The Sandy Sand-Lover: “Beach Grass” by Charles Wendell Townsend (1923)

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Aug 212022
 

In “Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes” I made note of intimate studies of such regions in my sojourns at Ipswich, of the varied forms and movements of the sand, of the growth and origin of the salt marsh and of the life in the dunes and the marshes both animal and vegetable. In the following pages I have endeavored to set forth additional studies in these same regions.

I have called the present volume by the title of “Beach Grass”, partly because this grass is so characteristic of the region and partly because of the meaning of its scientific name — Ammophila arenaria — the sandy sand-lover.

I am on a streak of two now. Again I have selected a book whose single greatest asset is its cover. I do not speak ill of the book’s contents, really — the cover, yet again, is quite visually appealing. The book as a whole simply never achieves greatness. But then again, Towsend warns readers from the beginning that he is effectively publishing an addendum to his earlier volume (previously reviewed). While Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes was intended to cover, in turn, the various landscape types of the Ipswich coast, this book feels instead like a smattering of additional bits — bonus material to what came before. Several times in the book, Townsend refers readers back to his first volume. Here, he builds on what came before, with more (and better) photographs of dunes and dune tracks, and an extensive section of several chapters on winter conditions along the coast. Then there is a section on a small forest that Townsend planted on his coastal property, and the lean-to he constructed within it. I cannot help but think of the cabin at Walden, though Townsend leaves the philosophizing to others in favor of straightforward accounts of his observations. At one point in a later chapter (“Hawking” — observing hawks, not hunting with them), Townsend even dares a dig at Thoreau:

It is true that one’s aesthetic sense may be gratified and one may receive great enjoyment from birds and flowers without knowledge of their structure or names. But on the other hand it is not true that a study of structure and the recognition of the species in the field is a detriment to the pure enjoyment of these wonderful creatures of nature. The musician who understands the musical composition of a symphony and whose ear is attuned to all its finer points, receives at a concert infinitely more pleasure than one who is ignorant of these matters. One who has studied flowers and birds and is able to distinguish the exact kind and the significance of form and markings, sees far more of their beauty than one not so trained and he obtains correspondingly more enjoyment. The untrained observer often fails to see the bird or flower at all, and if it is called to his attention, sees it but imperfectly. The enjoyment shown by naturalists — and I refer to the out-of-doors and not to the closet type — is evidenced in their writings. Wilson, Audubon, Darwin and Wallace, Gilbert White and Hudson are conspicuous examples. I am sure, although it is heresy to say so, Thoreau would have had more pleasure from his studies of out-of-doors and would have given the world more pleasure, if he had been willing to study more closely and identify more carefully birds and flowers.

Zing. OK, another reason this book doesn’t quite leave me enraptured.

Speaking of rapture, though, Townsend took a particular fascination for the ever-shifting coastal dunes. Here he describes two nighttime encounters with them — first at the full moon, and again during the autumn bird migrations:

At the time of the full moon the fascination of the sand dunes is increased to a superlative degree. The whiteness of the sand augments the brilliancy of the moonlight, just as is the case when the landscape is white with snow. Such a night was that of September 25 and 26, 1920. It was calm and warm, 68° Farenheit by the cricket thermometer. As I wandered alone about the dunes, listening to the voices of the birds passing overhead, and of those on the shore and sea, I was alert for a glimpse of night-wandering animals whose tracks were clearly visible by moonlight. Exposing a photographic plate for twenty minutes to the mysterious scene, I patiently waited and watched during this interval but saw no track-maker. The sky on the sandy horizon — on the crest of a sand wave — looked black in comparison with the white sand, but this starless darkness soon merged into the vault of the heavens with its suggestion of blue, studded sparsely with stars. Only those of greater magnitude showed in the brilliant light of the moon; the light of the lesser ones was quenched. We pay for the light of the full moon by loss of starlight just as we pay for sunshine by loss of moonlight. About five in the morning the moon set large and red, and the lesser as well as the greater stars blazed out, and the path of the Milky Way appeared across the heavens.

After a period of unfavorable wind or weather, a perfect night may come when the floodgates of bird migration are opened, and the pent-up multitudes, waiting for this chance, pour along the aerial channels. Such a night followed September 9, 1916, and it was my good fortune to spend it in the dunes and on the beach. The air, blown as clear as crystal by a sparkling northwest wind, and illuminated by the full moon, and its reflection from the sea and white sand, made the night almost as light as day. There was a brilliancy and ethereal quality suggestive of fairyland. Such nights as these fill one with rapture at the marvelous beauty and mystery of the sand dunes.

Here is another somewhat poetic passage from yet another night he spent among the dunes, interspersed with a couple of lines of poetry from William Wordsworth:

At night there is a gentle mystery and a sense of primeval grandeur in the sand dunes that sur- passes the mystery and the grandeur of the day. It is good for the soul to escape from the conven- tionalities of life and lose itself in darkness in this waste of sand. Like a wolf, turning and shaping his form in the grass before he lies down, so the dune-lover shapes his form in the sand, hollowing places for his shoulders and hips. Lying thus in his mold, securely wrapt in his blanket, on the crest of a dune wave, he sees the sun set, the blue eclipse of the sky by the earth rise in the East, and the pink glow overhead and in the West gradually fade. Swallows in straggling bands and in great multitudes, hastening to their night roost, skim close by, sometimes within a hair’s breadth of his face. The dark, ungraceful forms of night herons pass over with slow wing-flaps and discordant croaks, and the stars come out until the whole vault of heaven is aglow. Those who dwell in caves, in deep canyons or in rooms in city streets, know not the brilliancy of the heavens as revealed to those who lie out under the stars. They know not:

”The silence that is in the starry sky. The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

The laughing cry of the loon comes to his ears from the sea and the noisy clamor of a great company of herring gulls, gossiping with each other as they settle down for a night on the shore. Sandpipers and plovers whistle as they fly over, and the lisping notes of warblers, mi- grating from the sterile cold of the North, drop from above. Forming a continuous background to these voices is the boom and the crash of the waves on the sea beach.

