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.

Forests Seem Almost to Think: “The Spell of the Rockies” by Enos Mills (1911)

 book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History  No Responses »
Jul 192022
 

So well is man served in the distribution of the waters and management of their movements by the forests, that forests seem almost to think. The forest is an eternal mediator between winds and gravity in their never-ending struggle for the possession of the waters. The forest seems to try to take the intermittent and ever-varying rainfall and send the collected waters in slow and steady streams back to the sea.

I return to Enos Mills, at last, gladly encountering an old friend. The self-styled “John Muir of the Rockies”, MIlls shares amazing (almost unbelievable) survival stories in the mountains, many of which begin with a crazy act on his end (hiking up to the high country without his snowshoes, for instance) followed by a crazy dash across the landscape, outriding an avalanche or hurrying to the nearest medical assistance — in the dark off-trail — after drinking from a spring containing some sort of toxic substance (probably heavy metals). I do not know how he survived so long to write so many books. But I am grateful that he did. And I will be back to read more of his work in the future.

While Conrad Abbott stifles me with his dense, actionless prose, Mills is always on the go. When not quoting Muir, he is emulating him, consciously or otherwise. Perhaps you recall John Muir, in The Mountains of California, clinging onto the top of an ancient Douglas spruce in a thunderstorm, exulting in the elemental forces at play? Here is Mills’ own version, in the Rockies:

The summit of the forested slope was comparatively smooth where I gained it, and contained a few small, ragged-edged, grassy spaces among its spruces and firs. The wind was blowing and the low clouds pressed, hurried along the ground, whirled through the grassy places, and were driven and dragged swiftly among the trees. I was in the lower margin of cloud, and it was like a wet, gray night. Nothing could be seen clearly, even at a few feet, and every breath I took was like swallowing a saturated sponge.

These conditions did not last long, for a wind- surge completely rent the clouds and gave me a glimpse of the blue, sun-filled sky. I hurried along the ascending trend of the ridge, hoping to get above the clouds, but they kept rising, and after I had traveled half a mile or more I gave it up. Presently I was impressed with the height of an exceptionally tall spruce that stood in the centre of a group of its companions. At once I decided to climb it and have a look over the country and cloud from its swaying top.

When half way up, the swift manner in which the tree was tracing seismographic lines through the air awakened my interest in the trunk that was holding me. Was it sound or not? At the foot appearances gave it good standing. The exercising action of ordinary winds probably toughens the wood fibres of young trees, but this one was no longer young, and the wind was high. I held an ear against the trunk and heard a humming whisper which told only of soundness. A blow with broad side of my belt axe told me that it rang true and would stand the storm and myself.

The sound brought a spectator from a spruce with broken top that stood almost within touching distance of me. In this tree was a squirrel home, and my axe had brought the owner from his hole. What an angry, comic midget he was, this Fremont squirrel ! With fierce whiskers and a rattling, choppy, jerky chatter, he came out on a dead limb that pointed toward me, and made a rush as though to annihilate me or to cause me to take hurried flight; but as I held on he found himself more “up in the air” than I was. He stopped short, shut off his chatter, and held himself at close range facing me, a picture of furious study. This scene occurred in a brief period that was undisturbed by either wind or rain. We had a good look at each other. He was every inch alive, but for a second or two both his place and expression were fixed. He sat with eyes full of telling wonder and with face that showed intense curiosity. A dash of wind and rain ended our interview, for after his explosive introduction neither of us had uttered a sound. He fled into his hole, and from this a moment later thrust forth his head; but presently he subsided and withdrew. As I began to climb again, I heard mufHed expletives from within his tree that sounded plainly like “Fool, fool, fool!”

The wind had tried hard to dislodge me, but, seated on the small limbs and astride the slender top, I held on. The tree shook and danced; splendidly we charged, circled, looped, and angled; such wild, exhilarating joy I have not elsewhere experienced. At all times I could feel in the trunk a subdued quiver or vibration, and I half believe that a tree’s greatest joys are the dances it takes with the winds.

Conditions changed while I rocked there ; the clouds rose, the wind calmed, and the rain ceased to fall. Thunder occasionally rumbled, but I was completely unprepared for the blinding flash and explosive crash of the bolt that came. The violent concussion, the wave of air which spread from it like an enormous, invisible breaker, almost knocked me over. A tall fir that stood within fifty feet of me was struck, the top whirled off, and the trunk split in rails to the ground. I quickly went back to earth, for I was eager to see the full effect of the lightning’s stroke on that tall, slender evergreen cone. With one wild, mighty stroke, in a second or less, the century-old tree tower was wrecked.

Note that Mills returns quickly to earth, not to avoid a fatal lightning strike, but out of curiosity about the tree’s fate. So like John Muir!

Beyond the adventure stories, there is another, almost scholarly, side to Enos Mills. He is an early advocate for forests — not merely as agglomerations of trees, but as entities in their own right. This holistic viewpoint enables him to recognize the many benefits — scientists today would call them ecosystem services — that forests provide. He explores these gifts in his essay, “The Wealth of the Woods”. According to Mills, these include wood supply, climate regulation, moisture retention, soil erosion prevention, air filtering/purifying, and a source of foods and medicines. In a later chapter in the book, “A Rainy Day at the Stream’s Source”, Mills ventures out in the soaking rain to observe the confluence of two streams — one densely forested, the other a recent victim of a forest fire. These early observations of the effects of forest disturbance on sediment transport in mountain streams bring to mind my own graduate research on bedload transport in a subalpine channel of the Western Slope of the Rockies in the summer of 1993, and a host of other (more noteworthy) geomorphological research over many decades. As expected, one stream flows clear, while the other is choked with sediment. I will leave the reader to guess which was which.

