Six Visits with Five Old Friends: C.C. Abbott, James Buckham, Walter Prichard Eaton, Ernest Ingersoll, and Bradford Torrey

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Dec 282023
 

In this blog post, I am playing a bit of a catch-up, writing about six different books I have read recently by five forgotten nature writers, all of whom have previously appeared in this blog, and at least three of whom will likely return in the future. C.C. Abbott (1843-1919; left, above) was an amateur naturalist and archaeologist, who lived outside Trenton, New Jersey, and wrote mostly about the natural history of his marshland property and adjacent lands. Though quoted by many at the time (and participant in a heated debate about early human presence in America, which he argued pre-dated the last Ice Age), is known today only as the figure for whom Abbott Marshlands Park was named. James Buckham (1858-1908; no photo found), was a journalist and writer who lived in Melrose, Massachusetts. He does not currently have so much as a Wikipedia entry. Walter Prichard Eaton (1878-1957; right, above) was a theater critic and writer; for at least the last ten years of his life, he wintered in North Carolina and summered at his home in the Berkshires. He has a brief Wikipedia entry and a slightly longer New York Times obituary (courtesy the Way Back Machine). Ernest Ingersoll (1852-1946; not pictured above) was a naturalist and explorer of the West (including the Hayden Geological Survey of Colorado in 1873) and an early advocate for conservation. Born in Monroe, Michigan, Ingersoll spent most of his life in New York City. Finally, Bradford Torrey (1843-1912; middle, above) was a nature writer and ornithologist, whose books of nature rambles with birding and botanizing were quite popular during his lifetime. Torrey is essentially forgotten today; even the Torreya Pine (whose wild habitat is limited to a small park in the Florida panhandle) was named for a distant relative, not for him. Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, he spent most of his life in Boston before moving out to Santa Barbara, California where he spent his final years.

What all of these books have in common is that they were enjoyable but, for the most part, not particularly noteworthy. I have yet to read many writers from my chosen time period whose prose is abjectly painful to ingest (apart, perhaps, for some moments with Flagg — and yes, I will be returning to him eventually, too). All of these books were pleasant, and Eaton’s even had some dramatic scenes. But on the whole, reading these six titles was more about encountering old friends than making dramatic discoveries. I will begin my account with Torrey. I read two of his books recently: A Florida Sketch-Book (1894) and Footing It in Franconia (1901). Before I begin to share about each, I will briefly mention the provenance of my copies, both of which were likely first editions. Footing it in Franconia (upper left photo) bears a bookplate of Herbert S. Ardell. Herbert Stacy Ardell was born in 1878 and as of 1897, he lived at 221 Dean Street in Brooklyn. In 1895, he published “Among the Sioux Indians with a Camera” for Peterson Magazine. A Florida Sketch-Book was previously in the collections of Oxford Memorial Library in Oxford, New York; the book label shows a structure that matches well with the current library building.

On to my review of these two volumes. A Florida Sketch-Book was, well, rather a disappointment. Like Blatchley a few years later, Torrey approached Jacksonville by rail and spent his vacation in the northern portion of the state, mostly inland apart from some time around Daytona Beach. Ultimately, I think Torrey simply found the flat Florida landscape less enticing than, say, New Hampshire or even most of Massachusetts. Here is how he compared the Florida pine forest to his native woodlands of New England:

“Whether I followed the railway,—in many respects a pretty satisfactory method,—or some roundabout, aimless carriage road, a mile or two was generally enough. The country offers no temptation to pedestrian feats, nor does the imagination find its account in going farther and farther. For the reader is not to think of the flat-woods as in the least resembling a Northern forest, which at every turn opens before the visitor and beckons him forward. Beyond and behind, and on either side, the pine-woods are ever the same. It is this monotony, by the bye, this utter absence of landmarks, that makes it so unsafe for the stranger to wander far from the beaten track. The sand is deep, the sun is hot; one place is as good as another.”

Perhaps he saw literary merit in writing a book whose structure and quality generally mirrored the landscape he was writing about. Whether intended or not, his description of exploring the flat-woods matches my experience reading his book. There were a lot of birds seen and described (mostly woodland songbirds) and various encounters with natives whose conversational exchanges with Torrey fill intervening pages. But unlike Blatchley’s book, Torrey’s failed to transport me to north Florida. I closed the volume with little gained from the journey. Having read several other volumes he has written (and with a few more to go), I would say that he is capable of delightful, insightful prose, but not here.

Footing It in Franconia, on the other hand, was a much more delightful book. Here he trods far more familiar ground, in and around the Franconia Mountains of New Hampshire. Here, he shares his observations and reflections from a boat on Lonesome Lake on an autumn day:

“The lake is like a mirror, and I sit in the boat with the sun on my back (as comfortable as a butterfly), listening and looking. What else can I do? I have puUed out far enough to bring the top of Lafayette [Mountain] into view above the trees, and have put down the oars. The birds are mostly invisible. Chickadees can be heard talking among themselves, a flicker calls wicker, wicker, whatever that means, and once a kingfisher springs his rattle. Red squirrels seem to be ubiquitous, full of sauciness and chatter. How very often their clocks need winding! A few big dragon-flies are still shooting over the water. But the best thing of all is the place itself: the solitude, the brooding sky (the lake’s own, it seems to be), the solemn mountain top, the encircling forest, the musical woodsy stillness. The rowan trees were never so bright with berries. Here and there one still holds fidl of green leaves, with the ripe red clusters shining everywhere among them.

Here, the impatient, frustrated voice of Torrey in Florida is replaced by a more patient and contemplative one. Pausing to appreciate the landscape, Torrey draws the reader into it. Oh — and ironically, he also shares briefly about his visit to a Torreya Pine while in Florida years earlier. The memory emerges after sharing about a female entomologist he met during his travels:

“It was worth something to see a first-rate, thoroughly equipped ” insectarian ” at work and to hear her talk. I shoidd have been proud even to hold one of her smaller phials, but they were all adjusted beyond the need, or even the comfortable possibility, of such assistance. There was nothing for it but to play the looker-on and listener. In that part I hope I was less of a failure.

