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.

The Secrets of Field and Wood: “Field-Farings: A Vagrant Chronicle of Earth and Sky” by Martha McCulloch-Williams (1892)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Jul 252022
 

I do not know quite what to make of this book, its rather pretentious title, or its somewhat enigmatic author. I am not even clear that it qualifies as a “nature book”, though it is rich in bucolic scenes of flowering plants and singing birds. I suppose I will share what I know, and let readers figure out the rest on their own.

What is known about the author is that Martha McCulloch-Williams was born near Clarksville, northwest Tennessee, in approximately 1857. Daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, she grew up in luxury, being taught by an older sister instead of attending school. After the Civil War, her family lost much of their wealth. When her already elder parents both died in the mid-1880s, a distant cousin (Thomas McCulloch-Williams) arrived on the scene to help run the farm. Martha’s three sisters soon thereafter decided to sell out instead. Martha, an aspiring writer, moved with Thomas (whom she never actually married) to New York City. In 1882, she published Field-Farings, her first book. It was followed soon thereafter by many works of fiction, including over two hundred short stories. Later, she would gain renown for her domestic works, including a cookbook and household handbook. Eventually, Thomas and all three of her sisters died, then fire swept through her Manhattan apartment, leaving her destitute. She died in a New Jersey nursing home in 1934.

This book, then, is an orphan — her only foray into something akin to nature writing. Its closest relatives, from what I have read thus far, would be Prose Pastorals by Herbert Sylvester (published five years earlier) and Minstrel Weather by Marion Storm (published 28 years later). The work consists of a seasonal round of poetic vignettes of farm landscapes and life in Tennessee. For the first half of the book, the reader is led by the author through each scene, most of which are devoid of other human presences. The language is poetic and sentence structures are sometimes fluid, sometimes awkward, and almost always somewhat difficult to digest. At times, her word choices feel almost like the reimagined Anglo-Saxon of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As the book progresses, scenes of country life (such as haying) replace woodland explorations, and the reader is introduced to a few of the “darkies” who live in the area and presumably are the descendants of former plantation slaves. Always there is a hint of magic, of fairie. At various points, she speaks of elves, gnomes, wood-sprites, and Dyads. It is not that McCulloch-Williams disavows science — rather, she puts science in its place and lets magical thinking have a bit of room, too. Here, she writes about mysterious lights in the swamp, jack o’lanterns as they were known:

Of still, warm nights you may see his fairy lights adance over all the wooded swamp. Now they circle some huge, bent trunk, now leap bounding to the branches for the most part, though, plod slow and fitful, as though they were indeed true lantern rays, guiding the night-traveller by safe ways to his goal. Master Jack is full of treacherous humor. Follow him at your peril. He flies and flies, ever away, to vanish at last over the swamp’s worst pitfall, leaving you fast in the mire.

Wise folk say he has no volition he but flees before the current set up by your motion. We of the wood know better. There is method in Jack’s madness. He knows whereof he does. Science shall not for us resolve him into his original elements turn him to rubbish of gases and spontaneous combustion. Spite his tricksy treachery, he shall stay to light fairies on their revels, scare the hooting owls to silence.

This is not Burroughs, that is certain. Indeed, McCulloch-Williams names no antecedent writers; her only clear inspiration is her childhood on the plantation. Nature, in her eyes, is not some remote wilderness; it is part of the domestic world of her youth. Nature and humans coexist in this landscape — or at least, they do after the original forest was cleared:

Trees give room only through steel and fire. The felling is not a tenth part of the battle. Have you ever thought what it means to wrest an empire from the wilderness ? Do but look at those four sturdy fellows, racing, as for life, to the great yellow poplar’s heart. Four feet through, if one — sap and heart ateem with new blood, just begun to stir in this February sun — it is a field as fair, as strenuous, as any whereon athletes ever won a triumph of mighty muscle.

Once the plow arrives on the scene, so, too, does a host of birdlife. In this vignette, plowing the land not only yields future crops for the landowner but also an immediate gift to the birds:

In flocks, in clouds almost, they settle in each new furrow, a scant length behind the plough, hopping, fluttering, chirping, pecking eagerly at all the luckless creeping things whose deep lairs have suffered earthquake. A motley crowd indeed! Here be crow and blackbird, thrush and robin, song-sparrow, bluebird, bee-martin, and wren. How they peep and chirp, looking in supercilious scorn one at the other, making short flights over each other’s backs to settle with hovering motion nearer, ever nearer, the plough. Who shall say theirs is not the thrift, the wisdom, of experience. How else should they know thus to snatch dainty morsels breakfast, truly, on the fat of the land, for only the trouble of picking it up ? All day they follow, follow. It is the idle time now, when they are not under pressure of nest-making. Though mating is past, yet many a pretty courtship goes on in the furrow. Birds are no more constant, nor beyond temptation, than are we, the unfeathered of bipeds.

And so the vignettes rush by (or drag, depending upon my own reading mood at the time), from winter into spring, to summer, autumn, and back again, ending the round at Christmastime. The result is a sort of literary Currier and Ives calendar, with scenes a bit like the image below, but without the grand plantation home (no buildings other than cabins are mentioned in this book) and with the Mississippi River replaced with the Cumberland.

By Currier and Ives – Digital scan of a reprint of an original chromolithograph., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7530803

The problem with vignettes is that nothing actually happens. The height of drama in the book is a chapter toward the end in which a nighttime hunting party trees some opossums and raccoons. There are no fond memories here, not even tales of sauntering through the woods and some of the discoveries made along the way. As a volume on the edge of the nature genre, it acquaints the reader with Tennessee phenology but tells very little about the actual landscape and names no geographical locations. As sense-of-place literature, it largely fails. If I did not know where the writer grew up, I would not know where the book is set. Only the presence of “darkies” reminds the reader that it is a long way from New England.