For the sake of full disclosure, Townsend also shares a couple of nights among the dunes that did not pass so beautifully, thanks to the ravages of sandblasting winds and numerous vicious mosquitoes.

While Townsend’s first volume was published in 1913, this one is a decade later, with the Great War between them. In a couple of places here, memories of the war appear, offering hints of how many ravages it had wrought and how much it lingered in the American consciousness. Describing the impacts of a severe ice storm on the trees, he writes of a white maple whose “soft and brittle wood was unable to bear the heavy load of ice, and the snow underneath was covered with branches and great limbs torn and splintered as if the trees had been through a German barrage.” A few pages later, he describes experiencing the Northern lights as a patriotic vision:

Although the aurora borealis is not limited to the winter season, it is displayed to greatest perfection at that time. One of the most beautiful auroras I have ever seen occurred one cold clear night in March, 1918, during the Great War, and the superstitious might well have read omens in its display. A series of white streamers radiated from the zenith, constantly waving and changing their places. Whole sections of the sky glowed a blood red, as if it reflected a mighty conflagration or a mighty slaughter, and the snow was tinged with the crimson flood. When this crimson sky was crossed with bars of white with here and there patches of dark blue, it needed little imagination to picture a draping of the sky with Old Glory.

Finally, I cannot help but include in this highly scattered review some mention of a passage that suggests that concern over climate change — specifically, warming — actually dates back a full century. Ironically, Townsend argues firmly that the climate is unchanging (using quite valid scientific arguments to make his case):

Severe winters are sure to recur either singly or in a series and they are apt to shake the faith, temporarily at least, of those who say the climate is changing and is much milder than when they were young. Then, according to these wise ones, snow came regularly at Thanksgiving and there was sleighing until the end of March. Meteorological records kept for many years show that mild winters and severe winters occurred a generation ago as they do today, and that the snowfall has varied irregularly…

…in the long run, the cold and warm, the dry and wet balance each other, and the general average is the same. Meteorologists believe that there has been no material change in the climate within historical times.

Yet it is a common idea that the climate of New England is growing milder, and when we have much cold and snow, the older people speak of it as an ”old-fashioned winter.” The human mind is prone to remember vividly and even to magnify unusual events and seasons, while ordinary seasons of snowfall are forgotten. Then, too, a snowdrift three feet high, struggled through by a child, assumes gigantic proportions in the memory when the child has reached mature age and size.

In our cities a generation ago, the snowfall was not managed as efficiently as it is now, when powerful snow ploughs and gangs of men clear the streets within a few hours of the storm. In former days the snow was allowed to accumulate and remained longer in the way of traffic. Another cause for self-deception exists with those who have spent their earlier years in inland towns or country where the snowfall is greater and comes earlier than it does in coastal regions. A very few miles often makes a considerable difference.

While the Industrial Revolution marked the beginnings of the increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, 1923 was far too early for meteorologists to detect a warming signal. Still, it is intriguing that some people were convinced otherwise back then.

My copy of this book is marked by a holiday dedication from C. D. Tinker to his/her dear friend, Norman Wood, in December of 1926. Unfortunately, without a first name, C. D. Tinker is impossible to track down online, and the same is the case for Norman Wood, whose name is too commonplace — I simply cannot see the Wood for the Woods. I do hope Norman enjoyed this book.

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

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Jul 142022
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their Nefarious Calling: “Wild Honey” by Samuel Scoville, Jr. (1929)

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Night  No Responses »
Jun 172022
 

I have read nearly 50 “nature books” for this blog (with easily close to 100 to go), spanning the eighty years from 1861 to 1941. Yet this is the first time I can say that, while this work scarcely reads like a novel, it has an antagonist known as The Collector. While not present in every essay, he dominates the scene and dictates the “nefarious calling” that all other outing members, including the author, participate in: egg collecting, a.k.a., nest robbing. A host of other archetypal characters play bit roles in the drama: the Banker, the Naturalist, the Ornithologist, the Botanist, and the Native. Since Scoville does not elect to assign himself a persona, I will call him the Author. These lesser characters are enablers of the wanton destruction that repeatedly happens throughout this book’s pages. Indeed, the Author reports with pride his many successful ventures at locating birds’ nests to be plundered for the Collector’s collections. He even remarks at one point on how

some of the happiest days of my life have been spent with collectors of birds’ eggs — oölogists, they call themselves. They are all so eager and excited and happy over their hobby that it is a pleasure to be with them. They regard me rather pityingly, however, because I take no share of the findings; yet I think that I have chosen the better part. Boxes of blown eggs leave me cold, but I shall never forget the days and nights in the wilderness which I have had on bird-trips, and the excitement of discovering rare nests and the pleasure of learning secrets of bird life, unknown to me before.

And the Collector does not select one egg from each nest; he takes them all. On one outing to a New Jersey marsh, the Author discovers the first pileated woodpecker nest in the state. Despite its apparent rarity, “urged on by the Collector,” the Author attempts to rob it — without success, I am grateful to report. And when out of the Collector’s company — as in several other essays in the book — the Author generally behaves with greater reverence toward most animals. He does approach venomous snakes with repugnance, however. Pointing out a “very real menace” rattlesnakes supposedly posed to humans, he proposed that big game hunters capture them all for “various zoölogical gardens.” (Lest he appears to be advocating a live capture solution, however, it should be noted that the skins of at least two timber rattlesnakes dispatched by the Author hung on the walls of his cabin in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.)