How many species already bear her name she has never told me. I suspect they are so numerous and so frequent that she herself can hardly keep track of them. Think of the pleasure of walking about the earth and being able to say, as an insect chirps, ” Listen ! that is one of my species, — named after me, you know.” Such specific honors, I say, are common in her case, — common almost to satiety. But to have a genus named for her, — that was glory of a different rank, glory that can never fall to the same person but once ; for generic names are unique. Once given, they are patented, as it were. They can never be used again — for genera, that is — in any branch of natural science. To our Franconia entomologist this honor came, by what seemed a poetic justice, in the Lepidoptera, the order in which she began her researches. Hers is a genus of moths. I trust they are not of the kind that ” corrupt.”

…sometimes, the lady will turn to me. “It is too bad you can never have a genus,” she will say in her bantering tone “the name is already taken up, you know.”

“Yes, indeed, I know it,” I answer her. An older member of the family, a — th cousin, carried off the prize many years ago, and the rest of us are left to get on as best we can, without the hope of such dignities. When I was in Florida I took pains to see the tree, — the family evergreen, we may call it. Though it is said to have an ill smell, it is handsome, and we count it an honor.

And there we leave the matter. Let the shoemaker stick to his last. Some of us were not bom to shine at badinage, or as collectors of beetles. For myself, in this bright September weather I have no ambitions. It is enough, I think, to be a follower of the road, breathing the breath of life and seeing the beauty of the world.”

Here I cannot help but compare Torrey’s desire to be a “follower of the road” to Blatchley’s desire to be a generalist naturalist and find joy in the moment. Both of them let go of visions of fame within a particular discipline, in favor of following their bliss. And both, interestingly enough, take a moment to contemplate the nature of death as a return to the whole of the cosmos. Here, Torrey reflects more positively on that transition, while on a birding outing to Mount Agassiz:

“Now and then, as I listen, I seem to hear a voice saying, ” Blessed are the dead.” I foretaste a something better than this separate, contracted, individual state of being which we call life, and to which in ordinary moods we cling so fondly. To drop back into the Universal, to lose life in order to find it, this would be heaven; and for the moment, with this musical woodsy silence in my ears, I am almost there. Yet it must be that I express myself awkwardly, for I am never so much a lover of earth as at such a moment. Life is good. I feel it so now. Fair are the white birch stems; fair are the gray-green poplars. This is my third day, and my spirit is getting in tune.”

Onward to the next volume: Clear Skies & Cloudy by C. C.Abbott (1898). Easily the most elegant book of the lot, it has not only a stunning cover (above left) but lovely old photographs (unlike many other Abbott titles, which can include engravings but may not have any illustrations at all). Poaetquissings (above right) is a stream that flows through Abbott’s property named Three Beaches just south of Trenton, New Jersey. My copy of this book bears no marks of prior ownership and is in marvelous condition.

After two books of travel adventures from Torrey, Abbott offers an exploration of discoveries in his home place, defending that perspective with the observation that “The ever-present possibility of novelty is an incentive that should prove all-powerful, and nowhere is the world so worn out that the unexpected may not happen.” He further declares that “The best of what is out of doors is not always at arm’s length. Healthy enthusiasm is a rational phase of the spirit of adventure, but adventure does not necessarily mean distance, be it understood.” As Thoreau once remarked, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord.” Of course, it helps when one’s home place extends over many dozens of acres…

Making discoveries close to home can be a bit easier, too, when one is equipped with a Claude Lorraine Glass (also known as simply a Claude Glass), which I first encountered on page 68 of this book. A small black slightly concave mirror, it enabled the viewer to get a wider perspective of the landscape by bringing disparate elements closer together, while also showing more clearly the outlines of clouds. It is a largely forgotten tool that was widely used in the 1700s and 1800s by artists and travelers alike.

Here is one of my favorite passages from this book, on the art of listening to nature and the challenge of identifying the meaning behind sounds encountered in the woods:

“There is no such thing as a meaningless sound. It is a contradiction to speak of what we hear as having no significance, but the meaning of any sound may or may not be of importance to us. …To simply hear a sound is not all. To listen, to realize the full intent and purpose of every variation in the sound, to note the accompanying gesture with each characteristic utterance, whenever possible; in short, to appreciate the effort on an animal’s or bird’s part to interpret its own feelings, this is to listen intelligently, and in so doing to be taught a useful lesson in ornithology. There is profit, then, as well as pleasure in being abroad on a bright April morning like this, and noting, whether we stroll along the footpath way or stand by some one of the old oaks, whatsoever is to be heard on the hill-side.”

At a couple of points in his book, Abbott referred to the dramatic decline in bird numbers he had observed over the past few decades. Peregrine falcons and bald eagles had become rare, and even herons were much less common. “Time was when there were herons and heronries and stately white egrets along the river-shore, and the creeks teemed with wild fowl in season. It is a cause to be thankful, to-day, that the heron, a single heron, has given to this dismal day the charm of its presence….” At one point during a forest outing, Abbott noted sadly that

“It is hard to realize that time was when on this very spot there were birds by the thousands, and now often half a day goes by and not even one poor sparrow to make glad the fields. Many birds passed away with the trees, but not all. Birds have wit enough to accommodate themselves to very changed conditions, and would do so, but man will not permit. …Now, when it is almost, if not quite too late, an earnest cry is going up to spare the birds; but are not the fools too many and the wise too few to restor our one-time blessing? Spare what are left by all means, but what of those that are gone forever?”

Lest I leave the reader dispairing, I have to add here that not all moments in this book are as serious and dark as the one following the passage above, in which Abbott imagines a millstone he has found not as a testament to human progress, but a tombstone to all of nature that has been lost (p. 200). There is also this more whimsical moment, in which Abbott makes his way through a dense thicket in the woods, seeing the experience as an excellent cure for a naturalist’s boredom:

“…a wilderness of weeds of a single summer’s growth will well repay most careful exploration. It can offer stout resistance to your progress, and what may not hyssop and boneset and iron-weed and dudder conceal ? Your legs and arms held fast by the Gordian knot of greenbrier, you magnify, when helpless, every unexplained condition, and a foot-long garter-snake will give you a passing vision of a boa-constrictor, and mice will grow to wild-cats, before you see them scampering across your feet. If you would rid the day of possible monotony, push through a pathless thicket in the corner of some neglected field ; get scratched and pricked, and warmed by the effort, if not excitement, and believe ever after that the well-known country, as you thought it, is not so well known after all. Too seldom do we leave the beaten path and leap over the farmers’ fences.”