Mills also writes extensively about forest fires and their impacts. Though it would be most of a century before the apocalyptic infernos wrought by climate change in the West, the fires he describes were still quite intense; most were started by people (campfires, sparks from trains). Not surprisingly, Mills viewed fire almost entirely as a destructive force, one to be prevented if at all possible. However, he does acknowledge one positive effect of such fires — the formation of all the open grassy parks high in the Rocky Mountains, including his beloved Estes Park.

Before closing out my review of this book, I feel compelled to mention Mills’ fascination with beavers. He spent countless days closely observing them carrying out their industrial operations — logging the woods, hauling the timber, building dams, and building lodges. At one location, he observed more than forty beavers all hard at work at one time! He recognized their substantial role in modifying streams and forests. But the fascination with them went well beyond that. Here is MIlls, in one of his most charming passages, singing the praises of beavers and their world:

The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primitive place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle; around it are the ever-changing, never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. He grows up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the enameled flowers, the great boulders, the Ice King’s marbles, and the fallen logs in the edge of the mysterious forest; learning to swim and slide; listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water; living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich the hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days. If Mother Nature should ever call me to live upon another planet I could wish that I might be born a beaver, to inhabit a house in the water.

Finally, a few words about the provenance of my copy of this book. I suspect I will never fully grasp the complex intricacies of out-of-print book pricing. For some reason, Wild Life on the Rockies is generally much cheaper than The Spell of the Rockies. Fortunately, I was able to locate a fairly intact copy; the hinges are cracked, but the binding still has a bit of life left in it. For an ex-library volume, the cover is remarkably pristine. It was long in the possession of the Toledo – Lucks County Public Library, and it bears the scars — stamps, a card pocket in the front, a sticker with a computer code. All I know about its acquisition by the library is that it was “A Gift of a Citizen of Toledo”.

In These Degenerate Days: “Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes” by Charles Wendell Townsend (1913)

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Ocean, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 162022
 

Charles Wendell Townsend, MD was born in Boston in 1859, “of good old New England stock” (as an “In Memorium” piece by Glover Allen in The Auk puts it). He developed an early interest in birds, which at the time mostly involved collecting eggs and shooting “specimens”. In 1885, Townsend graduated from Harvard Medical School as a Doctor of Medicine. He married Gertrude Flint of Brookline, Massachusetts, and set up a private practice in Boston. In 1892, he built a summer house on a ridge overlooking a coastal marsh in Ipswich, Massachusetts, just north of Cape Ann. He would spend both summer vacations and weekends there over many years, increasingly opting to observe nature with binoculars and telescope instead of a gun. His particular interest was the land and shore birds frequenting the area, but he also closely observed changes in the dunes over time; the dunes took on a very different appearance in the summer than in the winter. He traveled extensively through the marshlands by boat, and became closely acquainted with the region’s natural history, including its geology (with its “pleasures and possibilities”). Remarking that “I have sometimes been asked what I found of interest in the dunes and marshes,” Towsend explained that “This little book [Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes] is the answer.” He published it in 1913, followed by Beach Grass in 1923. (That book will be explored in a future post.) Travel was another facet of Townsend’s life; he made several trips to Labrador, first by steamer and later by canoe, publishing several books about the region, particularly its human and bird life (at least one volume of which will also be covered in this blog at some point). He continued to travel extensively (including around the world) up to the time of his passing in 1934.

Taken as a whole, the book is a tribute to the rich natural history of the dunes and marshes of northern Massachusetts over one hundred years ago. While the text at times feels a bit dry (rather like the dunes themselves), Townsend’s photographs throughout are a delight. They depict landscapes at the time, animal tracks through the dunes, marsh haying operations, and a few images of the wildlife itself. Because he returned so frequently over many years, Townsend was able to document changes, such as the image below of a shipwreck soon after it happened and again a year later. For much of the book, I struggled a bit with his prose. I did enjoy his chapter on tracks in the dunes, where he identifies dune visitors by their tracks, and their meals by investigations of scats and bird pellets. He closes the chapter by declaring that “The study of ichnology and scatology in these sandy wastes is as absorbing as a detective story.” His bird chapters that followed were informative but so laden with bird descriptions (and, alas, no bird close-up photographs) that they were tough going. I think the main challenge to the reader is that Townsend himself is largely absent from most of the volume, stepping aside to report scientifically what he has seen. Oddly, though, the book is also interspersed with chunks of poetry — some identified by the author, others not (Townsend’s own writing?). Here, again, is that concept of the time, that effective nature writing combines both the scientific and the poetic sensibilities. Unfortunately, in this case, the two are mostly kept separate.

Townsend cooks a meal amid the dunes in winter.

The tone changes when Townsend reaches the salt marsh. Here, his voice strikes an enthusiastic, joyful tone that is uncommon in the rest of the book. Consider this passage describing the salt marsh in late summer:

All the marsh vegetation is at its height of luxuriance in mid-August. Then the marsh lies brilliant in the sunlight, a broad expanse, flat as a floor and glowing in yellow-greens, touched here and there with washes of buff and of chestnut.

Fringing its upper edge is the broad band of the mourning black-grass, while the rich dark green of the thatch threads invisible serpentine creeks, and borders the ribbons of water that wander hither and thither like tortuous veins through the marshes, reflecting the brilliant blue of the skies. There are wonderful plays of light and shade as cloud shadows chase each other over the surface of the marshes, or as the lengthening shadows of the hills extend their range with the declining sun. On windy days the tall thatch bends before the blasts, and shimmering waves like those on the surface of the water pass over it.

On such days, with the wind in the north- west quarter, the air is exceedingly clear, and every wooded island and distant hill stands out with great distinctness, while the creeks take on an intense blue which contrasts strongly with the light green of the marshes.