Venting over. Beyond the domain of the Collector, there is some delightful descriptive prose in this book. He mentions John Burroughs several times, though he does not identify any other nature writers or scientists of the day. (The Naturalist and the Ornithologist and the Botanist are never named.) For his faults, the Author is a skilled ornithologist and botanist who also takes a keen interest in how many landscapes of the Eastern US are haunted by traces of the human past. An old track through the pines was once a busy road for glassmakers and ironmakers in the Pine Barrens, while an old mill site in Connecticut once hummed with industrial activity. In recognizing stories in the landscape, he ties natural history into human history in a way that few other writers of his day did.

While there is no lofty poetry here, no sweeping metaphors or cosmic sentiments, there are still passages like this one describing an encounter with a bluebird:

Once, among all these interesting strangers, we heard the “far-away, far-away” of a bluebird — those lovely contralto notes which fall from the sky like drops of molten silver. Looking up, we saw that dear, brave bird of the North flying toward the sunset with the sky color on his back and the color of the red clay of the South on his breast, and we watched him until he was lost in a mother-of-pearl cloud.

Here, he describes the sounds of the night at his cabin in the Pine Barrens:

The shadows of the waving trees made a fretted, magical pattern on the smooth surface of the water. A pine-barren pickerel frog, all emerald and gold and purple-black, snored, and some other frogs unknown to me gave a couple of loud, startling notes which sounded like the clapping of two boards together. Then suddenly, in the distance, the stressed, hurried notes of a whippoorwill pealed through the darkness, to be answered by one close to the cabin. Over and over and over again these birds of the night repeated their triple notes with a little click after each one, hurrying as if they feared to be interrupted before they could finish. As the wild, sweet melody thrilled through the darkness, it seemed to me as if the moonlight itself had been set to music.

I will close my review of Wild Honey with this lovely passage describing a December boat journey into Okefenokee Swamp:

In the ice-blue sky the moon showed in the afternoon light like a bowl of alabaster, fretted and carved in shadowy patterns. In front of me stretched a fourteen-mile canal. The wine-brown water reflected the deep green of the long-leaf pines on either side of the stream, with now and then gleams of dragon’s blood and carmine-lake as the leaves of the black and sweet gums stained by the frost reflected their clors in the water. Everywhere were towering cypresses silvered with festoons of Spanish moss. Above the setting sun the western sky was a sea of amber and dim gold with shoals of violet and heliotrope clouds in its depths.

A few words about Samuel Scoville, Jr. (1872-1950) and my book copy are in order. Above is a photograph of the Author, circa 1918. According to his terse Wikipedia entry, Scoville was an American writer, naturalist, and lawyer. From Wild Honey, I can gather a few details; he resided in Haverford, Pennsylvania at the time of this book and worked on the thirteenth floor of an office building in Philadelphia. His practice was apparently lucrative; he also owned a home in Cornwall, Connecticut; a cabin (“Faraway”) in the New Jersey Pine Barrens; and a small peninsula on the coast of Maine. He married Katharine Gallaudet Trumbull in Philadelphia and had four children (all boys). He wrote a dozen books, mostly for children and mostly about nature. Wild Honey appears to have been his last collection of nature essays, though clearly with an adult audience in mind.

By 1929, the golden age of the artistic book cover had ended. My volume (the first and only edition) looks like most hardcovers of today, with textured board instead of cloth. The front cover is blank save for a small image impressed into the center, pictured above. What Poseidon and his trident have to do with this book is a mystery. The closest connection I can find is that the guides on his excursions into Okefenokee Swamp all used a “three-pronged push poll peculiar to the Swamp” to navigate the boat through the various waterways and hidden channels in the depths of Okefenokee.

I have to wonder how well this book was received. Its timing was far from ideal. It was published in October of 1929; at the end of that month came the great Stock Market Crash. I wonder how many Americans were looking to buy a nature book then? Furthermore, the Nature Movement, as described by Dallas Lore Sharp, was well over by then; World War I and the passing of John Burroughs in 1921 marked its close.

The Author inscribed my particular copy of Wild Honey to “my best customer and kindest critic” E. Lawrence Dudley on December 4th, 1929. Dudley (1879-1947) was the author of at least five works of biography and fiction, one of which was turned into a movie (Voltaire, 1933).

Go Out Under the Open Sky: “Wild Life on the Rockies” by Enos Mills, 1909

 book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Night, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 022020
 
Long’s Peak, Colorado from the east

This is a beautiful world, and all who go out under the open sky will feel the gentle, kindly influence of Nature and hear her good tidings. The forests of the earth are the flags of Nature. They appeal to all and awaken inspiring universal feelings. Enter the forest and the boundaries of nations are forgotten.

ENOS MILLS REMINDS ME VERY MUCH OF JOHN MUIR. The resemblance is far from accidental; in 1889, Mills chanced upon John Muir at a beach in San Francisco, and the experience left him seeking to emulate the master in his celebration of the western landscape. In fact, he even referred to himself as “John Muir of the Rockies” — popularizing the wild wonders of the Colorado Rockies and the joys of living a rugged life among them. From his cabin in Estes Park (now a museum), he led numerous trips into the Rockies, including hundreds of ascents up Long’s Peak. Like Muir, he had a charming, loyal, highly intelligent dog companion (Scotch); like Muir, he never carried a gun and respected all wildlife; like Muir, he played a vital role in the development of the National Park system and the preservation of wild mountains; like Muir, he had many dramatic adventures in the wild that he shared in his books; and like Muir, he saw encountering nature as a means of connecting with God. But unlike Muir, almost no one has heard of him nowadays. And I think that is a tragic loss.

