The Effect of Nature As a Whole: “Where Town and Country Meet” by James Buckham (1903)

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Jul 282023
 

If we are seeking God in nature, we shall not find him so readily by analysis as by synthesis; not by minute study of individuals and par ticulars, but by free, joyous acceptance of the effect of nature as a whole. So, I think, we shall be justified in leaving our note books at home in September, and just abandoning ourselves to the influence of nature upon the spirit. Something better may come out of that than the discovery of a new plant or the identification of a long-sought bird.

There is nothing spectacular about the works of James Buckham, or his life, for that matter. As far as I have been able to find out online, there is precious little biographical information about him (no Wikipedia entry!) and no photograph or other image of him. The closest I could find was a picture of his gravestone. He was born on November 25th, 1858 in Burlington, Vermont, and died only 49 years later, on January 8th, 1908, in Melrose, Massachusetts. In-between the two, he was well educated, obtaining a BA and MA. Evidently he planned a future in the theological seminary, but voice-related problems sent him into journalism instead. In 1895, he married Mary Bingham of Hyde Park, Vermont. After 18 years of journalism, he left the field to become an essayist, poet, fiction writer, and nature writer. As far as I have been able to tell, he published only two works about nature in his lifetime: “Where Town and Country Meet” and “Afield with the Seasons” (review coming soon). His cause of death is unknown.

Buckham’s book “Where Town and Country Meet” is a pleasant volume but nondescript compared to many of its time. The cover features only the title at the top and the author name at the bottom, gold-embossed on gray-green cloth. There are no illustrations of any kind, unless one counts the decorative insignia on the title page above. And there is little that is striking about the volume. It is a pleasant read, certainly. Like many other nature writers of his time (and not surprisingly, considering his theological bent), Buckham views nature experiences as opportunities for appreciating the wonders of God’s creation. This outlook leads him to extol “the impressions of nature as a whole”, in the passage above and in this one, from a page earlier:

One is not much disposed to observe minutely, I think, on a September tramp. The last of the birds and the last of the flowers may challenge a somewhat languid interest, but for my own part I like to take things in the mass, in the aggregate, when nature’s long season of emphasized indivi ualism is on the wane. For months we nature-lovers have been burdening our brains and note-books with observations of concrete life in a thousand different forms. Innumerable birds, flowers, insects, trees, plants, and four-footed creatures have confronted us at every step and stimulated curiosity and study. Now the birds have mostly departed, the flowers are a few and sedate company, the insects are frost-killed or driven into retirement, and I for one am tired of particularizing, and am glad to go back for a time to those free, buoyant, youthful impressions of nature as a whole. Instead of pulling to pieces single flowers I want to let my eye range over a whole living field of them, assembled in a carpet of purple and gold. I do not care to ask their names. I simply want them to make an impression of beauty and harmony and joy upon my spirit.

To speak of this as any sort of proto-ecological thinking would clearly be excessive. Yet, given the many writers of his time (Bradford Torrey being a fine example), nature experiences mostly involved identifying and watching birds, flowers, or the two in alternation. To pause and appreciate nature taken altogether I found refreshing.

That said, Buckham could also appreciate the particulars of an Eastern woodland. Here is his joyous tale of wandering the land in early springtime:

I had scarcely entered the woods when in the crumbling, disintegrating snow I found the wiry, nervous, wandering tracks of a ruffed grouse, which had evidently been abroad that very morning, far earlier than I, to seek a breakfast of leaves and berries on the knolls uncovered by the heat of the sun. I followed the winding trail for some distance, but finally it so turned, and doubled, and intertwined with itself, that I lost my clue and had to give it up.

Everywhere, from the trustworthy record of the snow, it appeared that the squirrels had been on the move likewise, passing from tree to tree with long, joyous leaps, the vigor of spring already in their veins. Many rabbit tracks through the thickets showed where the cottontails also had chased each other, like those black lovers in midair. All this awakening and new activity seemed a part of the glad expectation of spring.

The skunk-cabbage was thrusting its spearpoint up through the black loam along the brook earliest of all the wild sod breakers. I found the alder-buds swelling beneath their scales, and the catkins of both alders and willows already visible. There was bright green cress in the bed of the brook, and a few spears of green grass lifted themselves out of the loam in a shel tered, sunny corner of the swamp. Chickadees were lisping their faint dee-dee-dee in the hemlocks; jays were screaming lustily among the dwarf oaks ; and a yellow-hammer sent forth his clarion challenge from the hillside. Everywhere the decomposing snow was black with myriads of tiny, sput tering snow-lice, that darted hither and thither like sparks out of a fire. Surely, spring was in the air and underfoot! It was good to be abroad at the first whisper of her coming.

Buckham’s joy here is palapable and contagious. Reading his gleeful observations, I am sorely tempted to put down the book and step outside — into the steamy heat occf a climate-collapse summer heatwave in Georgia. The more I read these works from a hundred years ago or more, the greater my sorrow that the relative constancy of weather — and the relative abundance of many animal species — are both rapidly becoming things of the past.

Although the book focuses primarily on nature’s beauty as an experience of God, I do not want to leave readers thinking that he entirely lacked a scientific perspective or grounding in natural history. Inspired by Thoreau, he dined on thawed, wild apples, pronouncing them delicious indeed:

Beyond the golf links, on a hillside where scattered birches and scrub pines were growing, I came upon a stunted wild apple tree, the ground under which was thickly strewn with frozen and thawed apples. Immediately there occurred to me Thoreau’s enthusiastic praise of the spicy cider of thawed wild apples. Gathering my hands full of the russet fruit, I sat down upon a rock to taste this primitive nectar (as Thoreau recommends) “in the wind.” It was indeed delicious–not so tart and bitter as the juice of the wild apple in its sound state, but distinctly sweetened and ameliorated by the frost; a kind of spicy wild wine, innocent as water, refreshing to the palate, and wholesome and medicinal to the entire body. I gathered more and more of the wild apples, and sucked their cool nectar until my thirst was slaked. It was a real discovery, this new winter drink, and I would heartily pass on Thoreau’s recommendation of it to other ramblers.

In other passages, Buckham remarks on evolution by natural selection as a guiding biological principle. And most intriguingly, he writes about the urban heat island effect — I had never guessed this phenomenon was already recognized back in 1903! He notes how cities in summer reflect “abnormal conditions through which man artificially intensifies a phenomenon of nature. A hot wave raises the temperature of New York City from five to ten degrees above that of the surrounding country; but it is an adventitious supremacy, due to intercepted air, heated bricks, and blistering pavement.” (I have to admit that Buckham lost me there on the “adventitious” part.)

Still, these passages are exceptions to the general rule. This is a book whose audience was clearly those of a somewhat religious bent, laboring in urban workspaces (mostly executive offices, I would guess) but craving a taste of nature just beyond the city limits. Buckham does well at evoking such experiences in text. The result is a truly pleasant read, if a bit bland at times. Still, it is good to celebrate the poetic in nature, and that is how I will close out this post:

I am thoroughly in sympathy with those who think that too much exact knowledge takes something of the romance and poetry out of our acquaintance with nature. There must be a certain indefiniteness, a certain hazy quality, in our knowledge of the outer world we must not, in a word, know nature too well or we shall miss that elusive charm which pervades the poetry of Wordsworth, for instance. I am not sure but that we should be more appreciative nature lovers if we did not feel obliged to identify and mentally catalogue every creature and plant we see and every song or cry we hear.

Fellow Members of a Great Universe: “The Human Side of Plants” by Royal Dixon (1914)

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Jul 252023
 

It is amazing—the average child reaches manhood or womanhood with a surprising lack of knowledge concerning the simplest natural objects about it. Educated in the great colleges of the country, having laboured through “courses” in botany, the student too often comes forth with a vague impression that “chlorophyll is green stuff,” “plants are fertilised by bees,” and with decided likes and dislikes for plants in the edible form of table vegetables. The fact that in studying plants he has been studying living organisms, beings which think and feel, which have souls and worship, fellow members of a great universe, has never entered his thought. The appalling thing in this regarding of plants as mere things is not the apparent slight to the plant, but the real loss to the student in his lack of appreciation of the wonder and beauty around him.

