The Confidence of the Wild Things: “A Hermit’s Wild Friends” by Mason A. Walton, 1908

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Oct 072020
 

Well we know that the wild things manage their domestic affairs in a way best suited to their needs and natures. But it is only here and there than a human being can gain the confidence of the wild things so far as to share the secrets of their lives.

KNOWN TO HIS FANS AS THE HERMIT OF GLOUCESTER, MASON WALTON LIVED IN A CABIN IN THE WOODS OF CAPE ANN, MASSACHUSETTS. Born and raised in Maine, Mason came south for his health, hoping his various illnesses would be cured by some time at sea with the fishermen. When they all declined to take him aboard, he headed for a hill a short distance inland, set up his hammock, and began living out of doors. Within a few months, he had constructed his first cabin; a few years later, he built a second one. For eighteen years, he spent his days observing nature, and particularly the birds and small mammals that lived around (and even in) his rustic home. Even with his cabin sanctuary, he still spent eight months of every year sleeping outside in the hammock He made his living as a writer of columns in Field & Stream, a project that earned him many admirers. For a time, he grew flowers and sold them for supplemental money. He kept notebooks of all his interactions with “the wild things”, as he called them, and drew upon his notes to write a series of essays cobbled together in a volume published in 1908. It was his only book; he abandoned his hermit life a few years later, and passed away in his sleep in 1917, at the age of 79.

TO A CONSIDERABLE EXTENT, HOWEVER, HIS PERSONA OF A FOREST HERMIT WAS A MANUFACTURED ONE. He frequently had visitors to his home, sometimes even crowds. Though he remained unmarried (his only wife and child had died tragically when he was still young, before he moved to Cape Ann), he certainly did not want for friends and associates. Most humorously of all, though, was his daily coffee habit, which sounds frightfully like a modern-day Starbucks addiction many of us might confess to:

I found it inconvenient to cook my breakfast and then, after eating it, go to the city [Gloucester]. Why I did so was on account of my coffee habit. I had tried to find a good cup of coffee in the city and had failed, so had depended on my own brewing.

One morning I dropped into the little store at the head of Pavilion Beach, and the proprietor asked me to have a cup of coffee. He piloted me into the back shop, where he told me that he served a light lunch with coffee, to the farmers. The coffee was just to my taste, and for twelve years I patronized the coffee trade in that little back shop. My note-book shows that during the twelve years I had missed only eighty mornings. I had paid six hundred and forty-five dollars, during that time, for my lunch and coffee, and had walked, on account of my breakfast, seventeen thousand two hundred miles. Whew! It makes me feel poor and tired to recall it.

I CONFESS THAT I AM A BIT HARD-PRESSED TO CONSIDER HIM A HERMIT AFTER READING THIS PASSAGE. It is almost like a parody of Thoreau’s chapter on Economy in “Walden”. where Thoreau carefully considered his various expenses in setting up his cabin, which totaled just over twenty-five dollars. To put his expense into modern terms, using an online inflation calculator I was able to determine that his coffee habit cost him the 2020 equivalent of over $18,000. (To be fair, Thoreau’s 2020 expenses would be over $850.) Then I remind myself that Walton slept out-of doors from the first of April through Christmas, and that ought to count for something.

WALTON, AN AMATEUR NATURALIST, WAS KEENLY OBSERVANT OF THE BEHAVIORS OF LOCAL WILDLIFE. Unlike the modern ecologist, though, Walton was more than willing to interact with the wildlife, and learn from those cross-species communications. He regularly fed birds and squirrels and mice, keeping a loaf of bread in a caged box just outside his cabin door and regularly scattering anything from seeds and corn to cupcakes and donuts for his wild friends. While he maintained the noble attitude that they were his teachers, he did not always make the kindest of pupils. His very first story in the book, about a raccoon named Satan, begins with him catching the raccoon in a trap and chaining it to a tree in his front yard. Once, when upset about Satan’s running up a pine tree and being difficult to retrieve, Walton whipped the raccoon to teach it a lesson. And while he was generally quite kind to birds, he regularly killed crows, snakes, and weasels, all of which he saw as threats to the local songbirds. (Once he did keep a garter snake as a pet for a few months, but the weather turned colder and it died.)

ONCE WE ACKNOWLEDGE THE HERMIT OF GLOUCESTER’S VARIOUS IMPERFECTIONS, THOUGH, THERE REMAINS A CONSERVATIONIST SIDE TO HIM THAT IS WORTH RECOGNIZING AND APPRECIATING. To his credit, for instance, Walton gave up his gun in favor of respecting (nearly all) wildlife he encountered. And he was quite dedicated as a student of wild creatures. This is how he described his work, in an essay about a red squirrel he named Tiny:

I am writing natural history just as I find it, from observation of the wild things. To some of these wild things I am caterer, protector, and friend. They do not object to my presence when engaged in domestic affairs, so my ability to pry into their secrets is increased in ratio to the confidence accorded me.

Walton noted, on more than one occasion, that too many naturalists of the time simply echoed what they read about in books, rather than closely studying nature themselves:

With few exceptions, writer on outdoor life make it a point to denounce the red squirrel. They claim that he is a nest-robber of the worst kind. The most of this abuse bears the earmarks of the library. One author copies after another, without knowledge of the real life of one of the most interesting wild things of the woods.

Perhaps Walton’s most fascinating discovery, from all his observations, pertained to the white-footed mice that took possession of his cabin:

My object in writing about these mice is to call attention to their peculiar method of communication. I have summered and wintered them over fifteen years, and never have I heard one of them utter a vocal sound. They communicate with each other by drumming with their fore feet, or, rather, they drum with their toes, for the foot in the act is held rigid while the toes move.

If any writer has called attention to this…, it has escaped my reading. I am well satisfied that the habit has never been published before, so it must prove interesting to those who pry into the secrets of Dame Nature.

Curious, I investigated current scientific knowledge on the subject. According to the University of Georgia Museum of Natural History, the mice communicate by foot-stamping, vocal squeaks, and scent.

ONE FASCINATING THING I LEARNED ABOUT WALTON WAS THAT HE WAS, IN FACT, A FRIEND OF THE NATURE WRITER FRANK BOLLES, WHOSE THREE VOLUMES I READ AND WROTE ABOUT PREVIOUSLY IN THIS BLOG. Indeed, Bolles visited him at his cabin, and reported on the visit in his posthumously-published book, “From Blomidon to Smoky”:

I have a friend who lives alone, summer and winter, in a tiny hut amid the woods. The doctors told him he must die, so he escaped from them to nature, made his peace with her, and regained his health. To the wild creatures of the pasture, the oak woods, and the swamps, he is no longer a man, but a faun; he is one of their own kind, — shy, alert, silent. They, having learned to trust him, have come a little nearer to men…. The secret of my friend’s friendship with these birds was that, by living together, each had, by degrees, learned to know the other.

IN MARCH, 1903, JOHN BURROUGHS PUBLISHED AN ESSAY ENTITLED REAL AND SHAM NATURAL HISTORY, TOUCHING OFF WHAT CAME TO BE KNOWN AS “THE NATURE FAKERS CONTROVERSY”. Burroughs called attention to, and attacked, nature writers of the time who had taken to teaching children about wildlife by telling animal’s life stories from the animals’ own points of view. Although supposedly drawing upon actual observations, the accounts were simultaneously fictionalized, and they sometimes portrayed the animals as having very human thoughts and emotions. They threatened to blur the boundary between natural history and fantasy tales. It is no surprise that, in publishing his book about wild animals he befriended, Walton was very clear that he was a scientific observer, not a fiction author: “…the truth is that I describe wild life just as I find it, not as some books say I ought to find it.” In his finest moments as interpreter of animal thought and behavior, Walton is worthy of some degree, at least, of admiration and respect. I know that I would gladly join him for a cup of coffee and some conversation if I could.