The tides creeping over the sand flats, swell- ing the creeks, obliterating the brown banks and drowning the tall thatch, bursting out in unexpected veins and pools throughout the marshes,-all this, notwithstanding its twice daily repetition, is never other than a miracle.

or this passage about exploring the salt marsh creeks by boat at low tide:

To float down in a canoe with the ebb tide, to explore the narrow channels now sunk deep below the marsh level, to surprise the marsh birds on the broad sand and mud flats, to push over the waving forests of eel grass and their varied inhabitants, affrds much enjoyment, and opens up an entirely different world from that of the same water courses when they are brimming over onto the marsh. Partly from prejudice, partly from ignorance, dead low tide is not appreciated as it deserves. The clean sand of the estuaries and the fine mud of the smaller creeks and inlets, and the clear water of the sea, are all very different from the foulness to be found at low tide in the neighborhood of sewer-discharging cities.

For the reader of today, a clear theme throughout this book is the impact of humans upon nature, already underway in the 1910s and 1920s. Townsend notes the ongoing increase of invasive species, including beach wormwood (a plant), and the European periwinkle (a snail). He notes that deer numbers are up in the region, compared to their total absence in Thoreau’s day (1853), partly due to highly protective hunting laws in eastern Massachusetts, but also resulting from the extirpation of wolves, lynxes, panthers, and Indians from the region. Harbor seals, Townsend observes, are starting to return to the coast; until 1908, Massachusetts placed a bounty on them, intended as a boon to fishermen afraid of seals jeopardizing their livelihoods. Finally, there is mention of the impacts of the millinery trade on birds, specifically common terns:

Not so many years ago various fragments and the whole skins of these beautiful birds were fastened on women’s hats, just as scalps and feathers are fastened on the head-dresses of savages. Thousands of the birds were shot down where they could be most easily obtained. namely, on their breeding grounds, for they are plucky little birds and valiantly attack any marauder who intrudes on their homes, and they do not seek to escape. These, as well as other species of birds, were greatly reduced in numbes by this cold-hearted combination of fashion and slaughterers, when, through the strenuous efforts rof the Audubon Society ad of ther bird lovers, the killing was stayed, and, too the great joy of all naturalists, the graceful birds are again increasing.

Meanwhile, the situation for piping plovers and other shore birds remained grim. Consider the tragic fate of the immature sanderlings, who endure a barrage of guns every fall:

In the middle of August the young, sadly inexperienced, arrive, and in their tameness fall an easy prey to the gunner. They are beautiful birds, with faint smoky bands across their white breasts. It is a great pleasure to watch a flock as they crowd together along the shore, probing every spot of sand for the small molluscs and crustaceans which consti- tute their food. As the season advances our pleasure is somewhat dimmed by the fact that cripples, with a foot shot away or blood-stained sides, are common in their ranks.

The piping plovers, another shorebird species, are on the path to extinction:

Up to half a dozen years ago the piping plover bred regularly in the dunes and laid its eggs in the sand. It belongs to a dying race, and although it is protected by law at all seasons, I fear this is not sufficient to stop its path to extinction. So long as the law permits the shooting of other plovers of the same size and the small sandpipers, one cannot expect the ordinary gunner to discriminate, as in fact he is unable to do, and the piping plover is shot with the rest. Only by stopping all shooting, or by the creation of bird refuges, can the tendency to extinction of this and other shore birds be prevented.

The 1925 “New Edition” of this book (which I read) adds a hopeful footnote: “The passage of the Federal Migratory Bird Act has since stopped the shooting of most of our shore birds.” Indeed, despite its grim moments (for instance, disparaging “these degenerate times” for all the wanton shooting of wildlife), even the first edition of 1913 manages to strike a somewhat hopeful note, at least in regards to seabird protection:

What a joy it would be to have a return of the old conditions, when terns and piping plover bred in the dunes, and when shore birds large and small thronged the beaches, and when the sea teemed with water fowl. Many of the birds I have mentioned in this chapter are on the way to extinction, some have already disappeared forever; a few, happily as a result of protection, are increasing. In Japan it is said that when travelling artisans see an eagle, they take out their sketching tablets and record its beautiful shape and attitudes. The barbarians of this part of the world try to shoot it, a fate they have often meted out to every large or unusual bird they came across, even if it were of no value to them, and they left it to rot where it fell. Fortunately times are changing and the people are gradually awakening to the idea that money value in food or plumage, or even in work done for man, is not the only thing for which birds should be protected. We are also beginning to realize that the interest which finds pleasure in the sport of bird destruction is a very limited and a very selfish one, and that the claims of the sportsman are not paramount to those of the nature student or even of the lover of natural beauty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Take the Earth As One Finds It: “The Seer of Slabsides” by Dallas Lore Sharp (1921)

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books  2 Responses »
Jul 102022
 

To take the earth as one finds it, to plant oneself in it, to plant one’s roof-tree in it, to till it, to understand it and the laws which govern it, and the Perfection which created it, and to love it all — that is the heart of John Burroughs’ religion, the pith of his philosophy, the conclusion of his books.

In the end of March, 1921, John Burroughs passed away while on a train taking him back from California to his beloved home in New York State. A few months later, Dallas Lore Sharp, an admirer and friend of Burroughs, published this brief volume (71 pages in large print) as a eulogy to the fallen nature writer. The various copyright dates in the front (1910, 1913, 1921) hint at how it is a hastily cobbled-together affair. It says relatively little by way of biography; a good portion of the book is actually a comparison of Burroughs and Thoreau. Along the way, however, it sheds considerable light on why Burroughs was such a central figure in the literary Nature Movement of the previous half-century.

