Landscape History – Page 2 – CommonPlace Nature

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

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

Sep 192020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Holy Ground: “Spring Notes from Tennessee” by Bradford Torrey, 1896

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Aug 252020

Because I was newly in the country I was constantly under the feeling of its past. Hither and thither I went in the region round about, listening at every turn, spying into every bush at the stirring of a leaf or the chirp of a bird; yet I had always with me the men of ’63, and felt always that I was on holy ground.

IN 1895 OR THEREABOUTS, THE BOSTON NATURE WRITER BRADFORD TORREY VACATIONED FOR SEVERAL WEEKS IN SOUTH-CENTRAL TENNESSEE. An avid birder and occasional appreciator of other animals or native plants, he spent most of his time roaming a Civil Warm landscape in search of birds. In that quest he is, at times, quite intense. The story opens with his arrival at Missionary Ridge, outside Chattanooga. The rail car he has taken was occupied by several Confederate veterans who invite him to join them in climbing a view tower at the site of General Braxton Bragg’s headquarters “where they would show me the whole battlefield and tell me about the fight.” Instead, distracted by a bird, Torrey remains on the ground. “I might have heard all about the battle from a man who was there,” he relates to his readers, “and instead I went off to listen to a sparrow singing in a bush.” And for the next several dozen pages, all Torrey writes about are the birds he encounters — the ones he sees and identifies, and the ones he only hears and wonders about. Meanwhile, in the background is the immense drama that unfolded there about thirty years before, including the Battle of Chickamauga, a Confederate victory that was not enough to turn the tide of war in the Rebels’ favor. In the 1890s, many Civil War veterans were still living, and would visit the battlefields to recall their past moments of glory and struggle. Residents of the area, too, carried memories of those fateful days in September of 1863.

Finally, the Civil War seeps into Torrey’s tale, displacing the endless litany of birds. While on Chickamauga battlefield, the author converses with a Confederate veteran of Vicksburg:

…he gave me a vivid description of his work in the trenches, as well as the surrender, and the happiness of the half-starved defenders of [Vicksburg], who were at once fed by their captors.
All his talk showed a lively sense of the horrors of war. He had seen enough of fighting, he confessed; but he could n’t keep away from a battlefield, if he came anywhere near one.

All around him, the landscape contained traces of its violent past, brought back to life by first-hand and second-hand memories of those terrible days of war:

From the hill it was but a few steps to the Snodgrass house, where a woman stood in the yard with a young girl, and answered all my inquiries with cheerful and easy politeness. None of the Snodgrass family now occupied the house, she said, though one of the daughters still lived just outside the reservation. The woman had heard her describe the terrible scenes on the days of the battle. The operating-table stood under this tree, and just there was a trench into which the amputated limbs were thrown. Yonder field, now grassy, was then planted with corn; and when the Federal troops were driven through it, they trod upon their own wounded, who begged piteously for water and assistance. A large tree in front of the house was famous, the woman said; and certainly it was well hacked. A picture of it had been in “The Century.” General Thomas was said to have rested under it; but an officer who had been there not long before to set up a granite monument near the gate told her that General Thomas did n’t rest under that tree, nor anywhere else. Two things he did, past all dispute: he saved the Federal army from destruction and made the Snodgrass farmhouse an American shrine.

After passing the home that had been General Rosencrans’ headquarters during the battle, Torrey relates to readers,

…I came to a diminutive body of water, — a sink-hole, — which I knew at once could be nothing but Bloody Pond. At the time of the fight it contained the only water to be had for a long distance,. It was fiercely contended for, therefore, and men and horses drank from it greedily, while other men and horses lay dead in it, having dropped while drinking….
…a chickadee gave out his long and quiet sound just behind me, and a…swallow dropped upon the water’s edge. The pond was of the smallest and meanest, — muddy shore, muddy bottom, and muddy water; but men fought and died for it in those awful September days of heat and dust and thirst. There was no better place on the field, perhaps, in which to realize the horrors of the battle, and I was glad to have the chickadee’s voice the last sound in my ears as I turned away.

Throughout much of his stay in that part of Tennessee, Torrey kept encountering veteran soldiers and older civilians who recalled events from the Civil War. At one point, he met up with an old Union soldier from Massachusetts who had been born in Canada but joined up with a Michigan regiment. Torrey explained to readers that he wasn’t certain how it came to pass that he learned this information, but “in that country, where so much history had been made, it was hard to keep the past out of one’s conversation.”

ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, IT WAS THE PROSPECT OF BIRDING THAT BROUGHT TORREY TO TENNESSEE, AND THE BOOK IS MOSTLY ABOUT THAT. I am sure there are avid birders out there that relish accounts of other’s efforts to augment their life lists, but I do not count myself among the number. After telling of his unexpected glimpse of a Cape May warbler on Cameron Hill in Chattanooga, Torrey explained why he kept searching for birds — an argument that ultimately led him to speak in defense of all naturalists and the lives they lead:

“What good does it do?” a prudent friend and advisor used to say to me, smiling at the fervor of my first ornithological enthusiasm. He thought he was asking me a poser; but I answered gaily, “It makes me happy;” and taking things as they run, happiness is a pretty substantial “good.” So was it now with the sight of this long-desired warbler. It taught me nothing; it put nothing into my pocket, but it made me happy, — happy enough to sing and shout , though I am ashamed to say I did neither….
It is one precious advantage of natural history studies that they afford endless opportunities for a man to enjoy himself in this sweetly childish spirit, while at the same time his occupation is dignified by a certain scientific atmosphere and relationship. He is a collector of insects, let us say. Whether he goes to the Adirondacks for the summer, or to Florida for the winter, he is surrounded with nets and cyanide bottles. He travels with them as another travels with packs of cards. Every day’s catch is part of the game; and once in a while, as happened to me on Cameron Hill, he gets a “great hand,” and in imagination, at least, sweeps the board. Commonplace people smile at him, no doubt; but that is only amusing, and he smiles in turn. He can tell many good stories under that head. He delights to be called a “crank.” It is all because of people’s ignorance. They have no idea that he is Mr. So-and-So, the entomologist; that he is in correspondence with learned men the country over; that he once discovered a new cockroach, and has had a grasshopper named after him; that he has written a book, or is going to write one. Happy man! a contributor to the world’s knowledge, but a pleasure-seeker; a little of the savant, and very much of a child; a favorite of Heaven, whose work is play. No wonder it is commonly said that natural historians are a cheerful set.