MY VOLUME OF THIS BOOK WAS THE ONLY EDITION EVER PRINTED. A weighty tome, its pages are of heavy stock, interspersed with a variety of images, all black and white. Some are photographs, others drawings by more than one illustrator. The finest of these are full-page images of different birds. The artist of these was none other than Louis Agassiz Fuertes. My copy of the book had one previous owner whose name is written semi-illegibly along the right-hand edge of the inside front cover, along with the date of 4/1913.

No Less than an Inspiration: “In the Open” by Stanton Davis Kirkham, 1908

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Oct 052020
 

What familiarity with the elements and with natural features of the earth the migrating birds must acquire — with winds and clouds, with mountain chains and rivers and coast lines! They know the landmarks and guide-posts of two continents and can find their own way. The whistle of curlew, or the honk of wild geese high in the air, seems a greeting out of the clouds from these cosmopolites, to us, sitting rooted to the earth beneath. A flock of wild geese on the wing is no less than an inspiration. When the strong-voiced, stout-hearted company of pioneers pass overhead, our thoughts ascend and sail with them over the roofs of the world. As band after band come into the field of vision — minute glittering specks in the distant blue — to cross the golden sea of the sunset and disappear in the northern twilight, their faint melodious honk is an Orphean strain drawing irresistibly.

AND SO, TOO, WITH THIS STUNNING IMAGE AS ITS FRONTISPIECE, KIRKHAM’S “IN THE OPEN” DREW ME IRRESISTIBLY IN. My excitement about the book mounted as I read the opening lines of the first essay, The Point of View, poetically celebrating the opportunities to engage with the exuberant energy and vitality of nature around us:

Nature is in herself a perpetual invitation: the birds call, the trees beckon and the winds whisper to us. After the unfeeling pavements, the yielding springy turf of the fields has a sympathy with the feet and invites us to walk, It is good to hear again the fine long-drawn note of the meadow-lark — voice of the early year, — the first blue-bird’s warble, the field-sparrow’s trill, the untamed melody of the kinglet — a magic flute in the wilderness — and to see the ruby crown of the beloved sprite. It is good to inhale the mint crushed underfoot and to roll between the fingers the new leaves of the sweetbrier; to see again the first anemones — the wind-children, — the mandrake’s canopies, the nestling erythronium and the spring beauty, like a delicate carpet; or to seek the clintonia in its secluded haunts, and to feel the old childlike joy of lady’s-slippers.

ALAS, POOR KIRKHAM. Having read close to forty works of natural history now, I have to recognize that this book opens with two strikes against it. Firstly, it is set in New England — what is worse, Massachusetts — just like practically half of the nature books from its day. And then it relies heavily on the round-of-the-seasons motif, a tired structure for natural history accounts of the time. What is more, there is no reference to places; I suppose Kirkham’s idea was that his book encounters with nature might be anyone’s, and particularities of locale did not matter. Only in two essays near the close of the book — The Mountains and The Forest — does the author stray further afield, to the Rockies and the Sierras, respectively. (Even then, if not for brief name-dropping of the two mountain ranges midway through each chapter, I would not know where they were set.) Oh — and in a bit of bait-and-switch, the frontispiece painting is the only color image in the book, and Luis Agassiz Fuertes’ only contribution to it.

THE THIRD STRIKE, THOUGH, IS ITS RATHER FORMULAIC PROSE AND OVERLY FAMILIAR NATURE ENCOUNTERS. His writing is poetic and aesthetically rich, yet somehow falls mostly flat in the long run. Kirkham makes abundant mention of mythological figures, and fills his pages with names of plants and birds — clearly he knew his Greek and Roman legends and his New England natural history in abundant measure. But somehow, he rarely manages to bring something new to the genre of nature writing. He offers the reader vivid sensorial descriptions — the book does not want for adjectives. He shares many facets of the natural world, but they are ones I have encountered elsewhere — cowbirds laying their eggs in the nests of other species, caterpillars falling prey to ichneumon wasps, squirrels gathering acorns. He even includes several pages of observations of red and black ants fighting each other in a barn — the red ants evidently attempting to enslave the black ones (which he disturbingly refers to again and again as “negroes” — but we will leave that faux pas — or perhaps even bit of intentional racism — alone for the time being). But he brings no new realization to the story — Thoreau beat him to it with an ant battle scene in “Walden” several decades earlier.

OCCASIONALLY, THOUGH, KIRKHAM SUCCEEDS — AT LEAST, FOR THIS PARTICULAR READER. Kirkham devotes an essay to Pasture Stones. Perhaps it is the geologist in me that enjoyed his appreciation of them and his invocation of the last Ice Age. They infuse the New England pasture landscape with a sense of deep time, and Kirkham explores this here:

There is a rustic notion that boulders somehow grow, in some inexplicable manner enlarging like puffballs and drawing sustenance from the earth — and what could be more puzzling to the uninitiated than the presence of these pasture stones? His was an ingenious mind who conjured up that remote ice age from this fragmentary evidence and derived a history from these scattered letters and elliptical sentences. It was like tracing the stars in their origin.

It takes a bold imagination, indeed, to see these familiar fields and woods overlaid with a mile’s thickness of ice; to recognize here in this present landscape a very Greenland, redeemed and made hospitable. There was need of a solid foundation of fact, patiently garnered, before such an arch of fancy could be sprung. What chaos and desolation once reigned here, only these boulders can tell. Here was a frozen waste as barren as the face of the moon. But beneath lay the soil that was to nurture the violet and the hepatica. There was a fine satisfaction in riding a miracle like this to earth, to corner it and see it resolve itself into the working of natural laws.

Here is another passage I enjoyed, in which Kirkham muses on a bit of driftwood he found on an ocean beach. Again, he writes about the power of imagination, imbuing natural objects like pasture stones and pieces of wood with rich stories steeped in the magic of time’s long passage:

I take home a piece of driftwood, for no ordinary fire but to kindle the imagination, for it is saturated with memories and carries with it the enchantment of the sea. To light this is to set in motion a sort of magic-play. True driftwood has been seasoned by the waters and mellowed by the years. Not any piece of a lobster-pot, or pleasure yacht, or, for that matter, of any modern craft at all is driftwood. It must have come from the timber of a vessel built in the olden time when copper bolts were used, so that the wood is impregnated with copper salts. That is merely the chemistry of it. The wood is saturated with sunshine and moonlight as well, with the storms and calms of the sea — its passions, its subtle moods; more than this, it absorbed of the human life whose destiny was involved with the vessel — the tragedy, the woe. It had two lives — a forest life and a sea life. By force of tragedy alone it became driftwood. Winter and summer the sea sang its brave songs over the boat and chanted her requiem at last as she lay on the ledge. This fragment drifted ashore out of the wreck of a vessel, out of the wreck of great hopes, out of the passion of the sea.