I will keep this little trick in mind the next outing in which I feel bored — as long as ticks and chiggers aren’t in season, at least.

My next book, Afield with the Seasons (1907) is by James Buckham (1858-1908). My copy bears an inscription to Claire Whitman Hathaway in Boston from [name not legible] on November 5th, 1932. I could not figure out Claire.  There was a Claire May Whitman Hathaway who was born in Maine and died there 75 years later, in 1940. If she was given this book, she would have had to be living in Massachusetts at that time.

Buckham’s writing is poetic, evocative, and sensorially rich. Here is an example:

“While the March trumpets are blowing, and the March sun is shining, there is a keen delight in skirting the ice edge of the woods. All the wild life within seems to come out on that sheltered side, especially in the early afternoon. Here, too, the earliest wild-flowers peep out, and the pasture or meadow grass first begins to grow green.

Perhaps you may walk in the shelter of the woods for miles in a sun-glow that sets you tingling; and while you hear the wind roaring overhead, lashing the woods and blowing the clouds against the sky, you might almost carry a lighted candle in your hand under that lee shelter, without seeing it extinguished.”

In this passage, Buckham makes a metaphorical link between cow paths and human dreams which I find rather intriguing:

“As the rambler strolls homeward along the old lane, he notes the many cow-paths that seam and furrow it, winding hither and thither, irrespective of parallels or of one another, approaching and then receding, like those plotted curves by which the modern psychologists represent the unconscious action of the human brain in dreams. Some of the paths are worn deep as ditches, with even deeper hoof-printed hollows in them, where the habit-forming cows have stepped for generations.”

While Buckham brings some basic scientific knowledge into his writing, ultimately he eschews it in favor of a deeper kind of knowing, the kind he describes in his last essay in the book as having characterized the American Indians:

“…we must not seek too strenuously for scientific explanations of the sounds in nature, if we would retain their mystical and poetic charm. I would rather not know exactly what makes the ice-bound lake whoop in the winter. The Indian knew the phenomenon best, because he knew least about it. I wish it were possible for us to still know many things in nature as the Indian knew them — mystically, feelingly, poetically, that is, instead of scientifically and materially.”

I am reminded once again of the challenge Burroughs posed for all nature writers: to maintain a sensibility at once both scientific and poetic. Reading over dozens of authors between 1850 and 1930, I am struck by the myriad ways in which they nearly all endeavor to do that, from deep pantheism and magic realism on one end to juxtaposed scientific description and poetry fragments on the other. In his longing to weave the two into his lived experience, Buckham reminds me considerably of Winthrop Packard.     

The fifth book and fourth author is Skyline Camps by Walter Prichard Eaton (1922). In addition to writing books about nature around his home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Eaton also published this account of adventures out west, in newly established National Parks and Forests. He traveled with many others, adventuring in the wilderness on horseback and foot. Many chapters in this book concern adventures in Oregon (possibly on a single trip there), including exploring Glacier National Park, Crater Lake National Park, and the Northern Cascade Mountains, including an attempted ascent of snow-blanketed Mount Jefferson. His writing is effective and engaging if unspectacular. A wealthy Easterner by background, his exploits always involve a cast of many others, including a cook. He describes the landscape he experiences, identifying some of the birds and plants along the way. In places, he includes scientific names for the plants, though he rarely does more than name and briefly describe what he sees. I enjoyed the book and was glad I had read it, but I reached the end without encountering a single passage worth sharing here. I am finding that travel nature books can be a mixed bag. For those who dig in deep and intensely engage with a new place (such as Blatchley in Florida), the result can be fascinating. For other writers, just passing through and seeing what they can along the way (like Torrey in Florida and Eaton in Oregon), the result does not have the power of nature writing by authors who have inhabited and rambled through in their natural places for many years. Here I am thinking of Burroughs in the Catskills, Muir in the Sierras, Mills in the Rockies, and Abbott along the Delaware.

My last, and latest, visit was with Ernest Ingersoll’s Nature’s Calendar (1900). Above left is an image of the lovely dragonfly cover (in the case of my copy, looking a bit bedraggled), while a portrait of Ingersoll is above right. In the middle, you can get a sense of the book’s layout. Each page includes extensive white space in the margins, both beside and below the text. “…regard the printed part as nothing more than my beginning,“, Ingersoll explains to the reader, “and…complete it and correct it for your own locality in the blank spaces left to you for that purpose.” The reader is tasked with recording what they observe, given Ingersoll’s definition of observation as “the faculty of keeping open at the same time both the eyes and the mind.” Of course, to get the reader to do that requires overcoming hesitation amongst those uncomfortable with writing in their books. So Ingersoll does his best to encourage the reader further, noting that “It is well known to book-lovers and to the collectors of rare volumes that the value of an old book is enhanced in most cases when its margins show annotations by the owner; and that such books more often than others are kept as precious heirlooms…” Mary Bradley Allen, who received this book on September 17th, 1900 according to the flyleaf, never recorded anything else in the book, however, despite Ingersoll’s entreaties. 

The book gets off to a slow start, though starting in January, when so much of nature is hidden or asleep, makes this somewhat expected. Throughout the volume, Ingersoll relied heavily on the observations of others, including Thoreau, Burroughs, Abbott, Cram, Packard, Wright, Allen, Merriam, Flagg, and others. The text itself points out what may be experienced each month, assuming one is in southern New England or thereabouts. As the work continues, the prose seems to become a bit less wooden (perhaps I got used to it over time?), and Ingersoll offers helpful guidance to the novice naturalist. In the text for May, for example, he provides some basic recommendations for the would-be birder, beginning with the idea that birds ought to be approached quietly to avoid scaring them away. His birding advice includes this caveat:

“Few windows open so pleasantly into the temple of nature as that through which we look when we study the grace and beauty of birds. We should fall short of the highest advantage, however, if we learned merely to recognize the birds apart, and failed to get some idea of the larger world of which they are but one delightful feature.”

