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”.
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.
Charles Dudley Warner in 1875; photographer unknown.
Winds…circle about New England. They form a ring about it; they lie in wait on its borders, but only to spring upon it and harry it. They follow each other in contracting circles, in whirlwinds, in maelstroms of the atmosphere; they meet and cross each other, all at a moment. This New England is set apart; it is the exercise ground of the weather. Storms bred elsewhere come here full-grown; they come in couples, in quartets, in choruses. If New England were not mostly rock, the winds would carry it off; but they would bring it all back again, as happens with the sandy portions. What sharp Eurus carries to Jersey, Africus brings back. When the air is not full of snow, it is full of dust. This is called one of the compensations of Nature.
AFTER SO MANY SERIOUS INVESTIGATIONS OF OUR RELATIONSHIP TO NATURE, CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER’S ESSAYS ARE DELIGHTFUL SPRING BREEZES. Charming in their levity and rich in exaggeration, they explore (even celebrate) a contrary outlook on Nature. For Warner, Nature is capricious, somewhat dangerous (though not too hostile), and something best appreciated in short spells punctuated by comfortable hours at the fireside at home. Warner’s writing style is reminiscent of Mark Twain’s; indeed, the two co-authored a book, “The Gilded Age”, just two years before Warner published this one. But unlike Mark Twain, at the root of all the humor is a light-heartedness. Yes, nature can be really unpleasant, but time spent out of doors still translates into joyful memories, and the wanderer lost in the woods finds his way home at last with relatively few mishaps. At the close of his essay Camping Out, after two nights of soaking rain in a waterlogged camp in the woods, for instance, Warner remarks that most of the folks on the outing will likely return to the woods again, “For he who has once experienced the fascination of the woods-life never escapes its enticement; in the memory nothing remains but its charm.”
MY FAVORITE ESSAY IN THIS SLENDER VOLUME, WITHOUT A DOUBT, IS LOST IN THE WOODS. For anyone who has had that singular experience (as I have, through no fault but my own, not five miles from my doorstep), the essay rings true. And it is hilarious. My greatest complaint about Warner is that his essays are mostly too brief. I could read on and on about his travails getting home after a day of fly fishing in a mountain gorge (an adventure that yielded him only one small trout. (“Never were there such places for trout; but the trout were out of their places.”) Take, for instance, this scene in which Warner, pushing through the woods for hours with night approaching, finally consults his compass with a less than desirable outcome:
It then occurred to me that I had better verify my course by the compass. There was scarcely light enough to distinguish the black end of the needle. To my amazement, the compass, which was made near Greenwich, was wrong. Allowing for the natural variation of the needle, it was absurdly wrong. It made out that I was going south when I was going north. It intimated, that, instead of turning to the left, I had been making a circuit to the right. According to the compass, the Lord only knew where I was.
The inclination of persons in the woods to travel in a circle is unexplained. I suppose it arises from the sympathy of the legs with the brain. Most people reason in a circle: their minds go round and round, always in the same track. For the last half hour I had been saying over a sentence that started itself: “I wonder where the road is!” I had said it over till it had lost all meaning. I kept going round on it; and yet I could not believe that my body had been travelling in a circle. Not being able to recognize any tracts, I have no evidence that I had so travelled, except the general testimony of lost men.
The compass annoyed me. I’ve known experienced guides utterly discredit it. It could n’t be that I was to turn about, and go the way that I had come. Nevertheless, I said to myself: “You’d better keep a cool head, my boy, or you are in for a night of it. Better listen to science than to spunk.” And I resolved to heed the impartial needle.
On the right direction back to the inn at last (but still not having come across the road to take him there), Warner confronts his hunger in the wilds of the Adirondacks:
I began to be a question whether I could hold out to walk all night; for I must travel, or perish. And now I imagined that a spectre was walking by my side. This was Famine. To be sure, I had only recently eaten a hearty luncheon; but the pangs of hunger got hold on me when I thought that I should have no supper, no breakfast; and, as the procession of unattainable meals stretched before me, I grew hungrier and hungrier. I could feel that I was becoming gaunt, and wasting away: already I seemed to be emaciated. It is astonishing how speedily a jocund, well-conditioned human being can be transformed into a spectacle of poverty and want. Lose a man in the woods, drench him, tear his pantaloons, get his imagination running on his lost supper and the cheerful fireside that is expecting him, and he will become haggard in an hour. I am not dwelling on these things to excite the reader’s sympathy, but only to advise him, if he contemplates an adventure of this kind, to provide himself with matches, kindling-wood, something more to eat than one raw trout, and not to select a rainy night for it.
Nature is so pitiless, so unresponsive, to a person in trouble! I had read of the soothing companionship of the forest, the pleasure of the pathless woods. But I thought, as I stumbled along in the dismal actuality, that if I ever got out of it I would write a letter to newspapers, exposing the whole thing. There is an impassive, stolid brutality about the woods that has never been enough insisted on.
His response to his plight is to rail at Nature, sounding a marked counterpoint to all those nature-seekers of the day. Of course, when one considers the minor nature of Warner’s actual circumstances (versus survival stories of marooned athletes that wind up eating each other, for instance), the words begin to seem more comical than sincere. His quite rational reaction to this realization of nature’s brutality is to contemplate harm to the vegetation:
It seemed to me that it would be a sort of relief to kick the trees. I don’t wonder that the bears fall to, occasionally, and scratch the bark off the great pines and maples, tearing it angrily away. One must have some vent to his feelings. It is a common experience of people lost in the woods to lose their head; and even the woodsmen themselves are not free from this panic when some accident has thrown them out of their reckoning. Fright unsettles the judgement: the oppressive silence of the woods is a vacuum in which the mind goes astray. It’s a hollow sham, this pantheism, I said; being “one with Nature” is all humbug: I should like to see somebody. Man, to be sure, is of very little account, and soon gets beyond his depth; but the society of the least human being is better than this gigantic indifference. The “rapture on the lonely shore” is agreeable only when you know you can at any moment go home.
ONE OTHER ESSAY IN THE BOOK IS PARTICULARLY WORTH NOTING; A-HUNTING OF THE DEER. Most of the tale is told from the deer’s point of view. It is a tragic story in which a mother deer is forced by approaching hounds to abandon her fawn to keep it protected, leading the hounds on a chase down the hill, through a town, and up another mountain, concluding at a lake. Everywhere she runs, people have guns pointed at her. Finally, exhausted, swimming out into a lake to escape the approaching dog, she is knocked unconscious by a boat paddle and killed with a knife to the jugular vein. The poor fawn survives, but is left in the company of a buck who cannot provide the young deer with the food it needs. It is certainly Warner’s most tragic tale, accentuated by his emphasis on the innate brutality of humans:
In a panic, frightened animals will always flee to human-kind from the danger of more savage foes. They always make a mistake in doing so. Perhaps the trait is the survival of an era of peace on earth; perhaps it is a prophecy of the golden age of the future. The business of this age is murder, — the slaughter of animals, the slaughter of fellow-men, by the wholesale.
