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

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Oct 052020
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back of All Nature There Lies a Power: “Under the Open Sky” by S. C. Schmucker, 1910

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Sep 292020
 

So all nature awaits the return of Spring,. Whether it be the crow in his flock, the wasp in her sheltered cranny, the muskrat in its cave by the water, the rich thick sap in the root of the tree, or the stored up life in the bulb, they all await the one far-off divine event. For back of all Nature there lies a Power that has been and is and is to be. What, after all, do we mean by Nature but the sum total of all these manifestations of purpose, of foresight, of helpfulness, of striving for higher and ever higher levels?Why does evolution mean life more abounding , and degeneration mean atrophy and death, if there be not, pervading the universe, a power, a principle, a stimulus, a goal?

And shall we, as did the Hebrew tribes of old, falter to speak the ineffable name? Shall we not rather worship Him humbly as we see His power, thank Him gratefully that we have been permitted to think His thoughts after Him, look up to Him confidently for that we have come to see how He has infused us with Himself, and lovingly call him Father and God?

SO SOON AFTER MY ENCOUNTER WITH THE EXISTENTIAL STRUGGLES OF CHARLES MONTGOMERY SKINNER, IT WAS A BIT OF A SHOCK TO MEET HIS NEAR-POLAR OPPOSITE, SAMUEL CHRISTIAN SKINNER. This chemist, evolutionary biologist, Nature Study advocate, and theologian was Christian in more than middle name. Indeed, arriving at the passage above on the final pages of “Under the Open Sky”, the reader is tempted to conclude that, for Schmucker, getting close to Nature was primarily a vehicle for having a religious experience. While it is tempting to write him off as a Bible-thumper, in fact, Schmucker occupied an odd corner of the Biblical creationism / biological evolutionism controversy of the time. Viewing God as immanent in Nature, Schmucker was quite comfortable with speculating about the evolution of the hummingbird on one page, and then making a reference to the Hebrew Bible on the next one.

ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, HIS RELIGIOUS ZEAL LEFT HIM PRONE TO AN OVERLY ROSY OUTLOOK ON HUMAN PROGRESS AND ITS IMPACTS ON NATURE. In one early passage in this book (which explores nature from the conventional seasonal perspective so popular at the time), Schmucker even declared that “in the newness of the times we are growing back to a touch with nature; a tender, sympathetic, spiritual touch, closer than any of our forebears ever knew.” Perhaps humans had managed nearly to wipe out most of the larger mammals due to overhunting, but ultimately, humans are part of a larger purpose, allied with God in shaping nature. Consider a fruit orchard:

God set the plan for the fruit-trees and we have carried it out. Rarely has man worked better along lines laid down by the Creator. The original trees were doubtless hardier, but that was because they had to take care of themselves. We have relieved them of that necessity, and the new strain has responded to our kindness and rewarded most magnificently man’s skillful endeavor. So it comes that every little country home is glorified at each return of spring by the gorgeous beauty of the blossoming trees,

UGH. I confess it was tough getting through some of this. Schmucker’s natural world is nearly an Eden of human progress and prosperity. Consider the even-tempered tone of this passage, in which Schmucker contemplates how many larger mammals are mostly gone, while the smaller ones are thriving:

The whole rodent family, of which the squirrels are important members, is a striking example of the safety that lies in insignificance. There are more species of rodents than of all other fur-bearing animals combined. Man’s incursions into a neighborhood simply seem to relieve them of their enemies. Rabbits and squirrels are perhaps more abundant to-day than they were when the Indians roamed our forests. Certain it is that the advent of man in the Northwest increased the numbers of the Jack rabbits. This set of animals is unusually adaptable to all the varied possibilities of life…. So they have found for themselves a secure footing where the bear and the woolf, the deer and the bison have failed.

IF THE BISON “FAILED”, THEY WERE HELPED ALONG BY INCESSANT HUNTING FOR SPORT BY ANY WHITE MAN WITH A GUN WHO HAPPENED TO SEE THEM. But while I highlight these passages, it is not completely true that Schmucker has failed to see what humans have done to American nature. For instance, in writing about birds in the Middle Atlantic States, Schmucker acknowledges the Audubon Society and the Nature study movement in public schools as forces that have helped reduce hunting pressures and lead to a generation of birds less fearful of humans. But again, there is strangely little remorse about what has happened. If humans are merely tools of divine purpose, then perhaps it is simply a matter of divining the purpose as to why humans carried out such slaughter of animals for so long a time.