Finally, about my copy of this book: it appears to be the first edition (though I doubt it had a second) and is in remarkably good condition, apart from the very tanned pages. After a series of books with uncut pages, I was surprised to see that this one had probably been read before. I do not know who owned it, but I do know who gave it as a gift: Dr. Dowdell Wilson, Christmas 1896. And I think I found her — yes, her: Dr. Maria Louise Dowdell Wilson, a physician in Troy, New York: alumnus of Boston University School of Medicine (1877) and second wife of Hiram Austin Wilson (1887). She passed away in October 1902.

The Impersonal and Endless Beauty of the World: “Minstrel Weather” by Marion Storm (1920)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Jun 282022
 

I have read over fifty nature books for this blog thus far, with every expectation of at least that number before this project’s close (or, at least, transition into possible presentations and even a book — stay tuned!). I have gotten this far without once feeling befuddled about how to describe and interpret a book. This time, though, I have had to look to outside guidance, in the form of the words of Christopher Morley. He published a collection of Modern Essays in 121, including a chapter from this book in his anthology. He prefaced it with the following:

Marion Storm was born in Stormville, N.Y., and educated at Penn Hall, Chambersburg, Pa., and at Smith College. She did editorial and free-lance work in New York after graduation, and later went to Washington to become private secretary to the Argentine Ambassador. Since 1918 she has been connected with the New York Evening Post.

This essay comes from Minstrel Weather, a series of open-air vignettes which circle the zodiac with the attentive eye of a naturalist and the enchanted ardor of the poet.

Here I recall other nature writers I have read, who defined the art of a nature essay as combining science and poetry. For most authors thus far, the two have been fairly distinguishable: a few paragraphs of description interspersed with a few lines of poetry. But here, the two are fused together, and the reader is left with a whirlwind of carefully crafted images, spinning, flowing, changing from one into another, following the progression of the seasons back to the beginning. Consider this passage, from “Hay Harvest Time”, for June:

Into the whispering twilight of June come many creatures to play strange games and sing such songs as even the many-stringed orchestra of the sunlit hayfield does not know. The swooping bat darts from thick-hung woodbine and noiselessly crosses the garden, brushes the hollyhocks, and speeds toward the moon. Moths, white and pallid green, wander like spirits among the peonies. Sometimes the humming bird shakes the trumpet vine in the dark, queerly restless, though he is Apollo’s acolyte. The fireflies are lambently awing. The cricket’s pleading, interrupted song is half silenced by the steady, hot throb of the locust’s. The tree toad’s eerie note comes faint and sweet, but from what cranny of the bark only he knows. The mother bird, guardian even in sleep, speaks drowsily to her children. From the brooding timber the owl sends his call of despair across acres of friendly fields placid in the dew. Then enchantment deepens, fr there comes o pause in darkness for the joy of earth.

And there is no pause to the flow of events — each one a single jewel on a bracelet or bead on a rosary. Each sentence conjures another facet of nature’s magnificent abundance. The result is almost overwhelming. Through it all, Storm demonstrates a keen awareness of nature (particularly plants) blended with a bit of fancy — a “touch of fairie”. I could pick up the book at random and quote another passage of wonder, delight, and even a touch of humor. For instance, consider this listing of apple varieties (now mostly lost):

Down in the valley, through the woodsmoke haze. move the slow apple wagons through the lanes. This is appleland. Northern Spy and Lemon Pippin are ripe to cracking; Baldwins will be mellow by Twelfth-Night, the russet at Easter. Gorgeous and ephemeral hangs the Maiden’s Blush. The strawbery apples are like embers on the little trees, rubies of the orchard. Lady Sweets and Dominies are respectfully being urged into the cellar, and for those who will pay to learn the falseness of this world’s shows the freight cars are receiving Ben Davises. Sheep-noses, left often on the boughs, will hold cold nectar after the black frosts have killed the last marigold. They lie, dull red, by the orchard fence in the early snow, their blunt expression revealing no secrets. You have to know about them. Nothing is more inscrutable than a sheep-nose.

For the most part, her scenes are bucolic, the human participants mostly country folk who appear to be largely in harmony with nature. Norman Rockwell would be at home in Storm’s domain. Only once late in the book (after the year’s round is done), in “The Play of Leaves,” does Storm speak somewhat ill of humanity. In this case, her complaint is in regard to exotic (perhaps even invasive) species (fungal blights and the like) and their ecological impacts:

[Little leaves] are as playful as kittens, with their dances, poses, flutters, their delicate bursts of glee. Unless involved with flowers, or with timber or real estate, they are safe, not alone in winer babyhood, but throughout spring and summer, that minister to them with baths of dew and rain and with the somnolent wine of the sun. Only when old age has brought weariness and winds and heat, and even with the drawing of the sap, are they confronted by their enemy, frost. You will say, caterpillars, forest fires, but they are the fault of man and an unanticipated flaw in nature’s plan for letting the leaves off easily. We brought foreign trees that had their own mysterious protection at home into lands where that immunity vanished, and so the chestnut has left us, and apple and rose are threatened by foes whom their mother had not forseen. Were it not for man’s mistakes the leaves would have had an outrageously gay time with comparison to the darkling lives of the creatures that move among them and beneath them.

Even here, the suggestion is that we make “mistakes”, not that we are willfully destructive to the environment.

Minstrel Weather was Marion Storm’s first book. It would be another eleven years before she would publish again. By then, she had moved to Mexico, where she would write several additional books on Mexican culture and natural history. She would never return to the US, passing away in Guadalajara in 1975. Her obituary mentioned several of her books set in Mexico, but not this one.

