The appreciative mind will cherish this estate,not less for that which is local in its significance, than for that which is typical of the whole. It will desire to find itself equally at home either in the North or the South, either in the East or the West, nowhere a stranger among the birds and flowers of America, nowhere a stranger to plant lore and bird traditions…
For the present I desire nothing better than to reflect, if possible, this spirit of the North and of the South, as do the birch and the cypress: to communicate by description, but perhaps even more by wholly intangible means, a sense of certain regions…remember that they are parts of one and the same estate in nature.
After an endless procession of books on rambles in nature (a genre of which Abbott and Torrey are consummate masters), it was deeply refreshing to embark on this pair of books by Stanton Davis Kirkham (1868-1944) which appear to carry a theme of looking at differences between natural environments in the West, East, South(east), and North(east). The earlier of the two even carries the subtitle, “Comparative Studies of Nature in Eastern and Western States”, though the subtitle to the later work suggests a more humble goal: “Notes on the Natural History of a Summer Camp and a Winter Home”. In this post, I will explore these two volumes and consider the extent to which they accomplish such daring (well, in the first case, at least) comparative analyses.
There are shades of John C. Van Dyke throughout East and West. The very notion of a “comparative study” bespeaks Van Dyke. Then there is mention of “the opal sea”, a title of one of Van Dyke’s books. Finally, Kirkham is at his most poetic talking about the desert landscape, a section of the book where he seems almost to channel Van Dyke’s words and images. The timing certainly works: The Desert was first published in 1903, and The Opal Sea in 1906. These connections are all, as the police detective would remark, highly circumstantial, however. There is precious little online about Stanton Kirkham beyond the fact that he was a well-published author who is renowned as an ornithologist, naturalist, and philosopher. In the case of Van Dyke, I have a recently published copy of his autobiography, but Kirkham does not appear. All I can say is the two probably were not close associates. Perhaps they met, or perhaps Kirkham simply read Van Dyke’s books. Or perhaps not. Maybe they were both drawn to the allure of the desert landscape. “The desert,” Kirkham declared, “yields itself only to the mystic imagination.” Here are two examples of Kirkham’s mystical desert encounters:
Day after day, looking between the green columns of the saguaro, afar off towards the MacDowell Peaks, I have felt the spell of the desert. It has seemed to draw me like some entrancing mirage—a beautiful region, ethereal and opalescent and changeful. There is a sense of the desert as there is a sense of thesea: a spell, a witchery, which is like music, like poetry, is perhaps itself music and poetry in another form.
After a solitary vigil from starlight to starlight, I returned that night, impressed above all with the deceptiveness of the desert: I had discovered what a delusion it is. Yet, looking at it next day from my lava peak— lying so soft and opalescent in the distance —it beckoned as before, as beautiful and alluring and as full of enchantment as ever; and though arguing to myself that it was only distance lent it beauty, I felt its spell was not broken—would never be broken. Day after day it lures with its beautiful wiles, wrapped in mystery as profound as ever, in spite of my erstwhile disillusionment and a critical analysis of the facts. The desert ever refuses to be weighed in the balance of fact and of logic. While you reason and ponder, it weaves its spell around and around you, weaves it into the very fibre of your thought, until the sense is enmeshed and your little logic is forgotten—lost in that feeling for mystery and for beauty which the wonderful desert inspires.
Now having finished both volumes, I appreciate these passages even more. Only in the Arizona desert, it seems, was Kirkham able to engage with the landscape as a whole and evoke so richly a sense of place. Although his quest is to provide “a sense of certain regions“, more often than not his place accounts are filled with long descriptive lists of plants (in order of flowering) or birds (in order of appearance). At his best moments, Kirkham could dash off passages or phrases of philosophical insight and beauty. But at his worst, well, it was quite a slog. Bradford Torrey and Enos Mills could be delightful storytellers; Kirkham, on the other hand, rarely used the narrative form. Yes, there are many gems here, but only for the truly diligent reader. My copy of North and South had dozens of uncut pages. I was the first to read most of it since it was published in 1913. Yikes.
What, ultimately, is he able to say about the differences between natural regions in the United States? “Broadly speaking,” Kirkham announced on page 9 of East and West, “the charm of the East is pastoral, of the West, heroic.” He goes on to describe how the West is a land of open spaces, vast distances, and rich colors, a region that is “splendid, untamed, savage“. The “little green world of the East” on the other hand, inspires “gentle and cultured thoughts.” Western landscapes confront us with their wild distances, while Eastern habitats allure us with their cultured intimacy. If Kirkham had managed to carry this theme throughout his book, it might have been a minor masterpiece. Unfortunately, he revisits these ideas only once later in the volume, when he observes that “In the East, we do not know the enchantment which lies in distance.” Otherwise, the book largely functions as a gathering of place portraits, descriptions of natural settings like Cape Ann, Massachusetts, the woodlands of Long Island, and the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. And mostly, those descriptions involve birds and plants.
Before moving to Kirkham’s second effort at a comparative landscape study, North and South, a couple of features of the earlier work are worthy of note. One is Kirkham’s idea that returning to the wilderness allows us to connect with our primitive original selves:
In the wilderness, then, we return to our ancestral home—the earliest home of man—the memory of which was lost long before the beginning of history, but which inheres still in the cryptic depths of the subconscious mind of the race and, like an ancestral ghost, arises and flits before us in the depths of the forest.
At the same time, the past is the past, and progress dictates that what once was will be no longer. In his view, this law applies equally to reptiles and American Indians:
Serpent, alligator, and turtle are aliens to this biological day and the swamps and jungles are the reservations to which they are now confined. It is with them as it is with the American Indian, as it is with all primitive races: they have had their day and slowly but surely are passing from view.
Connecting the dots, if wilderness connects us to our biological past, and if remnants of that past are doomed to pass away, what does that mean about the ultimate fate of our wild places? But Kirkham manages to steer clear of that question. He does, quite keenly, note however that “Over a great part of the world man has become too dominant and saddens byhis desolating influence.” After sharing his rapture about masses of blooming wildflowers he saw on the hills of southern California, Kirkham added that “according to John Muir this is rapidly passing and no longer comparable to what it once was.” Like a few other nature writers of this time, it seems that Kirkham saw the horrible impacts of humans on natural places in America, yet stopped short of engaging in conservation advocacy to protect those places and their wildlife.
One other passage in East and West caught my attention. With shades of Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt, Kirkham posits that to truly know birds, one has to become a bird in their imagination and experience the world as the bird might, not merely as a human looking at birds:
To go up and down the continent recognising, comparing and enjoying birds in this way is a resource which belongs, not to those who merely study birds, but rather to those who have the companionship of birds, and this pleasant intercourse comes not from reading human nature into their ways but—bird nature: acquiring a sympathy for bird traits and bird manners, a somewhat bird-like nature perhaps. You must feel yourself on the wing with the wild geese, or teetering on the shore with the sandpiper; diving with the grebe, or skulking through the marsh grass with the rail. You must peer among the leaves with the vireos, dart with the agile redstart, and with the finches know the peculiar satisfaction of scraping the bill on a twig.
On to Kirkham’s second volume in his directional pairing, North and South. Published in 1913, it is the oldest book in my collection that still has a relatively intact dust jacket. For those wondering why people didn’t tend to keep book dust jackets from back then, this is a great example. It looks more like a bit of temporary wrapping paper than something one might display proudly in a bookcase. As evident from the right photo, the book itself is only slightly less pedestrian in appearance. This time around, Kirkham gave himself a less daunting task. Instead of comparing the North and South in general, he restricted himself to a comparison of two specific places: a summer camp (a tumbledown wooden house-like structure, based upon the photos) on Canandaigua Lake in New York Finger Lakes region and a winter home at Milford Plantation, an antebellum mansion on the coastal plain of South Carolina (and now a historic site). He explained the purpose of his project thus:
Long ago I laid claim to the deserts and mountains of the West, to Northern woods and Southern swamps, and the best part of my life has been spent in making good these claims… Of these lakes and hills in western New York one is the proprietor to just that extent that he is able to respond to their beauty and make them companionable. To this end he must see them not only as a naturalist but as an artist; must look at them with the eye of a poet and a philosopher as well. Above all, he must live with the hills, day by day and year by year, in the sun and in the rain. He must be himself a hillman and a woodsman–and something of a wildman… During the winter the opportunity is afforded me again by the seclusion of the Milford woods and the great wilderness of contiguous swamp bordering the Wateree and the Santee. Here one can surely be alone with Nature and can hear what she has to say, provided he has ears. thsi Southern country is quite unlike that of the North and it is as if Dame Nature, while having much the same message, spoke in another dialect and with softer accent. It is necessary that one should understand her different dialects if he is to be on intimate footing which alone makes possible the higher Nature study, and which slips insensibly, as the intimacy and understanding increase, into something not to be characterized as study at all but rather as companionship, a companionship of such sylvan and unworldly character as to ally it with both poetry and religion.
Does Kirkham leave the reader with an abiding sense of the nature of these two places in the North and the South? He certainly demonstrates considerable knowledge of the plant life and birds encountered at each place (at least, during the part of the year he was there). And he dabbled in a bit of landscape history of the Finger Lakes, explaining how the lakes were glacially carved. He even integrated a bit of culture in the form of a few pages about the Seneca Indians, a people he was wont to disparage in his book (page 112 offering the reader a particularly egregious passage). Ultimately, though, he simply concluded that he had achieved the deep connection he wanted, “And because of this intimacy he has the supreme satisfaction of feeling at home wherever he might be, of being truly able to say–This is my country.” But did he truly believe that, or was he writing to convince himself?
What drove Kirkham to yearn for such intimate companionship with nature in the first place? I suspect it was more than simply a personal quest or narrative trope to provide a theme for two books. Kirkham’s wife of only four years, Mary Clark Williams, died on April 10th, 1911. Kirkham never remarried. He never mentions her in these books, but I cannot help but think he was haunted by her absence. It is as if he yearned for Dame Nature to fill an empty place in his heart. In these books, he presents himself as semi-nomadic, shifting with the seasons, and struggling to find a lasting sense of home. “One must become very much at home in Nature,” he explains to the reader, “if he is to become an interpreter of Nature.” Ironically, that was not to be. A year later, while on a horseback trip across South America, he contracted an illness that left him semi-invalid for the remainder of his life. He went on to publish only a few more books, including a volume of his memories of travels around the world by cruise ship. His last book, fittingly, was entitled Shut-In (1936). He died in New York City eight years later and was buried beside his wife in Woodlawn Cemetery, Canandaigua, New York. Kirkham had found a home at last.