I CURRENTLY HAVE TWO OF MILLS’ BOOKS; TWO MORE ARE ON THEIR WAY; I ALSO HAVE HIS BIOGRAPHY. In the coming months, I will revisit him many times in this blog. His writing is superb; it flows beautifully, evoking the splendors of the Rockies without being pedantic or flowery. If anything, Mills was remarkably humble about his exploits. And in so many ways, his perception of the environment was far ahead of its time (or at very least, on the leading edge of a new ecological awareness). Consider, for instance, his essay on The Story of a Thousand-Year Pine. I suspect it is one of the earliest essays ever written for a popular audience in the field of dendrochronology. He opens with an homage to Muir:

The peculiar charm and fascination that trees exert over many people I have always felt from childhood, but it was that great nature-lover John Muir, who first showed me how and where to learn their language. Few trees, however, ever held for me such an attraction as did a gigantic and venerable yellow pine which I discovered one autumn day several years ago while exploring the southern Rockies. It grew within sight of the Cliff-Dwellers’ Mesa Verde, which stands at the corner of four States, and as I came upon it one evening just as the sun was setting over that mysterious tableland, its character and heroic proportions made an impression upon me that I shall never forget, and which familiar acquaintance only served to deepen while it yet lived and before the axeman came. Many a time I returned to build my camp-fire by it and have a day or night in its solitary and noble company.

ALAS, THE LOGGERS CAME AT LAST. In an indescribable tragedy, when the tree was felled, it crashed to the ground with such a resounding blow that the trunk was shattered. The loggers abandoned it as being of little value. Withholding comment on the loss of such a noble tree, Mills reports how he set to work piecing together its past: “Receiving permission to do as I pleased with his remains, I at once began to cut and split both the trunk and the limbs and to describe their strange records.” Carefully counting its rings, he discovered the tree had been born in about 856, and was felled in 1903, having lived 147 years. Over the next ten pages, Mills told the story of the pine’s remarkable life, including periods of drought, possible earthquakes, encounters with Indians, and episodes of fire. All in all, it is a remarkable bit of detective work, decades before radiometric dating was developed.

ANOTHER AMAZING ESSAY IN THIS BOOK IS ON THE BEAVER AND HIS WORKS. Based upon extensive observations of beavers in the Rockies and the surrounding region, Mills gave an account of the incredible engineering work beavers have accomplished — including a dam on the South Platte River that was over a thousand feet long! What makes the essay so impressive, however, is how he was able to extrapolate from what he witnessed beavers doing to a sense of the considerable role they had played in shaping the Western landscape:

[The beaver’s] engineering works are of great value to man. They not only help to distribute the water s and beneficially control the flow of the streams, but they also catch and save from loss enormous quantities of the earth’s best plant-food. In helping to do these two things — governing the rivers and fixing the soil — he plays an important part, and if he and the forest had their way with the water-supply, floods would be prevented, streams would never run dry, and a comparatively even flow of water would be maintained in the rivers every day of the year.

Later in the essay, he proposes that

An interesting and valuable book could be written concerning the earth as modified and benefitted by beaver action, and I have long thought that the beaver deserved at least a chapter in Marsh’s masterly book, “The Earth as modified by Human Action.” To “work like a beaver” is an almost universal expression for energetic persistence, but who realizes that the beaver has accomplished anything? Almost unread of and unknown are his monumental works.

In fact,

Beaver-dams have had much to do with the shaping and creating of a great deal of the richest agricultural land in America. To-day there are many peaceful and productive valleys the soil of which has been accumulated and fixed in place by ages of engineering activities on the part of the beaver before the white man came. On both mountain and plain you may still see much of the good work accomplished by them. In the mountains, deep and almost useless gulches have been filled by beaver-dams with sediment, and in course of time changed to meadows. As far as I know, the upper course of every river in the Rockies is through a number of beaver-meadows, some of them acres in extent.

Alas, the beavers were dying out, and that would lead inevitable to changes in the Western landscape:

Only a few beavers remain, and though much of their work will endure to serve mankind, in many places their old work is gone or is going to ruin for the want of attention. We are paying dearly for the thoughtless and almost complete destruction of the animal. A live baver is far more valuable to us than a dead one. Soil is eroding away, river-channels are filling, and most of the streams in the United States fluctuate between flood and low water. A beaver colony at the source of every stream would moderate these extremes and add to the picturesqueness and beauty of many scenes that are now growing ugly with erosion. We need to coöperate with the beaver. He would assist the work of reclamation, and be of great service in maintaining the deep-waterways. I trust he will be assisted in colonizing our National Forests, and allowed to cut timber there without a permit.

I WILL CLOSE WITH ONE MORE LOVELY PASSAGE CELEBRATING THE WESTERN WILDS. In this case, Mills is reminiscing about a trip into the Uncompahgre Mountains, where he spent many nights in solitude beside a campfire, miles from anyone:

The blaze of the camp-fire, moonlight, the music and movement of the winds, light and shade, and the eloquence of silence all impressed me more deeply here than anywhere else I have ever been. Every day there was a delightful play of light and shade, and this was especially effective on the summits; the ever-changing light upon the serrated mountain-crests kept constantly altering their tone and outline. Black and white they stood in madday glare, but a new grandeur was born when these tattered crags appeared above storm-clouds. Fleeting glimpses of the crests through s surging storm arouse strange feelings, and one is at bay, as though having just awakened amid the vast and vague on another planet. But when the long, white evening light streams from the west between the minarets, and the black buttressed crags wear the alpine glow, one’s feelings are too deep for words.

