Nature-Study Sisters: “Among Green Trees” (1902) by Julia Ellen Rogers, and “The Brook Book” (1901) by Mary Rogers Miller

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place, Spirituality  No Responses »
Feb 032024
 

SISTER ELLEN had never seen the trailing arbutus in its native woods. The rills and brooks near the city had been so greatly “improved” by their contact with civilization that scarcely a leaf remained to suggest the sweetness of the Mayflower. It had retreated before the ever-advancing army of flower pickers with baskets and grasping hands. With it had gone the pinxter- flower, and even the more rugged columbine had been driven to establish itself on the steep sides of the gorges, where no human foot had ever trod...

…one azalea remained in our near-by woods and a chosen few knew its station. It served us for a calendar. When its buds were pink at the points we knew that the north slope of Tower Hill would be covered with arbutus and the south side with pink azaleas. With baskets and small black pail we started, Sister Ellen, the Doctor and I.

We followed the course of the stream, making our own path as we went. Ellen pounced upon the first promising bit of green which showed under the carpet of dead leaves. It proved to be a small plant of arbutus too young to have a blossom. “Wait till we get farther down,” I advised knowingly.

We were coming to the arbutus country, by the signs which we who had been there aforetime recognized. Soon now the patient scrapings of Sister Ellen would be rewarded. We must keep near her and catch the glow of her first “fine frenzy.” For the twentieth time she dropped to her knees among the dead _ leaves. This time was her reward. There lay the most exquisite clusters, like pink ivory, delicately wrought. The faint elusive perfume enslaved us all. Down on your knees and offer homage to this woodland princess!

The turn of the century (from the 19th into the 20th) marked the apex of the Nature-Study Movement. Its purpose and principles are worthy of many blog posts if not a book or two. Inspired in part by Liberty Hyde Bailey, professor of horticulture at Cornell University, Nature-study was an approach to teaching children about the natural world through direct observation and guided inquiry. Led by an inquisitive teacher (who was likely far from being a nature expert herself), children would ramble out-of-doors, find a particular thing of interest (insect, plant, stream, etc.), and study it closely. They might be asked to sketch the object, and/or come up with different questions to ask about it. The intention was far less to teach natural history content than it was to guide children into a greater appreciation and wonder about the everyday natural landscape all around them (whether in rural places or cities). Other figures in the New York State branch of Nature-study education (there was another that emerged in Chicago) included author/educator Anna Botsford Comstock (who wrote The Handbook of Nature Study, still in print) and her husband, the entomologist and author John Henry Comstock, to whom The Brook Book was dedicated. (Comstock is “the Doctor” in the passage above.) Mentored by Bailey and the Comstocks, sisters Mary Rogers Miller (1868-1971) and Julia Ellen Rogers (1866-1958) pursued careers in Nature-study, first in Ithaca, New York, and later in Long Beach and Los Angeles, California, respectively. Early in their careers, while still in Upstate New York, they both authored nature books of their own. Encouraged by Liberty Hyde Bailey, Julia Ellen wrote a general book on trees, covering their structure, propagation, and care, along with a guide to the most common trees of the Northeast. Mary, inspired by John Comstock, wrote a book on streams with an emphasis on aquatic life, especially insects. Julia Ellen does not mention her sister, but Mary refers to “Sister Ellen” in several places, including the text above, which tells the story of Julia Ellen’s first encounter with blooming arbutus.

At first, I found The Brook Book a puzzling read. It consists of a series of vignettes chronicling nature expeditions, arranged seasonally to begin with spring and end with wintertime. But while her sister devoted several pages to explaining the design and rationale behind Among Green Trees, Mary explained the purpose behind her own book in much simpler terms: “Throughout a year a brook is captivating. It is as companionable as a child, and as changeful. It hints at mysteries. But does it tell secrets other than its own? Does it tell where the wild things come down to drink? Does it tell where the birds take their baths, or where the choice wild flowers lurk? I fain would know the story of its playfellows and dependents.” Between the lines of this playful, teasing account is some hint, perhaps, of her audience might be — the child within all of us, old and young alike.

That said, the first several dozen pages favored the young. I enjoyed the writing, but learned nothing new and encountered little of note. Then I came upon a chapter about how spiders spin their webs. Mary quoted briefly from a nature guidebook that explained how orb weavers begin constructing their webs by spinning a series of guy lines, using dry and rigid thread so that they can support the entire structure while being easy for the spider to traverse readily. Only then does the spider spin its web of sticky and elastic threads — not in concentric circles, but instead a continuous spiral. She then set out to find an orb web herself and see how it was built. Indeed, her own observations matched what she head read. But reading it alone was not enough. For my own part, reading her book almost 125 years after it was written, I confess that I had never stopped to think about how spiders build their webs. Somewhere along the line, I just assumed the webs consisted of a series of concentric circles, not single spirals. There was how it was done — hiding all this time in plain sight, in a web on the railing of a bridge over a brook. “After seeing all these things happen,” Mary observed, “we know the philosophy of the two kinds of threads, but the wonder of it is still with us.” And that wonder is the the ultimate prize of the Nature-study enthusiast. The book contains other intriguing discoveries, including a hypothesized “cow shed”, a “curious, muddy-looking” object on the stem of a shrub that John Comstock claims was built by ants to house a herd of aphids. (The aphidse secret a sugary substance that the ants feed on, receiving in exchange protection from would-be insect predators.) I admit to being skeptical regarding that one.

One of my favorite passages in the book, though, is a stern critique of a neighbor’s utilitarian outlook on the value of nature — an anthropromorphic one that, I fear, matches that of many Americans today:

…we are told that both the back-swimmer and the waterboatman grow, as do other insects of their order, by successive molts or changes of skin. They reach maturity, if they escape their enemies, and spend the winter at the bottom, as did their parents.

After enthusiastically describing these business-like little creatures to a neighbor one day, even persuading her to go with me and watch them in Meadow Brook, I was chilled and fairly disgusted at her question: “What are they good for?”