Royal Dixon (1885-1962 was, quite simply, one of the most intriguing nature writers from the era between Thoreau and World War II that I have yet encountered. He approached nature from a Christian religious perspective, like many 19th century natural history authors, particularly in England. Yet from that base emerged an enduring conviction that all living beings — plants (including trees), birds, water animals, insects, and all other animals — have a mind and a soul of their own, just like human beings. The implications of that are as profound now as they were over a hundred years ago — that all life is to be respected, and that all living beings are fellow-voyagers through the cosmos. Dixon’s life trajectory is one that a would-be biographer might only dream about. Born in Huntsville, Texas, he was a child actor and dancer. Following his schooling, he worked for five years as a curator of plant collections at the Field Museum of Chicago. He went on from there to become a staff writer for the Houston Chronicle and found a school for creative writing. Meanwhile, he co-founded the First Church of Animal Rights in Manhattan in 1921, with 300 congregants. For decades, he lived openly in Houston with his partner, Chester Snowdon, an artist who illustrated several of Dixon’s works. A prolific author, Dixon wrote (and co-wrote) quite a few books about how plants and animals are like human beings, beginning with The Human Side of Plants in 1914. He also wrote a book advocating for the “Americanization” of immigrants. And did I mention several works of fiction, including books of animal stories for children, an early science fiction/fantasy novel, and a novel in black dialect set in the South? To answer the inevitable question, yes, I am seriously considering undertaking his biography, a feat that has not yet been accomplished.

The Human Side of Plants was his first book. It is an elegant volume, with a lovely cover illustration of pitcher plants and several gorgeous color reproductions of artwork showing other plants, such as wisteria, in full bloom. The illustrations are tipped in. Then there are dozens of full-page black and white photographs, also. From his text (and the ownership history of another book in the series — stay tuned), I am confident that he intended readers to be both adults and older children (perhaps tweens and above). Reading it, I was reminded a bit of Ripley’s Believe It or Not as it shared accounts of all sorts of plants doing peculiar (and humanlike) things. (Ripley’s first Believe It or Not cartoon came out four years later.) I found myself reading with my smartphone beside me, periodically challenging some of the more outrageous claims Dixon made. The results were surprising. Most of what Dixon reported has turned out to be accurate. (I will share some of those instances below.) Maybe 10% or 15% of the stories were hoaxes. At the time, though, with the information resources available to him, I can understand why Dixon might have believed (or wanted to believe, at least) that some of them were true.

As I noted earlier, Dixon distingished trees from other plants, devoting a later book just to trees. As a result, herbaceous plants get top billing, along with woody vines and occasional shrubs. In order to make his case that plants are like us, his book enumerates different categories of similarity, some of which strike me as less than flattering to plants and humans alike or simply don’t sound all that human at all. Based upon Dixon’s chapter titles, plants walk, fish, see, entertain, and sleep. Plants also (like some humans) plunder and murder, kidnap, and keep a standing army. Yet other chapters tell of plants that eat insects, build islands, and hide their blossoms and fruit. I have yet to meet a person who does any of these things. Looking at Dixon’s entire list of common characteristics, there are quite a few that are particularly human, like telling stories, caring for others, and solving complex problems that are (understandably) absent from the list. The ultimate impact of the book (following both my reading of the words and some selective Internet truthing) was mostly a sense that plants are more fascinating than I had thought before, and that the book was in some ways ahead of its time. I don’t think I am quite ready yet to classify plants as “human”.

The very fact that I learned about some plant oddities that were entirely new to me is truly astounding for a book on plants over 100 years old. For the sake of full disclosure, though, I will begin with some completely absurd cases from the volume. First, accounts of a man-eating Vampire Vine growing on the shores of Lake Nicaragua are greatly exaggerated. Next, the rattlesnake iris may produce a dried seed pod that sounds a bit like a snake’s rattle when shaken by the wind, but that definitely did not evolve as a defense mechanism for the plant (most of which has died back by the time the seed pod dries out). Mistletoe, parasitic to many trees, does not share its nutrients with those trees during the wintertime. The leaves of rosary pea (Abrus precatorius) do not predict meteorological phenomena. Finally, plants do not emit light.

However, there were some real surprises here. I did already know about an acacia in South America with hollow thorns used by ants who feed on nectar from the plant, and in exchage for food and lodging, protect it from insect pests. But I did not realize this was known so long ago. Dixon also reported on a fern, Polypodium nectariferum (now Aglaomorpha nectarifera), that produces nectar which also attracts ants that protect it. In the past couple of decades, scientists have finally established that the fern species producing nectar (there are several) experience decreased herbivory relative to ferns that do not. Score one for Dixon. Then there is the telegraph plant of India, whose leaves move sponaneously above a certain temperature. This one has to be seen to be believed. Why had I never heard of this plant before? Finally, consider Dixon’s suggestion that plants have rudimentary eyes. I include an extended passage, which captures Dixon’s enthusiasm and optimism well, if not quite accurately capturing the state of knowledge at the time:

When the Creator made light, that was not enough; there must be eyes to appreciate this light; so He created animals with eyes, and human beings with eyes, and lastly, although the average person knows it not, plants with eyes, that they too might worship this great work of their Maker.

The number of plant eyes is legion. They are usually tiny cells located in the epidermis of the leaves, and occasionally on the leaf-stalk. Numerous experiments have been made by Dr. Haberlandt which prove conclusively that the eyes of many species of plants are capable of detecting as slight shades of variation in light as are those of man. This is amply proved by the fact that certain plants, like the vetch, pea, or lentil, may be so influenced in their earliest stages of growth that they deliberately turn toward lights.

The scientific world now thoroughly recognises that plants have eyes, and actually see! Not only do they respond to light, but they give every other evidence of the use of their eyes in their work. The eyes of plants are of two distinct kinds; one kind, the less complex, are made by smooth epidermis, and the cells have a plain outer covering. These are very similar to a glass window which allows the sun’s rays to pass through, and fall on the objects within a room, but in no way aids in concentrating the rays of light in definite places. The other kind of eyes are formed of papillose epidermis, whose outer and inner surfaces are so made as to produce plano-convex lenses. These readily concentrate the rays of light over a definite area, and in this respect are very similar to human eyes. In the study of light-producing plant types, as in the understanding of all types and classes of plants, the average botanist has but knocked at the outer door; while before him is a labyrinth of many doors and many barriers. Apparently the secret passage to the centre of this maze, to the heart of the flowers, lies in the attuning of the human nature to the nature of the plants. Science tells us much, but without an absolute communion, a thorough accord and responsive affinity between human soul and plant soul there never can be a thorough understanding of the nature of the plants.

A few things strike me in this passage. First, Dixon demonstrates a fairly keen technical grasp of research in the area of plant light detection. Second, he appears convinced that all scientists are in accord about plants having eyes. Finally, he argues that to really understand plants, scientists need to seek a sort of mystical union with them. Here, scientists would likely be in accord that this is preposterous. There are, however, recently published books well outside the scientific literature by people who claim they have communicated with plants telepathically. Now, in terms of plant eyes, I do think Dixon was a bit premature. However, a 2022 article from New Scientist reports on a controversial study that argues that plants can, in fact, see. So the claim, if not well substantiated, at least still remains in play 107 years later.

A few words about my lovely copy of this book. On the inside of the front covered is scrawled, in at least two different hands with three different writing instruments, three of the book’s previous owners — all of whom cared for it very well indeed.

Unfortunately, tracking down owners online by initials only is very difficult, particularly in the absence of other information, such as a particular city or town. A relatively common last name like Hansen doesn’t help. Still, I am thankful to these three unknowns that the volume I read was practically as elegant as when it was originally printed, apart from the inevitable tanning of age.

In the Blackness of a Blue Midnight: “Half Mile Down” by William Beebe (1934)

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Jul 222023
 

When, at any time in our earthly life, we come to a moment or place of tremendous interest it often happens that we realize the full significance only after it is all over. In the present instance the opposite was true and this very fact makes any vivid record of feelings and emotions a very difficult thing. At the very deepest point we reached I deliberately took stock of the interior of the bathysphere; I was curled up in a ball on the cold, damp steel, Barton’s voice relayed my observations and assurances of our safety, a fan swished back and forth through the air and the ticking of my wrist-watch came as a strange sound of another world.