MY COPY OF MILLS’ BOOK IS A LIBRARY REBIND. On the one hand, that means that the binding is really sturdy; on the other hand, the pain forest green cloth is no replacement for the decorated cover with its image of a bear on a snow-blanketed rock. However, the interior is the original first edition of the book from 1909. For some time, it was evidently the property of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, not far from my home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Compensations of Nature: “Into the Wilderness” by Charles Dudley Warner, 1878

 book review, Books, Night  No Responses »
Aug 292020
 
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.

Nature At a Snail’s Pace: “In Lower Florida Wilds” by Charles Torrey Sampson, 1920

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Night, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 212020
 

[The Seminoles’] words are composed of a great number of syllables. Willoughby has given a vocabulary of them in his book Across the Everglades and in this only two words have a single syllable while many run up into eight or more. For instance heron is “wak-ko-lat-koo-hi-lot-tee”; instep is “e-lit-ta-pix-tee-e-fa-cho-to-kee-not-ee,” and wrist “in-tee-ti-pix-tee-e-toke-kee-kee-tay-gaw.” I should think it would take a half hour for a Seminole to ask the time of day, but fortunately he has plenty of time.

There is something very distressing in the gradual passing of the wilds, the destruction of the forests, the draining of the swamps and lowlands, the transforming of the prairies with their wonderful wealth of bloom and beauty, and in its place the coming of civilized man with all his unsightly constructions — his struggles for power, his vulgarity and pretensions. Soon this vast, lonely, beautiful waste will be reclaimed and tamed; soon it will be furrowed by canals and highways and spanned by steel rails. A busy, toiling people will occupy the place that sheltered a wealth of wild life. Gaily dressed picnicers or church-goers will replace the flaming and scarlet ibis, the ethereal egret and the white flowers of the crinums and arrowheads, the rainbow bedecked garments of the Seminoles. In place of the cries of wild birds there will be heard the whistle of the locomotive and the honk of the automobile.

We constantly boast of our marvelous national growth. We shall proudly point some day to the Everglade country and say: “Only a few years ago this was a worthless swamp; to-day it is an empire.” But I sometimes wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings. Is the percentage of happiness greater in a state of five million inhabitants than in one of half a million, or in a huge city with all its slums and poverty than in a village? In short I question the success of our civilization from the point of view of general happiness gained for all or for the real joy of life for any.

IN THIS TIME WHEN HAPPINESS IS RARE INDEED TO FIND, SIMPSON’S WORDS SPEAK DIRECTLY TO MY HEART. Opening the first pages of “In Lower Florida Wilds”, I developed an immediate affinity for the author. Though I know relatively little about him yet (his published biography is on its way to me now), through the pages of this book I have found him to be sincere, affable, thoughtful, perceptive, caring, and a bit self-deprecating to boot. His deep love for nature flows through these pages — along with his keen scientific mind and eye. Over the course of nearly 400 pages and over 60 black and white photographs (not to mention a color frontispiece of Simpson’s beloved tree snails), the reader travels through the geologic story of South Florida and then the myriad terrestrial and marine ecosystems found in the region. Through it all, Simpson mourns again and again the tragic demise of Florida’s wild animals, plants, and places. He seems largely resigned to their passing, though he does offer a ray of hope that conservation might yet be possible:

This locality [along the south shore of mainland Florida] is one of the last resorts of some of our most beautiful and interesting wading birds. Here in days gone by resorted vast numbers of gorgeous flamingos, scarlet ibises, roseate spoonbills, and roseate terns. This was one of the chief breeding places of the ethereally beautiful egret…and the even more perfect snowy heron…. Owing to woman’s vanity and man’s greed they are now well-nigh exterminated….

The entire region (which is of little value for anything else) should be set apart by the federal government, as a great bird reservation, but even then it would be difficult enough to protect the birds within it, for the same men who killed Bradley [a murdered bird warden whose tale is told here] would not hesitate to do the same by any other warden.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE, SIMPSON IS ALSO A MARVELOUS TELLER OF TALES OF HIS EXPERIENCE IN THE SOUTH FLORIDA WILDS. One of my favorite stories, though, happens to him in Key West, where he finds himself collecting lovely shells — of still-living snails — with quite comicl consequences:

I once made a cruise in the schooner Asa Eldridge from Bradentown, Florida to Honduras and on a Sunday morning while lying at Key West I strolled over to the north side of the island. As I approached I saw from a short distance that it was everywhere a mass of glowing violet color and then I found it to be covered from below tide to well out on the land with fresh Hanthinas. All the depressions and pot holes in the rocky shore were filled — in places several feet deep. A vast community or gathering of them probably extending for miles had stranded the night before on the beach. It was the most astounding sight in the way of molluscan life I had ever seen and when I recovered from my surprise I proceeded to collect specimens. Lacking any receptacle in which to put them I used my handkerchief, then my new straw hat, then one pocket after another of my fresh white linen suit, and when fully loaded I started for the schooner.

The day was hot, and soon the snails seemed to be melting. To my horror violet blotches appeared on my coat and trousers, spreading rapidly until the purple juice from the animals actually ran down and filled my shoes! I reached the city as the church bells were ringing and I tried to evade people by taking alleys and back streets but everywhere I met groups of churchgoers who stared at me in astonishment. They no doubt took me for an escaped lunatic. It seemed to me that Key West had a population of a hundred thousand and all churchgoers. Having run that gauntlet and reached the vessel our crew greeted me with shouts and laughter. My smart suit was ruined, nor could I even wear it around the vessel without being derided — but I had the satisfaction of cleaning up over two thousand fine Janthina shells.