Now there’s a sentiment that George Torrey Simpson (no relation) would have agreed to with enthusiasm!

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. A “first edition” (was there a second?) from 1896, its cover (show at the opening of this post) is its finest feature. Inside the front cover is the signed name of a previous owner, who was evidently the mother-in-law of the person who sold me the book on eBay: Marguerite Heloise Crownover. The other feature of this volume is a child’s cartoon on page 9, preserving for posterity the claim that “mrs. mader is crazy!” In some truly enlightened dialogue, the smaller stick figure says “she sure is!” while the taller ones, arms akimbo, declares that “everybody knows that”. It was news to me, at least. Below the drawing is a mysterious bit of writing involving b. b. and c. c. with a plus and the letters l, o, v, and e in the four quadrants. The identities of the two besotted youths have, alas, been lost to history.

The obvious question, then, is was this actually a classroom literature text? If so, I would have to agree with the artist that Mrs. Mader was indeed crazy.

Beauty and madness and death and God: “The Land of Little Rain” by Mary Austin, 1903

book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place 1 Response »

Aug 162020

All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel, steep or slow they go up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of the hills open into each other, and the high meadows are often wide enough to be called valleys by courtesy; but one keeps this distinction in mind, — valleys are the sunken places of the earth, cañons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God. They have a better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced open glades of pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and there in this hill country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony barriers. These head also for the heart of the mountains; their distinction is that they never get anywhere.
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable thirst.

MARY AUSTIN’S “THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN” IS A LOVE POEM, IN PROSE, TO A LAND AND ITS INHABITANTS, HUMAN AND OTHERWISE. The landscape is the desolate country of eastern California, between the Sierras and Nevada. In Mary Austin’s words, the land is a living presence, evoked vividly and sensorially over the course of her slender tome. Her book is a work of nature writing inasmuch as nature is embedded in its pages, in the form of descriptions of landscapes, plants, and animals. Only once does Austin pause, at chapter’s end, to reflect on the human relationship to the natural world, and her pessimistic viewpoint is one I have encountered before in other writers from this time:

Man is the great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. Being so much warned beforehand, it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely hid. The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.

EXTRACTING FROM THIS WORK IS A DIFFICULT TASK. It is of one fabric, a tapestry of words that weaves the reader into the landscape, through encounters with its storms, topography, geology, cultures, and wildlife. Consider this rich evocation of the way to the home of the Shoshone Indians:

To reach that country…, one goes south and south, within hearing of the lip-lapping of the great tideless lake, and south by east over a high rolling distinct, miles and miles of sage and nothing else. So one comes to the country of the painted hills, — old red cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral earths, hot, acrid springs, and steam jets issuing from a leprous soil. After the hills the black rock, after the craters the spewed lava, ash strewn, of incredible thickness, and full of sharp, winding rifts. There are picture writings carved deep in the face of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do not know it. On the very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in a wide sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone land.
South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded with the ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very var by broken ranges, narrow valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line, east and east, and no man knows the end of it.

It is a land that was, in Austin’s day, still partly unknown, despite the (scanty) human presence upon it. Consider, for instance, Austin’s account of the tulares, vast expanses of marsh covered almost entirely by tule, a species of sedge. Avoided by people, the landscape is a haven for birds:

The tulares are full of mystery and malaria. That is why we have meant to explore them and have never done so. It must be a happy mystery. So you must think, to hear the redwinged blackbirds proclaim it clear March mornings. Flocks of them, and every flock a myriad, shelter in the dry, whispering stems. They make little arched runways deep into the heart of the tule beds. Miles across the valley, one hears the clamor of their high, keen flutings in the mating weather.
Wild fowl, quacking hordes of them, nest in the tulares. Any day’s venture will raise from open shallows the great blue heron on his hollow wings. Chill evenings the mallard drakes cry continually from the glassy pools, the bittern’s hollow boom rolls along the water paths. Strange and farflown fowl drop down against the saffron, autumn sky. All day wings beat above it, hazy with speed; long flights of cranes glimmer in the twilight. By night one wakes to hear the clanging geese go over. One wishes for, but gets no nearer speech from those the reedy fens have swallowed up. What they do there, how fare, what find, is the secret of the tulares.

Finally, to close, here is perhaps my favorite passage from the book — a potent evocation of the western landscape, told almost entirely through its scents. (Dare I call it scentsational?)

Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills, there is more sky than any place in the world. It does not sit flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean winey winds. There are some odors, too, that get into the blood. There is the spring smell of sage that is the warning that sap is beginning to work in a soil that looks to have none of the juices of life in it; it is the sort of smell that sets one thinking what a long furrow the plough would turn up here, the sort of smell that is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the plant’s best, and leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There is the smell of sage at sundown, burning sage from [Paiute Indian villages] and sheep camps, that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon long acquaintance, and every Paiute and shepherd smells of it indubitably. There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust that comes up from the alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and the smell of rain from the wide-mouthed cañons. And last the smell of the salt grass country, which is the beginning of other things that are the end of the mesa trail.

AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. Alas, I cannot afford a first edition of Austin’s work, priced in the hundreds of dollars. I settled instead for a 1961 paperback a Doubleday Anchor Book from the Natural History Library. Though well worn and weatherbeaten, the book was otherwise free of writing or other evidence of its history. The list of other titles in the series in back was particularly helpful; it enabled me to find two more writers from the first 42 years of the 20th century.

