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

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Jul 292020
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drawn to the Heart of Nature: “Among the Isles of Shoals” by Celia Thaxter, 1873

 Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Jul 272020
 

We waited for the spring with an eager longing; the advent of the growing grass, the birds and flowers and insect life, the soft skies and softer winds, the everlasting beauty of the thousand tender tints that brought us unspeakable bliss. To the heart of Nature one must needs be drawn in such a life….

AFTER READING A NUMBER OF AUTHORS WHO SCRUTINIZED NATURE THROUGH A SCIENTIFIC LENS, CELIA THAXTER’S MEMORIES OF LIFE ON THE ISLES OF SHOALS WAS A REFRESHING SEA CHANGE. “Among the Isles of Shoals” is not, strictly speaking, a work of natural history; rather, nature imbues its pages because it is impossible to avoid elemental forces from atop small bits of rock with veneers of soil, perched on the edge of a vast ocean, nine miles’ journey from the New Hampshire mainland. Encountering nature is an inevitable part of living there. Thaxter’s writing rambles, like a tourist to Appledore Island might do. There are no chapters; the reader is pulled into the author’s island world and swept along from one topic to the next, running the gamut of past settlers, folkways, weather patterns, past storms, shipwrecks, the seasons, the sky, the birds…. I like to think that the blending of topics in this manner is somewhat intentional, an organic form emerging out of the experience of inhabiting a small island:

The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception; sharp outlines become blurred and softened like a sketch in charcoal; nothing appeals to the mind with the same distinctness as on the mainland, among the rush and stir of people and things, and the excitements of social life.

It is a landscape where nature predominates; remnants of the human past become worn down and lichen encrusted, and eventually lost.

When man has vanished, Nature strives to restore her original order of things, and she smooths away gradually all traces of his work with the broad hands of her changing seasons.

THE MOST DELIGHTFUL PAGES IN THIS BOOK SPEAK OF THAXTER’S EARLY CHILDHOOD, SPENT AT THE LIGHTHOUSE ON WHITE ISLAND. She was “scarcely five years old” when her father became lighthouse keeper there. Celia and her two brothers grew up among the rocks, waves, birds, and flowers of a tiny, treeless island. Bereft of a social world beyond her own family, Nature instead provided her with everything she needed — companionship, play, and wonder. Over a span of about twenty pages, Thaxter magically evokes those experiences for the reader. Consider this extended passage, in which she speaks of the childhood mysteries and delights of White Island’s flowers:

I remember in the spring kneeling on the ground to seek the first blades of grass that pricked through the soil, and bringing them into the house to study and wonder over. Better than a shop full of toys they were to me! Whence came their color? How did they draw their sweet, refreshing tint from the brown earth, or the limpid air, or the white light? Chemistry was not on hand to answer me, and all her wisdom would not have dispelled the wonder. Later the little scarlet pimpernel charmed me. It seemed more than a flower; it was like a human thing. I knew it by its homely name of poor-man’s weatherglass. It was so much wiser than I, for, when the sky was yet without a cloud, softly it clasped its small red petals together, folding its golden heart in safety from the shower that was sure to come! How could it know so much? Here is a question science cannot answer. The pimpernel grows everywhere about the islands, in every cleft and cranny where a suspicion of sustenance for its slender root can lodge; and it is one of the most exquisite of flowers, so rich in color, so quaint and dainty in its method of growth. I never knew its silent warning fail. I wondered much how every flower knew what to do and to be; why the morning glory didn’t forget sometimes, and bear a cluster of elder-bloom, or the elder hang out pennons of gold and purple like the iris, or the golden-rod suddenly blaze out a scarlet plume, the color of the pimpernel, was a mystery to my childish thought. And why did the sweet wild primrose wait till after sunset to unclose its pale yellow buds; why did it unlock its treasure of rich perfume to the night alone? Few flowers bloomed for me upon the lonesome rock; but I made the most of all I had, and neither knew of nor desired more. Ah, how beautiful they were!

FOR THAXTER, LIFE ON THE ISLES OF SHOALS WAS A STREAM OF ENCOUNTERS WITH EVER-CHANGING ELEMENTAL PRESENCES. Everywhere she looked, she found entrancing forms and colors, shapes and scents, waves and winds. I will close the post with this enchanting collage of island experiences:

Nothing is too slight to be precious: the flashing of an oar-blade in the morning light; the twinkling of a gull’s wings afar off, like a star in the yellow sunshine of the drowsy summer afternoon; water-spout waltzing away before the wild wind that cleaves the sea from the advancing thunder-cloud; the distant showers that march about the horizon, trailing their dusky fringes of falling rain over sea and land; every phase of the great thunder-storms that make glorious the weeks of July and August, from the first floating film of cloud that rises in the sky till the scattered fragments of the storm stream eastward to form a background for the rainbow, — all these things are of the utmost importance to dwellers at the Isles of Shoals.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY COPY OF THIS BOOK. It is a paperback, from 1994, belonging to my wife; the book is a reproduction of the original 1873 edition. My wife studied marine biology on the Appledore Island in the Isles of Shoals, and likely purchased this book a few years later. It includes a few photos of the island from the time, including one of some buildings on Smuttynose Island, among which is the “Honvet House…where famous murders were committed in March 1873.” For those keen on learning more about 19th century New England axe murders, here is an article on what happened there. If you choose to check it out, remember, you axed for it.

The Glory of the Commonplace: “My Studio Neighbors” by W. Hamilton Gibson, 1897

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Jul 252020
 

I permitted my eyes to scan the tiny patch of bare ground at my feet, and what I observed during a very few moments suggested the present article as a good piece of missionary work in the cause of nature, and a suggestive tribute to the glory of the commonplace.

IN MY OPINION, W. HAMILTON GIBSON WAS THE MOST INSPIRING OF THE FORGOTTEN NATURALISTS FROM THE GENERATION AFTER THOREAU. Nowadays, he claims a Wiki page and little else, though scanned copies of his books are easily obtained from online archives, along with his biography (even more forgotten) from 1901. Gibson was an amazingly talented artist and natural scientist, who harnessed those two interests to craft highly engaging vignettes revealing mysteries of the everyday world around his summer art studio in Washington, Connecticut. Even the most dull bit of bare earth held its share of secrets to him, and he worked wonders with flowers, teasing out the complex interplay of flower structure and pollinator species. “Pluck the first flower that you meet in your stroll to-morrow,” he wrote, “and it will tell you a new story.”

GIBSON LIVED A TRAGICALLY BRIEF LIFE, DYING OF A STROKE BROUGHT ON BY OVERWORK AT THE AGE OF 46. “My Studio Neighbors” was published posthumously. As such, it does not have the coherence of his more polished works (which I will read and report upon at a later date). Instead, it is composed of several essays about insects and their fascinating (and somewhat macabre) stories well-crafted to engage the general reader, and several botanical essays on flowers and their pollinators that seem pitched to a more scientific crowd. I suspect he may have had a book in mind, or possibly even two. I learned quite a bit from his botanical pieces about pollination; for instance, I did not know that all orchids are characterized by having both anther and stigma (male and female reproductive parts) on the same stalk, known as a column. I also found fascinating how he went about figuring out what pollinated each flower, sometimes by observation, sometimes by deduction, and sometimes by forcing an insect such as a bumblebee to enter a flower to pollinate it. He accompanies his explanations by drawings that indicate stages if a process. In the drawings below, a bumblebee is making her way out of a Cyprepedium orchid (left), a process that requires getting doused with pollen (center) before being able to force her way out through the top (right).

MY FAVORITE ESSAYS FROM THIS BOOK, THOUGH, EXPLORED BACKYARD NATURE MYSTERIES. Gibson was an engaging storyteller: he we describe the what he saw, then explain carefully to the reader how he went about solving the puzzle as to what was actually going on. His stories focus on everyday things, and in doing so, they have the effect of inspiring the reader to find similar wonders close to home. He opens his essay Doorstep Neighbors with this exhortation:

How little do we appreciate our opportunities for natural observation! Even under the most discouraging and commonplace environment, what a neglected harvest! A backyard city grass-plot, forsooth, what an invitation!

After these enthusiastic words, Gibson gets to work setting the stage for his tale:

The arena of the events which I am about to describe and picture comprised a spot of almost bare earth less than one yard square, which lay at the base of the stone step to my studio door in the country.

Against this humble backdrop, Gibson proceeds to share about the many holes he finds there, and the wandering insects that suddenly disappear into them. Clearly, there is a whole lot going on. Not content merely to watch, Gibson consigns a couple of victims to their fate:

A poor unfortunate green caterpillar, which, with a very little forcible persuasion in the interest of science, was induced to take a short-cut across this nice clean space of earth to the clover beyond, was the next martyr to my passion for original observation. He might have pursued his even course across the area unharmed, but he…persisted in trespassing, and suddenly was seen to transform from a slow creeping laggard into the liveliest acrobat, as he stood on his head and apparently dived precipitately into the hole which suddenly appeared beneath him.

Gibson continues his bemused explorations, trying to cover up the holes and the watching them cleared of debris as if by magic. Finally, using a long blade of Timothy grass as a fishing pole equivalent, Gibson inserted it into one of holes. A beetle grub lurking at the bottom (10 inches down) snapped at the grass and was brought to the surface for inspection. But this did not solve all of the mysteries, because meanwhile other holes were being excavated by various wasps, who would fly away only to reappear dragging the body of a spider or a caterpillar. This, too, let to some fascinating research using everyday materials:

Constructing a tiny pair of balances with a dead grass stalk, thread, and two disks of paper, I weighed the wasp, using small square pieces of paper of equal size as my weights. I found that the wasp exactly balanced four of the pieces. Removing the wasp and substituting the caterpillar, I proceeded to add piece after piece of the paper squares until I had reached a total of twenty-eight, or seven times the number required by the wasp, before the scales balanced. Similar experiments with the tiny black wasp and its spider victim showed precisely the same proportion….

IF I WERE GOING TO USE ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE GIBSON’S WORK, I THINK ‘CHARMING’ WOULD DO THE JOB WELL. Gibson would have been a delightful person to meet and talk with at length — though in my case, I fear we would soon get stuck on the topic of how overwhelmed we our by our respective work obligations. He never quite took himself too seriously, avoiding the pontificating that Blatchley sometimes fell prey to. He was both a highly talented artist and a keen naturalist, and I will undoubtedly write more of him and his other books in the future.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE COPY I READ. My copy is likely a second edition, published in 1898. A bit stained and weatherbeaten, it is still in fine fettle, with the binding in excellent condition. The outstanding feature of the book (apart, of course, from Gibson’s drawings and writings) is the spectacular cover. A ring of butterflies encircles the book title, against a background of olive green cloth. As for its history, all I have in this regard is a tiny stamp glued to the upper left corner of the inside of the front cover, with the name Amelia Stevenson printed on it.

Each Pebble Has a Past: “Boulder Reveries” by W. S. Blatchley, 1906

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Jul 232020
 
W. S. Blatchley, 1859-1940
Unknown author / Public domain

Each pebble has a past; each tiny grain of clay and soil a future. The boulder on the hillside, how came it there and when? ‘Tis but an atom as compared with the bulk of the great round earth beneath, yet ’tis as worthy as a theme of thought.

THE TRANSITION FROM SIMPSON TO BLETCHLEY WAS JARRING. After the simple, straightforward sentences and comical scenes of Simpson’s Florida, Bletchley’s pontifications from north-central Indiana were tough going, like climbing the face of a sand dune in steel-toed hiking boots. Blatchley’s book is far more introspective and sullen. Written almost entirely as diary entries composed in fountain pen ink while the author was resting on a boulder in a wooded pasture, the book is an admixture of observations of the close-at-hand (mostly insects and flowers), ponderings on time’s passage (deep time and human transience), and occasional brow-beatings of his own supposed inability to make better use of his hours. (Given that he published a couple of dozen scientific monographs and books over his lifetime, I find that line unconvincing.) The language is frequently affected, and sometimes he gushes forth in lines that feel like fortune cookie clichés, even now, over 100 years later:

Possess thyself in patience, O my soul! Let seconds be as days unto thy reckoning. Do well the little things which come thy way. Think well the thoughts thou wouldst impress upon the table of eternity.

At one point, Blatchley describes the debris in a rural brook after a flood in these words:

Often-times in the bends of the stream are bunches of drift composed of logs, chips, pieces of bark, limbs, rails, boards, dead weeds and leaves, flotsam and jetsam of the freshet days, all heterogeneously mingled….

What an apt description of this book! There are images and ideas to be mined here, but there is also much to be, well, waded through. Part of it falls on the author’s book design — snippets of reflections from a boulder and along a nearby stream, mostly in the summer months, spanning several years. What could have been a fascinating study of place in nature over the course of a year (one that would have fit in well with many another nature book of the time) is lost due to the many missing months. Blatchley says little about himself (and his Wikipedia bio is fairly minimal), but I get the sense that he is writing from a summer retreat in the country (he mentions a city home at one point). By framing the book as reveries, he opened the door to saying pretty much whatever he felt like saying. It isn’t quite a nature book, or a book of philosophy, or of poetry. Unfortunately, for all that there are some intriguing passages, I cannot even find it possible to point to a page and say, “If only the rest of the book were like this.” Still, there are gems here, and let us explore them.

MY FAVORITE ASPECTS OF BLATCHLEY’S BOOK ARE HIS CONTEMPLATIONS OF ELEMENTAL FORCES AND DEEP TIME. He writes, for instance, about how matter and energy are united in living beings. He speaks of the forces of nature, and how glaciers have shaped the Indiana countryside. And always there is the presence of time — both human time (the time between entries, the span of person’s life) and deep time (the time it took for rocks to form and land be shaped). Consider this passage, in which Blatchley finds a bit of quartz and visualizes its story:

Stooping I pick up a piece of semi-transparent quartz; pure white, vitreous, and in outline roughly angular; yet worn by abrasion until its sharp edges and corners are rounded. How came it here? Go back through the centuries to the ice sheet, four hundred feet and more in thickness, which once covered this spot. Follow that sheet northward to some deep ravine whose edges are clothed with fir and pine, and there, in the dense Canadian wilderness, will you find the mother ledge of quartz, gleaming pure and white, from which this piece was broken. Cold, hard, and durable enough to withstand all elements of the present, it harks back to that age when ice was its master, bearing it onward in vise-like grip to be dropped on or near its present resting place. One fragment of matter, without life, thought or motion, has, after a lapse of thousands of centuries, met another endowed with these, and has been connected, at least in thought, with the ledge of which it was once a part.

OCCASIONALLY, TOO, BLATCHLEY WROTE ABOUT FLOWS IN NATURE, IN A MANNER THAT HINTED, AT LEAST, AT ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS THINKING. Here is one of his finest (in my opinion) forays into the topic — in this case, the flow from plant sap to aphid honey to ant nourishment:

…I noted by the pathway a clump of curled dock on the stems of which were hundreds of dark, leaden-gray plant-lice, or aphids, their bodies swelling with the juices that they had imbibed or rather sucked, from the soft succulent stems. Over the dock there crawled rapidly numerous large, black ants which, as they moved, were waving their antennae swiftly to and fro as if in search of something lost. As I looked, an ant approached closely one of the thicker-bodied of the lice, when the latter turned its abdomen upward and exuded therefrom a drop of liquid, clear as crystal . With a single lap the ant swallowed the morsel of “honey-dew.” Thus is the juice of the dock transmitted through the body of the aphis into the stomach of the ant, undergoing, doubtless, on the way a chemical change which renders it sweet and to the especial liking of that insect. Wonderful is the relationship thus existing between the organic matter in the soil, the plant and the two insects. Interesting the process by which that inorganic matter is fitted for the food of the higher form, the ant. Varied the changes which matter must undergo as a part of the earth and the dwellers thereon during its unceasing round of existence.

AS AN ENTOMOLOGIST, BLATCHLEY APPRECIATED, AND CELEBRATED, THE SMALL AND OVERLOOKED, AND HOW THOSE THINGS INTO A LARGER STORY. That could be a piece of quartz, or an aphid on a dock plant. Everything in nature belonged, and existed in some sort of relationship with other objects and beings. But I will stop here, lest I begin to put words and ideas into Blatchley’s book that he never quite managed to express. I will close with this thought about observing natural relationships:

To a true naturalist nothing in nature is lowly, nothing is isolated. An inter-relationship, and inter-dependence, is everywhere visible. However small, however stunted and ill shaped, nothing natural seems out of place.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE COPY OF THIS BOOK I READ. One thing I have noticed about all of W. S. Blatchley’s books is that they were published by the Nature Publishing Company and used a similar front cover design with title in gold at a jaunty angle. I strongly suspect that the Nature Publishing Company label was Blatchley’s own. According to a further note on the copyright page, it was printed by Wm. B. Burford of Indianapolis. It includes several black and white photographs of passable artistry, scattered throughout the pages. There is no writing on my copy, and therefore I can say nothing further of its history.

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

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Jul 212020
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Seaward Brook: “From Blomidon to Smoky and Other Papers” by Frank Bolles, 1894 (1856-1893)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Day Hikes, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 182020
 
Frank Bolles, photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons

Far up the cliff a brook, which had worked patiently downard from the soil on the summit of the mountain, appeared in a circular opening, and dashed its small spray seaward. Most brooks must fight their way over boulders and fallen trees, through dark ravines, by hot waysides and sleepy meadows, at last to win only a right to merge their lives in the greater life of the river. This brook had gone straight to its mother ocean, unchecked, unturned, and when its clear, cool drops fell towards the sea they were as pure as when they left the sky. The brook seemed symbolic of some lives, which, though living out their appointed time, go back to the source of life without ever having been polluted by society, or lost in its sullen and ill-regulated current.

I FOUND FRANK BOWLES’ LAST BOOK A DIFFICULT ONE TO READ. It was not specifically that the book was assembled posthumously from four essays about a vacation trip to Nova Scotia augmented by all Bowles’ essays (on birds) that had previously appeared in periodicals. Though I am not tremendously keen on birds and bird behavior (I am working on this, considering how prominently birds figure in early nature writing.), that was not the primary obstacle. I had already read two volumes of Frank Bolles’ work and therefore knew what to expect, but while Bolles’ work lacks the stunning mysticism of Henry Beston, he had become a familiar friend over the previous two volumes of his I had read, and his occasional gems of insight are a joy to encounter. No, what I found most difficult was that the book contained essays written mostly in the last year or so of an all-too-short life, chronicling Bolles’ summer adventures before the winter of his death by pneumonia. I experienced at once both the bittersweet appreciation of how fully he invested himself in engaging with nature (particularly birds), and also the realization that his gifts as a writer and scientist have been mostly lost to the world, thanks in good part, I suspect, to his early death. And I thought, naturally, of my late father, and our summer outing together to Nova Scotia many years ago to some of the very same places Bolles visited. I also thought back to the summer in Maine that Dad felt compelled to document in his tidy black ink handwriting; I have that work now, though have only read it once.

TO THOSE NOT FAMILIAR WITH BOWLES LIFE, THERE IS LITTLE TO FOSTER INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY IN THE READER. The only direct indications that this book was Bolles’ last are in the form of a brief opening note about the book’s contents by EQB, and the fact that it is copyrighted Elizabeth Quincy Bowles instead of the author himself. Elizabeth is mentioned only a couple of times in Bolles’ essays; readers learn that she paints watercolor scenes of Chocorua Lake, and that, clearly, she has an inordinate level of patience for Bolles’ menagerie of pet owls. Reading this book, I could not help but wonder what became of her. I know they had children, and one daughter donated the family’s White Mountain land (or at least a good portion of it) to the Nature Conservancy in 1969. Still, I wish Elizabeth had illustrated this volume (at least the frontispiece) with her artwork, so that readers might get to know her better.

THIS BOOK MAY HAVE A CLUNKY TITLE, AND MAY BE UNEVEN, BUT IT STILL CONTAINS A FEW INSPIRING PASSAGES. One of my favorites describes Frank’s experience rowing a small boat in a bay near Ingonish with his family, and encountering a marvelous phosphorescence in the water. It leads him quickly on a cosmic path:

In the sky, bright masses ploughed their way through our air, impelled by an unknown force, driven from an unknown distance, and aiming for an unknown fate. In the sea, bright atoms ploughed their way through the water and glowed in soft splendor. The meteors are inorganic, dead mysteries. The phosphorescence is an organic, living mystery. Yet it is not more impossible to imagine the history and future of a body perpetually traveling through endless space than to try to count the numbers of these phosphorescent myriads. Generally I have the feeling that science is bringing us nearer to a perception of what the vast creation is which surrounds us, but at times the greater truth flashes before my eyes — that what we are really learning is not more than a drop in the limitless ocean of fact.

In another section, describing a forested gorge not far from Ingonish, Bolles speaks of the spiritual beauty of wilderness in a way that seems almost to mirror John Muir. Was Bolles acquainted with Muir’s writing? I cannot imagine otherwise:

Since leaving the open meadow by the sea and entering the dark forest, I had felt the spell of the wilderness resting upon me, the sense of age, beauty, purity, persistent force; all existing or working without man’s knowledge or approval, yet being the very essence of this dewy land of twilight. On coming to this grotto of rushing waters, Nature seemed for the moment to find a voice with which to tell of her wonderful power….

The spell of the wilderness grew stronger upon me, and when, suddenly, I thought how many wearied souls there were in great cities who would love to see this beautiful, hidden spot, something akin to shame for my own race came also into my mind. If man came here, would he not destroy? His foot would trample, his hand deface, and finally he would cut down the firs, blast out the rock, choke the salmon with sawdust, and leave the glen to fire and the briers which follow flame. It is always so; those of us who love nature and the beautiful are only the few, soon to be thrust aside by the many who value bread or riches higher than the fair earth’s bloom.

Later in the same essay, standing beside a flowing stream within the gorge, Bolles returns to this subject. In the passage below, he seems to reject , the dominant anthropocentrism of his era for an appreciation of how humans are only one facet of Earth’s life, and the recognition that nature can have value in and of itself.

This sense of beauty is a focus of nature’s deepest and purest life; and though in it man has no place, it does not on that account lack meaning or significance. Man is a masterful figure in the drama of creation, but he is not all, nor even half, what the world has long been taught to consider him. Perhaps he has been studied too much; certainly Nature, unspoiled by his greed, has not been studied enough or loved enough. Standing alone in that fair solitude, as much alone as on some atoll in a distant sea, I felt as though I might know man better, see him in stronger contrasts and clearer lights, if I could live apart from him longer in such still, calm, holy places as Indian Brook cañon.

THE FINAL TWO-THIRDS OF THE BOOK CONSISTS OF BOLLES’ PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ESSAYS. These were tougher slogging (for me, at least), because they were all concerned with birds, either wild or tamed. Bolles tamed a number of owls (obtained partly by shooting the parents and partly as gifts from others who had presumably done the same), and also raised three yellow-bellied sapsuckers (again, after dispatching the parents). Accompanied by one of the owls, Puffy (named by his children), Bolles found himself able to get wild birds come to him out of curiosity. Thus, he was able to include still more lists of birds observed. In terms of particular observations, Bolles played the role of the amateur scientist; particular interests included the diet of yellow-bellied sapsuckers (tree sap, insects, or a combination of the two) and the personalities of owl species.

FROM WHAT I HAVE READ, I WOULD PROPOSE THAT BOWLES’ GREATEST CONTRIBUTION TO CONSERVATION EMERGED FROM HIS OBSERVATIONS ON INDIVIDUALITY IN BIRDS. Strange as it may seem to the modern reader, there clearly was a time post-Descartes when animals were viewed as machines, incapable of developing unique personalities. As such, they could be freely shot without remorse. And Bolles did quite a bit of that, early on.

With me, belief in the individuality of birds is a powerful influence against their destruction. Like most men familiar with out of door life, I have the hunting instinct strongly developed. If a game bird is merely one of an abundant species, killing it is only reducing the supply of that species by one; if, on the contrary, it is possessed of novel powers, or a unique combination of powers, and can be distinguished from all its fellows, killing it is destroying something which cannot be replaced. No one with a conscience would extinguish a species, yet I already feel towards certain races that their individuals are as different from one another as I formerly supposed one species of bird to be from another. At one time I should have shot a barred owl without a twinge of conscience; now I should as soon shoot my neighbor’s Skye terrier as kill one of these singularly attractive birds.

In his next paragraph, Bolles considers his own work in the light of biological investigations at the time, and puts out a prescient plea for early citizen science to address the deficit:

Sentiment aside, bird individuality, if real, is of deep scientific interest. If we knew more of the influence of individuals, we might have a clearer perception of the forces governing evolution. Serious science is now so fully given up to laboratory as distinguished from field study that but little thought is given to problems of this kind. This fact makes it all the more possible for amateurs to work happily in the woods and fields, encouraged by the belief that they have innumerable discoveries still to make, countless secrets of nature still to fathom.

Like Christopher Robin leaving Pooh at the edge of the Hundred Acre Wood, it is in the wooded patches around his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I will leave him — observing birds and recording their behaviors. As we part company, Bolles reminds me to keep observing nature and making discoveries:

A Sunday afternoon in May spent in the groves and fields of suburbs gives acquaintance with more species than there are hours in a day, and close watch for an hour of any one bird may yield a fact which no naturalist has ever recorded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look to the Horizon: “Land of the Lingering Snow” by Frank Bolles, 1891

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Geometry and Nature, Native Plants, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 042020
 

The summit [of Mt. Wachusett] consists of a few acres, destitute of trees, covered with bare rocks, interspersed with blueberry bushes, raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, moss, and a fine wiry grass. The common yellow lily, and dwarf cornel, grow abundantly in the crevices of the rocks. This clear space, which is gently rounded, is bounded a few feet lower by a thick shrubbery of oaks, with maples, aspens, beeches, cherries, and occasionally a mountain ash intermingled, among which we found the bright blueberries of the Solomon’s Seal, and the fruit of the pyrola. From the foundation of a wooden observatory, which was formerly erected on the highest point, forming a rude hollow structure of stone, a dozen feet in diameter, and five or six in height, we could dimly see Monadnock, rising in simple grandeur…..

from “A Walk to Wachusett” by H. D. Thoreau, 1842

The summit, reached just at noon, proved anything but attractive. Stripped of trees and bushes, it has been afflicted by a large and commonplace hotel, several barns and ugly sheds, and a bowling alley, billiard room, and tintype gallery. The north wind was polluted by the escaping odors of a cask of gasoline, and when we sought the groves below the crest, we encountered tin cans, broken bottles and other remains of previous seasons. When one seeks gasoline, electric bells, and a tintype gallery he has a right to feel pleased on finding them, but when I seek Nature on a mountain top and find her fettered by civilization, I have a right to feel aggrieved…. What first struck us was the number of fires which were contributing columns of blue smoke to [the] atmosphere…. Northward of the Berkshires the sky line was ragged with hills and distant mountains in Vermont and New Hampshire, even to the point where, rising serenely from its granite bed, Monadnock reared its noble head toward the heavens. It alone in all that smoky landscape was majestic.

from “Wachusett” by Frank Bolles, 1891

IT IS DIFFICULT TO READ FRANK BOWLES’ WORK WITHOUT THINKING OF THOREAU. While Bolles only mentions the sage of Concord a couple of times in his book, “Land of the Lingering Snow”, the spirit of Thoreau pervades it. A chronicle of Bolles’ outdoor nature encounters over the first half of a year, the book includes accounts of a trip to Cape Cod (visited several times by Thoreau) and a walk up Mt. Wachusett (also chronicled by Thoreau). Yet this connection only highlights the key difference between the experiences of the two authors; Thoreau inhabited the rural landscape of Concord in the mid-19th-century, while Bolles lived in the gritty industrialized landscape of Cambridge on the brink of the 20th century. Thoreau set out on a country walk to Wachusett, remarking on the bucolic scenery of the hop fields. Bolles set out by horse and carryall, remarking on the journey that

For the first four miles, the road was far from agreeable. We encountered rough pavements or dust, the obtrusive features of a young and by no means beautiful city, hillsides denuded of trees, and in many cases turned into quarries, the Nashua River defiled by mill-waste and stained by chemicals, railroad embankments coated with ashes and bare of verdure, and brick mill buildings, grim, noisy, and forbidding. The road gradually ascended, and at length crossed the river, passed under the railway and sought the woods. A parting glance down stream showed a mass of steeples, chimneys, brick walls, quarry derricks, freight cars, and dirty mill ponds flanked by wasted hillsides and overhung by a cloud of smoke. Between the smoke and the hurly-burly of the town a distant line of hills show out on the horizon. It was the promise of something purer above.

ALAS, BOLLES’ HOPE OF WACHUSETT AS EDEN WAS QUICKLY DASHED. Yet again, he looked to the horizon, and saw Monadnock in its grandeur. At least Monadnock yet remained, a symbol of that pure wild nature he craved.

IT IS DIFFICULT NOT TO THINK OF FRANK BOWLES AS A SOMEWHAT TRAGIC FIGURE. Like Thoreau, he was drawn to nature (particularly birds which, I suspect, he was better able to identify by plumage and song than Thoreau himself). He had a gift for reading stories in the snow or sand tracks of mammals and birds. But while I think of Thoreau as dying too young at the age of 47, Bolles died even younger, at the age of 38, of pneumonia. And many of the rural haunts of Thoreau were gone by Bolles’ day, transformed by industrial “progress” into mills and stone quarries. And while Thoreau is perhaps the most celebrated American environmental writer of all time, Frank Bolles has not even merited a Wikipedia entry yet. Partly I think this is due to the paucity of his work — two collections of nature essays: “Land of the Lingering Snow” (his outings in New England between January and June of a year) and “At the North of Bearcamp Water” (his wanderings between July and December), plus two posthumous volumes, one of poetry and the other of unpublished writings. All of his work is out of print now, unless you take into consideration the print-on-demand option and scanned copies available for free online.

AT THE SAME TIME, FRANK BOLLES STRIKES ME AS A NATURAL HISTORY WRITER I WOULD DEARLY LOVE TO HAVE MET. His youth, enthusiasm, and even humor (see his quote about the gasoline and electric bells on Wachusett, above) are quite winning. He is knowledgeable without being pretentious, keenly perceptive without being pedantic. He is humble and thoughtful. I admit that I do not care for his propensity for capturing baby owls from the wild and rearing them as pets. On the other hand, nowhere in the book does he mention hunting, though he catches quite a few trout for dinner one day. And like Robertson, Bolles is able to admire a snake and let it go: “Being given his freedom unhurt he rewarded us by some brilliant tree climbing, during which he glided up a trunk, in and out among branches, and along limbs from tree to tree. I hope he will do no harm during the new term of life which we gave him.”

PERHAPS BOLLES LACKED SOME OF THE LITERARY COMPLEXITY OF THOREAU. Yet in his simpler prose, there is much to wonder at and appreciate. Consider, for instance, his description of the effects of a rainstorm on the dune grasses:

As the wind blew the sand grass, its long blades whirled around, cutting circles in the sand with their tough tips and edges. These circles could be seen from a long distance, so deeply and clearly were they cut. Sometimes a long blade and a short one whirled on the same root and made concentric circles. The geometrical correctness of these figures made them striking elements in a landscape so chaotic as the dunes in the Equinoctial.

Then there is this peculiar bit of imaginative prose (a flight of fancy, one might call it) in which bluebirds generate goldfinches. The passage had been marked in pencil in my copy of the book, and further indicated by a torn piece of paper with the page number on it slipped into the book, so I feel compelled to share the passage here:

Over the brook stood an oak; in the oak sat a bluebird; from the bluebird’s inmost soul poured the sweetest of bird music, and, wonderful to relate, the music as it fell upon the air turned into goldfinches which undulated over the pasture, finally rested upon the oak and added their songs to the general join of the occasion. It may be said by harsh commentators that goldfinches never could have been made out of bluebirds’ music. Then the burden is on them to prove where the goldfinches come from, for to our eyes they came from the air, which had nothing in it except the song of the bluebird.

ULTIMATELY, BOLLES FOUND IN NATURE MUCH JOY AND PEACE, QUALITIES THE HUMAN WORLD DID NOT ALWAYS OFFER. After one walk through the woods and fields of eastern Massachusetts, Bolles remarked that “In all that day’s wandering I saw no sign of terror in any living thing that was not caused by man. Nature by herself is not all peace, by any means, but she is nearer to it than when man is present.” And ultimately, in the passage of the seasons Bolles chronicled in his two books, he even found meaning in mortality — meaning that I would like to think offered him solace during his final moments, dying of pneumonia in 1894:

As I look at this grass and the flowers which shine in its midst, at the myriad leaves upon the trees, at the butterflies, caterpillars, locusts, ants, and bees, and at the birds, solicitous for their eggs or young, should I be sorrowful because in a few days the annual tide of life will turn and the grass begin to ripen, the flowers to fade, the butterflies to die, and the birds to take note of the sky and begin their journey southward? No. The rhythm of the universe demands just this coming and going, rising and falling, expanding and contracting, living and dying. Without reaction there could be no action. Without death we should not know what life meant; without what we call sorrow there could be no joy.”

THOUGH FRANK BOLLES IS NEARLY FORGOTTEN TODAY, THERE REMAINS ONE MONUMENT TO HIM, OF WHICH HE WOULD BE QUITE PROUD. Frank Bolles had purchased land with an old farmhouse at the foot of Mt. Chocorua in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and took his family there as often as he could. The region features in several of Bolles’ nature essays. In 1969, Bolles’ daughter, Evelyn Bolles Phenix, donated 247 acres to the Nature Conservancy; Frank Bolles Preserve is now open to all those seeking peace and solace in nature.

The Nature Conservancy, https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/frank-bolles-preserve/

BY WAY OF CLOSING, A FEW REMARKS ON MY BOOK. My copy is a “first edition” from 1891; I did find record on the website of ABE Books of a 4th edition that came out in 1895. The book is still together though the binding it showing signs of coming apart. There were no names or other words written anywhere in the book, though a couple of passages were marked with pencil. In addition to “Page 105” written on a torn piece of paper and slipped into the book, the volume also included an old newspaper clipping (possibly from the period of the book) with a poem by Bolles, The Whip-Por-Will. It was later published on page 61 of a posthumous volume of his poetry entitled “Chocorua’s Tenants”. The book has been scanned and may be viewed online here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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