Living with Reverence: “The Outermost House” by Henry Beston, 1928

 Birds, Books, Natural History, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Jun 262020
 
Aprof2 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

CAUGHT UP IN POETIC WONDER, I HAVE COME HOME. In Beston’s writing, I glimpse nature as elemental force pervading the planet, flowing through our veins, rooting us to the land, to each other, to the sea, to the sky. I share the Outermost House with him, gazing reflectively into the hearth, peering out the window into a thunderstorm, seeing the swirl of birds just beyond the doorway in the dunes. Having read six previous nature writers, all struggling to convey something of what it is to encounter the natural world, I find success at last in Beston’s prose. All six authors — Treat, Torrey, Thomas, Burroughs, Stratton-Porter, Flagg — struggled to combine scientific scrutiny with poetic rapture. Their solution, time and again, was to riddle their prose with snatches of poetry — Emerson, Whitman, or even original work. Poetry and prose remained separate, apart. The prose spoke of wonder at times, yet never fully realized it. Until now. In “The Outermost House”, Beston has brought the two together at last, crafting some of the most soaring, magnificent sentences I have ever read. There is scientific insight here, and there is wonder here too. I am not quite clear where one ends and the other begins. Here, for instance, Beston explains how he came to take up solitary residence there, in words that could have been written just yesterday:

The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and of the year. The flux and reflux of ocean, the incomings of waves, the gatherings of birds, the pilgrimages of the peoples of the sea, winter and storm, the splendor of autumn and the holiness of spring — all these were part of the great beach. The longer I stayed, the more eager was I to know this coast and share its mysterious and elemental life….

THERE IS CLARITY AND WHOLENESS — AND HOLINESS — TO “THE OUTERMOST HOUSE”. Beston’s small cabin, the fo’c’sle, is positioned within a field of elemental forces — wind and wave and the life-energy of the schooling fish and flocking seabirds. And it is situated in a liminal space, between ocean water and salt marsh. Human presences are there, but isolated and largely predictable — the regular beats of the Coast Guard walking from the station at Nauset Light in the north, southward to a half-way house (a small structure lying halfway to the next station), then back to Nauset Light again. Beston would watch the time for the moment of their passage, hoping for a knock on the door, hot coffee prepared for the visitor. His world was contained, whole, and at once both austere and rich without measure: “…there is always reserve and mystery, always something beyond, on earth and sea something which nature, honouring, conceals.” And always overhead, the Sun, whose seasonal wanderings traverse the pages of Beston’s book:

We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy of it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.

FOR BESTON, NATURE, TOO, IS ELEMENTAL — AN ENERGY FLOWING THROUGH ALL BEINGS, NOT STRICTLY CONTAINED IN DISTINCT FORMS, BUT A FECUND FIELD OF POSSIBILITY. “Dwelling thus upon the dunes,” he explained, “I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy…. Life is as much a force in the universe as electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains life.”

WITHOUT DOUBT, BESTON’S “THE OUTERMOST HOUSE” IS ONE OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF NATURE WRITING EVER WRITTEN. He is renowned today chiefly as a regional writer, a naturalist who captured vividly life on the Cape Cod shore and, quite a few years later, on a farm in Maine (“Northern Farm”, 1948). “The Outermost House” is still in print, though that is not true of his other books. The book stands above the others I have read for several reasons. As I noted at the opening of this post, Beston merged science and poetry into a single, powerful voice, and used that voice to enchant the reader with the experience of life on the shore of Cape Cod. He also constructed a single, highly coherent work that spanned a natural passage of time (a year) — though, like Thoreau with Walden, he actually condensed the experiences of about two years down to one. For months, Beston gave himself fully to the experience of inhabiting the world, observing the birds and ants and growing dune grasses during the daytime, and writing into the evening. I sense, too, that Beston, in the wake of his years as a foreign war correspondent in Europe and stationed aboard a US destroyer, hungered for the deep, elemental engagement with the cosmos that living in the Outermost House offered him. The results were moments of wonder, awe, and deep insight — such as this famous passage about animals — the myriad other beings with which we share this planet — with which I will close this brief essay:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feature magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

AS A POSTSCRIPT, I WILL SHARE BRIEFLY ABOUT THE COPY OF THE BOOK THAT I READ THIS WEEK. Limited by financial considerations, I stopped short of buying a first edition hardcover of this work; eBay currently offers a signed copy of the work for merely $5,000 (but at least there is free shipping). I settled for a Viking Compass Edition paperback in its 11th printing from September, 1969. It included a forward written by Beston to mark the 20th anniversary of the work in 1949. The font and typesetting, at least, were the same as in the original hardcover edition. The back cover includes the text of a plaque placed on the house in a 1964 ceremony declaring it a National Literary Landmark. Beston actually attended the ceremony; it was his final visit there. (Unfortunately, the fo’c’sle was washed out to sea in a winter storm in February, 1978.) The brief bio of the author on the back cover of my book uses present tense to describe Beston, though he had actually died a year and a half before my copy was printed. As for the book’s history, it contains no marks that would offer clues, except for a bookseller’s stamp for the Fireside Book Shop in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a small town east of Cleveland.