One immediate shock the reader receives, upon opening the book with its mahogany veneer cover, is the dedication: “To Henry Ford / Lover of Birds / Friend of John Burroughs”. Here, one can immediately see a difference between Thoreau and Burroughs. Thoreau, I am confident, would never have befriended a robber baron, choosing instead to advocate for the “common man”. I am certain that Ford’s political views would have sat very uneasy with Thoreau. But for Burroughs, largely free of political views, it was a marvelous thing to ride about the countryside in a Model T given t him by Henry Ford.

As Sharp describes Burroughs early in the book, “He loved much, observed and interpreted much, speculated a little, and dreamed none at all.” He was a “…teacher and interpreter of the simple and the near at hand.” He brought a sense of wonder and curiosity to all that he encountered. According to Sharp, during his last visit with Burroughs a few months before the writer’s death, the two noticed a woodchuck, and Burroughs remarked, “How eternally interesting life is! I’ve studied the woodchuck my whole life, and there’s no getting to the bottom of him.” In various essays, he shed particular light on facets of the natural world, from woodchucks to bluebirds. Over 50 years, Burroughs produced what Sharp describes as “…beyond dispute, the most complete, the most revealing of all our outdoor literature.” Ultimately, Burroughs was after the whole of nature, more than just its individual living components: “His theme has not been this or that, but nature in its totality, as it is held within the circle of his horizon, as it surrounds, supports, and quickens him.”

A few pages later, Sharp presents the argument that the “modern” (i.e., 1921) nature writer model has its roots in Burroughs: “The essay whos matter is nature, whose moral is human, whose manner is strictly literary, belongs to John Burroughs.” As practiced by Burroughs, Sharp explains, good outdoor writing demonstrated both fidelity to fact and sincerity of expression. Sharp proposes two questions for testing all nature writing: 1) Is the record true?; and 2) Is the writing honest?

At this point, Thoreau enters the scene. In the next dozen pages or so, Sharp argues (without slighting Thoreau) that the founding figure of the Nature Movement is not Thoreau, but Burroughs. Thoreau’s thoughts were lofty, his demeanor iconoclastic. Burroughs was companionable and firmly grounded in everyday realities, with a prose style immediately accessible to the general public. In writing about their own garden or woodlot and observing the birds and trees, aspiring nature writers could hope to emulate Burroughs’ tone and voice; Thoreau’s was out of reach. “Burroughs takes us along with him,” Sharp explains, “Thoreau comes upon us in the woods, jumps out at us from behind some bush, with a ‘Scat!’ Burroughs brings us home in time for tea; Thoreau leaves us tangled up in the briars.” Thoreau hoed beans as a reenactment of the roots of civilization; Burroughs maintained an 18-acre vineyard and made a living from it. As Burroughs himself once asserted, “Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am.” Sharp follows with this vivid comparison of “…Thoreau, searching by night and day in all wild places for his lost horse and hound, while Burroughs quietly worshipped, as his rural divinity, the ruminating cow.” Burroughs made no new discoveries, but he saw old things anew and invited others to do the same.

As a closing observation, Sharp noted that there were many themes in Burroughs’ works, but only one central message: “…that this is a good world to live in; that these are good men and women to live with; that life is good; here and now, and altogether worth living.”

My somewhat weatherbeaten copy of this book bears no dedications or signatures but does have a tiny bookseller’s label from Dennen’s Book Shop, 37 East Grand River Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. Whoever owned the book at very least had it off the shelf for a time; there is some water staining along the edges of the first few pages, and the first half of the book has a gentle fold. But toward the end of the brief volume, I still found an uncut page.

To Interpret Nature: “Wake-Robin” by John Burroughs (1871)

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Jul 092022
 
Wake-Robin Trillium, Smoky Mountains (Wikimedia Commons)
John Burroughts at His Study Door

The literary naturalist does not take liberties with facts; facts are the flora upon which he lives. The more and the fresher the facts the better. I can do nothing without them, but I must give them my own flavor. I must impart to them a quality which heightens and intensifies them.

To interpret Nature is not to improve upon her: it is to draw her out; it is to have an emotional intercourse with her, absorb her, and reproduce her tinged with the colors of the spirit.

Thus states John Burroughs (1837-1921) in the introduction to his first nature book, Wake-Robin. Presented as “mainly a book about the Birds,” Burroughs actually took his title from the local flora, with a name evoking the birds but also suggesting a broader view of the natural world. Ironically, given his statement about not taking liberties with facts, in this case, John Burroughs was in error; he defines wake-robin as “the common name of the white Trillium, which blooms in all our woods, and which marks the arrival of all the birds.” However, as shown above, the wake-robin trillium is actually dark red, with a nodding flowerhead. Here I would grant Burroughs some slack; the book was actually written far away from his native New York State, while he was working as a clerk in Washington, D.C. In the introduction, he described his writing place: “I was the keeper of a vault in which many millions of bank-notes were stored. During my long periods of leisure I took refuge in my pen. How my mind reacted from the iron wall in front of me, and sought solace in memories of all the birds and of summer fields and woods!” I am confident I could not compose essays so evocative of the natural world of these while facing a bank vault door hundreds of miles away.

Why am I back reading Burroughs? After all, he is the second most well-known nature writer of his day (admittedly, a fairly distant second) after John Muir. Many of his books are still in print, and an annual nature-writing medal bears his name. However, the more I delve into the nature-writing world of the 1860s through the 1920s (after which it virtually disappears for a couple of decades), the more I come to realize that Burroughs was its High Priest. His name is the one most mentioned by other nature writers, either well-known in their day or utterly obscure then and now. He set the tone for the time; to understand many of the nature books that followed and the Nature Movement (as Dallas Lore Sharpe calls it) of which they were a part, it is vital to come to grips with Burroughs, including his style, subject matter, and outlook. A few essays will not suffice. I have invested (money and time) in getting to know him well, through all twenty-three volumes of his Collected Works, published three years after his death in the “Wake-Robin Edition”. I was fortunate enough to locate a copy of the set in excellent condition for a third of the price (converted to 2022 dollars) that the set would have cost new. In one volume, I noticed a few pencil marks; otherwise, there is no writing in any of the volumes, no sign of ownership whatsoever. The bindings are tight, the covers undamaged. The pages are a bit tanned, but still of a paper quality sufficient to have deckled sides and a gilt top edge. The cover is supposedly a very dark green, though closer to black. On my bookshelf, the volumes comprise a two-foot dark wall awaiting me. I suspect it will be many years before I reach its end.