AT TIMES OVERWROUGHT, AT TIMES TEDIOUS, AT TIMES NEARLY ELOQUENT, KIRKHAM’S BOOK LEAVES ME WITH A SENSE OF MISSED POTENTIAL. Perhaps, if he had chosen as a theme a collection of brief musings and impressions of natural objects and scenes, along the line of the pasture stones and driftwood, the book would have been more engaging. Like nearly every nature writer I have encountered so far, Kirkham clearly had moments of insight that he successfully transferred to the page. Yet his work, collectively, does not (in this volume, at least) sustain the wonder and intensity that it occasionally manages to convey so well. My favorite page, without question, is the stunning frontispiece painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

MY COPY OF THIS BOOK IS A FIRST (ONLY?) EDITION. Unlike the pasture stones Kirkham wrote about, this volume has no marks showing its journey. It is a lovely book, visually; the cover is so enticing in its simplicity (in an age of sometimes ornate gilded cover art), and the pages so thick and robust, with deckled edges on bottom and side and gold along the top. It would have made a fine gift for a discerning lover of nature — ideally, one who had not previously read half a dozen other books about Massachusetts through the seasons.

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

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Reptiles  No Responses »
Sep 292020
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Subtle Essence: “Days Out of Doors” by Charles C. Abbott, 1889

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 192020
 

In the forest, the sunlight softly stealing through the half-grown leaves gilds the dark mosses, warms the cold lichens, kisses the purple orchids, makes glad the gloomiest crannies of the wood. Scarcely a cave so dark, or ravine so deep, but the light reaches to its uttermost bounds, and, unlike the soulless glare of the midwinter sun, is life-inspiring. There is a subtle essence in an April Sun that quickens the seeming dead.

And while I have stood wondering at this strange resurrective force, at times almost led to listen to the bursting buds and steadily expanding leaves, a veil is suddenly drawn over the scene and the light shadows fade to nothingness. Falling as gently as the sunlight that preceded it, come the round, warm rain-drops from a passing cloud. Gathering on the half-clad branches overhead, they find crooked channels down the wrinkled bark. poise upon the unrolled leaves, globes of unrivaled light, or nestle in beds of moss, gems in a marvelous setting. Anon the cloud passes, and every raindrop drinks its fill of light. There is no longer a flood of mellow sunshine here, but a sparkling light — an all-pervading glitter. And it is thoroughly inspiring. Your enthusiasm prompts you to shout, if you can not sing, and the birds are always quickly moved by it. From out their hidden haunts, in which they have sat silently while it rained, come here and there the robins, and, perching where the world is best in view, extol the merits of the unclouded skies. Ernest sun-worshippers they, that watch his coming with impatient zeal and are ever the first to break the silence of the dawn; and all these April days their varying songs are tuneful records of the changing sky.

IN THIS BIT OF FLOWERY PROSE, CHARLES CONRAD ABBOTT OFFERS UP HIS EASTERTIDE PAEAN TO A SPRING DAY IN THE FOREST. It is easy to dismiss the text as purple prose, or a thinly-veiled Christian allegory (though it might easily be seen as pantheistic, as well). Yes, it is perhaps overwrought. And yet, reading it, I am transported into the forest glade dripping in the light April rain, and it is a forest alive with color and light. It is an everyday landscape, probably somewhere on Abbott’s land (a blend of tidal marsh and upland on the edge of Trenton, New Jersey), and yet it is also a place of wonder and magic. Indeed, many past readers have evidently found fault with this; the Friends of the Abbott Marshlands (Abbott’s property is now a park) note that “Abbott’s writing about Natural History have sometimes been criticized for being more romantic than scientific.” For my part, though, I appreciate Abbott’s sincere, I think, efforts to combine scientific observation with a sense of aesthetic, affective, and perhaps even spiritual engagement with the landscape.

ABBOTT ALSO CELEBRATED NOT KNOWING. In an age rich with scientific and technological progress, Abbott was quick to point out what we still do not know (though now, more than one hundred years on, some of those things are indeed known). For instance, he wondered frequently about birds — the why behind their seasonal migration, their degree of intelligence, their individuality, their pair bonding, and the intention behind their behaviors:

Although there may be many who assume to know, it were, in truth, as idle to question the Sphinx as to attempt to unravel the mystery of bird ways. Again and again, as the year rolls by, the rambler must be content t merely witness., not to unfathom the whys and wherefores of a bird’s doing; but still this unpleasant experience does not go for naught. It very soon teaches him that birds are something beyond what those who should know better have asserted them to be. To learn this is a great gain. It is well to give heed to him or her who carries a spy-glass; but as to him who merely carries a shot-gun, and robs birds’ nests in the name of science, faugh!

(AND TO MAURICE THOMPSON I SAY, “FAUGH!”)

FOR THE MOST PART, ABBOTT WAS CONSISTENT IN ADVOCATING THE STUDY OF NATURE WITHOUT HARMING ANY LIVING BEINGS. If we ignore a troubling passage in which Abbott apparently put a lizard to sleep with chloroform gas and removed its eyes in an experiment about the sense capacities of reptiles, Abbott generally wrote, and acted, in ways that reflect a respect for all life. In that way, he put himself at odds with many contemporary scientists, amateur or professional. For instance, in this passage he defines natural history in ecological terms that seem rather ahead of its time (particularly in the notion of perceiving the world through the senses of another animal, experiencing its umwelt (nearly half a century before Jacob von Uexküll first coined the term).

To place stuffed birds and beasts in glass cages, to arrange insects in cabinets, and dried plants in drawers, is merely the drudgery and preliminary of study; to watch their habits, to understand their relations to one another, to study their instincts and intelligence, to ascertain their adaptations and their relations to the forces of nature, to realize what the world appears to them — these constitute, as it seems to me at. least, the true interest of natural history, and may even give us the clew to senses and perceptions of which at present we have no conception.

ANOTHER NOTEWORTHY FEATURE OF ABBOTT’S ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WAS HIS DESIRE TO EXPERIENCE IT IN NOVEL WAYS. Consider, for instance, his suggestion that the nature enthusiast ought to consider looking up into the treetops while lying upon the ground:

It may not have occurred to ramblers generally, but to lie upon one’s back and study a tree-top, and particularly an old oak while in this position, has many advantages. If not so markedly so in October as in June, still the average tree-top is a busy place, though you might not expect it, judged by the ordinary methods of observation. If you simply stand beneath the branches of a tree or climb into them, you are too apt to be looked upon as an intruder. If you lie down and watch the play — often a tragedy — with a good glass, you will certainly be rewarded; and, not least of all, you can take your departure without some one or more of your muscles being painful from too long use. If the tree-top life deigns to consider you at all when you are flat upon your back, it will count you merely as a harmless freak of Nature.

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, CHARLES ABBOTT REFERS TO HIMSELF AS A “RAMBLER”; IN DOING SO, HE IS INTENTIONALLY PLACING HIMSELF IN THE COMPANY OF BURROUGHS, TORREY, FLAGG, AND THOREAU. Unlike Thoreau, but like all the others, Abbott writes in a consciously rambling style; his book is a collection of adventures, loosely strung together by the seasons of the year. Having read more than 30 books from this time period now, it is a format I have come to recognize readily. On the one hand, it is a style that was easier to write (not requiring much underlying structure) and pleasant to read (relating various encounters with plants, animals, and the weather). At the same time, it puts some limit on the overall quality of Abbott’s book. Without structure, it is ultimately without direction. While most of the book is set in and around his home acres in New Jersey, on a few occasions mid-chapter he would jump to another part of the state, or eastern Massachusetts, or even central Ohio (where Abbott, an archaeologist, spent some time at Serpent Mound). He didn’t even always stick to the month the chapter was about; at one point, he jumped from September back to May. I can see why the rambling nature essay format (a favorite with Torrey and Burroughs) eventually fell out of favor. Abbott is a fine writer, and this book has some charming passages; but the volume does not come close, in power or profundity, to Beston’s Outermost House.