The Poetic Eye: “The Round Year” by Edith Thomas, 1886

 Backyard Nature, Birds, Books, Geometry and Nature, Natural History, Night  2 Responses »
Jun 172020
 

I find the night, like the cup of Comus, “mixed with many murmurs.” First and the nearest at hand, the lively orchestration of the crickets (the later summer adds the fife of a grasshopper and the castanets of the katydid); then, in the distance, the regular, sonorous, or snoring antiphonies of the frogs at different points along the winding course of the creek. It would not surprise me to learn that these night musicians are systematically governed by the baton and metronome, so well do they keep time in the perplexing fugue movement which they are performing.

THANK GOODNESS FOR WIKIPEDIA, OR ELSE EDITH THOMAS WOULD HAVE LOST ME ON HER VERY FIRST LINE. Comus, it turns out, was the Greek god of festivities and revels. A god of excess, he represents anarchy and chaos. He was cup-bearer for Dionysus, Greek god of wine and fertility, so it is fairly easy to guess what Comus’ cup contained. Knowing this adds a contextual richness to Thomas’ imagery; the sense of chaos and wildness is juxtaposed with the “orchestration” of the “night musicians”. I glimpse a poet at work here.

EDITH THOMAS WAS FIRST AND FOREMOST A POET, FAMOUS IN HER DAY AND COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN NOW. Her poetry is tightly constructed, flowery, and ornate. Fortunately for her, and we in the 21st century, she also wrote a single book of nature essays, “The Round Year”, published in 1886. Written shortly after Thomas moved from her native northern Ohio to New York City (where she remained the rest of her life), the book is infused with a bittersweet longing for her home place. (“Who knows whether soul or body pines more for the familiar environment?” she asks in the book’s first essay. “Have wood, field, rock, and stream vested in us something of theirs? Or have we parted our spirit among them, that separation touches us so sorely?”) The title of her book comes from a poem by Emerson with these lines, “Cleave to thine acre; the round year / will fetch all fruits and virtues here.” In this, my third book journey, the pendulum has swung a full arc, from a scientist who seasoned her careful observations with a few poetic passages (Mary Treat) to a poetic rambler with a keen eye for birds and trees (Bradford Torrey) to a dedicated lifelong poet, well versed in literature and Greco-Roman mythology.

IT IS EASY SOMETIMES TO DROWN IN THOMAS’ LITERARY ALLUSIONS, WONDERING AT THE POINT OF IT ALL. There are certainly obstacles to accessing her work. By this, I mean not only the mythological thickets abounding in her prose but also her poetic flights of fancy that sometimes left me wondering if it all might be condensed to a pithy sentence or two instead. It is easy to write her off as lost in raptures of poetic fancy and musings of obscure myth, disconnected from nature. And then the minute I decide that, I find a passage that convinces me that she is, in fact, a perceptive observer of the natural world:

A strange servitude is this of the oak to the cynips, or gall-fly, in thus contributing of his substance to the housing and nourishment of his enemy’s offspring. The mischievous sylph selects sometimes the vein of a leaf, sometimes a stem, which she stings, depositing a minute egg in the wounded tissues. As soon, at least, as the egg hatches, the gall begins to form about the larva, simulating a fruity thriftiness, remaining green through the summer, but assuming at length the russet of autumn. The innocent acorn nature puts to bed as early as possible, that it may make a healthy, wealthy, and wise beginning on a spring morning; but the cradle that holds the gall-fly’s child she carelessly rocks above ground all winter.