My Berkshire house sits at the head of an ancient orchard and looks, on one side, up a steep, high, densely wooded mountain shoulder; on the other, over rolling fields plumed with maples and sentineled with little cedears, to the pines on a hill and the wall of tamaracks edging the great swamp. Trees are my cloud of witnesses. Ever they surround me, and from the once contemptibly familiar they have become, to eyes grown wiser in seeking beauty and solace in the familiar, a constant source of charm and wonder and delight…
Last night, I finished the last few essays in In Berkshire Fields (1920) by Walter Prichard Eaton (1878-1957), and closing the book was a bittersweet moment. It was my last book by Eaton, and this post is my farewell to an author I have grown to know as a companion and friend. As an author, his prose is generally more effective than soaring, and more informative than inspirational. While I finish some books with pages of notes of favorite passages to share, that generally does not happen with Eaton’s writing. Eaton was by no means a scientist of nature; rather, he was a fairly wealthy theater critic with a penchant for wandering the woods and fields around his Berkshire home, punctuated by occasional camping and hiking treks to the West. After living for several years in a home on just five acres in a western Massachusetts town, he purchased 200 acres on the slopes of Mt. Everett (the second most prominent peak in Massachusetts, after Greylock, although only the eighth tallest). Wandering his property, he would occasionally encounter hired help, pruning a tree in his orchard. Writing during the Depression, he observed that he had several friends who had gone golfing in Bermuda for the winter, and half-wished he could join them — indicating, in passing, that the cost did not hold him back. He was a golf aficionado, in fact — he mentions a local golf course or aspects of the game a few times in his writing. Despite these things, I find his writing sincere and his sense of place in the Berkshire hills sufficiently robust that I feel transported there with him as I read his work. His inspiration was chiefly Henry David Thoreau, though he dedicated In Berkshire Fields to William Hamilton Gibson. He did not advance the cause of science with discoveries or insights, although his essay on why we shouldn’t rake leaves (more anon) at least shows that the idea dates back at least to pre-1933. His writing is pleasant, and I am grateful to have shared his world over five volumes. In particular, I find him noteworthy because his nature essays are the first that I have read that refer to World War I and the Great Depression. Indeed, his 1930 and 1933 titles are practically the only ones I have found by nature authors published in those years.
First, though, a few words about Eaton’s substantial work, In Berkshire Fields. By substantial, I mean that it weighs 2 1/2 pounds, although it is just over 300 pages. The paper is exceedingly thick, and the illustrations are numerous. The artist, Walter King Stone (1875-1949), makes multiple appearances in Eaton’s essays, including sharing tales of his own animal encounters. A gifted illustrator and Cornell University art professor, Stone provided artwork for many publications and collaborated with Eaton both here and in Eaton’s Skyline Camps. Based on his excellent images in this volume, Stone also had a predilection for chickadees.
In Berkshire Fields is a deep investigation of nature in the Berkshires at the time — a region transitioning from agriculture back to woodland. Although no evident attempt was made to unify the work, the essay collection covers a range of natural history topics, from birds (obviously a favorite subject of Eaton’s) to mammals to trees and orchids to the landscape as a whole. Mostly, the essays themselves are workmanlike, making their way through aspects of a chosen topic (a particular bird species or group of birds, foxes and their kin, etc.). They become most engaging when given over to brief narratives, such as tales about the behaviors exhibited by various semi-tamed crows. (Evidently, it was a rural pastime in 1920 to capture a juvenile crow and rear it in the home for amusement.) One essay that stands out is “From a Berkshire Cabin: An Essay in War-Time”. Writing from a small cabin high on the slopes of Mount Everett, Eaton grapples with the paradox of being surrounded by nature’s calm beauty while a war was raging in Europe:
I am aware with a pang of almost intolerable sorrow of the peacefulness about me. How strange, how bitter the very word sounds! Even here, where I have come to forget for a day, I cannot forget. Dear friends, youngsters I have watched grow up, relatives, a myriad unknown brothers of every creed and color, are to-day plunged in bloody battle killing and being killed, and man has made of peace a mockery… What I try to realize right now with a care never before exercised in what was essentially a care-free enjoyment what it is exactly in my surroundings that gives me so much pleasure, and from that to realize, if possible, what strange duality in our natures must be explained in order to understand even a little the terrible facts of armed conflict.
Ultimately, Eaton realizes the extent to which he, and all humanity, are complicit in the world war. In a passage eerily appropriate today, Eaton recognizes the selfishness that comes from taking individual rights for granted without recognizing that democracy requires the dedicated participation of everyone:
We must descend from our mountain cabins, from our towers of ivory; we must come out of our gardens and up from our slums, forgetting our beautiful enjoyments, or our precarious jobs which carry no attendant enjoyments, and remembering only the ideal of beauty in our hearts, the ideal of beauty which means, too, the ideal of justice and mercy and peace and happiness for each and all, demand of what rulers we shall find that they give over to us the machinery which controls our destinies, and the destinies of all our fellows. The world to-day is fighting for democracy. I see my crime to have been that I considered democracy a condition wherein I was let alone, not wherein I was an active participant three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, fighting to write my best personal ideals into thewhole. That, I believe, has been the crime of the entire world, and in this sense it was not the Kaiser who made the war, but Goethe and Schumann and Beethoven. It was not “‘secret diplomacy,” trade jealousy, and all the rest, that kept the nations apart, straining at one another’s throats; it was the selfish complaisance of all the people who had the love of right and beauty in their hearts—and locked it there for their private enjoyment. The fight for democracy is only just beginning, for only now are we beginning to comprehend what democracy means, to glimpse the depths of its sacrifices, the glory of its creative spirit, the beauty of opportunity that it may be made to hold for common men. Had I the eloquence, I would write a new manifesto, and its slogan would not be, ‘‘ Workers of the world, unite!’ but, ‘‘Lovers of beauty in the world, unite! and capture the machinery by which we have been ruled in ugliness and cruelty.”” There would be no need of a union of the workers, then, for we should all be workers for the common weal. …
Making his way back down the mountain slope to home, Eaton loses much of his fervor, observing that “It is hard to come down from a mountain cabin, from an ivory tower, to give up a solitary possession or resign a comfortable privilege! If I owned a factory would I consent without a bitter struggle to industrial democracy? I ask myself as I pass the foxglove plant and touch its trumpet with my fingers. No—probably not. Undoubtedly not, I decide as I reach the clearing. Having determined what would be necessary to prevent future wars, Eaton realizes with bitter honesty just how difficult such a path would be. I am at once smitten with his integrity and disappointed with his lack of commitment. It is as if he glimpsed the entrance gate to Utopia, only to turn away.
Throughout the book, Eaton evidences appreciation for most wildlife, and particularly songbirds. However, in keeping with the time, he tends to emphasize the benefits of animals for humans, rather than advocating that other living beings ought to be protected for their own sake. Porcupines, for instance, “appear to serve no useful purpose”, while certain hawk species are “cruel” because they hunt farmers’ chickens. Ultimately, though, Eaton recognizes that calling for the outright extinction of certain species would likely be most unwise:
“…we are slowly learning that the balance of nature is something which should not be too rudely disturbed without careful investigation. We have learned the lesson—a costly one— with regard to our slaughtered forests and shrunken water-powers. We are learning it with regard to our birds. And it is certainly not beyond the range of possibility that the varmints—the flesh-eating animals like foxes, weasels, ’coons, and skunks—perform their useful functions, too, in their ceaseless preying upon rodents, rabbits, and the like, more ‘ than atoning for their occasional predatory visits to the chicken-roost. At any rate, who that loves the woods and streams does not love them the more when the patient wait or the silent approach is rewarded by the sight of some wild inhabitant about his secret business, or when the telltale snows of winter reveal the story of last night’s hunt, or when the still, cold air of the winter evenings is startled by the cry of a fox, as he sits, perhaps, on a knoll above the dry weed-tops in the field and bays the moon? To me, at least, the woods untenanted by their natural inhabitants are as melancholy as a deserted village, an abandoned farm, and I would readily sacrifice twenty chickens a year to know that I maintained thereby a family of foxes under my wall, living their sly, shrewd life in frisky happiness, against all the odds of man.
While the 1920 volume is rich with splendid artwork and lavish with thick paper and a decorated cover, the other two volumes of Eaton that I recently read are far more plain in appearance. The paper is browned and of much poorer quality, and the covers are undecorated apart from labels identifying the title and the author (albeit embossed in gold). There are no illustrations apart from a lovely pair of frontispieces by Walter King Stone and photographer Edwin Hale Lincoln, respectively (see below), and the books are about 130 pages each. New England Vista dates to 1930, and On Yankee Hilltops to 1933. Both works contain more essays about the landscape of the Berkshire hills and its wildlife, along with rambles in search of the cellar holes of long-abandoned settlers’ homes and reflections on home gardening. Published in the early days of the Great Depression, New England Vista is most noteworthy for its essay about leaf raking. “Burning Wealth” argues that fallen leaves ought either to be left where they lie or else gathered for composting and reuse. “Every leaf that falls represents nourishment taken out of the ground,” Eaton patiently explains to the reader. “Left to rot, it puts this nourishment back into the soil. Burned up, the nourishment is forever lost, and if it is not supplied artificially, the soil is gradually impoverished and dried up. Every pile of leaves that is composted is rescued wealth. Every pile of leaves burned up is wealth destroyed.” I suspect this recommendation aligned well with the concerns of thrifty readers struggling to keep afloat financially in the aftermath of Black Tuesday.
Speaking of Black Tuesday, the Depression itself (with a small “d”, though) puts in an appearance in On Yankee Hilltops. In “Sweets for Squirrels”, he mentions how “Two of my friends, appararently unaffected by the depression, are in Bermuda playing golf.” While working on building a new garden path along a limestone ledge, Eaton observes how his mind keeps trying to argue that he is better off for not having joined them (a decision that does not appear to reflect any financial hardship on his own account). Ultimately, Eaton concludes that “…I was better employed than if I had been playing golf.” Fortunately, he does not end his musing there. He shares about a visit from a struggling poet, living “up in the hills” in a shack on a small strip of ground, who walked ten miles just to call on Eaton.
When he sits in my study, and we talk of night sounds, and winter colors, and the long tramps the pheasants take, or discuss poetry, I am always a little ashamed of the litter of possessions which surround me–books, prints, tobacco jars, Dresden figures, overstuffed chairs, telephones, golf clubs, mirrors, goodness knows what all, accumulated to minister to the supposed needs of one unimportant human being who can hardly be considered an individual unless he can stand alone, free of such truck, and find his happiness in the creative power of his spirit, or, at the very least, of his own two hands.
Eaton then lists some of the “material comforts” of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age — motorcars, radios, tiled bathrooms, macadam highways, and the like. “We organized ourselves into a vast society to produce them, entirely based for its stability on our desire and ability to consume them. Then something went wrong.” After the stock market crashed, people lost the ability to pay for all these things. Once there is an economic upturn, though, Eaton predicts that the seemingly endless whirl of production and consumption will automatically resume. Under those conditions, most people work hard, but to no avail — living empty lives creating nothing truly meaningful. The better path, he suggests, would be to find contentment with simple things:
To rediscover the world of simplicities, the joys of creating with one’s own hands, the profound satisfactions of expressing an inner sense of beauty through the manipulation of visible forms,–trees, plants, paints, notes of music, or what not,–the relief of a slackened quest for Things, is to rediscover, perhaps, one’s self.
If only we could, collectively, make a better choice. Again, Eaton maps out the way for humanity to follow, only to stumble against the realities of the human condition. “I’m not overly hopeful,” he confesses.
In this blog post, I am playing a bit of a catch-up, writing about six different books I have read recently by five forgotten nature writers, all of whom have previously appeared in this blog, and at least three of whom will likely return in the future. C.C. Abbott (1843-1919; left, above) was an amateur naturalist and archaeologist, who lived outside Trenton, New Jersey, and wrote mostly about the natural history of his marshland property and adjacent lands. Though quoted by many at the time (and participant in a heated debate about early human presence in America, which he argued pre-dated the last Ice Age), is known today only as the figure for whom Abbott Marshlands Park was named. James Buckham (1858-1908; no photo found), was a journalist and writer who lived in Melrose, Massachusetts. He does not currently have so much as a Wikipedia entry. Walter Prichard Eaton (1878-1957; right, above) was a theater critic and writer; for at least the last ten years of his life, he wintered in North Carolina and summered at his home in the Berkshires. He has a brief Wikipedia entry and a slightly longer New York Times obituary (courtesy the Way Back Machine). Ernest Ingersoll (1852-1946; not pictured above) was a naturalist and explorer of the West (including the Hayden Geological Survey of Colorado in 1873) and an early advocate for conservation. Born in Monroe, Michigan, Ingersoll spent most of his life in New York City. Finally, Bradford Torrey (1843-1912; middle, above) was a nature writer and ornithologist, whose books of nature rambles with birding and botanizing were quite popular during his lifetime. Torrey is essentially forgotten today; even the Torreya Pine (whose wild habitat is limited to a small park in the Florida panhandle) was named for a distant relative, not for him. Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, he spent most of his life in Boston before moving out to Santa Barbara, California where he spent his final years.