Chin Deep in the Middle: “Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist” by Winthrop Packard, 1911

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Aug 062020

Chin deep in [the] middle [of Walden Pond], you begin to feel that you know the pond. In a sense you are its eye and look upon the world as it does. Day breaks for the swimmer as it does for Walden, and the flash of the sun above the wood to eastward warms you both with the same sudden sweep of its August fire. In the same sense you are pond’s ear and hear as it does. The morning rustle of the trees, shaking the dark from their boughs, comes to you as a clear ecstasy, and you think you can hear the wan tinkling of the invisible feet of fairy mists as they leap sunward from the surface and vanish in the day. Over the wood comes the intermittent pulse of Concord waking, and by fainter reverberations the pond knows that Lincoln and more distant villages are astir. Then the first train of the day crashes by the southern margin and stuns the tympanum with a vast avalanche of uproar.

THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST EVOCATIVE AND MYSTICAL PASSAGES IN PACKARD’S BOOK. If we can overlook the allusion to fairies, it is really quite beautiful; a lone swimmer at Walden’s center, who becomes the pond’s own ear and eye. I have read many accounts of visiting Walden (and have ventured there a few times myself, including one fairly magical early morning when the pond was wreathed in fog). Yet Packard manages to see the place from a different vantage point than anyone else, and to considerable effect. Other sections of “Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist,” while failing to reach the heights of that one, still do a noteworthy job of capturing the rich flora of an hillside pasture near the birthplace of John Greenleaf Whittier:

Kenoza Lake opens two wide blue eyes at your feet, and all along beneath you roll bare, round-topped hills sloping down to dark woods and scattered fields, as unspoiled by man as in Whittier’s days. The making of farms does not spoil the beauty of a county; it adds to it. It is the making of cities that spells havoc and desolation. Through the pasture, up the steep slopes to the summit of Job’s Hill, that seems so bare at first glimpse, climb all the lovely pasture things to revel in the free winds. Foremost of these is the steeplebush, prim Puritan of the open wold, erect, trying to be just drab and green and precise, but blushing to the top of his steeple because the pink wild roses have insisted on dancing with him up the hill, their cheeks rosy with the wind, their arms twined round one another at first, then around him as well.

I THINK WE HAD BEST STOP THERE. I have read writers that anthropomorphize wildlife — deer, foxes, perhaps even an insect or two. But until I encountered Packard, I never would have guessed it possible to imbue wildflowers with decidedly human behaviors and feelings. Packard describes birds and butterflies at times, too, but his specialty is flowers. And what strange descriptions they are. Consider Bouncing Bet, a.k.a. soapweed, Saponaria officinalis. I’ll bet the reader has never encountered it described as a wanton amidst New England Puritans before:

Here, too, rioting through the old time flower gardens and out of them, dancing and gossiping by the roadside and in the field, sending rich perfume across lots as a dare to us all, is Bouncing-Bet. I cannot think of this amorous, buxom beauty as having been allowed to come with a shipload of serious, praying Pilgrims or any later expedition of stern-visaged Puritans. I believe she was a stow-away and when she did reach New England danced blithely across the gang plank and took up her abode wherever she saw fit. Thus she does today. All over the Cape she strays, a common roadside weed and a beauty of the gardens at once.

And then there is his odd account of the seaside goldenrod with its “bare toes”:

Of these wild flowers the seaside goldenrod is most profuse. Pasture-born like the cedars, it too loves the sea and crowds to its very edge like the people at Revere and Nantasket, so close indeed that at high tides the smelt and young herring, swimming in silver shoals, nibble at the bare toes the plants dabble in the water. You may know this even if you do not see the nibblers, for the plants quiver and shake with suppressed laughter at being thus tickled.

TIME TO ADD “FLOWER TICKLING” TO MY LIST OF ODD NATURAL HISTORY ACTIVITIES I HAVEN’T YET ATTEMPTED. But if we can overlook Packard’s strange botanical fancies (and fantasies), we are left with a robust, serviceable (if not always inspiring) volume of the author’s rambles in the landscapes of writers of yore. In addition to Thoreau and Whittier, these include Frank Bolles and Celia Thaxter. I will close with a lovely text description of the interior reaches of Thaxter’s Appledore Island, followed by a 1911 photograph of Boles’ beloved Lake Chocorua, with the mountain beyond.

Often in the tiny valleys in the heart of [Appledore] Island, surrounded by its dense shrubbery, you lose sight of the sea, but you cannot forget it. However still the day, you can still hear the deep breathing of the tides, sighing as they sleep, and a mystical murmur running through the swish of the breakers, that is the song of the deep sea waves, riding steadily in shore, ruffled but in no wise impeded by the west winds that vainly press them in the contrary direction. However rich the perfume of the clematis the wind brings with it the cool, soothing odor that is born of wild gardens deep in the brine and loosed with nascent oxygen as the curling wave crushes to a smother of white foam. It may be that the breathing of this nascent oxygen and the unknown life-giving principles in this deep sea odor gives the plants of Appledore their vigor and luxuriance of growth. Certainly it would not seem to be the soil that does it. Down on the westward shore of the island, in an angle of the white granite, where there was but a thin crevice for its roots and no sign of humus, I found a single yarrow growing. Its leaves were so luxuriant, so fern-like and beautiful, such feathery fronds of soft, rich green as to make one, though knowing it but yarrow, yet half believe it a tropic fern by some strange chance transported to the rugged ledges of the lonely island. With something in the air, and perhaps in the granite, that makes this common roadside plant develop such luxuriance. it is no wonder that the other common pasture folk, goldenrod and aster, morning glory and wild parsnip, and a dozen others, growing in abundant soil in the tiny levels and hollows, are taller and fuller of leaf and petal than elsewhere. In the richness and beauty of the yarrow leaves growing in the very hollow of the granite’s hand, as in the height and splendor of the Shirley poppies in the little garden, one seems to find a parallel to Celia Thaxter, whose own character, nurtured on the same sea air, sheltered in the hollow hand of the same granite, grew equally rich and beautiful.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK ITSELF. This time, I read a first edition hardcover (was there ever another edition published?), fairly worn with library use. It spent many of its past days as 917.4 / P12 on a shelf at the library of the State Normal School in Valley City , North Dakota, about a third of the way from Fargo to Bismarck. I am a bit jealous of my book in that regard: North Dakota is one of only two states (along with Alaska) that I haven’t visited yet. According to the Date Due page (still present), the book was last checked out in November and December of 1967, and sometime after that was withdrawn from Allen Memorial Library of Valley City University (which, I suspect, is what the State Normal School later became). The volume’s most notable feature is its gilt cover, gold on a red cloth background:

In Tune with Nature: “At The North of Bearcamp Water” by Frank Bolles, 1893

Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Natural History, Night, Sense of Place No Responses »

Jul 082020

During nearly the whole of the forenoon of July 3, 1892, a soft rain had been falling. It had begun in the night to the discomfiture of the whippoorwills, but not to the extinguishment of their voices. It continued until nearly noon, when the wind shifted from east to west, patches of blue sky appeared, and ever and anon gleams of sunlight fell upon the distant forest across the lake, or slid slowly over the tree-tops on the side of Chocorua.

FRANK BOLLES’ FIRST BOOK, COVERED THE FIRST HALF OF A YEAR’S ROAMINGS IN NATURE, JANUARY THROUGH JUNE OF 1891. His second book, picks up the tale a year later, telling largely of his nature encounters between June and December of 1892. The lost year represents a considerable shift in Bolle’s world; no longer are his nature outings centered on the outskirts of Boston; instead, nearly the entire book (apart from a page or two at the very end) is set in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Some time earlier, Bolles had purchased an old farmhouse with a red roof, on the shore of a heart-shaped lake, opposite the peak of Chocorua. Presumably his family accompanied him during most of his visits to New Hampshire, though he barely mentions them and never volunteers any names. Mostly, the book is filled with his rambles, along cascading mountain streams and up along the ridges of the mountains. Always there are the birds, which “calls for” (presumably using a call of an owl or another predator) and describes with much enthusiasm. In one “experiment”, Bolles spends from prior to sunrise through sunset watching a hollow snag beside a stream flowing into the lake, noticing all the birds that visit the area at various hours of the day.

FOR THE MOST PART, THE BOOK READS LIKE THE ACCOUNTS OF PLEASANT OUTINGS WITH A CHARMING FRIEND. Rarely does the writing soar poetically like Beston or Muir, and not often does Bolles stop to contemplate the “big picture” of the ecological relationships evident around him, or the nature of human impacts on the White Mountain landscape. Still, reading the book transported me back in time, back to an age of sawmills and logging camps, railroad timetables and hidden bear traps in the forest. As a means of escape — a time machine between navy blue cloth covers — the book was mostly a delight. Before I had even finished it, I went ahead and ordered the only other book of Bolles’ essays ever published, a posthumous collection of essays including four from a trip to Cape Breton (more about those in a later post). Only one essay troubled me; Bolles wrote about the forest “gnomes” (voles, shrews, and the like) and his campaign setting out deadly traps near his home to see what he could catch (and kill). For all his evident respect for birds, he seemed to have a different attitude toward small mammals — one that was no doubt in keeping with that of most Americans at the time.

FOUR PASSAGES IN THE BOOK CAUGHT MY EYE, FOR DIFFERENT REASONS; I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE THEM HERE. The first is in the opening essay, A Thunderstorm in the Forest. Walking through the deep woods in a storm, he interrupts his ornithological observations to appreciate the rain falling on the leaves of various plants:

The rain pelting into my eyes bade me look less at the sky and more at the beauties at my feet…. There were no flowers, but the leaves were enough to satisfy both eye and mind — large leaves and small, coarse and delicate, strong and feeble, stiff and drooping. Some were long and slender, others deeply cleft, some round, or smoothly oval, others shaped like arrow-heads. Some received the rain submissively and bowed more and more before it, others responded buoyantly as each drop struck them and was tossed off. In some the up-and-down motion communicated by the falling drop was by the formation of the leaf-stalk transformed at once into an odd vibration from side to side, which was like an indignant shaking of the head.

What I appreciate about this passage is that, instead of stopping at describing leaf shapes, Bolles notices how the plants interact with the raindrops; instead of a static scene, the woodland forest floor comes alive for a few sentences. And I am left wondering how the different plants where I live here in Georgia might respond to the falling rain….

THE SECOND PASSAGE IS A MOMENT OF COSMIC WONDER, REMINISCENT OF BESTON. For Beston, that wonder called forth the rich interconnectedness of all things in ever-flowing energy and changing form; for Bolles, it points instead toward evidence for the existence of a God:

There is something inexpressibly touching and inspiring in the combination of fading night, with its planets still glowing, and the bird’s song of welcome to the day. Night is more eloquent than day in telling of the wonders of the vast creation. Day tells less of distance, more of detail; less of peace, more of contest; less of immortality, more of the perishable. The sun, with its dazzling light and burning heat, hides from us the stars, and those still depths as yet without stars. It narrows our limit vision, and at the same time hurries us worries us with our own tasks which we will not take cheerfully, and the tasks of others which are done so ill. Night tells not only of repose on earth, but of life in that far heaven where every star is a thing of motion and a creation full of mystery. Men who live only in great cities may be pitied for being atheists, for they see little beyond the impurity of man; but it seems incredible that a being with thoughts above appetite, and imagination above lust, should live through a night in the wilderness, with the stars to tell him of space, the dark depths of the sky to tell him of infinity, and his own mind to tell him of individuality, and yet doubt that some Being more powerful and less fickle than himself is in the universe.