BEFORE I CLOSE, A FEW KINDER WORDS FOR SAMUEL CHRISTIAN SCHMUCKER ARE IN ORDER. This book certainly provides abundant information about aspects of nature for perhaps a middle school or high school reading audience, though it is hardly comprehensive. (It favors rural nature in fields, orchards, and yards over a wilder nature of forest, swamp, and mountainside.) It covers diverse species — mammals, birds, insects, reptiles. And most significantly, I think, it makes a case for organisms that were heavily disliked by most people then (and largely still are, today). For example, in keeping with Schmucker’s purpose-driven outlook on Nature, even the poison ivy has innate value:

[Fall] is perhaps the most tempting season of all the year for a walk, and a country lane beneath the trees is never more lovely. But there is a serpent in this Eden, in the form of a creeping, enticing, but trouble-breeding vine.

Poison Ivy is a bold bad plant. It seems so subtle in its attacks, so bitter in its hatred, that we can hardly help believing it our sworn enemy. But this is only our view of the matter, and plant lovers all know there must be another side to this story. From its own stand-point the plant surely is most ingenious. That it is successful is evident from its abundance. Unless relentlessly weeded out by man, it covers our fence-posts, climbs the trunks of our trees, and clambers about our road-sides.”

What follows is a lengthy section of text enumerating poison ivy’s good points: it has managed to make do with relatively little material in its stem (relying upon various trees for its support), and it provides white berries for birds to eat. These qualities, together with its poisonous oil, have helped insure that the plant is a winner “in life’s race”. The image below, along with many others throughout the book, was done by the author’s wife, Katherine Elizabeth Schmucker.

FINALLY, A FEW PARTING WORDS ABOUT MY COPY. I read a “first edition” from 1910, apparently in very good condition. Not only was it unmarked by earlier owners, but also many of its pages had not even been cut. The paper, however, has clearly deteriorated over time, and is brittle and tears exceedingly easily; one post-it tab I placed on a page, when lifted off, removed a piece of the page, too. The illustrations are quite pleasant, but apart from the title page, not overly inspiring. Even the cover, while colorfully decorated, strikes me as somewhat bland. I suppose the apparent newness of the volume from 1910, its abundance of illustrations, and the relatively unknown nature of the author (who does not have a Wikipedia page yet) left me hoping for great things. I am afraid I am walking away rather disappointed — though, unlike the original owner at least, I did read the book cover to cover. It just didn’t live up to the grace and beauty of its title page.

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

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Prehistory  No Responses »
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Our Entertainment: “Sylvan Secrets in Bird-Songs and Books” by Maurice Thompson, 1887

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History  No Responses »
Sep 042020
 

From all we can gather it appears most probable that in its present form our songbird proper– our bird with a song to sing — is not much older than man; that he found his song just in time to gladden the ears of God’s last and greatest creation; that he struggled through countless ages and awful changes in order to fit himself for our entertainment. Think what the avian race has endured since first Archaeopteryx felt the feathers begin to bud in his arms! What a long, slow, hesitating, faltering current of development, from a scaly amphibian of the paleozoic time, up, up, to the glorious state of the nightingale and the mocking-bird! I never see a brown thrush flashing his brilliant song from the highest spray of a tree without letting a thought go back over the way he has come to us, and I always feel that to protect and defend the song-bird is one of man’s clearest duties.

I REALLY WANT TO FIND SOMETHING TO LIKE ABOUT MAURICE THOMPSON. The closest I can come is the close of this quote, in which Thompson — the same one that two years previously (as documented in my last post) killed one ivory-billed woodpecker and destroyed the nest of another pair — argues that we ought to protect songbirds. Of course, his rationale doing so is pure 19th Century anthropomorphism. Everything was created for us, pure and simple. Add to that the Great Chain of Being, a warped mismash of the Bible and Darwin, and a really bizarre explanation of the driving force behind evolution, and you have Thompson’s outlook on nature. History books celebrate the winners — the ones who get it right, the ones “ahead of their times”. Thompson most assuredly was not one of those. But his writing does offer a window into a long-gone age of American society, one in which the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the ivory-billed woodpecker all were driven rapidly toward extinction. What mindset made that possible? Here is another passage dripping with anthropocentrism and human entitlement:

The inspired record [the Bible] declares that man was given dominion, which would imply that the earth and all things upon it and in it were made for his benefit. Science may profit by this view of creation, and take the serving of man’s physical and mental needs as the end of evolution. In other words, we may assume that if the object of creation was to make a sphere of man’s dominion while in the human state, then all the lines of creature development have been drawn towards a culmination, have been led to their highest point, in the age of man’s creation; that the Creator perfected the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms before he made man.