What all of these books have in common is that they were enjoyable but, for the most part, not particularly noteworthy. I have yet to read many writers from my chosen time period whose prose is abjectly painful to ingest (apart, perhaps, for some moments with Flagg — and yes, I will be returning to him eventually, too). All of these books were pleasant, and Eaton’s even had some dramatic scenes. But on the whole, reading these six titles was more about encountering old friends than making dramatic discoveries. I will begin my account with Torrey. I read two of his books recently: A Florida Sketch-Book (1894) and Footing It in Franconia (1901). Before I begin to share about each, I will briefly mention the provenance of my copies, both of which were likely first editions. Footing it in Franconia (upper left photo) bears a bookplate of Herbert S. Ardell. Herbert Stacy Ardell was born in 1878 and as of 1897, he lived at 221 Dean Street in Brooklyn. In 1895, he published “Among the Sioux Indians with a Camera” for Peterson Magazine. A Florida Sketch-Book was previously in the collections of Oxford Memorial Library in Oxford, New York; the book label shows a structure that matches well with the current library building.
On to my review of these two volumes. A Florida Sketch-Book was, well, rather a disappointment. Like Blatchley a few years later, Torrey approached Jacksonville by rail and spent his vacation in the northern portion of the state, mostly inland apart from some time around Daytona Beach. Ultimately, I think Torrey simply found the flat Florida landscape less enticing than, say, New Hampshire or even most of Massachusetts. Here is how he compared the Florida pine forest to his native woodlands of New England:
“Whether I followed the railway,—in many respects a pretty satisfactory method,—or some roundabout, aimless carriage road, a mile or two was generally enough. The country offers no temptation to pedestrian feats, nor does the imagination find its account in going farther and farther. For the reader is not to think of the flat-woods as in the least resembling a Northern forest, which at every turn opens before the visitor and beckons him forward. Beyond and behind, and on either side, the pine-woods are ever the same. It is this monotony, by the bye, this utter absence of landmarks, that makes it so unsafe for the stranger to wander far from the beaten track. The sand is deep, the sun is hot; one place is as good as another.”
Perhaps he saw literary merit in writing a book whose structure and quality generally mirrored the landscape he was writing about. Whether intended or not, his description of exploring the flat-woods matches my experience reading his book. There were a lot of birds seen and described (mostly woodland songbirds) and various encounters with natives whose conversational exchanges with Torrey fill intervening pages. But unlike Blatchley’s book, Torrey’s failed to transport me to north Florida. I closed the volume with little gained from the journey. Having read several other volumes he has written (and with a few more to go), I would say that he is capable of delightful, insightful prose, but not here.
Footing It in Franconia, on the other hand, was a much more delightful book. Here he trods far more familiar ground, in and around the Franconia Mountains of New Hampshire. Here, he shares his observations and reflections from a boat on Lonesome Lake on an autumn day:
“The lake is like a mirror, and I sit in the boat with the sun on my back (as comfortable as a butterfly), listening and looking. What else can I do? I have puUed out far enough to bring the top of Lafayette [Mountain] into view above the trees, and have put down the oars. The birds are mostly invisible. Chickadees can be heard talking among themselves, a flicker calls wicker, wicker, whatever that means, and once a kingfisher springs his rattle. Red squirrels seem to be ubiquitous, full of sauciness and chatter. How very often their clocks need winding! A few big dragon-flies are still shooting over the water. But the best thingof all is the place itself: the solitude, the brooding sky (the lake’s own, it seems to be), the solemn mountain top, the encircling forest, the musical woodsy stillness. The rowan trees were never so bright with berries. Here and there one still holds fidl of green leaves, with the ripe red clusters shining everywhere among them.
Here, the impatient, frustrated voice of Torrey in Florida is replaced by a more patient and contemplative one. Pausing to appreciate the landscape, Torrey draws the reader into it. Oh — and ironically, he also shares briefly about his visit to a Torreya Pine while in Florida years earlier. The memory emerges after sharing about a female entomologist he met during his travels:
“It was worth something to see a first-rate, thoroughly equipped ” insectarian ” at work and to hear her talk. I shoidd have been proud even to hold one of her smaller phials, but they were all adjusted beyond the need, or even the comfortable possibility, of such assistance. There was nothing for it but to play the looker-on and listener. In that part I hope I was less of a failure.
How many species already bear her name she has never told me. I suspect they are so numerous and so frequent that she herself can hardly keep track of them. Think of the pleasure of walking about the earth and being able to say, as an insect chirps, ” Listen ! that is one of my species, — named after me, you know.” Such specific honors, I say, are common in her case, — common almost to satiety. But to have a genus named for her, — that was glory of a different rank, glory that can never fall to the same person but once ; for generic names are unique. Once given, they are patented, as it were. They can never be used again — for genera, that is — in any branch of natural science. To our Franconia entomologist this honor came, by what seemed a poetic justice, in the Lepidoptera, the order in which she began her researches. Hers is a genus of moths. I trust they are not of the kind that ” corrupt.”
…sometimes, the lady will turn to me. “It is too bad you can never have a genus,” she will say in her bantering tone “the name is already taken up, you know.”
“Yes, indeed, I know it,” I answer her. An older member of the family, a — th cousin, carried off the prize many years ago, and the rest of us are left to get on as best we can, without the hope of such dignities. When I was in Florida I took pains to see the tree, — the family evergreen, we may call it. Though it is said to have an ill smell, it is handsome, and we count it an honor.
And there we leave the matter. Let the shoemaker stick to his last. Some of us were not bom to shine at badinage, or as collectors of beetles. For myself, in this bright September weather I have no ambitions. It is enough, I think, to be a follower of the road, breathing the breath of life and seeing the beauty of the world.”
Here I cannot help but compare Torrey’s desire to be a “follower of the road” to Blatchley’s desire to be a generalist naturalist and find joy in the moment. Both of them let go of visions of fame within a particular discipline, in favor of following their bliss. And both, interestingly enough, take a moment to contemplate the nature of death as a return to the whole of the cosmos. Here, Torrey reflects more positively on that transition, while on a birding outing to Mount Agassiz:
“Now and then, as I listen, I seem to hear a voice saying, ” Blessed are the dead.” I foretaste a something better than this separate, contracted, individual state of being which we call life, and to which in ordinary moods we cling so fondly. To drop back into the Universal, to lose life in order to find it, this would be heaven; and for the moment, with this musical woodsy silence in my ears, I am almost there. Yet it must be that I express myself awkwardly, for I am never so much a lover of earth as at such a moment. Life is good. I feel it so now. Fair are the white birch stems; fair are the gray-green poplars. This is my third day, and my spirit is getting in tune.”
Onward to the next volume: Clear Skies & Cloudy by C. C.Abbott (1898). Easily the most elegant book of the lot, it has not only a stunning cover (above left) but lovely old photographs (unlike many other Abbott titles, which can include engravings but may not have any illustrations at all). Poaetquissings (above right) is a stream that flows through Abbott’s property named Three Beaches just south of Trenton, New Jersey. My copy of this book bears no marks of prior ownership and is in marvelous condition.
After two books of travel adventures from Torrey, Abbott offers an exploration of discoveries in his home place, defending that perspective with the observation that “The ever-present possibility of novelty is an incentive that should prove all-powerful, and nowhere is the world so worn out that the unexpected may not happen.” He further declares that “The best of what is out of doors is not always at arm’s length. Healthy enthusiasm is a rational phase of the spirit of adventure, but adventure does not necessarily mean distance, be it understood.” As Thoreau once remarked, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord.” Of course, it helps when one’s home place extends over many dozens of acres…
Making discoveries close to home can be a bit easier, too, when one is equipped with a Claude Lorraine Glass (also known as simply a Claude Glass), which I first encountered on page 68 of this book. A small black slightly concave mirror, it enabled the viewer to get a wider perspective of the landscape by bringing disparate elements closer together, while also showing more clearly the outlines of clouds. It is a largely forgotten tool that was widely used in the 1700s and 1800s by artists and travelers alike.
Here is one of my favorite passages from this book, on the art of listening to nature and the challenge of identifying the meaning behind sounds encountered in the woods:
“There is no such thing as a meaningless sound. It is a contradiction to speak of what we hear as having no significance, but the meaning of any sound may or may not be of importance to us. …To simply hear a sound is not all. To listen, to realize the full intent and purpose of every variation in the sound, to note the accompanying gesture with each characteristic utterance, whenever possible; in short, to appreciate the effort on an animal’s or bird’s part to interpret its own feelings, this is to listen intelligently, and in so doing to be taught a useful lesson in ornithology. There is profit, then, as well as pleasure in being abroad on a bright April morning like this, and noting, whether we stroll along the footpath way or stand by some one of the old oaks, whatsoever is to be heard on the hill-side.”
At a couple of points in his book, Abbott referred to the dramatic decline in bird numbers he had observed over the past few decades. Peregrine falcons and bald eagles had become rare, and even herons were much less common. “Time was when there were herons and heronries and stately white egrets along the river-shore, and the creeks teemed with wild fowl in season. It is a cause to be thankful, to-day, that the heron, a single heron, has given to this dismal day the charm of its presence….” At one point during a forest outing, Abbott noted sadly that
“It is hard to realize that time was when on this very spot there were birds by the thousands, and now often half a day goes by and not even one poor sparrow to make glad the fields. Many birds passed away with the trees, but not all. Birds have wit enough to accommodate themselves to very changed conditions, and would do so, but man will not permit. …Now, when it is almost, if not quite too late, an earnest cry is going up to spare the birds; but are not the fools too many and the wise too few to restor our one-time blessing? Spare what are left by all means, but what of those that are gone forever?”
Lest I leave the reader dispairing, I have to add here that not all moments in this book are as serious and dark as the one following the passage above, in which Abbott imagines a millstone he has found not as a testament to human progress, but a tombstone to all of nature that has been lost (p. 200). There is also this more whimsical moment, in which Abbott makes his way through a dense thicket in the woods, seeing the experience as an excellent cure for a naturalist’s boredom:
“…a wilderness of weeds of a single summer’s growth will well repay most careful exploration. It can offer stout resistance to your progress, and what may not hyssop and boneset and iron-weed and dudder conceal ? Your legs and arms held fast by the Gordian knot of greenbrier, you magnify, when helpless, every unexplained condition, and a foot-long garter-snake will give you a passing vision of a boa-constrictor, and mice will grow to wild-cats, before you see them scampering across your feet. If you would rid the day of possible monotony, push through a pathless thicket in the corner of some neglected field ; get scratched and pricked, and warmed by the effort, if not excitement, and believe ever after that the well-known country, as you thought it, is not so well known after all. Too seldom do we leave the beaten path and leap over the farmers’ fences.”