TO CLOSE, I OFFER ONE MORE CHARMING PARAGRAPH OF ABBOTT’S WORK. Here, Abbott called for protecting old trees, an action I vigorously second:

Why, when such trees as are perfect specimens of their kind stand near public roads, can they not e held — well, semi-sacred, at least? Should not their owners be induced to let them stand? Indeed, could a community do better with a portion of the public funds than to purchase all such trees for the common good? Particularly is it true of a level country that the only bit of nature held in common is the sky. I would that here and there a perfect tree could be added to the list. I have known enormous oaks to be felled because they shaded too much ground and only grass could be made to grow beneath them. It is sad to think that trees, respected even by the Indians, should have no value now. The forest must inevitably disappear, but do our necessities require that no monuments to it shall remain?

AS AN AFTERWARD, A FEW REMARKS ON THE STORIED BUT WEATHERBEATEN VOLUME I READ FOR THIS POST. The cloth at the spine is torn and loose, spine cocked, and part of edge of the front cover is missing. It is stained and tanned and the binding is loose. A collector’s copy it is not. In terms of history, as of 1890, it was owned by a Carrie Lucile Barton.

I have been able to find out very little about her online, but it is surprising there is anything at all. According to the National Register, in 1879 Carrie Lucile Barton was living in Washington, D.C., employed by the Coast Survey as a copyist. She had taken the position after living in Nebraska, though she was born in New York State. As confirmation that this is the same Carrie Barton as signed this book, I also found a Google links to a post mentioning that a Carrie Lucile Barton signed a copy of Les Misérables with her name and “Washington, D.C.” on December 3, 1888. Since my copy does not specify the location, did she move between 1888 and 1890? I also know a bit about her taste in poetry, if the two glued-in additions to the volume were her doing. Using Google again, I tracked the poem on the title page to Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford, a highly published author of novels, poems, and detective stories. The other poem is by Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician, scientist, novelist, and poet. If I were asked to indicate a preference between the two, I think Mitchell is a bit more enticing, despite the “lilies languidly afloat”.

Face to Face with Eternity: “Nature in a City Yard” by Charles M. Skinner, 1897

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Natural History, Prehistory, Sense of Place  4 Responses »
Sep 022020
 

Looking skyward one is face to face with eternity. How futile, yet inevitable, to put the questions suggested to himself and to unanswering space and time by that vision! He tries to think back to the time in eternity when matter did not exist, and concludes it always did exist. And he wonders if the universe is evolution or creation. And is order mind, or has mind developed from order? And in the future suns burn out, only to have their ashes swept up by comets, scouts and scavengers of space, and hurled together with such fury that they become gaseous with heat, condense, reform into suns and planets, and the drama goes on again, endlessly. With a spectator? Ah, useless to ask and wonder. Truth is in a well, so deep she cannot come to us, nor we descend to her. Let us be content to love and admire, create and maintain, live and improve. It is all — and the best — we can do.

I CONFESS THAT I ALMOST GAVE UP ON WRITING A BLOG POST ON THIS BOOK. Charles Montgomery Skinner’s book is pleasant, yes, but at first glance there was precious little in his writing that really caught my eye. Perhaps the most significant thing about the book, from the standpoint of American environmental writing, is that way back in 1897, someone living in a Brooklyn home with a “common city yard, about eighteen feet by fifty” opted to write an entire book about encountering nature right there, at his back doorstep. I always imagined that early nature writers looked to wild places for inspiration, but the more I read of the more unknown exemplars, the more I find them encountering nature anywhere and everywhere. (Another example of a writer encountering nature in a city, in this case Cambridge, is Frank Bolles, in “Land of the Lingering Snow”.) The result is a book mostly about gardening, though here gardening extends to finding weeds in neighboring lots — even dandelions — and placing them in the backyard, along with more distinguished cultivars. Four chapters cover his garden through the seasons, with another chapter on Flowers and Insects. Skinner also uses the book to rail, on practically every other page, about a highly destructive, horribly obnoxious neighbor boy, Reginald McGonigle. The author strikes me as one compelled by employment to live in the city (he states that at the opening), doing his best to appreciate what nature it still offers. The sky, for instance, is still accessible to view from a backyard hammock, and that becomes the subject of a chapter, also. Indeed, in a couple of moments in the book, Skinner transcends his yard and the city to engage in cosmic wonder, and I found those passages most striking. From my viewpoint as a geologist, his finest one is this one, connecting stones in his yard to geologic ice ages and roping in an inaccurate interpretation of Milankovitch Cycles. Or at least, that is what I thought he was doing, based upon his reference to astronomical processes in the passage. But it turns out that the concept of Earth’s orbital cycles affecting the timing of ice ages was not actually proposed by Milutin Milanković until 1924. I can only guess that the notion of some sort of link between Earth’s orbit and ice ages had been identified much earlier.

Late fall and early spring are good seasons for the study of geology and mineralogy, as the vegetation is light, and the character of the ground may be seen. And our yard, in common with the other yards of the town and some thousands of miles of unyarded country, has had an interesting history. Had I stood 18,000 years ago where I stand to-day when i weed the hydrangeas and stir the earth about the “pinys,” I should have been facing a wall of ice, the receding glacier of the last Ice Age. And I and certain millions of others live on the debris of that glacier. This enormous mass, over a mile thick, moving sluggishly but irresistibly southward to its melting-point, brought with it millions of tons of sand, soil, gravel, and boulders, and dumped them into the Atlantic, building up from the bottom of that sea an island 120 miles long, and leaving parts of its moraine at other points between here and the Rockies. A conjunction of exterior planets had pulled at the earth by gravitative force, elongating its orbit, so that for some years the winters on the side slanted from the sun were lengthened and the summers shortened. The southern half of the globe will be frozen up in about 75,000 years, when the conjunction is repeated.

And in the light of such portentous events the back yard becomes important. I know the locale of certain fragments that I find there — speaking now of minerals and rocks, instead of the commoner rags, boots, bottles, and other materials of “made land.” The green mica I know comes from Fort George, New York; the green feldspar from a mile or two south of that point; the basalt from the palisades of the Hudson; the jasper from a now extinct reef of it which may be traced beneath the river; the serpentine from Hoboken; but mixed with these are specimens from the Hudson Highlands, the Adirondacks, the Connecticut hills, the Green Mountains, perhaps from those oldest hills of all, the Laurentians — a noble range, no doubt, that the glacier wore down to mere roots and stumps of its old self. When we record or guess upon these things, man and his work appear too trivial to think about, and time, space, mass, force, too great for understanding. There is, too, in the passing of the autumn, some hint of the cold death that must overtake the race of humankind, the world it lives in, and the solar system in which it moves. It is too vast and lonely a theme for the imagination. By potting the plants for winter blooming, tearing up the faded annuals, setting bulbs that are to flower in spring, and mulching the beds against the coming of cold weather, one can forget these grandeurs, and his mind is comforted.

WHAT A REMARKABLE PASSAGE! It is, without a doubt, the earliest philosophical exploration of geologic deep time (a term coined by John McPhee in 1981) that I have ever read. It is literally several decades before radiometric dating — back in a time when geologists had precious little knowledge of the age of past Earth events, or the age of the planet itself, for that matter. As such, this text alone makes the book worthy of acknowledgement. The rest of it — well, now at least the reader understands the focus on gardening — to keep at bay a looming sense of cosmic angst.