LEST THE READER IMAGINE THAT WARNER HIMSELF WAS NOT FOND OF NATURE, I WILL CLOSE WITH A PASSAGE FROM AN EXCERPT FROM HIS ESSAY, WHAT SOME PEOPLE CALL PLEASURE. It is about his part in a hiking expedition ascending Nipple Top, a peak adjacent to Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks. Perhaps it is the sunnier weather (so many of Warner’s essays are set on stormy days), but here we have a different response to Nature, one more aesthetic and even celebratory:
The afternoon was bright; there was a feeling of exultation and adventure in stepping off into the open but pathless forest; the great stems of deciduous trees were mottled with patches of sunlight, which brought out upon the variegated barks and mosses of the old trunks a thousand shifting hues. There is nothing like a primeval wood for color on a sunny day. The shades of green and brown are infinite; the dull red of the melock bark glows in the sun, the russet of the changing moose-bush becomes brilliant; there are silvery openings here and there; and everywhere the columns rise up to the canopy of tender green which supports the intense blue sky and holds up a part of it from falling through in fragments to the floor of the forest. Decorators can learn here how Nature dares to put blue and green in juxtaposition; she has evidently the secret of harmonizing all the colors.
A FEW CLOSING WORDS ABOUT MY COPY OF THIS BOOK. Originally published in 1875, it was reprinted by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1905 as part of its Riverside Literature Series. My copy is actually copyright 1906 by Susan Lee Warner, his widow. The flyleaf identifies Sam Webb, at 852 Fifth Avenue in New York (in case anyone wants to try to locate him) as the author. The penmanship suggests a child’s hand. There is also the year 1922 written on the flyleaf, also in blue ink but not near the name. For the sake of a narrative, let’s assume he obtained the book then. There is also a bookplate on the inside front cover for The Pierson Library in Shelburne, Vermont. According to that, the book was a gift of Mrs. J. W. Webb, 3/10/30. My guess would be that she was Sam’s mother, who donated his book to a library after he was finished with it (and perhaps had gone off to college). The word “discarded” is written across the bookplate, but the date of that event is unknown. Below is a photograph of the library entrance as it looked prior to 2019, when a town center revitalization project was undertaken, including what appears to be an entirely new library building. Perhaps this book was discarded as part of a general review of library holdings prior to this.
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 ITIS 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.
Because I was newly in the country I was constantly under the feeling of its past. Hither and thither I went in the region round about, listening at every turn, spying into every bush at the stirring of a leaf or the chirp of a bird; yet I had always with me the men of ’63, and felt always that I was on holy ground.
IN 1895 OR THEREABOUTS, THE BOSTON NATURE WRITER BRADFORD TORREY VACATIONED FOR SEVERAL WEEKS IN SOUTH-CENTRAL TENNESSEE. An avid birder and occasional appreciator of other animals or native plants, he spent most of his time roaming a Civil Warm landscape in search of birds. In that quest he is, at times, quite intense. The story opens with his arrival at Missionary Ridge, outside Chattanooga. The rail car he has taken was occupied by several Confederate veterans who invite him to join them in climbing a view tower at the site of General Braxton Bragg’s headquarters “where they would show me the whole battlefield and tell me about the fight.” Instead, distracted by a bird, Torrey remains on the ground. “I might have heard all about the battle from a man who was there,” he relates to his readers, “and instead I went off to listen to a sparrow singing in a bush.” And for the next several dozen pages, all Torrey writes about are the birds he encounters — the ones he sees and identifies, and the ones he only hears and wonders about. Meanwhile, in the background is the immense drama that unfolded there about thirty years before, including the Battle of Chickamauga, a Confederate victory that was not enough to turn the tide of war in the Rebels’ favor. In the 1890s, many Civil War veterans were still living, and would visit the battlefields to recall their past moments of glory and struggle. Residents of the area, too, carried memories of those fateful days in September of 1863.
Finally, the Civil War seeps into Torrey’s tale, displacing the endless litany of birds. While on Chickamauga battlefield, the author converses with a Confederate veteran of Vicksburg:
…he gave me a vivid description of his work in the trenches, as well as the surrender, and the happiness of the half-starved defenders of [Vicksburg], who were at once fed by their captors.
All his talk showed a lively sense of the horrors of war. He had seen enough of fighting, he confessed; but he could n’t keep away from a battlefield, if he came anywhere near one.
All around him, the landscape contained traces of its violent past, brought back to life by first-hand and second-hand memories of those terrible days of war:
From the hill it was but a few steps to the Snodgrass house, where a woman stood in the yard with a young girl, and answered all my inquiries with cheerful and easy politeness. None of the Snodgrass family now occupied the house, she said, though one of the daughters still lived just outside the reservation. The woman had heard her describe the terrible scenes on the days of the battle. The operating-table stood under this tree, and just there was a trench into which the amputated limbs were thrown. Yonder field, now grassy, was then planted with corn; and when the Federal troops were driven through it, they trod upon their own wounded, who begged piteously for water and assistance. A large tree in front of the house was famous, the woman said; and certainly it was well hacked. A picture of it had been in “The Century.” General Thomas was said to have rested under it; but an officer who had been there not long before to set up a granite monument near the gate told her that General Thomas did n’t rest under that tree, nor anywhere else. Two things he did, past all dispute: he saved the Federal army from destruction and made the Snodgrass farmhouse an American shrine.
After passing the home that had been General Rosencrans’ headquarters during the battle, Torrey relates to readers,
…I came to a diminutive body of water, — a sink-hole, — which I knew at once could be nothing but Bloody Pond. At the time of the fight it contained the only water to be had for a long distance,. It was fiercely contended for, therefore, and men and horses drank from it greedily, while other men and horses lay dead in it, having dropped while drinking….
…a chickadee gave out his long and quiet sound just behind me, and a…swallow dropped upon the water’s edge. The pond was of the smallest and meanest, — muddy shore, muddy bottom, and muddy water; but men fought and died for it in those awful September days of heat and dust and thirst. There was no better place on the field, perhaps, in which to realize the horrors of the battle, and I was glad to have the chickadee’s voice the last sound in my ears as I turned away.
Throughout much of his stay in that part of Tennessee, Torrey kept encountering veteran soldiers and older civilians who recalled events from the Civil War. At one point, he met up with an old Union soldier from Massachusetts who had been born in Canada but joined up with a Michigan regiment. Torrey explained to readers that he wasn’t certain how it came to pass that he learned this information, but “in that country, where so much history had been made, it was hard to keep the past out of one’s conversation.”
ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, IT WAS THE PROSPECT OF BIRDING THAT BROUGHT TORREY TO TENNESSEE, AND THE BOOK IS MOSTLY ABOUT THAT. I am sure there are avid birders out there that relish accounts of other’s efforts to augment their life lists, but I do not count myself among the number. After telling of his unexpected glimpse of a Cape May warbler on Cameron Hill in Chattanooga, Torrey explained why he kept searching for birds — an argument that ultimately led him to speak in defense of all naturalists and the lives they lead:
“What good does it do?” a prudent friend and advisor used to say to me, smiling at the fervor of my first ornithological enthusiasm. He thought he was asking me a poser; but I answered gaily, “It makes me happy;” and taking things as they run, happiness is a pretty substantial “good.” So was it now with the sight of this long-desired warbler. It taught me nothing; it put nothing into my pocket, but it made me happy, — happy enough to sing and shout , though I am ashamed to say I did neither….