How could I answer her? Of the added joy of existence which they had given to me, I hadn’t the heart to speak. Her question told me that no such “foolishness” would appeal to her. Neither could I make her understand that, so far as I was concerned, no utility need be assigned to any creature as an excuse for its presence among us. As well ask: “What use, to them, are we?” But I saw she expected me to speak up in defense of these denizens of Meadow Brook, and so I said: “Oh, food for fish!”—a lame response and totally unfounded on personal observation. A conciliatory “Umph!” assured me that my reply was entirely satisfactory, as there could be no question in any one’s mind as to the use of fish.

…that intelligent grown people should demand a reason for the existence of every other creature is nearly unforgivable. May the time soon come when the silly superstitions about animals and plants will cease to be visited upon the third and fourth generation, and supplanted by personal knowledge of nature. Man will become more tolerant of other creatures and less sure, perhaps, of his own exalted position in the universe. Let us hope that he will then see himself as others see him and begin to learn to love his neighbor as himself.

A hearty “Amen” to that, Mary! I also found myself nodding in agreement at the high value she placed on ferns — much in keeping with the Victorian fascination for them: “Who ever had enough of ferns? They are always the right thing in the right place.” I will close my account of The Brook Book with this charming passage extolling the joys of a winter nature walk:

I shall never again allow myself to be mewed up between walls of brick and mortar for any length of time. The arching tree-tops are temples which call to worship. Their voices and the murmur of the ice-rimmed stream mingle like soft music from a far-off organ. I will go often, and be lifted out of the humdrum of every-day existence. The outdoor world is full of life in winter. To know this life one needs only to be open-eyed and open-hearted; the spirit of winter is ever ready to guide, to cheer and to bless.

Among Green Trees offered quite a contrast. Julia explained that she had crafted an “all-around tree book” offering no less than four different points of view: the Nature-study side; the physiological side; the practical side; and the systematic side”. Ellen herself clearly favored the nature-study side, and I would have to concur. The portions of the book covering the wonders of buds, branches, and bark were by far the most fascinating. Indeed, once the book transitioned into chapters on planting and caring for trees (including when and how to spray them with various toxic chemicals) I lost interest. I considered reading the detailed accounts of different trees (systematic side), but opted to be satisfied with having read on the the first half of the book (though, given the oversized pages and modest font, that was still considerable text).

Although Julia comes across as a bit more sophisticated and professional in tone, she comes alive when speaking about her true passion, Nature-study. “Nature-study,” she announces, “is a keen, appreciative study of the common things around us. It means accurate seeing and clear thinking. Nature-study is the most vital idea today in education. It is studying things instead of studying about things. Under it, the commonplace becomes transfigured.” It is intriguing to note that her choice of “transfigured” echoes the religious tone of her sister’s description of tree-tops as “temples which call to worship.” There is a spiritual, transformational facet to Nature-study, one that is largely neglected (or outright avoided) in environmental education programs nowadays.

Lest we get too serious, Julie also reminds her readers of the joy that can be found learning from nature. In a chapter on how leaves are arranged on branches, she observes that “Leaf-arrangement is intensely interesting, when we come to study it. The botanists try to scare the common folks away by calling it Phyllobotany. But they can’t keep the fun all to themselves. Let us get into their pleasant game.“

IJulia clearly loved trees, and went out of her way to describe them as akin to human beings. Indeed, the subtitle of her book is “A Guide to Pleasant and Profitable Acquaintance with Familar Trees“. Early on in the work, she observes that “Trees speak a language, if only we have the patience to learn it. It’s a sign language, and through it they tell us all manner of interesting things about how they make their living — about their hopes and their disappointments.” A bit later in the book, in a chapter called The Sleep of Trees, she declares that “Trees are, after all, very much like folks! …In winter, trees put on their warmest coats — a fashion set by the woodchuck and the bear — and just sleep and wait for spring! In warm weather a tree goes to sleep at sundown, and wakes up in the morning. If the sky is overcast, the tree is drowsy; if rain sets in, it goes right off to sleep.” One reviewer felt compelled to remark on the “many unscientific and misleading statements” in the book, particularly her lines about trees sleeping: “We suppose that this is a reference to the photosynthetic process, but to the uninitiated this would convey the idea that the tree is actually drowsy in the same sense that animals are.” Ironically, recent research on plants has revealed that they “behave” in particular ways and even have an innate, though highly distributed, “intelligence”.

Reading books that are 100 years old or more, I sometimes find myself a bit jarred by having passed into a long-gone world. In the case of Among Green Trees, this experience took the form of images and passages concerning elm trees. Thanks to the ravages of Dutch elm disease, it has been more than 50 years now since any elms could be found in backyards and along city streets. Julia opens her book with a lengthy quote from an 1841 article by Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (her abolitionist grandfather), part of which celebrates the elm:

And the elm — the patriarch of the family of shade, the majestic, the umbrageous, the antlered elm! We remember one at this moment — in sight from our own home on the banks of the Pemigewassett. It stood just across that cold stream, by the roadside, on the margin of the wide intervale. It stood upon the ground as lightly as though “it rose in dance,” its full top bending over toward the ground on every side with the dignity of the forest tree, and all the grace of the weeping willow. You could gaze upon it for hours. It was the beautify handy-work and architecture of God, on which the eye of man never tires, but always looks with refreshing and delight.

Julia herself extolled the glories of a New England village lined with elms:

Especially impressive to me was the little village whose main street forms the frontispiece of this volume. It is hardly what you would eall a populous village. There is just this one long avenue, with a few little feints at cross streets; no railroad, no factory, no noise, no bustle—just the quiet industries of a village whose commerce is with the thrifty farmer folk round about. It is not a village you could duplicate in the west, for the houses are century old, solidly built, and mostly innocent of paint. There are lilacs, purple and white, leaning up against the houses, and quaint, old-fashioned gardens shut in behind low picket fences.

The glory of the old place is its double row of superb American elms, which arch above the long street, intermingling their tops, and making of it a shadowy aisle with vaulted arches, like some vast cathedral. Long ago the villagers dug little trees im the neighboring woods and lined the road on both sides with them. Then they let them alone! Violets and ferns came with them from the woods, and spread undisturbed in their new environment. To-day they may still be seen among the gnarled roots of the patriarchal trees, springing out here and there as they have been doing for a hundred years.

Alas, the elms are long gone now, relics of another age.