Soon after this there came a moment which stands out clearly, unpunctuated by any word of ours, with no fish or other creature visible outside. I sat crouched with mouth and nose wrapped in a handkerchief, and my forehead pressed close to the cold glass—that transparent bit of old earth which so sturdily held back nine tons of water from my face. There came to me at that instant a tremendous wave of emotion, a real appreciation of what was momentarily almost superhuman, cosmic, of the whole situation; our barge slowly rolling high overhead in the blazing sunlight, like the merest chip in the midst of ocean, the long cobweb of cable leading down through the spectrum to our lonely sphere, where, sealed tight, two conscious human beings sat and peered into the abyssal darkness as we dangled in mid-water, isolated as a lost planet in outermost space. Here, under a pressure which, if loosened, in a fraction of a second would make amorphous tissue of our bodies, breathing our own homemade atmosphere, sending a few comforting words chasing up and down a string of hose—here I was privileged to peer out and actually see the creatures which had evolved in the blackness of a blue midnight which, since the ocean was born, had known no following day; here I was privileged to sit and try to crystallize what I observed through inadequate eyes and interpret with a mind wholly unequal to the task. To the ever-recurring question, “How did it feel?”’, etc., I can only quote the words of Herbert Spencer, I felt like “an infinitesimal atom floating in illimitable space.” No wonder my sole written contribution to science and literature at the time was “Am writing at a depth of a quarter of a mile. A luminous fish is outside the window.”

The C. William Beebe who traveled to Mexico in 1904 was definitely not the same Beebe who recorded the bathysphere’s deep ocean expeditions off the coast of Bermuda three decades later. The prose is far less rambling, and the book’s structure almost too consciously engineered: opposite the table of contents is an outline of the divisions of the book: Emotional (Chapter 1); Historical (Chapters 2-3), Pragmatic (Chapters 4-9), and Technical (Appendices). After an opening I would classify more as philosophical than emotional, the book devotes four chapters to the history of deep ocean exploration, culminating with Otis Barton’s design of the bathysphere. In a volume of only 225 pages (excluding the appendices), the first underwater visit to “Davy Jones’s Locker” doesn’t get underway until a hundred pages in. When it does, the more wooden prose of Beebe’s historical narrative gives way to passages expressing the childlike wonder he found in encountering new worlds. Until Beebe’s journeys, no one had ventured a quarter mile beneath the sea, let alone half a mile. The water pressures at such depths would kill a diver instantly. And deepwater trawls yielded only bits of dead fish; their bodies, so well adapted to the insane pressure of the deep ocean, could not endure when brought up to the surface. As the bathysphere passed below the range of light penetration, it very much entered an entirely new world.

On all but one of the dives — Beebe allowed two assistants to go down a short distance below the waves in celebration of a birthday) — the bathysphere was manned by William Beebe and Otis Barton. Barton, as the designer of the bathysphere and the chief funder of the expedition, allowed its use provided he accompanied Beebe on the dives. History has not been kind to Barton; in The Bathysphere Book, Brad Fox depicts him as entirely ineffectual at taking underwater photographs (though he kept on trying), less than useful at observing and describing marine life, and prone to bouts of nausea while sealed inside a tiny metal ball with Beebe. In the absence of photographs, the most stunning expedition discoveries were instead immortalized in paintings by Else Bostelmann. Like a forensic artist creating a composite image of a suspect from witness accounts, Else worked closely with Beebe to translate his word descriptions into stunning visual images. Tragically, an online scan of the book at Archive.org is missing the color paintings; they may not have been included in all editions of the book.

Today, of course, the modern reader with an interest in the deep ocean will have seen abundant photos and videos of many of the fishes Beebe saw, along with even stranger ones as much as seven miles down (plus, in a quite unsettling discovery, a plastic bag). In our day of access to visuals of all types (real and AI-generated) on the Internet, along with quite a few years of VR technology, it is difficult to imagine the degree of wonder Beebe experienced half a mile below the sea surface, suspended in a tiny metal ball, gazing out into an inky blackness occasionally aluminated by a light he turned off and on at intervals. Indeed, the finest moments in the text, in my opinion, are Beebe’s thoughts about the nature of the experience — his amazement and awe at the oceans’ vastness in space and time.

While still near the lowest limit of our dive the thought flashed across my mind of the reality of the old idea of elements—fire, water, earth, and air. They persist as a mental concept, no matter how our physicists and chemists continue to discover new elements, to dismember atoms, and to recognize such invisible phenomena as neutrons. I have seen and felt the heat of molten, blazing stone gushing out of the heart of our Earth; I have climbed three and a half miles up the Himalayas and floated in a plane still higher in the air, but nowhere have I felt so completely isolated as in this bathysphere, in the blackness of ocean’s depths. I realized the unchanging age of my surroundings; we seemed like unborn embryos with unnumbered geological epochs to come before we should emerge to play our little parts in the unimportant shifts and changes of a few moments in human history. Man’s recent period of strutting upon the surface of the earth would have to be multiplied half a million times to equal the duration of existence of this old ocean.

This is not to rule out, of course, the scientific discoveries Beebe made, including the identification of several new fish species. In this passage, he shares a literal flash of inspiration that resolves a long-standing puzzle from earlier dives of sudden flashes of light he would notice through the bathysphere’s window in the blackness of the deep sea’s “perpetual night”:

I have spoken of the three outstanding moments in the mind of a bathysphere diver, the first flash of animal light, the level of eternal darkness, and the discovery and description of a new species of fish. There is a fourth, lacking definite level or anticipation, a roving moment which might very possibly occur near the surface or at the greatest depth, or even as one lies awake, days after the dive, thinking over and reliving it. It is, to my mind, the most important of all, far more so than the discovery of new species. It is the explanation of some mysterious occurrence, of the display of some inexplicable habit which has taken place before our eyes, but which, like a sublimated trick of some master fakir, evades understanding.

This came to me on this last deep dive at 1680 feet, and it explained much that had been a complete puzzle. I saw some creature, several inches long, dart toward the window, turn sideways and—explode. This time my eyes were focused and my mind ready, and at the flash, which was so strong that it illumined my face and the inner sill of the window, I saw the great red shrimp and the outpouring fluid of flame. This was a real Fourth Moment, for many “dim gray fish” as I had reported them, now resolved into distant clouds of light, and all the previous “explosions” against the glass became intelligible. At the next occurrence the shrimp showed plainly before and during the phenomenon, illustrating the value in observation of knowing what to look for. The fact that a number of the deep-sea shrimps had this power of defense is well known, and I have had an aquarium aglow with the emanation. It is the abyssal complement of the sepia smoke screen of a squid at the surface.

Here, a bit abruptly perhaps, my blog post ends. For Beebe, too, when the expedition concluded, so did his days of deep underwater study. Ultimately, he would return to land, particularly the tropical jungles that he loved. The year Half Mile Down was published, Otis Barton would Otis Barton set a new human diving record, reaching 1,370 meters down (0.85 miles) in the bathysphere. And then, in 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh would descend to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (10,740 meters or 6.67 miles down). Seventeen years later, the bizarre chemosynthesis-based ecosystem of the hydrothermal vents would be encountered for the first time.

The Complicated Dependence of All the Life about Us: “Two Bird-Lovers in Mexico” by C. William Beebe (1905)

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Jul 212023
 

Every walk about our camp revealed new flowers or seed pods of beautiful colours and strange shapes. We longed for the key to the interrelations of plants and insects, for hints concerning the complicated dependence of all the life about us, — bird on insect, insect on plant, plant on both, which ever links even the extremes of nature.

When William Beebe published Two Bird-Lovers in Mexico in 1905, he was 28 years old and nly three-years married to someone as fascinated by nature as he was., Mary Blair Rice. Though they had honeymooned in Nova Scotia after the wedding, their trip to Mexico together from December, 1903 until April of 1904 was a second honeymoon for the two. The stated purpose of the expedition was to study and collect birds for the New York Zoological Park, where Beebe had recently become Curator of Ornithology. Much of Mexico was still wilderness at the time, and the two traveled mostly by horseback through a variety of tropical ecosystems, from desert scrub to lush rainforest, staying in tents at base camps for weeks at a time. Everywhere he went, Beebe was impressed by the rich bird life and the vast number of birds he encountered. For example, on a visit to the marshes surrounding Lake Chapala, he gushed that

…the feelings we experienced cannot be put into words; such one feels at a fist glance through a great telescope, or perhaps when one gazes in wonder upon the distant earth from a balloon. At these tims, one is for an instant outside of his petty personality and a part of, a realizer of, the cosmos. Here on these marshes and waters we saw, not individuals or flocks, but a world of birds! Never before had a realization of the untold solid bulk in numbers of the birds of our continent been impressed so vividly upon us.