THE THIRD PASSAGE IS FROM THE CLOSE OF THE BOOK; AS IF PRESAGING HIS OWN DEATH ONLY A YEAR AFTER THE BOOK WAS PUBLISHED, BOLLES CLOSES HIS FINAL ESSAY WITH THOUGHTS ON MORTALITY. Bolles ended his first volume on a similar note, though here, it is rendered more potently, as if Bolles is endeavoring through images and analogues of nature to convince himself that there is existence beyond the grave. There is tragic irony to his musings here:

…years are very real to us who can count so few of them before we reach that wide ocean towards which our stream flows. The flower has a day in its year, the gnat an hour. What a mighty harvest death has reaped since year began; yet no one expects any shrinkage in the current of life in the next year. The world’s rhythm will be just as strong, just as even, just as full of joy to those who will accept joy as the birds accept it. What, then, is death if it cannot diminish the sum total of creation’s forces? Is it more than a transfer of energy from one point to another? When the flower dies we can see and measure the transfer; when a man dies we who live cannot see it at all, but we can measure the poor shell which is left to us and feel sure, terribly sure at first, joyously sure in time, that all which was there in life is not still there; that something has been transferred where we can neither see nor measure it.

I WILL CLOSE ON A BRIGHTER NOTE, WITH THE FOURTH AND FINAL PASSAGE THAT CAPTURED MY ATTENTION AS I READ THIS BOOK. I have never seen Frank Bolles quoted anywhere — I hadn’t even heard of him before embarking on this blog. Meanwhile there are millions of Thoreau quotes written everywhere — there are even books filled with Thoreau’s quotes on different subjects (I have one on Education). But if I were to happen upon a Frank Bolles quote someday, I suspect it might be this one:

If we are in tune with nature, all her music can find a way into the heart and satisfy something there which yearns for it, and never can be wholly happy without it.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE COPY OF THE BOOK I READ. I managed to obtain a book whose cover appears practically new — vibrant blue cloth not at all faded, no writing inside — not even a bookplate or owner’s name anywhere. The volume was published in 1896, and is indicated as a Third Edition. I am gratified to know that, for at least a few years, Bolles’ work had some degree of popularity. From other copies I have seen for sale online, I suspect that my edition was also the last.

Travelling Through an Extensive Morass: “A Year Among the Trees” by Wilson Flagg, 1881

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Jun 252020

WHEN THOMAS WILSON FLAGG DROPPED HIS FIRST NAME EARLY IN HIS WRITING CAREER, IT WAS HIS FIRST AND LAST ACT AS EDITOR. What would follow, over the course of a lengthy and prolific writing career, would be dozens and dozens of highly detailed accounts of nature — birds, trees, the functions of a forest. What they nearly all share is a writing style that one admiring reader called “whimsical” but I would classify instead as soporific. I will allow the modern-day reader to judge from this supposedly “whimsical” passage:

Evening calls [the botanist] out from his retreat, to pursue another varied journey among the fairy realms of vegetation, and ere she parts with him curtains the heavens with splendor and prompts her choir of sylvan warblers to salute him with their vespers.

Another example, the inspiration for the title of this post:

The White Cedar constitutes with the southern cypress the principal timber of the Great Dismal Swamp, and is the last tree, except the red maple, which is discovered when travelling through an extensive morass.

FLAGG IS NOTABLE TODAY CHIEFLY FOR BEING A CONTEMPORARY OF HENRY THOREAU, RECOGNIZING THOREAU, GEORGE PERKINS MARSH, AND JOHN BURROUGHS AS SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. Alas, he and Thoreau never met (nor did he meet the the other two, from what I have found). However, in an 1857 letter to Daniel Rickerson, Thoreau voiced his opinion of Flagg’s work in no uncertain terms; after reading 300 pages of Flagg’s writing, I honestly confess that I agree with Thoreau on this one:

Your Wilson Flagg seems a serious person, and it is encouraging to recognize a contemporary who recognizes nature so squarely…. But he is not alert enough. He wants stirring up with a pole…. His style, as I remember, is singularly vague (I refer to the book) and before I got to the end of the sentences I was off the track.

TO BE FAIR TO FLAGG, THE BOOK I READ PUTS HIM AT A CONSIDERABLE DISADVANTAGE FOR WINNING OVER THE READER. During his lifetime, he produced dozens of essays, and all of his books are essay compilations. One of them followed the year round, making use of an organizational structure that was commonly employed from the 1840s through the 1940s, and is still encountered in some modern-day nature writing. The one I read — the only volume I could afford, I might add, due (I expect) to the relative scarcity of the other tiles — was “A Year Among the Trees”. It consists of a subset of essays, taken from a larger work, “The Woods and Byways of New England”. The common theme in this work is trees and shrubs. Unfortunately, most of the essays highlight particular tree and shrub species, giving them a rather field-guidish treatment but often without illustrations and without scientific names in the text (though they are included in the table of contents). Flag tends to focus his account on aesthetic considerations, highlighting the degree to which a tree form is picturesque or not, and the extent to which the tree is more or less attractive than its English counterpart (when there is one). Combine that with wandering sentences generally long on Latinate words, and the result is a sort of mind-numbing tedium, a morass of tree limbs, leaf forms, and flowery words.

THERE IS ANOTHER KIND OF ESSAY IN THIS BOOK, TOO; IT INCLUDES SOME OF HIS FINEST WORK AND ALSO SOME OF HIS MOST PECULIAR IDEAS. In a series of essays scattered throughout the book (with no clear order to them), Flagg explores the nature and functions of forests. The volume opens with an essay on The Primitive Forest in which Flagg proposes that, prior to European settlement, most of North America east of “The Great American Desert” (as the Great Plains was called at the time) was densely covered with forest. Subsequent clearing of the trees has led to regional warming, for reasons explained here:

The American climate is now in that transitional state which has been caused by opening the space to the winds from all quarters by operations which have not yet been carried to their extreme limit. These changes of the surface have probably increased the mean annual temperature of the whole country by permitting the direct rays of the sun to act upon a wider area….

