Arriving at No Particular Place: “Across Lots” by Horace Lunt (1888)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Reptiles  No Responses »
Jun 082022
 

According to Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge), Horace Lunt was a linguist in Slavic Studies who lived from 1918 until 2010. Unfortunately, that does not explain how he managed to publish a book of New Hampshire nature essays in 1888. Hence the problem. While trying to gain information about this author, every site I visited invariably led to the wrong Horace Lunt. Finally, I stumbled upon a scan of a book on the Lunt family of New England, which included a paragraph about the right Horace. What I learned only made him more mysterious to me. Horace was born on March 17, 1838. He worked as a house servant before joining a local militia company in 1861 and then a Maine infantry regiment a year and a half later. His regiment fought in many battles during the Civil War, including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and Appomattox. He was one of the few members of his regiment to survive the war, although one of his legs was severely impaired due to the long marches and other hardships. After the war, he became a nature writer, publishing three books; Across Lots was the first. He died in 1911. I could not find an image of his grave, let alone of him.

So I fill in the blanks as best I can. What happened to him between 1865 and the publication of his first book? Did he try his hand at other careers along the way? Did he have the 19th Century equivalent of PTSD? (How could he have possibly endured so many horrific battles psychologically unscathed?) Did he perhaps seek solace in nature, a calming presence to soothe his troubled memories? I don’t know. I did notice the presence of his past, in terms of how frequently he would use military images to describe natural scenes in his essays. Here is how the first essay, “A March Ramble,” opens:

March, in New England, is the disputable month between the seasons spring and winter; the space, as it were, between the picket lines of both armies, where many battles are fought for the mastery and power of governing the land. Winter commands Boreas to station his wind batteries on the bleak northern hills to belch forth a storm of snow and hail, and a general frigid icicle charge is ordered along the whole line until not a vestige of spring is seen. Then the frost army, wearied with its fierce onslaught, sleeps, and the vernal force, driven far southward, turns again its face toward the foe, insidiously creeps along the flank, and takes the gray old general in his fancied stronghold by surprise… Winter wakes again and marshals his strength, but his front is not so vigorous. He sullenly retires before the genial commander of the other side, that moves slowly and steadily forward to the vernal equinox.

Equinox? Appomatox? They practically rhyme. Only, in this version of the story, the South ultimately wins (for the spring, at least).

I truly wanted to enjoy Lunt’s work. His essays are vivid, and his emulation of Thoreau is uncanny. He captures a couple of Thoreau’s mannerisms from his journals, including a tendency to interrupt description to declare something fervently and his frequent addition of questions without answers. However, he lavishes the most praise on John Burroughs, “whose writings have the true sylvan ring — to read them is next to walking in the woods.” And that, I suppose, is what Lunt is chiefly after in his book — using text to evoke a virtual reality through which the reader can travel, as if out of doors. Lunt keeps his own musings to a minimum and eschews references to literature and history. Reading his descriptive passages, I feel like I am there with him — roaming the woods, gazing down into a pond, following a half-tumbled-down wall. Consider this delightful passage on autumnal plants and how they disperse their seeds:

As I walk across-lots, I am struck with the varied and ingenious methods the different plants have used to scatter their seeds. Here is an army of goldenrods and asters, milk-weeds and epilobiums, holding aloft on their wand-like stems millions of seeds, to which are attached balloons, parachutes and wings, that the wind at the proper time may carry them miles away. I wave one of these wands when, as if by magic, hundreds of the winged grains go sailing through the air like the flight of insects. Here, too, are hooks, barbs, and prickles that cling to the dress of passers-by or to the hairs of cattle, and thus are carried away to be rubbed off and deposited in some other locality. Other seeds artfully hide themselves in lucious, brilliant wrappings that the birds may be attracted to them. Strawberries, raspberries, and the early drupes have scattered their seeds by this process; but the various cornels, honeysuckles, greenberries, rose and spice bushes, the bright red fruit clusters of the winter-berry, the purple panicles of the prim, that feast the eyes of the autumn rambler, are still waiting patiently for the snows to put an embargo on other supplies near the ground.

Here I chose a botanical passage. But Lunt’s observational skills were far-ranging. He emphasized birds the most (meticulously describing their color patterns, as if the poor reader could ever remember them in a book devoid of illustrations). But he also wrote about snakes, turtles, small mammals, insects, and even microscopic pond life. While his command of animal behavior was perhaps average for nature writers of the time, his skills in identifying and describing organisms were prodigious. And yet I struggled with feeling that the book was missing something vital — without which it simply could not stand alongside Thoreau. After reading one of the last passages from the final essay, “Cross-cut Views of Winter,” I finally figured it out.

I note the tracks of various prowlers in the woods. A rabbit has lately passed along, making indentations in the snow at regular intervals, as if he had been surveying or pacing off a certain portion of the lot for himself. Further on the lines appear more numerous; cross and re-cross each other, and are tangled in such a knot that it would be a hopeless task to find the creatures’ homes. They seem to have gone everywhere, and arrived at no particular place.