WHAT EMERGES IS A SEQUENCE OF LIFE, FROM PRIMITIVE AND LACKING MERIT TO HIGHLY EVOLVED AND MERITORIOUS. In this way, tacking the concept of evolution onto the notion of creation by God, Thompson offers a model in which man reigns supreme and can bask in the knowledge that it has been a long evolutionary journey to arrive at the human being:

All the more honor to the man if indeed he has come up from the germ in the old dust of chaos, has wriggled past the worms, swam past the fishes, outstripped the birds, and made himself the lord of all the animals. Indeed, as I sit here in this tropical springtide, with my eyes full of color-visions and my ears full of soothing sounds, I am willing to consider myself a manifestation of nature’s patient work, the end of a labor begun when life first stirred in the most favored spot of the earth.

THINGS GET REALLY CRAZY ONCE THOMPSON PULLS OUT HIS “SCIENTIFIC” EXPLANATION FOR HOW EVOLUTION WORKS. In his model, it is, well, I will let him explain instead:

Evolution is the outcome of natural desire, and natural desire has been generated by a disturbance of natural equilibrium. There is nothing abstruse or occult in this proposition; it is merely a recognition of the development of intelligence and of the controlling power of the brain in animals.

Lest that seem a bit bewildering, Thompson offers the model in much simpler terms a few pages later:

Evolution tinges everything. One grows like what one contemplates….

My elementary school cafeteria got it wrong: you aren’t what you eat. Instead, you are what you think. And your offspring, over many generations, will become more and more of that. For example,

Birds of the polar areas of snow and ice are white, those of the tropics are vari-colored and brilliant-hued. The condition in each instance has been reached by a natural desire to hide by blending with the prevailing tone of Nature.

And here is a different example:

In the case of wading birds, those species which have chosen to live near small streams have shorter legs and neck that species which prefer larger streams, lakes or sea-borders, and, taking the little green heron as an example, as our streams diminish in volume year by year, the bird modifies its habit in accordance with necessity, and in my mind there is no doubt that its legs and neck will be affected, in the course of a comparatively short period, to a noticeable degree.

If animals evolve by the choices they make and the things they desire, then it follows that it is possible to make better or worse choices. Consider the case of the flying frog of Borneo:

Here is a strange, belated effort of nature to urge the scaleless reptiles up to arboreal, aerial, and song-singing life, by the side of their more fortunate avian kinsmen, who early chose a better method of development!

And yes, this model of various levels (orders) of relative quality extends to other human cultures, too, as this passage reveals:

The woodpecker, beating his unique call on a bit of hard, elastic wood, is making an effort, blind and crude enough, but still an effort, to express a musical mood vaguely floating in his nature. We may not laugh at him, so long as from the interior of Africa explorers bring forth the hideous caricatures of musical instruments that some tribes of our own genus delight themselves withal. Among the Southern negroes it was once common to see a dancer going through an intricate terpsichorean score to the music of a “pat,” which was a rhythmical hand-clapping performed by a companion. I mention this in connection with the suggestion that the chief difference between the highest order of bird-music and the lowest order of man-music is expressed by the word rhythm. There is no such an element as the rhythmic beat in any bird-song that I have heard.

WITH WHITE AMERICAN MALE HUMANS AT THE PINNACLE OF CREATION, THEY ARE FREE TO ACT AS THEY SEE FIT TOWARD EVERYTHING ELSE. Thompson certainly allows for the sentiment of care, but in another essay he writes about a day spent in a Southern swamp during which he wasn’t in the mood for shooting anything — as if blasting away at birds was a perfectly reasonable accompaniment to observing them. Try as I will, I cannot appreciate Thompson as a writer — my mind is stuck on the image of him (from his own essay) standing atop a ladder in the deep woods, tearing through the rotten trunk of a tree in order in order to rob a nest of ivory-billed woodpecker eggs “for the sake of knowledge,” only to watch all five of them plummet to the ground by his own klutziness. “The species will probably be extinct within a few years,” he concluded.