WHILE HIS CLIMATOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS FELL WIDE OF THE MARK, HIS CONCERNS ABOUT THE LOGGING OF STEEP SLOPES REMAIN SCIENTIFICALLY VALID. As in his thoughts about the influence of forest cover on climate, it is not clear the extent to which Flagg’s ideas are original; in this case, for instance, he may owe a debt to George Perkins Marsh (who he mentions in another essay in the book). In his essay Relations of Trees to Water, Flagg explains,

If each owner of land would keep all his hills and declivities, and all slopes that contain only a thin deposit of soil or a quarry, covered with forest, he would lessen his local inundations from vernal thaws and summer rains. Such a covering of wood tends to equalize the moisture that is distributed over the land, causing it, when showered upon the hills, to be retained by the mechanical action of the trees and their undergrowth of shrubs and herbaceous plants, and by the spongy surface of the soil underneath them, made porous by mosses, decayed leaves, and other debris, so that the plains and valleys have a moderate oozing supply of moisture for a long time after every shower. Without this covering, the water when precipitated upon the slopes, would immediately rush down over an unprotected surface in torrents upon the space below.

AS AN AMATEUR GEOMORPHOLOGIST, FLAGG IS QUITE NOTEWORTHY. Indeed, his musings remind me of some of Thoreau’s own unpublished research and observations on the effects of dams on stream flow. Like Thoreau, Flagg looked closely and thought deeply about natural processes in his native Massachusetts. Also like Thoreau, he calls for the establishment of parks to protect the remaining New England forests. First, here is Thoreau, from the last pages of his manuscript “Wild Fruits” as edited by Bradley Dean:

I think that each town should have a park, or rather primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres…where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses — a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.

And here is Wilson Flagg’s proposal, from his essay The Dark Plains; though not quite as plainly spoken, he echoes Thoreau’s general sentiment well:

Some spacious wood ought to remain, in every region, in which the wild animals would be protected, and we might view the grounds as they appeared when the wild Indian was lord of this continent.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK ITSELF. This time, the closest I could come to an original volume by the author was an edition of Flagg from 1889, eight years after the original edition, and five years after Flagg’s death. Apart from the gilt cover with pine branch and cones, the book is fairly nondescript. The work includes three photo illustrations, including the roadside elm above. It also includes a number of line drawings of the parts of various trees and shrubs. Affixed to the inside of the front cover is a book label, indicating this book was once part of the Private Library of Walter S. Athearn. Here my tale potentially gets more interesting. Out of curiosity, I did a Google search of the name, and this biography turned up. Dr. Walter Scott Athearn lived from 1872 until 1934, and was a pioneering religious educator. While much of his life was spent in Iowa, he did move east in 1916 to serve for 13 years as a Graduate School Dean at Boston University. Could he have purchased the title in some used bookshop upon his arrival, perhaps with an eye toward learning more about the trees and forests of his new home state? Or could the person who owned my book just happened to have had the same name? I could not locate any obituaries online for a different Walter S. Athearn, but I doubt I will ever know for certain. Meanwhile, his photo brings a fitting closure to this post.

Keeping a Sharp Lookout: “A Year in the Fields” by John Burroughs, 1901

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Jun 192020

…the student and lover of nature has this advantage over people who gad up and down the world, seeking some novelty and excitement; he has only to stay at home and see the procession pass. The great globe swings round to him like a revolving showcase; the change of seasons is like the passage of strange and new countries; the zones of the earth, with all their beauties and marvels, pass one’s door and linger long in the passing…. I sit here among the junipers of the Hudson, with purpose every year to go to Florida, or to the West Indies, or to the Pacific coast, yet the seasons pass and I am still loitering, with a half-defined suspicion, perhaps, that, if I remain quiet and keep a sharp lookout, these countries will come to me.

AFTER THREE QUITE OBSCURE NATURE WRITERS, I THOUGHT IT WAS TIME TO VISIT FAMILIAR GROUND, SO I PULLED MY VOLUME OF BURROUGHS DOWN FROM THE SHELF. Granted, many casual natural history readers forget “the other John”, recalling from this time period only John Muir (who, like Burroughs, sported a white beard and spoke exultantly of nature’s marvels). The two, though, are remarkably different. John Muir was a mountain prophet, speaking in tones of religious rapture about his beloved Sierra Nevada fastnesses. John Burroughs, on the other hand, grew up and lived out his days in the Catskills of New York State, keeping close to the Hudson River. Muir walked long distances alone in the mountains and climbed a redwood in a thunderstorm just to feel it rocking in the wind; Burroughs, meanwhile, remarked self-deprecatingly about his own efforts to venture into the wilds. After a particularly difficult short camping trip with a few companions, he observed that “On this excursion…I was taught how poor an Indian I should make, and what a ridiculous figure a party of men may cut in the woods when the way is uncertain and the mountains high.” It must be added that the highest point in the Catskill “Mountains” is Slide Mountain, at 4189 feet; the highest point in the Sierras, Mount Whitney, is 14,505 feet.

JOHN BURROUGHS’ PROSE WANDERS COMFORTABLY THROUGH THAT LIMINAL RURAL SPACE BETWEEN CIVILIZATION AND THE WILD. I would classify him as a ruderal writer, using a term most commonly applied to plants that are the first to colonize ground disturbed by human action, such as an abandoned field. Cattle roam across many a page, and he frequently writes of fields and weeds. My particular copy of this book, the second edition from 1901, features about 50 photographs (all black and white, of course) of John Burroughs in the landscape and at home. Most of his out-of-door images show predominantly open farmland dotted with occasional trees. In these familiar haunts, Burroughs encountered, and wrote about, numerous birds, trees, and forbs (flowering ground plants), occasionally drifting into comments about his other “neighbors”, from bumblebees to black bears. In all of his walks, his enduring goal, I think, was to realize himself as more deeply a part of his home landscape, and to more fully understand not only nature, but himself as part of it:

One’s on landscape comes in time to be be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mor those hills, and he suffers…. Man can have but one interest in nature, namely, to see himself reflected or interpreted there; and we quickly neglect both poet and philosopher who fail to satisfy, in some measure, this feeling.