Directions Home: East and West (1912) and North and South (1913) by Stanton Davis Kirkham

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Jan 162024
 

The appreciative mind will cherish this estate,not less for that which is local in its significance, than for that which is typical of the whole. It will desire to find itself equally at home either in the North or the South, either in the East or the West, nowhere a stranger among the birds and flowers of America, nowhere a stranger to plant lore and bird traditions…

For the present I desire nothing better than to reflect, if possible, this spirit of the North and of the South, as do the birch and the cypress: to communicate by description, but perhaps even more by wholly intangible means, a sense of certain regions…remember that they are parts of one and the same estate in nature.

After an endless procession of books on rambles in nature (a genre of which Abbott and Torrey are consummate masters), it was deeply refreshing to embark on this pair of books by Stanton Davis Kirkham (1868-1944) which appear to carry a theme of looking at differences between natural environments in the West, East, South(east), and North(east). The earlier of the two even carries the subtitle, “Comparative Studies of Nature in Eastern and Western States”, though the subtitle to the later work suggests a more humble goal: “Notes on the Natural History of a Summer Camp and a Winter Home”. In this post, I will explore these two volumes and consider the extent to which they accomplish such daring (well, in the first case, at least) comparative analyses.

There are shades of John C. Van Dyke throughout East and West. The very notion of a “comparative study” bespeaks Van Dyke. Then there is mention of “the opal sea”, a title of one of Van Dyke’s books. Finally, Kirkham is at his most poetic talking about the desert landscape, a section of the book where he seems almost to channel Van Dyke’s words and images. The timing certainly works: The Desert was first published in 1903, and The Opal Sea in 1906. These connections are all, as the police detective would remark, highly circumstantial, however. There is precious little online about Stanton Kirkham beyond the fact that he was a well-published author who is renowned as an ornithologist, naturalist, and philosopher. In the case of Van Dyke, I have a recently published copy of his autobiography, but Kirkham does not appear. All I can say is the two probably were not close associates. Perhaps they met, or perhaps Kirkham simply read Van Dyke’s books. Or perhaps not. Maybe they were both drawn to the allure of the desert landscape. “The desert,” Kirkham declared, “yields itself only to the mystic imagination.” Here are two examples of Kirkham’s mystical desert encounters:

Day after day, looking between the green columns of the saguaro, afar off towards the MacDowell Peaks, I have felt the spell of the desert. It has seemed to draw me like some entrancing mirage—a beautiful region, ethereal and opalescent and changeful. There is a sense of the desert as there is a sense of the sea: a spell, a witchery, which is like music, like poetry, is perhaps itself music and poetry in another form.

After a solitary vigil from starlight to starlight, I returned that night, impressed above all with the deceptiveness of the desert: I had discovered what a delusion it is. Yet, looking at it next day from my lava peak— lying so soft and opalescent in the distance —it beckoned as before, as beautiful and alluring and as full of enchantment as ever; and though arguing to myself that it was only distance lent it beauty, I felt its spell was not broken—would never be broken. Day after day it lures with its beautiful wiles, wrapped in mystery as profound as ever, in spite of my erstwhile disillusionment and a critical analysis of the facts. The desert ever refuses to be weighed in the balance of fact and of logic. While you reason and ponder, it weaves its spell around and around you, weaves it into the very fibre of your thought, until the sense is enmeshed and your little logic is forgotten—lost in that feeling for mystery and for beauty which the wonderful desert inspires.

Now having finished both volumes, I appreciate these passages even more. Only in the Arizona desert, it seems, was Kirkham able to engage with the landscape as a whole and evoke so richly a sense of place. Although his quest is to provide “a sense of certain regions“, more often than not his place accounts are filled with long descriptive lists of plants (in order of flowering) or birds (in order of appearance). At his best moments, Kirkham could dash off passages or phrases of philosophical insight and beauty. But at his worst, well, it was quite a slog. Bradford Torrey and Enos Mills could be delightful storytellers; Kirkham, on the other hand, rarely used the narrative form. Yes, there are many gems here, but only for the truly diligent reader. My copy of North and South had dozens of uncut pages. I was the first to read most of it since it was published in 1913. Yikes.

What, ultimately, is he able to say about the differences between natural regions in the United States? “Broadly speaking,” Kirkham announced on page 9 of East and West, “the charm of the East is pastoral, of the West, heroic.” He goes on to describe how the West is a land of open spaces, vast distances, and rich colors, a region that is “splendid, untamed, savage“. The “little green world of the East” on the other hand, inspires “gentle and cultured thoughts.” Western landscapes confront us with their wild distances, while Eastern habitats allure us with their cultured intimacy. If Kirkham had managed to carry this theme throughout his book, it might have been a minor masterpiece. Unfortunately, he revisits these ideas only once later in the volume, when he observes that “In the East, we do not know the enchantment which lies in distance.” Otherwise, the book largely functions as a gathering of place portraits, descriptions of natural settings like Cape Ann, Massachusetts, the woodlands of Long Island, and the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. And mostly, those descriptions involve birds and plants.

Before moving to Kirkham’s second effort at a comparative landscape study, North and South, a couple of features of the earlier work are worthy of note. One is Kirkham’s idea that returning to the wilderness allows us to connect with our primitive original selves:

In the wilderness, then, we return to our ancestral home—the earliest home of man—the memory of which was lost long before the beginning of history, but which inheres still in the cryptic depths of the subconscious mind of the race and, like an ancestral ghost, arises and flits before us in the depths of the forest.

At the same time, the past is the past, and progress dictates that what once was will be no longer. In his view, this law applies equally to reptiles and American Indians:

Serpent, alligator, and turtle are aliens to this biological day and the swamps and jungles are the reservations to which they are now confined. It is with them as it is with the American Indian, as it is with all primitive races: they have had their day and slowly but surely are passing from view.

Connecting the dots, if wilderness connects us to our biological past, and if remnants of that past are doomed to pass away, what does that mean about the ultimate fate of our wild places? But Kirkham manages to steer clear of that question. He does, quite keenly, note however that “Over a great part of the world man has become too dominant and saddens by his desolating influence.” After sharing his rapture about masses of blooming wildflowers he saw on the hills of southern California, Kirkham added that “according to John Muir this is rapidly passing and no longer comparable to what it once was.” Like a few other nature writers of this time, it seems that Kirkham saw the horrible impacts of humans on natural places in America, yet stopped short of engaging in conservation advocacy to protect those places and their wildlife.