Thank you, Horace! That is precisely what I mean. Your book goes everywhere (within your New Hampshire woodland domain) and arrives at no particular place. There is no point to your essays — or rather, the point of your essays is the ramble itself. Unless I include your understandable fascination with war imagery, there are no connection to anything larger than the moment and the walk and the things you discover along the way. There is no destination. A reader could pick up the book and begin anywhere — could probably even read the paragraphs in backward order, and it wouldn’t matter. Across Lots is intended as a vehicle for virtual experience at a time long before the coffee-table photography book, video, and virtual reality headsets. And as such, it can end equally at any point, such as here.

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

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Sep 292020
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Infinite Mental Detail: “The Friendship of Nature” by Mabel Osgood Wright, 1894

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Reptiles, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 292020
 

Day is relentless, boundless, pushing in its thoughts and suggestions; one road opens upon another and every path has its branches. Walk in the fields; at each step you meet a new circumstance and a different idea is forced upon you. In the woods you are led by a strange leaf, a new flower, a mossed stone, — in themselves, trifles, — into infinite mental detail. The flight of a bird opens vista upon vista, until you cease to follow, cease even to absorb, but are both possessed and absorbed by the power of Nature. Beauty becomes almost an oppression, and the sun-fed colour blinding, the sense of personal littleness humbling. How can we realize it all, how can we arrange ourselves in relation to it and interpret it rightly? There is so much to see, so much to learn, and so little time between the first consciousness of the eye and its closing.

THIS QUOTE FROM MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT’S “THE FRIENDSHIP OF NATURE” BRILLIANTLY CAPTURES THE EXPERIENCE I HAD READING THIS BOOK. For most of its scant hundred pages, I felt utterly barraged by a never-ending procession of birds and flowers. In a single sentence, I might encounter a towee (who “hops among the bushes”), a redstart (“with breeze-ruffled feathers”), and a bluebird (whose “plaintive note drops liquidly”). Consider, for instance, this encounter with roadside weeds on a summer’s day walk:

The seeds and flowers are mingled together along the roadside, and the loiterer treasures many things that the farmer casts out of his fields. The yellow-starred St. Johnswort traces the path, and the grimy burdock, meshed with dusk-hung cobwebs, crowds the moth-mullein, and wild carrots spread their filmy umbles beside brown stalks of last year’s dock. Creeping, with clean, green leaves, the yellow hop-clover spreads and mats with the sweet white clover escaped from the files. The yellow toad-flax, or butter and eggs, a cousin of the garden snapdragon, with its densely packed racemes, steps in and out, climbing on stone heaps, tangled thick with trailing blackberry vines, underneath whose leaves lies the ripe, sweet, astringent fruit. Tasting it, we suck the purple drops of summer wine, and drinking, grow in tune with Nature’s melodies.

Reading this passage again, I am in awe of how brilliantly Wright has composed her scene, moving beyond a litany of names to ascribe unique features to each flowering plant, something to set it apart in the crowd of weeds along the road’s edge. The result is almost overpoweringly rich in visual detail. Indeed, her writing at times evokes a photograph album (Wright herself was an early nature photographer of considerable merit, and included several of her photographs in this book). Consider, for example, this wintery scene, incorporating seven different kinds of plants and animals:

In winter, when the frost-crust had the ground and the caked ice banked the stiffened creek, the reeds and sedges, long since gone to seed, rustled and cracked in the wind, etching clear shadows in the snow. The stripped bushes, with every twig articulated by crystal points, were perches for the owls, and on the wooded knoll, by the creek’s mouth, the eagle watched high in a tattered oak. The starving crows winged past like silhouettes, and the gulls, with hollow laugh, swept morsels from the sea, and at sunset all the scene was suffused with a cold purple glow.

CLICK. The vivid scene is etched into the reader’s memory, like the shadows of sedges in the snow. And all of it is beautiful, all of it is to be savored. Beauty calls to us everywhere:

Precious is the solitude and the song of the water thrush, for they soothe the spirit; precious are the orchards, the sunlight, and the home-going cattle, for they warm the heart. The red thrush perching high pours out his voluble song, while the lilacs sway over the wall. Still querying in an elm swings the oriole; is he bird, or flower, or cloud, or the transmigration of all?

BUT THERE ARE SERPENTS IN THIS WRIGHT’S GARDEN OF EDEN, ALSO. I intend that in the most literal sense — snakes. “Whether they are hurtful or not,” Wright declares to her readers, “snakes always seem a token of evil, a sign of some sinister power, and doubly so when we come upon them amid birds and flowers.” Care and appreciation for nature, then, may include removing (i.e., killing) certain animals so that others can prosper. For instance, during the first three years in which Wright managed a bird sanctuary near her home, cats, rats, snakes, and several unwanted bird species (such as European starlings) were all killed. Indeed, there is a reason that Wright’s book is subtitled “A New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers”; those are the elements of Nature that she finds most entrancing. She may mention a squirrel in a sentence or two, but by the following paragraph, she has returned to her beloved birds and flowers once again.