AGAIN, I HAVE LITTLE TO SAY ABOUT MY COPY OF THOMPSON’S WORK. The cover is quite impressive, certainly compared to his book of nature essays, “Byways and Bird Notes”, from two years earlier. Otherwise, the book again reveals its age through crumbling binding and yellowed pages, but is without any traces of the journey it has taken to reach me.

A Flash of Color: “Byways and Bird Notes” by Maurice Thompson, 1885

 Birds, book review, Environmental conservation, Natural History  1 Response »
Sep 032020
 

In concluding this paper a general description of the male ivory-bill may prove acceptable to those who may never be able to see even a stuffed specimen of a bird which, taken in every way, is, perhaps, the most interesting and beautiful in America. In size 21 inches long, and 33 in alar extent; bill, ivory white, beautifully fluted above, and two and a-half inches long; head-tuft, or crest, long and fine, of pure scarlet faced with black. Its body-color is glossy blue-black, but down its slender neck on each side, running from the crest to the back, a pure white stripe contrasts vividly with the scarlet and ebony. A mass of white runs across the back when the wings are closed…leaving the wing-tips and tail black. Its feet are ash-blue, its eyes amber-yellow. The female is like the male, save that she has a black crest instead of the scarlet. I can think of nothing in Nature more striking than the flash of color this bird gives to the dreary swamp-landscape, as it careers from tree to tree, or sits upon some high skeleton cypress-branch and plies its resounding blows. The species will probably be extinct within a few years.*

*Since writing the foregoing, I have made several excursions in search of the ivory-bill. Early in January, 1885, I killed a fine male specimen in a swamp near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi; but was prevented, by an accident, from preserving it or making a sketch of it.

THE IRONY IS RIGHT THERE, IN FRONT OF THE READER. After a paragraph closing with the remark that the ivory-billed woodpecker will likely soon be extinct, Maurice Thompson, author, reports on killing a male he later found. He is not alone; among many naturalists of his time, appreciation of bird life often involved a shotgun and/or a spate of nest and/or egg collecting. What I find baffling is that many of the naturalists also recognized that species were becoming endangered, yet still they persevered. It is a miracle, I think, that so many birds still survived to this day. Alas, the ivory-billed woodpecker is not among them. Thompson clearly admired the bird greatly and held it up as a paragon of Nature’s beauty:

Of all our wild American birds, I have studied no other one which combines all of the elements of wildness so perfectly in its character as does the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Indeed, when describing his trip into a swamp to await the birds’ arrival at their nest hole in a stump, Thompson even called them the King and Queen of the Woodpeckers. He watched a pair of them for day after day, during which time “excepting a visitation of mosquitoes now and then, nothing occurred to mar my enjoyment.” Alas, they eventually realized he was watching them from his hiding place, “and that was the end of all intimacy between us.”

SOMETIME SOON AFTERWARDS, THOMPSON DECIDED TO TAKE ACTION FOR THE SAKE OF SCIENCE. “I reached the determination,” he explains to his readers, “that it was my duty to rob that nest in the interest of knowledge,”Digging deep into the stump’s recesses, he observed that

Five beautiful pure white eggs of the finest old-china appearance, delicate, almost transparent, exceedingly fragile, and, to the eyes of a collector, vastly valuable, lay in a shallow bowl of pine chips. But in breaking away the last-piece of wood-crust, I jerked it a little too hard, and those much-coveted prizes rolled out and fell to the ground. Of course they were “hopelessly crushed,” and my feelings with them…. Once or twice I went back to the spot in early morning, but my birds did not appear.

At the close of his book, Thompson speaks rapturously of “the unrecognized and unnamed science of bird-loving.” But if killing birds for art or collecting their eggs for a museum display is love, then truly the ivory-billed woodpecker was loved to death.

MY COPY OF THIS BOOK WAS SINGULARLY NONDESCRIPT. It is an original 1885 copy (I do not believe it was ever reissued), completely lacking illustrations. The book is tall, narrow, and slender, the pages browned and tearing easily. Besides its deteriorating binding and pages, it contains no traces of its 135-year history.

Face to Face with Eternity: “Nature in a City Yard” by Charles M. Skinner, 1897

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Natural History, Prehistory, Sense of Place  4 Responses »
Sep 022020
 

Looking skyward one is face to face with eternity. How futile, yet inevitable, to put the questions suggested to himself and to unanswering space and time by that vision! He tries to think back to the time in eternity when matter did not exist, and concludes it always did exist. And he wonders if the universe is evolution or creation. And is order mind, or has mind developed from order? And in the future suns burn out, only to have their ashes swept up by comets, scouts and scavengers of space, and hurled together with such fury that they become gaseous with heat, condense, reform into suns and planets, and the drama goes on again, endlessly. With a spectator? Ah, useless to ask and wonder. Truth is in a well, so deep she cannot come to us, nor we descend to her. Let us be content to love and admire, create and maintain, live and improve. It is all — and the best — we can do.