COMPARED TO SKINNER’S BACKYARD, MY COPY OF HIS BOOK HAS A MUCH LESS DRAMATIC HISTORY. It was once part of the collection of the Young Men’s Library Association in Palmer, Massachusetts, nowadays a town of about 12,000 people a few miles east of Springfield. It was last due back on March 16, 1960, and sometime after that was stamped “Discarded”.

These Days of Parks and Chipmunks: “A Watcher in the Woods” by Dallas Lore Sharp, 1903

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History  No Responses »
Aug 312020
 
Author photo 1911 by William L. Finley, Oregon State Historical Society Library archives

Our forests by daylight are rapidly being thinned into picnic groves; the bears and panthers have disappeared, and by day there is nothing to fear, nothing to give our imaginations exercise. But the night remains, and if we hunger for adventure, why, besides the night, here is the skunk; and the two offer a pretty sure chance for excitement. Never to have stood face to face in a narrow path at night with a full-grown, leisurely skunk is to have missed excitement and suspense second only to the staring out of countenance of a green-eyed wildcat. It is surely worth while, in these days of parks and chipmunks, when all stir and adventure has left the woods, to sally out at night for the mere sake of meeting a skunk, for the shock of standing before a beast that will not give you the path. As you back away from him you feel as if you really were escaping. If there is any genuine adventure left for us in this age of suburbs, we must be helped to it by the dark.

WRITTEN AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY (1901), THESE WORDS REFLECT THE RAPIDLY TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE OF THE EASTERN SEABOARD OF THE UNITED STATES. From his home in New Jersey, Sharp bore witness to an age of urbanization and suburbanization. Wild woodlands were rapidly disappearing, replaced with orchards, fields, and city blocks. For Sharp, this change meant a dramatic shift, largely positive, in the state of America’s songbirds, as he saw more and more of them learning how to co-exist with humans. and their constructions. At the same time, he bemoaned the rapid disappearance of mammals and raptors, a situation he saw as inevitably becoming worse over time. And these changes would be a tremendous loss to all Americans:

I wish the game-laws could be amended to cover every wild animal left to us. In spite of laws they are destined to disappear; but if the fox, weasel, mink and skunk, the hawks and owls, were protected as the quail and deer are, they might be preserved a long time to our meadows and woods. How irreparable the loss to our landscape is the extinction of the great golden eagle! How much less of spirit, daring, courage, and life come to us since we no longer mark the majestic creature soaring among the clouds, the monarch of the skies! A dreary world it will be out of doors when we can hear no more the scream of the hawks, can no longer find the tracks of the coon, nor follow a fox to den.

On the other hand,

There is promise of a future for the birds in their friendship with us and in our interest and sentiment for them. Everybody is interested in birds; everybody loves them. There are bird-books and bird-books and bird-books — new volumes in every publisher’s spring announcements. Every one with wood ways knows the songs and nests of the more common species.

In fact, Sharp gloried in the extent to which he saw so many bird species adapting to a human presence. When a friend declared to him that the birds would all soon be extinct because “Civilization is bound to sweep them away,” Sharp

made no reply, but, for an answer, led the way to the street and down the track to this pole which High-hole [a northern flicker] had appropriated. I pointed out his hole, and asked them to watch. Then I knocked. Instantly a red head appeared at the opening. High-hole was mad enough to eat us; but he changed his mind, and with a bored, testy flip, dived into the woods. He had served my purpose, however, for his read head sticking out of a hole in a street-railway pole was a rising sun in the east of my friend’s ornithological world, New light broke over this question of birds and men…..

High-hole is a civilized bird. Perhaps “domesticated” would better describe him; though domesticated implies the purposeful effort of man to change character and habits, while the changes which have come over High-hole — and over most of the wild birds — are the result of High-hole’s own free choosing.

If we should let the birds have their way they would voluntarily fall into civilized, if not into domesticated, habits.

As evidence of this, Sharp highlights the avian riches in his own “civilized” backyard:

Using my home for a center, you may describe a circle of a quarter-mile radius and all the way round find that radius intersecting either a house, a dooryard, or an orchard. Yet within this small and settled area I found one summer thirty-six species of birds nesting. Can any cabin in the Adirondacks open its window to more voices — any square mile of solid, unhacked forest on the globe show richer, gayer variety of bird life?

In fact, orchards are particularly rich with avian fauna:

Except for the warblers, one acre of apple-trees is richer in the variety of its birds than ten acres of woods.

FORTUNATELY, SHARP’S PROGNOSTICATIONS CONCERNING THE FUTURE OF AMERICA’S RAPTORS AND MAMMALS WERE WILDLY INACCURATE. And fortunately, too, his claims about the degree to which birds adapt joyously to humans (to the point that wildlands become largely unnecessary for their continuance) appear to have been ignored. Still, in the midst of all the pessimism about the future of America’s wildlife that i have encountered in many other writers from this time, Sharp’s hopefulness and positive outlook on the human impact on nature was refreshing.

UNFORTUNATELY, FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS, I FOUND SHARP HIMSELF RATHER UNLIKEABLE. I know I ought to be open-minded toward others, particularly those that have been dead for almost a century. I kept trying to, even after the opening chapter ended with the shooting of several muskrats. In another essay, Sharp encounters an opossum in a hollow tree — and dines on him the next day. He writes about how toads are “unlovely” and “repulsive”, but how we should still learn to appreciate them for their other qualities. The final straw, though, is a random attack on those who love old books. How dare he?

An ardor for decayed trees is not from any perversity of nature. There is nothing unreasonable in it, as in — bibliomania, for instance. I discover a gaunt, punky old pine, bored full of holes, and standing among acres of green, characterless companions, with the held breath, the jumping pulse, the bulging eyes of a collector stumbling upon a Caxton in a latest-publication book-store. But my excitement is really for some cause; for — sh! look! In that round hole up there, just under the broken limb, the flame of the red-headed woodpecker — a light in one of the windows of the woods. Peep through it. What rooms! What people! No; I never paid ten cents extra for a volume because it was full of years and mildew and rare errata (I sometimes buy books at a reduction for these accidents); but I have walked miles, and passed forests of green, good-looking trees, to wait in the slim shade of some tottering, limbless old stump.

While I respect his attempt to juxtapose dead wood (trees) with dead paper (books) as a means of highlighting the life present in an old snag, as one who is equal parts lover of books and of nature, I will continue to find delight in both.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE COPY OF THIS BOOK THAT I READ. First, a clarification regarding the age of the text, though. A prolific writer of nature essays celebrating the local wonders of each season, Sharp published “Wild Life Near Home” in 1901, and then put out a thinner volume of excerpted pieces as “A Watcher in the Woods” two years later. In 1911, the Century Company published a School Edition — a slender volume without illustrations, but including notes and suggestions for teachers at the end. This particular edition appears to have been in the possession of an Ollie Brown (written in pencil, mostly erased) and (probably later) a Jennie Gordon from Yonkers Training School. Another person’s handwriting appears in fountain pen on the flyleaf, writing an indecipherable line (if anyone reading this can interpret it, please let me know what it says), followed by New York, followed by April 1934. That is all I know of this book’s history.