One other passage in East and West caught my attention. With shades of Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt, Kirkham posits that to truly know birds, one has to become a bird in their imagination and experience the world as the bird might, not merely as a human looking at birds:

To go up and down the continent recognising, comparing and enjoying birds in this way is a resource which belongs, not to those who merely study birds, but rather to those who have the companionship of birds, and this pleasant intercourse comes not from reading human nature into their ways but—bird nature: acquiring a sympathy for bird traits and bird manners, a somewhat bird-like nature perhaps. You must feel yourself on the wing with the wild geese, or teetering on the shore with the sandpiper; diving with the grebe, or skulking through the marsh grass with the rail. You must peer among the leaves with the vireos, dart with the agile redstart, and with the finches know the peculiar satisfaction of scraping the bill on a twig.

On to Kirkham’s second volume in his directional pairing, North and South. Published in 1913, it is the oldest book in my collection that still has a relatively intact dust jacket. For those wondering why people didn’t tend to keep book dust jackets from back then, this is a great example. It looks more like a bit of temporary wrapping paper than something one might display proudly in a bookcase. As evident from the right photo, the book itself is only slightly less pedestrian in appearance. This time around, Kirkham gave himself a less daunting task. Instead of comparing the North and South in general, he restricted himself to a comparison of two specific places: a summer camp (a tumbledown wooden house-like structure, based upon the photos) on Canandaigua Lake in New York Finger Lakes region and a winter home at Milford Plantation, an antebellum mansion on the coastal plain of South Carolina (and now a historic site). He explained the purpose of his project thus:

Long ago I laid claim to the deserts and mountains of the West, to Northern woods and Southern swamps, and the best part of my life has been spent in making good these claims… Of these lakes and hills in western New York one is the proprietor to just that extent that he is able to respond to their beauty and make them companionable. To this end he must see them not only as a naturalist but as an artist; must look at them with the eye of a poet and a philosopher as well. Above all, he must live with the hills, day by day and year by year, in the sun and in the rain. He must be himself a hillman and a woodsman–and something of a wildman… During the winter the opportunity is afforded me again by the seclusion of the Milford woods and the great wilderness of contiguous swamp bordering the Wateree and the Santee. Here one can surely be alone with Nature and can hear what she has to say, provided he has ears. thsi Southern country is quite unlike that of the North and it is as if Dame Nature, while having much the same message, spoke in another dialect and with softer accent. It is necessary that one should understand her different dialects if he is to be on intimate footing which alone makes possible the higher Nature study, and which slips insensibly, as the intimacy and understanding increase, into something not to be characterized as study at all but rather as companionship, a companionship of such sylvan and unworldly character as to ally it with both poetry and religion.

Does Kirkham leave the reader with an abiding sense of the nature of these two places in the North and the South? He certainly demonstrates considerable knowledge of the plant life and birds encountered at each place (at least, during the part of the year he was there). And he dabbled in a bit of landscape history of the Finger Lakes, explaining how the lakes were glacially carved. He even integrated a bit of culture in the form of a few pages about the Seneca Indians, a people he was wont to disparage in his book (page 112 offering the reader a particularly egregious passage). Ultimately, though, he simply concluded that he had achieved the deep connection he wanted, “And because of this intimacy he has the supreme satisfaction of feeling at home wherever he might be, of being truly able to say–This is my country.” But did he truly believe that, or was he writing to convince himself?

What drove Kirkham to yearn for such intimate companionship with nature in the first place? I suspect it was more than simply a personal quest or narrative trope to provide a theme for two books. Kirkham’s wife of only four years, Mary Clark Williams, died on April 10th, 1911. Kirkham never remarried. He never mentions her in these books, but I cannot help but think he was haunted by her absence. It is as if he yearned for Dame Nature to fill an empty place in his heart. In these books, he presents himself as semi-nomadic, shifting with the seasons, and struggling to find a lasting sense of home. “One must become very much at home in Nature,” he explains to the reader, “if he is to become an interpreter of Nature.” Ironically, that was not to be. A year later, while on a horseback trip across South America, he contracted an illness that left him semi-invalid for the remainder of his life. He went on to publish only a few more books, including a volume of his memories of travels around the world by cruise ship. His last book, fittingly, was entitled Shut-In (1936). He died in New York City eight years later and was buried beside his wife in Woodlawn Cemetery, Canandaigua, New York. Kirkham had found a home at last.

Seeking Beauty and Solace in the Familiar: Three Books by Walter Prichard Eaton (1920, 1930, 1933)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Jan 072024
 

My Berkshire house sits at the head of an ancient orchard and looks, on one side, up a steep, high, densely wooded mountain shoulder; on the other, over rolling fields plumed with maples and sentineled with little cedears, to the pines on a hill and the wall of tamaracks edging the great swamp. Trees are my cloud of witnesses. Ever they surround me, and from the once contemptibly familiar they have become, to eyes grown wiser in seeking beauty and solace in the familiar, a constant source of charm and wonder and delight…

Last night, I finished the last few essays in In Berkshire Fields (1920) by Walter Prichard Eaton (1878-1957), and closing the book was a bittersweet moment. It was my last book by Eaton, and this post is my farewell to an author I have grown to know as a companion and friend. As an author, his prose is generally more effective than soaring, and more informative than inspirational. While I finish some books with pages of notes of favorite passages to share, that generally does not happen with Eaton’s writing. Eaton was by no means a scientist of nature; rather, he was a fairly wealthy theater critic with a penchant for wandering the woods and fields around his Berkshire home, punctuated by occasional camping and hiking treks to the West. After living for several years in a home on just five acres in a western Massachusetts town, he purchased 200 acres on the slopes of Mt. Everett (the second most prominent peak in Massachusetts, after Greylock, although only the eighth tallest). Wandering his property, he would occasionally encounter hired help, pruning a tree in his orchard. Writing during the Depression, he observed that he had several friends who had gone golfing in Bermuda for the winter, and half-wished he could join them — indicating, in passing, that the cost did not hold him back. He was a golf aficionado, in fact — he mentions a local golf course or aspects of the game a few times in his writing. Despite these things, I find his writing sincere and his sense of place in the Berkshire hills sufficiently robust that I feel transported there with him as I read his work. His inspiration was chiefly Henry David Thoreau, though he dedicated In Berkshire Fields to William Hamilton Gibson. He did not advance the cause of science with discoveries or insights, although his essay on why we shouldn’t rake leaves (more anon) at least shows that the idea dates back at least to pre-1933. His writing is pleasant, and I am grateful to have shared his world over five volumes. In particular, I find him noteworthy because his nature essays are the first that I have read that refer to World War I and the Great Depression. Indeed, his 1930 and 1933 titles are practically the only ones I have found by nature authors published in those years.