What new realization, ultimately, would tyro naturalists stand to gain by making their way through the year with Ingersoll as a guide? As he closed out the volume, he offered this parting prospect in a somewhat comma-tose fashion:

“We have now followed the circle of year round to its calendar, beginning in January. and have found that it all moves together, the revival of vegetation under the spring sun being the signal for the awakening of animal life and the renewal of its energies, and its progress from leaf to flower, and then to fruit, being accompanied by the development of the various creatures that depend upon it for food. Each year is a grand illustration of the interdependence of all nature; of the exact adjustment of each creature to the other creatures of its locality and to their surroundings, and of the uniformity of law.”

Before Me the Atlantic Stretches Eastward: “A Nature Wooing at Ormond by the Sea” by W. S. Blatchley (1902), part two

 Birds, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Dec 262023
 

“In the afternoon a strong, cold wind blows from the west. I cross the river and the peninsula beyond to the ocean’s beach. Before me the Atlantic stretches eastward, blue and unbroken to the shores of Africa. The wind blows off shore, and except for the sight and roar of the surf I would not know the ea was there. No odor of salt water, no sign of seaweed greets me. The beach is a hard, unbroken mass of reddish yellow sand, with only here and there the valve of a sea shell or the body of a giant sea squid to break its monotony. Not a pebble, not a sign of fish, not a rock for the waves to dash upon ; how different from the beach of the same ocean along New England’s rock-bound coast! A solitary steamer of small size, southward bound, about half a mile from shore, is the only vessel in sight. After an hour the whole scene becomes monotonous in the extreme and, on account of the sharp wind which catches up and carries outward clouds of sand from the inner edge of the beach, very disagreeable.”

Told by his doctor that he should take a vacation in the south to recover from “nervous prostration”, Willis Blatchley (1859-1940) journeyed south by train to Ormond by the Sea (now part of the City of Ormond Beach) in March of 1899. He chronicles his time in Florida (and his midlife crisis — see my previous post on this book) in A Nature Wooing at Ormond by the Sea. (Yes, that is one of the oddest titles of a natural history book I have encountered in my research thus far.). But for those picturing a Florida vacation as days on the beach and nights in fine restaurants and resort hotels, Blatchley managed nearly completely to avoid it all. One of his rare beach outings, reported above, was a disaster. He visited a different beach later in his vacation but was most taken with the wreck of a ship that had recently washed ashore, and spent very little time observing the waves or even the seabirds.

Instead, for Blatchley, vacation was an opportunity to continue the life he loved in Indiana, but in a warmer, more humid, more biodiverse setting: observe wildlife, particularly small organisms. Mostly, he turned over many logs and reported on what he saw (making A Nature Wooing a logbook of sorts). He did a bit of botanizing, a modicum of birdwatching, and a fair bit of observing of critters in shells (or just the empty shells). He spent a few days poking about in a local shell midden, Ormond Mound (now known as the Timucua Indian Burial Mound). And for all his casual rambling, Blatchley even managed to make important discoveries for science and archaeology. First, he observed a belly-up horseshoe crab right itself (something renowned naturalist Thomas Say had claimed was not possible). Then, while excavating the lowermost level of Ormond Mound, he discovered the humerus bone of a Great Auk! The discovery was reported in the newspapers in the spring of 1902; Prof. C. H. Hitchcock, of Dartmouth College, was in Ormond at the time, and immediately began an excavation of his own, unearthing a second Great Auk bone — another left humerus, indicating that at least two birds had been caught (and presumably eaten) there. According to the Florida Museum, these bones date back only about a thousand years, indicating that Great Auks likely wintered along the Atlantic coast of Florida during the Little Ice Age. Presumably, they migrated seasonally from their northern nesting grounds. That would have been quite a journey, given that they had lost the ability to fly and would have had to swim the entire way.

I admit to being astonished at how Great Auks were present in Florida just a few hundred years before they went extinct. According to Blatchley, another extinct bird may still have been living in the northern part of Florida in 1899, too. According to a couple of local fieldworkers, Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers still inhabited heavily timbered hammocks (uplands) in the region, while the Carolina Parakeet had been seen around Ormond as recently as 1887. Both, Blatchley noted, had once been common in Indiana but had long since vanished from the state.

Where Blatchley’s work particularly shines (apart from the midlife crisis angle I explored in a previous post) is in his thorough documentation of the biodiversity of a corner of Florida that has since succumbed to dramatic sprawl. At the time of Blatchley’s visit in 1899, Ormond had only 600 residents; now, greater Ormond Beach is home to over 43,000 people. Some of what Blatchley saw has been preserved, fortunately. The “old Spanish chimneys” that were a popular tourist destination in 1899 have been preserved (and partially restored) as Dummett Sugar Mill Ruins (although Blatchley was much mistaken about their age — supposedly over two hundred years old at the time and of Spanish origin, they had actually been constructed by a British entrepreneur only 75 years earlier). Part of the Tomoka River that Blatchley explored also remains relatively untouched, in Tomoka State Park. In addition to detailed descriptions and drawings of many of his animal finds (especially insects), Blatchley’s book also includes a list of all the insects he identified in the Ormond area. It would be a fascinating research project (M.S., anyone) to return to the region and see how many of them can still be found there today.

Finally, a promised few words of biography. Alas, for all the books he wrote and travels he undertook, he is little known today. There is a nature club in Indiana that bears his name, but there is no direct connection beyond the club founder thinking highly of Blatchley. He moved from Connecticut to Indiana at the age of one and never left the state. For many years he headed the Science Department at Terre Haute High School. He also served as State Geologist for 16 years. He married Clara Fordyce (or Fordice?) in 1882, and they had two sons. After a couple of visits to Florida (including the one chronicled here), he purchased land in Dunedin, near Tampa, and had a winter residence built. He visited there regularly, and one of his nature books chronicles his nature observations from a tree on his property. His journeys took him to Mexico, Alaska, and South America (the last trip being the topic of his final published work). He died in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1940 at the age of 80. He is most famous today for his contributions to entomology. None of his books was ever reprinted, with the exception of a small commemorative run of his book set in Dunedin, My Nature Nook, courtesy of the Dunedin Historical Society.