There is a youthful vigor to this book. While Beebe would later be famous for his vast number of global expeditions, particularly to the topics, at the time of his trip to Mexico he had never been so far from his home in New York City. He brought with him a zest for seeing wildlife, though his desire to learn all the ways of the local wildlife did not extend to the human cultures of the region, as this whimsical tale of his daily encounters with a local villager makes plain:

Every day about noon, an old, old man drove several forlorn cows down the trail and up past our camp, for a drink and an hour’s feed of fresh green grass. A ragged shirt, a breech-clout, and a pair of dilapidated sandals formed the whole of his outfit. He knew not a word of Spanish, but jabbered cheerfully away to us in some strange Indian tongue, — Aztec, we pleased ourselves by calling it, — as if we understood every word. When he learned that we were afraid to have his half-wild cattle roaming at will about our provision tent, he took great pains, by means of liandfuls of gravel and a torrent of “Aztec” expletives, to banish them to the opposite side of the stream. His greeting was always ”Ping-pong racket!” This may seem absurdly trivial and irrelevant, yet these syllables exactly represent his utterance. “Ping-pong racket!” I shouted to liim as he appeared with his wild charges. “Ping-pong racket!” he answered joyfully, and patted me on the back with an outburst of incoherent gutturals, doubtless expressing his pleasure at my ready grasp of his mother tongue!

He showed us where the purest and coldest spring was to be found, for which we were extremelv grateful. A bowl of frijoles drew expressions of extravagant delight from him. But he seemed most pleased if only we would talk to him, although the words could convey not a particle of meaning. I would converse for a while in my choicest German, then harangue him with all the Latin I could recall and perhaps end witli an AEsop’s Fable, or part of tlie multiplication table. Whether I gravely informed him that Artemia salina could be converted into Artemia muhlenhausii by adding fresh water and stirring, or whether I chanted the troubles of AEneas, the venerable “Aztec” courteously listened with the greatest interest!

His final greeting was tremulous and sincere, and, as we repeated the phrase which sounded so ridiculous to our ears, we felt a strong pity for this poor ignorant man, whose speech was that of long-gone centuries. And yet he had no need of our sympathy. Day after day for years (so we gathered from his sign language) he had driven his cattle back and forth from some tiny village miles away. He was faithful in this and his happiness was full. It was overflowing when, at parting, we gave him some little trinkets and our spare change.

I found this charming and whimsical tale (albeit a bit disdainful on the part of a white American scientist) to be a highlight of the book. Beyond it, the prose was pleasant enough, though lackluster. Beebe was still developing as a writer, and the fact that the book reflected a first journey into uncharted territory meant that he came way from the trip with far more questions than answers. Still, while so much of the narrative was consumed with descriptions of the birds he saw, Beebe also offered glimpses of a more inclusive vision of nature, one that would emerge into the mainstream as the discipline of ecology over the coming decades. While 19th Century writers like Badford Torrey would go for woodland rambls seeking to identify and observe birds and plants just like Beebe in Mexico, Beebe was consumed by the questions of how they related to each other, and how they fit together into a larger whole — a “complicated dependence of all the life”.

To Arouse True Appreciation of Nature: “Nature Trails” by Dietrich Lange (1927)

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Jul 082023
 

Nothing in nature is isolated. Everything is somehow connected with everything else. There is interaction everywhere between climate and plant life, between plants and insects, between insects and higher animals, and in that way the chain of life runs on and on. The organic is linked to the inorganic; the whole universe is one.

This passage opens a brief essay on the distribution of trees in North America in Lange’s work. It captures that nascent ecological vision that quite a few early 20th-century naturalists observed and pondered. It also stands out in a work that, while well-crafted, is directed toward an audience of older children, to encourage them to get outdoors and appreciate its wonders. Indeed, Lange served at various times in his life as a supervisor and a director of nature study programming in Minnesota. At the time his book was published, he was serving as principal of the Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul.

I was excited to discover this title a few months ago, because for the considerable sweep of time this blog covers (almost 100 years, from 1850 to WW2), so many parts of the country remain unrepresented by nature writers. I have found dozens in Massachusetts, for example, but very few in Connecticut. Up until this book, I had not found any from the Upper Midwest. Lange, himself, was not a native. He was born in Bonstorf, Germany on June 2nd, 1863, traveling with his family to Minnesota at age 18. He held various teaching and principal positions in and around St. Paul throughout his adult years. He wrote at least fifteen works of both fiction (often featuring boy scouts) and non-fiction (nature-themed, particularly birds). He also published a handbook of nature study for teachers and pupils in the elementary grades. He died in St. Paul in 1940 of unknown causes.

As a nature writer, Longe was eager to encourage young people to “observe, investigate, and enjoy” nature. He listed among his own inspirations the works of Thoreau, Burroughs, Muir, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Gilbert White. Elsewhere, he quoted Bradford Torrey, mentioned C.C. Abbott, and recommended Ernest Ingersoll’s book, “Nature’s Calendar” (blog review coming soon). On the whole, he spoke up for environmental conservation at a time when relatively few animals (apart from birds) were given any protection. He called for game laws to protect bears, for instance, and also protections for orchids (which were being driven extinct by enthusiastic collectors and bouquet gatherers). “It was, perhaps, natural that in the pioneer stage of our country everybody should have been allowed to cut, pick, and burn; to kill, trap, and catch as he pleased,” Lange wrote. “We have now conquered the continent, and the days of the pioneer are gone, but we are still altogether too much a nation of destroyers and exploiters of all that is useful and beautiful in our land.” But lest we exalt Lange too highly, this nature writer who found a place in his heart (and in natural ecosystems) for giant ragweed also argued that the extinction of venomous snakes was “desirable”.

In keeping with Lange’s calling as a nature study teacher, the book includes an appendix on outdoor nature study, with questions to encourage students to engage with the natural world around them.

My copy of this book has considerable text on the flyleaf. As well as I can discern the writing, it reads “Merry Christmas to my friend Henry Horowitz. D. Lange. 1936. Ryan Hotel, December 23, 1936.” I pursued this puzzle a bit further, locating a circa 1900 postcard of the opulent Ryan Hotel in St. Paul, which stood downtown from 1885 until it was demolished in 1962 (see below). I even found a potential recipient of the dedication. Henry Alchanon Horowitz (1906-1990) was living at the time in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. It could be him, though I would have felt more confident to have located someone living in Minnesota at the time.

His Lot Is Cast in Poetic Places: “In Beaver World” with Enos Mills (1913)

 book review, Books, Landscape History, Natural History, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 082023
 

Beaver works are of economical and educational value besides adding a charm to the wilds. The beaver is a persistent practicer of conservation and should not perish from the hills and mountains of this land. Altogether the beaver has so many interesting ways, is so useful, skilled, practical, and picturesque that his life and his deeds deserve a larger place in literature and in our hearts.

This was not my first visit with Enos Mills. The self-styled “John Muir of the Rockies”, Mills lived for many years in a cabin in Estes Park, and was a staunch advocate for the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park. Over several decades, he rambled through the mountains, often serving as a guide for tourists to the region. I have read a couple of his books already, with considerable relish. A consummate storyteller, Mills had a tendency to end up in backcountry predicaments (such as getting caught in a blizzard or falling down a slope) and then managing to emerge hale and hearty as ever. I have several more of his books that will appear in this blog in the future, including a book on geology — a topic near and dear to my heart

But given the relatively recent (past year) arrival of a family of beavers to a local park near my home, I decided to embark on a reading campaign to get to know them better. I am slowly working my way through Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why they Matter, by Roy Goldfarb (2018). I purchased it on Kindle, unfortuately, and I rarely am willing to view yet anther screen for my reading, so it is still half unfinished. About the same time, I pulled Mills’ volume off my shelf for a more historical take on the charming mammals.