Janthina janthina sea snail with its bubble raft, washed up on the east shore of Maui, Hawaii. (Wikimedia Commons)

THOUGH I DO NOT PICTURE SIMPSON AS A CHURCHGOER HIMSELF, HE WROTE OFTEN OF THE INSPIRATION AND WONDER HE FOUND IN NATURE. For instance, in this passage, he wrote admiringly (and well ahead of his time) of an intelligence operative throughout the natural world — not the intelligence of a supernatural designer, but of the plants and animals themselves:

It seems to me that there is a soul throughout nature, that the animals, and I like to believe, the plants, to a certain extent, think, something in the same manner that human beings do. Howe invents the sewing machine, Bell the telephone, McCormick the reaper — all devices to perform some service to the benefit of man. A palm sends its growing stem deep into the earth and buries its vitals to protect them from fire; the mangrove raises itself high on stilted roots in order than it may live above the water and breathe; an orchid perfects a complicated device to compel honey-loving insects to cross-fertilize its pollen. Animals resort to all manner of tricks to conceal themselves from their enemies. All these work not merely for themselves but for the benefit of the race to which they belong. If the work of man is the result of thought that of animals and plants must be also in some lesser degree. If man developed from a lower animal, the superior from the inferior, where may we draw the line between reason and instinct?

Consider, too, the paragraph below, in which Simpson (an “old man” at 73, though he lived another 13 years after this) celebrates the deep joys that come from going on wilderness adventures under primitive conditions in the swamps of south Florida:

Why should an old man, past the age when most persons seek adventure, leave a comfortable home and plunge into the wilderness to endure such hardships? What rewards can he receive for it? I never return utterly warn out from such a trip but that I vow it is the last. But in time the hardships are forgotten and recollections of the pleasant features only remain and I am ready to start again. There is in all this a sort of fascination not easy to explain — the relief that comes from being away from all the restraints and artificialities of communal life — and then, the “call of the wild.” There is a wonderful inspiration in the great out of doors. Every feels it — some more, some less. Personally I cannot resist the call and must respond when I hear it and understand its meaning.

Here is a lovely passage in which Simpson expresses a childlike wonder at the experience of being outdoors at night:

I love the night with its silence, its strange sounds, its beauty and mystery. It has an infinite attraction for the devotee of nature: al that he sees, hears, and feels are so different from the experiences of the daytime; he seems to be in another world…. Much of the wonder and beauty of the night consists in what is only half seen, in what is partly suggested, leaving the imagination to do the rest.

Itis then largely because of the stimulation of the imagination that the night is so wonderful. Under its spell we create a world of our own and revel in the make-believe — like the children of a larger growth that we all are.

Finally, I will close with this marvelous passage in which Simpson speaks of his reverence and devotion toward nature, something he fears that too many specialist scientists have lost:

It was in the wilds that Humboldt, Darwin, Wallace, Bates, Spruce, and the splendid company of the earlier and greater naturalists studied and worshipped Nature. They were interested in every phase and detail of it; their contact with it made them broad and big and able to see the great truths. There are many specialists who study intensively some small group of animals or plants until they know more about it than anyone else, but they have too little general scientific knowledge, and they care too little for the great scheme of nature. In fact they are too little. They may slave on the anatomy or heredity of a few things but they neglect the larger questions of environment and distribution. They are closet students — scientists, not naturalists; their whole occupation is business; they find neither beauty nor charm in it. They dig in a tunnel and see nature through a pinhole….

I do not want to investigate nature as though I were solving a problem in mathematics. I want none of the element of business to enter into any of my relations with it. I am not and cannot be a scientific attorney. In my attempts to unravel its mysteries I have a sense of reverence and devotion, I feel as though I were on enchanted ground. And whenever any of its mysteries are revealed to me I have a feeling of elation — I was about to say exaltation, just as though the birds or the trees had told me their secrets and I had understood their language — and Nature herself had made me a confidant.

Close-up of page edges of “In Lower Florida Wilds” showing water-damage(left);
birthday note to unknown recipient from Elsa, 1932, on flyleaf of book (right)

REGARDING MY COPY OF THIS BOOK, IT HAS HAD A ROUGH LIFE, THAT’S FOR SURE. The covers bow out a bit, and the pages have recovered from a good soaking. Reading it, I do not get that pleasurable sensation of being able to bend back the top corner of the page and advance quickly through the text; pages turn only singly. Though there is no salt brine, and my wife assures me the damage is not great enough to reflect a complete immersion, I cannot shake the image of this book having been used as a life preserver, cast overboard to a drowning would-be swimmer somewhere off the Florida Keys. I suspect the truth is as prosaic as an unexpected afternoon rainshower falling on a book left on a table on the back patio.

In terms of its history, the only event in its existence of which I can speak (besides its publication in 1920) happened on an unknown recipient’s birthday, March 4th, 1932, when Elsa gave someone this book on her (or his) 40th birthday, in Miami, Florida.

As another note from one who has taken a fancy to Charles Torrey Simpson — the friendship can be a costly one. This book was not terribly costly — about $40. However, his other two books, published in 1923 and 1932, are another matter. I have learned that any book published after 1922 is not available as a free scan online, nor are facsimile copies sold on Amazon or elsewhere. The book is truly out of print. For those craving more of this author, the choices are hunting university libraries for copies, or buying copies. I opted for the latter. I snatched a copy of his 1932 book for only $40, but his 1923 book was a “steal” in a signed copy in good shape for “only” $135. I think in the future I need to stick to less desirable authors — the disreputable riffraff of the literary naturalist community, if there is such a thing.

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

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Natural History, Night, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 082020
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Praise of Luna: A Moth Encounter

 Backyard Nature, Books, Natural History, Night  No Responses »
Jun 202020
 

June is the time for appreciative people to sing in praise of the moths…. (Gene Stratton-Porter)

THE OTHER EVENING, along a stretch of Piney Woods Church Road bordered primarily by loblolly pines, with a scattering of sassafras, sweet-gum, and persimmon, I encountered a male luna moth. When I met up with him, he was just in the process of unfurling his elegant wings; half an hour later, when I left him, he had achieved the glorious pose in the last of the series of photographs above.