Meanwhile, from time to time, I will pull the next volume down from the shelf and saunter through it. It will help keep me reminded of Burroughs’ centrality to nature-writing between shortly after the passing of Thoreau and his own death in 1921. Why he played such a leading role in the Nature Movement is a question that will take much pondering to answer; however, I will sketch out an initial explanation in my next blog post. In this first volume of his work, I encounter a young(ish) John Burroughs in his mid-thirties. According to the dates at the ends of each essay in the book, though, its contents date from 1863 through 1869, when he was in his 20s. In keeping with the day, Burroughs included in his outdoor experiences both hunting and fishing. It was perfectly reasonable to shoot a bird in order to identify it or to describe a trout that had been caught and eaten. At times it is tempting to be deeply troubled by this; then I recall that I am at the beginning of Burroughs’ 50-year journey as a writer, during which his outlook toward nature certainly changed.

The essays in this volume can be dispatched in relatively short order. His opening salvos in the nature field definitely emphasize birds; as he notes in the preface, he wishes the book to be “an invitation to the study of Ornithology.” As such, it is one I must turn down. Most of the essays are highly bird-centric, with the notable exception of “Birch Browsings”, a whimsical account of a nature excursion (with the aim of trout fishing) that Burroughs undertook with some friends. The trip was mostly a disaster, since the fishing party was unable to figure out the directions to the lake, and ended up somewhat lost in the woods with practically no food. Along the way, Burroughs describes some of the flora and fauna. The essay is a delightful mix of story and nature experience and is frequently anthologized.

Throughout the essays, I paid close attention to any name-dropping, seeking to identify Burroughs’ early influences. He mentioned Thoreau repeatedly, and Wilson Flagg once. He quoted Wordsworth but did not mention Emerson. In the more strictly ornithological realm, he mentioned John James Audubon, Thomas Nuttall, and Alexander Wilson; twice he referred to a “Dr. Brewer”. I was surprised to locate Thomas Mayo Brewer (1814-1880) right away using Google.

Those looking for early glimmers of a conservation outlook will not find them here. In fact, in his very first essay, “The Return of the Birds,” Burroughs argues that human civilization has been highly beneficial to many American bird species. Many songbirds, he suggested, are more abundant and sing more now that they have meadows and forests created by European settlers clearing the forest. (The recognition that Native American peoples intentionally cleared forest areas using fire long before the arrival of the Mayflower would have to wait on William Cronon 132 years later.) Here is Burroughs’ argument, in full:

Yet, notwithstanding that birds have come to look upon man as their natural enemy, there can be little doubt that civilization is on the whole favorable to their increase and perpetuity, especially to the smaller species. With man come flies and moths, and insects of all kinds in greater abundance; new plants and weeds are introduced, and, with the clearing up of the country, are sowed broadcast over the land.

As noted earlier in this post, this is a snapshot of John Burroughs in his early days as a writer; I am eager to see how his views may change across half a century of his work. It is unlikely that he realized when he first issued his invitation to others to get out into nature and study the birds that he was at the inception of a Nature Movement that would span the rest of his life, and in which he would take considerable part.

Sitting at the Feet of Nature: “Prose Pastorals” by Herbert Milton Sylvester (1887)

 book review, Environmental conservation, Insects, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Jul 022022
 
The Emerald Pool by Albert Bierstadt (1870)

A half-hour’s climb ends at the well-worn path that follows the steep descent to the edge of Emerald Pool, made famous by its portrait by Bierstadt… At first glance at the liquid emerald below, one’s inclination is to sit down upon the rude plank seat upheld between two huge spruces growing just above the Pool, so restful and so full of repose is this charming nook. It is a place above all others in which to dream and drowse. Strange fancies flit through the brain, and the world is forgotten. I am sitting at the feet of Nature, spellbound by the magic of her subtle influences. Above is the dark silhouette of the treetops against the sky, and below is a circular sheet of water, less than a hundred feet in diameter, unsurpassed in its natural beauty by any woodland pool I have ever seen, and so translucent as to reflect the minutest object above it. It is an emerald cup brimful of liquid amber. At its head, massive buttresses of granite stretch almost across the stream, to stay the torrent of the Peabody but a moment, that with tumultuous roar pushes through the narrow flume of these rocks out into the basin of deep, calm water, leaving a track white as the snow of winter. A few feet below the commotion of the cascade, the boiling, seething current is soon lost in faint and ever-widening ripples, tinged with every shade of green from dark to light, — to almost the paleness of sherry as they reach out toward the shallows at its lower edge, where they again escape in wild, broken leaps over the mountain roadway, paved with immense boulders, into the valley. An old gnarled wide-limbed canoe birch, dirty-white, spotted with blotches of sienna and umber, leans far out over the Pool, every limb and tiny twig of which is reproduced in reverse upon or within its polished surface, while around its ragged margin the tall shapely spruces keep stately watch over this jewel of the mountain, most beautiful when the sun pours down its strong vertical light, when the waters become transparent like crystal, and that are like a huge palette strown with rare colors of sky and wood.