I will keep this little trick in mind the next outing in which I feel bored — as long as ticks and chiggers aren’t in season, at least.
My next book, Afield with the Seasons (1907) is by James Buckham (1858-1908). My copy bears an inscription to Claire Whitman Hathaway in Boston from [name not legible] on November 5th, 1932. I could not figure out Claire. There was a Claire May Whitman Hathaway who was born in Maine and died there 75 years later, in 1940. If she was given this book, she would have had to be living in Massachusetts at that time.
Buckham’s writing is poetic, evocative, and sensorially rich. Here is an example:
“While the March trumpets are blowing, and the March sun is shining, there is a keen delight in skirting the ice edge of the woods. All the wild life within seems to come out on that sheltered side, especially in the early afternoon. Here, too, the earliest wild-flowers peep out, and the pasture or meadow grass first begins to grow green.
Perhaps you may walk in the shelter of the woods for miles in a sun-glow that sets you tingling; and while you hear the wind roaring overhead, lashing the woods and blowing the clouds against the sky, you might almost carry a lighted candle in your hand under that lee shelter, without seeing it extinguished.”
In this passage, Buckham makes a metaphorical link between cow paths and human dreams which I find rather intriguing:
“As the rambler strolls homeward along the old lane, he notes the many cow-paths that seam and furrow it, winding hither and thither, irrespective of parallels or of one another, approaching and then receding, like those plotted curves by which the modern psychologists represent the unconscious action of the human brain in dreams. Some of the paths are worn deep as ditches, with even deeper hoof-printed hollows in them, where the habit-forming cows have stepped for generations.”
While Buckham brings some basic scientific knowledge into his writing, ultimately he eschews it in favor of a deeper kind of knowing, the kind he describes in his last essay in the book as having characterized the American Indians:
“…we must not seek too strenuously for scientific explanations of the sounds in nature, if we would retain their mystical and poetic charm. I would rather not know exactly what makes the ice-bound lake whoop in the winter. The Indian knew the phenomenon best, because he knew least about it. I wish it were possible for us to still know many things in nature as the Indian knew them — mystically, feelingly, poetically, that is, instead of scientifically and materially.”
I am reminded once again of the challenge Burroughs posed for all nature writers: to maintain a sensibility at once both scientific and poetic. Reading over dozens of authors between 1850 and 1930, I am struck by the myriad ways in which they nearly all endeavor to do that, from deep pantheism and magic realism on one end to juxtaposed scientific description and poetry fragments on the other. In his longing to weave the two into his lived experience, Buckham reminds me considerably of Winthrop Packard.
The fifth book and fourth author is Skyline Camps by Walter Prichard Eaton (1922). In addition to writing books about nature around his home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Eaton also published this account of adventures out west, in newly established National Parks and Forests. He traveled with many others, adventuring in the wilderness on horseback and foot. Many chapters in this book concern adventures in Oregon (possibly on a single trip there), including exploring Glacier National Park, Crater Lake National Park, and the Northern Cascade Mountains, including an attempted ascent of snow-blanketed Mount Jefferson. His writing is effective and engaging if unspectacular. A wealthy Easterner by background, his exploits always involve a cast of many others, including a cook. He describes the landscape he experiences, identifying some of the birds and plants along the way. In places, he includes scientific names for the plants, though he rarely does more than name and briefly describe what he sees. I enjoyed the book and was glad I had read it, but I reached the end without encountering a single passage worth sharing here. I am finding that travel nature books can be a mixed bag. For those who dig in deep and intensely engage with a new place (such as Blatchley in Florida), the result can be fascinating. For other writers, just passing through and seeing what they can along the way (like Torrey in Florida and Eaton in Oregon), the result does not have the power of nature writing by authors who have inhabited and rambled through in their natural places for many years. Here I am thinking of Burroughs in the Catskills, Muir in the Sierras, Mills in the Rockies, and Abbott along the Delaware.
My last, and latest, visit was with Ernest Ingersoll’s Nature’s Calendar (1900). Above left is an image of the lovely dragonfly cover (in the case of my copy, looking a bit bedraggled), while a portrait of Ingersoll is above right. In the middle, you can get a sense of the book’s layout. Each page includes extensive white space in the margins, both beside and below the text. “…regard the printed part as nothing more than my beginning,“, Ingersoll explains to the reader, “and…complete it and correct it for your own locality in the blank spaces left to you for that purpose.” The reader is tasked with recording what they observe, given Ingersoll’s definition of observation as “the faculty of keeping open at the same time both the eyes and the mind.” Of course, to get the reader to do that requires overcoming hesitation amongst those uncomfortable with writing in their books. So Ingersoll does his best to encourage the reader further, noting that “It is well known to book-lovers and to the collectors of rare volumes that the value of an old book is enhanced in most cases when its margins show annotations by the owner; and that such books more often than others are kept as precious heirlooms…” Mary Bradley Allen, who received this book on September 17th, 1900 according to the flyleaf, never recorded anything else in the book, however, despite Ingersoll’s entreaties.
The book gets off to a slow start, though starting in January, when so much of nature is hidden or asleep, makes this somewhat expected. Throughout the volume, Ingersoll relied heavily on the observations of others, including Thoreau, Burroughs, Abbott, Cram, Packard, Wright, Allen, Merriam, Flagg, and others. The text itself points out what may be experienced each month, assuming one is in southern New England or thereabouts. As the work continues, the prose seems to become a bit less wooden (perhaps I got used to it over time?), and Ingersoll offers helpful guidance to the novice naturalist. In the text for May, for example, he provides some basic recommendations for the would-be birder, beginning with the idea that birds ought to be approached quietly to avoid scaring them away. His birding advice includes this caveat:
“Few windows open so pleasantly into the temple of nature as that through which we look when we study the grace and beauty of birds. We should fall short of the highest advantage, however, if we learned merely to recognize the birds apart, and failed to get some idea of the larger world of which they are but one delightful feature.”
What new realization, ultimately, would tyro naturalists stand to gain by making their way through the year with Ingersoll as a guide? As he closed out the volume, he offered this parting prospect in a somewhat comma-tose fashion:
“We have now followed the circle of year round to its calendar, beginning in January. and have found that it all moves together, the revival of vegetation under the spring sun being the signal for the awakening of animal life and the renewal of its energies, and its progress from leaf to flower, and then to fruit, being accompanied by the development of the various creatures that depend upon it for food. Each year is a grand illustration of the interdependence of all nature; of the exact adjustment of each creature to the other creatures of its locality and to their surroundings, and of the uniformity of law.”
I knew the desert at first hand, and wrote about it with intimate knowledge… That was a summer of strange wanderings. The memory of them comes back to me now mingled with half-obliterated impressions of white light, lilac air, heliotrope mountains, blue sky. I cannot well remember the exact route of the Odyssey, for I kept no record of my movements. I was not traveling by map.
There is something suspect here, when I contrast these words, from John C. Van Dyke’s book The Open Spaces, with the photograph that adorns the frontispiece (in fact, the only image in the book). The Mojave (as the desert is now spelled) extends nearly 48,000 square miles, sprawling from California and Nevada down into Mexico. Van Dyke could have selected any image that would capture its immensity, the vastness of its sky, and the stark majesty of its landscapes. Instead, we have a photograph of a saguaro cactus against a backdrop of yuccas and a distant mesa. Unfortunately, saguaros do not grow in the Mojave Desert. They are restricted to the warmer, wetter climate of the adjacent Sonoran Desert. In his masterpiece, The Desert (stay tuned for a review), Van Dyke reports on wandering both deserts. Only his descriptions of the Sonoran Desert include multiple obvious observational errors. For instance, the saguaro blossom is white, not purple. That is because he most likely never visited the Sonoran Desert.
This post is, of course, not a review of The Desert, but rather, The Open Spaces: Incidents of Nights and Days Under the Blue Sky. Nonetheless, this book is considerably overshadowed by the former work. Abundant research (particularly the work of the late Professor Peter Wild of the University of Arizona) now shows that Van Dyke did not wander about through the desert on his own as he claims here. Instead, he sat on the porch of his brother’s Mojave Desert ranch and wrote most of the book from there. He was an East Coast aesthete, a friend to rich financiers like Andrew Carnegie, and fond of a posh upper-class lifestyle. An art historian who taught at Rutgers, Van Dyke conducted early research on Rembrandt, then explored the beauty of natural settings — including the desert — over a series of six books. The final volume of the six, The Meadows, was previously reviewed in this blog. The other five await their turn on my bookshelf. What I find challenging — a difficulty quite germane to the present volume and review task — is that I simply cannot trust Van Dyke. Am I to read his reminiscences as fiction, rather like The Education of Little Tree? Can I believe him if the same account appears in his autobiography (also on my TBR list)? I know he traveled extensively — to the West Indies and the East Indies, both documented in other books of his. But am I to believe he canoed the Mississippi as a child or ranched in the wilds of eastern Montana as a young man? What am I to make of his memories? How embellished are they?
It is certainly true that, at his best, John C. Van Dyke was a superb craftsman with language. The Desert, despite its flaws and sketchy origins, is still published today. Heck, no less than Ed Abbey referred to it as one of the most important books to read about the desert Southwest. It singlehandedly shifted American views about deserts from avoidance to desire. The vast populations of Tucson, Phoenix, and Las Vegas are testimony to what he accomplished. It is the progenitor to a thousand volumes of nature essays exploring and celebrating the American desert regions. Now, that said, it is tempting to refer to Van Dyke as a “one-hit wonder”, like the singer Don McLean, whose “American Pie” catapulted him to stardom (OK, “Vincent” is a lovely song, too — and is even about an artist — I would like to think Van Dyke would have enjoyed it also.) Peter Wild worked to get other Van Dyke books back into print in affordable paperback editions, including the other five nature volumes and The Open Spaces. (Since his death, all but The Desert are out of print again.)
But The Open Spaces is certainly not the equal of The Desert. Ironically, my favorite passages in the book are probably the few reflecting on his time in (or near, at least) the desert. The rest rambles through memories of camping outdoors as a rancher in Montana, boating the Mississippi as a child growing up in Minnesota, and hunting and fishing in various places. Two threads run through the work, loosely tying it together. First, there is a nostalgia for what has been lost. By 1922, many birds and large mammals had been radically reduced in number. The American buffalo could be written off as a goner. The passenger pigeon was extinct, though Van Dyke recalled how its numbers once darkened the skies:
…in 1870, or perhaps it was 1872, the sky was darkened with flocks of wild passenger-pigeons. Again and again, day after day, I saw passing up the Mississippi Valley cloud-flocks of pigeons that extended from the Wisconsin to the Minnesota bluffs, a distance of five miles. The flocks continued daily and all day long for several weeks. Everybody shot into the nearer and smaller flocks, until the pigeon became a nuisance in the kitchen and an unappetizing article of food on the table. In that year the passenger pigeons had a monster roost in the Mississippi bottoms near the mouth of the Chippewa River, where the birds swarmed like bees, where every litde tree was loaded down with nests, and eggs, crowded out of the nests, were lying on the ground so thick that one could hardly step without crushing them. When the young pigeons were half-grown and could not yet fly, some “sportsmen” went there with clubs, shook and beat the trees until the young birds fluttered out and fell to the ground, and then the “sportsmen” tore their breasts off with their forefingers, flung the breasts into a bag, and threw the carcasses on the ground. That is the wretched kind of thing that one does not like to write about or think about, and yet it was perhaps just such butchery that was responsible for the absolute extinction of this bird. There were such numbers of them then that scarcity seemed a word to laugh at. The roar of that pigeon-roost — a roar like a distant waterfall — could be heard at Wabasha eight miles away. The roar came from the “knac-a” call of the birds, mingled with the flutter and beat of countless wings.