I Do Not Desire to Grow Old Too Soon: “A Nature Wooing at Ormond by the Sea” by W. S. Blatchley (1902), part one

 Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Dec 252023
 

“For fifteen years I have been a naturalist. They have been years full of work, of hopes, of ambitions. Happiest those days when I have been alone in woods and fields, when I was learning for the first time lessons from nature — lessons purer, nobler and better than I ever expect to learn from the books of man — lessons showing me the close relationship existing among all animate and inanimate things, teaching me that this world, this universe of ours, is not made up of single, isolated objects and forces, but that each object, each force is but a necessary part of one grand and perfect whole. At the end of fifteen years I am still a tyro — still learning daily new facts from the book of nature, still, and ever expect to be, a tramp naturalist. I still delight to chase the winged butterfly o’er field and pasture; draw the seine through ripple and shallow for silvery minnow and rainbow darter — climb hill and wade pond for partridge berry or water lily, or wander all day through thicket and forest in search of hermit thrush and hooded warbler.

I am not a specialist in any branch of natural history, nor do I ever expect to be one. I do not desire to spend my life in pondering over the synonymy, and studying the minute structure of the organs of some particular group of animal or plant life. The world at large will never know me as an eminent ichthyologist or botanist, ornithologist or entomologist, geologist or conchologist, but I wish to know myself as being, in a small way, an ichtho-bota-ornigeo-concho-entom-etc.-gist, and so be able to see more and more clearly as time goes on the mutual relations and interdependence of the various classes of nature’s objects. Such a course will never bring me the renown that I might have achieved had I become a specialist; but what is renown as compared with present happiness and pleasure? And then, as Emerson, in his Essay on Nature, says: “In the woods a man caste off his years as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth.” I do not desire to grow old too soon, and so will seek in the way that I have chosen that fountain of youth which Ponce de Leon sought for in vain on the coast where I am now sitting.”

On March 17, 1899, Willis Blatchley penned these words from the coast of north Florida, in between excavating part of the Ormond Mound (a shell midden) the day before, and encountering a red-headed lizard later the same day. The book in which he shares these reflections, A Nature Wooing at Ormond by the Sea, is ostensibly an account of a naturalist’s exploits on vacation in Florida. But there is another story here, as well, one that I find intriguing and a bit mysterious as well. The book, I highly suspect, also chronicles Blatchley’s struggles with what nowadays would be termed a midlife crisis. And here, in this passage, he confronts the possibility that he will achieve no lasting fame, but has traded that for present happiness. His comments (and Emersonian quote) on growing old speak to someone midway on their life journey, confronting the reality of diminishing days. Even more telling is the reason Blatchley went to Florida in the first place: on the advice of his doctor, following “a severe attack of nervous prostration.” What precipitated the crisis is a mystery at the moment (though one I am keen to research further if I can). It could have resulted from stress, overwork, depression, or some combination of these. Born in October of 1859, Blatchley would have been 39 1/2 when he visited Florida. Given that life expectancy in America in 1900 was only 47, Blatchley was already facing the possibility of being in his last decade (fortunately, he lived until 1940, passing away at the age of 80). Is a mid-life crisis an underlying diagnosis here?

A week later, Blatchley returns to his theme of the interconnectedness of all things, in an enraptured moment of Emersonian pantheism:

“I would not give much for a man who can look upon the first wild flowers of spring and not feel a love, a boundless love, of Nature in his soul. For to know God, the true God, the one universal and all, one must know Nature in the true sense. But few, if any, men have ever known her thus, for to do so is to know the relation existing between matter and force, between atom and molecule, between element and compound, between cell and tissue, between organ and system, between plant and animal, between each one of nature’s objects and all the rest. It is to grasp, as it were, the universe in one grand comprehension— to stand on an eminence a thousand times higher than any on earth and see all objects in one grand vista before you; and at the same time feel and understand the workings of the great natural forces about you. Then, and then only, can one see and know his relation to all — feel that he is a part of the universal whole — a parcel of the universe — bound to it and kin to all which it comprises. For the Universe is God, and God is the Universe.”

Where does that leave human beings, then? What is the human condition, but to return — both body and consciousness — to the universe upon death? Two days later, Blatchley grapples with the prospect of ceasing to exist in a “revery on death” (as he labels the page). It closes with the inevitable realization that all we have is the moment in which we live, and happy is the one that can find joy in it.

“I note the body of a butterfly lying beside me and its presence begets a revery on death — that death which cometh to one and all in some form — which is as inevitable as the rising of tomorrow’s sun. Whether it comes to the mansion of the rich, where every desire of the invalid is granted, or to the hovel of the hermit, where solitude is its only companion ; whether it comes in the cool shade on the mountain’s side, or in the burning glare of the noonday sun on a desert waste, it matters little; it can come but once. Peace and forgetfulness are its accompaniments. All hopes, all fears, all hatreds, all loves, all desires, all passions, become forever things of the past. The step is taken into the great unknown. Millions, aye, hundreds of billions of human forms, of plant and animal forms, have gone — not one has e’er returned to tell us of the way. All concerning it is guess work. The wisdom of years’ experience stored in the gray matter of cerebral cells availeth nothing. The clay — the matter — is left behind. The living part — the energy — passeth beyond. Like that heat which, transmitted into electric power, propels a car, and then, by friction, passes into space, so the energy of all living forms joins that sum total of all energies, which pervadeth the universe. The thoughts which man has inscribed, the good which he has done to his fellowman; the ambitions, the loves, the hopes which he has inspired, are left and become a part of the world’s wealth, for the future use of mankind.

He who can get his pleasures during life from simple, common things, is the happiest, the richest. If the song of bird, the habits of insects, the colors of flowers and the graceful forms of leaves afford me material for thought and reason, and lead to my contentment, I am most fortunate. Then, O Nature, let me be a devotee to thee while life remains!”