FOR BURROUGHS, KEEPING A SHARP LOOKOUT INVOLVED ALL THE SENSES, NOT JUST THE KEEN EYE. In his essays in this volume (collected from his previous works), Burroughs wrote with equal enthusiasm about the scents and sounds of the fields and woodlands near his home. For instance, writing about early April, he enthusiastically remarked:

Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and indescribable odors — the perfume of the bursting sod, of the quickened roots and rootlets, of the mould under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No other month has odors like it. The west wind the other day came fraught with a perfume that was to the sense of smell what a wild and delicate strain of music is to the ear. It was almost transcendental.

Speaking of “music to the ear”, here Burroughs describes the sounds of tiny frogs (species not identified) “piping in the marshes” in late April:

…toward the last of the month, there is a shrill musical uproar, as the sun is setting, in every marsh and bog in the land. It is a plaintive sound, and I have heard people from the city speak of it as lonesome and depressing, but to the lover of the country it is a pure spring melody.

BURROUGHS ALSO CELEBRATES SEASONAL CHANGE, AND HOW IT REFLECTED THE NATURE’S INNATE VITALITY. “Does not the human frame yield to and sympathize with the seasons?” he asked the reader, in his essay “Autumn Tides”. Underlying it all, no matter how much insight science can offer us, is an abiding mystery: “The only thing inexplicable is the inherent impulse to experiment, the original push, the principle of Life.”

BURROUGHS IS AT HIS MOST PROFOUND, I FEEL, IN HIS MUSINGS ABOUT SCIENCE AND POETRY. In his written work, he moves comfortably between the two worlds, appreciating their kindred natures. As he explains toward the close of his essay, “A Sharp Lookout”,

You may go to the fields and the woods, and gather fruit that is ripe for the palate without any aid of yours, but you cannot do this in science and in art. Here truth must be disentangled and interpreted — must be made in the image of man. Hence all good observation is more or less a refining and transmuting process, and the secret is to know the crude material when you see it…. Before a fact can become poetry, it must pass through the heart or the imagination of the poet; before it can become science, it must pass through the understanding of the scientist.

THE PACE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE DURING HIS LIFETIME WAS QUITE DRAMATIC. He was already in his late 20s when the Civil War broke out, but by the last decade of his life he gleefully roamed the countryside in a Model T automobile given to him by Henry Ford. His long life (he died just short of his 84th birthday) spanned America’s transition from a largely agrarian society to a rapidly industrializing one. Yet he maintained a confidence in what science and technology have to offer. I wonder if he would still maintain this outlook if he were alive today?

Science does not mar nature. The railroad, Thoreau found, after all, to be about the wildest road he knew of, and the telegraph wires the best aeolian harp out of doors. Study of nature deepens the mystery and charm because it removes the horizon farther off. We cease to fear, perhaps, but how can one cease to marvel and to love?

BEFORE CLOSING THIS ESSAY, I CANNOT RESIST COMPARING HIS WRITING STYLE WITH THAT OF HIS CONTEMPORARY, EDITH THOMAS. Both of them, it turns out, wrote about gossamer — the slender threads of spider silk festooning the landscape in the autumntime. Thomas actually devoted an entire essay to it, and provides a more detailed picture of the phenomenon than Burroughs does. Here is an excerpt:

During this season [of gossamer summer], …miles and miles of hazy filament (if it could be measured linearly) are floating about in the soft, indolent air. Especially, late in the afternoon, with a level and glowing sun, do these mysterious threads flash out along the ground, horizontally between shrubs, slantwise from grass to tree, or else cut adrift, and sailing as the wind wills…. It takes nothing from the poetry that lies in the weft of the gossamer when it is known to be the work of an unconsidered spider…. By some, it is claimed that this floating web is not spread with predaceous intent, but rather as a means of aerial navigation; indeed, these vague and indeterminate threads would hardly disturb a gnats’ cotillion, if blown in their path. Hitherto, we have regarded the spider as an humble, plodding creature of the earth, an unaspiring, stay-at-home citizen, but this new aeronautic hypothesis hints that the poor insect is a very transcendentalist, an ideal voyager…. Some naturalists assert that the gossamer spider instinctively takes advantage of the levity of the atmosphere, thrusting out its threads until they reach a current of warmer and rarer air, which draws them upward, the spider going along with the uncompleted web. Whether it is capable of cutting short its journey and casting anchor at pleasure is indeed questionable.

And here is gossamer again, this time described by Burroughs:

A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be seen of a clear afternoon late in the season. Looking athwart the fields under the sinking sun, the ground appears covered with a shining veil of gossamer. A fairy net, invisible at midday and which the position of the sun now reveals, rests upon the stubble and the spears of grass covering acres in extent — the work of innumerable little spiders. The cattle walk through it, but do not seem to break it. Perhaps a fly would make his mark upon it. At the same time, stretching from the tops of the trees, or from the top of a stake in the fence, and leading off toward the sky, may be seen the cables of the flying spider, — a fairy bridge from the visible to the invisible. Occasionally seen against a deep mass of shadow, and perhaps enlarged by clinging particles of dust, they show quite plainly and sag down like a stretched rope, or sway and undulate like a hawser in the tide.

(A hawser is a thick rope for mooring or towing a ship.)

AS A POSTSCRIPT, I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WHAT I CAN ABOUT MY PARTICULAR VOLUME OF BURROUGHS. I was able to obtain an original second edition from 1901 (augmented by a biographical sketch of Burroughs and the some further photos by Clifton Johnson). It has a lovely gold gilt cover, and includes dozens of photographs of Burroughs, posing on rocks, standing in the doorway of his study, pointing out tracks in the snow with his walking stick, etc. My copy bears almost no marks of its 119-year journey to me, with the notable exception of a normally blank back page filled with text in ink. It is a poem (not inspiring particularly, but a step up from Bradford Torrey’s), entitled “The Lure o’ the Woodland”, attributed to Thomas S. Jones, Jr. Thanks to the marvel of the Internet, I was able to discover that the work originally appeared in Ainslee’s magazine in November, 1907. Unfortunately, every year of the magazine is available online except for 1907. So this transcription of the poem, semi-legible though it is, may be the only copy left in existence. Of the copy-writer, all I know is that his or her initials were JWD, and that he or she was in Jacksonville, Florida on March 19, 1911.