It is one precious advantage of natural history studies that they afford endless opportunities for a man to enjoy himself in this sweetly childish spirit, while at the same time his occupation is dignified by a certain scientific atmosphere and relationship. He is a collector of insects, let us say. Whether he goes to the Adirondacks for the summer, or to Florida for the winter, he is surrounded with nets and cyanide bottles. He travels with them as another travels with packs of cards. Every day’s catch is part of the game; and once in a while, as happened to me on Cameron Hill, he gets a “great hand,” and in imagination, at least, sweeps the board. Commonplace people smile at him, no doubt; but that is only amusing, and he smiles in turn. He can tell many good stories under that head. He delights to be called a “crank.” It is all because of people’s ignorance. They have no idea that he is Mr. So-and-So, the entomologist; that he is in correspondence with learned men the country over; that he once discovered a new cockroach, and has had a grasshopper named after him; that he has written a book, or is going to write one. Happy man! a contributor to the world’s knowledge, but a pleasure-seeker; a little of the savant, and very much of a child; a favorite of Heaven, whose work is play. No wonder it is commonly said that natural historians are a cheerful set.
Now there’s a sentiment that George Torrey Simpson (no relation) would have agreed to with enthusiasm!
FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. A “first edition” (was there a second?) from 1896, its cover (show at the opening of this post) is its finest feature. Inside the front cover is the signed name of a previous owner, who was evidently the mother-in-law of the person who sold me the book on eBay: Marguerite Heloise Crownover. The other feature of this volume is a child’s cartoon on page 9, preserving for posterity the claim that “mrs. mader is crazy!” In some truly enlightened dialogue, the smaller stick figure says “she sure is!” while the taller ones, arms akimbo, declares that “everybody knows that”. It was news to me, at least. Below the drawing is a mysterious bit of writing involving b. b. and c. c. with a plus and the letters l, o, v, and e in the four quadrants. The identities of the two besotted youths have, alas, been lost to history.
The obvious question, then, is was this actually a classroom literature text? If so, I would have to agree with the artist that Mrs. Mader was indeed crazy.
There is a nameless charm in the flatwoods, there is enchantment for the real love of nature in their very sameness. One feels a sense of their infinity as the forest stretches away into space beyond the limits of vision; they convey to the mind a feeling of boundless freedom. The soft, brilliant sunshine filters down through the needle-like leaves and falls in patches on the flower-covered floor; there is a low, humming sound, sometimes mimicking the patter of raindrops, as the warm southeast wind drifts through the trees; even the loneliness has an attraction. To me it all brings a spirit of peace, a feeling of contentment; within the forest nature rules supreme. The memory of all that is evil and annoying has fallen away like the burden of Christian at the foot of the cross; I am alone and utterly care free in the pine woods. I cast off all my troubles and discomforts of my daily existence, the strain and worry of civilization; I am happy as a child. I am at peace with the earth, the forest, the sky, the entire world. As I lie in the long, soft grass I feel that I do not care to go back to the dull, sordid routine of every day life again.
GOING BACK THROUGH THIS BOOK AFTER RELUCTANTLY FINISHING IT, I KNEW RIGHT AWAY WHAT PASSAGE TO CHOOSE TO OPEN MY POST. No matter that Simpson was in his mid-70s when he wrote this book (he lived nearly another decade after this) — his childlike nature is everywhere on these pages. Wandering the Florida Keys, he gleefully recalls all the times he was mistaken for a tramp and (literally) left out in the rain by residents who looked askance at him. In pursuit of his beloved tree snails, he nearly died from mosquito bites (more to follow on that) and was constantly in the mud or struggling through greenbriars and thorny cacti. Yet he was also a keen scientist, one who used his tree snail collection to assemble a history of the environmental changes South Florida had undergone in the previous thousands of years. His writing is a delight, albeit a costly one (more about that later, also). He speaks of nature with religious rapture on one page, then recounts tales of Cuban rum-runners he knew that managed to evade the law by various creative means. I will save the humor and pathos of his collecting adventures for the second half of this post; first, though, some more passages that place him firmly in the company of religious naturalists. This one is from an account of a visit to Paradise Key in the Everglades:
We ventured a little way into the glades but the rains had made the mud very soft and after getting a backward view of the forest in which some fifteen great royals [royal palms] showed themselves, we started in on our return along the trail. Before reaching the road I left my companions and went back into the hammock. Leaving the trail I worked my way out into the dense, tangled growth, and as I sat down at the foot of a great tree and gazed around and upward it seemed as though the spirit of the forest took possession of me. On the ground was a carpet of dead leaves, for in such places they are falling all the time, and over this the few rays of the sun that came through the dense foliage seemed to be almost filtered. Near me several young palms, twelve to fifteen feet high, stood like graceful forest nymphs, their long leaves arching upward and outward with indescribable beauty. Around me on every hand were countless trunks of other trees varying from a few inches to several feet in diameter, erect, leaning or nearly prostrate, those of the live oaks almost black from the wetting by the rain, the gumbo limbos coppery, the poison tree brown, the West Indian cherry reticulated and variegated while the lancewoods and Ilex were white. Some were clothed with vivid green from several feet from the ground, a mantle spread over them by the abundant mosses, and immense lianes were carelessly thrown over all. Close by was the smooth, straight trunk of a big royal, pushed far up, its crown lost in the greenery above, but not far away stood another and through an opening in the leaves I could see its great head restlessly swinging in the strong wind, not a breath of which reached the ground where I sat. Not the slightest sound disturbed me; in fact one of the charms of the great forest is its stillness. I sat and fairly drank in the wonderful silence and loneliness of the hammock. In such a place one must be alone to enjoy the full beauty and sweetness of it all. Even the presence of the most congenial friend or lover of nature is distracting and in a sense a disturbing element. Alone with uncovered head I bared my life, my all to the Great Power of the Universe, call it Nature, God, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma or whatever you will, and reverently worshipped.
In his very next essay, The Vagaries of Vegetation, he shares his thoughts about intelligence in nature, coming to a conclusion as to where his religious outlook lies:
There is no chance, no haphazard; nothing happens. The universe is governed by law; no power can change or set it aside for a moment. Whenever and wherever life can fit itself to its domination it will survive and flourish; if it does not it perishes and becomes extinct.
I cannot believe either in a loving or hating deity who sits on a throne somewhere in the universe and watches over his creatures, who listens to and answers prayers, who orders the suns and planets on their courses, who make the rains , the wind storms and earthquakes. Yet I cannot be a mere materialist. I am sure there is not only matter and law but that there is intelligence, spirit. I constantly find the lower forms of life doing just what I would do with their environment, sometimes with less intelligence, sometimes with more. I can only believe that in a way these things think. I believe I must be, to some extent, a Pantheist.
LEST WE CONSIGN SIMPSON TOO QUICKLY TO THE ROLE OF MOUNTAINTOP (OR TREETOP) SAGE, THERE IS ANOTHER, HIGHLY COMICAL AND SELF-DEPRECATING SIDE TO HIM WHICH I ENJOYED IMMENSELY. His first essay in the book, Down the West Coast, chronicles an 1885 boat trip along the southwest coast of Florida that kindled his zoological cravings:
Not very far away [from the ruin of a coastal home] there was some fine hammock and on searching through it I came across the first specimens of the large, handsome arboreal snails called Liguus I ever collected. I was overjoyed to find them and from that day to the present time I have been completely daft about them, having tramped and traveled thousands of miles in lower Florida, Cuba and Haiti in an effort to collect and study them.