First, though, a few words about Eaton’s substantial work, In Berkshire Fields. By substantial, I mean that it weighs 2 1/2 pounds, although it is just over 300 pages. The paper is exceedingly thick, and the illustrations are numerous. The artist, Walter King Stone (1875-1949), makes multiple appearances in Eaton’s essays, including sharing tales of his own animal encounters. A gifted illustrator and Cornell University art professor, Stone provided artwork for many publications and collaborated with Eaton both here and in Eaton’s Skyline Camps. Based on his excellent images in this volume, Stone also had a predilection for chickadees.

In Berkshire Fields is a deep investigation of nature in the Berkshires at the time — a region transitioning from agriculture back to woodland. Although no evident attempt was made to unify the work, the essay collection covers a range of natural history topics, from birds (obviously a favorite subject of Eaton’s) to mammals to trees and orchids to the landscape as a whole. Mostly, the essays themselves are workmanlike, making their way through aspects of a chosen topic (a particular bird species or group of birds, foxes and their kin, etc.). They become most engaging when given over to brief narratives, such as tales about the behaviors exhibited by various semi-tamed crows. (Evidently, it was a rural pastime in 1920 to capture a juvenile crow and rear it in the home for amusement.) One essay that stands out is “From a Berkshire Cabin: An Essay in War-Time”. Writing from a small cabin high on the slopes of Mount Everett, Eaton grapples with the paradox of being surrounded by nature’s calm beauty while a war was raging in Europe:

I am aware with a pang of almost intolerable sorrow of the peacefulness about me. How strange, how bitter the very word sounds! Even here, where I have come to forget for a day, I cannot forget. Dear friends, youngsters I have watched grow up, relatives, a myriad unknown brothers of every creed and color, are to-day plunged in bloody battle killing and being killed, and man has made of peace a mockery… What I try to realize right now with a care never before exercised in what was essentially a care-free enjoyment what it is exactly in my surroundings that gives me so much pleasure, and from that to realize, if possible, what strange duality in our natures must be explained in order to understand even a little the terrible facts of armed conflict.

Ultimately, Eaton realizes the extent to which he, and all humanity, are complicit in the world war. In a passage eerily appropriate today, Eaton recognizes the selfishness that comes from taking individual rights for granted without recognizing that democracy requires the dedicated participation of everyone:

We must descend from our mountain cabins, from our towers of ivory; we must come out of our gardens and up from our slums, forgetting our beautiful enjoyments, or our precarious jobs which carry no attendant enjoyments, and remembering only the ideal of beauty in our hearts, the ideal of beauty which means, too, the ideal of justice and mercy and peace and happiness for each and all, demand of what rulers we shall find that they give over to us the machinery which controls our destinies, and the destinies of all our fellows. The world to-day is fighting for democracy. I see my crime to have been that I considered democracy a condition wherein I was let alone, not wherein I was an active participant three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, fighting to write my best personal ideals into the whole. That, I believe, has been the crime of the entire world, and in this sense it was not the Kaiser who made the war, but Goethe and Schumann and Beethoven. It was not “‘secret diplomacy,” trade jealousy, and all the rest, that kept the nations apart, straining at one another’s throats; it was the selfish complaisance of all the people who had the love of right and beauty in their hearts—and locked it there for their private enjoyment. The fight for democracy is only just beginning, for only now are we beginning to comprehend what democracy means, to glimpse the depths of its sacrifices, the glory of its creative spirit, the beauty of opportunity that it may be made to hold for common men. Had I the eloquence, I would write a new manifesto, and its slogan would not be, ‘‘ Workers of the world, unite!’ but, ‘‘Lovers of beauty in the world, unite! and capture the machinery by which we have been ruled in ugliness and cruelty.”” There would be no need of a union of the workers, then, for we should all be workers for the common weal. …

Making his way back down the mountain slope to home, Eaton loses much of his fervor, observing that “It is hard to come down from a mountain cabin, from an ivory tower, to give up a solitary possession or resign a comfortable privilege! If I owned a factory would I consent without a bitter struggle to industrial democracy? I ask myself as I pass the foxglove plant and touch its trumpet with my fingers. No—probably not. Undoubtedly not, I decide as I reach the clearing. Having determined what would be necessary to prevent future wars, Eaton realizes with bitter honesty just how difficult such a path would be. I am at once smitten with his integrity and disappointed with his lack of commitment. It is as if he glimpsed the entrance gate to Utopia, only to turn away.

Throughout the book, Eaton evidences appreciation for most wildlife, and particularly songbirds. However, in keeping with the time, he tends to emphasize the benefits of animals for humans, rather than advocating that other living beings ought to be protected for their own sake. Porcupines, for instance, “appear to serve no useful purpose”, while certain hawk species are “cruel” because they hunt farmers’ chickens. Ultimately, though, Eaton recognizes that calling for the outright extinction of certain species would likely be most unwise:

“…we are slowly learning that the balance of nature is something which should not be too rudely disturbed without careful investigation. We have learned the lesson—a costly one— with regard to our slaughtered forests and shrunken water-powers. We are learning it with regard to our birds. And it is certainly not beyond the range of possibility that the varmints—the flesh-eating animals like foxes, weasels, ’coons, and skunks—perform their useful functions, too, in their ceaseless preying upon rodents, rabbits, and the like, more ‘ than atoning for their occasional predatory visits to the chicken-roost. At any rate, who that loves the woods and streams does not love them the more when the patient wait or the silent approach is rewarded by the sight of some wild inhabitant about his secret business, or when the telltale snows of winter reveal the story of last night’s hunt, or when the still, cold air of the winter evenings is startled by the cry of a fox, as he sits, perhaps, on a knoll above the dry weed-tops in the field and bays the moon? To me, at least, the woods untenanted by their natural inhabitants are as melancholy as a deserted village, an abandoned farm, and I would readily sacrifice twenty chickens a year to know that I maintained thereby a family of foxes under my wall, living their sly, shrewd life in frisky happiness, against all the odds of man.