As for my copy, a tiny book stamp in the back indicates that it was sold at the Neighborhood Book Shop, 435 Park Avenue [New York]. Someone must have purchased the book and taken it home. But given the numerous uncut pages, it is clear that I was the first to read it cover to cover.

Whole Earth’s a Sanctuary: “The Song of the Cardinal” by Gene Stratton Porter (1903)

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Jun 032022
 

Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924) was 40 when The Song of the Cardinal was published. Her first book, it was the start of a long lineage of works, primarily fiction, extolling the wonders of the natural world. Though it tells a story (in a manner of speaking), along the way, The Song of the Cardinal offers a rich tapestry of Edenic landscapes, including both an orange grove in Florida and Limberlost Swamp and a farm along the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana. The 1912 edition that I read (a copy of which is housed in the collections of The Met in NYC) is graced by a truly magnificent art nouveau cover attributed to Margaret Armstrong. Armstrong (1867-1944) was one of the premier artists of the golden age of book design. A year after this book was published, Armstrong left the cover design field to write her own books: first an illustrated wildflower guide for the Western US, then biographies and mystery novels.

Most of the book is told from the viewpoint of a male Cardinal, as he returns north for the spring and struggles to attract a mate. Humans briefly appear on the scene — an old man and his daughter in the orange grove — then vanish from the story. Later, the reader meets 60-year-old Abram and his wife Maria, a farming couple growing corn and keeping chickens along the Wabash River in Indiana. From that point forward, the book alternates between their rustic dialogue and the viewpoint of the cardinal. Throughout the book, nature is really the central character. Early on, Porter introduces us to the glories of Limberlost Swamp:

Three thousands of acres of black marsh-much stretch under summers’ sun and winters’ snws. There are darksome pools of murky water, bits of swale and high morass. Giants of the forest reach skyward, or, coated with velvet slime, lie decaying in sun-flecked pools, while the underbrush is almost impenetrable.

The swamp resembles a big dining table for the birds. Wild grape vines clamber to the tops of the highest trees, spreading umbrella-like over the banches, and their festooned floating trailers wave like silken fringe in the play of the wind. The birds loll in the shade, peel bark, gather dried curlers for nest material, and feast on the pungent fruit. They chatter in swarms over the wild-cherry trees, and overload their crops with red haws, wild plums, pawpaws, blackberries and mandrake. The alders around the edge draw flocks in search of berries, and the marsh grasses and weeds are weighted with seed hunters. The muck is alive with worms; and the whole swamp ablaze with flowers, whose colors and perfumes attract myriads of insects and butterflies.

Although the male cardinal in this story fledged there and first returned there after his winter in the south, ultimately he abandons Limberlost for a bucolic farm and woodland along the Wabash River, home of Abram and Maria. “To my mind,” Abram declares to the cardinal (whom he greets as Mr. Redbird), “it’s jest as near Paradise as you’ll strike on earth.”

Old Wabash is a twister for curvin’ and windin’ round, an’ it’s limestone bed half the way, an’ the water’s as pretty an’ clear as in Maria’s springhouse. An’ as for trimmin’, why say, Mr. Redbird, I’ll just leave it t you if she ain’t all trimmed up like a woman’s spring bonnit. Look at that grass a-creepin’ right dwn till it’ a-trailin’ in the water! Did you ever see jest quite such fie frigy willers? An’ you wait a little, an’ the flowerin’ mallows ‘at grows long the shinin’ old river are fine as garden hollyhocks. Maria says ‘at they’d be purtier ‘an hurs if they wer eonly double; but, lord, Mr. Redbird, they are! See ’em once on the bak, an’ agin in the water! An’ back a little an’ there’s jest thickets of pawpaw, an’ thorns, an’ wild grapevines, an’ crab, an’ red an’ black haw, an’ dogwod, an’ sumac, an’ spicebush, an’ trees! Lord! Mr. Redbird, the sycamrs, an’ maples, an’ tulip, an’ ash, an’ elm rees are so bustin’ fine ‘long the old Wabash they put ’em in poetry books an’ sing songs about ’em. What do you think of that? Jest back o’ you a little there’s a sycamore split into five trunks, any one of them a famous big tree, tops up ‘mong the cluds, an’ roots diggin’ under the old river; an’ over a little further ‘s a maple ‘at’s eight big trees in one. Most anything you can name, you can find it ‘long the old Wabash, if you only know where to hunt for it.

To her credit, while Gene Stratton Porter describes her Indiana natural landscapes in Edenic terms, that does not mean that the wolf lies with the lamb and the leopard lays down with the kid. There is predation and death; for instance, a cardinal chick falling into the water is at once snatched up by a mackerel. And the birds, for all their lovely songs, do not all behave in considerate ways toward each other. Indeed, Porter uses a pair of woodpeckers nesting in a sycamore tree to portray domestic abuse, long before that was a topic for everyday conversation:

…the woodpecker had dressed his suit in finest style, and with dulcet tones and melting tenderness had gone a-courting. Sweet as the dove’s had been his wooing…yet scarcely had his plump, amiable little mate consented to his caresses and approved the sycamore, before he turned on her, pecked her severely, and pulled a tuft of plumage from her breast. There was not the least excuse for this tyrranical action; and the sight filled the Cardinal with rage. He fully expected to see Madam Woodpecker divorce herself and flee her new home, and he most earnestly hoped that she would; but she did no such thing. She meekly flattened her feathers, hurried work in a lively manner, and tried in every way to anticipate and avert her mate’s displeasure. Under this treatment he grew more abusive, and now Madam Woodpecker dodged every time she came within his reach.