Herbert Milton Sylvester (1849-1923) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, where his father held a management position of some kind in a cotton mill. When Sylvester was 10, his father related to a farm in Maine for his health. Sylvester spent the rest of his childhood there and at Bridgton Academy, a boarding school in rural Maine. After college (location unknown), he went into legal practice, serving in Portland for 13 years before relocating to Boston. While living there, he wrote Prose Pastorals (1887) and Homestead Highways (1888). True to its title, Prose Pastorals is a series of poetic vignettes, mostly reminiscences of Sylvester’s rural childhood in Maine. While not strictly nature writing (farm life figures prominently in some passages), the presence of Nature is woven throughout and is never far from the farmhouse door. “All out-of-door life is filled with poetry and charm,” he announces at one point early in the book. While he finds abundant nature in the farm fields, “It is in the woods,” he observes, “that I find the most perfect repose in nature.”

As a writer, he is perhaps a shade or two shy of profound, and some of his word images, in the style of the times, can be a bit flowery. His poetry, which infuses the book, is solid if some of the rhymes are a tad forced. It is easy to take him as a wealthy city dweller longing for the peace and quiet of his long-lost country life, and that sentiment is present here. Another theme running through the work is his spirituality, heavily influenced by Emerson’s concept of the Over-soul, the transcendent unity of nature of which we are all part. “The lover of Nature,” Sylvester declares,

must, of a truth, be a worshipper at God’s altars. Touch a single key of the piano, and the harp which stands beside will respond with perfect sympathy, but only that string of the harp which accords with that note of the piano will answer with its vibration. Men who are in sympathy with the great Tone constantly sounding throughout Nature will find their hearts unconsciously thrilled with a willing unison of purpose and desire, unconsciously answering its subtle harmonies, unconsciously obedient to the Infinite Hand which has so wonderfully laid the foundations of the grand cathedrals of the woods and mountains. The woods are filled with hosts of unseen worshippers, the mountains with countless altars whose smokes of incense are the white morning mists which lie so lightly along the tree-tops, hiding the battlements of gray, turretted stone and filling the skies with fleecy clouds. The leaping waters that jar the firmly-set rocks the feet of the ever-rising domes, with their tummult and deep reverberations, make the heavy diapson to which all other sounds are attuned. Nature’s grand melodies are ever pitched upon the same key-note. Nature knows no discord. From ocean depth and roar of breaking surf to the light treble of the shallows of the mountain brooklet the harmony is sustained and its rendering is faultless. God sounds the key-note in many a subtle touch of color, tone, and form, animate and inanimate, and wherever he finds a responsive heart there he finds a willing worshipper.

What rescues Sylvester, in my eyes, at least, is that there is another thread running through many of these pastoral pieces. He does not merely celebrate grand vistas and dramatic weather. He also bends down to the ground to explore the myriad invertebrates lurking in the forest leaf litter. He describes ant behaviors from close observations, and frequently mentions (and quotes) John Burroughs. Even Charles Darwin is mentioned a couple of times. He may find “poetry and charm” in nature, but what he notices also piques his curiosity and wonder:

Bird-life and insect-life are full of interest and fascination, and they tell charming stories of intellect and intelligence; and their movements are full of constant surprises, even to those who know them best. The big-bodied humblebee of the fields and meadows, his coat slashed with gold and black velvet, with pollen-covered wings, probing the pink-hewed tubes of the field-clover for their nectar, while the wind sways both bee and clover blossom to and fro like a child in a swing; the ant-carpenter sawing away diligently at a twig or leaf, making lumber for the building and finishing of his house; the gray field-spider setting his filmy trap for a dinner or a breakfast, or else dragging his prey into his funnel-shaped den to sup upon at his leisure, are all abundant in attractions, and are but two or three of the hosts of magicians who make the study of Nature so charming.

Humbled by the complexity of Nature, Sylvester embraces its study as a lifelong endeavor: “How much there is to see in these tramping-grounds of Nature, and how much there is to learn! The ground is written over in all directions with intelligible signs for men’s deciphering.” The passage quoted here, unfortunately, goes on to identify some of those who might seek to decipher these signs: the bee-hunter, the sportsman, the fox-hunter. Indeed, Sylvester admits to a bit of hunting and fishing; after extolling the magnificence of Emerald Pool, he casts a line into the waters and immediately catches a trout. He also shares his approval of crow-hunting, confessing that he finds no redeeming qualities in crows. But while Sylvester may have been too conventional in his leanings to bemoan disappearing birds or logged forests in his writings, he also appears to have avoided the naturalist’s worst vices of the day — shooting birds as specimens and collecting their eggs and nests. I would like to think that he may have felt some faint conservationist leanings, even if they never seem to arise in this book.

In this closing paragraph, I will share a few reflections on my reading experience. This is the third book I have read in a row (not counting the booklet by Minot) that had uncut pages in it, despite its age. In the other two volumes, I did not come across an uncut page until quite a distance into the work. In this case, though, I made it only 13 pages before the first one. According to a hastily scrawled note inside the front cover, the book was a gift from HRP to LS in July of 1887. Apparently, HRP was not a good judge of the reading material LS preferred. That said, reading the book was a tactile delight. The pages are gilt at the top, deckled at the edge, and constituted of high-quality, laid paper. The volume is covered in plain, dark blue cloth that has a pleasant softness in the hand. My copy is in remarkable condition; I was honored to be its first reader, only 135 years after it was originally published.

In Behalf of Us Poor, Unhappy, Persecuted Birds: “The Diary of a Bird” by H.D. Minot (1880)

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation  1 Response »
Jun 292022
 

A colleague of mine (long deceased) introduced me to the author of this fascinating little book. I am speaking here of Horace Lunt, who shared some observations of birds and referenced “Mr. Minot” in his 1891 Short Cuts and By-Paths. The name Minot seemed oddly familiar already; in fact, Minot is a small city in eastern North Dakota, which happens to have been named after him. Henry Davis Minot (1859-1890), was a railroad financier and ornithologist. He had an adventuresome and productive though tragically brief life. At Harvard, he met Theodore Roosevelt, and the two become fast friends and traveling companions. After two years enrolled there, Minot left for a lucrative career in the railroad industry, which required extensive travel. Everywhere he went, he recorded the birds he observed. He published several full-length works on birds, beginning with Land Birds and Game Birds of New England, published when he was just 18. Three years later, he published the booklet, The Diary of a Bird. Ten years later he was dead, killed instantly in a railroad collision in Pennsylvania.