I CONFESS THAT I ALMOST GAVE UP ON WRITING A BLOG POST ON THIS BOOK. Charles Montgomery Skinner’s book is pleasant, yes, but at first glance there was precious little in his writing that really caught my eye. Perhaps the most significant thing about the book, from the standpoint of American environmental writing, is that way back in 1897, someone living in a Brooklyn home with a “common city yard, about eighteen feet by fifty” opted to write an entire book about encountering nature right there, at his back doorstep. I always imagined that early nature writers looked to wild places for inspiration, but the more I read of the more unknown exemplars, the more I find them encountering nature anywhere and everywhere. (Another example of a writer encountering nature in a city, in this case Cambridge, is Frank Bolles, in “Land of the Lingering Snow”.) The result is a book mostly about gardening, though here gardening extends to finding weeds in neighboring lots — even dandelions — and placing them in the backyard, along with more distinguished cultivars. Four chapters cover his garden through the seasons, with another chapter on Flowers and Insects. Skinner also uses the book to rail, on practically every other page, about a highly destructive, horribly obnoxious neighbor boy, Reginald McGonigle. The author strikes me as one compelled by employment to live in the city (he states that at the opening), doing his best to appreciate what nature it still offers. The sky, for instance, is still accessible to view from a backyard hammock, and that becomes the subject of a chapter, also. Indeed, in a couple of moments in the book, Skinner transcends his yard and the city to engage in cosmic wonder, and I found those passages most striking. From my viewpoint as a geologist, his finest one is this one, connecting stones in his yard to geologic ice ages and roping in an inaccurate interpretation of Milankovitch Cycles. Or at least, that is what I thought he was doing, based upon his reference to astronomical processes in the passage. But it turns out that the concept of Earth’s orbital cycles affecting the timing of ice ages was not actually proposed by Milutin Milanković until 1924. I can only guess that the notion of some sort of link between Earth’s orbit and ice ages had been identified much earlier.

Late fall and early spring are good seasons for the study of geology and mineralogy, as the vegetation is light, and the character of the ground may be seen. And our yard, in common with the other yards of the town and some thousands of miles of unyarded country, has had an interesting history. Had I stood 18,000 years ago where I stand to-day when i weed the hydrangeas and stir the earth about the “pinys,” I should have been facing a wall of ice, the receding glacier of the last Ice Age. And I and certain millions of others live on the debris of that glacier. This enormous mass, over a mile thick, moving sluggishly but irresistibly southward to its melting-point, brought with it millions of tons of sand, soil, gravel, and boulders, and dumped them into the Atlantic, building up from the bottom of that sea an island 120 miles long, and leaving parts of its moraine at other points between here and the Rockies. A conjunction of exterior planets had pulled at the earth by gravitative force, elongating its orbit, so that for some years the winters on the side slanted from the sun were lengthened and the summers shortened. The southern half of the globe will be frozen up in about 75,000 years, when the conjunction is repeated.

And in the light of such portentous events the back yard becomes important. I know the locale of certain fragments that I find there — speaking now of minerals and rocks, instead of the commoner rags, boots, bottles, and other materials of “made land.” The green mica I know comes from Fort George, New York; the green feldspar from a mile or two south of that point; the basalt from the palisades of the Hudson; the jasper from a now extinct reef of it which may be traced beneath the river; the serpentine from Hoboken; but mixed with these are specimens from the Hudson Highlands, the Adirondacks, the Connecticut hills, the Green Mountains, perhaps from those oldest hills of all, the Laurentians — a noble range, no doubt, that the glacier wore down to mere roots and stumps of its old self. When we record or guess upon these things, man and his work appear too trivial to think about, and time, space, mass, force, too great for understanding. There is, too, in the passing of the autumn, some hint of the cold death that must overtake the race of humankind, the world it lives in, and the solar system in which it moves. It is too vast and lonely a theme for the imagination. By potting the plants for winter blooming, tearing up the faded annuals, setting bulbs that are to flower in spring, and mulching the beds against the coming of cold weather, one can forget these grandeurs, and his mind is comforted.