The woodpecker is one of the exceptions, though. On the whole, the natural world in Porter’s tale tends to be filled largely with flowers and birdsong. The true serpent in this paradise is Man the Hunter. It is he who threatens to disrupt the pastoral tranquility, wantonly killing birds and other wildlife. Abram attempts to protect the cardinal and all the other birds on his farm by posting “No Hunting” signs, explaining that

…them town creatures…call themselves sportsmen, an’ kill a hummi’ bird to see if they can hit it. Time was when trees an’ underbrush were full o’ birds an’ squirrels, any amount o’ rabbits, an’ the fish fairly crowdin’ in the river. I used to kill all the quail an’ wild turkeys about here to make an appetizing change. It was always my plan to take a little an’ leave a little. But just look at it now. Surprise o’ my life if I get a two-pound bass. Wild turkey gobblin’ would scare me out o’ my senses, an’, as for the birds, there are just about a fourth what there used to be, an’ the crops eaten to pay for it.

Here, Abram’s complaints seem hauntingly familiar, as scientists continue to report on the decline of songbirds across the US. Of course, the signs prove insufficient. Abram observes a hunter walking down his lane and confronts him. The hunter claims to be merely passing through, and Abram lets him continue. Before Abram can stop him, the hunter has fired at the cardinal in a sumac tree, fortunately missing him completely. Abram arrives in time to prevent any killing, launching into a several-page impassioned tirade about needing to protect the natural world. I wonder if the entire book, with its minimal narrative, was intended primarily as a vehicle for sentiments such as these:

Sky over your head, earth under foot, trees around you, an’ river there, — all full o’ life ‘at you ain’t no mortal right to touch, ‘cos God made it, an’ it’s His! Course, I know ‘at he said distinct ‘at man was to have “dominion over the beasts o’ the field, an’ the fowls o’ the air.” An’ ‘at means ‘at you’re free to smash a copper-head instead of letting it sting you. Means at’ you better shoot a wolf than to let it carry off your lambs. Means ‘at its right to kill a hawk an’ save your chickens; but God knows ‘at shootin’ a redbird just to see the feathers fly isn’t having dominion over anything; it’s just makin’ a plumb beast o’ yourself.

Alas, Porter’s concern for wildlife included a number of exceptions that would make the modern-day environmentalist cringe. Still, Porter’s central argument stands: humans need to protect other beings, because they have a spiritual origin. Ultimately, caring for God’s creation is more than just a Biblical obligation in Porter’s mind; it is a profoundly religious act. As Abram explains (further along in the same tirade, while the hunter stands mute):

To my mind, ain’t no better way to love an’ worship God, ‘an to protect an’ ‘preciate these fine gifts he’s given for our joy an’ use. Worshippin’ that bird’s a kind o’ religion with me. Getting the beauty from the sky, an’ the trees, ‘an the grass, ‘an the water that God made, is nothin’ but doin’ him homage. Whole earth’s a sanctuary. You can worship from sky above to grass underfoot.

Finally, the hunter, reduced to jelly by the farmer’s words (either their intent, or merely their duration) pleads for forgiveness, abandons his gun to Abram’s keeping, and flees, declaring that “I’ll never kill another harmless thing.” Summer ends, and with the autumn, the cardinal and his brood take flight for the orange grove in Florida, bringing the book full circle.

As a work of literature, Porter’s Song of the Cardinal has faded into fitting obscurity; the story simply doesn’t manage to live up to its cover (at least, not the 1912 art nouveau one). Very little happens in the tale, and what does occur is either highly predictable or rather silly. Yet there is poetry in Porter’s rich descriptions, along with a wealth of firsthand knowledge of the plants and animals of her native state, gleaned from many years of fieldwork in the swamps, fields, and woods around her homes (she had a house on Sylvan Lake in Rome City, and a cabin on the edge of Limberlost Swamp). And the passionate call for better treatment of wildlife, so vital at the time, qualifies her as an early member of the American environmental movement. Her fascination with birds would continue long beyond this book, in her early wildlife photography efforts documented in non-fiction works published later in her life. She also wrote (and illustrated with photos) a guide to the moths of the Limberlost. I have secured copies of these books and will devote posts to them at some point in the future.

As I noted a the beginning of this post, I preferentially sought out the 1912 edition of this book (rather than a 1903 first edition) because of its spectacular cover. The artwork on this spine, though, is a bit, well, odd. Apparently the spine was stamped upside down. So rather than displaying the title with flowers above and below it, the title stands by itself at the top of the spine, with flowers bracketing bare cloth further down. From what I was able to find out online, the remaining copies of this edition appear equally split between the correct stamping of the spine and this alternative (accidental) one.

My book was previously the property of Mary S. Jones of Fairfield, Alabama; her name (printed in blue ink) and a return address sticker are found on the flyleaf. The sticker looks more recent than the actual book. I was unable to locate any information about Mary S. Jones, though the task was made difficult by her rather common last name.

Old-Time Vines: “Travels in a Tree-Top” by Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D., 1894

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Sep 272020
 

How seldom do we see the coral honeysuckle, and how generally the trumpet-creeper has given place to exotic vines of far more striking bloom, but, as will appear, of less utility! If the old-time vines that I have mentioned bore less showy flowers, they had at least the merit of attracting hummingbirds, that so grandly rounded out our complement of summer birds. These feathered fairies are not difficult to see, although so small, and, if so inclined, we can always study them to great advantage. They become quite tame, and in the old-fashioned gardens were always a prominent feature by reason of their numbers. They are not forever on the wing, and when preening their feathers let the sunshine fall upon them, and we have emeralds and rubies that cost nothing, but are none the less valuable because of this. In changing the botanical features of our yard we have had but one thought, gorgeous flowers; but was it wise to give no heed to the loss of birds as a result? I fancy there are many who would turn with delight from formal clusters of unfamiliar shrubs, however showy, to a gooseberry hedge or a lilac thicket with song-sparrows and a cat-bird hidden in its shade. We have been unwise in this too radical change. We have abolished bird-music in our eagerness for color, gaining a little, but losing more. We have paid too dear, not for a whistle, but for its loss. But it is not too late. Carry a little of the home forest to our yards, and birds will follow it.