Granted this conviction, Blatchley is able, by the end of his stay, to arrive at newfound hope (or, short of that, appears to talk himself into finding it), as he reports under the heading of April 10th:

“This morn a new life begins to stir within me. I know not how long it will last. I feel that new ambitions should be cherished in my soul, that the old should be forsaken; that new hopes should reign in my heart, that the old should be forgotten; that a new love of nature should be forever with me, that the old should belong to the eternity of the past.”

To this reader, at least, it seems that Blatchley’s time in nature along the Florida coast granted him the healing he yearned for. He returned to Indiana in mid-April and lived another 40 years — time spent pursuing his myriad passions in natural history, traveling to Alaska, South America, and yes, back to Florida as well.

Having considered the book as a work of mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation, there remains the question of how the book fares as a work of nature literature. That will be the topic of my next post — along with a bit more biographical matter on this fascinating naturalist.

The Little Things that Sing Around Us: “The Dune Country” by Earl H. Reed (1916)

 Birds, Sense of Place, Spirituality  No Responses »
Dec 232023
 

“One may stand upon a mountain-top and behold the splendors of awful immensities, but the imagination is soon lost in infinity, and only the atom on the rock remains. The music of the swaying rushes, the whispers among rippling waters and softly moving leaves, and the voices of the Little Things that sing around us, all come within the compass of our spiritual realm. It is with them that we must abide if we would find contentment of heart and soul.”

Earl Howell Reed (1863-1931) was, first and foremost, a self-taught artist. After working for 20 years as a grain broker for the Chicago Stock Exchange, he gave it up to pursue a dream of becoming an artist and author. He found inspiration among the Indiana Dunes, returning many times and publishing three books of his etchings of the dune landscape and people; seventy-seven of his original works are now in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, while five others (particularly stunning) are held at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, though none is currently on display. Ironically, though, for all the lovely black and white images that fill The Dune Country, the book is as much a celebration of sound as of vision. For all its “appealing picturesqueness,” the Dune Country is most marked by the richness of its wild music. The Dune Country was Reed’s second book; his first, primarily artwork with brief text accompaniment, was titled, The Voices of the Dunes. In a chapter on gulls and terns, Reed explains that

“The voices of the dunes are in many keys. The cries of the gulls and crows — the melodies of the songsters — the wind tones among the trees — the roar of the surf on the shore — the soft rustling of the loose sands, eddying among the beach grasses – — the whirr of startled wings in the ravines — the piping of the frogs and little toads in the marshy spots — the chorus of the katydids and locusts — the prolonged notes of the owls at night-— and many other sounds, all blend into the greater song of the hills, and become a part of the appeal to our higher emotions, in this land of enchantment and mystery.”

And the voices, for the most part, come from the Little Things. I find it fascinating how Reed chooses to take a label for smaller living creatures and capitalize it, so that collectively, those Little Things are, in fact, beings of much power and beauty. Reed explains, a page before the quote above, why he is inspired by them:

“The love of the Little Things which are concealed from the ordinary eye comes only to one who has sought out their hiding-places, and learned their ways by tender and long association. Their world and ours is fundamentally the same, and to know them is to know ourselves.

We sometimes cannot tell whether the clear, flutelike note from the depths of the ravine comes from the thrush or the oriole, but we know that the little song has carried us just a little nearer to nature’s heart than we were before.”

For all the beauty Reed finds among the dunes, there is wildness here, too — a fierce wildness that cannot be escaped.

“The herons stand solemnly, like sentinels, among the thick grasses, and out in the open places, watching for unwary frogs, minnows, and other small life with which nature has bountifully peopled the sloughs. The crows and hawks drop quickly behind clumps of weeds on deadly errands in the day time, and at night the owls, foxes, and minks haunt the margins of the wet places. The enemies of the Little Things are legion. Violent death is their destiny. With the exception of the turtles, they are all eaten by something larger and more powerful than themselves.”

Tragically, the love and care Reed expresses for the wild landscape of the dunes is not shared by everyone. Early on in the book, Reed complains about how

“Man has changed or destroyed natural scenery wherever he has come into practical contact with it. The fact that these wonderful hills are left to us is simply because he has not yet been able to carry away and use the sand of which they are composed. He has dragged the pines from their storm-scarred tops, and is utilizing their sands for the elevation of city railway tracks. Shrieking, rasping wheels now pass over them, instead of the crow’s shadow, the cry of the tern, or the echo of waves from glistening and untrampled shores.”

Much later in the book, Reed encounters a farm family living a hardscrabble existence in the backcountry behind the dunes. The family kept a raccoon they had saved as a baby after the rest of its family had been killed by dogs in a coon hunting outing. They kept the raccoon chained beside a wooden box in their front yard. The sight of it prompted Reed to declare, “It is mankind that does these things — not the brutes — and yet we cry out in denunciation when humanity is thus outraged. We chain and cage the wild things, and shriek for freedom of thought and action. Verily this is a strange world!”

For all his fascination with wild beauty in sound and scene, Reed spends much of his book sharing about the unusual human characters he encounters living in various isolated shacks throughout the dune country. He sketches their facial profiles at every opportunity, and in his visits with them documents their stories (believable or otherwise). Overwhelmingly old men, these dune residents are “old derelicts,” human flotsam cast ashore among the dunes, living on the edge of civilization, usually by choice:

“While we may be interested and amused with the petty gossip, the rude philosophy, the quaint humor, the little antagonisms, and the child-like foibles of these lonely dwellers in the dune country, the pathos that overshadows them must touch our hearts.

They have brought their life scars into the desolate sands, where the twilight has come upon them. The roar of a mighty world goes on beyond them. Unable to navigate the great currents of life, they have drifted into stagnant waters.”

The accounts of these eccentric souls are well worth reading. I could even imagine constructing a one-act play around them and their stories.