WHAT A REMARKABLE PASSAGE! It is, without a doubt, the earliest philosophical exploration of geologic deep time (a term coined by John McPhee in 1981) that I have ever read. It is literally several decades before radiometric dating — back in a time when geologists had precious little knowledge of the age of past Earth events, or the age of the planet itself, for that matter. As such, this text alone makes the book worthy of acknowledgement. The rest of it — well, now at least the reader understands the focus on gardening — to keep at bay a looming sense of cosmic angst.

COMPARED TO SKINNER’S BACKYARD, MY COPY OF HIS BOOK HAS A MUCH LESS DRAMATIC HISTORY. It was once part of the collection of the Young Men’s Library Association in Palmer, Massachusetts, nowadays a town of about 12,000 people a few miles east of Springfield. It was last due back on March 16, 1960, and sometime after that was stamped “Discarded”.

These Days of Parks and Chipmunks: “A Watcher in the Woods” by Dallas Lore Sharp, 1903

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History  No Responses »
Aug 312020
 
Author photo 1911 by William L. Finley, Oregon State Historical Society Library archives

Our forests by daylight are rapidly being thinned into picnic groves; the bears and panthers have disappeared, and by day there is nothing to fear, nothing to give our imaginations exercise. But the night remains, and if we hunger for adventure, why, besides the night, here is the skunk; and the two offer a pretty sure chance for excitement. Never to have stood face to face in a narrow path at night with a full-grown, leisurely skunk is to have missed excitement and suspense second only to the staring out of countenance of a green-eyed wildcat. It is surely worth while, in these days of parks and chipmunks, when all stir and adventure has left the woods, to sally out at night for the mere sake of meeting a skunk, for the shock of standing before a beast that will not give you the path. As you back away from him you feel as if you really were escaping. If there is any genuine adventure left for us in this age of suburbs, we must be helped to it by the dark.

WRITTEN AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY (1901), THESE WORDS REFLECT THE RAPIDLY TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE OF THE EASTERN SEABOARD OF THE UNITED STATES. From his home in New Jersey, Sharp bore witness to an age of urbanization and suburbanization. Wild woodlands were rapidly disappearing, replaced with orchards, fields, and city blocks. For Sharp, this change meant a dramatic shift, largely positive, in the state of America’s songbirds, as he saw more and more of them learning how to co-exist with humans. and their constructions. At the same time, he bemoaned the rapid disappearance of mammals and raptors, a situation he saw as inevitably becoming worse over time. And these changes would be a tremendous loss to all Americans:

I wish the game-laws could be amended to cover every wild animal left to us. In spite of laws they are destined to disappear; but if the fox, weasel, mink and skunk, the hawks and owls, were protected as the quail and deer are, they might be preserved a long time to our meadows and woods. How irreparable the loss to our landscape is the extinction of the great golden eagle! How much less of spirit, daring, courage, and life come to us since we no longer mark the majestic creature soaring among the clouds, the monarch of the skies! A dreary world it will be out of doors when we can hear no more the scream of the hawks, can no longer find the tracks of the coon, nor follow a fox to den.

On the other hand,

There is promise of a future for the birds in their friendship with us and in our interest and sentiment for them. Everybody is interested in birds; everybody loves them. There are bird-books and bird-books and bird-books — new volumes in every publisher’s spring announcements. Every one with wood ways knows the songs and nests of the more common species.

In fact, Sharp gloried in the extent to which he saw so many bird species adapting to a human presence. When a friend declared to him that the birds would all soon be extinct because “Civilization is bound to sweep them away,” Sharp

made no reply, but, for an answer, led the way to the street and down the track to this pole which High-hole [a northern flicker] had appropriated. I pointed out his hole, and asked them to watch. Then I knocked. Instantly a red head appeared at the opening. High-hole was mad enough to eat us; but he changed his mind, and with a bored, testy flip, dived into the woods. He had served my purpose, however, for his read head sticking out of a hole in a street-railway pole was a rising sun in the east of my friend’s ornithological world, New light broke over this question of birds and men…..

High-hole is a civilized bird. Perhaps “domesticated” would better describe him; though domesticated implies the purposeful effort of man to change character and habits, while the changes which have come over High-hole — and over most of the wild birds — are the result of High-hole’s own free choosing.

If we should let the birds have their way they would voluntarily fall into civilized, if not into domesticated, habits.