Elsewhere, John C. Van Dyke reflects on how “automobilists” have contributed to despoiling the West — in this case, the stunning mountain meadows of the California Sierras:
Unfortunately, these wonderful places are now being desecrated, if not destroyed, by the automobilist — the same genius that has invaded the Yosemite and made that beautiful spot almost a byword and a cursing. No landscape can stand up against the tramp automobile that dispenses old newspapers, empty cans and bottles, with fire and destruction, in its wake. The crew of that craft burn the timber and grasses, muddy up the streams and kill the trout, tear up the flowers, and paint their names on the face-walls of the mountains. They are worse than the plagues of Egypt because their destruction is mere wantonness.
John Burroughs, the Sage of Slabsides himself, loved his Model T, a gift from his friend Henry Ford. And I am sure Van Dyke traveled considerably by automobile in his later years. Such are the contradictions of many a nature writer — stretching way back to Thoreau, walking home from Walden Pond on the weekend to dine with his parents.
A second thread, less pronounced but more intriguing, is a celebration of wild open spaces. Given Van Dyke’s preference for comfort, there is abundant irony here. But I do think there is still a note of sincerity to his musings in the opening chapter:
What a strange feeling, sleeping under the wide sky, that you belong only to the universe. You are back to your habitat, to your original environment, to your native heritage. With that feeling you snuggle down in your blankets content to let ambitions slip and the glory of the world pass you by. The honk of the wild goose, calling from the upper space, has for you more understanding, and the stars of the sky depth more lure. At last, you are free. You are at home in the infinite, and your possessions, your government, and your people dwindle away into needle points of insignificance. Danger? Sleep on serenely! Danger lies within the pale of civilization, not in the wilderness.
Similarly, Van Dyke closes off the final chapter with these musings:
Had man always lived in the open and maintained a healthy animalism, he would perhaps have been better advised. He was bom and equipped as an excellent animal, but he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage called culture and took on fear and a whimper as a part of the bargain.
Will he always be able to live up to his bargain, holding himself above and superior to nature? Culture is something that requires teaching anew to each generation. Nature will not perpetuate it by inheritance. On the contrary, animalism is her initial endowment; it has been bom and bred in the bone since the world began. Man cannot escape it if he would. Will not Nature in her own time and way bring man back to the earth?
It is tempting to read these lines as a celebration of living close to nature, and maybe Van Dyke wanted to believe that himself. But they are not matched by his somewhat disparaging treatment of native people throughout the book. More than once, he emphasizes that their minds are constantly occupied with meeting material needs (particularly food) and therefore they lack a more spiritual sensibility. I suspect this was a mindset of the time. And for all he writes about encounters with Indians, I am skeptical as to whether they even happened.
As an aside, I found this book enlightening in helping me make connections between John C. Van Dyke and other Van Dykes, as well as John Muir. From this book, I learned that Henry Van Dyke (encountered elsewhere in this blog) was a cousin, while Theodore Strong (T. S.) Van Dyke, owner of a Mojave Desert ranch and advocate for western settlement and development, was his older brother. (T. S. wrote a few books of his own about Southern California, but the parts on nature tended to emphasize the opportunities for fishing and hunting.) And John C. Van Dyke even met John Muir! Sometime in the last seven years of Muir’s life, he showed up at the ranch of T. S. Van Dyke, accompanied by his ailing daughter who was seeking a better climate to aid recovery. Unlike Enos Mills (who encountered Muir on a California beach), Van Dyke was less overwhelmed by the encounter. He tells the tale this way in The Open Spaces:
For several days on the Silver Valley Ranch in the Mohave Desert, with John Muir, I kept bothering him with questions about flower and weed and shrub. What was the name of this or the variety of that ? Learned botanist that he was, his usual answer was: “I don’t know.” The desert growths puzzled him and some of them were wholly incomprehensible to him. He was not afraid to say, “I don’t know,” because there were so many things he did know. When Muir gave it up, no one else ventured a further guess.
The prospect that all was not warm between the two is further hinted at in Van Dyke’s autobiography, in which he remarks that “He liked my book on the desert, he liked my brother who lived in the desert, and he thought he might like me. Well, at any rate, I liked him.” Indeed, Dix Van Dyke (son of T.S.) described in print in 1953 (according to an essay by Peter Wild) how the two “wrangled incessantly” and that sometimes Muir would even stomp off in outrage.
A few words about my copy of this book. It has a nondescript army-green cloth cover. The title is in gold at the top, and below that is an image evoking a Western landscape. The book has a history as a loaner. At one point, it was book 814 of the Indiana Traveling Library. I am guessing that it eventually settled down in Vevay, Indiana, as a guest of the Switzerland County Library. From 1919 until 1992, the library was in the building above, which is now Town Hall. In a delightful twist of fate, the building above was constructed with funds from the Carnegie Corporation, and was the last Carnegie library constructed in Indiana. Andrew Carnegie, a close friend of John C. Van Dyke, would have been delighted to know that his library held some of John C. Van Dyke’s books. It is entirely possible that the book was discarded around 1992, when the library shifted to its current building across the street.
Nothing in nature is isolated. Everything is somehow connected with everything else. There is interaction everywhere between climate and plant life, between plants and insects, between insects and higher animals, and in that way the chain of life runs on and on. The organic is linked to the inorganic; the whole universe is one.
This passage opens a brief essay on the distribution of trees in North America in Lange’s work. It captures that nascent ecological vision that quite a few early 20th-century naturalists observed and pondered. It also stands out in a work that, while well-crafted, is directed toward an audience of older children, to encourage them to get outdoors and appreciate its wonders. Indeed, Lange served at various times in his life as a supervisor and a director of nature study programming in Minnesota. At the time his book was published, he was serving as principal of the Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul.
I was excited to discover this title a few months ago, because for the considerable sweep of time this blog covers (almost 100 years, from 1850 to WW2), so many parts of the country remain unrepresented by nature writers. I have found dozens in Massachusetts, for example, but very few in Connecticut. Up until this book, I had not found any from the Upper Midwest. Lange, himself, was not a native. He was born in Bonstorf, Germany on June 2nd, 1863, traveling with his family to Minnesota at age 18. He held various teaching and principal positions in and around St. Paul throughout his adult years. He wrote at least fifteen works of both fiction (often featuring boy scouts) and non-fiction (nature-themed, particularly birds). He also published a handbook of nature study for teachers and pupils in the elementary grades. He died in St. Paul in 1940 of unknown causes.
As a nature writer, Longe was eager to encourage young people to “observe, investigate, and enjoy” nature. He listed among his own inspirations the works of Thoreau, Burroughs, Muir, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Gilbert White. Elsewhere, he quoted Bradford Torrey, mentioned C.C. Abbott, and recommended Ernest Ingersoll’s book, “Nature’s Calendar” (blog review coming soon). On the whole, he spoke up for environmental conservation at a time when relatively few animals (apart from birds) were given any protection. He called for game laws to protect bears, for instance, and also protections for orchids (which were being driven extinct by enthusiastic collectors and bouquet gatherers). “It was, perhaps, natural that in the pioneer stage of our country everybody should have been allowed to cut, pick, and burn; to kill, trap, and catch as he pleased,” Lange wrote. “We have now conquered the continent, and the days of the pioneer are gone, but we are still altogether too much a nation of destroyers and exploiters of all that is useful and beautiful in our land.” But lest we exalt Lange too highly, this nature writer who found a place in his heart (and in natural ecosystems) for giant ragweed also argued that the extinction of venomous snakes was “desirable”.
In keeping with Lange’s calling as a nature study teacher, the book includes an appendix on outdoor nature study, with questions to encourage students to engage with the natural world around them.
My copy of this book has considerable text on the flyleaf. As well as I can discern the writing, it reads “Merry Christmas to my friend Henry Horowitz. D. Lange. 1936. Ryan Hotel, December 23, 1936.” I pursued this puzzle a bit further, locating a circa 1900 postcard of the opulent Ryan Hotel in St. Paul, which stood downtown from 1885 until it was demolished in 1962 (see below). I even found a potential recipient of the dedication. Henry Alchanon Horowitz (1906-1990) was living at the time in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. It could be him, though I would have felt more confident to have located someone living in Minnesota at the time.
No other objects in inanimate nature touch so many hearts tenderly, like the actual presence of dear friends, as flowers. Not children alone, but men and women often look upon them with attributes not possessed by other inanimate objects. It does not seem out of place to talk to them any more than to talk to young children.
I like to picture Eldridge E. Fish (a challenge made difficult by not finding any online images of him) strolling a park in Buffalo, New York, greeting the blooming asters as he wanders past them. In a book with few interesting passages or scenes (more anon), here is a moment of true oddity. A few sentences later, though, his prose returns to its bland, though solid, form, and what little sense I have of Fish as a naturalist and scientist disappears again.
The Blessed Birds, or HIghways and Byways (1890) appears to have been Fish’s only work. I would call it his magnum opus, but I would not dare to apply that to his fairly slender volume. Fish contributed occasional pieces to the Buffalo Sunday Currier newspaper and a couple of other publications, and at some point, he decided to compile them into a book, locally published by Otto Ulbrich at 396 Main Street in Buffalo. The result is uneven but serviceable. The essays draw upon the usual cast of fellow natural history writers: Thoreau, Burroughs, Abbott, and Torrey. And we mustn’t forget Wilson Flagg, who is responsible for this horrendous poem that opens one of the pieces in this volume:
Bird of the wilderness, dearer than Philomel;
Echoes are telling thy notes from the hill and dell;
But I wander. The purpose of this post is to explore Fish’s natural history work, not his taste in 19th-century poetry.
Not surprisingly, there is no biography of Fish — not so much as a Wikipedia entry online. Finally, I found him via a Wikipedia page on New York Central College, a predecessor to Cornell that existed for ten years in Upstate New York. It was an abolitionist institution that welcomed all qualified students, one of whom was Eldridge Fish. In the Wikipedia article, Fish is described as a “scientist and school principal”. Fortunately, there is also a reference citation to a Buffalo Currier newspaper article on Buffalo area schools and their principals, which includes a couple of paragraphs about Fish. It notes that he was born in Otsego County in 1829, and raised on his father’s farm in Cortland County. In 1871, he became principal of School No. 10 in Buffalo, a position he still held in 1894. He wrote papers on botany and ornithology, and “Many of his best papers have been printed in the Courier.” Several of his students went on to Harvard and Cornell.
Unfortunately, publishing the book did not grant Fish any lasting fame. His greatest moment of success was probably on July 23rd, 1890, when Dr. John Johnston of Bolton, England visited John Burroughs at his summerhouse, Slabsides. Strewn about the table and seats were a number of magazines and books, including a copy of Fish’s The Blessed Birds. Did Burroughs actually read it? If so, did Burroughs manage to finish it?
Fish is at his strongest when offers condemnation of the ongoing destruction of forests and songbirds. Regarding logging of woodlands, Fish observes how that results not only in damage to the rural scenery but also impacts the local hydrology and climate. Here, I wonder if he might have been inspired by George Perkins Marsh, who was widely read in the last few decades of the 19th century. Fish is even more troubled by the loss of songbirds, titling an essay, “Danger of an Early Extinction of Song Birds”. He attributes their dwindling numbers to the clearing of forests, the invasion of English swallows, the killing of birds for food in the American South, lighthouses and the Statue of Liberty’s torch, the hunting out of larger game birds, ornithologists gathering bird skins and eggs for their collections, and (of course) the millinery trade. “God no more created the birds for you and me than he created you and me for the birds,” he declared. He also astutely noted that “Men are generally slow to realize the danger of losing that which is apparently abundant, especially if it costs nothing.” That sentiment is equally true today.