These wanderings led to some challenging moments for our author-protagonist, to say the least. Lest the reader every contemplate a trip to the Florida Keys, here is Simpson’s tale of his quest for Liguus specimens on Lower Matecumbe Key, long before the highway 1A was built (though after the Keys were connected by railroad):
The island of Lower Matecumbe is about three miles long and shaped something like a kidney with the concave side toward the mainland. The southwest end is largely a buttonwood swamp, but the other end is higher and contains a good deal of very dense, gangled scrub hammock. There are probably sixty or more species of native trees on the island, all tropical unless it is the cabbage palmetto, and the forest nowhere rises to a height of over thirty-five feet. A large part of the trees and vines are thorny, and I counted a full dozen species of these as I worked by way into it, twelve apostles of villainy, the worst of all being the dreadful Cereus pentagonus [triangle cactus]. There were three other cacti, the terrible pull-and-haul-back, a toothache tree, a Pithecolobium which bears the appropriate common name of “cat’s claw”, a couple of rampant vines, (Guilandina or nicker beans) which are covered with spines even to the seed pods, tw hateful Smilax [green briar] and a dwarf century plant. In such scrub the rocky floor is more or less covered with decaying tinder and as one of the natives once observed, “Them thorns stays right thar an’ is ready for bizness after the wood is all rotted an’ gone.”
In places the forest was so dense I had t get down and crawl and in others I was obliged to turn back and get out at the spot where I entered. I have seen mosquitoes worse, but not very often, and it seemed to me that most of the space not occupied by them was filled with sand flies, though there was sufficient room left for all to work freely. Between them they kept my hands and face covered, the bit of the latter feeling like the burn of a coal of fire. Though outside the hammock the wind was strong not a breath was felt where I worked and I was literally in a sweat bath. Every small tree and shrub I touched threw down a shower of water on me and my shoes were soon full. However, it was an ideal time for my business for snails are very active during wet weather, though they hid away when it is dry….
Before I had been in five minutes I ran into one of the curious wasps’ nests which are common in Lower Florida. They are hung to a twig by a slender stem and consist of a single series, or sometimes two, of papery cells whose sides are so glued to each other that they run diagonally to the direction of the whole. The wasps are small but make up in ferocity what they lack in size; they are regular dynamos of condensed villainy. A little later I ran into another and shortly before leaving the hammock I stumbled and partly fell, striking my hand against a third. In attempting to run from the wasps I stepped into a depression and fell full length into a bed of the dreadful cactus (Cereus pentagonus). Finally my face swelled so from the stings that I could scarcely see, and I determined to leave the hammock. On account of the cloudiness I could not tell which direction to take, but fortunately a train came along and I was soon out on the right of way. In climbing up the embankment I stumbled and fell, dropping my little sack and stepping on it. When I got to the track and turned out the contents I found every precious shell crushed to atmos. I was not merely angry, I was furious. I said that any man, especially at my age, who would come to such an inferno to collect was an idiot. I declared that I would at once go back to camp, pack up and flag the first train for home, that I would never come to the Florida Keys again. After tramping a quarter of a mile the strong wind and rain which blew in my face cooled alike my temper and temperature. I began to think that one of the chief objects of my coming to the Keys was to visit this island and work out certain important problems in distribution and evolution, that if I went home without doing this my trip would be largely wasted and that I might never come again. Why should I be so foolish as to be driven out by a few hardships? Then I wavered, stopped, turned back and went into the inferno again.
But it was on another trip, this time to Big Pine Key, where Simpson nearly died from all the mosquitoes attacking him:
Between the heel or point of Big Pine where the railroad coming from the north enters and the main island is a strip of swamp about two miles long. Over this the track was grown up thickly with grass and weeds to a height of a foot or so and in this the mosquitoes were packed almost solid. Although the atmosphere was full of them yet as I walked along I stirred them up by uncounted millions. The swarms were so dense at times that when I looked downward I could not distinguish the tracks or vegetation, nothing but a confused brownish green cloud and above they dimmed the light of the sun, they actually darkened the air. I have had a good deal of experience with mosquitoes…but I believe I can honestly say that fr numbers and fierceness as well as for a long continued siege what I saw and endured that day exceeded anything I have ever known before or since. I constantly broke off branches from the scrub along the road and brushed them off as well as I could, but they covered the exposed parts of my body until they were gray, and whenever I wiped them from my face, neck or hands the blood dripped on the ground.
The effect of the stings of such a swarm soon became something like that of morphine, producing a stupid, drowsy sensation, and in addition to this my cheeks and eyelids swelled until it was difficult to see. I began to grow weak, my legs tottered, and I realized that I could only last a limited time. Things swayed around me as if I was on a rolling vessel, and again and again I said: “Can I ever get through?” Twice I went to the side of the track and dropped down and gave up, but had I remained there I would have been dead in ten minutes. As often by a supreme effort I dragged myself on to my feet and staggered on half out of my mind for what seemed like hours. Finally I reached the main part of the island and realized that my tormenters were becoming less numerous. I passed through the village and on to where I was stopping, but could not eat and sleep and was sick all night.
Not all Simpson’s misadventures involved insects. He captured one such experience on film for posterity. First, his description of the event, his attempt to step out of a boat onto terra not-so-firma; note that he calls himself “the old man” in this narrative:
Running along the canal [near Moore Haven, Florida] the Doctor [J.K. Small] saw a rather inviting field for plants and the boat came in to the edge of it. There seemed to be some delay about finding a suitable place to land and as there was a fine lot of freshwater mussels in sight and the bank was fully three feet high and looked dry and firm the old man [Simpson] got his collecting outfit and made a flying leap out on to it. When he finally settled into place he careened over and his entire right arm and leg were buried in the soft mud of which the deceptive shore was composed. At once the entire gang aboard fell over and laughed until they cried, and when at last the Doctor was able to sit up, he declared that it was simply a scientific calamity that he couldn’t have had the camera ready and taken a photo of the performance. He said so much about it that the old man, rather than being a disaster to the cause of science went to where he had alighted and fitted himself into the mud again and was photographed. The episode was referred to afterwards as “The Landing of the Pilgrim Father.”
Finally, to close out this post, I will include a picture (literally) of what lengths (or heights) Simpson went to in quest of his snails. This episode, which took place during a visit to Lignumvitae Key:
As I went along I saw at some distance high on a slender tree something which looked like a white Liguus, but it seemed to be altogether too large, I hastened back and found to my astonishment that it was an enormous specimen which, although it was more than thirty feet above me, I was sure was the largest I had ever seen. I at once set my wits to work to secure it…..