I greatly enjoyed The Dune Country for its haunting prose and fascinating depictions of the people who lived there, as well as its fine etchings. Reed was an artist and observer, not a naturalist, of course. His bird classification extends no further than “gulls”, “terns”, and “crows”. He does remark, a bit wistfully, on how being able to identify songbirds might enrich our appreciation of them: “If we could see the singer and learn his name, his silvery tones would be still more pure and sweet when he comes again.” But he is far more fascinated by the music and poetry of Indiana Dunes than the ecological relationships he encounters there. Yet his descriptions are evocative, and effectively transport the reader (or me, at least) into the world of the dunes. For instance, he writes about how “Swamps of tamarack, which are impenetrable, contribute their masses of deep green to the charm of the landscape. The ravagers of the wet places hide in them, and the timid, hunted wild life finds refuge in their still labyrinths. In the winter countless tracks and trails on the snow lead into them and are lost.” Reed’s gift was not lost among contemporary readers, however forgotten his works are today. As Annex Galleries claims, “Reed brought so much attention to the Dunes and the need to conserve the natural habitat that the Indiana State Legislature established the Indiana Dunes State Park in 1923.”

Finally, a few words about the provenance of my edition of this book. It is a first edition, but was also the only edition ever published. It appears to have been owned by two people in the past 110 years. One signed his (her?) name in the upper right-hand corner of the flyleaf. The second stamped his name on the lower left-hand corner of the front end sheet. I am guessing, from the style of the signature, that it belongs to the first owner. I honestly cannot read the name with any confidence. If anyone reading this blog can offer a translation of the script, please leave a comment here, as I would very much like to know who they were.

The second name, Harold Phelps Stokes, actually belongs to someone of some renown. He served on the Editorial Board of the New York Times between 1928 and 1937. He also traveled to Alaska on Warren G. Harding’s ill-fated journey (Harding died in California on the way home.) and was a friend of Herbert Hoover. Stokes wrote editorials regarding state and city affairs in New York, along with problems relating to transit and traffic. In vain I sought some connection between his life and travels and Indiana Dunes, but that connection, if there ever was one, appears to belong to Elemental Mystery (to use another term of Reed’s).

A Summer of Strange Wanderings: “The Open Spaces” by John C. Van Dyke (1922)

 book review, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  1 Response »
Dec 222023
 

I knew the desert at first hand, and wrote about it with intimate knowledge… That was a summer of strange wanderings. The memory of them comes back to me now mingled with half-obliterated impressions of white light, lilac air, heliotrope mountains, blue sky. I cannot well remember the exact route of the Odyssey, for I kept no record of my movements. I was not traveling by map.

There is something suspect here, when I contrast these words, from John C. Van Dyke’s book The Open Spaces, with the photograph that adorns the frontispiece (in fact, the only image in the book). The Mojave (as the desert is now spelled) extends nearly 48,000 square miles, sprawling from California and Nevada down into Mexico. Van Dyke could have selected any image that would capture its immensity, the vastness of its sky, and the stark majesty of its landscapes. Instead, we have a photograph of a saguaro cactus against a backdrop of yuccas and a distant mesa. Unfortunately, saguaros do not grow in the Mojave Desert. They are restricted to the warmer, wetter climate of the adjacent Sonoran Desert. In his masterpiece, The Desert (stay tuned for a review), Van Dyke reports on wandering both deserts. Only his descriptions of the Sonoran Desert include multiple obvious observational errors. For instance, the saguaro blossom is white, not purple. That is because he most likely never visited the Sonoran Desert.

This post is, of course, not a review of The Desert, but rather, The Open Spaces: Incidents of Nights and Days Under the Blue Sky. Nonetheless, this book is considerably overshadowed by the former work. Abundant research (particularly the work of the late Professor Peter Wild of the University of Arizona) now shows that Van Dyke did not wander about through the desert on his own as he claims here. Instead, he sat on the porch of his brother’s Mojave Desert ranch and wrote most of the book from there. He was an East Coast aesthete, a friend to rich financiers like Andrew Carnegie, and fond of a posh upper-class lifestyle. An art historian who taught at Rutgers, Van Dyke conducted early research on Rembrandt, then explored the beauty of natural settings — including the desert — over a series of six books. The final volume of the six, The Meadows, was previously reviewed in this blog. The other five await their turn on my bookshelf. What I find challenging — a difficulty quite germane to the present volume and review task — is that I simply cannot trust Van Dyke. Am I to read his reminiscences as fiction, rather like The Education of Little Tree? Can I believe him if the same account appears in his autobiography (also on my TBR list)? I know he traveled extensively — to the West Indies and the East Indies, both documented in other books of his. But am I to believe he canoed the Mississippi as a child or ranched in the wilds of eastern Montana as a young man? What am I to make of his memories? How embellished are they?

It is certainly true that, at his best, John C. Van Dyke was a superb craftsman with language. The Desert, despite its flaws and sketchy origins, is still published today. Heck, no less than Ed Abbey referred to it as one of the most important books to read about the desert Southwest. It singlehandedly shifted American views about deserts from avoidance to desire. The vast populations of Tucson, Phoenix, and Las Vegas are testimony to what he accomplished. It is the progenitor to a thousand volumes of nature essays exploring and celebrating the American desert regions. Now, that said, it is tempting to refer to Van Dyke as a “one-hit wonder”, like the singer Don McLean, whose “American Pie” catapulted him to stardom (OK, “Vincent” is a lovely song, too — and is even about an artist — I would like to think Van Dyke would have enjoyed it also.) Peter Wild worked to get other Van Dyke books back into print in affordable paperback editions, including the other five nature volumes and The Open Spaces. (Since his death, all but The Desert are out of print again.)