While the 1920 volume is rich with splendid artwork and lavish with thick paper and a decorated cover, the other two volumes of Eaton that I recently read are far more plain in appearance. The paper is browned and of much poorer quality, and the covers are undecorated apart from labels identifying the title and the author (albeit embossed in gold). There are no illustrations apart from a lovely pair of frontispieces by Walter King Stone and photographer Edwin Hale Lincoln, respectively (see below), and the books are about 130 pages each. New England Vista dates to 1930, and On Yankee Hilltops to 1933. Both works contain more essays about the landscape of the Berkshire hills and its wildlife, along with rambles in search of the cellar holes of long-abandoned settlers’ homes and reflections on home gardening. Published in the early days of the Great Depression, New England Vista is most noteworthy for its essay about leaf raking. “Burning Wealth” argues that fallen leaves ought either to be left where they lie or else gathered for composting and reuse. “Every leaf that falls represents nourishment taken out of the ground,” Eaton patiently explains to the reader. “Left to rot, it puts this nourishment back into the soil. Burned up, the nourishment is forever lost, and if it is not supplied artificially, the soil is gradually impoverished and dried up. Every pile of leaves that is composted is rescued wealth. Every pile of leaves burned up is wealth destroyed.” I suspect this recommendation aligned well with the concerns of thrifty readers struggling to keep afloat financially in the aftermath of Black Tuesday.

Speaking of Black Tuesday, the Depression itself (with a small “d”, though) puts in an appearance in On Yankee Hilltops. In “Sweets for Squirrels”, he mentions how “Two of my friends, appararently unaffected by the depression, are in Bermuda playing golf.” While working on building a new garden path along a limestone ledge, Eaton observes how his mind keeps trying to argue that he is better off for not having joined them (a decision that does not appear to reflect any financial hardship on his own account). Ultimately, Eaton concludes that “…I was better employed than if I had been playing golf.” Fortunately, he does not end his musing there. He shares about a visit from a struggling poet, living “up in the hills” in a shack on a small strip of ground, who walked ten miles just to call on Eaton.

When he sits in my study, and we talk of night sounds, and winter colors, and the long tramps the pheasants take, or discuss poetry, I am always a little ashamed of the litter of possessions which surround me–books, prints, tobacco jars, Dresden figures, overstuffed chairs, telephones, golf clubs, mirrors, goodness knows what all, accumulated to minister to the supposed needs of one unimportant human being who can hardly be considered an individual unless he can stand alone, free of such truck, and find his happiness in the creative power of his spirit, or, at the very least, of his own two hands.

Eaton then lists some of the “material comforts” of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age — motorcars, radios, tiled bathrooms, macadam highways, and the like. “We organized ourselves into a vast society to produce them, entirely based for its stability on our desire and ability to consume them. Then something went wrong.” After the stock market crashed, people lost the ability to pay for all these things. Once there is an economic upturn, though, Eaton predicts that the seemingly endless whirl of production and consumption will automatically resume. Under those conditions, most people work hard, but to no avail — living empty lives creating nothing truly meaningful. The better path, he suggests, would be to find contentment with simple things:

To rediscover the world of simplicities, the joys of creating with one’s own hands, the profound satisfactions of expressing an inner sense of beauty through the manipulation of visible forms,–trees, plants, paints, notes of music, or what not,–the relief of a slackened quest for Things, is to rediscover, perhaps, one’s self.

If only we could, collectively, make a better choice. Again, Eaton maps out the way for humanity to follow, only to stumble against the realities of the human condition. “I’m not overly hopeful,” he confesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Dec 252023
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Rune of the Ancient Earth: “Woodland Paths” by Winthrop Packard (1910)

 Birds, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Aug 122023
 

The April showers touch with caressing fingers the chords of all things and bring music from them, each according to its kind. In the open forest under deciduous trees the dead leaves thrummed a ghostly dirge like that of the “Dead March in Saul.” Winter ghosts marched to it in solemn procession out of the woodland. Memories of sleet and deep snow, ice storm, and heartbreaking frost, tramped soggily in sullen procession over the misty ridge and on northward toward the barren lands to the north of Hudson’s Bay. Thrilling through this solemn march below I heard the laughing fantasia of young drops upon bourgeoning twigs above, dirge and ditty softening in distance to a mystic music, a rune of the ancient earth.

In the open pasture the tune changed again. It was there a chirpy crepitation that presaged all the tiny, cheerful insects whose songs will make May nights merry. These, no doubt, take their first music lessons from the patter of belated April showers on the grass roofs of their homes. But it was down on the pond margin that I found the most perfect music. Slender mists danced to it, fluttering softly up from the margin, swaying together in ecstasy, and floating away into a gray dreamland of delight. It was the same tune, with quaint, syncopated variations, that the budding twigs and the brown pasture grasses had given forth, but more sprightly and with a bell-like tinkle more clear and fresh than any other sound that can be made, this tintinnabulation of falling globules ringing against their kindred water.

Every drop danced into the air again on striking and in the mellow glow of an obscure twilight I could see the surface stippled with pearly light. Then through it all came a new song; the first soloist of the night, the first of his kind of the season, thrilling a long, dreamy, heart-stirring cadenza of happiness, the love call of the swamp tree frog.