It looked so large and handsome that I determined I would try to shin up to it. Shining a tree is pretty good exercise for a young fellow, but for a man nearly seventy-three and weighing more than a hundred and seventy-five pounds it is a good deal like hard work. However, I slowly pulled myself up and whenever I was completely exhausted I clung tightly to the tree and rested. The slender trunk swayed over so that I feared it would break, and once I made up my mind I would not attempt to go any further but the sight of the great, glittering jewel above me tempted me to go on and risk it. At last by reaching out as far as possible I could just touch it with the tip of my finger; then one more tremendous effort and I held it in my hand. I carefully loosened it, put it in my overalls pocket and in about the time it takes to tell of it I slid to the foot of the tree. Then I took it out; I fairly shouted and capered about like a happy boy; I rubbed it against my cheek and lovingly patted it; I talked. foolishly to it. No miser ever gloated over his gold as I did over that magnificent snail.
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN A DELIGHT TO READ — AT TERMS INSPIRING AND AMUSING. Simpson evokes a Florida before development took so much of it, though quite a bit of the degradation actually happened in the author’s lifetime. For instance, here is his account of how much damage had already befallen Lake Okeechobee, including his prediction for its future that is frightfully accurate:
All the glamor and mystery which once surrounded the great lake, all the wildness and loneliness, its beauty and grandeur, its peace and holiness are fast disappearing before the advance of the white man’s civilization and soon it will be only a sheet of dirty water surrounded by truck gardens and having winter homes on its eastern shore. Its rare birds and other wild fauna are gone forever, even the fish which once swarmed its waters are far less abundant than formerly. Its splendid forests are a thing of the past and in their place we will have a lot of cheap bungalows and atrocious plantings of exotics. It should have been preserved as a state or government reservation where its rare flora and rich wild fauna, its mystery and beauty could have been kept forever.
Sadly, it is virtually impossible to find a copy of Simpson’s book nowadays. Until 2017, no printed work newer than 1922 could be scanned for online reading, or published as low-cost on-demand printed paperbacks. (This has supposedly now changed, as this article reports; however, I expect it will be a considerable time before the largely volunteer world of book scanners catches up.) For Out of Doors in Florida, this meant that my only options were to find one in a university library, or purchase one online for a small fortune. Even if I could locate a library copy, I would be stuck in the library for a couple of days, reading it and writing my post. Because that was unrealistic given my daily work demands, I took the latter route, and I have to say this is the most I ever paid for a book (and it was supposedly on a one-week sale on eBay). Suffice it to say that I am delighted that my copy includes Simpson’s complete autograph (he usually signed his letters Chas. T. Simpson).
In terms of the volume’s history, it was formerly the property of the Park East Mobile Home Club, on the Tamiami Trail in Sarasota. One reader/owner filled half the inside back cover with listings of native plants, both common and Latin names, in pencil. I think Simpson would have been pleased to see the book put to such use.
A native royal palm rises 125 feet above the ground of Paradise Key, the Everglades.
In the fifty-two short essays of this volume I have presented familiar objects from unusual points of view. Birds-eye glances and insect’s eye glances, at the nature of our woods and fields, will reveal beauties which are wholly invisible from the usual human view-point, five feet or more above the ground.
Who follows the lines must expect to find moods as varying as the seasons; to face storm and night and cold, and all other delights of what wildness still remains to us upon the earth.
WITH THESE WORDS, THE EXPLORER-NATURALIST WILLIAM BEEBE SETS THE READER ON A JOURNEY THROUGH THE FAMILIAR WILDS OF THE NORTHEAST COAST,FROM JANUARY TO DECEMBER. Clearly inspired by John Burroughs, Beebe intended his first book to be another of many volumes published at the time tracing out seasonal changes in New England and environs (in this case, near New York City). His format: a weekly entry about nearby wildlife, especially birds, capped off with a bit of nature poetry as a nod to the temperment of the age. But at this project, Beebe largely failed. Yes, there are a number of brief pieces about looking at the familiar in new ways, such as studying pond life with a microscope or getting down close to the ground to see the winter world of tunneling mice close-up. But there are a number of chapters — his finest writing in the book, in my estimation — that seek out wilder places such as swamps and marshes or, better still, the open ocean. Indeed, the book’s longest chapter, at twenty-four pages, is Secrets of the Ocean. There is wanderlust in these pages — a world adventurer constrained, for a time, to a single place, seeking to make the most of it. In fact, at one point he celebrates the love of home as a source of abiding connection with the birds he so keenly observes:
This love of home, of birthplace, bridges over a thousand physical differences between feathered creatures and ourselves. We forget their expressionless masks of horn, their scaly toes, and looking deep into their clear, bright eyes, we know and feel a kinship, a sympathy of spirit, which binds us all together, and we are glad.
Clearly, though, while he may appreciate a sense of home, what he truly yearns for instead is wilder places, where humans have not ventured. In wetlands he found an approximation that was temporarily satisfying:
To many, a swamp or marsh brings only that very practical thought of whether it can be readily drained. Let us rejoice, however, that many marshes cannot be thus easily wiped out of existence, and hence they remain as isolated bits of primeval wilderness, hedged about by farms and furrows. The water is the life-blood of the marsh, — drain it, and reed and rush, bird and batrachian, perish or disappear. The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation, — melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man,
The ideal marsh is as far as one can go from civilization. The depths of a wood holds its undiscovered secrets; the mysterious call of the veery sends a wildness that even to-day has not ceased to pervade the old wood. There are spots overgrown with fern and carpeted with velvety wet moss; here also the skunk cabbage and cowslip grow rank among the alders. Surely man cannot live near this place — but the tinkle of a cowbell comes faintly on the gentle stirring breeze — and our illusion is dispelled, the charm is broken.
But even to-day, when we push the punt through the reeds from the clear river into the narrow, tortuous channel of the marsh, we have left civilization behind us. The great ranks of the cattails shut out all view of the outside world; the distant sounds of civilization serve only to accentuate the isolation….
The marsh has remained unchanged since the days when the Mohican Indians speared fish there. We are living in a bygone time. A little green heron flies across the water. How wild he is; nothing has tamed him. He also is the same now as always.
The chapter continues, and night settles in. Beebe revels in the wild sounds and presences all around him, until at least compelled to depart:
All sounds have ceased save the booming of the frogs, which but emphasizes the loneliness of it all. A distant whistle of a locomotive dispels the idea that all the world is wilderness. The firefly lams glow along the margin of the rushes. The frogs are now in full chorus, the great bulls beating their tim-toms and the small fry filling in the chinks with shriller cries. How remote the scene and how melancholy the chorus!….
The moon rises over the hills. The mosquitoes have become savage. The marsh has tolerated us as long as it cares to, and we beat our retreat….
A water snake glides across the channel, leaving a silver wake in the moonlight. The frogs plunk into the water as we push past. A night heron rises from the margin of the river and slowly flops away. The bittern booms again as we row down the peaceful river, and we leave the marshland to its ancient and rightful owners.
ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, IT IS TRUE WILDERNESS HE YEARNS FOR. A microscope or a canoe may carry him out of the familiar for a time, until “the charm is broken”, but the open ocean is far wilder, far more remote, and it calls to him:
We are often held spellbound by the majesty of mountains, and indeed a lofty peak forever capped with snow, or pouring forth smoke and ashes, is impressive beyond all terrestrial things. But the ocean yields to nothing in its grandeur, in its age, in its ceaseless movement, and the question remains forever unanswered, “Who shall sound the mysteries of the sea?” Before the most ancient of mountains rose from the heart of the earth, the waves of the sea rolled as now, and though the edges of the continents shrink and expand, bend into bays or stretch out into capes, always through all the ages the sea follows and laps with ripples or booms with breakers unceasingly upon the shore.