But The Open Spaces is certainly not the equal of The Desert. Ironically, my favorite passages in the book are probably the few reflecting on his time in (or near, at least) the desert. The rest rambles through memories of camping outdoors as a rancher in Montana, boating the Mississippi as a child growing up in Minnesota, and hunting and fishing in various places. Two threads run through the work, loosely tying it together. First, there is a nostalgia for what has been lost. By 1922, many birds and large mammals had been radically reduced in number. The American buffalo could be written off as a goner. The passenger pigeon was extinct, though Van Dyke recalled how its numbers once darkened the skies:

…in 1870, or perhaps it was 1872, the sky was darkened with flocks of wild passenger-pigeons. Again and again, day after day, I saw passing up the Mississippi Valley cloud-flocks of pigeons that extended from the Wisconsin to the Minnesota bluffs, a distance of five miles. The flocks continued daily and all day long for several weeks. Everybody shot into the nearer and smaller flocks, until the pigeon became a nuisance in the kitchen and an unappetizing article of food on the table. In that year the passenger pigeons had a monster roost in the Mississippi bottoms near the mouth of the Chippewa River, where the birds swarmed like bees, where every litde tree was loaded down with nests, and eggs, crowded out of the nests, were lying on the ground so thick that one could hardly step without crushing them. When the young pigeons were half-grown and could not yet fly, some “sportsmen” went there with clubs, shook and beat the trees until the young birds fluttered out and fell to the ground, and then the “sportsmen” tore their breasts off with their forefingers, flung the breasts into a bag, and threw the carcasses on the ground. That is the wretched kind of thing that one does not like to write about or think about, and yet it was perhaps just such butchery that was responsible for the absolute extinction of this bird. There were such numbers of them then that scarcity seemed a word to laugh at. The roar of that pigeon-roost — a roar like a distant waterfall — could be heard at Wabasha eight miles away. The roar came from the “knac-a” call of the birds, mingled with the flutter and beat of countless wings.

Elsewhere, John C. Van Dyke reflects on how “automobilists” have contributed to despoiling the West — in this case, the stunning mountain meadows of the California Sierras:

Unfortunately, these wonderful places are now being desecrated, if not destroyed, by the automobilist — the same genius that has invaded the Yosemite and made that beautiful spot almost a byword and a cursing. No landscape can stand up against the tramp automobile that dispenses old newspapers, empty cans and bottles, with fire and destruction, in its wake. The crew of that craft burn the timber and grasses, muddy up the streams and kill the trout, tear up the flowers, and paint their names on the face-walls of the mountains. They are worse than the plagues of Egypt because their destruction is mere wantonness.

John Burroughs, the Sage of Slabsides himself, loved his Model T, a gift from his friend Henry Ford. And I am sure Van Dyke traveled considerably by automobile in his later years. Such are the contradictions of many a nature writer — stretching way back to Thoreau, walking home from Walden Pond on the weekend to dine with his parents.

A second thread, less pronounced but more intriguing, is a celebration of wild open spaces. Given Van Dyke’s preference for comfort, there is abundant irony here. But I do think there is still a note of sincerity to his musings in the opening chapter:

What a strange feeling, sleeping under the wide sky, that you belong only to the universe. You are back to your habitat, to your original environment, to your native heritage. With that feeling you snuggle down in your blankets content to let ambitions slip and the glory of the world pass you by. The honk of the wild goose, calling from the upper space, has for you more understanding, and the stars of the sky depth more lure. At last, you are free. You are at home in the infinite, and your possessions, your government, and your people dwindle away into needle points of insignificance. Danger? Sleep on serenely! Danger lies within the pale of civilization, not in the wilderness.

Similarly, Van Dyke closes off the final chapter with these musings:

Had man always lived in the open and maintained a healthy animalism, he would perhaps have been better advised. He was bom and equipped as an excellent animal, but he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage called culture and took on fear and a whimper as a part of the bargain.

Will he always be able to live up to his bargain, holding himself above and superior to nature? Culture is something that requires teaching anew to each generation. Nature will not perpetuate it by inheritance. On the contrary, animalism is her initial endowment; it has been bom and bred in the bone since the world began. Man cannot escape it if he would. Will not Nature in her own time and way bring man back to the earth?

It is tempting to read these lines as a celebration of living close to nature, and maybe Van Dyke wanted to believe that himself. But they are not matched by his somewhat disparaging treatment of native people throughout the book. More than once, he emphasizes that their minds are constantly occupied with meeting material needs (particularly food) and therefore they lack a more spiritual sensibility. I suspect this was a mindset of the time. And for all he writes about encounters with Indians, I am skeptical as to whether they even happened.

As an aside, I found this book enlightening in helping me make connections between John C. Van Dyke and other Van Dykes, as well as John Muir. From this book, I learned that Henry Van Dyke (encountered elsewhere in this blog) was a cousin, while Theodore Strong (T. S.) Van Dyke, owner of a Mojave Desert ranch and advocate for western settlement and development, was his older brother. (T. S. wrote a few books of his own about Southern California, but the parts on nature tended to emphasize the opportunities for fishing and hunting.) And John C. Van Dyke even met John Muir! Sometime in the last seven years of Muir’s life, he showed up at the ranch of T. S. Van Dyke, accompanied by his ailing daughter who was seeking a better climate to aid recovery. Unlike Enos Mills (who encountered Muir on a California beach), Van Dyke was less overwhelmed by the encounter. He tells the tale this way in The Open Spaces:

For several days on the Silver Valley Ranch in the Mohave Desert, with John Muir, I kept bothering him with questions about flower and weed and shrub. What was the name of this or the variety of that ? Learned botanist that he was, his usual answer was: “I don’t know.” The desert growths puzzled him and some of them were wholly incomprehensible to him. He was not afraid to say, “I don’t know,” because there were so many things he did know. When Muir gave it up, no one else ventured a further guess.

The prospect that all was not warm between the two is further hinted at in Van Dyke’s autobiography, in which he remarks that “He liked my book on the desert, he liked my brother who lived in the desert, and he thought he might like me. Well, at any rate, I liked him.” Indeed, Dix Van Dyke (son of T.S.) described in print in 1953 (according to an essay by Peter Wild) how the two “wrangled incessantly” and that sometimes Muir would even stomp off in outrage.

A few words about my copy of this book. It has a nondescript army-green cloth cover. The title is in gold at the top, and below that is an image evoking a Western landscape. The book has a history as a loaner. At one point, it was book 814 of the Indiana Traveling Library. I am guessing that it eventually settled down in Vevay, Indiana, as a guest of the Switzerland County Library. From 1919 until 1992, the library was in the building above, which is now Town Hall. In a delightful twist of fate, the building above was constructed with funds from the Carnegie Corporation, and was the last Carnegie library constructed in Indiana. Andrew Carnegie, a close friend of John C. Van Dyke, would have been delighted to know that his library held some of John C. Van Dyke’s books. It is entirely possible that the book was discarded around 1992, when the library shifted to its current building across the street.