SEEKING TO LEARN MORE OF LUNA’S WAYS, I turned to my bookcase with its growing collection of old natural history books and field guides, wondering what nature writers thought and wrote about Actias luna over one hundred years ago. First, these brief words, from “The Moth Book” by W. J. Holland, 1916:

This common and well-known insect has an extensive range from Canada to Florida and westward to Texas and the trans-Mississippi States as far as the region of the great plains. The larva [see below]…feeds upon the various species of walnut and hickory, the sweet-gum, the persimmon, and other trees. In North Carolina it appeared to be particularly fond of the persimmon. The cocoon is thin and papery, spun among leaves, and falls to the ground in autumn.

Next, I consulted my copy of “Moths and Butterflies” by Mary C. Dickenson, 1901, with a less than satisfactory result:

The larva feeds on hickory, walnut, and birch; and the cocoons are found under these trees…. The cocoons are very thin, so thin that color can be seen through them and the time of change from the green caterpillar to the brown chrysalis be ascertained. The large light green moth is very beautiful indeed and is a great favorite with amateur collectors.

Finally, I opened Gene Stratton-Porter’s “Moths of the Limberlost” from 1921, where I found this richer and far more satisfying account of the majestic creature I had seen:

Clinging to my finger, the living creature was of such delicate beauty as to impoverish my stock of adjectives in the beginning. Its big, pursy body was covered with long, furry scales of the purest white imaginable. The wings were of an exquisite light green colour; the front pair having a heavy costa of light purple that reached across the back of the head: the back pair ended in long artistic “trailers”, faintly edged with light yellow. The front wing had an oval transparent mark close to the costa, attached to it with a purple line, and the back had circles of the same. These decorations were bordered with lines of white, black, and red. At the bases of the wings were long, snowy, silken hairs; the legs were purple, and the antennae resembled small, tan colored ferns. This is the best I can do at description, A living moth muse be seen to form a realizing sense of its shape and delicacy of colour.

Photograph by Gene Stratton-Porter from “Moths of the Limberlost”, 1921

The Poetic Eye: “The Round Year” by Edith Thomas, 1886

 Backyard Nature, Birds, Books, Geometry and Nature, Natural History, Night  2 Responses »
Jun 172020
 

I find the night, like the cup of Comus, “mixed with many murmurs.” First and the nearest at hand, the lively orchestration of the crickets (the later summer adds the fife of a grasshopper and the castanets of the katydid); then, in the distance, the regular, sonorous, or snoring antiphonies of the frogs at different points along the winding course of the creek. It would not surprise me to learn that these night musicians are systematically governed by the baton and metronome, so well do they keep time in the perplexing fugue movement which they are performing.

THANK GOODNESS FOR WIKIPEDIA, OR ELSE EDITH THOMAS WOULD HAVE LOST ME ON HER VERY FIRST LINE. Comus, it turns out, was the Greek god of festivities and revels. A god of excess, he represents anarchy and chaos. He was cup-bearer for Dionysus, Greek god of wine and fertility, so it is fairly easy to guess what Comus’ cup contained. Knowing this adds a contextual richness to Thomas’ imagery; the sense of chaos and wildness is juxtaposed with the “orchestration” of the “night musicians”. I glimpse a poet at work here.

EDITH THOMAS WAS FIRST AND FOREMOST A POET, FAMOUS IN HER DAY AND COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN NOW. Her poetry is tightly constructed, flowery, and ornate. Fortunately for her, and we in the 21st century, she also wrote a single book of nature essays, “The Round Year”, published in 1886. Written shortly after Thomas moved from her native northern Ohio to New York City (where she remained the rest of her life), the book is infused with a bittersweet longing for her home place. (“Who knows whether soul or body pines more for the familiar environment?” she asks in the book’s first essay. “Have wood, field, rock, and stream vested in us something of theirs? Or have we parted our spirit among them, that separation touches us so sorely?”) The title of her book comes from a poem by Emerson with these lines, “Cleave to thine acre; the round year / will fetch all fruits and virtues here.” In this, my third book journey, the pendulum has swung a full arc, from a scientist who seasoned her careful observations with a few poetic passages (Mary Treat) to a poetic rambler with a keen eye for birds and trees (Bradford Torrey) to a dedicated lifelong poet, well versed in literature and Greco-Roman mythology.

IT IS EASY SOMETIMES TO DROWN IN THOMAS’ LITERARY ALLUSIONS, WONDERING AT THE POINT OF IT ALL. There are certainly obstacles to accessing her work. By this, I mean not only the mythological thickets abounding in her prose but also her poetic flights of fancy that sometimes left me wondering if it all might be condensed to a pithy sentence or two instead. It is easy to write her off as lost in raptures of poetic fancy and musings of obscure myth, disconnected from nature. And then the minute I decide that, I find a passage that convinces me that she is, in fact, a perceptive observer of the natural world:

A strange servitude is this of the oak to the cynips, or gall-fly, in thus contributing of his substance to the housing and nourishment of his enemy’s offspring. The mischievous sylph selects sometimes the vein of a leaf, sometimes a stem, which she stings, depositing a minute egg in the wounded tissues. As soon, at least, as the egg hatches, the gall begins to form about the larva, simulating a fruity thriftiness, remaining green through the summer, but assuming at length the russet of autumn. The innocent acorn nature puts to bed as early as possible, that it may make a healthy, wealthy, and wise beginning on a spring morning; but the cradle that holds the gall-fly’s child she carelessly rocks above ground all winter.