Mills is nearly forgotten today, beyond his local hero status as father of Rocky Mountain National Park (established in 1915). A wannabe Muir, his writing (delightful though it is) never reached the mystical raptures of his hero of the Sierras. Still, I cannot help but feel amazement at his level of committment to observing beavers in the wild: by 1913, he had spent 27 years noticing them (which, admittedly, takes him back to the humble age of six) in every state of the US (at the time) and also Alaska, Mexico, and Canada. He had observed active beaver colonies in every season, and often for one or more weeks at a time.

The book is full of his accounts of what he saw — the extents of dams (the longest measuring 2140 feet, on the Jefferson River, near Three Forks, Montana), the number of active beavers in one place (over a dozen) and counts (quite precise) of how many aspen trees were taken down by a group of beavers in a certain amount of time. Again and again, he tells of his patient witnessing of beaver construction projects (dams and lodges) brought to an end by local trappers after their pelts. At the time, there was no protection whatsoever for beavers, who were largely viewed with a mix of amusement, disdain, and avarice (for their pelts) by most Americans encountering them.

The book is a bit of a trudge to get through — the observations vastly outnumber his stories present in many of his other essays. But what emerges is a portrait of a beaver as actively shaping the ecosystem it inhabits — a holistic picture constructed decades before ecology hit the mainstream. He also celebrated the beaver in passages that occasionally touched the poetic, such as this one:

As animal life goes, that of the beaver stands among the best. His life is full of industry and is rich in repose. He is home-loving and avoids fighting. His lot is cast in poetic places.

The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primeval place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle. Around are the ever-changing and never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. Beaver grow up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the brilliant flowers and great boulders, in the piles of driftwood and among the fallen logs on the forest’s mysterious edge. They learn to swim and slide, to dive quickly and deeply from sight, to sleep, and to rest moveless in the sunshine; ever listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water, living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich autumn’s hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days.

In another delightful passage, Mills chronicles the many ways in which beavers’ supreme architectural achievements, their dams, influence the surrounding landscape and its myriad other inhabitants. It is quite an impressive list indeed!

The dam is the largest and in many respects the most influential beaver work. Across a stream it is an inviting thoroughfare for the folk of the wild. As soon as a dam is completed, it becomes a wilderness highway. It is used day and night. Across it go bears and lions, rabbits and wolves, mice and porcupines; chipmunks use it for a bridge, birds alight upon it, trout attempt to leap it, and in the evening the graceful deer cast their reflections with the willows in its quiet pond. Across it dash pursuer and pursued. Upon it take place battles and courtships. Often it is torn by hoof and claw. Death struggles stain it with blood. Many a drama, romantic and picturesque, fierce and wild, is staged upon the beaver dam.

The beaver dam gives new character to the landscape. It frequently alters the course of a stream and changes the topography. It introduces water into the scene. It nourishes new plant-life. It brings new birds. It provides a harbor and a home for fish throughout the changing seasons. It seizes sediment and soil from the rushing waters, and it sends water through subterranean ways to form and feed springs which give bloom to terraces below. It is a distributor of the waters; and on days when dark clouds are shaken with heavy thunder, the beaver dam silently breasts, breaks, and delays the down-rushing flood waters, saves and stores them; then, through all the rainless days that follow, it slowly releases them.

My copy of this book was never signed, so I can say little about its history. There is a small bookseller’s stamp affixed to the inside back cover: G. F. Warfield & Co. / Booksellers & Stationers / Hartford, Conn. After changing hands (and names) many times, Huntington’s Bookstore closed in 1993 after being in continuous operation for 158 years.

Talking to Flowers: “The Blessed Birds or Highways and Byways” by Eldridge E. Fish (1890)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Environmental conservation, Natural History  No Responses »
May 262023
 

No other objects in inanimate nature touch so many hearts tenderly, like the actual presence of dear friends, as flowers. Not children alone, but men and women often look upon them with attributes not possessed by other inanimate objects. It does not seem out of place to talk to them any more than to talk to young children.

I like to picture Eldridge E. Fish (a challenge made difficult by not finding any online images of him) strolling a park in Buffalo, New York, greeting the blooming asters as he wanders past them. In a book with few interesting passages or scenes (more anon), here is a moment of true oddity. A few sentences later, though, his prose returns to its bland, though solid, form, and what little sense I have of Fish as a naturalist and scientist disappears again.

The Blessed Birds, or HIghways and Byways (1890) appears to have been Fish’s only work. I would call it his magnum opus, but I would not dare to apply that to his fairly slender volume. Fish contributed occasional pieces to the Buffalo Sunday Currier newspaper and a couple of other publications, and at some point, he decided to compile them into a book, locally published by Otto Ulbrich at 396 Main Street in Buffalo. The result is uneven but serviceable. The essays draw upon the usual cast of fellow natural history writers: Thoreau, Burroughs, Abbott, and Torrey. And we mustn’t forget Wilson Flagg, who is responsible for this horrendous poem that opens one of the pieces in this volume:

Bird of the wilderness, dearer than Philomel;

Echoes are telling thy notes from the hill and dell;

Lovers and poets delighted are listening

When the first star in the dewdrop is glistening,

Waiting the call of the eremite forester,—

Lonely, nocturnal and sentinel chorister!

Prophet of gladness, but never foreboding ill,

Caroling cheerily from his green domicile,

Uttering whippoorwill, whippoorwill, whippoorwill,

Sibylline, tuneful, mysterious whippoorwill.

But I wander. The purpose of this post is to explore Fish’s natural history work, not his taste in 19th-century poetry.

Not surprisingly, there is no biography of Fish — not so much as a Wikipedia entry online. Finally, I found him via a Wikipedia page on New York Central College, a predecessor to Cornell that existed for ten years in Upstate New York. It was an abolitionist institution that welcomed all qualified students, one of whom was Eldridge Fish. In the Wikipedia article, Fish is described as a “scientist and school principal”. Fortunately, there is also a reference citation to a Buffalo Currier newspaper article on Buffalo area schools and their principals, which includes a couple of paragraphs about Fish. It notes that he was born in Otsego County in 1829, and raised on his father’s farm in Cortland County. In 1871, he became principal of School No. 10 in Buffalo, a position he still held in 1894. He wrote papers on botany and ornithology, and “Many of his best papers have been printed in the Courier.” Several of his students went on to Harvard and Cornell.

Unfortunately, publishing the book did not grant Fish any lasting fame. His greatest moment of success was probably on July 23rd, 1890, when Dr. John Johnston of Bolton, England visited John Burroughs at his summerhouse, Slabsides. Strewn about the table and seats were a number of magazines and books, including a copy of Fish’s The Blessed Birds. Did Burroughs actually read it? If so, did Burroughs manage to finish it?

Fish is at his strongest when offers condemnation of the ongoing destruction of forests and songbirds. Regarding logging of woodlands, Fish observes how that results not only in damage to the rural scenery but also impacts the local hydrology and climate. Here, I wonder if he might have been inspired by George Perkins Marsh, who was widely read in the last few decades of the 19th century. Fish is even more troubled by the loss of songbirds, titling an essay, “Danger of an Early Extinction of Song Birds”. He attributes their dwindling numbers to the clearing of forests, the invasion of English swallows, the killing of birds for food in the American South, lighthouses and the Statue of Liberty’s torch, the hunting out of larger game birds, ornithologists gathering bird skins and eggs for their collections, and (of course) the millinery trade. “God no more created the birds for you and me than he created you and me for the birds,” he declared. He also astutely noted that “Men are generally slow to realize the danger of losing that which is apparently abundant, especially if it costs nothing.” That sentiment is equally true today.

Before I allow Fish to return to his well-earned obscurity, I will share one other passage of note. Like many nature writers of his day, Fish advocated for readers to get outside and notice the wonders of their own backyards:

The orchard assists in teaching the lesson that objects which yield the greatest pleasure lie nearest our doors; that it is not necessary to make long journeys or to explore far-off countries to see the most interesting objects in nature. I can find more of interest in Limestone groves, in Wende’s woods and meadows and in the vicinity of Portage than I can in the Adirondacks, the wilds of Northern Michigan or the primitive forests of the Carolinas. Even this old orchard of less than a dozen acres has so many charming things growing and living, flowerless and flowering, winged and four-footed in it, that a Gray or a Nuttall would find it a field of delight and study. There are mosses on the north side of the tree trunks and lichens pendant from leafless branches. Tall ferns are growing in a shaded corner of the lot near a rivulet of pure water, and their broad fronds are as green and thrifty as in the shady woods. The jewel weed, with almost transparent stem, and leaves that look like silver, when immersed in water, are abundant and luxuriant.

