For my latest book, I have chosen Volume 4 from The Riverside Library for Young People, Up and Down Brooks by Mary E. Bamford. At a bit smaller than five by seven inches, this little tome invites smaller hands or perhaps the pocket of a knapsack. The book itself is a carefree romp with a quirky, playful, scholarly “self-named “bug-hunter” as she makes her way up and down brooks, armed with a cloth dredger and a bucket, collecting water beetles and anything else she can find in the streams of Alameda County, California. Along the way, at an (and every) opportunity, she makes some sort of connection to classical or medieval history, culture, and literature. The result is, well, exhausting. Perhaps her literary allusions were common to readers at the time (maybe even younger ones), but most of them were entirely lost on me. As a guidebook for how to study streams, the book also fails. The reader is halfway through the text (of over 200 pages) before mention is made of how to make a dredger of one’s own. And there are few common names for insects; instead, Bamford resolutely names them by genera. Thus, a hellgrammite becomes “larva of horned Corydalus,” and the adult dobson-fly is simply “Horned Corydalus.” Who are her readers, then? How many children would have a clue what her various insect names signify? At the same time, some of her playful passages definitely seem best suited to a child (or childlike adult). Consider her experiences with a captive predacious water stick-insect, Ranatra (again, the genus name):
I think Ranatra had no music in his soul, and he probably never missed the bird-twitterings of his native brook. As a personal favor and a reminder of the days when he lived in the creek, I sometimes took a flute and played “Way down upon the Swanee River” close to his jar. But the calmness with which he received the serenade was only equal to that with which he usually surveyed the world when no music was going on. Neither the “growly” nor the “squeeky” parts of the piano affected his nerves, even when his bottle was placed touching the instrument next the keys.
A page later, Bamford reports on Ranatra’s unexpected death:
Peace to his ashes. I never did know how I loved him until he died. Never did I part from a bug with such regret… The jar looked lonely without him, he had lived in it so long, and I felt half inclined to that, in spite of his having dwelt with them so securely for so long a time, he had at last fallen a victim to those cowardly cousins of his, the scorpion-bugs. They rushed about as usual, evidently caring nothing for the death of the bug that was worth twenty of them.
As the reader can plainly observe, Bamford does not hold back on her feelings about the various organisms she encounters. There is a whimsy to her descriptions and even sometimes abject silliness. Her many failed attempts to raise a tiger beetle larva to adulthood in captivity included the following individuals (forever immortalized in her prose): Conqueror of Coffee-Pot-Lid Lake; Conqueror II; The Hesitator; Larva of Yeast-Powder-Lid Lake; Scarer of Soapdish-Lid-Lake; Triumpher of Tin-Pan Lake; Monarch of Mortar Lake; “The Last”; Oliver; Frightener of Flower-Pot Lake; and “The Last-But-One.” Yet beneath all the craziness and the random references to obscure etymologies and myths, there is also an observant and patient scientist noting the minutiae of lives mostly overlooked at the time. Consider her assessment of a snail’s lot:
Yet the fact of the matter is that there is not much character to a pond-snail. To slip out of a mass of jelly with one’s house on one’s back, to float on the surface of the pond, to dine on leaves or confervae, to rest when weary and to journey when so disposed, to retreat into one’s house when in danger, to pass along through life in a somewhat humdrum fashion with small spirit or vim in one, to cleanse the pool what little one may, and finally to drop down through the water and whiten with one’s lifeless shell the scum of the pond, to have that slime close at last over one’s shell and leave one buried in oblivion while all the pond-life goes on above one still, — this is the snail’s life. Devoid of fighting instincts, not gifted with ambition to soar like the beetles, or to be ever in sight like the skaters, treating all the pond-neighbors with quiet reserve, going one’s own way and doing much good in the world, such is the pond-snail. If he is not brilliant, he is good, and what more could be asked of him?
The respect Bamford grants many f the insects she encounters is not always expressed toward the many local residents, particularly children, who see her with dredger in hand and assume she is trying to catch fish. All too few of them, she complains more than once, have any interest in insects — like this teen who disrupts her work:
“What are you catching? Fish?” demands a voice, and I look up to see the yellow head of an inquisitive foureen-year-old youth peering over the bank.
“Water-beetles,” and I hold up my pail to show the contents.
“What are they good for?” proceeds the utilitarian.