WHERE DO HUMAN BEINGS FIT INTO IT ALL? In the final pages of her book, she speaks briefly of the inevitability of some environmental harm, so that human beings can live and progress. The damage cannot be ignored, but also cannot be prevented:

To the eastward stand tall chimneys that breathe flame and cinders, a factory city, whose thin, piercing spires are partly hidden by smoke.

Look at those chimneys also, though they break the harmonious circle, we must wear clothes and we must eat, for we may not all find sweetness in white oak acorns, like Thoreau. In winter, which lays bare the earth, man’s needs appear, and intensify his personal limitations. Mutual dependence, and not isolation, was the plan of creation.

IN RECOGNIZING OUR DEPENDENCE UPON NATURE, SHE WAS PERHAPS AHEAD OF HER TIME. In her claim that Nature somehow depends upon us, she was very much a product of her time. “The earth,” she asserted, “needs man’s stamp of progression.” It would be many decades — well beyond the scope of this present study — before humans would come to realize that, in fact, Nature would quite likely thrive without us.

ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT ABOUT MY BOOK. This time I had to settle for a recent paperback, as an original first edition is outside my price range. (But it is not as costly as one might imagine: a first edition is available right now at ABEBooks for under $100. It should be further noted that the initial run of this book was a mere 250 copies.) My modern edition from Johns Hopkins University Press includes a lengthy, highly informative introduction by Daniel Philippon, providing an account of Mabel Osgood Wright’s life and work. My particular paperback was published in 1999, and includes an inscription on the flyleaf: “To Mom with thoughts of our VT walks. [heart] Katy. 11/06.”

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

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Reptiles, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 022020
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upon My Return

 Natural History, Reptiles  No Responses »
Jan 012017
 

A green anole greets me on a walk near Fort White, Florida, mid-December, 2016.

With this post, I at long last resume Commonplace Nature.  There is a delightful symmetry to this event.  After my last entry exactly two years ago, my wife and I traveled south, to Florida, and ultimately to the Keys.  While staying in Everglades City, a town perched on the northwestern edge of the glades, I received a call from a former Montessori colleague from my earliest days in Georgia, asking if I might be willing to jump back into teaching after years away, taking over a class of half a dozen 4th graders after their former teacher’s abrupt departure.  I dove into the heart of the whirlwind:  somehow, despite a heavy teaching load at multiple universities, I balanced that with working in the classroom every day — and even starting down the road to Elementary 2 teacher certification.  Then, a year later (and again on vacation in Florida — I start to see a pattern here), I sat in an unfinished wooden gazebo beside a dying 1980s shopping mall, and had my final interview for a full-time teaching position at Ashford University.  Again my life abruptly changed; I transitioned as gracefully as a I could from the elementary classroom into a full-time job as course lead for an introductory environmental science general education course.  Two months in, I discovered that the class was on the docket for revision, almost immediately.  I shepherded it through, did myriad other teaching tasks, and returned again with my wife to the Florida Keys, two Decembers later.  This time, thankfully, nobody called me.

Throughout all this time, my thoughts have rarely left this blog.  What I thought would be a sabbatical from photography and writing has become, instead, two full years.  I have grown rusty with my Olympus 4/3 camera, though I have gone so far as to purchase Lightroom and I have plans this year to begin capturing raw images.  Meanwhile, I discovered the charming simplicity of my iPhone camera (a blessing, one of many, of my new life at Ashford University).  I have added a Ztylus Revolver, a device which makes the iPhone look like a conventional camera, adding a circular polarizer, fisheye lens, and macro lens.  Equipped with this, I have taken and uploaded various photos on Facebook, but never to the blog.  I wasn’t ready yet.

Now, at last, I am.  My dream of another yearlong project, though, is still on hold.  Escaping every day for new photos simply is not possible now, though I have every intention of posting something every day (though not the 19th of March; see below).  I have quite a few iPhone photos to share from my last year, and that will probably occupy most of January and February.  Many of the images are from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens; for a time, my wife volunteered there, and I would serve as driver, savoring the morning hours to roam with my iPhone camera in hand, finding inspiration among the foliage.  In-between, I hope to take an occasional outing to a local park to enjoy the bare bones of winter.  And then, in March, I set off for Australia — my first time there in 25 years.  I will spend about 6 weeks Down Under, partly in Tasmania, partly roaming the Outback and the coast south of Sydney.  And this blog will accompany my journey, celebrating the not-quite-so commonplace (for me, at least).  I hope that you, dear reader, will join me, too.  My journey takes me, for the first time in decades, across the International Date Line; I leave Atlanta on March 18th, and arrive in Sydney (and from there, fly to Hobart) on March 20th.  The 19th of March will not exist for me, so I apologize in advance for not posting on that day.  I return Stateside on the first of May.

Come summer, who knows?  I had plans to spend a year documenting Cochran Mill Park near my home, perhaps taking a few hikes every month (though probably not every day).  I might get that started at last.  But for now, a few weeks looking backward to begin the New Year…..