THERE IS NOTHING REMARKABLE IN THE ABOVE PASSAGE, UNTIL ONE REALIZES THAT IT WAS WRITTEN IN 1894. That places it almost a hundred years ahead of any other writing advocating gardening with native plants that I have ever read. Perhaps this sentiment was commonplace at the time, and then forgotten completely. But I suspect that Abbott was relatively unusual in observing the tendency of native birds to pollinate native flowers, and realize the implications of planting nonnative plants in our yards. Not surprisingly given the fascination with birds at the time, Abbott focuses here on the impact on ruby-throated hummingbirds. I suspect that the insect pollinators — bumblebees, butterflies, and their kin — were so abundant then that it was not necessary to go out of one’s way to make a flower garden a suitable habitat for them. But at least there is the clear connection between our garden choices and benefits (or harm) to local species. It was a start.

ON THE WHOLE, “TRAVELS IN A TREE-TOP” WAS A PLEASANT BUT UNREMARKABLE READ. I enjoyed returning to the upland and meadows of Abbott’s farm, “Three Beeches”, in the tidal Delaware Valley just south of Trenton, New Jersey. Unlike the previous book, this one did not ramble in the geographical sense — nearly all of his essays (mostly brief ones) took place on his property, and the few exceptions were nearby in New Jersey. This time, he included some essays reminiscing about his rural boyhood, and also a few making reference to his archaeological work (both prehistoric and colonial American sites). For instance, in this passage, Abbott writes about the overgrown ruin of a colonial warehouse, almost entirely returned to nature. While he observes the birds and trees of 1894, he also imagines the time when the warehouse was a busy center of colonial commerce:

Up the creek with many a turn and twist, and now on a grassy knoll we land again, where a wonderful spring pours a great volume of sparkling water into the creek…. An obscure backcountry creek now, but less than two centuries ago the scene of busy industry. Perhaps no one is now living who saw the last sail that whitened the landscape. Pages of old ledgers, a bit of diary, and old deeds tell us something of the place; but the grassy knoll itself give no hint of the fact that upon it once stood a warehouse. Yet a busy place it was in early colonial times, and now utterly neglected.

It is difficult to realize how very unsubstantial is much of man’s work. As we sat upon the grassy slope, watching the outgoing tide as it rippled and broke in a long line of sparkling bubbles, I rebuilt, for the moment, the projecting wharf, of which but a single log remains, and had the quaint shallops of pre-Revolutionary time riding at anchor. There were heard, in fact, the cry of a heron and the wild scream of a hawk; but these, in fancy, were the hum of human voices and the tramp of busy feet.

The scattered stones that just peeped above the grass were not chance bowlders rolled from the hill nearby, but door-step and foundation of the one-time warehouse. The days of buying, selling, and getting gain come back, in fancy, and I was more the sturdy colonist than the effeminate descendant. But has the present no merit? We had the summer breeze that came freighted with the odors gathered from the forest and the stream, and there were thrushes rejoicing in our hearing that the hill-sides were again as Nature made them.

His fascination for evidence of the past extended to geology, as well. Here he ponders the ancient landscape evoked by fossilized footprints:

Difficult as fossil footprints may be to decipher, they call up with wonderful distinctiveness the long ago of other geologic ages. It is hard to realize that the stone of which our houses are built once formed the tide-washed shore of a primeval river or the bed of a lake or ocean gone long before man came upon the scene.

I will close this scattered collection of brief scenes with one from the opening essay in the book, conventently entitled Travels in a Tree-top. It seems fitting, after all, to include at least one scene in which the author observed his domain from a treetop on the property. Here, he looks out over the marshland along the shoreline of the Delaware River:

The meadows are such a comprehensive place that no one knows where to begin, if the attempt is made to enumerate their features. There is such a blending of dry land and wet, open and thicket-grown, hedge and brook and scattered trees, that it is bewildering if you do not choose some one point for close inspection. From the tree-top I overlook it all, and try in vain to determine whether the azure strip of flowering iris or the flaunting crimson of the Turk’s cap lilies is the prettier. Beyond, in damper soil, the glistening yellow of the sunflowers is really too bright to be beautiful; but not so where the water is hidden by the huge circular leaves of the lotus. They are majestic as well as pretty, and the sparse bloom, yellow and rosy pink, is even more conspicuous by reason of its background. How well the birds know the wild meadow tracts! They have not forsaken my tree and its surroundings, but for one here I see a dozen there. Mere inky specks, as seen from my point of view, but I know them as marsh-wrens and swamp-sparrows, kingbird and red-wings, that will soon form those enormous flocks that form so marked a feature to the autumn landscape. It needs no field-glass to mark down the passing herons that, coming from the river-shore, take a noontide rest in the overgrown marsh.

MY COPY OF THIS BOOK WAS BOUND IN KELLY GREEN CLOTH, AND GILT WITH THE TITLE IN AN ORNAMENTAL FRAME. The title on the title page was likewise decorated in a manner evocative of a medieval illuminated manuscript; in keeping with the motif, the copyright date on the title page was in Roman numerals: MDCCCXCIV. I might add that the paper the book was printed on is of exceptional quality ( sturdy bond with watermarked parallel lines). Alas, it is without illustrations. On the inside cover is a gift inscription: “Mary dear, from Mother and daddy / Christmas 1934”. I assume the parents obtained the book in a used bookstore. Unfortunately, there is no other writing anywhere in the volume, so I can say little else about its past.