Before I allow Fish to return to his well-earned obscurity, I will share one other passage of note. Like many nature writers of his day, Fish advocated for readers to get outside and notice the wonders of their own backyards:
The orchard assists in teaching the lesson that objects which yield the greatest pleasure lie nearest our doors; that it is not necessary to make long journeys or to explore far-off countries to see the most interesting objects in nature. I can find more of interest in Limestone groves, in Wende’s woods and meadows and in the vicinity of Portage than I can in the Adirondacks, the wilds of Northern Michigan or the primitive forests of the Carolinas. Even this old orchard of less than a dozen acres has so many charming things growing and living, flowerless and flowering, winged and four-footed in it, that a Gray or a Nuttall would find it a field of delight and study. There are mosses on the north side of the tree trunks and lichens pendant from leafless branches. Tall ferns are growing in a shaded corner of the lot near a rivulet of pure water, and their broad fronds are as green and thrifty as in the shady woods. The jewel weed, with almost transparent stem, and leaves that look like silver, when immersed in water, are abundant and luxuriant.
Finally, in closing, a word about my copy, from 1890 — likely a first and only edition. Its green cloth cover includes this charming gold-embossed title with a picture:
What is more, my copy is signed — a bit tentatively, perhaps — by the author, with his kind regards:
Stewart’s Pond, on the Hamburg road a mile or so from the village of Highlands, served me, a visiting bird-gazer, more than one good turn: selfishly considered, it was something to he thankful for; but I never passed it, for all that, without feeling that it was a defacement of the landscape. The Cullasajah River is here only four or five miles from its source, near the summit of Whiteside Mountain; and already a land- owner, taking advantage of a level space and what passes among men as a legal title, has dammed it (the reader may spell the word as he chooses — “ dammed ” or “ damned,” it is all one to a mountain stream) for uses of his own. The water backs up between a wooded hill on one side and a rounded grassy knoll on the other, narrows where the road crosses it by a rude bridge, and immediately broadens again, as best it can, against the base of a steeper, forest-covered hill just beyond. The shapelessness of the pond and its romantic surroundings will in the course of years give it beauty, but for the present everything is unpleasantly new. The tall old trees and the ancient rhododendron bushes, which have been drowned by the brook they meant only to drink from, are too recently dead. Nature must have time to trim the ragged edges of man’s work and fit it into her own plan. And she will do it, though it may take her longer than to absorb the man himself.
When I came in sight of the pond for the first time, in the midst of my second day’s explorations, my first thought, it must be confessed, was not of its beauty or want of beauty, but of sandpipers, and in a minute more I was leaning over the fence to sweep the water-line with my opera-glass. Yes, there they were, five or six in number, one here, another there; solitary sandpipers, so called with only a moderate degree of appropriateness, breaking their long northward journey beside this mountain lake, which might have been made for their express convenience. I was glad to see them.
Bradford Torrey was a master at the “ramble”, a genre of nature essay that, as the name suggests, rambled about. It had no particular objective beyond relating what Torrey saw and experienced on his outings into the natural world. Torrey’s world was dominated by what passed for a birding life-list in his day — he was constantly seeking out new species. He rarely observed them closely — identification was his primary goal. When birds were scarce, he noticed plants, particularly flowering ones. Very occasionally he mentioned some other other animal — for instance, a box turtle:
On Buck Hill, in the comparative absence of birds, I amused myself with a “dry land tarrapin,” as my West Virginia acquaintance had called it (otherwise known as a box turtle), a creature which I had seen several times in my wanderings, and had asked him about; a new species to me, of a peculiarly humpbacked appearance, and curious for its habit of shutting itself up in its case when disturbed, the anterior third of the lower shell being jointed for that purpose. A phlegmatic customer, it seemed to be; looking at me with dull, unspeculative eyes, and sometimes responding to a pretty violent nudge with only a partial closing of its lid. It is very fond of may apples (mandrake), I was told, and is really one of the “features” of the dry hill woods. I ran upon it continually.
While Torrey’s earliest essays explored familar haunts in Massachusetts (Torrey lived in Weymouth for most of his life), many of his later books feature his travels (by train, stagecoach, and foot) through various parts of the country that were beginning to find renown as touristed areas. Indeed, his accounts of his visits likely encouraged others to follow suit and take to the open road. A World of Green Hills was one of these accounts, based upon trips to the mountains of North Carolina and to Virginia (southwestern and the Natural Bridge area). In these later works, Torrey infused his nature observations with some of his notes on and conversations with the rural folk he chanced to meet along the way. They add a note of entertainment to what is otherwise a rather dry text — despite the “exotic” (for him) locales.
I have come to the conclusion that the ramble was very much a genre for its day, and its day has long passed. When Torrey published his book in 1898, reading was still one of the chief forms of entertainment for the urban and suburban middle and upper classes. In a time before radio and television, I can imagine a family gathering around a fireplace in the evening to listen to Torrey’s writings. They flow well and do not overly challenge the intellect. For all that I suspect he saw of changes in the land, Torrey rarely rebelled against the status quo. The opening passage of this blog post is a rare exception indeed. At another spot in this book, Torrey does observe how bird species appear to be changing in response to the clearing of forests, but here he offers no critique (if anything, I suspect that he welcomed what he perceived as an increase in avian biodiversity). Specifically, in comparing birds observed in North Carolina by William Brewster (a renowned ornithologist) many years previous, Torrey noted that
A few birds, too familiar to have attracted any particular notice on their own account, became interesting because of the fact that they were not included among those found here by Mr. Brewster. One of these was the Maryland yellow-throat, of which Mr. Brewster saw no signs above a level of 2100 feet… Probably the species had come in since Mr. Brewster’s day (eleven years before), with some change of local conditions, — the cutting down of a piece of forest, perhaps, and the formation of a bushy swamp in its place. A villager closely observant of such things, and well acquainted with the bird, assured me from his own recollection of the matter (and he remembered Mr. Brewster’s visit well) that such was pretty certainly the case.
Otherwise, I confess that I found little to share in this book. The ramble simply does not allow for in-depth explorations of ideas, issues, or even animal behaviors. Everything is cursory, in passing. The result may be ideal for a winter evening off-grid, but does not leave the reader much enriched in new insights. Still, may more Torrey volumes still await reading, and I will continue to seek out the few moments (like his dammed and damned passage above) where his observations and reflections shine.
We open another eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of things–whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision.
Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes were added.
Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees. The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key.
Here, in what is undoubtedly the finest essay in this volume (“Sharp Eyes”), Burroughs hints at possessing an ecological vision, half a century before the term “ecosystem” was coined in 1935. (Although Ernest Haeckel came up with “ecology” in 1866, that concept, too, awaited the 20th century to develop much further.) Yet here, in this passage, lies the beginnings of a transition from merely identifyingliving things (birds, plants, etc.) to seeingliving things in relationship to each other and the landscape. The more naturalists enhance their base of knowledge, the more “words” they can glimpse, and the better authors they can become, assembling the words into meaningful sentences that can tell wonderful tales: “Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes, are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them.” Wonder emerges when we look beyond the name of the bird, to begin exploring its behaviors at a particular moment.
Later in the same essay, Burroughs offers further guidance on seeing the natural world deeply:
…the habit of observation is the habit of clear and decisive gazing. Not by a first casual glance, but by a steady deliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic things discovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The sharp-shooter picks out his man and knows him with fatal certainty from a stump, or a rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to locate, not only form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but also a faculty which they call individuality–that which separates, discriminates, and sees in every object its essential character. This is just as necessary to the naturalist as to the artist or the poet. The sharp eye notes specific points and differences,–it seizes upon and preserves the individuality of the thing.
These insights (in a literal and figurative sense) comprise the highlight of this volume. I think of this work as one of transition; he moved to a farm in the Hudson Valley in 1873, so these essays mark his first encounters with a landscape he would grow to know even more deeply over the next 48 years. Many of his delightful works deeply rooted in the Hudson landscape and adjacent regions of New York State (such as the Catskills) were yet to be penned in 1879. I found these writings pleasant enough, I suppose, and certainly diverse; they covered beekeeping, trout fishing, weather prognostication, wild strawberries, traveling, an expedition to Canada, and, of course, birds of all kinds. (One essay, comparing British birds to American ones, is even entitled, “Birds and Birds”. Cue Monty Python’s infamous “Spam Song”.)
A couple more passages will suffice, I think, to offer a satisfactory sampling of Locusts and Wild Honey. In his “Birds and Birds” essay, Burroughs reminds us of how long ago the book was written. In 1879, passenger pigeons were still fairly abundant. This led Burroughs to wonder, “The pigeon lays but two eggs, and is preyed upon by both man and beast, millions of them meeting a murderous death every year; yet always some part of the country is swarming with untold numbers of them.” A tragic footnote, dated 1895, adds that “This is no longer the case. The passenger pigeon now seems on the verge of extinction.” Even Burroughs didn’t see that coming.
Next, a lovely, rich description of Rondout Brook in the Catskills, complete with some 19th century geological terms:
If there ever was a stream cradled in the rocks, detained lovingly by them, held and fondled in a rocky lap or tossed in rocky arms, that.stream is the Rondout. Its course for several miles from its head is over the stratified rock, and into this it has worn a channel that presents most striking and peculiar features. Now it comes silently along on the top of the rock, spread out and flowing over that thick, dark green moss that is found only in the coldest streams; then drawn into a narrow canal only four or five feet wide, through which it shoots, black and rigid, to be presently caught in a deep basin with shelving, overhanging rocks, beneath which the pheebe-bird builds in security, and upon which the fisherman stands and casts his twenty or thirty feet of line without fear of being thwarted by the brush ; then into a black, well-like pool, ten or fifteen feet deep, with a smooth, circular wall of rock on one side worn by the water through long ages; or else into a deep, oblong pocket, into which and out of which the water glides without a ripple.
The surface rock is a coarse sandstone superincumbent upon a lighter-colored conglomerate that looked like Shawangunk grits, and when this latter is reached by the water it seems to be rapidly disintegrated by it, thus forming the deep excavations alluded to.
My eyes had never before beheld such beauty in a mountain stream. The water was almost as trans- parent as the air, — was, indeed, like liquid air; and as it lay in these wells and pits enveloped in shadow, or lit up by a chance ray of the vertical sun, it was a perpetual feast to the eye, —so cool, so deep, so pure; every reach and pool like a vast spring. You lay down and drank or dipped the water up in your cup, and found it just the right degree of refreshing coldness. One is never prepared for the clearness of the water in these streams. It is always a surprise… Absolutely without stain or hint of impurity, it seems to magnify like a lens, so that the bed of the stream and the fish in it appear deceptively near. It is rare to find even a trout stream that is not a little “off color,” as they say of diamonds, but the waters in the section of which I am writing have the genuine ray; it is the undimmed and untarnished diamond.
If I were a trout, I should ascend every stream till I found the Rondout. It is the ideal brook. What homes these fish have, what retreats under the rocks, what paved or flagged courts and areas, what crystal depths where no net or snare can reach them!—no mud, no sediment, but here and there in the clefts and seams of the rock patches of white gravel, — spawning beds ready-made.