Sweetgum Conversations

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Jun 082014

On my Sunday morning walk along Piney Woods Church Road, I kept noticing evidence of sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua). Perhaps that was partly because it is so abundant. Along with loblolly pines, sweetgums are the dominant trees in the the second, third, and fourth growth woodlands and woodlots of the Georgia Piedmont. Not only do they grow everywhere from seed, but they also sprout from the roots of other trees, making lines of tiny saplings in my lawn. Meanwhile, the deer that browse most undergrowth to brown nubs ignore the sweetgums altogether.

And they can be beautiful — particularly their five-pointed, star-shaped leaves. Here are three photographs from my walk, fragments of an ongoing conversation between myself and the Piney Woods Church Road landscape.

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Living Monuments for Memorial Day (Sunday at the Archives #22)

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May 252014

As Memorial Day approaches yet again, the naturalist’s thought turns to how we memorialize those our nation has lost in wars. We construct monuments of granite and marble, polished stone faces with lettering that has come to signify, in our culture, the tragic reality of death, of loss. Perhaps on Memorial Day we might visit a memorial, brush our fingertips against the cold stone letters, and touch, for a moment, our own inevitable mortality. Perhaps even while standing beneath an appropriately leaden sky, we weep for the enormity of our losses along the path to maintain the freedom we first fought for over two hundred years ago. And while we weep, the chainsaws growl, and another tree falls in a stand of forest that stood untouched for the past fifty years or more. Bulldozers scrape their way across the land, and the forest is forgotten.

There is another way.

There is a way to honor our fallen and also to protect and cherish the living forests all around us. It is a model whose roots go back at least to ancient Greece, and probably further. The Greeks (and many other civilizations) maintained sacred groves, patches of forest where they could approach the great Mystery through ritual. The forest was a place for spiritual connection — an awareness not lost on Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, who had a vision of God and Jesus while praying in a ten-acre beech grove on his family farm in 1820. As a result of this vision, that patch of forest is now cared for and protected. As Donald Enders writes in an article at www.LDS.org, “The Sacred Grove is one of the last surviving tracts of primeval forest in western New York state….. The Church has for some years been directing a program to safeguard and extend the life of this beautiful woodland that is sacred to Latter-day Saints.” Along the streets of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and many other towns and cities across the United States, trees have been planted to honor the deceased. Beside the trees, small stone plaques bear a name, a few words of remembrance, and birth and death dates. Within this tradition, the idea of honoring the dead through caring for the living still remains. The next step back to the grove would be to recognize healthy, mature forests as being fitting sacred sites.
Through dedication ceremonies and markers in the forest, they can become places to acknowledge our losses while celebrating life’s continuance, in leaves of an oak and flowers of a tulip poplar. It is this very idea that Joan Maloof proposes in Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest.

On the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she lives, a tract of mature forest was obtained by her county for conversion into a public park. For many residents and county officials, such a park meant ball fields, parking areas, and open spaces — not necessarily a forest. And then September 11th happened. In her grief, inspired by a talk on Buddhist approaches to nature, she decided to turn the forest grove into a memorial for the victims. With red yarn, she hung name tags of the fallen on trees, creating the September 11 Memorial Forest. The act at once established a sacred space for grieving, and protected the trees from being cut. Imagine another Memorial Day in Georgia, years from now. Families gather together, fill their picnic baskets, and wander off into the forest. They come at last to a sturdy beech, or sweet gum,
or sycamore, growing along the banks of a stream. At its base, a small stone bears the name of a brother, a husband, a son. Against a backdrop of birdsong and flowing water, they share memories of the love he had given, and tears, too, for the loss they have endured without him. All
around, they are consoled by the living presence of nature, in a forest forever protected as a memorial grove.

May 27, 2010

And while we weep, the chainsaws growl, and another tree falls in a stand of forest that stood untouched for the past fifty years or more. Bulldozers scrape their way across the land, and the forest is forgotten.

There is another way.

Along the streets of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and many other towns and cities across the United States, trees have been planted to honor the deceased. Beside the trees, small stone plaques bear a name, a few words of remembrance, and birth and death dates. Within this tradition, the idea of honoring the dead through caring for the living still remains. The next step back to the grove would be to recognize healthy, mature forests as being fitting sacred sites. Through dedication ceremonies and markers in the forest, they can become places to acknowledge our losses while celebrating life’s continuance, in leaves of an oak and flowers of a tulip poplar.

It is this very idea that Joan Maloof proposes in Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she lives, a tract of mature forest was obtained by her county for conversion into a public park. For many residents and county officials, such a park meant ball fields, parking areas, and open spaces — not necessarily a forest. And then September 11th happened. In her grief, inspired by a talk on Buddhist approaches to nature, she decided to turn the forest grove into a memorial for the victims. With red yarn, she hung name tags of the fallen on trees, creating the September 11 Memorial Forest. The act at once established a sacred space for grieving, and protected the trees from being cut.

Imagine another Memorial Day in Georgia, years from now. Families gather together, fill their picnic baskets, and wander off into the forest. They come at last to a sturdy beech, or sweet gum, or sycamore, growing along the banks of a stream. At its base, a small stone bears the name of a brother, a husband, a son. Against a backdrop of birdsong and flowing water, they share memories of the love he had given, and tears, too, for the loss they have endured without him. All around, they are consoled by the living presence of nature, in a forest forever protected as a memorial grove.

Privet Blooming

Backyard Nature, Landscape History, Sense of Place No Responses »

Apr 192014

At last, after numerous attempts and almost as an afterthought, I managed to capture a privet blossom today along Piney Woods Church Road. The flowers are simple yet almost elegant. Like wisteria, I think they are more attractive solitary than in the clusters where they are typically found (in the case of privet, perhaps four or five blooms all crammed together on a stem). Perhaps that is because both plants are so highly invasive. All the privet flowers (happily visited by buzzing bumblebees on sunny days) will become privet seeds, and privet’s conquest of the Georgia Piedmont will continue.

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