With this passage, Packard traces the liminal world of winter becoming spring, as experienced at Ponkapoag Bog in Blue Hills State Reservation on the southern edge of Boston. What I find entrancing in this passage, and much of his work is his ability to blend fairly accurate natural history with an air of mystery, of faerie even. There is an old magic that haunts the edges of Packard’s woodland wanderings. Yes, there are frogs calling — but maybe, too, they are wood sprites humming an ancient melody. In that magical landscape, Packard shares about how he “could feel the happiness of the pasture shrubs.” Raindrops do not merely fall from clouds — they dance and sparkle and tap upon the leaves. This is a much more animate (and animated) vision of nature than many more scientifically inclined nature writers might suggest. He evokes wonder by entertaining just enough doubt about his experiences that he leaves a space for ancient magic to dwell and take root. For example, he writes about his time silently watching the goings-on in a bog that “As I sat quiet, hour after hour, in this miniature wilderness, I came to hear many a strange and unclassified sound that, for all I know, may have been fay or frog, banshee or bird.” Like an impressionist painter, Packard engages with the wetland not only with the objective gaze of scientist, but also with the soul of a poet and mythologist. The result is a world in which frog and fae commingle as one. It is a world, too, of the imaginative experiences of my own childhood. I recall walking through the woods behind my house and imagining all sorts of other worlds, from a path through Mirkwood in Middle Earth to a swamp at the time of the dinosaurs. Where a sapling was bent over by an ice storm, there would be a portal into another place, another landscape of my own creation, fecund with possibility.

This volume is one of four chronicling the seasons in Packard’s corner of Massachusetts. Taken together, their titles are “Woodland Paths” (spring); “Wild Pastures” (summer); “Wood Wanderings” (autumn); and “Wildwood Ways” (winter). This is the third volume I have obtained and chronicled in this blog. “Wood Wanderings has remained unobtainable in its original form; I have settled for a Kindle edition that I will read someday. I do have to say that Packard managed to choose four titles that are practically impossible to keep straight. And on Thriftbooks, where reprints of “Wood Wanderings” are sometimes sold, “0 people are interested in this title.”

Few people, too, appear interested in Winthrop Packard himself. He has no Wikipedia entry. The “Lit2Go” website provides his birth and death dates (1862 and 1943, respectively) and tersely sums him up in two sentences. The first claims that “Winthrop Packard is best known for his novels of the nature genre.” This is patently untrue; his books contain nature essays; they are most definitely not novels. The second sentence merely lists several titles he wrote. Fortunately, Praweb.com offers a slightly more extensive overview of his life. You can read more about Packard in my earlier blog post on his “Wild Pastures”.

To Hobnob with the Clouds: “Green Trails and Upland Pastures” by Walter Prichard Eaton (1925)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Landscape History, Native Plants, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Aug 082023
 

In these softer modern days, when we all desire the valley warmth, the nervous companionship of our kind, the handy motion-picture theatre, many an upland pasture is going back to wildness, invaded by birch and pine upon the borders, overrun with the hosts of the shrubby cinquefoil, most provocative of plants because it refuses to blossom unanimously, putting forth its yellow flowers a few at a time here and there on the sturdy bush. Such a pasture I know upon a hilltop eighteen hundred feet above the sea, where now few cattle browse, and seldom enough save at blueberry season does a human foot pass through the rotted bars or straddle the tumbling, lichen-covered stone wall, where sentinel mulleins guard the gaps. It is not easy now even to reach this pasture, for the old logging roads are choked and the cattle tracks, eroded deep into the soil like dry irrigation ditches, sometimes plunge through tangles of hemlock, crossing and criss-crossing to reach little green lawns where long ago the huts of charcoal burners stood, and only at the very summit converging into parallels that are plain to follow. Some of them, too, will lead you far astray, to a rocky shoulder of the hill guarded by cedars, where you will suddenly view the true pasture a mile away, over a ravine of forest. Yet once you have reached the true summit pasture, there bursts upon you a prospect the Lake country of England cannot excel; here the northbound [white-throated sparrows] rest in May to tune their voices for their mating song, here the everlasting flower sheds its subtle perfume on the upland air, the sweet fern contends in fragrance, and here the world is all below you with naught above but Omar’s inverted bowl and a drifting cloud.

It is good now and then to hobnob with the clouds, to be intimate with the sky. “The world is too much with us” down below; every house and tree is taller than we are, and discourages the upward glance. But here in the hilltop pasture nothing is higher than the vision save the blue zenith and the white flotilla of the clouds. Climbing over the tumbled wall, to be sure, the grass-line is above your eye; and over it, but not resting upon it, is a great Denali of a cumulus. It is not resting upon the pasture ridge, because the imagination senses with the acuteness of a stereoscope the great drop of space between, and feels the thrill of aerial perspective. Your feet hasten to the summit, and, once upon it, your hat comes off, while the mountain wind lifts through your hair and you feel yourself at the apex and zenith of the universe. Far below lie the blue eyes of Twin Lakes, and beyond them rises the beautiful dome of the Taconics, ethereal blue in colour, yet solid and eternal. Lift your face ever so little, and the green world begins to fall from sight, the great cloud-ships, sailing in the summer sky, begin to be the one thing prominent. How softly they billow as they ride! How exquisite they are with curve and shadow and puffs of silver light! Even as you watch, one sweeps across the sun, and trails a shadow anchor over the pasture, over your feet. You almost hold your breath as it passes, for it seems in some subtle way as if the cloud had touched you, had spoken you on its passage.

What an exultant, rhapsodic love song to an upland pasture in the Berkshires of Massachusetts! One hundred years ago, the once-productive fields were slowly turning back to forest, and it was possible to gaze a great distance across the changing landscape. And in this passage, Walter Prichard Eaton captured the sublime vision in such flowing prose. He wrote about a place he new well, where he and his wife would escape the hustle and bustle of the East Coast cities. Clearly he treasured it deeply. Yet for all eight colored artworks illustrating the volume, only one is from his home, and it is a nondescript, practically black and white image of two deer drinking at the edge of a lake at twilight. The remainder of the images are from Pritchard’s extensive travels out west. Yet without doubt, this evolcation of a place he knew so well and frequented so often is the highlight of this volume. When he wrote of Western landscapes, he shared them as an outsider, identifying trails traversed and plants observed in flower. The poetic spirit infusing the lines above is missing. As it is, unfortunately, from most of the book.I am reading a biography of Mary Treat, author of Home Studies in Nature that I wrote about in this blog ages back. One might argue that Mary is unknown in large part because she was a woman in an age when only men were recognized for their scientific accomplishments. While women authored books, few of them from this period are remembered today. But what of Mr. Prichard Eaton, a white male and scholar, who published several books (stay tuned for more) yet is forgotten today. What excuse might we offer for him? I am beginning to realize that some forgotten authors may be forgotten for good reason. Yes, there are beautiful swathes of text. But was it worth the long journey across over 300 pages to encounter them? I am not so sure.