The oceans, too, set a boundary for human destructiveness, or so it seemed to Beebe over a hundred years ago, long before the invention of plastic:
The time is not far distant when the bottom of the sea will be the only place where primeval wildness will not have been defiled or destroyed by man. He may sail his ships above, he may peer downward, even dare to descent a few feet in a suit of rubber or a submarine boat, or he may scratch a tiny furrow for a few yards with a dredge: but that is all.
Alas, Beebe failed to predict so much, from commercial trawler fishing operations to single-use plastic grocery bags…. But in 1906, many years and journeys lay still ahead for him, around the world and into the ocean deeps. He would even return, almost half a century later, to another visit with the commonplace, publishing in 1953 “The Unseen Life of New York” As a Naturalist Sees It”. But for the moment, I will close with one last glimpse of the wilds of a marsh — in this case, a cypress swamp somewhere in the coastal plain of the American Southeast:
…in the mysterious depths of our southern swamps we find the strangely picturesque cypresses, which defy the waters about them. One cannot say where trunk ends and root begins, but up from the stagnant slime rise great arched buttresses, so that the tree seems to be supported on giant six- or eight-legged stools between the arches of which the water flows and finds no chance to use its power. Here, in these lonely solitudes, — heron-haunted, snake-infested, — the hanging moss and orchids search out every dead limb and cover it with an unnatural greenness. Here, great lichens grow and a myriad tropical insects bore and tunnel their way from bark to heart of tree and back again,. Here, in the blackness of night, when the air is heavy with hot, swampy odours, and only the occasional squawk of a heron or cry of some animal is heard, a rending, grinding, crashing, breaks suddenly upon the stillness, a distant boom and splash, awakening every creature. Then the silence again closes down and we know that a cypress, perhaps linking a trio of centuries, has yielded up its life.
FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. Not being overly drawn to costlier first editions, I purchased a 1927 copy of Beebe’s work. The book is without a mark, though the pages are considerably browned with age. Alas, apart from the wintertime scene frontispiece shown above (by Walter King Stone), the book is unillustrated.
All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel, steep or slow they go up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of the hills open into each other, and the high meadows are often wide enough to be called valleys by courtesy; but one keeps this distinction in mind, — valleys are the sunken places of the earth, cañons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God. They have a better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced open glades of pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and there in this hill country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony barriers. These head also for the heart of the mountains; their distinction is that they never get anywhere.
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable thirst.
MARY AUSTIN’S “THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN” IS A LOVE POEM, IN PROSE, TO A LAND AND ITS INHABITANTS, HUMAN AND OTHERWISE. The landscape is the desolate country of eastern California, between the Sierras and Nevada. In Mary Austin’s words, the land is a living presence, evoked vividly and sensorially over the course of her slender tome. Her book is a work of nature writing inasmuch as nature is embedded in its pages, in the form of descriptions of landscapes, plants, and animals. Only once does Austin pause, at chapter’s end, to reflect on the human relationship to the natural world, and her pessimistic viewpoint is one I have encountered before in other writers from this time:
Man is the great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. Being so much warned beforehand, it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely hid. The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.
EXTRACTING FROM THIS WORK IS A DIFFICULT TASK. It is of one fabric, a tapestry of words that weaves the reader into the landscape, through encounters with its storms, topography, geology, cultures, and wildlife. Consider this rich evocation of the way to the home of the Shoshone Indians:
To reach that country…, one goes south and south, within hearing of the lip-lapping of the great tideless lake, and south by east over a high rolling distinct, miles and miles of sage and nothing else. So one comes to the country of the painted hills, — old red cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral earths, hot, acrid springs, and steam jets issuing from a leprous soil. After the hills the black rock, after the craters the spewed lava, ash strewn, of incredible thickness, and full of sharp, winding rifts. There are picture writings carved deep in the face of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do not know it. On the very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in a wide sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone land.
South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded with the ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very var by broken ranges, narrow valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line, east and east, and no man knows the end of it.
It is a land that was, in Austin’s day, still partly unknown, despite the (scanty) human presence upon it. Consider, for instance, Austin’s account of the tulares, vast expanses of marsh covered almost entirely by tule, a species of sedge. Avoided by people, the landscape is a haven for birds:
The tulares are full of mystery and malaria. That is why we have meant to explore them and have never done so. It must be a happy mystery. So you must think, to hear the redwinged blackbirds proclaim it clear March mornings. Flocks of them, and every flock a myriad, shelter in the dry, whispering stems. They make little arched runways deep into the heart of the tule beds. Miles across the valley, one hears the clamor of their high, keen flutings in the mating weather.
Wild fowl, quacking hordes of them, nest in the tulares. Any day’s venture will raise from open shallows the great blue heron on his hollow wings. Chill evenings the mallard drakes cry continually from the glassy pools, the bittern’s hollow boom rolls along the water paths. Strange and farflown fowl drop down against the saffron, autumn sky. All day wings beat above it, hazy with speed; long flights of cranes glimmer in the twilight. By night one wakes to hear the clanging geese go over. One wishes for, but gets no nearer speech from those the reedy fens have swallowed up. What they do there, how fare, what find, is the secret of the tulares.
Finally, to close, here is perhaps my favorite passage from the book — a potent evocation of the western landscape, told almost entirely through its scents. (Dare I call it scentsational?)
Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills, there is more sky than any place in the world. It does not sit flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean winey winds. There are some odors, too, that get into the blood. There is the spring smell of sage that is the warning that sap is beginning to work in a soil that looks to have none of the juices of life in it; it is the sort of smell that sets one thinking what a long furrow the plough would turn up here, the sort of smell that is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the plant’s best, and leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There is the smell of sage at sundown, burning sage from [Paiute Indian villages] and sheep camps, that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon long acquaintance, and every Paiute and shepherd smells of it indubitably. There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust that comes up from the alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and the smell of rain from the wide-mouthed cañons. And last the smell of the salt grass country, which is the beginning of other things that are the end of the mesa trail.
AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. Alas, I cannot afford a first edition of Austin’s work, priced in the hundreds of dollars. I settled instead for a 1961 paperback a Doubleday Anchor Book from the Natural History Library. Though well worn and weatherbeaten, the book was otherwise free of writing or other evidence of its history. The list of other titles in the series in back was particularly helpful; it enabled me to find two more writers from the first 42 years of the 20th century.
The elemental forces — water, air, earth, light — were from the beginning. Man is merely a later happening, dependent upon the elements for existence, and in the scheme of creation little more than a looker-on. Only in recent years has he begun to study his environment and to notice the myriad combinations and manifestations of the elements which he calls Nature. It is still a bewildering panorama to him. He sees and admires the striking high-lights, the bright colors, the huge forms, but he overlooks the half-tones, the broken tints, the lesser forms that make up the great body and background of the picture. These minor keys seem to him ordinary or commonplace. But there are no such words in Nature’s vocabulary. Everything is shaped to an end, in a mould and pattern of its own, and for a specific purpose. The fault is in man’s lack of vision and want of comprehension. He sees and understands only in part. If he saw and understood all he would admire all.