THERE IS SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY HERE, THOUGH CLOTHED IN POETIC TRAPPINGS. Replace the sylph — an imaginary aerial spirit — with a wasp, and you have a fairly robust description of the formation of an oak gall. And sometimes Thomas’ poetic insights can even shift from being an obstacle to understanding to offering the reader a path toward an alternative way of encountering the world, a reminder that a successful scientist needs imagination and wonder, too. Consider this image:

Would you for a while shut out the earth and fill your eye with the heavens, lie down, some summer day, on the great mother’s lap., with a soft grass pillow under your head; then look around and above you, and see how slight, apparently, is your terrestrial environment, how foreshortened has become the foreground — only a few nodding bents of blossomed grass, a spray of clover with a bumble-bee probing for honey, and in the distance, perhaps the billowy outline of the diminished woods. What else you see is the blue of heaven illimitably stretched above and beyond you. You seem to by lying not so much on the surface of earth as at the bottom of the sky.

Consider, too, this lovely blending of mathematics and flowing water:

In cooler and deeper retirement, on languid summer afternoons, this flowing philosopher sometimes geometrizes. It is always of circles — circles intersecting, tangent, or inclusive. A fish darting to the surface affords the central starting-point of a circle whose radius and circumference are incalculable, since the eye fails to detect where it fades into nothingness. Multiplied intersections there may be, but without one curve marring the smooth expansion of another. There are hints of infinity to be gathered from this transient water-ring, as well as from the orb of the horizon at sea.

DESPITE THEIR DIFFERENCES IN WRITTEN VOICE, TREAT AND THOMAS SHARED MUCH COMMON GROUND. For instance, just as Treat studied nature in the field (the backyard or the further woods), so Thomas spoke strongly of the need to engage with living nature, instead of collecting dead specimens. On the very first page of “The Round Year”, for instance, she addressed the reader thus:

You come, eager and aggressive, on your specialist’s errand, whatever it may be — botany, ornithology, or other; you may take hence, perforce, a large number and variety of specimens, press the flower, embalm the bird; but a “dry garden” and a case of still-life are poor showings for the true natural history of flower or bird.

ANOTHER COMMON ELEMENT IS THAT BOTH WRITERS ENCOUNTERED A KINGFISHER AND DESCRIBED IT TO THE READER. A comparison of the two accounts provides further insight into their different approaches to observing birds. First, Mary Treat:

The belted kingfisher (Ceryle alycyon) is another familiar bird that frequents the grounds. His name indicates his occupation, and a very successful fisher he is. His fishing-post is on the railing that runs along the wharf. The wharf extends from the grounds about two hundred and fifty feet into the river. Whether he remains at this post the entire year I do not know; we find him here upon our arrival, and leave him here when we depart for the North. I am inclined to think that his permanent residence; at all events, he objects to being disturbed, as if he had been sole manager too long to yield the ground without a loud protest. If more than one person geos upon the wharf, he leaves with a clang and clatter which sound like a watchman’s rattle. and usually flies to the terrace, and alights upon a small tree bending over the water, where he can overlook and watch proceedings. But he does not seem to be afraid of one person alone; if I go upon the wharf unaccompanied, he flits along before me, alighting upon the railing, often not more than fifteen or twenty feet distant, and faces about as if to intimidate me. Seeing this I quietly drop upon a seat; for really, with his rumpled crest and fierce-looking black eyes, he looks rather formidable, being a foot or more in length. Seeming to be satisfied that I am under subjection, he goes on with his fishing, in which he is very expert. Motionless he eyes the finny tribes beneath him until one of their number comes within his range to suit his taste, when he dives under the water and brings it up; and now beating it upon the railing until it is quite limp, he swallows it. Small fish-scales are scattered along the entire length of the railing, where he has dressed his fish preparatory to taking his meals.

And now a very different account of a kingfisher (likely a different species, one found along Lake Erie in Ohio) from the pen of Edith Thomas:

There were fish taken under my observation, though not by line or net. I did not fish, yet I felt warranted in sharing the triumphs of the sport when, for the space of ten minutes or more, I had maintained most cautious silence, while that accomplished angler, the kingfisher, perches on a stately elm branch over the water, was patiently waiting the chance of an eligible haul. I had, meanwhile, a good opportunity for observing this to me wholly wild and unrelated adventurous bird. Its great head and mobile crest, like a helmet of feathers, its dark blue glossy coat and white neck-cloth, make it a sufficiently striking individual anywhere. No wonder the kingfisher is specially honored by poetic legend. I must admit that whenever I chanced to see this bird about the stream it was faultless, halcyon weather.

IT IS AMAZING TO THINK THAT BOTH AUTHORS ARE ENCOUNTERING THE SAME BIRD. I have to confess that Treat’s kingfisher strikes me as far more believable than Thomas’s. Perhaps that is in part because Treat sought to interact with the kingfisher, while Thomas instead watched it quietly from a distance. Treat’s kingfisher emerges as a unique character, while Thomas’s is inextricably part of a semi-mythical landscape, with one foot on an elm branch and the other lost in the mists of “poetic legend”.

AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY PARTICULAR VOLUME. I managed to locate an 1886 copy, the first (and, I suspect, only) edition. It is an austere volume, bound in army gray without ornamentation apart from the title and author in gold on the spine. It was once Number 2973 at Belding Memorial Library but was stamped Discard at some point. Curious about where my book had been, I tracked down the library. There are two Belding Libraries. There is one in Michigan, but I do not think that is the correct one, since that is technically the Alvah N. Belding Library (in Belding, Michigan). More likely, this book was once held by the Belding Memorial Library in Ashfield, Massachusetts, pictured below.

Day 196: After the Cardinal’s Last Flight

 Backyard Nature, Piney Woods Church Road 365 Project  6 Responses »
Jul 152014
 

I could not avoid today’s image.  The dead cardinal, head crushed and body mostly decomposed but with feathers still retaining a bright red sheen, lay on the dirt and gravel just a few feet from where cars and trucks raced by along Rico Road.    After hesitating a moment, I quickly snapped a single photograph, reassuring myself that it was “for documentary purposes only” and that I would undoubtedly discover something else on my walk.  Only, I didn’t.  I unenthusiastically took a couple of photographs of a new black cherry leaf, and tried (without much success) to catch an orb-weaving spider in the midst of wrapping a giant fly caught in her web.  But I knew, as I walked up to Hutcheson Ferry Road and back again, that I had already found the day’s subject.  So when I returned to where the cardinal lay, I stopped for a few more photographs; the one below was the last I took before continuing toward home.

For 195 days, I have largely avoided death in my photography.  When I first considered photographs that evoke wonder, I tended to think of springtime and new growth, or else the play of shadows and light on the trees and grass.  As an occasional oblique memento mori, I might photograph some fallen leaves or wildflowers past their peak.  But today, I came to accept, at last, that death is a source of wonder, and that wonder can sometimes be tinged with sorrow and loss.  Death is, after all, the ultimate mystery of our lives.  It waits on the edges of our vision, lingering there in the shadows, occasionally emerging into our noonday hours when we lose a parent, a spouse, a dear friend.  Each time that happens, we are compelled to recognize how precious our hours and days are, and how vital it is that we live them deeply and fully, sucking the marrow out of life, as my mentor H.D. Thoreau once wrote.  Confronting death, whether that of another or even our own in the midst of a terminal illness, can serve to accentuate the delight we can find in simple everyday experiences and things, if we allow that to happen.  And without the prospect of death, would our potential for wonder and awe be as great as it is?  When we know that the only certainty is here and now, we can open up to the incredible possibilities each and every moment may offer us.

 

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From the Morning

 Backyard Nature, Golden Hour, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Apr 102014
 

I had a marvelous time exploring Piney Woods Church Road this morning.  Strange to say, I walked the its length hundreds of times with our dogs before I began this project, and I was bored with it and really wanted to be anyplace but there.  Yet since beginning this project 100 days ago, every day I have found joy and delight exploring this 4/10-mile gravel road.  Today I left my wristwatch at home, and spent an hour and a half exploring the early morning light.  Here are a few more photographs from my day’s adventures.

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Day 94: Eastern Towhee

 Backyard Nature, Natural History, Piney Woods Church Road 365 Project  No Responses »
Apr 042014
 

On my walk late this morning, I was serenaded by the shrill calls of an Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus), perched in the undergrowth along the roadside.   I am not a birder, and have no intentions of beginning a life list.  But I am pleased to say that this is a species of sparrow that I had never seen before.

Eastern Towee

 

Appreciating Urban Wildlife

 Natural History  4 Responses »
Mar 072014
 

Earlier today, I visited a public garden near my home.  I was there in the late afternoon on a Friday, and the grounds were nearly deserted.  Squirrels raced about, carrying bits of trash or snacking on the various garden plants.  I also heard — and saw — numerous cardinals.  The squirrels posed for me and the cardinals stayed put long enough to turn and look at me once or even twice.  By comparison, the Piney Woods Church Road wildlife is exceedingly skittish.  The other day, I glimpsed my first cardinal along the roadway, but it vanished long before I could bring it into focus with my camera.  I have seen a few squirrels, but always from a distance, and always racing away from me as rapidly as possible.  Their urban cousins are so much more affable with regard to being photographed.  I suspect this is, in good part, because of all the food (human litter and various plants) available in the gardens.  I suspect people try to feed the squirrels from time to time, too.  Whatever the cause(s), the result was some charming images.

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