I hesitate a moment. Shall I tell him of the decaying leaves that these numerous Hydrophilidae devour, assisted by these pond-snails; of the yearly plague of frogs from which we are delivered by the disappearance of the juices of the polliwogs through the proboscides of these water-boatmen; of the multitudes of mosquitoes who never have a chance to bite us, because as wigglers they have met their fates under the masks of these dragon-fly larvae? I excuse myself from this lesson on zoology, and make answer, “I take them home and keep them, and study their habits.”
What motivates Bamford to make such a study of stream life, especially insects? At one point in her ramblings, she shares this early memory with her readers, offering a window into her motivations:
I remember the day when the idea first entered my brain that other creatures than human have interesting lives. I must have been about eight or nine years old. I had been taking a walk in a little mining town among the Sierra Nevada foothills. A minister was with me, and he had a hand-microscope or glass in his pocket.
We sat down under the trees on a hill somewhere back of a church, and he showed me through the glass a multitude of little creatures living in the heart of a yellow flower… I remember that as a very wonderful day, one on which I did not see half enough through that glass to suit me, but still one on which I obtained a glimpse of a world very different from that in which I usually lived.
Indeed, it is a world with very different rules. Toward the book’s close, Bamford remarks on “how hard-hearted the insects are toward one another! In all the time I have watched them, I do not recollect ever having seen an act of compassion performed by any kind of insect for another.” She then proceeds to describe her experiences waiting for a caterpillar to pupate, only for many parasitic flies to emerge instead, having fed upon the caterpillar’s body. Yet through this all, she ultimately conveys a sense of wonder and delight in this foreign world beneath the water’s surface.
And so the traveler beside this brook and over these hills may learn, if he looks, that man is not the only creature who builds houses and is disappointed about living in them. There is material here for a fine sermon after all, take the brook through and through. Here are fightings and murders and thefts and trickeries, the semblance of death, the awakening from slumber, the rising to new life, the change from the grovelling on the earth to the soaring of wings in the sunshine.
And the ultimate point of the sermon? Here, Banford slips back into a comfortable corner within Nineteenth-Century American Christianity, declaring fervently that “The majority of people scarcely pause to realize that the different kinds of creatures represent so many of God’s different thoughts and that it might possibly be worth while to glance at the things that He has deigned to place on earth.”
Mary Bamford’s grave, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland
And what of Mary Ellen Bamford? She was born to a pioneer settler couple in Healdsburg, California, in 1857. After attending public school in Oakland, she worked for four years as an assistant in the Oakland Free Public Library. After that, she became a full-time writer, producing over a dozen books, including several titles for the American Baptist Publishing Society. She was a prohibitionist and advocate for Asian immigration into the US. She died in 1946 at the age of 88.
My first (only) edition of this book was previously in the collections of the Reed Free Library in Surrey, New Hampshire.
Cover of First (Only?) Edition, Harper & Brothers, 1880
At last, after a year-and-a-half away, I return to my quest — an exploration of the fascinating lost world of the golden age of American nature writing. Beginning with Thoreau’s passing in 1861 and extending until WWI, this time period is historically interpreted as being a wasteland of nature writing. There was John Muir, of course. And for the more intense environmental writing aficionados, there was the other John, John Burroughs. But otherwise, there are no authors typically identified as writing in the genre until Aldo Leopold’s groundbreaking “Sand County Almanac” was published in 1949. True, there aren’t as many naturalist essayists between the two world wars (I have found a few, and will visit them from time to time). But it turns out that the first few decades of this time period were fecund with nature essays — a rich array of magazine articles, and a plethora of delightfully obscure authors, many of whom corresponded with and visited each other. What is even more gratifying is that the writers’ very obscurity makes this adventure possible. I am striving to read original copies — first editions if I can, period texts if not — of as many of the books as I can afford. During my absence, I have discovered hitherto unknown troves of book titles, including a collection from the Library of Congress holdings. I am so excited to return to this bygone era. The books are stacked on my desk and crowded into my bookcase. Let’s get underway!
Ernest Ingersoll, 1906 or before
My first selection is one of several works by Ernest Ingersoll that I now own. According to the font of all knowledge (a.k.a., Wikipedia), Ingersol was an American naturalist, writer, and explorer who lived from 1852 until 1946. He published nearly two dozen books, mostly in the nature essay vein. He began his career in academia, under the tutelage of Louis Aggasiz at Harvard University. He served as Zoologist on the Hayden Geological Expedition to Yellowstone in 1874. Returning East, he wrote up his discoveries from the trip, mostly mollusks. He also became a staff reporter for the New York Tribune and contributed articles to a periodical that was the antecedent to Field and Stream. He traveled west again in 1877 and 1879, reporting on his experiences. He also embarked on a project reporting on US shellfisheries for the US Fish Commission and US Census Bureau. He subsequently became a popular nature essayist and lecturer. Friends Worth Knowing was his very first foray into the genre.
The book is quite an eclectic affair. There is no clear structure to the essay collection — it appears to be a compilation of previously published articles, sufficient to justify a book title. Given the author’s molluscan predilections, it is not surprising that the first chapter, In a Snailery, is a visit with gastropods. A later essay explores the lives and habits of wild mice species. There is also an essay on bison and their fate. One less-memorable essay reports on various accounts of domesticated animals finding their way back home over long distances. Another essay, toward the end of the book, considers the “civilizing influences” of western culture at the time (more about that ahead). The rest of the book’s offerings are largely ornithological in scope.
I have to say that In a Snailery sets a fairly high standard for the volume. The engravings are my favorites in the book. Indeed, many other chapters had few engravings at all, and the artwork isn’t of the same quality of detail. Some of the snail engravings are visually packed (such as the tropical snails below), but my favorite is probably an edible snail making its way across the middle of a page, sans slime trail.
I quite enjoyed Ingersoll’s pronouncements about the merits of snails, too. He observed on the first page that “Snails are of a vast multitude and variety, ancient race, graceful form, dignified manners, industrious habits, and gustatory excellence…” I appreciated how Ingersoll enthusiastically set out to counter what was likely a general disgust or disinterest with snails, apart from their culinary potential. His prose is thoughtful and observant as he details the life cycle of the snail and then considers its long evolutionary heritage, going back to an origin “when dark forests of ferns waved their heavy fronds over the inky Paleozoic bogs. Distance disappears in the presence of such prodigious time.” Along the way, his essay points out where the reader might find snails in the wild. This is not the last time in the book that Ingersoll encourages readers to venture out into nature on their own. While the essays share Ingersoll’s own observations, his intent is, at least in part, to offer a gentle nudge to his readers.
His second essay, First Comers, is about the first birds of spring that he encounters in his New England home. “To the lovers of long rambles in the woods and meadows,” he announces, “…every indication of approaching spring is eagerly scanned, and is hailed with delight.” HIs enthusiasm and sense of familiarity with the birds he writes about are evident in descriptions like this one, of a house wren: “…this little bobbing bunch of brown excitement is the very spirit of impudence.” After introducing a number of bird species, he turns to the chipping sparrow. Here, he remarks that “The chippy is so easily watched that I do not propose to tell all I have learned about it, and thus rob a reader of the pleasure of learning its beautiful ways for himself.” I appreciate, again, how Ingersoll seeks to guide his readers, but ultimately toward making their own discoveries.
Throughout the book, Ingersoll gestures toward many contemporaries and near-contemporaries in the natural history field. At various points, he mentions H.D. Thoreau, John Burroughs (quoting a letter Ingersoll received from him), Alfred Russel Wallace, and Dr. C.C. Abbott (whom I have visited before in this blog, and will return to frequently in upcoming posts). He mentions many other people, too, who appear to have shared anecdotal information about nature with him. I continue to appreciate how there was a vibrant nature study community present in the US during this time period.
Jumping over some ornithological writings (there will be plenty of those in the blog posts ahead), we come to The Buffalo and His Fate. The essay purports to be a review of another scientist’s report on the status of the bison, but it is difficult to determine what Ingersoll is offering second-hand and what is based upon his considerable time in the West. He opens the essay with a grim prognosis: “Its history has been a tale of its extermination, and a very short time will be likely to see the last of these noble beasts roaming over the plains.” Then, at the close of the essay, he notes that the remaining bison are now in two main herds– northern and southern. Considering the southern herd in Texas (which, at the time, was occupied by understandably hostile Indians), Ingersoll coldly noted that “…unless legal interference be quickly made and strict regulations enforced, the fate of the buffalo south of the Platte will be a repetition of its history east of the Mississippi — speedy extermination.” And here is where I realized the extent to which Ingersoll’s era is quite foreign to my own. Nowadays, such an announcement would be followed by exhortations to take action. Surely, Ingersoll’s readers might send letters to their Congressmen urging such safeguards for the remaining bison? Yet instead, Ingersoll resolutely accepts their inevitable demise. This was not an age for environmental activism. The certain march of Western progress was not to be questioned. Along the way, there might be casualties, but they were unavoidable.
This outlook is even more blaring in Civilizing Influences, where Ingersoll seeks to convince his readers (and maybe himself, too) that Western progress is not all bad. Sure, most wild quadrupeds were being wiped out (other than the mice) and hawks, owls, and snakes were routinely killed by farmers, but the songbirds “seem…to recognize the presence of man’s civilization as a blessing.” In a mix of accurate science, anecdotal observations, and dubious theorizing, Ingersoll presents the premises of his argument. Less forest means a less rigorous climate (huh?) and more sunny spots where birds prefer to place their nests (really?). Plowing exposes more insects for birds to eat, while orchards likewise encourage insects to thrive. Horses, cattle, and sheep droppings provide food and homes for beetles that many birds feed upon. Fewer avian and reptilian predators make it easier for the birds to survive. In fact, not only are songbirds thriving, Ingersoll asserts, but they are singing more, too. We are civilizing them! “By making their lives less laborious, apprehensive, and solitary, man has left the birds time and opportunity for far more singing than their hard-worked, scantily-fed, and timorous ancestors ever enjoyed….”
I will not leave Ingersoll there, in the baffling heart of his own longing to exempt Western civilization from all the accusations of environmental damage that might be levied against it. After all, here he was merely echoing ideas that were all too popular at the time. I will offer up, instead, this charming portrait of the musical enchantment available to the rambler out-of-doors on a New England April day: “[The song sparrow’s] clear tenor, the gurgling, bubbling alto of the blackbirds, the slender purity of the bluebird’s soprano, and the solid basso profundo of the frogs, with the accompaniment of the April wind piping on the bare reeds of winter, or the drumming of raindrops, form the naturalist’s spring quartette — as pleasing, if not as grand, as the full chorus of early June.”
I will close with a paragraph about my particular copy of this book, which has a bit of history of its own. The bookplate is that of Jonathan Dwight, Jr. (actually Jonathan Dwight V), 1858-1926, founding member of the American Ornithologist’s Union and ultimately its president. His ornithological collections were housed in the American Museum of Natural History. After his death, his extensive ornithological library found its way to the Smithsonian in 1970. I am assuming this particular volume didn’t make the cut, and instead remained in private hands.
There is a nameless charm in the flatwoods, there is enchantment for the real love of nature in their very sameness. One feels a sense of their infinity as the forest stretches away into space beyond the limits of vision; they convey to the mind a feeling of boundless freedom. The soft, brilliant sunshine filters down through the needle-like leaves and falls in patches on the flower-covered floor; there is a low, humming sound, sometimes mimicking the patter of raindrops, as the warm southeast wind drifts through the trees; even the loneliness has an attraction. To me it all brings a spirit of peace, a feeling of contentment; within the forest nature rules supreme. The memory of all that is evil and annoying has fallen away like the burden of Christian at the foot of the cross; I am alone and utterly care free in the pine woods. I cast off all my troubles and discomforts of my daily existence, the strain and worry of civilization; I am happy as a child. I am at peace with the earth, the forest, the sky, the entire world. As I lie in the long, soft grass I feel that I do not care to go back to the dull, sordid routine of every day life again.
GOING BACK THROUGH THIS BOOK AFTER RELUCTANTLY FINISHING IT, I KNEW RIGHT AWAY WHAT PASSAGE TO CHOOSE TO OPEN MY POST. No matter that Simpson was in his mid-70s when he wrote this book (he lived nearly another decade after this) — his childlike nature is everywhere on these pages. Wandering the Florida Keys, he gleefully recalls all the times he was mistaken for a tramp and (literally) left out in the rain by residents who looked askance at him. In pursuit of his beloved tree snails, he nearly died from mosquito bites (more to follow on that) and was constantly in the mud or struggling through greenbriars and thorny cacti. Yet he was also a keen scientist, one who used his tree snail collection to assemble a history of the environmental changes South Florida had undergone in the previous thousands of years. His writing is a delight, albeit a costly one (more about that later, also). He speaks of nature with religious rapture on one page, then recounts tales of Cuban rum-runners he knew that managed to evade the law by various creative means. I will save the humor and pathos of his collecting adventures for the second half of this post; first, though, some more passages that place him firmly in the company of religious naturalists. This one is from an account of a visit to Paradise Key in the Everglades:
We ventured a little way into the glades but the rains had made the mud very soft and after getting a backward view of the forest in which some fifteen great royals [royal palms] showed themselves, we started in on our return along the trail. Before reaching the road I left my companions and went back into the hammock. Leaving the trail I worked my way out into the dense, tangled growth, and as I sat down at the foot of a great tree and gazed around and upward it seemed as though the spirit of the forest took possession of me. On the ground was a carpet of dead leaves, for in such places they are falling all the time, and over this the few rays of the sun that came through the dense foliage seemed to be almost filtered. Near me several young palms, twelve to fifteen feet high, stood like graceful forest nymphs, their long leaves arching upward and outward with indescribable beauty. Around me on every hand were countless trunks of other trees varying from a few inches to several feet in diameter, erect, leaning or nearly prostrate, those of the live oaks almost black from the wetting by the rain, the gumbo limbos coppery, the poison tree brown, the West Indian cherry reticulated and variegated while the lancewoods and Ilex were white. Some were clothed with vivid green from several feet from the ground, a mantle spread over them by the abundant mosses, and immense lianes were carelessly thrown over all. Close by was the smooth, straight trunk of a big royal, pushed far up, its crown lost in the greenery above, but not far away stood another and through an opening in the leaves I could see its great head restlessly swinging in the strong wind, not a breath of which reached the ground where I sat. Not the slightest sound disturbed me; in fact one of the charms of the great forest is its stillness. I sat and fairly drank in the wonderful silence and loneliness of the hammock. In such a place one must be alone to enjoy the full beauty and sweetness of it all. Even the presence of the most congenial friend or lover of nature is distracting and in a sense a disturbing element. Alone with uncovered head I bared my life, my all to the Great Power of the Universe, call it Nature, God, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma or whatever you will, and reverently worshipped.
In his very next essay, The Vagaries of Vegetation, he shares his thoughts about intelligence in nature, coming to a conclusion as to where his religious outlook lies:
There is no chance, no haphazard; nothing happens. The universe is governed by law; no power can change or set it aside for a moment. Whenever and wherever life can fit itself to its domination it will survive and flourish; if it does not it perishes and becomes extinct.
I cannot believe either in a loving or hating deity who sits on a throne somewhere in the universe and watches over his creatures, who listens to and answers prayers, who orders the suns and planets on their courses, who make the rains , the wind storms and earthquakes. Yet I cannot be a mere materialist. I am sure there is not only matter and law but that there is intelligence, spirit. I constantly find the lower forms of life doing just what I would do with their environment, sometimes with less intelligence, sometimes with more. I can only believe that in a way these things think. I believe I must be, to some extent, a Pantheist.
LEST WE CONSIGN SIMPSON TOO QUICKLY TO THE ROLE OF MOUNTAINTOP (OR TREETOP) SAGE, THERE IS ANOTHER, HIGHLY COMICAL AND SELF-DEPRECATING SIDE TO HIM WHICH I ENJOYED IMMENSELY. His first essay in the book, Down the West Coast, chronicles an 1885 boat trip along the southwest coast of Florida that kindled his zoological cravings:
Not very far away [from the ruin of a coastal home] there was some fine hammock and on searching through it I came across the first specimens of the large, handsome arboreal snails called Liguus I ever collected. I was overjoyed to find them and from that day to the present time I have been completely daft about them, having tramped and traveled thousands of miles in lower Florida, Cuba and Haiti in an effort to collect and study them.
These wanderings led to some challenging moments for our author-protagonist, to say the least. Lest the reader every contemplate a trip to the Florida Keys, here is Simpson’s tale of his quest for Liguus specimens on Lower Matecumbe Key, long before the highway 1A was built (though after the Keys were connected by railroad):
The island of Lower Matecumbe is about three miles long and shaped something like a kidney with the concave side toward the mainland. The southwest end is largely a buttonwood swamp, but the other end is higher and contains a good deal of very dense, gangled scrub hammock. There are probably sixty or more species of native trees on the island, all tropical unless it is the cabbage palmetto, and the forest nowhere rises to a height of over thirty-five feet. A large part of the trees and vines are thorny, and I counted a full dozen species of these as I worked by way into it, twelve apostles of villainy, the worst of all being the dreadful Cereus pentagonus [triangle cactus]. There were three other cacti, the terrible pull-and-haul-back, a toothache tree, a Pithecolobium which bears the appropriate common name of “cat’s claw”, a couple of rampant vines, (Guilandina or nicker beans) which are covered with spines even to the seed pods, tw hateful Smilax [green briar] and a dwarf century plant. In such scrub the rocky floor is more or less covered with decaying tinder and as one of the natives once observed, “Them thorns stays right thar an’ is ready for bizness after the wood is all rotted an’ gone.”
In places the forest was so dense I had t get down and crawl and in others I was obliged to turn back and get out at the spot where I entered. I have seen mosquitoes worse, but not very often, and it seemed to me that most of the space not occupied by them was filled with sand flies, though there was sufficient room left for all to work freely. Between them they kept my hands and face covered, the bit of the latter feeling like the burn of a coal of fire. Though outside the hammock the wind was strong not a breath was felt where I worked and I was literally in a sweat bath. Every small tree and shrub I touched threw down a shower of water on me and my shoes were soon full. However, it was an ideal time for my business for snails are very active during wet weather, though they hid away when it is dry….
Before I had been in five minutes I ran into one of the curious wasps’ nests which are common in Lower Florida. They are hung to a twig by a slender stem and consist of a single series, or sometimes two, of papery cells whose sides are so glued to each other that they run diagonally to the direction of the whole. The wasps are small but make up in ferocity what they lack in size; they are regular dynamos of condensed villainy. A little later I ran into another and shortly before leaving the hammock I stumbled and partly fell, striking my hand against a third. In attempting to run from the wasps I stepped into a depression and fell full length into a bed of the dreadful cactus (Cereus pentagonus). Finally my face swelled so from the stings that I could scarcely see, and I determined to leave the hammock. On account of the cloudiness I could not tell which direction to take, but fortunately a train came along and I was soon out on the right of way. In climbing up the embankment I stumbled and fell, dropping my little sack and stepping on it. When I got to the track and turned out the contents I found every precious shell crushed to atmos. I was not merely angry, I was furious. I said that any man, especially at my age, who would come to such an inferno to collect was an idiot. I declared that I would at once go back to camp, pack up and flag the first train for home, that I would never come to the Florida Keys again. After tramping a quarter of a mile the strong wind and rain which blew in my face cooled alike my temper and temperature. I began to think that one of the chief objects of my coming to the Keys was to visit this island and work out certain important problems in distribution and evolution, that if I went home without doing this my trip would be largely wasted and that I might never come again. Why should I be so foolish as to be driven out by a few hardships? Then I wavered, stopped, turned back and went into the inferno again.
But it was on another trip, this time to Big Pine Key, where Simpson nearly died from all the mosquitoes attacking him:
Between the heel or point of Big Pine where the railroad coming from the north enters and the main island is a strip of swamp about two miles long. Over this the track was grown up thickly with grass and weeds to a height of a foot or so and in this the mosquitoes were packed almost solid. Although the atmosphere was full of them yet as I walked along I stirred them up by uncounted millions. The swarms were so dense at times that when I looked downward I could not distinguish the tracks or vegetation, nothing but a confused brownish green cloud and above they dimmed the light of the sun, they actually darkened the air. I have had a good deal of experience with mosquitoes…but I believe I can honestly say that fr numbers and fierceness as well as for a long continued siege what I saw and endured that day exceeded anything I have ever known before or since. I constantly broke off branches from the scrub along the road and brushed them off as well as I could, but they covered the exposed parts of my body until they were gray, and whenever I wiped them from my face, neck or hands the blood dripped on the ground.
The effect of the stings of such a swarm soon became something like that of morphine, producing a stupid, drowsy sensation, and in addition to this my cheeks and eyelids swelled until it was difficult to see. I began to grow weak, my legs tottered, and I realized that I could only last a limited time. Things swayed around me as if I was on a rolling vessel, and again and again I said: “Can I ever get through?” Twice I went to the side of the track and dropped down and gave up, but had I remained there I would have been dead in ten minutes. As often by a supreme effort I dragged myself on to my feet and staggered on half out of my mind for what seemed like hours. Finally I reached the main part of the island and realized that my tormenters were becoming less numerous. I passed through the village and on to where I was stopping, but could not eat and sleep and was sick all night.
Not all Simpson’s misadventures involved insects. He captured one such experience on film for posterity. First, his description of the event, his attempt to step out of a boat onto terra not-so-firma; note that he calls himself “the old man” in this narrative:
Running along the canal [near Moore Haven, Florida] the Doctor [J.K. Small] saw a rather inviting field for plants and the boat came in to the edge of it. There seemed to be some delay about finding a suitable place to land and as there was a fine lot of freshwater mussels in sight and the bank was fully three feet high and looked dry and firm the old man [Simpson] got his collecting outfit and made a flying leap out on to it. When he finally settled into place he careened over and his entire right arm and leg were buried in the soft mud of which the deceptive shore was composed. At once the entire gang aboard fell over and laughed until they cried, and when at last the Doctor was able to sit up, he declared that it was simply a scientific calamity that he couldn’t have had the camera ready and taken a photo of the performance. He said so much about it that the old man, rather than being a disaster to the cause of science went to where he had alighted and fitted himself into the mud again and was photographed. The episode was referred to afterwards as “The Landing of the Pilgrim Father.”
Finally, to close out this post, I will include a picture (literally) of what lengths (or heights) Simpson went to in quest of his snails. This episode, which took place during a visit to Lignumvitae Key:
As I went along I saw at some distance high on a slender tree something which looked like a white Liguus, but it seemed to be altogether too large, I hastened back and found to my astonishment that it was an enormous specimen which, although it was more than thirty feet above me, I was sure was the largest I had ever seen. I at once set my wits to work to secure it…..
It looked so large and handsome that I determined I would try to shin up to it. Shining a tree is pretty good exercise for a young fellow, but for a man nearly seventy-three and weighing more than a hundred and seventy-five pounds it is a good deal like hard work. However, I slowly pulled myself up and whenever I was completely exhausted I clung tightly to the tree and rested. The slender trunk swayed over so that I feared it would break, and once I made up my mind I would not attempt to go any further but the sight of the great, glittering jewel above me tempted me to go on and risk it. At last by reaching out as far as possible I could just touch it with the tip of my finger; then one more tremendous effort and I held it in my hand. I carefully loosened it, put it in my overalls pocket and in about the time it takes to tell of it I slid to the foot of the tree. Then I took it out; I fairly shouted and capered about like a happy boy; I rubbed it against my cheek and lovingly patted it; I talked. foolishly to it. No miser ever gloated over his gold as I did over that magnificent snail.
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN A DELIGHT TO READ — AT TERMS INSPIRING AND AMUSING. Simpson evokes a Florida before development took so much of it, though quite a bit of the degradation actually happened in the author’s lifetime. For instance, here is his account of how much damage had already befallen Lake Okeechobee, including his prediction for its future that is frightfully accurate:
All the glamor and mystery which once surrounded the great lake, all the wildness and loneliness, its beauty and grandeur, its peace and holiness are fast disappearing before the advance of the white man’s civilization and soon it will be only a sheet of dirty water surrounded by truck gardens and having winter homes on its eastern shore. Its rare birds and other wild fauna are gone forever, even the fish which once swarmed its waters are far less abundant than formerly. Its splendid forests are a thing of the past and in their place we will have a lot of cheap bungalows and atrocious plantings of exotics. It should have been preserved as a state or government reservation where its rare flora and rich wild fauna, its mystery and beauty could have been kept forever.
Sadly, it is virtually impossible to find a copy of Simpson’s book nowadays. Until 2017, no printed work newer than 1922 could be scanned for online reading, or published as low-cost on-demand printed paperbacks. (This has supposedly now changed, as this article reports; however, I expect it will be a considerable time before the largely volunteer world of book scanners catches up.) For Out of Doors in Florida, this meant that my only options were to find one in a university library, or purchase one online for a small fortune. Even if I could locate a library copy, I would be stuck in the library for a couple of days, reading it and writing my post. Because that was unrealistic given my daily work demands, I took the latter route, and I have to say this is the most I ever paid for a book (and it was supposedly on a one-week sale on eBay). Suffice it to say that I am delighted that my copy includes Simpson’s complete autograph (he usually signed his letters Chas. T. Simpson).
In terms of the volume’s history, it was formerly the property of the Park East Mobile Home Club, on the Tamiami Trail in Sarasota. One reader/owner filled half the inside back cover with listings of native plants, both common and Latin names, in pencil. I think Simpson would have been pleased to see the book put to such use.
A native royal palm rises 125 feet above the ground of Paradise Key, the Everglades.