“THE MEADOWS” WAS WRITTEN LATE IN VAN DYKE’S LIFE, AFTER HE HAD ALREADY PUBLISHED CLOSE TO 20 BOOKS, MOSTLY ON ART HISTORY BUT ALSO SEVERAL EXPLORING THE DRAMATIC LANDSCAPES OF THE AMERICAN WEST. Dyke’s best-known work, by far, “The Desert”, had been published nearly a quarter-century before, back when Van Dyke was a spry 42. After traveling afar (and in his imagination — most of what Van Dyke reports seeing and doing in “The Desert” was, it turns out, manufactured from his brother’s experiences and books he read), Van Dyke set his eyes on the humble Raritan Valley of his native New Brunswick, New Jersey, and crafted this book. Like myself setting out on a year-long pilgrimage down Piney Woods Church Road in search of the wonders of the everyday, Van Dyke looked to the woods and meadows for rich colors and forms and intriguing patterns changing across the seasons. As an artist first and naturalist second, Dyke celebrates the colors and textures of the feathers of common birds; he touches upon their behavior also, but there he seems to draw mostly on personal experience and less on scientific knowledge at the time. The book as a whole is flowing panorama of changing colors and forms, and array of exclamations of wonder and delight.
WHAT STANDS OUT MOST FOR ME ABOUT THE BOOK IS NOT THAT IT IS A WORK CELEBRATING LOCAL NATURAL HISTORY, BUT RATHER IT IS A BOOK WRITTEN BY A NEARLY 70-YEAR-OLD ART CRITIC CONFRONTING MORTALITY AND LOSS. There is beauty and delight here, but even that somehow always feels bittersweet. Speaking of the field mice, for example, Van Dyke turns an appreciation of their simple lives into a critique of civilization shortly after the end of the First World War:
Apparently the field mice lead a tranquil existence, raise large families, and feed fat without a varied diet. They are not worried about their hours of labor or their social status, nor are they obsessed by their possessions. They have no large ambitions to gratify, no desire to “get on” or be “progressive” or “up to date.” Their forefathers before them lived in the meadow grass and the orn shock, and probably they long ago concluded that their living conditions could not be improved by fighting the mice in a neighboring corn shock or agitating for socialism or communism in their tribal relations. They accepted the mouse tradition, and carried on with it because they realized that they could not, by taking thought or changing habit, become anything different, try as much as they could or would.
Set against the magnificence of Nature, the human contribution seems so empty, perhaps even irrelevant. Nature is, well, natural, while human art is awkward and forced:
I am continually bringing home from the meadows bare sprays of wild rose, raspberry, bittersweet; dead stalks of thistle, wild rice, wild oats, purple aster; pods of the milkweed, cones of the pine and hemlock, clustered berries of the black haw, bunched seeds of the scarlet sumac. Placed in jars or arranged against the wall, and studied leisurely, they become more marvellous even than in their meadow habitat. One never gets to the end, never gets to the point where all is told, as so often happens with human inventions. Always there is something new, something beyond, something never known before. Nature seems limitless in design, fathomless in meaning.
How these dead stems and branches cheapen the art of man! A spray of bronze-green cedar makes my apple-green tea-jar of the best Chinese kiln look like a common crockery door-knob, and the pod of the milkweed or the cone of the hemlock puts a Renaissance bronze into a gas-fixture category. I account for this with an odd notion that the chemical elements that go to make up the cedar, the cone, or the pod are in perfect accord, agree in every particular, and come together by natural affinity. This coming together under peculiar conditions of soil, light, heat, moisture is perhaps fortuitous — something that may happen in a certain year or century or millenium, and then never again in the world’s history. On the contrary, the vase and the bronze are things arbitrarily put together by man without regard to chemical affinity or time or any other natural combination or circumstance. The result with them is a feeling of things being pushed into false relation, a lack of harmony in color, a lack of unity in design, a lack of quality in texture. We feel instinctively that nature never did, never could, bring forth such a distortion.
ULTIMATELY, VAN DYKE SAVES HIS GREATEST CONDEMNATION OF HUMANITY FOR HIS OBSERVATIONS ABOUT HUMAN DESTRUCTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT. Song and garden birds were disappearing, for instance:
That year by year the lawn and garden birds grow less is perhaps due to the lawn and garden producing less. Coal dust, city smoke, carbonic acid gas in the air and in the rainfall over cities, are not good for the growth of either insects or fruit.
Meanwhile, sprawl had overtaken the landscape — something I am sure he had witnessed first hand in his many decades living in northern New Jersey:
Nature and her progeny change little and have no wish to change at all. Indeed, it is nature’s plan to maintain the status quo, the existing order of things, for a time at least; but man is ever driving her to a wall, sapping her resources, distorting her purposes, establishing artificial conditions. Year by year the border-line is being pushed further back. Civilization and the suburbs are being carried into the fields and forests, and the birds and animals are shrinking away into the inaccessible portions of the earth. Nature did not reckon wisely in bringing forth her last creation — man. She perhaps had no thought that he would prove to be the great destroyer. Least of all did she reckon with his arrogant assumption that the world was given him to destroy.
Consider, too, his bitter, almost nihilistic lines about the polluted Raritan River and its disappearing fish:
Even some of the fishes once native to the stream, such as the sunfish, the perch, the small-mouthed black bass, have disappeared. Chemical factories that spit fumes into the air and refuse, acids, and oils into the streams will destroy almost anything that lives….
No one sighs or protests much about the river pollution and the passing of the fish. A river in these days is usually thought merely as an open sewer for cities. If necessity demands use of the water for drinking purposes, a filtering plant gives it a clean look and chlorine kills the typhoid germs. The conception of a river as something worth while, aside from water supply or drainage, passed out some time ago. Consuming, not conserving, the earth is the present bent. It is sometimes called “development”, which is too often only another name for flaying the face of things for present profit.
BUT WE CANNOT END THERE. It is too dark. There is still joy in this book, even if it is found mostly in the backward glance. While the future of nature and man may be grim, the past is a refuge, freely accessed through memory:
Children gathering flowers! Was that not the earliest recollection, the first introduction to nature, for most of us? That long-ago, far-away day when we first were taken to the meadows! How dreamily we can still remember the scent and hum and warm wind blowing, with white clouds above and a great blue beyond! And out of the vagueness we can still see that picture of waving fields of grass, with daisies and buttercups caught and rolled in the green wave — daisies spattered thicker than the stars in the Milky Way. And later, the trip along the brook where the small fish darted at our approach and the crows were cawing about their nests in the locusts — the trip that led through the woods with all the wonder of its humming life in the month of June! Was not that our first expansion to the glory of the world, even as the growths themselves had expanded to the sunlight and the air!
How those first experiences remain with us and refuse to be ousted by the sordid rush of later life! Down in the street, worrying with the world of business, or hemmed in a factory with the whirr of machinery, or tethered by the leg to some desk in a breathless office, how often a glance at the sky or the distant hills brings back the memories of those childhood days! No wonder there is a sigh over lost youth and a vision of a return to the countryside — to the farmhouse, the orchard, the fields of timothy and clover, the slow-winding brook and the great oak in the meadow, with its branches spread across the pool. We know now, if not then, that one impulse from a vernal wood may last us through a lifetime and be a consecration and a poet’s dream to us forever.It is not necessary that it should be a romantic, a classic, or a haunted wood. Even the commonplace woods of New Jersey may prove sufficiently compelling.