The major harvest of our pasture is undoubtedly the apple crop, and the major harvesters are the deer. The apples are small and bitter or else tasteless now. Encouraged by the optimism of Thoreau, I have bitten into many hundreds of wild apples since I first read his immortal psean in their praise, but I have yet to discover a second Baldwin, or even an equal of the poorest variety in our orchard crop. At any rate, I no longer pick the apples in this pasture. No one picks them. They fall to the ground on an autumn night, and no one hears the soft, startling thud in the silence of the forgotten clearing. But the squirrels and the deer know where they are.

True, Walter Prichard Eaton does have a (brief) Wikipedia entry, along with an obituary in the New York Times. He lived from 1878 until 1957. Born in Molden, Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard, he was a theater critic for various newspapers, and wrote a number of books on theater and nature. He was also a professor of play writing at Yale from 1933 until 1947. He was a staunch enemy of the movie industry, strongly preferring the theatrical stage. His obituary notes that Eaton’s “tales of woodland ramblings were not as recognized as they deserved to be, according to one critic.” Hmm…

As a casual observer of nature with a busy professional career writing about plays (and writing a few of his own), perhaps he can be forgiven for a focus on the scenery rather than diving more deeply into the landscape. He identifies some birds and some plants, but I suspect he did not spend many hours with a hand lens, deeply observing the minute worlds of a mossy log or a woodland pool along a stream. He did, at least, express some familiarity with Thoreau. Like James Buckham 22 years earlier, for instance, he experimented with winter apples, but with less successful results:

When not writing about the Berkshire landscape or his adventures out West, Eaton was also prone to Norman Rockwell moments — descriptions of old covered bridges, barns, and the like. There are definitely hints of long here for the rural America of his boyhood, complete with itinerant ragmen, tin peddlers, and rural mail carriers. These were passing away, replaced by automobiles and — heaven forbid! — movie theaters. I find it strangely comforting that, just as I often look back on my own past in the days before Internet and iPhone, Eaton looked back on a slower, gentler age in his youth.

But there are still those rare moments, moments where he captures a view in a particularly engaging way. Here is another one, this time describing a flowing stream, as seen from the bow of a canoe wending its way through the twists and turns with the current:

We enter a canoe — a canoe because it slips noiselessly through the water, and can go almost anywhere and examine the river bank more closely, with quite a new impression of its size here on the surface of the water, where it towers six feet above us and shuts out all but the tops of the mountains. It is composed of compact layers of loamy sand, with here and there a little slippery clay. The constant erosion of the water at freshet time has hollowed it out beneath the surface soil, and the grass and flowers, holding together the surface overhang by tenacious roots, curve out and droop along the top like peat thatching. Each Spring great chunks of this overhang break away and fall into the water, as the river continues to deepen the bend. Under this thatch, looking quaintly like a street of Upper West Side apartment houses, are the dark little holes of the bank swallows, row after row of them, neatly tunnelled into the damp brown earth. The swallows skim low over the surrounding fields, snapping up insects as they fly, or come home unerringly to their abodes and disappear with a flutter of tail. The nests are so exactly similar in appearance that one marvels at the birds’ discrimination. It is fortunate, certainly, that sobriety is one of their virtues. Now and then among the swallows’ cliff dwellings is a larger hole, where dog or woodchuck or predatory rat has burrowed, hunting, perhaps, for eggs.

The complementary tongue of land which is always formed by the river opposite one of these concave sweeps of exposed bank is no less interesting. Close to the water it is like a sand bar, forming an excellent shelving beach for bathing, and a playground for the sandpipers and the plovers. You may often come upon a flock of these birds on a bar, as your canoe rounds the bend, running back and forth and bobbing their heads up and down. “Tip ups,” some boys call them. But back a few feet from the new shelf of the bar, the receding waters have deposited soil and seeds, and last year’s deposit is already rank and green with swampy verdure. Then the willows begin. Almost every new tongue of land has its clump of willows, sown by the sweep of the stream on a curve as regular as any topiary artist could lay down, and trimmed to a uniform height. There is one long bend on our river, perhaps four hundred yards in extent, which is not a sharp but a gradual curve. The river was evidently nearly straight at this point a generation or two ago, but something deflected its current perhaps a tree which fell into the water and piled up a dam of roots and tangled flotsam. The current, swinging out from this new obstruction, ate into the farther bank and gradually channelled a great bend, depositing new land on the eastern side. Along high -water mark on this new land, following the new curve of the channel, it planted a hedge of willow possibly fifteen years ago. That hedge is now thirty feet high, as uniform along the top as though it were annually trimmed, and presenting an unbroken wall of shimmering, delicate green set on the sweeping curve of the stream, with a pink garden of Joe-pye-weed at its feet. There is no gardener like the river when you give him a chance!

Finally, in closing, I offer this passage on trees and their personalities. Could Eaton have read Royal Dixon’s book on the topic, “The Human Side of Trees” (1917), perhaps?

Trees, of course, are the most beautiful as well as the most useful of growing things, not because they are the largest but because they attain often to the finest symmetry and because they have the most decided and appealing personalities. Any one who has not felt the personality of trees is oddly insensitive. I cannot, indeed, imagine a person wholly incapable of such feeling, though the man who plants a Colorado blue spruce on a trimmed lawn east of the Alleghanies, where it is obliged to comport itself with elms and trolley cars, is admittedly pretty callous. Trees are peculiarly the product of their environment, and their personalities, in a natural state, have invariably a beautiful fitness.

No, haven’t given up on Walter Prichard Eaton, not quite yet. In fact, I have four more volumes of his waiting on my shelf, three of which I tracked down after finishing this one. But I think I will save them for later.

Addendum: When I first wrote this post, I neglected to mention a bit of side path I ended up following as a result of a passage early on in Eaton’s book. Describing a New Hampshire landscape, he noted that “Behind the oak looms the great north peak of Kinsman, which can now be climbed, thanks to a trail recently cut by the son of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, whose collected poems, published in 1860, have been quite unjustly forgotten.” Taking up the challenges, I looked up Frederick Tuckerman, and discovered that his complete poems were republished in 1965, in a volume edited by no other than N. Scott Momaday! I have since tracked down the work (which is long out of print), and will be sharing my gleanings from it in a future blog post.

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