As evidence of this, Sharp highlights the avian riches in his own “civilized” backyard:

Using my home for a center, you may describe a circle of a quarter-mile radius and all the way round find that radius intersecting either a house, a dooryard, or an orchard. Yet within this small and settled area I found one summer thirty-six species of birds nesting. Can any cabin in the Adirondacks open its window to more voices — any square mile of solid, unhacked forest on the globe show richer, gayer variety of bird life?

In fact, orchards are particularly rich with avian fauna:

Except for the warblers, one acre of apple-trees is richer in the variety of its birds than ten acres of woods.

FORTUNATELY, SHARP’S PROGNOSTICATIONS CONCERNING THE FUTURE OF AMERICA’S RAPTORS AND MAMMALS WERE WILDLY INACCURATE. And fortunately, too, his claims about the degree to which birds adapt joyously to humans (to the point that wildlands become largely unnecessary for their continuance) appear to have been ignored. Still, in the midst of all the pessimism about the future of America’s wildlife that i have encountered in many other writers from this time, Sharp’s hopefulness and positive outlook on the human impact on nature was refreshing.

UNFORTUNATELY, FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS, I FOUND SHARP HIMSELF RATHER UNLIKEABLE. I know I ought to be open-minded toward others, particularly those that have been dead for almost a century. I kept trying to, even after the opening chapter ended with the shooting of several muskrats. In another essay, Sharp encounters an opossum in a hollow tree — and dines on him the next day. He writes about how toads are “unlovely” and “repulsive”, but how we should still learn to appreciate them for their other qualities. The final straw, though, is a random attack on those who love old books. How dare he?

An ardor for decayed trees is not from any perversity of nature. There is nothing unreasonable in it, as in — bibliomania, for instance. I discover a gaunt, punky old pine, bored full of holes, and standing among acres of green, characterless companions, with the held breath, the jumping pulse, the bulging eyes of a collector stumbling upon a Caxton in a latest-publication book-store. But my excitement is really for some cause; for — sh! look! In that round hole up there, just under the broken limb, the flame of the red-headed woodpecker — a light in one of the windows of the woods. Peep through it. What rooms! What people! No; I never paid ten cents extra for a volume because it was full of years and mildew and rare errata (I sometimes buy books at a reduction for these accidents); but I have walked miles, and passed forests of green, good-looking trees, to wait in the slim shade of some tottering, limbless old stump.

While I respect his attempt to juxtapose dead wood (trees) with dead paper (books) as a means of highlighting the life present in an old snag, as one who is equal parts lover of books and of nature, I will continue to find delight in both.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE COPY OF THIS BOOK THAT I READ. First, a clarification regarding the age of the text, though. A prolific writer of nature essays celebrating the local wonders of each season, Sharp published “Wild Life Near Home” in 1901, and then put out a thinner volume of excerpted pieces as “A Watcher in the Woods” two years later. In 1911, the Century Company published a School Edition — a slender volume without illustrations, but including notes and suggestions for teachers at the end. This particular edition appears to have been in the possession of an Ollie Brown (written in pencil, mostly erased) and (probably later) a Jennie Gordon from Yonkers Training School. Another person’s handwriting appears in fountain pen on the flyleaf, writing an indecipherable line (if anyone reading this can interpret it, please let me know what it says), followed by New York, followed by April 1934. That is all I know of this book’s history.

From the Tide Pool to the Stars: “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” by John Steinbeck, 1941

 book review, Books, Natural History, Ocean, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Aug 282020
 
John Steinbeck
Sonya Noskowiak / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)

Our own interest lay in relationships of animal to animal. If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational to a point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And then not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it. Then one can come back to the microscope and the tide pool and the aquarium. But the little animals are found to be changed, no longer set apart and alone. And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known as unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things — plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

JOHN STEINBECK HAD AN EYE FOR THE QUOTIDIAN AND AN EYE FOR THE COSMIC, AND IN “THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ” HE MOVED COMFORTABLY BETWEEN THE TWO. Ostensibly the account of a several-week boat excursion down the California coast and into the Gulf of California to collect marine specimens, it is actually a journey into the fundamental questions of (as Douglas Adams would say) life, the universe, and everything. From the beginning, Steinbeck cautions us that this will be no ordinary account of a voyage, with this nod to the recently-discovered Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

We said, “Let’s go wide open. Let’s see what we see, record what we find, and not fool ourselves with conventional scientific strictures. We could not observe a completely objective Sea of Cortez anyway, for in that lonely and uninhabited Gulf our boat and ourselves would change it the moment they entered. By going there, we would bring a new factor to the Gulf. Let us consider that factor and not be betrayed by this myth of permanent objective reality. If it exists at all, it is only available in pickled tatters or in distorted flashes. Let us go,” we said, “into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a field of eelgrass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too.” And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn’t terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn’t very important to the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.