Of course, Van Dyke could not stop there. He closed out the passage with one final dig at modern society, a critique that sounds all the more true today, nearly one hundred years later:
But all that belongs to a bygone age. The humble things to-day fail to make lasting impressions. The rushing world craves the novel and exotic, and in seeking to avoid the obvious it only too often falls into admiration of the merely bizarre.
AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY COPY OF THIS BOOK. While many of Van Dyke’s titles have been reprinted in paperback, that is not true for “The Meadows”. As far as I can tell, his 1926 edition was never reissued. My copy is a navy blue hardback with gilt letters and a front cover design with a stream flowing through a meadow. The cover photograph of a meadow is the only one in the book. After reading Van Dyke’s insightful remarks about environmental destruction, I regret that this book is so obscure. Any arguments that Americans in the early 1900s didn’t recognize the extent of the damage civilization was causing to the natural world are quickly put to rest by a few excerpts from this volume.
So the study of trees in winter leads us directly into other fields of knowledge, — the great world of insects that live upon the trunk and branches, the parasitic fungi that develop in the bark, the birds that search for winter insects. For in nature, nothing lives by itself alone: it is related in a thousand ways to other living things. To this is largely due the fascination of the outdoor world: when you really become acquainted with the nearest tree, you find yourself on speaking terms with a large part of the universe.
FOR AN HISTORICAL BIOLOGIST WITHOUT EVEN A WIKIPEDIA PAGE TO HIS NAME, CLARENCE M. WEED OFFERS THE READER MANY MOMENTS OF WONDER AND INSIGHT. I am baffled as to why he is so unknown; his knowledge of botany and ecology is impressive and seems at moments ahead of its time (or at least, quite up to date for 1913). (To be accurate, these is, in fact, a Wikipedia page for Clarence Weed; but that is for Clarence R. Weed, a football and basketball coach of the same time period.) Having read just one of Weed’s books (the naturalist, not the coach) and ordered a second one, I am quite convinced that he could have gained renown as an author; I will endeavor to convince readers of that with this post. “Seeing Nature First” begins as a guide for teens and adults into how to perceive and interpret natural phenomena throughout the seasons. The first several chapters, set in springtime, include numerous examples of fascinating facts about plants and insects (Weed was an entomologist by profession.). I learned new things, myself. For instance, have known for ages that skunk cabbage flowers, which often emerge while snow still covers the ground, actually heat the air around them, attracting early insect pollinators seeking warmth. What I never knew was how this trick was done. According to Weed, “the hoods [of skunk cabbage flowers] not only furnish protection from the elements, but the purplish tissues of which they are composed oxidize so rapidly that the temperature within is raised above that of the air outside.” I was amazed to find this fact was already known over 100 years ago.
ULTIMATELY, HOWEVER, THE BOOK IS UNEVEN; CHAPTERS THAT FASCINATE ARE MIXED WITH ONES THAT ELICIT ONLY TEDIUM. At times, I even wonder if Weed didn’t simply sweep every paper on his desk into a pile, sort it by seasons (affording some sense of structure) and sending the whole mess off to the publisher. The audience varies, too. Most “chapters” are only a few pages in length. The best ones, in my opinion, are geared toward a lay audience of potential Nature enthusiasts. Other articles seem more like abstracts of reports on efforts to keep various insect pests under control. Then there is an article about frogs changing colors — admittedly a worthy topic — that consists of several pages of dry details about different captive frogs in different enclosures on various days and differing hours on those days. As field notes for a short essay, they work well. As flowing text to engage the reader, they are a disaster.
THEN ANOTHER PAGE OR PASSAGE POPS OUT AT THE READER, AND HE OR SHE IS LEFT IN AWE. Did you know, for instance, that early season flowers pollinated by bumblebees. such as the columbine, tend to be quite large, because they attract the queens? Then, by midsummer, the bumblebee-pollinated flowers are noticeably smaller, because the worker bees have joined her in the colony? Or have you ever been curious about how a closed gentian flower gets pollinated? (John Burroughs even speculated that it lacks a pollinator.) According to Weed, “the worker bumblebees…have learned how to pry open the mouth of the blossom and enter for the nectar at its base, where they circle around the flower in a way to come in contact with both stamens and pistil. And they can tell from the color of the blossom whether it is young and nectar-bearing.” Wow.
IN A COUPLE OF SPOTS IN HIS WORK, WEED POINTS TO THE ECOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE OF THE BALANCE OF NATURE. I know little about the early days of ecological study, but at very least this concept was relatively new at the time. In a chapter on the ichneumon flies, Weed notes that “There are numberless ways in which nature keeps that balance of life which renders human existence upon the earth possible.” In the case of these parasitic flies that prey on caterpillars, Weed notes that they perform a necessary function, keeping those caterpillar species in check. Without them, Weed acknowledges, the caterpillars would likely “cause untold damage to forests and cultivated crops.” Indeed, in one of his drier chapters, Weed discusses efforts to control an invasive caterpillar species through use of a natural predator insect. Eventually, Weed explains, such invasive species can be made subject to the Balance of Nature: “This is the condition of most injurious insects that have been present in a given region for a long time. There are periods of scarcity and of abundance, due largely to the fluctuations in the numbers of natural enemies.”
WHAT MOST STANDS OUT TO ME ABOUT WEED’S BOOK, HOWEVER, IS THE INVITATION IT OFFERS US — PARTICULARLY THOSE OF US LIVING IN NEW ENGLAND — TO GET OUTDOORS AND MAKE NEW DISCOVERIES. The ultimate result of our time in nature is the fashioning of stories — tales that tell of the complexity and interconnectedness of the natural world. To close, here is a passage from Weed, extolling the virtues of exploring the woods in wintertime:
There is much more to be learned in the winter woods than merely to become acquainted with the different kinds of trees. Desirable as it is, such acquaintance should be but the beginning of one’s knowledge. Every tree has many stories to tell to one who will look with the seeing eye and the active mind. Such stories relate to the age of the tree, to the relations it has established with the sunlight, to its battles with its enemies, to its cooperation with its friends. Stories of all these and many other mysteries of plant life are mutely waiting interpreters in every winter landscape.
AS A POSTSCRIPT, I SHOULD MENTION BOTH THE BOOK’S ILLUSTRATOR AND A BIT ABOUT MY COPY. The illustrator is W. I. Beecroft, and his stunning, almost three-dimensional drawings are another highlight of the book. (In fact, they are considerably more impressive than the scattered black and white photographs also included.) Beecroft authored and illustrated short field guides to ferns and wildflowers, too.
My copy of this book appears to be a first edition (though there may never have been a second one). It was published in April of 1913. There is no bookseller’s stamp, but there is an inscription to Emily Mills Page, 87 High Street, Newburyport, Massachusetts, from Mother, on February 20, 1915. (I was even able to find the home on Google Maps.) The most noteworthy feature of my book, though, is its elegant though somewhat worn green-and-gilt cover. The metallic portion is actually gold, but it looks much more silvery in the image below.
