another book, and instead to concentrate on encounters with the Western landscape and its flora and fauna. Finally, most ironically of all, Sharp’s title, “Where Rolls the Oregon” (lifted from Thanatopsis, a poem by William Cullen Bryant) refers to an older name for the Columbia River, whose striking gorge along the Oregon/Washington border cuts through the heart of the Pacific Northwest. Yet Sharp does not mention the river even once in his book.

I WAS FORTUNATE TO LOCATE A VOLUME IN SUPERB CONDITION. It is a first edition from 1914, with cover art well preserved. It was signed by a previous owner, Henrietta A. Pratt, but without a date. My attempts to track down the owner via Google met with no success. At very least, I would like to thank her for caring for this book so thoughtfully.

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.

What, Then, Are We?: “The Do-Nothing Library” by Charles M. Skinner, 1899

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Landscape History, Natural History, Night, Prehistory  4 Responses »
Sep 232020
 

Night on the house-top frees the way to a solitude that can be terrifying; and as your mind swims away through the star-frosted deeps, you check it, now and again, with a gasp, and bring it back to earth, just as you clutch the shrubbery when you look down into a Western cañon, lest your body make excursions to the bottom likewise. This earth is a bubble of cooling lava circling its parent sun; the sun is one luminous drop in a flood of suns that we see as the Milky Way; that, again, is but an episode in the unthinkable vastnesses that extend beyond, beneath, around it. What, then, are we? But be calm. Nature is so. Be at one with it. In the multitude of lights out there, not one is varying from its course, not one falters or hastnes, seldom does one brighten or grow dull: therefore, know that we are sheltered and saved by law; that we are parts of an infinite order; and we dream that somewhere in the universe, whose sun-clouds roll about the throne of it, dwells Mind.

IN 1899, CHARLES MONTGOMERY SKINNER PUBLISHED “DO-NOTHING DAYS” ALONG WITH A SECOND EDITION OF “WITH FEET TO THE EARTH”, OFFERING THE TWO AS A BOX SET ENTITLED, “THE DO-NOTHING LIBRARY.” Skinner’s volumes are highly uneven compilations of landscape (and seascape) vignettes, Thoreauvian aphorisms (often semi-paradoxical or at odds with societal norms), fragments of memory, and shreds of advice to travellers. Having finished the first volume (“With Feet to the Earth”), I decided to read the second and author a single blog post on the pair. To my surprise and delight, the second one proved to have a richer trove of insights. I also discovered more of the cosmic wonder that (briefly) graced his book I had previously read, “Nature in a City Yard”. There were clearly moments in his life (and writing) in which Skinner confronted the vastness of the universe, and struggled with its implications for humanity. For instance, at the close of his essay, In the Desert, he reflected on the work the Mormons had accomplished, founding Salt Lake City and turning the desert landscape into a fertile plain, and pondered how that same transformation could someday be accomplished throughout the arid lands of the West. The result was a literary journey into the depths of that most haunting question of being, “Why?” — a journey that portends the existential angst of the mid 20th century and beyond.

Men make little impress upon the earth, yet we look for the time when the salt shall be washed or neutralized out of this soil, its flintiness assuaged, trees and grass mde to grow where nothing larger than willow nor more succulent than sage can be found at present, melted snow brought from the mountains and sent abroad in cooling streams, lakes and reservoirs created to hold the overflow, roads cut across the hills, and cities summoned out of the rocks. Onward and ever onward to physical conquest, if not more, the race portends. This lifeless empire will yet be peopled, must be peopled, for the race of man will presently lack room on this globe; and the lonely ones, the asking ones, looking from their chambers or their peaks upon the transmuted plain and its ondrawing multitudes, will ask again, “To what end is life? What is the gain that makes these men so desperate to keep foothold or lawhold on the earth, to win the wilderness to fertility? Is this race sufficient to itself, and no more? If to something else, what can that something be, that profits by our homage or our striving? Had men been uncreated, the globes would still have rolled through space, as bald of life as if these fields were when they were desert; yet, had suns and planets never been, what then? Would space have listened for us, questioned, expected, wished, or set in action the sleeping world germs? We come: is earth the richer save for the moment? We go: do we gain by leaving? What can these crowds advance that would not as well be left without beginning? Of what use to live through eternity, even to advance ourselves?”

Time passes. The cities of all lands increase and multiply, each a builded paradise, where temples, museums, and halls shine amid groves and gardens, and towering phalansteries overlook a nature as green, as wild, as sweet, as friendly, as it is to-day. The people are strong, large, beautiful, and wise. Their minds are fed by contact with strong schools and lofty arts. Yet among them the same questioners walk apart and ask, “Why do we build, and why is the earth fair? How are time and space the better for our world and us, and how are we better for the world, the void, eternity?”