Full Assurance of Spring: “In New England Woods and Fields” by Rowland E. Robinson, 1896

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Jul 022020
 

The lifeless dun of the close-cropped southward slopes and the tawny tangles of the swales are kindling to living green with the blaze of the sun and the moist tinder of the brook’s overflow.

ROWLAND ROBINSON IS NOT AN EASY AUTHOR TO READ. His sentences sometimes run for a dozen lines on the page, nearly every one a dense thicket of adjectives and nouns with scarcely an adverb in sight. He was taken to reflecting, and rhapsodizing, on the campfire; half a dozen of his essays focus on them. (He is quite taken with fire in general, as the quote above demonstrates.) The volume I read is a collection of short essays, written for the magazine Forest and Stream, an early conservation magazine that merged with Field and Stream in 1930. As such, the works are organized, to a rough approximation, across the seasons of the year. But otherwise, the book has no structure or theme beyond encountering nature in the woods and fields of Vermont. And while his text includes a number of passages in his essays on various animals that could be interpreted as the work of an early conservationist, he falls short of advocating for greater regulations on sport hunting. (In Robinson’s defense, George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt are even more famous conservationists who bagged far more game than he did.)

AND YET HIS WRITING SOMETIMES EVOKES SEASONAL MOMENTS OF NATURE IN A VIVID AND BEAUTIFUL WAY. Consider, for instance, that same quote with which I began this essay. Or here is another one, from earlier in the season. Reading it slowly, I am transported there, to see and feel his world of the northern Vermont forest, still gripped by winter but with intimations of springtime, tree trunks decorated by shifting patterns of light and shadow:

The coarse-grained snow is strewn thickly with shards of bark that the trees have sloughed in their long hibernation, with shreds and tatters of their tempest-torn branches. But all this litter does not offend the eye nor look out of place, like that which is scattered in fields and about homesteads. When this three months’ downfall of fragments sinks to the carpet of flattened leaves, it will be at one with it, an inwoven pattern, as comely as the shifting mesh of browner shadows that trunks and branches weave between the splashes of sunshine. Among these is a garnishment of green moss patches and fronds of perennial ferns which tell of life that the stress of winter could not overcome. One may discover, amid the purple lobes of the squirrelcup leaves, downy buds that promise blossoms, and others, callower, but of like promise, under the dusty links of the arbutus chain.

IT IS EASY TO CLASSIFY HIS WRITING AS “FLOWERY” AND DISMISS IT ALTOGETHER. Nowadays, nature writing is not tasked with painting pictures, but instead can accompany them. Robinson was first an artist, and only later in life a writer; surprisingly, this book of nature essays is entirely unillustrated apart from its cover art. Instead, his essays are filled with still-lifes, vivid sentences depicting the landscape and its inhabitants (primarily birds, frogs, and mammals, with a brief nod to a few different plants (like squirrelcup, a.k.a. hepatica, which has cameos in several of the essays). They challenge the frenetic reader of today to slow down and let the words sink in and allow his landscape to appear in the imagination:

At last there is full and complete assurance of spring, in spite of the baldness of the woods, the barrenness of the fields, bleak with sodden furroughs of last year’s ploughing, or pallidly tawny with bleached grass, and untidy with the jetsam of winter storms and the wide strewn litter of farms in months of foddering and wood-hauling.

There is full assurance of spring in such incongruities as a phoebe a-perch on a brown mullein stalk in the midst of grimy snow banks, and therefrom swooping in airy loops of flight upon the flies that buzz across this begrimed remnant of winter’s ermine, and of squirrelcups flaunting bloom and fragrance in the face of an ice cascade, which, with all its glitter gone, hangs in dull whiteness down the ledges, greening the moss with the moisture of its wasting sheet of pearl.

At its best, the result of Robinson’s wordsmithery is a prose poem to the season, fraught with images akin to William Carlos Williams’ poem, Red Wheelbarrow, but far less spartan — more like a scene filled choc-a-bloc with various wheelbarrows, all clamoring for attention at once:

Summer is past its height. The songless bobolink has forsaken the shorn meadow. Grain fields, save the battalioned maize, have fallen from gracefulness and beauty of bending heads and ripple of mimic waves to bristling acres of stubble. From the thriftless borders of ripening weeds, busy flocks of yellowbirds in faded plumage scatter in sudden flight at one’s approach like upblown flurries of dun leaves. Goldenrod gilds the fence corners, asters shine in the dewy borders of the woods, sole survivors of the floral world save the persistent bloom of the wild carrot and succory — flourishing as if there had never been mower or reaper — and the white blossoms of the buckwheat crowning the filling kernels. The fervid days have grown perceptibly shorter, the lengthening nights have a chilly autumnal flavor, and in the cool dusk the katydids call and answer one to another out of their leafy tents, and the delicate green crickets the Yankee folks call August pipers play their monotonous tunes.