What Wildness Still Remains: “The Log of the Sun: A Chronicle of Nature’s Year” by William Beebe, 1906

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Insects, Ocean  No Responses »
Aug 182020
 

In the fifty-two short essays of this volume I have presented familiar objects from unusual points of view. Birds-eye glances and insect’s eye glances, at the nature of our woods and fields, will reveal beauties which are wholly invisible from the usual human view-point, five feet or more above the ground.

Who follows the lines must expect to find moods as varying as the seasons; to face storm and night and cold, and all other delights of what wildness still remains to us upon the earth.

WITH THESE WORDS, THE EXPLORER-NATURALIST WILLIAM BEEBE SETS THE READER ON A JOURNEY THROUGH THE FAMILIAR WILDS OF THE NORTHEAST COAST, FROM JANUARY TO DECEMBER. Clearly inspired by John Burroughs, Beebe intended his first book to be another of many volumes published at the time tracing out seasonal changes in New England and environs (in this case, near New York City). His format: a weekly entry about nearby wildlife, especially birds, capped off with a bit of nature poetry as a nod to the temperment of the age. But at this project, Beebe largely failed. Yes, there are a number of brief pieces about looking at the familiar in new ways, such as studying pond life with a microscope or getting down close to the ground to see the winter world of tunneling mice close-up. But there are a number of chapters — his finest writing in the book, in my estimation — that seek out wilder places such as swamps and marshes or, better still, the open ocean. Indeed, the book’s longest chapter, at twenty-four pages, is Secrets of the Ocean. There is wanderlust in these pages — a world adventurer constrained, for a time, to a single place, seeking to make the most of it. In fact, at one point he celebrates the love of home as a source of abiding connection with the birds he so keenly observes:

This love of home, of birthplace, bridges over a thousand physical differences between feathered creatures and ourselves. We forget their expressionless masks of horn, their scaly toes, and looking deep into their clear, bright eyes, we know and feel a kinship, a sympathy of spirit, which binds us all together, and we are glad.

Clearly, though, while he may appreciate a sense of home, what he truly yearns for instead is wilder places, where humans have not ventured. In wetlands he found an approximation that was temporarily satisfying:

To many, a swamp or marsh brings only that very practical thought of whether it can be readily drained. Let us rejoice, however, that many marshes cannot be thus easily wiped out of existence, and hence they remain as isolated bits of primeval wilderness, hedged about by farms and furrows. The water is the life-blood of the marsh, — drain it, and reed and rush, bird and batrachian, perish or disappear. The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation, — melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man,

The ideal marsh is as far as one can go from civilization. The depths of a wood holds its undiscovered secrets; the mysterious call of the veery sends a wildness that even to-day has not ceased to pervade the old wood. There are spots overgrown with fern and carpeted with velvety wet moss; here also the skunk cabbage and cowslip grow rank among the alders. Surely man cannot live near this place — but the tinkle of a cowbell comes faintly on the gentle stirring breeze — and our illusion is dispelled, the charm is broken.

But even to-day, when we push the punt through the reeds from the clear river into the narrow, tortuous channel of the marsh, we have left civilization behind us. The great ranks of the cattails shut out all view of the outside world; the distant sounds of civilization serve only to accentuate the isolation….

The marsh has remained unchanged since the days when the Mohican Indians speared fish there. We are living in a bygone time. A little green heron flies across the water. How wild he is; nothing has tamed him. He also is the same now as always.

The chapter continues, and night settles in. Beebe revels in the wild sounds and presences all around him, until at least compelled to depart:

All sounds have ceased save the booming of the frogs, which but emphasizes the loneliness of it all. A distant whistle of a locomotive dispels the idea that all the world is wilderness. The firefly lams glow along the margin of the rushes. The frogs are now in full chorus, the great bulls beating their tim-toms and the small fry filling in the chinks with shriller cries. How remote the scene and how melancholy the chorus!….

The moon rises over the hills. The mosquitoes have become savage. The marsh has tolerated us as long as it cares to, and we beat our retreat….

A water snake glides across the channel, leaving a silver wake in the moonlight. The frogs plunk into the water as we push past. A night heron rises from the margin of the river and slowly flops away. The bittern booms again as we row down the peaceful river, and we leave the marshland to its ancient and rightful owners.

ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, IT IS TRUE WILDERNESS HE YEARNS FOR. A microscope or a canoe may carry him out of the familiar for a time, until “the charm is broken”, but the open ocean is far wilder, far more remote, and it calls to him:

We are often held spellbound by the majesty of mountains, and indeed a lofty peak forever capped with snow, or pouring forth smoke and ashes, is impressive beyond all terrestrial things. But the ocean yields to nothing in its grandeur, in its age, in its ceaseless movement, and the question remains forever unanswered, “Who shall sound the mysteries of the sea?” Before the most ancient of mountains rose from the heart of the earth, the waves of the sea rolled as now, and though the edges of the continents shrink and expand, bend into bays or stretch out into capes, always through all the ages the sea follows and laps with ripples or booms with breakers unceasingly upon the shore.

The oceans, too, set a boundary for human destructiveness, or so it seemed to Beebe over a hundred years ago, long before the invention of plastic:

The time is not far distant when the bottom of the sea will be the only place where primeval wildness will not have been defiled or destroyed by man. He may sail his ships above, he may peer downward, even dare to descent a few feet in a suit of rubber or a submarine boat, or he may scratch a tiny furrow for a few yards with a dredge: but that is all.

Alas, Beebe failed to predict so much, from commercial trawler fishing operations to single-use plastic grocery bags…. But in 1906, many years and journeys lay still ahead for him, around the world and into the ocean deeps. He would even return, almost half a century later, to another visit with the commonplace, publishing in 1953 “The Unseen Life of New York” As a Naturalist Sees It”. But for the moment, I will close with one last glimpse of the wilds of a marsh — in this case, a cypress swamp somewhere in the coastal plain of the American Southeast:

…in the mysterious depths of our southern swamps we find the strangely picturesque cypresses, which defy the waters about them. One cannot say where trunk ends and root begins, but up from the stagnant slime rise great arched buttresses, so that the tree seems to be supported on giant six- or eight-legged stools between the arches of which the water flows and finds no chance to use its power. Here, in these lonely solitudes, — heron-haunted, snake-infested, — the hanging moss and orchids search out every dead limb and cover it with an unnatural greenness. Here, great lichens grow and a myriad tropical insects bore and tunnel their way from bark to heart of tree and back again,. Here, in the blackness of night, when the air is heavy with hot, swampy odours, and only the occasional squawk of a heron or cry of some animal is heard, a rending, grinding, crashing, breaks suddenly upon the stillness, a distant boom and splash, awakening every creature. Then the silence again closes down and we know that a cypress, perhaps linking a trio of centuries, has yielded up its life.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. Not being overly drawn to costlier first editions, I purchased a 1927 copy of Beebe’s work. The book is without a mark, though the pages are considerably browned with age. Alas, apart from the wintertime scene frontispiece shown above (by Walter King Stone), the book is unillustrated.

A Bewildering Panorama: “The Meadows: Familiar Studies of the Commonplace” by John C. Van Dyke, 1926

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Aug 132020
 

The elemental forces — water, air, earth, light — were from the beginning. Man is merely a later happening, dependent upon the elements for existence, and in the scheme of creation little more than a looker-on. Only in recent years has he begun to study his environment and to notice the myriad combinations and manifestations of the elements which he calls Nature. It is still a bewildering panorama to him. He sees and admires the striking high-lights, the bright colors, the huge forms, but he overlooks the half-tones, the broken tints, the lesser forms that make up the great body and background of the picture. These minor keys seem to him ordinary or commonplace. But there are no such words in Nature’s vocabulary. Everything is shaped to an end, in a mould and pattern of its own, and for a specific purpose. The fault is in man’s lack of vision and want of comprehension. He sees and understands only in part. If he saw and understood all he would admire all.