The ages roll solemnly along. The world is dead and frozen, its stony peaks and blasted plains still more a desert than these wilds are in our day. The sun hangs like a fading coal. No thing remains alive. Traces of men are gone. An aged ghost wanders about the globe that used to be its home, and asks again, “Why was the earth made? Since men came only to vanish, how were they the better for having lived?” He sees that, with the dying of the sun, the stars and comets are shining brighter. A wind, the last of the air, moves by and whispers, “Wait!”

In another passage from the same book, but this time in an essay On the Roof, Skinner confronts mortality again — this time, not death of humanity and the Earth, but individual death, and the hope for a gift of insight at the moment of passing, to make it all worthwhile:

Death and beauty; they are nearly as close as death and life. And what are those disclosures that are made to the dying? Why do so many go to their rest with smiling wonder? The materialist says that there is no future for us; were it so, it might still be worth a life to gain one glimpse of the great mystery, just as we are giving back the spirit to its source — to hear one chord of the great symphony, to see one ray of creation’s light.

WOULD THAT SKINNER HAD CRAFTED A BOOK WOVEN OUT OF VISIONS AND WONDERS LIKE THESE; I SUSPECT IT WOULD HAVE BECOME A CLASSIC FOR THE AGES. But alas, the same book grappling with these cosmic questions included essays on Some Cheap Delights and A Few Dollars’ Worth of Europe. Some of his essays were a barrage of thoughts to live by, with occasional morsels, like this one:

When you say that you must have “life”, you commonly mean noise, bluster, effort, crowd. Why, friend, the woods are full of life; it shines on you out of the sun, stirs in the earth beneath you, falls on you in the rain, talks to you in the wind. Hear birds, see squirrels, fish, snakes, flies, and the voiceless yet whispering trees. Learn the ways and speech of wild things, and you will know life.

IN ONE ESSAY, MENTIONED BEFORE , SKINNER VIVIDLY EVOKED THE EXPANSIVE BARREN SPACES OF THE WESTERN DESERT. At a time when most nature writers focused their essays on the commonplace and rural East, Skinner’s In the Desert is a powerful testament to the dusty Western wilds:

Distance is a factor in our enjoyment of the desert. Indeed, the ocean-like vastness of the plains is the reason for the vastness of imagination and spirit that may beset us there. The human soul craves room. It has it in these wastes. Down in the hollows the desert is less impressive, and bodily discomforts are multiplied. It is hot, and sharp dust enters your eyes, mouth, nose, and ears. The ground is full of the old sea salt, and in the wind, that always blows as gloriously as on the sea, stinging the blood and inflaming the sense of liberty so that we want to rush about and yell — in this wind the white dust rises and stalks in columns across the earth. You see it in Nevada, spiring up and up, as water-spouts rise on the ocean, whiling as it advances, and finally breaking in a dry rain against the purple hills.

Two years later, John Charles Van Dyke would publish his largely fictionalized volume, “The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances” and go down in history as the first writer to write positively and evocatively about the desert landscape.

ONE OTHER WAY IN WHICH SKINNER WAS A BIT AHEAD OF HIS TIME WAS IN HIS REJECTION OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM. In an age in which many people still viewed animals as mechanical and without intelligence or individuality, most everyone thought of nature as being there for humans to use and abuse at will. Gifted with a cosmic perspective, Skinner was able to see that the unfolding story of evolution was not just about human beings.

One of [nature’s] lessons is hard for us to learn, for it is the lesson of modesty, or reserve. There are men so made that they look patronizingly over the mountains, the sea, the prairies, the sky, all those symbols of the infinite, and say, “How nice it is that these things were created especially for us!” For them! little accidents of evolution; insects of a day, bumbling over this brief globe. Nay, truly, the bird, the bat, the tree, the flower, have the same right, cause, and purpose here as men. We are, happily, come in time to enjoy this beauty that is the world.

I will close with Skinner’s invitation to his readers to engage deeply and sensorially with nature, and thereby receive the energy of the cosmos:

When weather and disposition permit, …sprawl on the grass, inhale its acid fragrance, note the life the wriggles and scuttles beneath it…. Thus to rest between earth and sky, the sun ninety-three million miles over your head and warming it, eight thousand miles of rock beneath you, and life leaving darkness to meet the sun, is to be yourself penetrated by the vital currents that shape creation out of chaos.

TO CLOSE, I OFFER A QUICK WORD ABOUT THE VOLUMES I READ. Both of them were identical, apart from their different titles. Both volumes were, alas, heavily foxed, though otherwise in excellent condition for being over 120 years old. Violet Oakley’s cover is stunning; Holloway’s scattered watercolors lose quite a bit for being in black and white, I think. Neither volume had any owner’s signatures or other traces of its past.

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