NONE OF IT IS IMPORTANT OR ALL OF IT IS. Perhaps that sums up this book well. Steinbeck’s thought roams freely from one topic to another, constantly seeking out interconnections. At one moment, he is recording the shapes and colors of the marine invertebrates he encountered; in the next, teasing apart the threads of what we have woven together to call reality. From the near edge of my blog’s chronological scope, the world is a lot more uncertain than it was nearly eighty years previously. It is a world at war, a World War that Americans would join following Pearl Harbor in December of that year. And it is a world where the latest scientific upheaval is not the result of Darwin’s musings, but is instead the revolutions in Physics that produced both an Uncertainty Principle and a Relativistic Universe. The ground (or water, in this case) is constantly shifting beneath Steinbeck’s feet, and in-between downing beers and pickling marine specimens, in the midst of a relatively wild seascape teeming with life and energy (which Steinbeck calls (tuna water — life water), Steinbeck tries to make sense of his part — and our part — in it all. Ultimately, his biological work and philosophical thinking enable him to arrive at the meaning of life — or, at least — a meaning for all life — to survive:

In the little Bay of San Carlos, where there were many schools of a number of species, there was even a feeling (and “feeling” is used advisedly) of a larger unit which was the interrelation of species with their interdependence for food, even though that food be each other. A smoothly working larger animal surviving within itself — larval shrimp to little fish to larger fish to giant fish — one operating mechanism. And perhaps this unit of survival may key into the larger animal which is the life of all the sea, and this into the larger of the world. There would seem to be only one commandment for living things: Survive! And the forms and species and units and groups are armed for survival, fanged for survival, timid for it, fierce for it, clever for it, poisonous for it, intelligent for it. This commandment decrees the death and destruction of myriads of individuals for the survival of the whole. Life has one final end, to be alive; and all the tricks and mechanisms, all the successes and all the failures, are aimed at that end.

And in all of this, who are we? How does the individual human make sense of his or own life? Here, Steinbeck has little to offer — at least, communicated directly to the reader. Meanwhile, a couple of Indians he meets up with offer us one possible answer: we are caught up in a dream — part of everything, imagining a separateness which is not really there.

Their dark eyes never leave us. They seem actually to be dreaming. Sometimes we asked of the Indians the local names of animals we had taken, and then they consulted together. They seemed to live on remembered things, to be so related to the seashore and the rocky hills and the loneliness that they are these things. To ask about the country is like asking about themselves. “How many toes have you?” “What, toes? Let’s see — of course, ten. I have known them all my life, I never thought to count them. Of course it will rain tonight, I don’t know why. Something in me tells me I will rain tonight. Of course, I am the whole thing, now that I think about it. I ought to know when I will rain.”

AND ON THAT QUITE STRANGE PASSAGE, I WILL CLOSE OUT THIS POST. I admit that I struggled with classifying this book — does it qualify as a work of “nature writing”? I have puzzled over that category considerably in this project. Some titles fall completely into this genre. This one, though, is first and foremost a literary work. Nature is a part, but it is the entire weave that fascinated Steinbeck — the fish and the corals, yes, but the villagers and Indians, the sunlight and waves, the Japanese fishermen and the Mexican marine officials, the pickling jars and the skiff’s outboard motor (with a malignant mind of its own). None of it is important or all of it is. I will leave each reader to arrive at his or her own decision on that.

MY COPY OF THE BOOK WAS A NONDESCRIPT PENGUIN PAPERBACK, PAGES ALREADY WELL TANNED. This edition is copyrighted 1986, and I have been its sole owner. I purchased it in Fort Collins, Colorado, probably in 1987, on the recommendation of Dr. Ellen Wohl, my graduate and literary advisor. Although a native of Ohio, Wohl opened up my world to a host of remarkable authors of the American West, from Steinbeck to Stegner. I probably walked, or bicycled, from my rented room at 1016 Sycamore Street to purchase this book, back in the days before Amazon. I read it once, voraciously, and recall enjoying it greatly. I had not returned to it until the occasion of this blog.

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