VIVID, OR OVERWROUGHT? Rowland walks that line through much of his prose, and my reaction to it depends upon my willingness to absorb his words and enter his world. Either way, though, I can still appreciate him, too, for some of his environmental sentiments. For instance, here he speaks out about the wanton killing of garter snakes, at a time when the killing of animals of any and all kinds was commonplace and often done with little thought of the consequences:

…a moving curved and recurved gleam of gold on black and a flickering flash of red catch your eye and startle you with an involuntary revulsion. With charmed eyes held by this new object, you grope blindly for a stick or stone. But, if you find either, forbear to strike. Do not blot out one token of spring’s awakening nor destroy one life that rejoices in it, even though it be so humble a life as that of a poor garter snake. He is so harmless to man that, were it not for the old, unreasoning antipathy, our hands would not be raised against him; and, if he were not a snake, we should call him beautiful in his stripes of black and gold, and in graceful motion — a motion that charms us in their undulation of waves, in their flickering reflections of sunlight on rushy margins and wooded shores, in the winding of a brook through a meadow, in the flutter of a pennant and the flaunting of a banner, the ripple of wind-swept meadow and grain field, and the sway of leafy boughs.

Robinson continues the scene by imagining that the viewer witnesses the garter snake, newly out of hibernation, catch and swallow a frog. He then suggests that the snake will, in fact, catch and eat many “noxious insect[s] and mice over the course of the year, and thus be of considerable benefit to the farmer. Robinson acknowledges that a garter snake might also feed on some eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, supposedly providing justification for killing the snake. In fact, though, Robinson argues, that is a hypocritical act, because the same person killing the snake probably shoots numerous woodcock and grouse for sport. Robinson closes the scene with these strong and prescient words about the human relationship to nature:

Of all living things, only man disturbs the nicely adjusted balance of nature. The more civilized he becomes, the more mischievous he is. The better he calls himself, the worse he is. For uncounted centuries the bison and the Indian shared a continent, but in two hundred years or so the white man has destroyed the one and spoiled the other.

AT THE SAME TIME, THERE ARE MOMENTS IN HIS WRITING WHEN HE SEEMS WILLING TO EXCUSE SOME OF THE DAMAGE, OR AT LEAST EXPRESSES RESIGNATION TO THE FACT THAT IT IS LIKELY TO CONTINUE. For instance, it is still okay in his book to kill potentially harmful animals, or animals that provide some value to humans. Robinson’s is still an anthropocentric viewpoint, much aligned with the end of the 19th century in America. His essay, A Century of Extermination, bemoans the fate of so many dwindling creatures — bison, passenger pigeons, heath hens. The last two were still living in 1896, though rapidly headed toward extinction. Yet Robinson offers little hope for change, closing the essay with an image of an old man grateful he will not live to see the destruction, and sad when pondering “the poor inheritance of his children.”

By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11310696

AS A POSTSCRIPT, I OFFER THESE REFLECTIONS ON WHAT PHYSICALLY REMAINS OF ROWLAND ROBINSON’S LIFE AND WORK. I will begin with a photograph of Rokeby in Ferrisburg, Vermont, the home for 200 years of the Robinson family, including Rowland Robinson’s father (a radical abolitionist who used his home as a stop on the Underground Railroad) and Rowland himself. Apart from Gene Stratton-Porter (two of whose homes are preserved and open to the public in Indiana) and John Burroughs (whose cabin and final home are both available for viewing New York), Robinson is only the third of the eight authors with at least one home preserved for posterity. (I might add that efforts are also underway to save Chimney Farm, Henry Beston’s home in Maine after leaving the Outermost House.) Sadly, I have yet to visit any of these places; perhaps I will plan a tour once travel becomes both possible and safe again.

MEANWHILE, I HAVE A FIRST EDITION (ONLY EDITION) OF ROBINSON’S BOOK. My copy is in excellent condition, which, on the flip side, means that there is little I can share of its history. Only one page, the opening of his Golden-Winged Woodpecker essay, contains pencil writing. On the margin, almost a poem, are the words, “Flicker / white rump / wings show / yellow in / flight.” It is comforting to know that at least one reader of this book was not content to encounter nature by armchair, but also sought to encounter its wild inhabitants out-of-doors. Dare I call it a flicker of hope?

With Senses Alive to Everything: “Music of the Wild” by Gene Stratton-Porter, 1910

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, Books, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jun 222020
 
Ripening pawpaws: Gene Stratton-Porter, 1910 (left) & the author, 2020 (right)

“Somewhere in the depths of the forest you will meet the Creator. The place is the culmination of His plan for men adown the ages, a material thing proving how His work evolves, His real gift to us remaining in natural form. The fields epitomize man. They lay as he made them. They are artificial. They came into existence by the destruction of the forest and the change of natural conditions. They prove how man utilized the gift God gave to him. But in the forest the Almighty is yet housed in His handiwork and lives in His creation. Therefore step out boldly. You are with the Infinite.

AFTER READING OVER THREE HUNDRED PAGES OF GENE-STRATTON PORTER’S BOOK, “THE MUSIC OF THE WILD”, I AM UNSURE WHERE TO BEGIN; SO I WILL BEGIN WITH THE PAWPAWS. The ripening pawpaws on my backyard tree offer me an immediate and direct connection to her work. The book is laden with her original photos. Taken sometime prior to the book’s publication in 1910, they represent some of the earliest nature photography in America. Only four years earlier, in 1906, National Geographic had published its first photographs of wildlife. Across 110 years, I find a sense of connection and belonging. It is relatively easy for me to find those points of contact through her photography; her text, however, frequently leaves me feeling adrift in a foreign land. For Gene Stratton Porter, everything exists by design of God, and was carefully brought into being in order to meet the human needs. To go into the deep woods is to enter a cathedral in a quite literal sense. Nature brings humans delight fundamentally because nature is the handiwork of a Supreme Being.

THERE ARE OTHER OBSTACLES TO APPRECIATING THIS BOOK. She tends to anthropomorphize most everything, from a calling songbird to a flowing stream. In the case of animal calls, she frequently translates them into everyday human speech with less than inspiring results. For instance, she proposes that a calling heron could be saying “Come my love, this spot is propitious. Share a morning treat with your dearest,” or might intend to mean “Better keep away, old skin and bones; there’s danger around this frog pond.”