“THE MEADOWS” WAS WRITTEN LATE IN VAN DYKE’S LIFE, AFTER HE HAD ALREADY PUBLISHED CLOSE TO 20 BOOKS, MOSTLY ON ART HISTORY BUT ALSO SEVERAL EXPLORING THE DRAMATIC LANDSCAPES OF THE AMERICAN WEST. Dyke’s best-known work, by far, “The Desert”, had been published nearly a quarter-century before, back when Van Dyke was a spry 42. After traveling afar (and in his imagination — most of what Van Dyke reports seeing and doing in “The Desert” was, it turns out, manufactured from his brother’s experiences and books he read), Van Dyke set his eyes on the humble Raritan Valley of his native New Brunswick, New Jersey, and crafted this book. Like myself setting out on a year-long pilgrimage down Piney Woods Church Road in search of the wonders of the everyday, Van Dyke looked to the woods and meadows for rich colors and forms and intriguing patterns changing across the seasons. As an artist first and naturalist second, Dyke celebrates the colors and textures of the feathers of common birds; he touches upon their behavior also, but there he seems to draw mostly on personal experience and less on scientific knowledge at the time. The book as a whole is flowing panorama of changing colors and forms, and array of exclamations of wonder and delight.

WHAT STANDS OUT MOST FOR ME ABOUT THE BOOK IS NOT THAT IT IS A WORK CELEBRATING LOCAL NATURAL HISTORY, BUT RATHER IT IS A BOOK WRITTEN BY A NEARLY 70-YEAR-OLD ART CRITIC CONFRONTING MORTALITY AND LOSS. There is beauty and delight here, but even that somehow always feels bittersweet. Speaking of the field mice, for example, Van Dyke turns an appreciation of their simple lives into a critique of civilization shortly after the end of the First World War:

Apparently the field mice lead a tranquil existence, raise large families, and feed fat without a varied diet. They are not worried about their hours of labor or their social status, nor are they obsessed by their possessions. They have no large ambitions to gratify, no desire to “get on” or be “progressive” or “up to date.” Their forefathers before them lived in the meadow grass and the orn shock, and probably they long ago concluded that their living conditions could not be improved by fighting the mice in a neighboring corn shock or agitating for socialism or communism in their tribal relations. They accepted the mouse tradition, and carried on with it because they realized that they could not, by taking thought or changing habit, become anything different, try as much as they could or would.

Set against the magnificence of Nature, the human contribution seems so empty, perhaps even irrelevant. Nature is, well, natural, while human art is awkward and forced:

I am continually bringing home from the meadows bare sprays of wild rose, raspberry, bittersweet; dead stalks of thistle, wild rice, wild oats, purple aster; pods of the milkweed, cones of the pine and hemlock, clustered berries of the black haw, bunched seeds of the scarlet sumac. Placed in jars or arranged against the wall, and studied leisurely, they become more marvellous even than in their meadow habitat. One never gets to the end, never gets to the point where all is told, as so often happens with human inventions. Always there is something new, something beyond, something never known before. Nature seems limitless in design, fathomless in meaning.

How these dead stems and branches cheapen the art of man! A spray of bronze-green cedar makes my apple-green tea-jar of the best Chinese kiln look like a common crockery door-knob, and the pod of the milkweed or the cone of the hemlock puts a Renaissance bronze into a gas-fixture category. I account for this with an odd notion that the chemical elements that go to make up the cedar, the cone, or the pod are in perfect accord, agree in every particular, and come together by natural affinity. This coming together under peculiar conditions of soil, light, heat, moisture is perhaps fortuitous — something that may happen in a certain year or century or millenium, and then never again in the world’s history. On the contrary, the vase and the bronze are things arbitrarily put together by man without regard to chemical affinity or time or any other natural combination or circumstance. The result with them is a feeling of things being pushed into false relation, a lack of harmony in color, a lack of unity in design, a lack of quality in texture. We feel instinctively that nature never did, never could, bring forth such a distortion.

ULTIMATELY, VAN DYKE SAVES HIS GREATEST CONDEMNATION OF HUMANITY FOR HIS OBSERVATIONS ABOUT HUMAN DESTRUCTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT. Song and garden birds were disappearing, for instance:

That year by year the lawn and garden birds grow less is perhaps due to the lawn and garden producing less. Coal dust, city smoke, carbonic acid gas in the air and in the rainfall over cities, are not good for the growth of either insects or fruit.

Meanwhile, sprawl had overtaken the landscape — something I am sure he had witnessed first hand in his many decades living in northern New Jersey:

Nature and her progeny change little and have no wish to change at all. Indeed, it is nature’s plan to maintain the status quo, the existing order of things, for a time at least; but man is ever driving her to a wall, sapping her resources, distorting her purposes, establishing artificial conditions. Year by year the border-line is being pushed further back. Civilization and the suburbs are being carried into the fields and forests, and the birds and animals are shrinking away into the inaccessible portions of the earth. Nature did not reckon wisely in bringing forth her last creation — man. She perhaps had no thought that he would prove to be the great destroyer. Least of all did she reckon with his arrogant assumption that the world was given him to destroy.

Consider, too, his bitter, almost nihilistic lines about the polluted Raritan River and its disappearing fish:

Even some of the fishes once native to the stream, such as the sunfish, the perch, the small-mouthed black bass, have disappeared. Chemical factories that spit fumes into the air and refuse, acids, and oils into the streams will destroy almost anything that lives….

No one sighs or protests much about the river pollution and the passing of the fish. A river in these days is usually thought merely as an open sewer for cities. If necessity demands use of the water for drinking purposes, a filtering plant gives it a clean look and chlorine kills the typhoid germs. The conception of a river as something worth while, aside from water supply or drainage, passed out some time ago. Consuming, not conserving, the earth is the present bent. It is sometimes called “development”, which is too often only another name for flaying the face of things for present profit.

BUT WE CANNOT END THERE. It is too dark. There is still joy in this book, even if it is found mostly in the backward glance. While the future of nature and man may be grim, the past is a refuge, freely accessed through memory:

Children gathering flowers! Was that not the earliest recollection, the first introduction to nature, for most of us? That long-ago, far-away day when we first were taken to the meadows! How dreamily we can still remember the scent and hum and warm wind blowing, with white clouds above and a great blue beyond! And out of the vagueness we can still see that picture of waving fields of grass, with daisies and buttercups caught and rolled in the green wave — daisies spattered thicker than the stars in the Milky Way. And later, the trip along the brook where the small fish darted at our approach and the crows were cawing about their nests in the locusts — the trip that led through the woods with all the wonder of its humming life in the month of June! Was not that our first expansion to the glory of the world, even as the growths themselves had expanded to the sunlight and the air!

How those first experiences remain with us and refuse to be ousted by the sordid rush of later life! Down in the street, worrying with the world of business, or hemmed in a factory with the whirr of machinery, or tethered by the leg to some desk in a breathless office, how often a glance at the sky or the distant hills brings back the memories of those childhood days! No wonder there is a sigh over lost youth and a vision of a return to the countryside — to the farmhouse, the orchard, the fields of timothy and clover, the slow-winding brook and the great oak in the meadow, with its branches spread across the pool. We know now, if not then, that one impulse from a vernal wood may last us through a lifetime and be a consecration and a poet’s dream to us forever.It is not necessary that it should be a romantic, a classic, or a haunted wood. Even the commonplace woods of New Jersey may prove sufficiently compelling.