Finally, in closing, a word about my copy, from 1890 — likely a first and only edition. Its green cloth cover includes this charming gold-embossed title with a picture:

What is more, my copy is signed — a bit tentatively, perhaps — by the author, with his kind regards:

The Simple Delights of Childhood: “Days Afield on Staten Island” by William T. Davis (1892)

 book review, Books, Day Hikes, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Oct 062022
 

These Spring days, when we hear the bluebirds carol, and mark the revivifying influence of the season, we are sure to be affected thereby, and my companion smiles to see me dance beneath the pine tree. ” You seem happy,” he says, and yet I notice the light kindle in his own eyes, for the sunshine, the bluebirds and the robins have not come in vain to him.

What a blessing are the balmy hours of Spring! The warm sun distills a fragrance from the earth, and in the waste pastures, where there is a thick mat of vegetation, this odor is particularly strong. Nature is stirring straw- berries and crickets into life. The air is full of little flies, beetles run along the roadway, dogs lie asleep on the grass and the yellow flicker sounds his rattle in the trees. Then does the light within burn brightest, and our hearts seem to beat more joyously than they have all Winter long, and we are happy and at least transiently well under the sun. Old Sol smiles at our ways; we are flies on the sunny side of a pumpkin to him, and to ourselves we know not what we are.

It is a blessing to retain the simple delights of childhood, to be easily pleased, and it is well to be affected by the greening of the earth, even though we cannot exactly mention the charm or tell why we should be glad. It is no wonder that there have been May-poles, no wonder that the shepherds of old danced about the straws in the field at the feasts of Pales, and no wonder again that my companion and I become joyous in the hopeful days of Spring.

A child-like wonder infuses William T. Davis’ work, Days Afield on Staten Island (1892). With curiosity, wonder, and delight he explores the scruffy landscapes of a long-inhabited place, from its vacant lots and old orchards to its tidal marshes and its tumbledown farmhouses. He ventures afield through the seasons, describing both the remains of past inhabitation and the plants and animals that have taken over now that the human occupants are gone. In a time when much of Staten Island was still somewhat rural, he provided a series of charming vignettes of places that are now largely (though not completely) gone. I suspect he saw what was coming, though. In his second essay, “South Beach”, he observed that “not only do the land animals fall year by year before advancing civilization, but the life that ocean would seem to hold so securely, is also being gradually stolen away.”

Throughout his book, there is a haunting presence of the past. At one point, he explores an abandoned farmhouse, finding old ledgers and other artifacts strewn about the home. The dead are never far away; they linger at the edges of our sight. In the passage below, the Revolutionary War is remembered in the landscape.

In April the blood-root blossoms, and its single leat often closely clasps the flower stem, forming a sort of green collar. It is a dainty flower but none too choice to deck the steep hill sides of the crooked and shaded ravine where it grows in greatest profusion. This is Blood-root Valley and Blood-root Valley Brook, along the course of which, it is said, a British messenger, in Revolutionary days, travelled on his way from camp to camp. This stream, which is often dry in summer, also rises near the highest point, and goes to form the Richmond brook. The drainage of the district was formerly collected in a pond, used by a saw-mill, of which there is now only a few beams left, and the dam is broken. About 1870, the boys bathed in this pond, and a little lame boy with crutches and a board for support, used to enjoy himself as much as his companions.

A number of skirmishes occurred along Richmond or Stony brook, in the years of the Revolution, particularly on the day of the fight at St. Andrew’s Church. But it is more pleasing to think of it in the times of peace, to see the water snakes glide in so smoothly, the turtles scuttle with much haste and the wayward frogs jump recklessly off the bank frightening the black-nosed dace below. When these little fish are disturbed, they will scatter in all directions, coming together shortly, if they imagine the danger is past. At other times they will sink to the deepest places in the stream, and remain on the sand or pebbles, not moving a fin, and as their backs are sand colored, they are not easily seen from above. Occasionally when there is nothing to fear, one will be seen lying motionless for a long time between two pebbles, and thus can they rest and sleep when they desire.

And here, in this passage, the Indian presence is evoked by scattered potsherds:

To the east of the Bohman mansion, near Bohman’s Point, there is a little brook, that flows through a sandy semi pasture and woodland region. It is bordered in part by willows and old orchard trees, and the land has that unmistakable air of an ancient farming spot. On the high sand dune, nearby, about which this brook bends in bow fashion, the Indians lived in old time, and their implements and little heaps of flint chips, where the arrows were made, may still be discovered. The spring, where they got water, is on the hill-side, though now filled up with sand and grass grown, but the stones that formed its sides mark the site, and a tiny rill issues from among them in very wet weather.

They had an eye for beauty, as evinced by the patterns on the broken pieces of pottery lying about, and no doubt they thought the warblers very gay, that congregate in spring-time about a moist place near the brook. The warblers come every year, just the same, but the Indians are gone, and probably in the large factory across the Kill with its thousands of employes, only one or two would recognize their implements scattered among the other stones on the sand.

Finally, here is one last passage from the book, a charming vignette from the autumn time:

It is good to ramble in the autumn fields, in one of the barren sandy nooks where the sweet-fern grows, and where a sad pleasant flavored joy, seems to pervade all about you. With dextrous throws you bring down the apples, and though they may be gnarled and puny, you eat them with a relish, for they seem such free gifts from nature. They come without the asking or the toil, like the persimmons, or the strawberries in the field.

Autumn colors the barren ground vegetation very early with the deepest dye, and as we are taller than most of the plants that grow on the sand, we may look over them, and thus get a wide and varied view. The Virginia creeper runs flaming red along the ground, and the sumachs, the cat-briers and the poison ivy vines, are most vividly colored.

Perhaps the most curious tint of all the autumnal show is the greenish-white leaves of the bittersweet vine, that are speckled with yellow. They have an odd appearance, for all about them the leaves have turned to most vivid colors, while they alone have assumed so white and ghostly a shade. In the chestnuts and some of the oaks, the green color remains longest near the mid-rib, and in the oaks it is often a deep olive shade, and greatly adds to the beauty of the turning leaf. The wild cherry trees color an orange red, and the seedling cultivated cherries are flushed with red and look to be in a fever. The chestnut-oaks turn a light yellow, as do the chestnut trees and the hickories.

There is a vividness of color in many of the leaves that seems almost supernatural, and it is plain that we, who live and grow old on the Earth, can never cease to wonder at the yearly display. ” Look,” says the little boy, “at that Virginia creeper,” and in manhood he points again in wonderment at the flaming red vine in the cedar tree.

A few words about this book and its author are in order. I confess that I broke down and purchased a modern-day paperback copy; the originals are far outside f my price range, even though the book contains no illustrations whatsoever. At the time, I had assumed the author is unknown. In fact, William Thompson Davis (1862-1945) has a National Wildlife Refuge on Staten Island named after him. The property is now only 30 acres smaller than Central Park. Working with the Audobon Society, Davis helped secure the original 52-acre parcel back in 1928. Davis himself was a naturalist, entomologist, and historian. This was his only nature volume for a general audience, although he also published some scientific work on cicadas (ironically, cicadas are not mentioned in this book). Much later in his life, in 1930, he co-authored a five-volume history of Staten Island.

All One to a Mountain Stream: “A World of Green Hills” by Bradford Torrey (1898)

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Oct 062022
 

Stewart’s Pond, on the Hamburg road a mile or so from the village of Highlands, served me, a visiting bird-gazer, more than one good turn: selfishly considered, it was something to he thankful for; but I never passed it, for all that, without feeling that it was a defacement of the landscape. The Cullasajah River is here only four or five miles from its source, near the summit of Whiteside Mountain; and already a land- owner, taking advantage of a level space and what passes among men as a legal title, has dammed it (the reader may spell the word as he chooses — “ dammed ” or “ damned,” it is all one to a mountain stream) for uses of his own. The water backs up between a wooded hill on one side and a rounded grassy knoll on the other, narrows where the road crosses it by a rude bridge, and immediately broadens again, as best it can, against the base of a steeper, forest-covered hill just beyond. The shapelessness of the pond and its romantic surroundings will in the course of years give it beauty, but for the present everything is unpleasantly new. The tall old trees and the ancient rhododendron bushes, which have been drowned by the brook they meant only to drink from, are too recently dead. Nature must have time to trim the ragged edges of man’s work and fit it into her own plan. And she will do it, though it may take her longer than to absorb the man himself.