Holding it in my hands, The Diary of a Bird feels precious and fragile. Two small staples and a bit of glue (and now, a piece of archival-quality transparent tape) are all that hold it together. Apart from the inevitable browning and a smudge or two, my copy of the booklet is without a blemish. It astounds me that this little volume (selling for 25 cents in 1880 — about $7.16 today) managed to survive 142 years so unscathed. There are no bent pages, no pen or pencil marks, and no stains of coffee or tea. I have no idea how many copies remain; online, I found an image of only one, with much greater wear than this. It was offered at $25 on eBay, and I negotiated to $18. But how does one put a dollar value on something so unusual and underappreciated as this?

At the age of 21, Henry Davis Minot had already seen firsthand the peril America’s birds faced. Young and brash and wanting to do something about the problem, he wrote The Diary of a Bird, sending copies to renowned naturalists of the time, including Samuel Lockwood and John Burroughs. He hoped that the booklet of only thirty-eight pages would raise awareness of the birds’ plight and prompt action. As a work of early environmental conservation, it has been virtually forgotten (as has, I have found through my reading and research, so much of early efforts to protect bison and birds). A charming blog entry from the Massachusetts Historical Society tells Minot’s story, suggesting that his untimely death prevented him from doing more to safeguard America’s birds.

The booklet itself is difficult to categorize. Ostensibly a diary of a black-throated green warbler (“translated” by Minot), it opens with a remark by the “writer” that “I am aware that among men the keeping of a diary is ordinarily a way of misspending a part of one’s time in describing how one has wasted the rest. I disapprove of diaries among birds; yet I have decided to keep one for the purpose of amusing, instructing, and enlightening mankind.” The first few pages chronicle the bird’s arrival in the White Mountains after a long migration from the South, and his mate’s efforts to build a nest and rear their young (with his occasional support). In one early passage, the bird (who has no name, in keeping with all birds) complains about all the white pines that have been lost to logging. He also has a brief run-in with a birder, who is after his feathers for a lady’s hat.

The heart of the booklet concerns a gathering of birds in the woods to discuss The Destruction and Extermination of Birds: how caused, and how to be prevented. Each bird, in turn, shares its greatest threat; these include hunters, egg collectors, domestic cats, and lighthouse collisions. The black-throated green warbler is about to speak when hunters arrive, and the protagonist shelters in a tree cavity an owl had previously occupied. The translator interjects at this point, with statistics on bird deaths for the state of Massachusetts, concluding that humans killed approximately a quarter-million wild birds (including eggs) every year. After quoting other writers on the extent of the problem. the translator offers solutions:

How are the ravages to be checked? By arousing the better sentiment of the people, so, for instance, that birds shall be practically protected for other purposes than mere sport; by having a sufficient police to enforce the present laws, so as to prevent the wanton or illegal destruction of birds and eggs; by more descriminate, effective, and extensive legislation.

Minot goes on to call for an effective game commissioner for every state, and, wonder of wonders, a tax on firearms, “a tax which would prevent, among many other things, many accidents caused by such comparatively useless weapons as pistols.” But even that does not go far enough. “The best law for Massachusetts,” Minot declares, “would be one prohibiting the firing of a shot-gun within the state, for a term of years. (We say this advisedly after thought and consultation.)”

The translator steps aside to allow the warbler gets the last word. In a final diary entry, he makes this plea: “I trust that he to whom these pages are to be consigned, one who, as a sincere lover of Nature, seems to understand our language and to know our ways, will make some appeal to his fellow-men, in behalf of us poor, unhappy, persecuted birds.”

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.

Jesus Was a Pantheist: “Walks in New England” by Charles Goodrich Whiting (1903)

 book review, Books, Day Hikes, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Jun 262022
 

If you happen to search this book by the title on Amazon or any purveyor of used and/or new books, you are likely to encounter quite a few hiking guides to New England. This is not one of them. The author, Charles Goodrich Whiting (1842-1922), lived and worked in the Springfield, Massachusetts area, and clearly spent many hours out-of-doors. Yet while he writes fondly of the natural landscape (particularly its botanical elements), he does not report on any actual walks he has taken. The frontispiece photo shows him taking a break on a hike up Mount Tom; a brief statement about the photographs (in stunning sepia) mentions “constant companions” that I assume accompanied his hikes; but only once does he report on an actual walk. Even then, all we know is that he and several others climbed the south side of Mount Tom one autumn, walking along the ridge and finding 56 wildflower species in bloom (the first BioBlitz?). Otherwise, there is an endless cavalcade of brief essays (few more than four pages) describing seasonal offerings, mostly plants in bloom at a given time. Blended into the volume are many poems, some enchanting (works of Emerson, Whitman, and Longfellow) and others less so (his own). The third ingredient of this book is a pious Christianity that sees the natural world through a highly positive, somewhat transcendental lens. If not obsessed with the question of death, Whiting certainly brings it up frequently, reminding the reader (and himself) over and over that it does not exist. The essays themselves are arranged in an arc of the seasons, from late winter back through to midwinter. Whiting was an editor for the Springfield Republican newspaper, and author of a Sunday column, “The Saunterer.” The essays in Walks in New England were likely compiled from several years’ worth of his columns. As a result, there is a fair bit of repetition; the same wildflower appears in bloom across multiple essays. One essay may speak of particular weather conditions, but the next essay might be from another year altogether. As a work of phenology, it could have been improved, at the minimum, by an indication of the original publication dates of each piece.