AND THEN THERE IS HER RELENTLESS “POETRY”. The lovely black and white photographs, some the result of hours spent atop a ladder in her orchard, are each accompanied by a few lines, usually rhymed. Some innocuous passages are taken from other poets, like Emerson or Whitman. Others are snippets of doggerel she dreamed up, best forgotten as quickly as possible after reading them. For instance, consider this one: “The screech owl screeches when courting, / Because it’s the best he can do. / If you couldn’t court without screeching, / Why, then, I guess you’d screech too.”

FOR THOSE THAT SURVIVE POETRY THAT WOULD PUT A VOGON TO SHAME, AND ENDURE HER INSISTENT CHRISTIANITY, THERE IS MUCH TO BE GAINED FROM SPENDING AN AFTERNOON WITH STRATTON-PORTER. Although not a professional scientist, she carefully observed the workings of nature in and around Limberlost Swamp in northern Indiana. She took photographic sequences documenting breeding birds, from nest-building to the first flights of the young — in some cases, being the first to do so for particular species. As she explained early on in the volume,

Whenever I come across a scientist plying his trade I am always so happy and content to be merely a nature-lover, satisfied with what I can see, hear, and record with my cameras. Such wonders are lost by specializing on one subject to the exclusion of all else. No doubt it is necessary for someone to do this work, but I am so glad it is not my calling. Life has such varying sights and songs for the one who goes afield with senses alive to everything.

THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, STRATTON-PORTER CELEBRATES THE RICH PLANT AND ANIMAL LIFE OF RURAL INDIANA — THE MOTHS, THE BIRDS, THE FROGS, THE BATS. She takes delight in celebrating what others would pass off as mundane. “I sing for dandelions,” she announces proudly. “If we had to import them and they cost us five dollars a plant, all of us would grow them in pots. Because they are the most universal flower of field and wood, few people pause to see how lovely they are.” After essays on the forest and the field, she closes the book with a paean to the life of the swamp and its rich music:

It is the marsh that furnishes the croakings, the chatter, the quackings, the thunder, the cries, and the screams of birdland…. At times we may think that we would be glad not to hear again the most discordant of these musicians, but they are all dear in their places, and were any of them to become extinct, something of its charm would be taken from the damp, dark, weird marsh life that calls us so strongly. We have learned to know and understand them, and they have won our sympathy and our love.

IF STRATTON-PORTER DEPICTS HER LIMBERLOST LANDSCAPES AS AKIN TO PARADISE, THERE IS A SERPENT IN THE GARDEN: HUMANS. Lurking in the passage above is the possibility of extinction, something naturalists were just beginning to come to grips with then. Four years after the book was published, Martha, the last known passenger-pigeon, died. Concerned over what was being lost, Stratton-Porter wrote bitterly of the wanton destruction of waterbirds for the millinery trade, and the trampling and picking of wildflowers by unthinking nature tourists. And already in her day there was abundant evidence of how humans were altering the land — turning forests into agricultural fields and draining the swamps. In my opinion, without a doubt the most perceptive passage in the book is one where she considers, the bigger picture — how humans were even beginning to alter Earth’s hydrologic cycle:

It was Thoreau who, in writing of the destruction of the forests, exclaimed, “Thank Heaven, they can not cut down the clouds!” Aye, but they can! That is a miserable fact, and soon it will become our discomfort and loss. Clouds are beds of vapor arising from damp places and floating in air until they meet other vapor masses, that mingle with them, and the weight becomes so great the whole falls in drops of rain. If men in their greed cut forests that preserve and distil moisture, clear fields, take the shelter of trees from creeks and rivers until they evaporate, and drain the water from swamps so that they can be cleared and cultivated, — they prevent vapor from rising; and if it does not rise it cannot fall. Pity of pities it is; but man can change and is changing the forces of nature.

ALAS, IT WAS A WARNING THAT NO ONE HEEDED. When the first water cycle diagrams appeared two decades later, they depicted an entirely natural process, from which humans were absent. That is still the case in most hydrologic cycle diagrams available today. In a recent Nexus Media article on human impacts on hydrology, Dr. David Hannah from the University of Birmingham remarked that “Nearly a century ago, human impacts were less extensive and less understood. But we have no excuses now not to include people and their various interactions with water in a changing world.”

AS AN AFTERWARD, A FEW REFLECTIONS ON THE COPY THAT I READ. When this first edition copy of “Music of the Wild” first arrived in the mail many weeks ago, I immediately thought back to my penchant as a child for removing book jackets and disposing of them. Here, I really wished the jacket had been retained, as the outside of the book is rather soiled, detracting a bit from the charm of its gilt gold lettering against a green background. Making the spine white was not particularly wise to begin with; it definitely shows its age. In terms of the volume’s history, all I can say is that it once belonged to Jean Kerr, who wrote her name on the top of the first page in flowing pencil. The most notable characteristic of the book is its weight: 2.4 pounds, according to a bathroom scale. Every sturdy page of text is followed by an even thicker page with a photograph on it; there are literally over a hundred photographs included in the volume. What a magnificent “coffee table” tome it must have been, 110 years ago.

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

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
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.

Day 295: Cosmic Strings

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Piney Woods Church Road 365 Project, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Oct 222014
 

On a sunny, blue-sky Wednesday afternoon, I returned to one of my favorite subjects along Piney Woods Church Road — strands of horsehair in a barbed wire fence.  Here, they catch the light (and breeze) to become flowing, cosmic forms.

 

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