When I came in sight of the pond for the first time, in the midst of my second day’s explorations, my first thought, it must be confessed, was not of its beauty or want of beauty, but of sandpipers, and in a minute more I was leaning over the fence to sweep the water-line with my opera-glass. Yes, there they were, five or six in number, one here, another there; solitary sandpipers, so called with only a moderate degree of appropriateness, breaking their long northward journey beside this mountain lake, which might have been made for their express convenience. I was glad to see them.

Bradford Torrey was a master at the “ramble”, a genre of nature essay that, as the name suggests, rambled about. It had no particular objective beyond relating what Torrey saw and experienced on his outings into the natural world. Torrey’s world was dominated by what passed for a birding life-list in his day — he was constantly seeking out new species. He rarely observed them closely — identification was his primary goal. When birds were scarce, he noticed plants, particularly flowering ones. Very occasionally he mentioned some other other animal — for instance, a box turtle:

On Buck Hill, in the comparative absence of birds, I amused myself with a “dry land tarrapin,” as my West Virginia acquaintance had called it (otherwise known as a box turtle), a creature which I had seen several times in my wanderings, and had asked him about; a new species to me, of a peculiarly humpbacked appearance, and curious for its habit of shutting itself up in its case when disturbed, the anterior third of the lower shell being jointed for that purpose. A phlegmatic customer, it seemed to be; looking at me with dull, unspeculative eyes, and sometimes responding to a pretty violent nudge with only a partial closing of its lid. It is very fond of may apples (mandrake), I was told, and is really one of the “features” of the dry hill woods. I ran upon it continually.

While Torrey’s earliest essays explored familar haunts in Massachusetts (Torrey lived in Weymouth for most of his life), many of his later books feature his travels (by train, stagecoach, and foot) through various parts of the country that were beginning to find renown as touristed areas. Indeed, his accounts of his visits likely encouraged others to follow suit and take to the open road. A World of Green Hills was one of these accounts, based upon trips to the mountains of North Carolina and to Virginia (southwestern and the Natural Bridge area). In these later works, Torrey infused his nature observations with some of his notes on and conversations with the rural folk he chanced to meet along the way. They add a note of entertainment to what is otherwise a rather dry text — despite the “exotic” (for him) locales.

I have come to the conclusion that the ramble was very much a genre for its day, and its day has long passed. When Torrey published his book in 1898, reading was still one of the chief forms of entertainment for the urban and suburban middle and upper classes. In a time before radio and television, I can imagine a family gathering around a fireplace in the evening to listen to Torrey’s writings. They flow well and do not overly challenge the intellect. For all that I suspect he saw of changes in the land, Torrey rarely rebelled against the status quo. The opening passage of this blog post is a rare exception indeed. At another spot in this book, Torrey does observe how bird species appear to be changing in response to the clearing of forests, but here he offers no critique (if anything, I suspect that he welcomed what he perceived as an increase in avian biodiversity). Specifically, in comparing birds observed in North Carolina by William Brewster (a renowned ornithologist) many years previous, Torrey noted that

A few birds, too familiar to have attracted any particular notice on their own account, became interesting because of the fact that they were not included among those found here by Mr. Brewster. One of these was the Maryland yellow-throat, of which Mr. Brewster saw no signs above a level of 2100 feet… Probably the species had come in since Mr. Brewster’s day (eleven years before), with some change of local conditions, — the cutting down of a piece of forest, perhaps, and the formation of a bushy swamp in its place. A villager closely observant of such things, and well acquainted with the bird, assured me from his own recollection of the matter (and he remembered Mr. Brewster’s visit well) that such was pretty certainly the case.

Otherwise, I confess that I found little to share in this book. The ramble simply does not allow for in-depth explorations of ideas, issues, or even animal behaviors. Everything is cursory, in passing. The result may be ideal for a winter evening off-grid, but does not leave the reader much enriched in new insights. Still, may more Torrey volumes still await reading, and I will continue to seek out the few moments (like his dammed and damned passage above) where his observations and reflections shine.

The Woods and Fields Are Poem-Full: “The Face of the Fields” by Dallas Lore Sharp (1911)

 book review, Books, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Oct 052022
 
“Dallas Lore Sharp”, 2012-06-11, https://hdl.handle.net/1912/17140

We entered the tiny road (for in this kind of hunting a mouse is as good as a mink), and found ourselves descending the woods toward the garden-patch below. Halfway down we came to a great red oak, into a hole at the base of which, as into the portal of some mighty castle, ran the road of the mice. That was the end of it. There was not a single straying footprint beyond the tree.

I reached in as far as my arm would go, and drew out a fistful of pop-corn cobs. So here was part of my scanty crop ! I pushed in again, and gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-nuts, and several neatly rifled hazelnuts. This was story enough. There was a nest, or family, of mice living under the slashing pile, who for some good reason kept their stores here in the recesses of this ancient red oak. Or was this some squirrel’s barn being pilfered by the mice, as my barn is the year round ? It was not all plain. But this question, this constant riddle of the woods, small, indeed, in the case of the mouse, and involving no great fate in its solution, is part of our constant joy in the woods. Life is always new, always strange, always fascinating.

It has all been studied and classified according to species. Any one knowing the woods at all would know that these were mice-tracks, the tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and not the tracks of the jumping mouse, the house mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the whole small story of these prints ? What purpose, intention, feeling do they spell? What and why? a hundred times!

But the scientific books are dumb. Indeed, they do not consider such questions worth answering, just as under the species Mus they make no record of the fact that

The present only toucheth thee.

But that is a poem. Burns discovered that Burns, the farmer! The woods and fields are poem-full, and it is largely because we do not know, and never can know, just all that the tiny snow-prints of a wood-mouse may mean, nor understand just what

root and all, and all in all, / the humblest flower is.

The pop-corn cobs, however, were a known quantity, a tangible fact, and falling in with a gray squirrel’s track not far from the red oak, we went on, our game-bag heavier, our hearts lighter at the thought that we, by the sweat of our brow, had contributed a few ears of corn to the comfort of this snowy winter world.

The more I read the works of Dallas Lore Sharp, the more I appreciate his flair for seeing both the scientific and the poetic elements in nature. The marriage of the two, as I have observed in many past blogs, was a common theme in American nature writing of this period. Sometimes the combinations were forced, like an arranged marriage between polar opposites, enforced by an author who is either a poet or a scientist, but rarely both at once. And sometimes a lovely description is marred by bad poetry, or a poetic account is marred by poor science. But in Sharp’s finest work, the two seem supremely natural when joined together. Neither alone can capture the complexity, majesty, wonder, and magic of nature, either in our own backyard or in the remote wilds. (In Sharp’s case, mostly rural nature, close at hand.)

This volume of Sharp’s essays is a trove of delightful writing. If I had to single out a few for praise, I would certainly highlight “Turtle Eggs for Aggasiz”, a somewhat humorous second-hand account of a naturalist’s frantic effort to secure turtle eggs for the renowned scientist Louis Agassiz, under the stipulation that the eggs had to have been laid no more than four hours previously. This essay, which is about as close to a page-turner as nature writers from this era ever achieve, is frequently anthologized. (Frequently, that is, relative to practically anything else I have read for the blog thus far.) Another essay celebrates John Burroughs; however, he borrowed heavily from it for his eulogy to Burroughs, The Seer of Slabsides, after the author’s death. The title essay, “The Face of the Fields”, celebrates the childlike quality of nature, in contrast to adults’ feelings of fear and dread we feel as we confront death in its many guises:

We cannot go far into the fields without sight-ing the hawk and the snake, the very shapes of Death. The dread Thing, in one form or another, moves everywhere, down every wood-path and pasture-lane, through the black close waters of the mill-pond, out under the open of the winter sky, night and day, and every day, the four seasons through. I have seen the still surface of a pond break suddenly with a swirl, and flash a hundred flecks of silver into the light, as the minnows leap from the jaws of the pike. Then a loud rattle, a streak of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl, and I see the pike, twisting and bending in the beak of the kingfisher. The killer is killed; but at the mouth of the nest-hole in the steep sandbank, swaying from a root in the edge of the turf above, hangs the black snake, the third killer, and the belted kingfisher, dropping the pike, darts off with a cry. I have been afield at times when one tragedy has followed another in such rapid and continuous succession as to put a whole shining, singing, blossoming world under a pall. Everything has seemed to cower, skulk, and hide, to run as if pursued. There was no peace, no stirring of small life, not even in the quiet of the deep pines; for here a hawk would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping, or I would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his keen hungry face an instant as he halted, winding me.