Did I mention that my copy of this book, once in the library of C. J. Peacock, had many uncut pages in it? Apparently, I am the first one to have read it from cover to cover in nearly 120 years.

Now that I have thoroughly disparaged the book, I will argue that it is one that bears closer scrutiny: his Christianity would hardly be called conventional, for one. And for another, his outlook on human civilization and its environmental impacts seems far more ecologically aware than I would have suspected in 1903.

“Jesus was a pantheist…he knew no space where God was not,” Whiting declared. And while the gnostic, pantheistic Jesus is recognized in some circles today, it was certainly not the conventional perspective on his nature at the time Whiting lived. There are glimmers of this Jesus in the four gospels of the New Testament; but mostly this is the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian scripture excluded from the New Testament as apocryphal. The 77th verse from that gospel reads, “Jesus said, ‘I am the light that shines upon all things. Indeed, I am all things. Everything comes from me, and everything returns to me. Whenever you split a log or turn over a stone, you can find me there.'” But Whiting’s spirituality does not stop there. Consider these passages from his book:

Let us open our eyes, our ears, our hearts to the great current of life, of which we are but a part, — how small a part or how great we cannot yet imagine…

The universe, from least atom to greatest concourse of atoms, from the simplest sensitiveness to the furthest reaches of man’s soul, is all one living being, of which man no less surely and no more truly than the amoeba is the expression…

All life is one; we are one with tree and shrub and flower, one with squirrel and bird, one even with the sinuous serpent…

On a mountain top dwells the vast Oversoul, and man accepts his place, and is silent…

Although Whiting cannot help but single out a serpent, this one is beneficent, a vital part of creation in which “everything in Nature has its value.” But alas, like Eden, this garden universe in which we exist as part of all that is also has a serpent in the darker sense. Where that evil arises, how harm can come from a part of all that is (a fragment of God?) is unaddressed. But it is there, and it is us. After another lovely passage about the beauty of Nature, Whiting interjects, “So goes on the life of earth, only interfered with by man, who does his worst to ruin and obliterate this constant impulse of life.” A few pages later, in a different essay, Whiting again disrupts a peaceful forest landscape to add social commentary: “…and as one drinks of the cold spring beneath the hemlocks, he partakes of the greatest blessing of Nature, the pure essence of her life, distilled through clouds and suns, and filtered through the channel of the holy earth, where as yet man has not arrived to delete and pollute with his many inventions.” Finally, here is one more passage of condemnation, with the added thought that what we do to nature we do ultimately to ourselves: “As for man, only he introduces a breach in the order of being, and destroys tree and flower and bird without respect to their offices, despoiling himself the worst of all.”

At various points, Whiting identifies several ways that humans have adversely impacted nature. One is deforestation; there are repeated references to “the woodsman’s axe”, and Whiting notes that almost all trees in the region are no older than 30 years. Another is air pollution, “the soft coal smoke that hangs over the valley,” an inevitable by-product of industrialization, and entirely unregulated at the time. The steam railroads, meanwhile, were sparking many fires along their routes. Yet another destructive force is the hunter:

Now all the forest regions would be full of squirrels, rabbits, foxes and others of their kin, — of grouse and woodcock, too, — were it not for the hunters, who almost outnumber the game. The woodland on our western hills abounded in these charming creatures, 40 years ago, but now there are probably more gray squirrels in Springfield streets than there are on Mount Tom or Mount Holyoke. It is probable that city protection may yet be the only means to preserve them.

But the worst of the hunters were those going after birds, mostly for the millinery trade. The result had been not only the decimation of many bird species but an ecological impact too, as Whiting explains:

In the state of Nature all these [insects] are kept in subjection by the birds, but since of late years the birds have been slaughered by wholesale to make women’s hats hideous, the balance is lost, and hence we have plagues of elm beetles, cottony louses, and gypsy and brown-tailed moths. Thousands of varieties of insects have found their proper food on trees from time immemorial, and might continue to do so without reminding us of the Plagues of Egypt, were it not for the women who want birds and feathers of birds on their hats… Why do they proclaim themselves murderers?

Dutch Elm Disease, spread by the elm beetle, arrived in the United States. Could it be that the depredation of birds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped enable this beetle to spread the blight more rapidly than otherwise would have been the case? Beyond this intriguing prospect, I have to admit that I am quite impressed by Whiting’s grasp of how food chains work, way back in 1903.

Finally, Whiting also appears to have decried in humanity what we would refer to today as a limited grasp of sustainability.

What has man been given reason for? Apparently, to make a dollar to-day. forgeting that generations are to come after him to whom this dollar will be valueless because long since expended, and whom his destruction of the very sources of life has left us poor indeed…

What the earth is to render, what society is to become, when we are gone, — these things are not sufficiently regarded by the present generation.

Wow. That sounds frightfully like our present situation. It is quite depressing, really. Whiting felt the same way. After a few pages indicting humanity for these crimes against Nature, he announces, “Let us try to escape from these difficult and dispiriting thoughts,” and returns to his descriptions of field and forest scenes. As T.S. Eliot would later observe in Burnt Norton, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Finally, about C.J. Peacock (not to be confused with J. Alfred Prufrock, also from T.S. Eliot): it turns out that another book from his collection ended up in the holdings of the University of Prince Edward Island, which happens to have established a program called Book Lives. It traces, wherever possible, the life stories of those who originally owned the books. In this case, C.J. Peacock was born in 1834 in Yorkshire, England. He apprenticed to become a draper (a very different “man of the cloth”) but ended up working as a dentist in Scarborough, England. He retired in 1911, but it is not known when he died or how his book made its journey back across the Atlantic Ocean.

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