The finishing touch is given by the moss with which the rock is everywhere carpeted. Even in the narrow grooves or channels where the water runs the swiftest, the green lining is unbroken. It sweeps down under the stream and up again on the other side, like some firmly-woven texture. It softens every outline and cushions every stone.
Oh, for the days when naturalists out in the wilds would drink the waters of mountain streams with delight (and impunity)!
I close with this marvelous quote, from the same essay as above (“A Bed of Boughs”), on the virtues of immersing oneself in wild nature: “It is our partial isolation from Nature that is dangerous; throw yourself unreservedly upon her and she rarely betrays you.”
Three volumes of my 23-volume Burroughs collection down, and 20 more to go. Stay tuned…
Nature becomes to the soul a perpetual letter from God,freshly written every day and each hour.
I am not quite certain what to make of this book or its author, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887). A contemporary of Thoreau, the two may have met but were certainly not close acquaintances. Thoreau does report in his journal about attending church in New York City to see him preach. It is not known whether Beecher, a Unitarian clergyman, ever read Emerson or Thoreau. Beecher wrote one novel — Norwood — entirely unknown today, though his sister’s novel remains famous for helping start the Civil War (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Beecher published only this one collection of writings that included nature essays (among other topics in the volume). Yet he is not an obvious progenitor of any later nature authors, although he did develop a close friendship with William Hamilton Gibson late in his life (this friendship included marrying Gibson and Emma Ludlow Blanchard in 1878). The book title is one of its most mysterious features, though there is no cosmic significance intended. It turns out that Beecher had written a number of columns for the New York Independent Newspaper, with the ones authored by him denoted with a star. Inevitably, then, this book is a compilation of those starred papers.
Opening the book with care — it is one of the oldest titles in my collection — I steeled myself for flowery, overwrought prose and a lot of reflections of a religious bent (as the title of this blog post suggests). And while these characteristics are present, so, too, is a passion for nature and a delightfully whimsical and occasionally even self-deprecating sense of humor. His essay on books and bookshops (see my previous post) rings amazingly true for me today. And while he was certainly no scientist, he did have a keen command of plant identification and basic botanical nomenclature (both wildflowers and trees) and a working knowledge of common names of birds. Here are two passages on flowering weeds from “A Discourse on Flowers” that opens the Nature section of his book. First, dog fennel, a tall and odoriferous weed I contend with each year on my property in Georgia:
What shall we say of mayweed, irreverently called dog-fennel by some? Its acrid juice, its heavy pungent odor, make it disagreeable; and being disagreeable, its enormous Malthusian propensities to increase render it hateful to damsels of white stockings, compelled to walk through it on dewy mornings. Arise, O scythe, and devour it!
And second, the lowly dandelion that covers my yard with its festive yellow blooms:
You can not forget, if you would, those golden kisses all over the cheeks of the meadow, queerly called dandelions. There are many greenhouse blossoms less pleasing to us than these. And we have reached through many a fence, since we were incarcerated, like them, in a city, to pluck one of these yellow flower drops. Their passing away is more spiritual than their bloom. Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe — a fairy dome of splendid architecture.
His greatest rapture, though, he reserves for the stately Connecticut elms. This extended passage evokes what America has lost, and how different the small town landscape must have been 150 years ago when elms were commonplace:
A village shaded by thoroughly grown elms can not but be handsome. Its houses may be huts; its streets may be ribbed with rocks, or channeled with ruts; it may be as dirty as New York, and as frigid as Philadelphia; and yet these vast, majestic tabernacles of the air would redeem it to beauty. These are temples indeed, living temples, neither waxing old nor shattered by Time, that cracks and shatters stone, but rooting wider with every generation and casting a vaster round of grateful shadow with every summer. We had rather walk beneath an avenue of elms than inspect the noblest cathedral that art ever accomplished. What is it that brings one into such immediate personal and exhilarating sympathy with venerable trees! One instinctively uncovers as he comes beneath them; he looks up with proud veneration into the receding and twilight recesses; he breathes a thanksgiving to God every time his cool foot falls along their shadows. They waken the imagination and mingle the olden time with the present. Did any man of contemplative mood ever stand under an old oak or elm, without thinking of other days, — imagining the scenes that had transpired in their presence? These leaf-mountains seem to connect the past and the present to us as mountain ridges attract clouds from both sides of themselves…
No other tree is at all comparable to the elm. The ash is, when well grown, a fine tree, but clumpy; the maple has the same character. The horse-chestnut, the linden, the mulberry, and poplars, (save that tree-spire, the Lombardy poplar,) are all of them plump, round, fat trees, not to be despised, surely, but representing single dendrological ideas. The oak is venerable by association, and occasionally a specimen is found possessing a kind of grim and ragged glory. But the elm, alone monarch of trees, combines in itself the elements of variety, size, strength, and grace, such as no other tree known to us can at all approach or remotely rival. It is the ideal of trees; the true Absolute Tree! Its main trunk shoots up, not round and smooth, like an over-fatted, lymphatic tree, but channeled and corrugated, as if its athletic muscles showed their proportions through the bark, like Hercules’ limbs through his tunic. Then suddenly the whole idea of growth is changed, and multitudes of long, lithe branches radiate from the crotch of the tree, having the effect of straightness and strength, yet really diverging and curving, until the outermost portions droop over and give to the whole top the most faultless grace. If one should at first say that the elm suggested ideas of strength and uprightness, on looking again he would correct himself, and say that it was majestic, uplifting beauty that it chiefly represented. But if he first had said that it was graceful and magnificent beauty, on a second look he would correct himself, and say that it was vast and rugged strength that it set forth. But at length he would say neither; he would say both; he would say that it expressed a beauty of majestic strength, and a grandeur of graceful beauty.
Such domestic forest treasures are a legacy which but few places can boast. Wealth can build houses, and smooth the soil; it can fill up marshes, and create lakes or artificial rivers; it can gather statues and paintings; but no wealth can buy or build elm trees — the floral glory of New England. Time is the only architect of such structures; and blessed are they for whom Time was pleased to fore-think! No care or expense should be counted too much to maintain the venerable elms of New England in all their regal glory!
Elm trees are not the only living beings lost or diminished since Beecher’s days. Similarly, we are rapidly losing the diversity and number of insects that were once present in the American landscape. Consider this account of a trouting excursion gone awry. Can you imagine encountering this many (and this great a diversity of) grasshoppers on a rural New England fishing trip today?
Still further north is another stream, something larger, and much better or worse according to your luck. It is easy of access, and quite unpretending. There is a bit of a pond, some twenty feet in diameter, from which it flows; and in that there are five or six half-pound trout who seem to have retired from active life and given themselves to meditation in this liquid convent. They were very tempting, but quite untemptable. Standing afar off, we selected an irresistible fly, and with long line we sent it pat into the very place. It fell like a snow-flake. No trout should have hesitated a moment. The morsel was delicious. The nimblest of them should have flashed through the water, broke the surface, and with a graceful but decisive curve plunged downward, carrying the insect with him. Then we should, in our turn, very cheerfully, lend him a hand, relieve him of his prey, and, admiring his beauty, but pitying his untimely fate, bury him in the basket. But he wished no translation. We cast our fly again and again; we drew it hither and thither; we made it skip and wriggle; we let it fall plash like a blundering bug or fluttering moth; and our placid spectators calmly beheld our feats, as if all this skill was a mere exercise for their amusement, and their whole duty consisted in looking on and preserving order.
Next, we tried ground-bait, and sent our vermicular hook down to their very sides. With judicious gravity they parted, and slowly sailed toward the root of an old tree on the side of the pool. Again, changing place, we will make an ambassador of a grasshopper. Laying down our rod, we prepare to catch the grasshopper. That is in itself no slight feat. At the first step you take, at least forty bolt out and tumble headlong into the grass; some cling to the stems, some are creeping under the leaves, and not one seems to be within reach. You step again; another flight takes place, and you eye them with fierce penetration, as if thereby you could catch some one of them with your eye. You can not, though. You brush the grass with your foot again. Another hundred snap out, and tumble about in every direction. There are large ones and small ones, and middling-sized ones; there are gray and hard old fellows; yellow and red ones; green and striped ones. At length it is wonderful to see how populous the grass is. If you did not want them, they would jump into your very hand. But they know by your looks that you are out a-fishing. You see a very nice young fellow climbing up a steeple stem, to get a good look-out and see where you are. You take good aim and grab at him. The stem you catch, but he has jumped a safe rod. Yonder is another creeping among some delicate ferns. With broad palm you clutch him and all the neighboring herbage too. Stealthily opening your little finger, you see his leg; the next finger reveals more of him; and opening the next you are just beginning to take him out with the other hand, when, out he bounds and leaves you to renew your entomological pursuits! Twice you snatch handfuls of grass and cautiously open your palm to find that you have only grass. It is quite vexatious. There are thousands of them here and there, climbing and wriggling on that blade, leaping off from that stalk, twisting and kicking on that vertical spider’s web, jumping and bouncing about under your very nose, hitting you in your face, creeping on your shoes, or turning summersets and tracing every figure of parabola or ellipse in the air, and yet not one do you get. And there is such, a heartiness and merriment in their sallies! They are pert and gay, and do not take your intrusion in the least dudgeon. If any tender-hearted person ever wondered how a humane man could bring himself to such a cruelty as the impaling of an insect, let him hunt for a grasshopper in a hot day among tall grass; and when at length he secures one, the affixing him upon the hook will be done without a single scruple, with judicial solemnity, and as a mere matter of penal justice.
Now then the trout are yonder. We swing our line to the air, and give it a gentle cast toward the desired spot, and a puff of south wind dexterously lodges it in the branch of the tree. You plainly see it strike, and whirl over and over, so that no gentle pull will loosen it. You draw it north and south, east and west; you give it a jerk up and a pull down; you try a series of nimble twitches; in vain you coax it in this way and solicit it in that. Then you stop and look a moment, first at the trout and then at your line. Was there ever anything so vexatious? Would it be wrong to get angry? In fact you feel very much like it. The very things you wanted to catch, the grasshopper and the trout, you could not; but a tree, that you did not in the least want, you have caught fast at the first throw. You fear that the trout will be scared. You cautiously draw nigh and peep down. Yes, there they are, looking at you and laughing as sure as ever trout laughed! They understand the whole thing. With a very decisive jerk you snap your line, regain the remnant of it, and sit down to repair it, to put on another hook, you rise up to catch another grasshopper, and move on down the stream to catch a trout!
In this brief passage, also on the theme of fishing, Beecher gazes longingly at a brook plunging down the mountainside. He urges readers to leave some wild places unfished (untouched). Or then again…
…we are on the upper brink of another series of long down-plunges, each one of which would be enough for a day’s study. Below these are cascades and pools in which the water whirls friskily around like a kitten running earnestly after its tail. But we will go no further down. These are the moun- tain jewels ; the necklaces which it loves to hang down from its hoary head upon its rugged bosom.
Shall we take out our tackle? That must be a glorious pool yonder for trout ! No, my friend, do not desecrate such a scene by throwing a line into it with piscatory intent. Leave some places in nature to their beauty, unharassed, for the mere sake of their beauty. Nothing could tempt us to spend an hour here in fishing; — all the more because there is not a single trout in the whole brook.
To declare Beecher an early conservationist akin to Thoreau would be a stretch, I think. But he does make a strident call for respecting old trees instead of cutting them down. Ultimately, his motivation is less for the sake of the tree itself, however, than for its spiritual significance as a creation of God.