THERE IS SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY HERE, THOUGH CLOTHED IN POETIC TRAPPINGS. Replace the sylph — an imaginary aerial spirit — with a wasp, and you have a fairly robust description of the formation of an oak gall. And sometimes Thomas’ poetic insights can even shift from being an obstacle to understanding to offering the reader a path toward an alternative way of encountering the world, a reminder that a successful scientist needs imagination and wonder, too. Consider this image:

Would you for a while shut out the earth and fill your eye with the heavens, lie down, some summer day, on the great mother’s lap., with a soft grass pillow under your head; then look around and above you, and see how slight, apparently, is your terrestrial environment, how foreshortened has become the foreground — only a few nodding bents of blossomed grass, a spray of clover with a bumble-bee probing for honey, and in the distance, perhaps the billowy outline of the diminished woods. What else you see is the blue of heaven illimitably stretched above and beyond you. You seem to by lying not so much on the surface of earth as at the bottom of the sky.

Consider, too, this lovely blending of mathematics and flowing water:

In cooler and deeper retirement, on languid summer afternoons, this flowing philosopher sometimes geometrizes. It is always of circles — circles intersecting, tangent, or inclusive. A fish darting to the surface affords the central starting-point of a circle whose radius and circumference are incalculable, since the eye fails to detect where it fades into nothingness. Multiplied intersections there may be, but without one curve marring the smooth expansion of another. There are hints of infinity to be gathered from this transient water-ring, as well as from the orb of the horizon at sea.

DESPITE THEIR DIFFERENCES IN WRITTEN VOICE, TREAT AND THOMAS SHARED MUCH COMMON GROUND. For instance, just as Treat studied nature in the field (the backyard or the further woods), so Thomas spoke strongly of the need to engage with living nature, instead of collecting dead specimens. On the very first page of “The Round Year”, for instance, she addressed the reader thus:

You come, eager and aggressive, on your specialist’s errand, whatever it may be — botany, ornithology, or other; you may take hence, perforce, a large number and variety of specimens, press the flower, embalm the bird; but a “dry garden” and a case of still-life are poor showings for the true natural history of flower or bird.

ANOTHER COMMON ELEMENT IS THAT BOTH WRITERS ENCOUNTERED A KINGFISHER AND DESCRIBED IT TO THE READER. A comparison of the two accounts provides further insight into their different approaches to observing birds. First, Mary Treat:

The belted kingfisher (Ceryle alycyon) is another familiar bird that frequents the grounds. His name indicates his occupation, and a very successful fisher he is. His fishing-post is on the railing that runs along the wharf. The wharf extends from the grounds about two hundred and fifty feet into the river. Whether he remains at this post the entire year I do not know; we find him here upon our arrival, and leave him here when we depart for the North. I am inclined to think that his permanent residence; at all events, he objects to being disturbed, as if he had been sole manager too long to yield the ground without a loud protest. If more than one person geos upon the wharf, he leaves with a clang and clatter which sound like a watchman’s rattle. and usually flies to the terrace, and alights upon a small tree bending over the water, where he can overlook and watch proceedings. But he does not seem to be afraid of one person alone; if I go upon the wharf unaccompanied, he flits along before me, alighting upon the railing, often not more than fifteen or twenty feet distant, and faces about as if to intimidate me. Seeing this I quietly drop upon a seat; for really, with his rumpled crest and fierce-looking black eyes, he looks rather formidable, being a foot or more in length. Seeming to be satisfied that I am under subjection, he goes on with his fishing, in which he is very expert. Motionless he eyes the finny tribes beneath him until one of their number comes within his range to suit his taste, when he dives under the water and brings it up; and now beating it upon the railing until it is quite limp, he swallows it. Small fish-scales are scattered along the entire length of the railing, where he has dressed his fish preparatory to taking his meals.

And now a very different account of a kingfisher (likely a different species, one found along Lake Erie in Ohio) from the pen of Edith Thomas:

There were fish taken under my observation, though not by line or net. I did not fish, yet I felt warranted in sharing the triumphs of the sport when, for the space of ten minutes or more, I had maintained most cautious silence, while that accomplished angler, the kingfisher, perches on a stately elm branch over the water, was patiently waiting the chance of an eligible haul. I had, meanwhile, a good opportunity for observing this to me wholly wild and unrelated adventurous bird. Its great head and mobile crest, like a helmet of feathers, its dark blue glossy coat and white neck-cloth, make it a sufficiently striking individual anywhere. No wonder the kingfisher is specially honored by poetic legend. I must admit that whenever I chanced to see this bird about the stream it was faultless, halcyon weather.

IT IS AMAZING TO THINK THAT BOTH AUTHORS ARE ENCOUNTERING THE SAME BIRD. I have to confess that Treat’s kingfisher strikes me as far more believable than Thomas’s. Perhaps that is in part because Treat sought to interact with the kingfisher, while Thomas instead watched it quietly from a distance. Treat’s kingfisher emerges as a unique character, while Thomas’s is inextricably part of a semi-mythical landscape, with one foot on an elm branch and the other lost in the mists of “poetic legend”.

AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY PARTICULAR VOLUME. I managed to locate an 1886 copy, the first (and, I suspect, only) edition. It is an austere volume, bound in army gray without ornamentation apart from the title and author in gold on the spine. It was once Number 2973 at Belding Memorial Library but was stamped Discard at some point. Curious about where my book had been, I tracked down the library. There are two Belding Libraries. There is one in Michigan, but I do not think that is the correct one, since that is technically the Alvah N. Belding Library (in Belding, Michigan). More likely, this book was once held by the Belding Memorial Library in Ashfield, Massachusetts, pictured below.

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