Fox and snake and hawk are real, but not the absence of peace and joy except within my own breast. There is struggle and pain and death in the woods, and there is fear also, but the fear does not last long; it does not haunt and follow and terrify; it has no being, no substance, no continu- ance. The shadow of the swiftest scudding cloud is not so fleeting as this shadow in the woods, this Fear. The lowest of the animals seem capable of feeling it; yet the very highest of them seem incapable of dreading it; for them Fear is not of the imagination, but of the sight, and of the passing moment.

The present only toucheth thee!

It does more, it throngs him our fellow mortal of the stubble field, the cliff, and the green sea. Into the present is lived the whole of his life — none of it is left to a storied past, none sold to a mortgaged future. And the whole of this life is action; and the whole of this action is joy. The moments of fear in an animal’s life are moments of reaction, negative, vanishing. Action and joy are constant, the joint laws of all animal life, of all nature, from the shining stars that sing together, to the roar of a bitter northeast storm across these wintry fields.

We shall get little rest and healing out of nature until we have chased this phantom Fear into the dark of the moon. It is a most difficult drive. The pursued too often turns pursuer, and chases us back into our burrows, where there is nothing but the dark to make us afraid. If every time a bird cries in alarm, a mouse squeaks with pain, or a rabbit leaps in fear from beneath our feet, we, too, leap and run, dodging the shadow as if it were at our own heels, then we shall never get farther toward the open fields than Chuchundra, the muskrat, gets toward the middle of the bun- galow floor. We shall always creep around by the wall, whimpering.

But there is no such thing as fear out of doors. There was, there will be; you may see it for an instant on your walk to-day, or think you see it; but there are the birds singing as before, and as before the red squirrel, under cover of large words, is prying into your purposes. The universal chorus of nature is never stilled. This part, or that, may cease for a moment, for a season it may be, only to let some other part take up the strain; as the winter’s deep bass voices take it from the soft lips of the summer, and roll it into thunder, until the naked hills seem to rock to the measures of the song.

As nature lives only in the moment, fear and dread are largely absent. The predator strikes and kills, then death departs again — its presence a fleeting shadow, quickly forgotten again. At the close of the essay, Sharp reprises this theme in a haunting, poetic passage that explains the meaning of the essay title:

Life, like Law and Matter, is all of one piece. The horse in my stable, the robin, the toad, the beetle, the vine in my garden, the garden itself, and I together with them all, come out of the same divine dust ; we all breathe the same divine breath; we have our beings under the same divine law; only they do not know that the law, the breath, and the dust are divine. If I do know, and yet can so readily forget such knowledge, can so hardly cease from being, can so eternally find the purpose, the hope, the joy of life within me, how soon for them, my lowly fellow mortals, must vanish all sight of fear, all memory of pain! And how abiding with them, how compelling, the necessity to live! And in their unquestioning obedience what joy!

The face of the fields is as changeful as the face of a child. Every passing wind, every shifting cloud, every calling bird, every baying hound, every shape, shadow, fragrance, sound, and tremor, are so many emotions reflected there. But if time and experience and pain come, they pass utterly away; for the face of the fields does not grow old or wise or seamed with pain. It is always the face of a child, asleep in winter, awake in summer, a face of life and health always, if we will but see what pushes the falling leaves off, what lies in slumber under the covers of the snow; if we will but feel the strength of the north wind, and the wild fierce joy of the fox and hound as they course the turning, tangling paths of the woodlands in their race with one another against the record set by Life.

One other particularly noteworthy essay in this volume is “The Nature-Writer”, which sheds light upon the character of the Nature Writing Movement of the time. Early in the essay, Sharp observes that “the nature-writer has now evolved into a distinct, although undescribed, literary species.” Sharp goes on to attempt to elucidate what characterizes him (or her, though usually him):

…the nature-writer, while he may be more or less of a scientist, is never mere scientist — zoologist or botanist. Animals are not his theme; flowers are not his theme. Nothing less than the universe is his theme, as it pivots on him, around the distant boundaries of his immediate neighborhood.

His is an emotional, not an intellectual, point of view; a literary, not a scientific, approach; which means that he is the axis of his world, its great circumference, rather than any fact any flower, or star, or tortoise. Now to the scientist the tortoise is the thing: the particular species Tbalassochelys kempi; of the family Testudinidse; of the order Chelonia; of the class Reptilia; of the branch Vertebrata. But the nature-writer never pauses over this matter to capitalize it. His tortoise may or may not come tagged with this string of distinguishing titles. A tortoise is a tortoise for a’ that, particularly if it should happen to be an old Sussex tortoise which has been kept for thirty years in a yard by the nature-writer’s friend, and which [quoting Gibert White] “On the 1st November began to dig the ground in order to the forming of its hybernaculum, which it had fixed on just beside a great tuft of hepaticas.”

The nature-writer also becomes deeply familiar with a particular spot of Earth, inhabiting it deeply and sharing its lessons with readers.

It is characteristic of the nature-writer… to bring home his outdoors, to domesticate his nature, to relate it all to himself. His is a dooryard universe, his earth a flat little planet turning about a hop-pole in his garden — a planet mapped by fields, ponds, and cow-paths, and set in a circumfluent sea of neighbor townships, beyond whose shores he neither goes to church, nor works out his taxes on the road, nor votes appropriations for the schools.

He is limited to his parish because he writes about only so much of the world as he lives in, as touches him, as makes for him his home…

It is a large love for the earth as a dwelling-place, a large faith in the entire reasonableness of its economy, a large joy in all its manifold life, that moves the nature-writer. He finds the earth most marvelously good to live in — himself its very dust; a place beautiful beyond his imagination, and interesting past his power to realize — a mystery every way he turns. He comes into it as a settler into a new land, to clear up so much of the wilderness as he shall need for a home.

Alas, Sharp’s examples of nature writers are mostly the familars — Gilbert White, Henry David Thoreau, and John Burroughs. (“In none of our nature-writers… is this love for the earth more manifest than in John Burroughs. It is constant and dominant in him, an expression of his religion.”) Later in the essay, Sharp does make brief reference to Dr. C. C. Abbott and Maruice Maeterlinck (Belgian playwright and author of The Life of the Bee). But no others make the cut — not even Bradford Torrey. Alas, “the sad case with much nature-writing… is that it not only fails to answer to genuine observation, but it also fails to answer to genuine emotion. Often as we detect the unsound natural history, we much oftener are aware of the unsound, the insincere, art of the author.” Here, it would have been most helpful for Sharp to identify a few particular authors and their works, as a caution to the reader. Which of the many nature authors I have read, I wonder, would Sharp have placed in this category?

Sharp closes his essay with this poetic passage about good nature writing. Essentially, good nature writing is true to life, expressing an abiding love of the natural world.

Good nature-literature, like all good literature, is more lived than written. Its immortal part hath elsewhere than the ink-pot its beginning. The soul that rises with it, its life’s star, first went down behind a horizon of real experience, then rose from a human heart, the source of all true feeling, of all sincere form. Good nature-writing particularly must have a pre-literary existence as lived reality; its writing must be only the necessary accident of its being lived again in thought. It will be something very human, very natural, warm, quick, irregular, imperfect, with the imperfections and irregularities of life. And the nature-writer will be very human, too, and so very faulty; but he will have no lack of love for nature, and no lack of love for the truth. Whatever else he does, he will never touch the flat, disquieting note of make-believe. He will never invent, never pretend, never pose, never shy. He will be honest which is nothing unusual for birds and rocks and stars ; but for human beings, and for nature-writers very particularly, it is a state less common, perhaps, than it ought to be.

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