Of course, Van Dyke could not stop there. He closed out the passage with one final dig at modern society, a critique that sounds all the more true today, nearly one hundred years later:

But all that belongs to a bygone age. The humble things to-day fail to make lasting impressions. The rushing world craves the novel and exotic, and in seeking to avoid the obvious it only too often falls into admiration of the merely bizarre.

AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY COPY OF THIS BOOK. While many of Van Dyke’s titles have been reprinted in paperback, that is not true for “The Meadows”. As far as I can tell, his 1926 edition was never reissued. My copy is a navy blue hardback with gilt letters and a front cover design with a stream flowing through a meadow. The cover photograph of a meadow is the only one in the book. After reading Van Dyke’s insightful remarks about environmental destruction, I regret that this book is so obscure. Any arguments that Americans in the early 1900s didn’t recognize the extent of the damage civilization was causing to the natural world are quickly put to rest by a few excerpts from this volume.

Nothing Lives By Itself Alone: “Seeing Nature First” by Clarence M. Weed, 1913

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History  1 Response »
Aug 112020
 

So the study of trees in winter leads us directly into other fields of knowledge, — the great world of insects that live upon the trunk and branches, the parasitic fungi that develop in the bark, the birds that search for winter insects. For in nature, nothing lives by itself alone: it is related in a thousand ways to other living things. To this is largely due the fascination of the outdoor world: when you really become acquainted with the nearest tree, you find yourself on speaking terms with a large part of the universe.

FOR AN HISTORICAL BIOLOGIST WITHOUT EVEN A WIKIPEDIA PAGE TO HIS NAME, CLARENCE M. WEED OFFERS THE READER MANY MOMENTS OF WONDER AND INSIGHT. I am baffled as to why he is so unknown; his knowledge of botany and ecology is impressive and seems at moments ahead of its time (or at least, quite up to date for 1913). (To be accurate, these is, in fact, a Wikipedia page for Clarence Weed; but that is for Clarence R. Weed, a football and basketball coach of the same time period.) Having read just one of Weed’s books (the naturalist, not the coach) and ordered a second one, I am quite convinced that he could have gained renown as an author; I will endeavor to convince readers of that with this post. “Seeing Nature First” begins as a guide for teens and adults into how to perceive and interpret natural phenomena throughout the seasons. The first several chapters, set in springtime, include numerous examples of fascinating facts about plants and insects (Weed was an entomologist by profession.). I learned new things, myself. For instance, have known for ages that skunk cabbage flowers, which often emerge while snow still covers the ground, actually heat the air around them, attracting early insect pollinators seeking warmth. What I never knew was how this trick was done. According to Weed, “the hoods [of skunk cabbage flowers] not only furnish protection from the elements, but the purplish tissues of which they are composed oxidize so rapidly that the temperature within is raised above that of the air outside.” I was amazed to find this fact was already known over 100 years ago.

ULTIMATELY, HOWEVER, THE BOOK IS UNEVEN; CHAPTERS THAT FASCINATE ARE MIXED WITH ONES THAT ELICIT ONLY TEDIUM. At times, I even wonder if Weed didn’t simply sweep every paper on his desk into a pile, sort it by seasons (affording some sense of structure) and sending the whole mess off to the publisher. The audience varies, too. Most “chapters” are only a few pages in length. The best ones, in my opinion, are geared toward a lay audience of potential Nature enthusiasts. Other articles seem more like abstracts of reports on efforts to keep various insect pests under control. Then there is an article about frogs changing colors — admittedly a worthy topic — that consists of several pages of dry details about different captive frogs in different enclosures on various days and differing hours on those days. As field notes for a short essay, they work well. As flowing text to engage the reader, they are a disaster.

THEN ANOTHER PAGE OR PASSAGE POPS OUT AT THE READER, AND HE OR SHE IS LEFT IN AWE. Did you know, for instance, that early season flowers pollinated by bumblebees. such as the columbine, tend to be quite large, because they attract the queens? Then, by midsummer, the bumblebee-pollinated flowers are noticeably smaller, because the worker bees have joined her in the colony? Or have you ever been curious about how a closed gentian flower gets pollinated? (John Burroughs even speculated that it lacks a pollinator.) According to Weed, “the worker bumblebees…have learned how to pry open the mouth of the blossom and enter for the nectar at its base, where they circle around the flower in a way to come in contact with both stamens and pistil. And they can tell from the color of the blossom whether it is young and nectar-bearing.” Wow.

IN A COUPLE OF SPOTS IN HIS WORK, WEED POINTS TO THE ECOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE OF THE BALANCE OF NATURE. I know little about the early days of ecological study, but at very least this concept was relatively new at the time. In a chapter on the ichneumon flies, Weed notes that “There are numberless ways in which nature keeps that balance of life which renders human existence upon the earth possible.” In the case of these parasitic flies that prey on caterpillars, Weed notes that they perform a necessary function, keeping those caterpillar species in check. Without them, Weed acknowledges, the caterpillars would likely “cause untold damage to forests and cultivated crops.” Indeed, in one of his drier chapters, Weed discusses efforts to control an invasive caterpillar species through use of a natural predator insect. Eventually, Weed explains, such invasive species can be made subject to the Balance of Nature: “This is the condition of most injurious insects that have been present in a given region for a long time. There are periods of scarcity and of abundance, due largely to the fluctuations in the numbers of natural enemies.”

WHAT MOST STANDS OUT TO ME ABOUT WEED’S BOOK, HOWEVER, IS THE INVITATION IT OFFERS US — PARTICULARLY THOSE OF US LIVING IN NEW ENGLAND — TO GET OUTDOORS AND MAKE NEW DISCOVERIES. The ultimate result of our time in nature is the fashioning of stories — tales that tell of the complexity and interconnectedness of the natural world. To close, here is a passage from Weed, extolling the virtues of exploring the woods in wintertime:

There is much more to be learned in the winter woods than merely to become acquainted with the different kinds of trees. Desirable as it is, such acquaintance should be but the beginning of one’s knowledge. Every tree has many stories to tell to one who will look with the seeing eye and the active mind. Such stories relate to the age of the tree, to the relations it has established with the sunlight, to its battles with its enemies, to its cooperation with its friends. Stories of all these and many other mysteries of plant life are mutely waiting interpreters in every winter landscape.

AS A POSTSCRIPT, I SHOULD MENTION BOTH THE BOOK’S ILLUSTRATOR AND A BIT ABOUT MY COPY. The illustrator is W. I. Beecroft, and his stunning, almost three-dimensional drawings are another highlight of the book. (In fact, they are considerably more impressive than the scattered black and white photographs also included.) Beecroft authored and illustrated short field guides to ferns and wildflowers, too.

My copy of this book appears to be a first edition (though there may never have been a second one). It was published in April of 1913. There is no bookseller’s stamp, but there is an inscription to Emily Mills Page, 87 High Street, Newburyport, Massachusetts, from Mother, on February 20, 1915. (I was even able to find the home on Google Maps.) The most noteworthy feature of my book, though, is its elegant though somewhat worn green-and-gilt cover. The metallic portion is actually gold, but it looks much more silvery in the image below.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries