August 2022 – CommonPlace Nature

A Perpetual Letter from God: “Star Papers: Experiences of Art and Nature” by Henry Ward Beecher (1855)

Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Spirituality No Responses »

Aug 282022

Nature becomes to the soul a perpetual letter from God,

I am not quite certain what to make of this book or its author, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887). A contemporary of Thoreau, the two may have met but were certainly not close acquaintances. Thoreau does report in his journal about attending church in New York City to see him preach. It is not known whether Beecher, a Unitarian clergyman, ever read Emerson or Thoreau. Beecher wrote one novel — Norwood — entirely unknown today, though his sister’s novel remains famous for helping start the Civil War (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Beecher published only this one collection of writings that included nature essays (among other topics in the volume). Yet he is not an obvious progenitor of any later nature authors, although he did develop a close friendship with William Hamilton Gibson late in his life (this friendship included marrying Gibson and Emma Ludlow Blanchard in 1878). The book title is one of its most mysterious features, though there is no cosmic significance intended. It turns out that Beecher had written a number of columns for the New York Independent Newspaper, with the ones authored by him denoted with a star. Inevitably, then, this book is a compilation of those starred papers.

Opening the book with care — it is one of the oldest titles in my collection — I steeled myself for flowery, overwrought prose and a lot of reflections of a religious bent (as the title of this blog post suggests). And while these characteristics are present, so, too, is a passion for nature and a delightfully whimsical and occasionally even self-deprecating sense of humor. His essay on books and bookshops (see my previous post) rings amazingly true for me today. And while he was certainly no scientist, he did have a keen command of plant identification and basic botanical nomenclature (both wildflowers and trees) and a working knowledge of common names of birds. Here are two passages on flowering weeds from “A Discourse on Flowers” that opens the Nature section of his book. First, dog fennel, a tall and odoriferous weed I contend with each year on my property in Georgia:

What shall we say of mayweed, irreverently called dog-fennel by some? Its acrid juice, its heavy pungent odor, make it disagreeable; and being disagreeable, its enormous Malthusian propensities to increase render it hateful to damsels of white stockings, compelled to walk through it on dewy mornings. Arise, O scythe, and devour it!

And second, the lowly dandelion that covers my yard with its festive yellow blooms:

You can not forget, if you would, those golden kisses all over the cheeks of the meadow, queerly called dandelions. There are many greenhouse blossoms less pleasing to us than these. And we have reached through many a fence, since we were incarcerated, like them, in a city, to pluck one of these yellow flower drops. Their passing away is more spiritual than their bloom. Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe — a fairy dome of splendid architecture.

His greatest rapture, though, he reserves for the stately Connecticut elms. This extended passage evokes what America has lost, and how different the small town landscape must have been 150 years ago when elms were commonplace:

A village shaded by thoroughly grown elms can not but be handsome. Its houses may be huts; its streets may be ribbed with rocks, or channeled with ruts; it may be as dirty as New York, and as frigid as Philadelphia; and yet these vast, majestic tabernacles of the air would redeem it to beauty. These are temples indeed, living temples, neither waxing old nor shattered by Time, that cracks and shatters stone, but rooting wider with every generation and casting a vaster round of grateful shadow with every summer. We had rather walk beneath an avenue of elms than inspect the noblest cathedral that art ever accomplished. What is it that brings one into such immediate personal and exhilarating sympathy with venerable trees! One instinctively uncovers as he comes beneath them; he looks up with proud veneration into the receding and twilight recesses; he breathes a thanksgiving to God every time his cool foot falls along their shadows. They waken the imagination and mingle the olden time with the present. Did any man of contemplative mood ever stand under an old oak or elm, without thinking of other days, — imagining the scenes that had transpired in their presence? These leaf-mountains seem to connect the past and the present to us as mountain ridges attract clouds from both sides of themselves…
No other tree is at all comparable to the elm. The ash is, when well grown, a fine tree, but clumpy; the maple has the same character. The horse-chestnut, the linden, the mulberry, and poplars, (save that tree-spire, the Lombardy poplar,) are all of them plump, round, fat trees, not to be despised, surely, but representing single dendrological ideas. The oak is venerable by association, and occasionally a specimen is found possessing a kind of grim and ragged glory. But the elm, alone monarch of trees, combines in itself the elements of variety, size, strength, and grace, such as no other tree known to us can at all approach or remotely rival. It is the ideal of trees; the true Absolute Tree! Its main trunk shoots up, not round and smooth, like an over-fatted, lymphatic tree, but channeled and corrugated, as if its athletic muscles showed their proportions through the bark, like Hercules’ limbs through his tunic. Then suddenly the whole idea of growth is changed, and multitudes of long, lithe branches radiate from the crotch of the tree, having the effect of straightness and strength, yet really diverging and curving, until the outermost portions droop over and give to the whole top the most faultless grace. If one should at first say that the elm suggested ideas of strength and uprightness, on looking again he would correct himself, and say that it was majestic, uplifting beauty that it chiefly represented. But if he first had said that it was graceful and magnificent beauty, on a second look he would correct himself, and say that it was vast and rugged strength that it set forth. But at length he would say neither; he would say both; he would say that it expressed a beauty of majestic strength, and a grandeur of graceful beauty.
Such domestic forest treasures are a legacy which but few places can boast. Wealth can build houses, and smooth the soil; it can fill up marshes, and create lakes or artificial rivers; it can gather statues and paintings; but no wealth can buy or build elm trees — the floral glory of New England. Time is the only architect of such structures; and blessed are they for whom Time was pleased to fore-think! No care or expense should be counted too much to maintain the venerable elms of New England in all their regal glory!

Elm trees are not the only living beings lost or diminished since Beecher’s days. Similarly, we are rapidly losing the diversity and number of insects that were once present in the American landscape. Consider this account of a trouting excursion gone awry. Can you imagine encountering this many (and this great a diversity of) grasshoppers on a rural New England fishing trip today?

Still further north is another stream, something larger, and much better or worse according to your luck. It is easy of access, and quite unpretending. There is a bit of a pond, some twenty feet in diameter, from which it flows; and in that there are five or six half-pound trout who seem to have retired from active life and given themselves to meditation in this liquid convent. They were very tempting, but quite untemptable. Standing afar off, we selected an irresistible fly, and with long line we sent it pat into the very place. It fell like a snow-flake. No trout should have hesitated a moment. The morsel was delicious. The nimblest of them should have flashed through the water, broke the surface, and with a graceful but decisive curve plunged downward, carrying the insect with him. Then we should, in our turn, very cheerfully, lend him a hand, relieve him of his prey, and, admiring his beauty, but pitying his untimely fate, bury him in the basket. But he wished no translation. We cast our fly again and again; we drew it hither and thither; we made it skip and wriggle; we let it fall plash like a blundering bug or fluttering moth; and our placid spectators calmly beheld our feats, as if all this skill was a mere exercise for their amusement, and their whole duty consisted in looking on and preserving order.
Next, we tried ground-bait, and sent our vermicular hook down to their very sides. With judicious gravity they parted, and slowly sailed toward the root of an old tree on the side of the pool. Again, changing place, we will make an ambassador of a grasshopper. Laying down our rod, we prepare to catch the grasshopper. That is in itself no slight feat. At the first step you take, at least forty bolt out and tumble headlong into the grass; some cling to the stems, some are creeping under the leaves, and not one seems to be within reach. You step again; another flight takes place, and you eye them with fierce penetration, as if thereby you could catch some one of them with your eye. You can not, though. You brush the grass with your foot again. Another hundred snap out, and tumble about in every direction. There are large ones and small ones, and middling-sized ones; there are gray and hard old fellows; yellow and red ones; green and striped ones. At length it is wonderful to see how populous the grass is. If you did not want them, they would jump into your very hand. But they know by your looks that you are out a-fishing. You see a very nice young fellow climbing up a steeple stem, to get a good look-out and see where you are. You take good aim and grab at him. The stem you catch, but he has jumped a safe rod. Yonder is another creeping among some delicate ferns. With broad palm you clutch him and all the neighboring herbage too. Stealthily opening your little finger, you see his leg; the next finger reveals more of him; and opening the next you are just beginning to take him out with the other hand, when, out he bounds and leaves you to renew your entomological pursuits! Twice you snatch handfuls of grass and cautiously open your palm to find that you have only grass. It is quite vexatious. There are thousands of them here and there, climbing and wriggling on that blade, leaping off from that stalk, twisting and kicking on that vertical spider’s web, jumping and bouncing about under your very nose, hitting you in your face, creeping on your shoes, or turning summersets and tracing every figure of parabola or ellipse in the air, and yet not one do you get. And there is such, a heartiness and merriment in their sallies! They are pert and gay, and do not take your intrusion in the least dudgeon. If any tender-hearted person ever wondered how a humane man could bring himself to such a cruelty as the impaling of an insect, let him hunt for a grasshopper in a hot day among tall grass; and when at length he secures one, the affixing him upon the hook will be done without a single scruple, with judicial solemnity, and as a mere matter of penal justice.
Now then the trout are yonder. We swing our line to the air, and give it a gentle cast toward the desired spot, and a puff of south wind dexterously lodges it in the branch of the tree. You plainly see it strike, and whirl over and over, so that no gentle pull will loosen it. You draw it north and south, east and west; you give it a jerk up and a pull down; you try a series of nimble twitches; in vain you coax it in this way and solicit it in that. Then you stop and look a moment, first at the trout and then at your line. Was there ever anything so vexatious? Would it be wrong to get angry? In fact you feel very much like it. The very things you wanted to catch, the grasshopper and the trout, you could not; but a tree, that you did not in the least want, you have caught fast at the first throw. You fear that the trout will be scared. You cautiously draw nigh and peep down. Yes, there they are, looking at you and laughing as sure as ever trout laughed! They understand the whole thing. With a very decisive jerk you snap your line, regain the remnant of it, and sit down to repair it, to put on another hook, you rise up to catch another grasshopper, and move on down the stream to catch a trout!

In this brief passage, also on the theme of fishing, Beecher gazes longingly at a brook plunging down the mountainside. He urges readers to leave some wild places unfished (untouched). Or then again…

…we are on the upper brink of another series of long down-plunges, each one of which would be enough for a day’s study. Below these are cascades and pools in which the water whirls friskily around like a kitten running earnestly after its tail. But we will go no further down. These are the moun- tain jewels ; the necklaces which it loves to hang down from its hoary head upon its rugged bosom.
Shall we take out our tackle? That must be a glorious pool yonder for trout ! No, my friend, do not desecrate such a scene by throwing a line into it with piscatory intent. Leave some places in nature to their beauty, unharassed, for the mere sake of their beauty. Nothing could tempt us to spend an hour here in fishing; — all the more because there is not a single trout in the whole brook.

To declare Beecher an early conservationist akin to Thoreau would be a stretch, I think. But he does make a strident call for respecting old trees instead of cutting them down. Ultimately, his motivation is less for the sake of the tree itself, however, than for its spiritual significance as a creation of God.

Thus do you stand, noble elms! Lifted up so high are your topmost boughs, that no indolent birds care to seek you; and only those of nimble wings, and they with unwonted beat, that love exertion, and aspire to sing where none sing higher. — Aspiration! so Heaven gives it pure as flames to the noble bosom. But debased with passion and selfishness it comes to bo only Ambition!
It was in the presence of this pasture-elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow that we had indeed become owners of the soil ! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, This is mine, there was a shrinking as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said, “I may not call thee property, and that property mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise God. Thou belongest to no man’s hand, but to all men’s eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God ! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots, and the ax from thy trunk.”
For, remorseless men there are crawling yet upon the face of the earth, smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that it is food for the ax and the saw ! These are the wretches of whom the Scripture speaks: “A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees.“
Thus famous, or rather infamous, was the last owner but one, before me, of this farm. Upon the crown of the hill, just where an artist would have planted them, had he wished to have them exactly in the right place, grew some two hundred stalworth and ancient maples, beeches, ashes, and oaks, a narrow belt-like forest, forming a screen from the northern and western winds in winter, and a harp of endless music for the summer. The wretched owner of this farm, tempted of the Devil, cut down the whole blessed band and brotherhood of trees, that he might fill his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for the wood! Well, his pocket was the best part of him. The iron furnaces have devoured my grove, and their huge stumps, that stood like gravestones, have been cleared away, that a grove may be planted in the same spot, for the next hundred years to nourish into the stature and glory of that which is gone.
In other places, I find the memorials of many noble trees slain; here, a hemlock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into the winter air; there, a huge double-trunked chestnut, dear old grandfather of hundreds of children that have for generations clubbed its boughs, or shook its nut-laden top, and laughed and shouted as bushels of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree exists only in the form of loop-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do hope the fellow got a sliver in his finger every time he touched the hemlock plank, or let down the bars made of those chestnut rails !
What then, it will be said, must no one touch a tree? must there be no fuel, no timber? Go to the forest for both. There are no individual trees there, only a forest. One trunk here, and one there, leaves the forest just as perfect as before, and gives room for young aspiring trees to come up in the world. But for a man to cut down a large, well-formed, healthy tree from the roadside, or from pastures or fields, is a piece of unpardonable Vandalism. It is worse than Puritan hammers upon painted windows and idolatrous statues. Money can buy houses, build walls, dig and drain the soil, cover the hills with grass, and the grass with herds and flocks. But no money can buy the growth of trees. They are born of Time. Years are the only coin in which they can be paid for. Beside, so noble a thing is a well-grown tree, that it is a treasure to the community, just as is a work of art. If a monarch were to blot out Euben’s Descent from the Cross, or Angelo’s Last Judgment, or batter to pieces the marbles of Greece, the whole world would curse him, and for ever. Trees are the only art-treasures which belong to our villages. They should be precious as gold.
But let not the glory and grace of single trees lead us to neglect the peculiar excellences of the forest. We go from one to the other, needing both ; as in music we wander from melody to harmony, and from many-voiced and intertwined harmonies back to simple melody again.
To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resinous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the sound of its leaves.

Do I detect, at the close of this passage, incipient thoughts about the diversity of forest ecosystems? Alas, it is a thought he carries no further, beyond remarking on his favorite blending of forest trees.

Ultimately, his thoughts of nature are bounded by his ultimate aim, appreciating God in all his glory. Here, toward the end of the book, Beecher considers the various uses of nature. While he does not identify fully with the utilitarian perspective, he does not reject it, either. Ultimately, he advocates nature appreciation as a form of religious devotion. We will leave him there, pondering the ineffable as the sun sinks low in the sky over New England.

As things go in our utilitarian age, men look upon the natural world in one of three ways: the first, as a foundation for industry, and all objects are regarded in their relations to industry. Grass is for hay, flowers are for medicine, springs are for dairies, rocks are for quarries, trees are for timber, streams are for navigation or for milling, clouds are for rain, and rain is for harvests. The relation of an object to some commercial or domestic economy, is the end of observation. Beyond that there is no interest to it.
The second aspect in which men behold nature, is the purely scientific. We admire a man of science who is so all-sided that he can play with fancy or literality, with exactitudes or associations, just as he will. But a mere man of accuracy, one of those conscientious-eyed men, that will never see any thing but just what is there, and who insist upon bringing every thing to terms; who are for ever dissecting nature, and coming to the physical truths in their most literal forms, these men are our horror. We should as soon take an analytic chemist to dine with us, that he might explain the constituent elements of every morsel that Eve ate; or an anatomist into a social company, to describe the bones, and muscles, and nerves that were in full play in the forms of dear friends. Such men think that nature is perfectly understood when her mechanism is known; when her gross and physical facts are registered, and when all her details are catalogued and described. These are nature’s dictionary-makers. These are the men who think that the highest enjoyment of a dinner would be to be present in the kitchen and that they might see how the food is compounded and cooked.
A third use of nature is that which poets and artists make, who look only for beauty.
All of these are partialists. They all misinterpret, because they all proceed as if nature were constructed upon so meager a schedule as that which they peruse; as if it were a mere matter of science, or of commercial use, or of beauty; whereas these are but single developments among hundreds.
The earth has its physical structure and machinery, well worth laborious study; it has its relations to man’s bodily wants, from which spring the vast activities of industrial life; it has its relations to the social faculties, and the finer sense of the beautiful in the soul; but far above all these are its declared uses, as an interpreter of God, a symbol of invisible spiritual truths, the ritual of a higher life, the highway upon which our thoughts are to travel toward immortality, and toward the realm of just men made perfect that do inherit it.

For its vast age, my copy of this book offers few clues as to its history. There is a bookseller stamp for J.T. Heald, Bookseller and Binder, 127 Market Street, Wilmington, Delaware. There is also a signature without a date or other identifying information. The name appears to be Hannah B. Michner. I was unable to locate the name online when searched with Delaware, Pennsylvania,

Wilmington, or Philadelphia. I am not clear if the last name is a maiden name or a name received upon marriage. Nor do I have any hint regarding whether the owner purchased the book new, in Delaware, or used, somewhere else.

An Aside about Books and the Acquiring of Them: Henry Ward Beecher and Me

Books 1 Response »

Aug 272022

OK, I have a Book Problem. I own it. I have books everywhere, in a dozen bookcases and stacked in piles atop the bookcases. And lately, a lot of those books have been of the antiquarian ilk. For those of you wondering how I finance this blog, it is a labor of love — and debt. I do not want to run the numbers, but I am confident I have spent something north of $3000 on obtaining original (or near-original) copies of perhaps 150 “nature” books, from the 1850s into the 1930s. My wife has been, for the most part, looking aside while I have been indulging this habit, though she has flinched a couple of times at purchases above $50 for a single highly desired volume. (I think $70 is my record unless you count the complete set of John Burroughs.) There are a few books I will simply do without. An original copy of Days Afield on Staten Island (1892) starts at $150, for instance — though I did manage to buy a paperback reproduction for under $5. Lately, she has finally called a halt to my acquisitions, though I had already decided I have reached a state of saturation. I now own a large percentage of the books of the more prolific authors of the time — including the 23-book Collected Works of John Burroughs. I have enough to be truly humbled by it all.

You are probably wondering why at this point. Not why I am reading the books, I hope — I feel like I have discovered a treasure-trove of writers the world has forgotten, from a golden age of nature writing nobody talks about anymore. I am thrilled at the prospect of creating an anthology to celebrate them all (or at least the ones worthy of celebrating). But why the original editions, when I could read nearly every book online for free, or buy on Kindle or in paperback from less than half the price of the original?

My answer is that reading, to me, is a richly sensorial experience. I blame my friend Alan Craig for that. He is not really responsible, even indirectly. But his grandfather, who was largely responsible, has passed on, and his father, who probably shares a bit of the blame, I have not spoken with for years and would not wish to offend by dint of blame, so I will blame Alan in his stead. You see, when I was in about 5th grade, I would roam through my neighborhood, knocking on people’s doors and visiting with them. Nobody told me not to do that, and I honestly enjoyed conversations with older folks (ones about my age now, I expect). The Craigs has a charming rambling home that included a den, and that den was lined with bookshelves, and in the bookshelves were books, and one of them was in a red slipcase and had a huge spine decorated with runes. Jeff Craig had given the book to his father. I knew zero about the book or its author (The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien). But based on the cover alone, I was fascinated. I was permitted to take the book home to read. I remember the weight of the book in my lap, the way the map in the back unfolded to reveal Middle Earth, the smell of the book, and the feeling of sliding it out of its slipcase. That is when I truly discovered reading as a vehicle for visiting other worlds. And that is when I experienced reading as embodied, sensorial. I will assert to this day that a set of three mass-market paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings is not the same book as the one I read. I know, because I tried reading it in paperback copies years later.

What does this have to do with my current project? Everything. There is a magical quality to holding an old book in my hands, turning the pages, viewing hundred-year-old photographs, viewing signatures of past owners whose grandchildren are dead and buried by now. My most recent venture, Star Papers, is a first edition of the work, from 1855. With some luck, I will live to see its 200th birthday. The cover is dark and rather depressing — it would fit in well in a Victorian parlor at a viewing. The paper is robust — likely a thick cotton rag. The printing is letterpress — I can feel each letter on the page.

What is even better, the author, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) understands me well. We are kindred spirits in our dedication to bibliophilia. His essay on “Book-Stores, Books” speaks directly to my book pursuits, though written back before the Civil War. My next post will visit in great depth with his book as a whole, especially in regard to his sentiments on nature. For this post, though, I cannot help but share his essay on the purchasing of books in its entirety. If it describes your plight, reader, know that you are not alone.

Nothing marks the increasing wealth of our times and the growth of the public mind toward refinement, more than the demand for books. Within ten years the sale of common books has increased probably two hundred per cent, and it is daily increasing. But the sale of expensive works, and of library-editions of standard authors in costly bindings, is yet more noticeable. Ten years ago, such a display of magnificent works as is to be found at the Appletons’ would have been a precursor of bankruptcy. There was no demand for them. A few dozen, in one little show-case, was the prudent whole. Now, one whole side of an immense store is not only filled with most admirably bound library-books, but from some inexhaustible source the void continually made in the shelves is at once refilled. A reserve of heroic books supply the places of those that fall. Alas! Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store! Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bonvivant’s relish for a dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearnings of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller’s temptation-hall?

How easily one may distinguish a genuine lover of books from the worldly man! With what subdued and yet glowing enthusiasm does he gaze upon the costly front of a thousand embattled volumes! How gently he draws them down, as if they were little children; how tenderly he handles them! He peers at the title-page, at the text, or the notes, with the nicety of a bird examining a flower. He studies the binding: the leather, — Russia, English calf, morocco; the lettering, the gilding, the edging, the hinge of the cover! He opens it, and shuts it, he holds it off, and brings it nigh. It suffuses his whole body with book-magnetism. He walks up and down, in a maze, at the mysterious allotments of Providence that gives so much money to men who spend it upon their appetites, and so little to men who would spend it in benevolence, or upon their refined tastes! It is astonishing, too, how one’s necessities multiply in the presence of the supply. One never knows how many things it is impossible to do without till he goes to Windle’s or Smith’s house-furnishing stores. One is surprised to perceive, at some bazaar, or fancy and variety store, how many conveniences he needs. He is satisfied that his life must have been utterly inconvenient aforetime. And thus, too, one is inwardly convicted, at Appleton’s, of having lived for years without books which he is now satisfied that one can not live without.

Then, too, the subtle process by which the man convinces himself that he can afford to buy. No subtle manager or broker ever saw through a maze of financial embarrassments half so quick as a poor book-buyer sees his way clear to pay for what he must have. He promises with himself marvels of retrenchment; he will eat less, or less costly viands, that he may buy more food for the mind. He will take an extra patch, and go on with his raiment another year, and buy books instead of coats. Yea, he will write books, that he may buy books. He will lecture, teach, trade; he will do any honest thing for money to buy books! The appetite is insatiable. Feeding does not satisfy it. It rages by the fuel which is put upon it. As a hungry man eats first, and pays afterward, so the book-buyer purchases, and then works at the debt afterward. This paying is rather medicinal. It cures for a time. But a relapse takes place. The same longing, the same promises of self-denial. He promises himself to put spurs on both heels of his industry; and then, besides all this, he will somehow get along when the time for payment comes! Ah! this Somehow! That word is as big as a whole world, and is stuffed with all the vagaries and fantasies that Fancy ever bred upon Hope. And yet, is there not some comfort in buying books, to be paid for? We have heard of a sot, who wished his neck as long as the worm of a still, that he might so much the longer enjoy the flavor of the draught! Thus, it is a prolonged excitement of purchase, if you feel for six months in a slight doubt whether the book is honestly your own or not. Had you paid down, that would have been the end of it. There would have been no affectionate and beseeching look of your books at you, every time you saw them, saying, as plain as a book’s eyes can say, “Do not let me be taken from you.”

Moreover, buying books before you can pay for them, promotes caution. You do not feel quite at liberty to take them home. You are married. Your wife keeps an account-book. She knows to a penny what you can and what you can not afford. She has no “speculation” in her eyes. Plain figures make desperate work with airy “somehows.” It is a matter of no small skill and experience to get your books home, and into their proper places, undiscovered. Perhaps the blundering Express brings them to the door just at evening. ” What is it, my dear?” she says to you. “Oh nothing — a few books that I can not do without.” That smile! A true housewife that loves her husband, can smile a whole arithmetic at him in one look! Of course she insists, in the kindest way, in sympathizing with you in your literary acquisition. She cuts the strings of the bundle, (and of your heart) and out comes the whole story. You have bought a complete set of costly English books, full bound in calf, extra gilt! You are caught, and feel very much as if bound in calf yourself, and admirably lettered.

Now, this must not happen frequently. The books must be smuggled home. Let them be sent to some near place. Then, when your wife has a headache, or is out making a call, or has lain down, run the books across the frontier and threshold, hastily undo them, stop only for one loving glance as you put them away in the closet, or behind other books on the shelf, or on the topmost shelf. Clear away the twine and wrapping-paper, and every suspicious circumstance. Be very careful not to be too kind. That often brings on detection. Only the other day we heard it said, somewhere, “Why, how good you have been, lately. I am really afraid that you have been carrying on mischief secretly.” Our heart smote us. It was a fact. That very day we had bought a few books which “we could not do without.” After a while, you can bring out one volume, accidentally, and leave it on the table.” Why, my dear, what a beautiful book! Where did you borrow it?” You glance over the newspaper, with the quietest tone you can command: “That! oh! that is mine. Have you not seen it before? It has been in the house these two months;” and you rush on with anecdote and incident, and point out the binding, and that peculiar trick of gilding, and every thing else you can think of; but it all will not do; you can not rub out that roguish, arithmetical smile. People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman, will vanquish ten men. Of course you repent, and in time form a habit of repenting.

Another method which will be found peculiarly effective, is, to make a present of some fine work, to your wife. Of course, whether she or you have the name of buying it, it will go into your collection and be yours to all intents and purposes. But, it stops remark in the presentation. A wife could not reprove you for so kindly thinking of her. No matter what she suspects, she will say nothing. And then if there are three or four more works, which have come home with the gift-book — they will pass through the favor of the other.

These are pleasures denied to wealth and old bachelors. Indeed, one cannot imagine the peculiar pleasure of buying books, if one is rich and stupid. There must be some pleasure, or so many would not do it. But the full flavor, the whole relish of delight only comes to those who are so poor that they must engineer for every book. They set down before them, and besiege them. They are captured. Each book has a secret history of ways and means. It reminds you of subtle devices by which you insured and made it yours, in spite of poverty!

Beautiful Mysteries: “Eye Spy: Afield With Nature Among Flowers and Animate Things” by William Hamilton Gibson (1897)

Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Spirituality No Responses »

Aug 272022

…A few more similar expositions of the beautiful mysteries of the common flowers which we meet every day in our walks, and which we claim to “know” so well, may serve to add something to the interest of our strolls afield. It is scarcely fair to assert that familiarity can breed contempt in our relations to so lovely an object as a flower, but certain it is that this everyday contact or association, especially with the wild things of the wood, meadow, and wayside, is conducive to an apathy which dulls our sense to their actual attributes of beauty. Many of these commonplace familiars of the copse and thicket and field are indeed like voices in the wilderness to most of us. We forget that the “weed” of one country often becomes a horticultural prize in another, even as the mullein, for which it is hard for the average American to get up any enthusiasm, and which is tolerated with us only in a worthless sheep pasture, flourishes in distinction in many an English or Continental garden as the “American velvet plant.”

Try as I may, I cannot shake the parallels from my mind. Every time I bring William Hamilton Gibson (1850-1896) into my thoughts, inevitably I also think of James Abram Garfield (1831-1881), 20th President of the United States. Both have three names (though Garfield’s middle name is usually abbreviated to A.); both have last names of two syllables, beginning with G; both were of roughly the same era; both were quite gifted — Garfield in politics, Gibson in art and writing; both sported similar beards; and both died tragically at a young age (well, younger than I am, a least). James A. Garfield fell to an assassin’s bullet just a few months into his Presidency; William H. Gibson died of a stroke from overwork just a few months before Eye Spy was published. Of the two, I think Gibson was likely the more light-hearted and playful; Garfield looks fairly serious in this photo. I greatly admire Garfield, but since this is a nature blog (and since Candace Millard already crafted a fabulous biography of him), I will focus solely on Gibson in this post, despite my innate need to associate them somehow.

Gibson was a gifted artist who closely observed the world around him — particularly what lay at his feet, in the form of both flowers and the insects associated with them. Employing the two skills in tandem, Gibson reveals in Eye Spy many mysteries pertaining to everyday nature in rural New England, where his studio was situated. “The beauty of the commonplace often requires the aid of the artist as its interpreter,” he remarks in an early essay in this volume. He then proceeds to share with readers, using careful drawings, how the lowly figwort (“a tall, spindling weed”) orchestrates visits by the tiny wasp that pollinates it. He reveals how “these queer little homely flowers” function as “mere devices — first, to insure the visit of an insect, and second, to make that insect the bearer of the pollen from one blossom to the stigma of another.”

I will not bother with the complexities of the process here, but you can read all about this sequence of images in Gibson’s essay, “A Homely Weed”.

One particularly noteworthy feature of this book is that, in keeping with Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Gibson examines flowers and insects together, in light of the “‘new botany’, which recognizes the insect as an important affinity of the flower–the key to its various puzzling features of color, form, and fragrance…” Gibson, though, goes beyond Darwin to imbue these relationships with spiritual significance, reflecting “the conscious intention of the flower as an embodiment of a divine companion to an insect.” Remarking on how botany has been transformed by Darwin’s work, Gibson exclaims in “Riddles in Flowers”: “What puzzles to the mere botanist! for it is because these eminent scholars were mere botanists—students and chroniclers of the structural facts of flowers—that this revelation of the truth about these blossom features was withheld from them. It was not until they had become philosophers and true seers, not until they sought the divine significance, the reason, which lay behind or beneath these facts, that the flowers disclosed their mysteries to them.”

Gibson’s volume (culled largely from previously-published essays) is a book full of magic and mystery, equally inviting to older children and adults. Some chapters focus on the mysteries of pollination, others on predation and parasitism. In one essay, a “mischief-making midge” lays an egg inside a stem or leaf, producing a gall. Three of Gibson’s accounts have a dimension of tragedy — parasitic wasps laying eggs inside caterpillars, cicadas, and grasshoppers, leading to their slow, inevitable death. Others exude joy and delight; in “The Dandelion Burglar”, a dandelion falls victim, not to an insect, but to a redstart thief — a “tiny, black bird with a rosy band in his tail” who steals the developing seeds of a recently-bloomed dandelion to line its nest. Yet other essays reveal to readers how to take spore prints from a mushroom, and how to increase the likelihood of finding multiple four-leaf clovers. My favorite essay in the book reports on the engineering feats of spiders, building bridges very much in keeping with the feats of human engineering. It is entitled “The Spider’s Span”, and I include it in its entirety below.

Observers who witnessed from day to day the construction of the great Brooklyn Bridge were often heard to remark, as they looked up with awe from the ferryboats beneath at the workmen suspended everywhere among the net-work of cables, “Those men look just like spiders in a web.” The comparison seemed irresistible, and the writer heard it expressed many times. But how few who gave utterance to the sentiment realized the full significance of the “spider” allusion, or for a moment reflected that the span itself was, in many particulars of its construction, but a parallel of an engineering feat of which the spider was the earliest discoverer. Yet among all the distinguished names engraved upon the memorial tablet upon the stone bridge-tower the spider gets no credit.
Day after day and week after week we might have seen, travelling back and forth against the sky, a wheel-shaped messenger reeling off its tiny wire. Night and day it was busy, each trip adding one more strand to the growing cable which was to support the great substructure below. And what was this travelling wheel called? “ The carrier,” or “traveller,” if I remember rightly. Why this obviously intentional slight and discourtesy when every field and wood and copse in the country—indeed, on the globe—showed its living example, and bore its myriadfold witness that the “spider” was the only legitimate and proper designation?
In the other most notable suspension-bridge, at Niagara, the time-honored methods of the spider were further and conspicuously recognized, but here again without any courteous engraven acknowledgment on the tablet of fame, so far as I have learned.
A kite was flown from the American shore, and reeled out so as to fall upon the Canadian side, and this initial strand was drawn across, and subsequently strengthened by the travelling reel. The ends of the added wires were firmly secured at their anchorage, and the completed cable at length re-enforced by guy-ropes.
What is the method of our spider? Ages before the advent of the human engineer he followed the same tactics which we now see him performing in every meadow, or even at our window-sill, or on the bouquet upon our table, linking flower with flower, window-sill with garden fence, bush with bush, tree with tree, with his glistening suspension-bridge spanning the stream, river, and meadow. This wiry thread that tightens across our face as we ride in our carriage, and leaves its tingling “snap” upon our nose, what is this but the model suspension cable of Arachne strengthened a hundredfold by the spider which has travelled back and forth over its course for hours perhaps, each trip leaving a fresh strand, one extremity being anchored on yonder oak in the meadow and the other on the church steeple? Such a cable twenty feet in length is a common challenge in our walks in the open wood road, even making a perceptible motion among the leaves and bending twigs on either side ere it yields to our advance. And to the walker who cares to investigate, a silken bridge a hundred feet in length is not a very exceptional find.
This bridge-building is not confined to any particular month or season, nor to any one species of spider. The autumn will afford us the best opportunity for observation. At that season the spider-egg tufts are turning out their baby spiders by the millions, each a perfect grown spider in miniature, and apparently as skilled at birth in the peculiar arts of its kind as its parents were in their ripe old age. Here is a troop of them upon this drooping branch of wild grape by the river brink. Its leaves are glistening in the loose, rambling tangle which marks their wanderings. They are evidently not satisfied with their present surroundings, and would seem desirous of getting as far as possible from the neighborhood of their cradle and swaddling-clothes. They are the most independent and self-reliant babies on record. They ask advice from no one—indeed their mother died a year ago, perhaps—but each determines to leave his brothers and sisters, to “see the world” for himself, and paddle his own canoe.
Fancy a first trial trip on a tight-rope from the torch of the Statue of Liberty to Governors Island! Yet such is the corresponding feat accomplished by this self-reliant acrobat, which a few days or perhaps hours ago was but an egg!
Here is one family of spiderlings upon the grapevine spray, for instance. They are hanging several yards above the water, and with an ocean, as it were, between them and the distant country upon which their hearts are set. But there is no hesitation or misgiving. Let us closely observe this eager youngster far out upon the point of the leaf. The breeze is blowing across the brook. In an instant, upon reaching the edge of the leaf, the spiderling has thrown up the tip of its body, and a tiny, glistening stream is seen to pour out from its group of spinnerets. Farther and farther it floats, waving across the water like a pennant. Two, three, five, ten, fifteen feet are now seen glistening in the sun. Now it floats in among the herbage upon the opposite bank, and seems reaching out for a foothold. In a minute more its tip has brushed against a tall group of asters, and clings fast, the loose span sagging in the breeze, and as we turn our attention to the spider, we see that he has turned about, and is now “hauling in the slack,” which he continues to do until the span is taut, when he anchors it firmly to the leaf, and without a moment’s ceremony steps out upon his tight-rope, and makes the “trial trip” across the abyss —a feat which Dr. McCook, the spider specialist and historian, has most felicitously compared to the similar trial trip of Engineer Farrington across the cable of the East River Bridge, a thrilling event which was witnessed by thousands of spectators from sailing craft and housetops.
Our spider has now reached the asters twenty feet away, and is doubtless busying himself by further securing the anchorage at this terminus. It is quickly done, for see, he is even now far out over the water on his return trip, arriving at the grape leaf a moment later. His strand is now three times as strong as at first, and will be many times stronger before he is satisfied with it. An hour later, if we care to go up-stream half a mile to the bridge, or half a mile below to the crossing pole, for the sake of examining those asters across the brook, we shall find our spiderling nicely settled in a tiny little home of his own. The glistening span is now like a tough silken thread, and is moored to the head of flowers by a half-dozen guy-threads in all directions, while in their midst, in the “nave of his tiny wheel of lace,” our smart young baby rests from his labors.
Such is the probable course which he would follow, unless, perhaps, his roving spirit, thus tempted, has further asserted itself, and not content with this exploit, he has concluded to span the clouds, and is even now sailing a thousand feet aloft in his “ balloon.”
As a bridge-builder he has had many successful imitators, but as a balloonist he is yet more than a match for his bigger copyist, Homo sapiens, as I shall explain in a subsequent paper [enitled “Ballooning Spiders”].

The Sandy Sand-Lover: “Beach Grass” by Charles Wendell Townsend (1923)

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Aug 212022

In “Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes” I made note of intimate studies of such regions in my sojourns at Ipswich, of the varied forms and movements of the sand, of the growth and origin of the salt marsh and of the life in the dunes and the marshes both animal and vegetable. In the following pages I have endeavored to set forth additional studies in these same regions.
I have called the present volume by the title of “Beach Grass”, partly because this grass is so characteristic of the region and partly because of the meaning of its scientific name — Ammophila arenaria — the sandy sand-lover.

I am on a streak of two now. Again I have selected a book whose single greatest asset is its cover. I do not speak ill of the book’s contents, really — the cover, yet again, is quite visually appealing. The book as a whole simply never achieves greatness. But then again, Towsend warns readers from the beginning that he is effectively publishing an addendum to his earlier volume (previously reviewed). While Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes was intended to cover, in turn, the various landscape types of the Ipswich coast, this book feels instead like a smattering of additional bits — bonus material to what came before. Several times in the book, Townsend refers readers back to his first volume. Here, he builds on what came before, with more (and better) photographs of dunes and dune tracks, and an extensive section of several chapters on winter conditions along the coast. Then there is a section on a small forest that Townsend planted on his coastal property, and the lean-to he constructed within it. I cannot help but think of the cabin at Walden, though Townsend leaves the philosophizing to others in favor of straightforward accounts of his observations. At one point in a later chapter (“Hawking” — observing hawks, not hunting with them), Townsend even dares a dig at Thoreau:

It is true that one’s aesthetic sense may be gratified and one may receive great enjoyment from birds and flowers without knowledge of their structure or names. But on the other hand it is not true that a study of structure and the recognition of the species in the field is a detriment to the pure enjoyment of these wonderful creatures of nature. The musician who understands the musical composition of a symphony and whose ear is attuned to all its finer points, receives at a concert infinitely more pleasure than one who is ignorant of these matters. One who has studied flowers and birds and is able to distinguish the exact kind and the significance of form and markings, sees far more of their beauty than one not so trained and he obtains correspondingly more enjoyment. The untrained observer often fails to see the bird or flower at all, and if it is called to his attention, sees it but imperfectly. The enjoyment shown by naturalists — and I refer to the out-of-doors and not to the closet type — is evidenced in their writings. Wilson, Audubon, Darwin and Wallace, Gilbert White and Hudson are conspicuous examples. I am sure, although it is heresy to say so, Thoreau would have had more pleasure from his studies of out-of-doors and would have given the world more pleasure, if he had been willing to study more closely and identify more carefully birds and flowers.

Zing. OK, another reason this book doesn’t quite leave me enraptured.

Speaking of rapture, though, Townsend took a particular fascination for the ever-shifting coastal dunes. Here he describes two nighttime encounters with them — first at the full moon, and again during the autumn bird migrations:

At the time of the full moon the fascination of the sand dunes is increased to a superlative degree. The whiteness of the sand augments the brilliancy of the moonlight, just as is the case when the landscape is white with snow. Such a night was that of September 25 and 26, 1920. It was calm and warm, 68° Farenheit by the cricket thermometer. As I wandered alone about the dunes, listening to the voices of the birds passing overhead, and of those on the shore and sea, I was alert for a glimpse of night-wandering animals whose tracks were clearly visible by moonlight. Exposing a photographic plate for twenty minutes to the mysterious scene, I patiently waited and watched during this interval but saw no track-maker. The sky on the sandy horizon — on the crest of a sand wave — looked black in comparison with the white sand, but this starless darkness soon merged into the vault of the heavens with its suggestion of blue, studded sparsely with stars. Only those of greater magnitude showed in the brilliant light of the moon; the light of the lesser ones was quenched. We pay for the light of the full moon by loss of starlight just as we pay for sunshine by loss of moonlight. About five in the morning the moon set large and red, and the lesser as well as the greater stars blazed out, and the path of the Milky Way appeared across the heavens.
After a period of unfavorable wind or weather, a perfect night may come when the floodgates of bird migration are opened, and the pent-up multitudes, waiting for this chance, pour along the aerial channels. Such a night followed September 9, 1916, and it was my good fortune to spend it in the dunes and on the beach. The air, blown as clear as crystal by a sparkling northwest wind, and illuminated by the full moon, and its reflection from the sea and white sand, made the night almost as light as day. There was a brilliancy and ethereal quality suggestive of fairyland. Such nights as these fill one with rapture at the marvelous beauty and mystery of the sand dunes.

Here is another somewhat poetic passage from yet another night he spent among the dunes, interspersed with a couple of lines of poetry from William Wordsworth:

At night there is a gentle mystery and a sense of primeval grandeur in the sand dunes that sur- passes the mystery and the grandeur of the day. It is good for the soul to escape from the conven- tionalities of life and lose itself in darkness in this waste of sand. Like a wolf, turning and shaping his form in the grass before he lies down, so the dune-lover shapes his form in the sand, hollowing places for his shoulders and hips. Lying thus in his mold, securely wrapt in his blanket, on the crest of a dune wave, he sees the sun set, the blue eclipse of the sky by the earth rise in the East, and the pink glow overhead and in the West gradually fade. Swallows in straggling bands and in great multitudes, hastening to their night roost, skim close by, sometimes within a hair’s breadth of his face. The dark, ungraceful forms of night herons pass over with slow wing-flaps and discordant croaks, and the stars come out until the whole vault of heaven is aglow. Those who dwell in caves, in deep canyons or in rooms in city streets, know not the brilliancy of the heavens as revealed to those who lie out under the stars. They know not:
”The silence that is in the starry sky. The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”
The laughing cry of the loon comes to his ears from the sea and the noisy clamor of a great company of herring gulls, gossiping with each other as they settle down for a night on the shore. Sandpipers and plovers whistle as they fly over, and the lisping notes of warblers, mi- grating from the sterile cold of the North, drop from above. Forming a continuous background to these voices is the boom and the crash of the waves on the sea beach.

For the sake of full disclosure, Townsend also shares a couple of nights among the dunes that did not pass so beautifully, thanks to the ravages of sandblasting winds and numerous vicious mosquitoes.

While Townsend’s first volume was published in 1913, this one is a decade later, with the Great War between them. In a couple of places here, memories of the war appear, offering hints of how many ravages it had wrought and how much it lingered in the American consciousness. Describing the impacts of a severe ice storm on the trees, he writes of a white maple whose “soft and brittle wood was unable to bear the heavy load of ice, and the snow underneath was covered with branches and great limbs torn and splintered as if the trees had been through a German barrage.” A few pages later, he describes experiencing the Northern lights as a patriotic vision:

Although the aurora borealis is not limited to the winter season, it is displayed to greatest perfection at that time. One of the most beautiful auroras I have ever seen occurred one cold clear night in March, 1918, during the Great War, and the superstitious might well have read omens in its display. A series of white streamers radiated from the zenith, constantly waving and changing their places. Whole sections of the sky glowed a blood red, as if it reflected a mighty conflagration or a mighty slaughter, and the snow was tinged with the crimson flood. When this crimson sky was crossed with bars of white with here and there patches of dark blue, it needed little imagination to picture a draping of the sky with Old Glory.

Finally, I cannot help but include in this highly scattered review some mention of a passage that suggests that concern over climate change — specifically, warming — actually dates back a full century. Ironically, Townsend argues firmly that the climate is unchanging (using quite valid scientific arguments to make his case):

Severe winters are sure to recur either singly or in a series and they are apt to shake the faith, temporarily at least, of those who say the climate is changing and is much milder than when they were young. Then, according to these wise ones, snow came regularly at Thanksgiving and there was sleighing until the end of March. Meteorological records kept for many years show that mild winters and severe winters occurred a generation ago as they do today, and that the snowfall has varied irregularly…
…in the long run, the cold and warm, the dry and wet balance each other, and the general average is the same. Meteorologists believe that there has been no material change in the climate within historical times.
Yet it is a common idea that the climate of New England is growing milder, and when we have much cold and snow, the older people speak of it as an ”old-fashioned winter.” The human mind is prone to remember vividly and even to magnify unusual events and seasons, while ordinary seasons of snowfall are forgotten. Then, too, a snowdrift three feet high, struggled through by a child, assumes gigantic proportions in the memory when the child has reached mature age and size.
In our cities a generation ago, the snowfall was not managed as efficiently as it is now, when powerful snow ploughs and gangs of men clear the streets within a few hours of the storm. In former days the snow was allowed to accumulate and remained longer in the way of traffic. Another cause for self-deception exists with those who have spent their earlier years in inland towns or country where the snowfall is greater and comes earlier than it does in coastal regions. A very few miles often makes a considerable difference.

While the Industrial Revolution marked the beginnings of the increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, 1923 was far too early for meteorologists to detect a warming signal. Still, it is intriguing that some people were convinced otherwise back then.

My copy of this book is marked by a holiday dedication from C. D. Tinker to his/her dear friend, Norman Wood, in December of 1926. Unfortunately, without a first name, C. D. Tinker is impossible to track down online, and the same is the case for Norman Wood, whose name is too commonplace — I simply cannot see the Wood for the Woods. I do hope Norman enjoyed this book.

Blue-Sky Philosophy: “Little Rivers” by Henry Van Dyke (1895)

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Aug 182022

You shall not be deceived in this book. It is nothing but a handful of rustic variations on the old tune of ” Rest and be thankful,” a record of unconventional travel, a pilgrim’s scrip with a few bits of blue-sky philosophy in it. There is, so far as I know, very little useful information and absolutely no criticism of the universe to be found in this volume. So if you are what Izaak Walton calls “a severe, sour- complexioned man,” you would better carry it back to the bookseller, and get your money gain, if lie will give it to you, and go your way rejoicing after your own melancholy fashion.
But if you care for plain pleasures, and informal company, and friendly observations on men and things, (and a few true fish-stories) then perhaps you may find something here not unworthy your perusal. And so I wish that your winter fire may burn clear and bright while you read these pages; and that the summer days may be fair, and the fish may rise merrily to your fly, whenever you follow one of these little rivers.

I am still not entirely clear what blue-sky philosophy means, even though I think it describes this book well. There is no suffering or sorrow in these pages, nor does the book dive deeply into anything. It is like a stone skipping along the surface of a pond, carrying the reader merrily along to nowhere in particular. Its author and protagonist is Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933): writer of fiction and essays, educator, foreign diplomat, and clergyman. His many volumes, popular in their day, are virtually unread now. Quite a few of them were issued with stunning Art Nouveau covers by Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944), and this has earned them a space in many art museum collections. Alas, in this case, the four dragonflies gracing the cover do not appear in the text.

OK, I admit that I jumped at the excuse to read a work of Van Dyke (one might even say that I angled for it), simply to own a copy of one of Margaret Armstrong’s stunning works from the 1903/4 edition of the book. I had hoped that it would turn out to fit well into the “nature book” category, even though I knew it was ostensibly about fishing. Van Dyke’s literary knowledge is fairly wide-ranging, and he includes quotes by Hamilton Mabie and John Burroughs. Indeed, when suggesting books one might take on a nature outing, he asks, “Are not John Burroughs’ cheerful, kindly essays full of woodland truth and companionship?” His botanical and ornithological knowledge seems fairly robust, though he shows a marked preference for common names over Latin ones. Alas, though, the skipping stone gathers no moss; having named a plant or bird, he rarely pauses long enough to describe its habits. Van Dyke carries the reader along on his journeys to rivers in New England, Quebec, and Europe, often accompanied by his wife, whom he refers to as “Graygown”. He tells a pleasant story about his travels and the fish he catches (or fails to catch) and remarks about the human and natural landscapes he encounters along the way. One of the few brief “nature passages” I found was this one, reporting his ascent of Nuvolau, a mountain in Italy:

Monte Nuvolau is not a perilous mountain. I am quite sure that at my present time of life I should be unwilling to ascend a perilous mountain unless there were something extraordinarily desirable at the top, or remarkably disagreeable at the bottom. Mere risk has lost the attractions which it once had. As the father of a family I felt bound to abstain from going for amusement into any place which a Christian lady might not visit with propriety and safety. Our preparation for Nuvolau, therefore, did not consist of ropes, ice-irons, and axes, but simply of a lunch and two long sticks.
Our way led us, in the early morning, through the clustering houses of Lacedel, up the broad, green slope that faces Cortina on the west, to the beautiful Alp Pocol. Nothing could exceed the pleasure of such a walk in the cool of the day, while the dew still lies on the short, rich grass, and the myriads of flowers are at their brightest and sweetest. The infinite variety and abundance of the blossoms is a continual wonder. They are sown more thickly than the stars in heaven, and the rainbow itself does not show so many tints. Here they are mingled like the threads of some strange embroidery; and there again nature has massed her colours; so that one spot will be all pale blue with innumerable forget-me-nots, or dark blue with gentians; another will blush with the delicate pink of the Santa Lucia or the deeper red of the clover; and another will shine yellow as cloth of gold. Over all this opulence of bloom the larks were soaring and singing. I never heard so many as in the meadows about Cortina. There was always a sweet spray of music sprinkling down out of the sky, where the singers poised un-seen. It was like walking through a shower of melody.

I will close this post with my favorite passage, from a fishing journey by canoe down the Peribonka River in Quebec. This excerpt concludes with Van Dyke pursuing his favorite pastime.

The river leaped, shouting, down its double stairway of granite, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race. The after-glow in the western sky deepened from saffron to violet among the tops of the cedars, and over the cliffs rose the moonlight, paling the heavens but glorifying the earth. There was something large and generous and untrammelled in the scene, recalling one of Walt Whitman’s rhapsodies : —
“Earth of departed sunsets ! Earth of the mountains misty-topped !
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!”
All the next day we went down with the current. Regiments of black spruce stood in endless files like grenadiers, each tree capped with a thick tuft of matted cones and branches.
Tall white birches leaned out over the stream, Narcissus-like, as if to see their own beauty in the moving mirror. There were touches of colour on the banks, the ragged pink flowers of the Joe-Pye-weed (which always reminds me of a happy, good-natured tramp), and the yellow ear-drops of the jewel-weed, and the intense blue of the closed gentian, that strange flower which, like a reticent heart, never opens to the light. Sometimes the river spread out like a lake, between high bluffs of sand fully a mile apart; and again it divided into many channels, winding cunningly down among the islands as if it were resolved to slip around the next barrier of rock without a fall. There were eight of these huge natural dams in the course of that day’s journey. Sometimes we followed one of the side canals, and made the portage at a distance from the main cataract; and sometimes we ran with the central current to the very brink of the chute, darting aside just in time to escape going over. At the foot of the last fall we made our camp on a curving beach of sand, and spent the rest of the afternoon in fishing.

Only in Their Enchanted Silence: “Wildwood Ways” by Winthrop Packard (1909)

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

Aug 162022

In spite of the soft raiment in which the weather garbs itself to-day it is only three days ago that the great organ of the woods piped to the northerly wind as it breathed pedal notes through the pines and piped shrill in the chestnut twigs. And there was more than organ music. The white and red oaks, still holding fast to their brown leaves, gave forth the rattling of a million delicate castanets, and the wind drew like a soft bow across the finer strings of the birches so that all among slender twigs you heard this fine tone of a muted violin singing a little tender song of joy. For the trees were sadly weary of being frozen one day and thawed the next. They thought the real winter was at hand when the cold would be continuous and the snow deep. All we northern-bred folk love the real winter and feel defrauded of our birthright if we do not get it.

Strangest of all were the beeches. They have held the lower of their tan-pale leaves and with them have whispered of snow all winter long. Whatever the day, you had but to stand among them with closed eyes and you could hear the beech word for snow going tick, tick, tick, all about. It seemed as if flakes must be falling and hitting the leaves so plainly they spoke it. Now that the flakes were beginning the beeches never said a word, but just stood mute and watched it come and listened to the music of all the other trees. Or perhaps they listened to something finer yet. It was only in their enchanted silence that I thought I heard it. Now and then the wind held its breath and the oak leaf castanets ceased, and then for a second I would be sure of it; an elfin tinkle so crepuscular, so gossamer fine that it was less a sound than a thought, the ringing of snow crystal on snow crystal as the feathery flakes touched and separated in the frost-keen air. It surely was there and the beech trees heard it and stood breathless in solemn joy at the sound.

This is my third in an extensive number of nature books by Winthrop Packard (1862-1943) of Canton, Massachusetts. This is an example, too, of the need to read many books by the same author, if possible. The first two left me somewhat disenchanted with his nature sketches. But in Wildwood Ways, the enchantment is evident on every page. There is magic here, but always out of the corner of the eye, just beyond reach. Often, as in the passage above, it is a magic of sounds and silences. For all that Packard grounds his winter vignettes in scientific knowledge, he never quite discounts alternative explanations, ways of encountering nature rooted in myth and folklore. Yes, he seems to say, there is a scientific explanation here. But maybe, just maybe, there is more — wonder, beauty, awe. There is the way things are on the surface, and then something deeper — whisperings of trees, reflections of cosmic mysteries. His finest moments, without a doubt, are in an essay entitled “Thin Ice”. I will share the first portion below. The nebular hypothesis is the most widely-accepted explanation for the origin of our solar system; it was first proposed by in 1755 by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Toward midnight the pond fell asleep. All day long it had frolicked with the boisterous north wind, pretending to frown and turn black in the face when the cold shoulders of the gale bore down upon its surface, dimpling as the pressure left it and sparkling in brilliant glee as the low hung sun laughed across its ruffles. The wind went down with the sun, as north winds often do, and left a clear mirror stretching from shore to shore, and reflecting the cold yellow of the winter twilight.

As this chill twilight iced into the frozen purple of dusk, tremulous stars quivered into being out of the violet blackness of space. The nebular hypothesis is born again in the heavens each still winter night. It must have slipped thence into the mind of Kant as he stood in the growing dusk of some German December watching the violet-gray frost vapors of the frozen sky condense into the liquid radiance of early starlight, then tremble again into the crystalline glints of unknown suns whirling in majestic array through the full night along the myriad miles of interstellar space.

Standing on the water’s edge on such a night you realize that you are the very centre of a vast scintillating universe, for the stars shine with equal glory beneath your feet and above your head. The earth is forgotten. It has become transparent, and where before sunset gray sand lay beneath a half-inch of water at your toe-tips, you now gaze downward through infinite space to the nadir, the unchartered, unfathomable distance checked off every thousand million miles or so by unnamed constellations that blur into a milky way beneath your feet. The pond is very deep on still winter nights.

If you will take canoe and glide out into the centre the illusion is complete. There is no more earth nor do the waters under the earth remain; you float in the void of space with the Pleiades for your nearest neighbor and the pole star your only surety. In such situations only can you feel the full loom of the universe. The molecular theory is there stated with yourself as the one molecule at the centre of incomputability. It is a relief to shatter all this with a stroke of the paddle, shivering all the lower half of your incomputable universe into a quivering chaos, and as the shore looms black and uncertain in the bitter chill it is nevertheless good to see, for it is the homely earth coming back to you. You have had your last canoe trip of the year, but it has carried you far.

No wonder that on such a night the pond, falling asleep for the long winter, dreams. A little after midnight it stirred uneasily in its sleep and a faint quiver ran across its surface. A laggard puff of the north wind that, straggling, had itself fallen asleep in the pine wood and waked again, was now hastening to catch up. The surface water had been below the freezing point for some time and with the slight wakening the dreams began to write themselves all along as if the little puff of wind were a pencil that drew the unformulated thoughts in ice crystals. Water lying absolutely still will often do this. Its temperature may go some degrees below the freezing point and it will still be unchanged. Stir it faintly and the ice crystals grow across it at the touch.

Strange to tell, too, the pond’s dreams at first were not of the vast universe that lay hollowed out beneath the sky and was repeated to the eye in its clear depths. Its dreams were of earth and warmth, of vaporous days and humid nights when never a frost chill touched its surface the long year through, and the record the little wind wrote in the ice crystals was of the growth of fern frond and palm and prehistoric plant life that grew in tropic luxuriance in the days when the pond was young.

These first bold, free-hand sketches touched crystal to crystal and joined, embossing a strange network of arabesques, plants drawn faithfully, animals of the coal age sketched in and suggested only, while all among the figures great and small was the plaided level of open water. This solidified, dreamless, about and under the decorations, and the pond was frozen in from shore to shore. Thus I found it the next morning, level and black under one of those sunrises which seem to shatter the great crystal of the still atmosphere into prisms. The cold has been frozen out of the sky, and in its place remains some strange vivific principle which is like an essence of immortality.

I close my eyes and I can imagine myself in that canoe, adrift in the cosmic ocean. Are the stars below me merely reflections, or has the Earth vanished? A brief motion of my paddle in the water grounds me again. But was what I experienced all smoke and mirrors, or was I glimpsing an underlying cosmic reality?

In other places, throughout the book, Packard evokes giants and goblins. I am confident he does not seriously consider their existence; rather, I suspect that they are stand-ins for the wonder and magic we can find in nature. They represent missing pieces of the story, ones science has not revealed to us — and possibly never will. Consider this encounter with the sounds made by an iced-over lake in the dead of winter:

In the whirligig of our New England winter weather the soft rain and strong south wind passed. Then the wind blew strong from the northwest and fair skies and low temperature prevailed for some days, welding the erstwhile softened ice into an elastic surface as resonant as tempered steel. Then came a still warm day in which we had the same increase of temperature under springlike skies as on that previous day. Yet the pond never uttered a word—audible to my listening human ears. Here were the conditions like those of the other message period, yet not a word was said. Even the soft haze which presaged another south blow filled the sky, so apparently nothing was wanted but the voice at the other end of the line. It was along in the evening that I heard the first call, followed rapidly by a great uproar, so that people heard it in their houses half a mile or more away. Immediately I looked up the thermometer. The temperature had not changed a degree for hours. Yet here were the primal forces telephoning back and forth to one another and fairly making the welkin ring with their hubbub. Surely wires were crossed somewhere on the ether waves, or else the tempers of the primal forces themselves were out of sorts.

I seemed to hear familiar words in their roarings, admonitions to get farther away from the transmitter, requests for strangers to get off the line and other little courtesies that pass current in the telephone booth; and so for a half-hour they kept it up. It was all very ghostly and disquieting and savoring of the superhuman to listen to it in the night and wonder what it was all about. At last one or the other giant hung up the receiver with a tremendous bang, and nothing more was to be heard but the mutterings of the other, grumbling about it in notes low and tremendously deep.

Before morning the wind was blowing a wild gale from the south, rain was pouring in torrents and we were evidently on the outer edge of a winter hurricane that had been well up the coast, perhaps as far as Nantucket, when the pond began to talk about it. No; I do not think changes in temperature have much to do with it. My explanation for the scientist is that these noises begin with a drop in the atmospheric pressure, a region of low barometer moving up in advance of the storm. Taking the pressure quite suddenly off the ice would start all the air imprisoned in solution beneath it to pushing upward for a chance to get away. No wonder it groans and whoops with all that wind in its wame.

But privately I am not so sure. We have so many sure-thing theories, and so much definite knowledge to-day that to-morrow is all discredited and cast aside leaving us groping for another theory, that it is just as easy to believe myself eavesdropping at telephone talk between giants. That particular night it sounded to me like Hercules on his way up from Hades with Cerberus under his arm and a bit over-anxious lest the deities fail to have the dog pound ready for him on arrival in the upper regions—but of course that’s pagan myth.

“But of course that’s pagan myth.” But what does Packard really mean by this offhand remark? Is he asserting that the myth is nothing more than the silly imaginings of a bygone age, and ought to be discarded? Or is he instead with irony, echoing those around him while recognizing that the myths of the distant past offer other ways of seeing and describing the world around us? Certainly, Packard does not settle easily for the humdrum and quotidian. In one humorous section, he disparages a settler whose imagination extended no further than naming a small water body “Muddy Pond”:

The gravelly ridges of the woodland I tramped as I faced the golden sun again are singularly like waves of the sea. They roll here and rise to toppling pinnacles there and tumble about in a confusion that seems at once inextricable and as if it had in it some rude but unfathomed order. Surely as at sea every seventh wave is the highest; or is it the ninth, or the third? Just as at sea, the horizon is by no means a level line. Wave-strewn ridges shoulder up into it and now and then a peak lifts that is a cumulation of waves all rushing toward a common center through some obscure prompting of the surface pulsations. Sometimes at sea your ship rises on one of these aggregations of waves and you see yawning in front of it a veritable gulf; or the ship slips down into this gulf and the toppling pinnacle whelms it and the captain reports a tidal wave to the hydrographic office, if he is fortunate enough to reach it. So along my route southward the terminal and lateral moraines, drumlins, and kames rolled and toppled and leapt upward till they had swung me to a pinnacled ridge whence I looked down into a stanza from the Idylls of the King. Along a way like this once rode scornful and petulant Lynette, followed by great-hearted Gareth, newly knighted, on his first quest;

“Then, after one long slope was mounted, saw

Bowl-shaped, through tops of many thousand pines

A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink

To westward—in the deeps whereof a mere,

Round as the red eye of an eagle owl

Under the half-dead sunset glared;—”

That is the way Tennyson saw it, and the counterpart of the gulf, out of which looked the round-eyed mere, lay at my feet. Long years ago some first settler, lacking certainly Tennyson’s outlook, stupidly cognizant only of the worst that his prodding pole could stir up, named the wee gem of a lake “Muddy Pond.” Here surely was another man with eyes and no eyes. Round the margin’s lip, summer and winter, rolls the bronze green sphagnum, its delicate tips simulating shaggy forest growth of hoary pine and fir. Nestling in its gray-gold heart are the delicate pink wonder-orchids of late May, the callopogon and arethusa. Here the pitcher plant holds its purple-veined cups to the summer rain and traps the insects that slide down its velvety lip and may not climb again against this same velvet, become suddenly a spiny chevaux-de-frise. All about are set the wickets of the bog-hobble, the Nesæa verticillata, which in July will blossom into pink-purple flags—decorations, I dare say, of wood-goblins who play at cricket here on the soft turf of a midsummer-night’s tournament.

Of a summer day this tiny bowl is a mile-deep sapphire, holding the sky in its heart. When thunder clouds hang threatening over it, it is a black pearl with evanescent gleams of silver playing in its calm depths; and always the dense green of the swamp cedars that rim its golden bog-edge round are a setting of Alexandrite stone such as they mine in the heart of the Ceylon mountains, decked with lighter pencilings of chrysoprase and beryl. And some man, looking upon all this, saw only the mud beneath it! Probably he trotted the bog and only knew the wickets of the Nesæa verticillata were there because they tripped him. And I’ll warrant the goblins, sitting cross-legged in the deepest shadows of the cedars, waiting for midnight and their game, mocked him with elfin laughter—and all he heard was frogs.

For Packard, nature beckons us to engage with it through not only our physical senses but also our active imagination. He taps into myths and folktales to evoke landscapes in one chapter; in another, on a winter walk, he imagines himself made invisible by the snow; unseen, he observes the comical strutting of a ruffed grouse:

In woodland pathways where the trees were large enough on either side so that they did not bend beneath the snow and obstruct, all passage was noiseless; amongst shrubs and slender saplings it was almost impossible. The bent withes hobbled you, caught you breast high and hurled you back with elastic but unyielding force, throttled you and drowned you in avalanches of smothering white. To attempt to penetrate the thicket was like plunging into soft drifts where in the blinding white twilight you found yourself inexplicably held back by steel-like but invisible bonds, drifts where you felt the shivery touch of the cold fingers of winter magic changing you into a veritable snow man, and as such you emerged. It was more than baptism, it was total immersion, you were initiated into the order of the white woods and not even your heel was vulnerable…

Thus panoplied in white magic, my snowshoes making no sound on the fluffy floor of woodland paths, I felt that I might stalk invisible and unheeded in the wilderness world. The fern-seed of frost fronds had fallen upon my head in fairy grottos built by magic in a night. These had not been there before, they would not be there to-morrow. To-morrow, too, the magic might be gone, but for to-day I was to feel the chill joy of it.

A ruffed grouse was the first woodland creature not to see me. I stalked around a white corner almost upon him and stood poised while he continued to weave his starry necklaces of footprints in festoons about the butts of scrubby oaks and wild-cherry shrubs. He too was barred from the denser tangle which he might wish to penetrate. He did not seem to be seeking food. Seemingly there was nothing under the scrub oaks that he could get. It was more as if, having breakfasted well, he now walked in meditation for a little, before starting in on the serious business of the day. He too was wearing his snowshoes, and they held him up in the soft snow fully as well as mine supported me. His feet that had been bare in autumn now had grown quills which helped support his weight but did not take away from the clean-cut, star-shaped impression of the toes. Rather they made lesser points between these four greater ones and added to the star-like appearance of the tracks.

I knew him for a male bird by the broad tufts of glossy black feathers with which his neck was adorned. It was the first week in February, but then Saint Valentine’s day comes on the fourteenth, and on this day, as all folklore—which right or wrong we must perforce believe—informs us, the birds choose their mates. My cock partridge must have been planning a love sonnet, weaving rhymes as he wove his trail in rhythmic curves that coquetted with one another as rhymes do. His head nodded the rhythm as his feet fell in the proper places. Now and then he bent forward in his walk as one does in deep meditation. If he had hands they would have been clasped behind his back when in this attitude, as his wings were. Again he lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy black neck feathers and strutted. Here surely was a fine phrase that would reach the waiting heart of that mottled brown hen that was now quietly keeping by herself in some secluded corner of the wood. The thought threw out his chest, and those tail feathers that had folded slimly as he walked in pensive meditation spread and cocked fan-shaped. I half expected him to open his strong, pointed bill and gobble as a turkey does under similar circumstances. The demure placing of star after star in that necklace trail was broken by a little fantastic pas seul, from which he dropped suddenly on both feet, vaulted into the air, and whirred away down arcades of snowy whiteness and vanished. I don’t think he saw me. He was rushing to find the lady and recite that poem to her before he forgot it.

I could continue with even more passages from this small book. It has rekindled my desire to produce an anthology of these lesser-known nature writers. Certainly, my enthusiasm for reading additional works by Packard has been renewed by my encounter with his evocations of a Massachusetts winter — despite all that I have already read by so many others in a similar vein.

My copy of this volume bears a signature on the front endpaper: M.E. Webber, February 11, 1925. Unfortunately, without a first name or location, who this was will remain a mystery. All pages were free, so I can at least assume that he (or she) read the book before me.

Never Has a Springtime Been So Welcome to Me: “A Woman Who Went to Alaska” by May Kellogg Sullivan (1903)

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Aug 152022

May Kellogg Sullivan’s exultation over the coming of spring to northern Alaska is matched by my own notebook comment regarding the same page — “Nature, at last!”. It is page 354 of a book with 392 pages, and it is one of the first (and precious few) passages where Sullivan contributes a few words of description of the natural world. Throughout much of the book, it is the Arctic winter, and Sullivan passes her days knitting clothes for Eskimo children at a mission. Nearly all of the animals she mentions in the book take the form of pelts. For instance, a red fox pelt figures prominently; she had bought it to add to her winter gear, only to have it stolen by one of the several bad elements she encountered during her time in the far north. Her first encounter with a ptarmigan is one that was caught in a trap and was trussed up to be served at dinner.

To be completely fair, the book was a mostly enjoyable read (though the winter knitting scenes did get tedious); it only fails completely when evaluated as a nature book. One thing I learned from reading his volume, and the previous one by Frederick Schwatka, is that a journey to a wild place does not automatically constitute nature writing. May Kellogg Sullivan was not, as far as I can tell, a naturalist of any kind. Her trip to Alaska appears to have been motivated by a quest for gold coupled with some level of interest in adventure. Only once does a proclivity for nature study appear in the work — on page 354. Here it is, in its entirety. Molly was the native wife of the Mission director (called the Captain); Jennie was her semi-invalid daughter.

The last week of May has finally come, and with it real spring weather. The children play out in the sand heap on the south side of the house for hours together, enjoying the warm sunshine and pleasant air, the little girl clothed from head to foot in furs. Never has a springtime been so welcome to me, perhaps because in striking contrast to the long, cold winter through which we have just passed. From the hillside behind the Mission, the snow is slowly disappearing, first from the most exposed spots and rocks, the gullies keeping their drifts and ice longer. Mosses are everywhere peeping cheerfully up at me in all their tints of gorgeous green, some that I found recently being tipped with the daintiest of little red cups. This, with other treasures, I brought in my basket to Jennie when I returned from my daily walk upon the hill, and together we studied them closely under the magnifying glass.
To examine the treasures brought in by Mollie, however, we needed no glass. They are sand-pipers, ptarmigan, squirrels, and occasionally a wild goose, shot, perhaps, in the act of flying over the hunter’s head, as these birds are now often seen and heard going north. In the evening I see from my window the neighboring Eskimo children playing with their sleds, and sometimes they light a bonfire, shouting and chattering in their own unique way. All “mushers” now travel at night when the trail is frozen, as it is too soft in the daytime, and the glare of the sun often causes snow-blindness. Then, too, there is water on the ice in places, which we are glad to see, and pools of the same are standing around the Mission and schoolhouse. I can no longer go out in my muckluks, but must wear my long rubber boots and short skirts.
Today I went out for an hour, walking to Chinik Creek over the tundra, from which the snow has almost disappeared, and returned by the hill-top path. The tundra was beautiful with mosses, birds were singing, and the rushing and roaring of the creek waters fairly made my head swim, they were such unusual sounds. The water was cutting a channel in the sands where it empties into the bay. Here it was flowing over the ice, helping to loosen the edge and allow it to drift out to sea.

It is, on the whole, a charming springtime tundra scene, though the particular species of birds and mosses are, of course, not provided. How I longed for Sullivan to set out across the tundra and have adventures amongst the various animals of the north — though I suppose the hazard of polar bears would rather discourage that kind of behavior. I struggled throughout the book with wanting it to be what it clearly wasn’t. Where it shines, actually, is in documenting the gritty realities of life in gold rush communities of tents and shacks. Her time in Alaska was chiefly spent in such places, where the thirst for gold was causing considerable environmental harm (which was, of course, overlooked by all). Sullivan’s Kodak camera documents the damage, though.

And yes, this is the Nome gold rush. I had never heard of it before.

Sullivan herself is a bit of a mystery. I know that she visited Alaska twice over 18 months in 1899-1900, covering over 12,000 miles in her solo travels. She was evidently married at the time but says absolutely nothing about her husband. Were they estranged? Was he deceased? And I have no birth or death dates for Sullivan. She does mention that she is a native of the Badger State, a.k.a., Wisconsin.

I will close out my post with another all-too-brief nature scene, this one from the Arctic summer, soon after Kellogg arrived in Nome (where she got a job in a tent restaurant since women were not permitted to participate in the actual mining work). It is tacked onto a picture of the burgeoning mining camp:

To eyes so unaccustomed as ours to the sight, how strange it all looked at midnight. From the big tent door which faced south and towards Nome City we could see the blue waters of Behring Sea away in the distance. Great ships lying there at anchor, lately arrived from the outside world or just about to leave, laden with treasure, at this long range looked like mere dots on the horizon. Between them and us there straggled over the beach in a westerly direction, a confused group of objects we well knew to be the famous and fast growing camp on the yellow sands. To our right, as well as our left, rolled the softly undulating hills, glowing in tender tints of purples and greys, or, if the moon hung low above our heads, there were warmer and lighter shades which were doubly entrancing.
Accompanying the low moon twinkled the silver stars with their olden time coyness of expression. Little birds, not knowing when to sleep in the endless daylight, hopped among the dewy wild flowers of the tundra, calling to their mates or nestlings, twittering a song appropriate to the time and place because entirely unfamiliar.

My copy of this book is a later edition, from 1915. According to the title page, it is part of the “Thirteenth Thousand” of Kellogg’s work. Given the book’s clear sales success, I am surprised that so little information is available online about its author.

For White Men’s Purposes: “A Summer in Alaska: A Popular Account of the Travels of an Alaska Exploring Expedition Along the Great Yukon River, from Its Source to Its Mouth, in the British North-West Territory, and in the Territory of Alaska ” by Frederick Schwatka (1892)

book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Sense of Place 1 Response »

Aug 052022

These Eskimos had been hired on the Lower Yukon, and but for their being a little more stolid and homely than those of north Hudson’s Bay, I should have thought myself back among the tribes of that region. They make better and more tractable workmen than any of the Indians along the river, and in many other ways are superior to the latter for the white men’s purposes, being more honest, ingenious and clever in the use of tools, while treachery is an unknown element in their character.

The transition from a “standard-issue nature book” to an explorer’s narrative came as quite a shock to me. Alaska was the rugged West in 1885, a wild country with boundless resources to be identified and exploited. Schwtka eyes everything around him in terms of potential use, from forests to native peoples. The only moment the modern reader glimpses a different future for Alaska in this account is in a passing mention of the Muir Glacier, discovered by John Muir during his own 1879 expedition (to be covered in a future blog post). Although he had evidenced an aptitude for natural history during his time at the US Military Academy, Schwatka was a military officer first and foremost and saw the landscape and objects in it in largely utilitarian terms.

In this particular expedition, Schwatka commanded a truly low-budget, under-the-radar journey from the headwaters of the Yukon River almost 2000 miles to its mouth, mostly by raft. But whereas John Wesley Powell’s thousand-mile journey down the Green and Colorado Rivers through the Grand Canyon is widely celebrated today, who has even heard of Schwatka? For all its length, his expedition was virtually free of rapids; instead, it was the gnats and mosquitoes that posed the greatest danger. There are no grand dramatic moments in this account. In terms of advancing the cause of natural science, Schwatka did gather some herbarium specimens at the beginning of the trip, and he includes a few descriptions of wild animal encounters in this book. But for the most part, wildlife was there to be shot at (fortunately, as his comments frequently show, expedition members tended to aim poorly). Birds might be pleasant to observe, but there was always the possibility that they could be good for eating, too (or not):

Everywhere we came in contact with the grouse of these regions, all of them with broods of varying numbers, and while the little chicks went scurrying through the grass and brush in search of a hiding place, the old ones walked along in front of the intruder, often but a few feet away, seemingly less devoid of fear than the common barn fowls, although probably they had never heard a shot fired.
The Doctor and I sat down to rest on a large rock with a perturbed mother grouse on another not over three yards away, and we could inspect her plumage and study her actions as well as if she had been in a cage. The temptation to kill them was very great after having been so long without fresh meat, a subsistence the appetite loudly demands in the rough out-of-door life of an explorer. A mess of them ruthlessly destroyed by our Indian hunters, who had no fears of the game law, no sportsman’s qualms of conscience, nor in fact compassion of any sort, lowered our desire to zero, for they were tougher than leather, and as tasteless as shavings; and after that first mess we were perfectly willing to allow them all the rights guaranteed by the game laws of lower latitudes.

Fortunately (in my opinion), most of the animals observed on the journey survived. Grizzlies fared quite well, as even the natives of the region tended to avoid hunting them, as Schwatka explains:

Everywhere in his dismal dominions [the grizzly bear] is religiously avoided by the native Nimrod, who declares that his meat is not fit to be eaten, that his robe is almost worthless, and that he constantly keeps the wrong end presented to his pursuers. Although he is never hunted encounters with him are not altogether unknown, as he is savage enough to become the hunter himself at times, and over some routes the Indians will never travel unless armed so as to be fairly protected from this big Bruin.

(As a side note, for all of Schwatka’s condescension toward the natives, I am fairly confident that by Nimrod, he means to label the Indian as a skillful hunter, not as a dimwitted or stupid person. The more insulting use of the word did not appear in text until 1932.)

The attribute of this narrative that stands out the most is its length. It is over 400 pages, and most of the time, the expedition members are struggling downstream on the very wide and often quite braided Yukon River, trying to keep the raft off the sand bars and moving downstream. This is occasionally interrupted by visits to native villages along the shoreline, typically described as squalid affairs consisting of a few shacks (often untenanted, since the Indians were semi-nomadic and did not occupy most locations for extended periods of time). Mosquitoes are mentioned on nearly every page, and gnats put in appearances too, along with one particularly vicious horsefly. Expeditions by foot into the adjacent forest and mountains are rare, since they inevitably resulted in encounters with brutal clouds of biting insects. Those readers seeking an armchair vacation in paradise had best look elsewhere; backcountry Alaska definitely does not conform to Mabie’s transcendental visions of Eden. Here is what a coastal forest walk (prior to the Yukon raft journey) was like for Schwatka; for once, the hazards aren’t insects, but topography and climate:

To turn inland from the shore was at once to commence the ascent of a slope that might vary frcm forty to eighty degrees, the climbing of which almost beggars description. The compact mass of evergreen timber had looked dense enough from the ship, but at its feet grew a denser mass of tangled undergrowth of bushes and vines, and at their roots again was a solid carpeting of moss, lichens, and ferns that often ran up the trees and underbrush for heights greater than a man’s reach, and all of it moist as a sponge, the whole being absolutely tropical in luxuriance. This thick carpet of moss extends from the shore line to the edges of the glaciers on the mountain summits, and the constant melting of the ice through the warm summer supplies it with water which it absorbs like a sponge… It is almost impossible to conceive how heavily laden with tropical moisture the atmos- phere is in this supposed sub-Arctic colony of ours. It oozes up around your feet as you walk, and drips from overhead like an April mist, and nothing is exempt from it. Even the Indians’ tall, dead ” totem-poles” of hemlock or spruce, which would make fine kindling wood any where else, bear huge clumps of dripping moss and foliage on their tops, at heights varying from ten to thirty feet above the ground. An occasional stray seed of a Sitka spruce may get caught in this elevated tangle, and make its home there just as well as if it were on the ground. It sprouts, and as its branches run up in the air, the roots crawl down the “totem-pole ” until the ground is reached, when they bury themselves in it, and send up fresh sustenance to the trunk and limbs, which until then have been living a parasitic sort of life off the decayed moss… Imagine a city boy tossing a walnut from a fourth story window, and its lodging on top of a telegraph pole, there sprouting next spring, and in the course of a couple of years extending its roots down the pole, insinuating themselves in the crevices and splitting it open, then piercing the pavement; the tree continuing to grow for years until the boy, as a man, can reach out from his window and pick walnuts every fall, and the idea seems incredible ; and yet the equivalent occurs quite often in the south-eastern portions of our distant colony. Nor is all this marshy softness confined to the levels or to almost level slopes, as one would imagine from one’s experience at home, but it extends up the steepest places, where the climbing would be hard enough without this added obstacle. In precipitous slopes where the foot tears out a great swath of moist moss, it may reveal underneath a slippery shingle or shale where nothing but a bird could find a footing in its present condition. There is wonderful preservative power in all these conditions, for nothing seems to rot in the ground, and the accumulated timber of ages, standing and fallen, stumps, limbs, and trunks, “criss-cross and tumble-tangled,” as the children say, forms a bewildering mass which, covered and intertwined as it is with a compact entanglement of underbrush and moss, makes the ascent of the steep hillsides a formidable undertaking. A fallen trunk of a tree is only indicated by a ridge of moss, and should the traveler on this narrow path deviate a little too far to the right or left, he may sink up to his arm-pits in a soft mossy trap from which he can scramble as best he may, according to his activity in the craft of “backwoodsmanship.” Having once reached the tops of the lower hills — the higher ones are covered with snow and glacier ice the year round — a few small openings may be seen, which, if anything, are more boggy and treacherous to the feet than the hillsides themselves, lagoon-like morasses, covered with pond lilies and aquatic plant life, being connected by a network of sluggish canals with three or four inches of amber colored water and as many feet of soft black oozy mud, with here and there a clump of willow brake or “pussy-tails” springing above the waste of sedge and flags.

While Schwatka doesn’t exult in nature like Muir or even celebrate the rich biodiversity of the temperate rainforest ecosystem, he does a robust job of describing the scene, and for those moments, I am grateful to have read this book. And here, in whimsically describing a moose, he even goes so far as to wish the species well, though he naturally refers to it as “noble game”:

While descending the stream on the 24th, late in the forenoon, we saw a large buck moose swim from one of the many islands to the mainland just back of us, having probably, as the hunter would say, “gotten our scent.” I never comprehended what immense noses these animals have until I got a good profile view of this big fellow, and although over half a mile away, his nose looked as if he had been rooting the island and was trying to carry away the greater part of it on the end of his snout. The great palmated horns above, the broad “throat-latch” before, combined with the huge nose and powerful shoulders, make one think that this animal might tilt forward on his head from sheer gravity, so little is there apparently at the other end to counterbalance these masses… A few winters ago the cold was so intense, and the snow covered the ground for so great a depth throughout the season, that sad havoc was played with the unfortunate animals, and a moose is now a rare sight below the upper ramparts of the river, as I was informed by the traders of that district. It is certainly to be hoped that the destruction has only been partial, so that this noble game may again flourish in its home, where it will be secure from the inroads of firearms for many decades to come.

As evident in this description of a moose, there is a charmingly comedic edge to this book. Schwatka has a delightfully wry sense of humor, though it is often directed toward the natives he encounters. Here, he conveys a sense of what the interiors of the Indian dwellings were like: “The vast majority of the houses are squalid beyond measure, and the dense resinous smoke of the spruce and pine blackens the walls with a funereal tinge, and fills the house with an odor which, when mingled with that of decayed salmon, makes one feel like leaving his card at the door and passing on.” And here are his thoughts about dried salmon as a food source:

This [Indian] house was deserted, but evidently only for a while, as a great deal of its owner’s material of the chase and the fishery was still to be seen hanging inside on the rafters. Among these were a great number of dried salmon, one of the staple articles of food that now begin to appear on this part of the great river, nearly two thousand miles from its mouth. This salmon, when dried before putrefaction sets in, is tolerable, ranking somewhere between Limburger cheese and walrus hide. Collecting some of it occasionally from Indian fishermen as we floated by, we would use it as a lunch in homeopathic quantities until some of us got so far as to imagine that we really liked it.

Ultimately, though, this book casts a long shadow as a work of Western imperialism. Throughout their odyssey, Schwatka and his men pass rivers, cross lakes, and view distant mountains that all most likely have native names. But rather than seeking them out to add to the map, Schwatka draws from an endless well of European scientists and statesmen to furnish new ones. And it is difficult to overlook his disdain for the native peoples of Alaska. Consider this passage about those in the southeastern part of the territory:

The progress of the natives of Southeastern Alaska toward civilization is steady and certain, though it must not be supposed that these people yet take high rank in learning, intelligence or morality. The educating and elevating influences of the schools and missions, though doing much, perhaps more than we should expect under the circumstances, must be continued a long time in order to effect anything like satisfactory conditions.

Reading this book has been particularly helpful to me as I continue to explore American nature writing. I feel comfortable saying that, while nature is present in it, this is not in that category. Perhaps the line might be drawn at books of exploration written by naturalists, such as William Beebe, books that focus on nature first and foremost. All I know is that if I expand this blog to encompass more works like this one, I will have thousands of titles yet to read, instead of merely hundreds.

This will be my first in a pair of posts about Alaska; the next blog post will feature a title recommended to me by the renowned environmental historian, Ralph Lutts (who has so kindly been guiding more toward further titles and resources, much to my wife’s dismay and my bank account’s suffering). I anticipate there will be more in the future — at some point, I will be reading Muir’s travels in Alaska, as well.

As a postscript, while my copy of this book is from 1894, it was first published in 1892, the year of Schwatka’s untimely death at the age of 43. One newspaper reported that he died of an accidental overdose of morphine, while another paper claimed it was suicide by laudanum. The true cause of his death has never been resolved.