Thus do you stand, noble elms! Lifted up so high are your topmost boughs, that no indolent birds care to seek you; and only those of nimble wings, and they with unwonted beat, that love exertion, and aspire to sing where none sing higher. — Aspiration! so Heaven gives it pure as flames to the noble bosom. But debased with passion and selfishness it comes to bo only Ambition!
It was in the presence of this pasture-elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow that we had indeed become owners of the soil ! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, This is mine, there was a shrinking as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said, “I may not call thee property, and that property mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise God. Thou belongest to no man’s hand, but to all men’s eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God ! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots, and the ax from thy trunk.”
For, remorseless men there are crawling yet upon the face of the earth, smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that it is food for the ax and the saw ! These are the wretches of whom the Scripture speaks: “A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees.“
Thus famous, or rather infamous, was the last owner but one, before me, of this farm. Upon the crown of the hill, just where an artist would have planted them, had he wished to have them exactly in the right place, grew some two hundred stalworth and ancient maples, beeches, ashes, and oaks, a narrow belt-like forest, forming a screen from the northern and western winds in winter, and a harp of endless music for the summer. The wretched owner of this farm, tempted of the Devil, cut down the whole blessed band and brotherhood of trees, that he might fill his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for the wood! Well, his pocket was the best part of him. The iron furnaces have devoured my grove, and their huge stumps, that stood like gravestones, have been cleared away, that a grove may be planted in the same spot, for the next hundred years to nourish into the stature and glory of that which is gone.
In other places, I find the memorials of many noble trees slain; here, a hemlock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into the winter air; there, a huge double-trunked chestnut, dear old grandfather of hundreds of children that have for generations clubbed its boughs, or shook its nut-laden top, and laughed and shouted as bushels of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree exists only in the form of loop-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do hope the fellow got a sliver in his finger every time he touched the hemlock plank, or let down the bars made of those chestnut rails !
What then, it will be said, must no one touch a tree? must there be no fuel, no timber? Go to the forest for both. There are no individual trees there, only a forest. One trunk here, and one there, leaves the forest just as perfect as before, and gives room for young aspiring trees to come up in the world. But for a man to cut down a large, well-formed, healthy tree from the roadside, or from pastures or fields, is a piece of unpardonable Vandalism. It is worse than Puritan hammers upon painted windows and idolatrous statues. Money can buy houses, build walls, dig and drain the soil, cover the hills with grass, and the grass with herds and flocks. But no money can buy the growth of trees. They are born of Time. Years are the only coin in which they can be paid for. Beside, so noble a thing is a well-grown tree, that it is a treasure to the community, just as is a work of art. If a monarch were to blot out Euben’s Descent from the Cross, or Angelo’s Last Judgment, or batter to pieces the marbles of Greece, the whole world would curse him, and for ever. Trees are the only art-treasures which belong to our villages. They should be precious as gold.
But let not the glory and grace of single trees lead us to neglect the peculiar excellences of the forest. We go from one to the other, needing both ; as in music we wander from melody to harmony, and from many-voiced and intertwined harmonies back to simple melody again.
To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resinous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the sound of its leaves.
Do I detect, at the close of this passage, incipient thoughts about the diversity of forest ecosystems? Alas, it is a thought he carries no further, beyond remarking on his favorite blending of forest trees.
Ultimately, his thoughts of nature are bounded by his ultimate aim, appreciating God in all his glory. Here, toward the end of the book, Beecher considers the various uses of nature. While he does not identify fully with the utilitarian perspective, he does not reject it, either. Ultimately, he advocates nature appreciation as a form of religious devotion. We will leave him there, pondering the ineffable as the sun sinks low in the sky over New England.
As things go in our utilitarian age, men look upon the natural world in one of three ways: the first, as a foundation for industry, and all objects are regarded in their relations to industry. Grass is for hay, flowers are for medicine, springs are for dairies, rocks are for quarries, trees are for timber, streams are for navigation or for milling, clouds are for rain, and rain is for harvests. The relation of an object to some commercial or domestic economy, is the end of observation. Beyond that there is no interest to it.
The second aspect in which men behold nature, is the purely scientific. We admire a man of science who is so all-sided that he can play with fancy or literality, with exactitudes or associations, just as he will. But a mere man of accuracy, one of those conscientious-eyed men, that will never see any thing but just what is there, and who insist upon bringing every thing to terms; who are for ever dissecting nature, and coming to the physical truths in their most literal forms, these men are our horror. We should as soon take an analytic chemist to dine with us, that he might explain the constituent elements of every morsel that Eve ate; or an anatomist into a social company, to describe the bones, and muscles, and nerves that were in full play in the forms of dear friends. Such men think that nature is perfectly understood when her mechanism is known; when her gross and physical facts are registered, and when all her details are catalogued and described. These are nature’s dictionary-makers. These are the men who think that the highest enjoyment of a dinner would be to be present in the kitchen and that they might see how the food is compounded and cooked.
A third use of nature is that which poets and artists make, who look only for beauty.
All of these are partialists. They all misinterpret, because they all proceed as if nature were constructed upon so meager a schedule as that which they peruse; as if it were a mere matter of science, or of commercial use, or of beauty; whereas these are but single developments among hundreds.
The earth has its physical structure and machinery, well worth laborious study; it has its relations to man’s bodily wants, from which spring the vast activities of industrial life; it has its relations to the social faculties, and the finer sense of the beautiful in the soul; but far above all these are its declared uses, as an interpreter of God, a symbol of invisible spiritual truths, the ritual of a higher life, the highway upon which our thoughts are to travel toward immortality, and toward the realm of just men made perfect that do inherit it.
For its vast age, my copy of this book offers few clues as to its history. There is a bookseller stamp for J.T. Heald, Bookseller and Binder, 127 Market Street, Wilmington, Delaware. There is also a signature without a date or other identifying information. The name appears to be Hannah B. Michner. I was unable to locate the name online when searched with Delaware, Pennsylvania,
Wilmington, or Philadelphia. I am not clear if the last name is a maiden name or a name received upon marriage. Nor do I have any hint regarding whether the owner purchased the book new, in Delaware, or used, somewhere else.
May Kellogg Sullivan’s exultation over the coming of spring to northern Alaska is matched by my own notebook comment regarding the same page — “Nature, at last!”. It is page 354 of a book with 392 pages, and it is one of the first (and precious few) passages where Sullivan contributes a few words of description of the natural world. Throughout much of the book, it is the Arctic winter, and Sullivan passes her days knitting clothes for Eskimo children at a mission. Nearly all of the animals she mentions in the book take the form of pelts. For instance, a red fox pelt figures prominently; she had bought it to add to her winter gear, only to have it stolen by one of the several bad elements she encountered during her time in the far north. Her first encounter with a ptarmigan is one that was caught in a trap and was trussed up to be served at dinner.
To be completely fair, the book was a mostly enjoyable read (though the winter knitting scenes did get tedious); it only fails completely when evaluated as a nature book. One thing I learned from reading his volume, and the previous one by Frederick Schwatka, is that a journey to a wild place does not automatically constitute nature writing. May Kellogg Sullivan was not, as far as I can tell, a naturalist of any kind. Her trip to Alaska appears to have been motivated by a quest for gold coupled with some level of interest in adventure. Only once does a proclivity for nature study appear in the work — on page 354. Here it is, in its entirety. Molly was the native wife of the Mission director (called the Captain); Jennie was her semi-invalid daughter.
The last week of May has finally come, and with it real spring weather. The children play out in the sand heap on the south side of the house for hours together, enjoying the warm sunshine and pleasant air, the little girl clothed from head to foot in furs. Never has a springtime been so welcome to me, perhaps because in striking contrast to the long, cold winter through which we have just passed. From the hillside behind the Mission, the snow is slowly disappearing, first from the most exposed spots and rocks, the gullies keeping their drifts and ice longer. Mosses are everywhere peeping cheerfully up at me in all their tints of gorgeous green, some that I found recently being tipped with the daintiest of little red cups. This, with other treasures, I brought in my basket to Jennie when I returned from my daily walk upon the hill, and together we studied them closely under the magnifying glass.
To examine the treasures brought in by Mollie, however, we needed no glass. They are sand-pipers, ptarmigan, squirrels, and occasionally a wild goose, shot, perhaps, in the act of flying over thehunter’s head, as these birds are now often seen and heard going north. In the evening I see from my window the neighboring Eskimo children playing with their sleds, and sometimes they light a bonfire, shouting and chattering in their own unique way. All “mushers” now travel at night when the trail is frozen, as it is too soft in the daytime, and the glare of the sun often causes snow-blindness. Then, too, there is water on the ice in places, which we are glad to see, and pools of the same are standing around the Mission and schoolhouse. I can no longer go out in my muckluks, but must wear my long rubber boots and short skirts.
Today I went out for an hour, walking to Chinik Creek over the tundra, from which the snow has almost disappeared, and returned by the hill-top path. The tundra was beautiful with mosses, birds were singing, and the rushing and roaring of the creek waters fairly made my head swim, they were such unusual sounds. The water was cutting a channel in the sands where it empties into the bay. Here it was flowing over the ice, helping to loosen the edge and allow it to drift out to sea.
It is, on the whole, a charming springtime tundra scene, though the particular species of birds and mosses are, of course, not provided. How I longed for Sullivan to set out across the tundra and have adventures amongst the various animals of the north — though I suppose the hazard of polar bears would rather discourage that kind of behavior. I struggled throughout the book with wanting it to be what it clearly wasn’t. Where it shines, actually, is in documenting the gritty realities of life in gold rush communities of tents and shacks. Her time in Alaska was chiefly spent in such places, where the thirst for gold was causing considerable environmental harm (which was, of course, overlooked by all). Sullivan’s Kodak camera documents the damage, though.
And yes, this is the Nome gold rush. I had never heard of it before.
Sullivan herself is a bit of a mystery. I know that she visited Alaska twice over 18 months in 1899-1900, covering over 12,000 miles in her solo travels. She was evidently married at the time but says absolutely nothing about her husband. Were they estranged? Was he deceased? And I have no birth or death dates for Sullivan. She does mention that she is a native of the Badger State, a.k.a., Wisconsin.
I will close out my post with another all-too-brief nature scene, this one from the Arctic summer, soon after Kellogg arrived in Nome (where she got a job in a tent restaurant since women were not permitted to participate in the actual mining work). It is tacked onto a picture of the burgeoning mining camp:
To eyes so unaccustomed as ours to the sight, how strange it all looked at midnight. From the big tent door which faced south and towards Nome City we could see the blue waters of Behring Sea away in the distance. Great ships lying there at anchor, lately arrived from the outside world or just about to leave, laden with treasure, at this long range looked like mere dots on the horizon. Between them and us there straggled over the beach in a westerly direction, a confused group of objects we well knew to be the famous and fast growing camp on the yellow sands. To our right, as well as our left, rolled the softly undulating hills, glowing in tender tints of purples and greys, or, if the moon hung low above our heads, there were warmer and lighter shades which were doubly entrancing.
Accompanying the low moon twinkled the silver stars with their olden time coyness of expression. Little birds, not knowing when to sleep in the endless daylight, hopped among the dewy wild flowers of the tundra, calling to their mates or nestlings, twittering a song appropriate to the time and place because entirely unfamiliar.
My copy of this book is a later edition, from 1915. According to the title page, it is part of the “Thirteenth Thousand” of Kellogg’s work. Given the book’s clear sales success, I am surprised that so little information is available online about its author.
My next book, 
