Writing the Land : John Burroughs and his Legacy; Essays from the John Burroughs Nature Writing Conference [1 ed.] 9781443810838, 9781847184870

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Writing the Land

Writing the Land: John Burroughs and his Legacy; Essays from the John Burroughs Nature Writing Conference

Edited by

Daniel G. Payne

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Writing the Land: John Burroughs and his Legacy; Essays from the John Burroughs Nature Writing Conference, Edited by Daniel G. Payne This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Daniel G. Payne and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-487-1, ISBN (13): 9781847184870

This book is dedicated to Dr. Charlotte Zoë Walker, Colleague, mentor, and friend.

“The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is ‘look under foot.’ You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.” —John Burroughs, “The Divine Soil” (1908)

Figure 1: John Burroughs, ca. 1900. Milne Library, State University of New York at Oneonta

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...................................................................................... x Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Part I: John Burroughs and his Legacy 1. An Island in a Sea of Ice: An Autumn Vista Robert J. Titus ............................................................................................. 2 2. John Burroughs and the Anti-Rent War Roger Hecht................................................................................................. 7 3. John Burroughs and Henry Thoreau: Traveling Widely at Home Edward J. Renehan, Jr. .............................................................................. 14 4. The Insolence of Social Power: Bovine Nonchalance, Gentle Suggestion or What? Jeff Walker ................................................................................................ 23 5. John Burroughs’s Transpersonal Identity with Place Stephen A. Mercier.................................................................................... 34 6. Emerson’s Natural Theology: John Burroughs and the “Church” of Latter Day Transcendentalism Daniel G. Payne......................................................................................... 44 7. Burroughs Country: The Catskills Then and Now Tom Alworth ............................................................................................. 63 Part II: Writing the Land 8. Treaties and the Ecological Perspective of William Bartram and John Burroughs Ian Stapley................................................................................................. 70

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9. The Use of Metaphor and Metonymy in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours: A Structural Analysis Nancy Metzger .......................................................................................... 83 10. Reworking Nature Writing: Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals Michael Buckley........................................................................................ 98 11. Buying the Farm: Jewett’s “A White Heron” and Nature as Commodity Robert A. Beuka ...................................................................................... 112 12. Nessmuk’s Log of the Bucktail: “The Effect of This Constant Depletion of Green Timber” T.P. Murphy ............................................................................................ 121 13. Libby Beaman: Creating a Role for Herself as Naturalist in the Pribilof Islands Wendy Weaver ........................................................................................ 130 14. An Oblique Prophecy: A Re-Examination of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s The Holy Earth Richard Hunt ........................................................................................... 140 15. Phases of Farm Life and Senses of Place: Environmental Ethics as Home Economics in John Burroughs and Willa Cather Christine Nadir ........................................................................................ 148 16. Place, Belonging, and Environmental Humility: The Experience of “Teched” as Portrayed by American Novelist and Agrarian Reformer Louis Bromfield David Seamon ......................................................................................... 158 Part III: Writing About Nature: Urban, Suburban, and Rural Perspectives 17. John Burroughs’s Contrarian Path John Tallmadge ....................................................................................... 176 18. Our Big Backyard: Nature in Suburban Writing Robert Beuka ........................................................................................... 186

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19. Rural to the Last Drop: Writing Rural Land from John Burroughs to Ourselves Charlotte Zoë Walker .............................................................................. 197 List of Contributors ................................................................................. 238 Index........................................................................................................ 242

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: John Burroughs, ca. 1900. Milne Library, State University of New York at Oneonta............................................................................. vi Figure 2: Lantern slide of Burroughs, 1903. Milne Library, State University of New York at Oneonta ............................................... xxii Figure 3: Burroughs Memorial atop Slide Mountain (photograph by Daniel G. Payne).................................................................................... 3 Figure 4: View from Slide Mountain (photograph by Daniel G. Payne)..... 4 Figure 5: Slabsides (photograph by Daniel G. Payne)............................. 205

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Since 1992, SUNY College at Oneonta has hosted the biannual John Burroughs Nature Conference & Seminar (“Sharp Eyes”), which honors the influence of Burroughs on American nature writing. The scope of the conference is not limited solely to Burroughs, however, as each year the writers and scholars in attendance direct attention toward a particular theme of significance to contemporary nature writers and scholars of environmental literature. Distinguished keynote speakers who have addressed the conference include John Elder, John Tallmadge, Joy Harjo, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Edward Kanze, James Perrin Warren, and Edward J. Renehan, Jr. The editor would first like to thank the many people who have contributed to the Burroughs conference and to this collection, starting with the scholars whose essays appear in this volume. Invaluable conference support was also provided by Jeff and Kathy Walker and their wonderful and talented family; William and Virginia Kauffmann; Kate Benjamin, Nancy Cannon, Heather Heyduk, Elaine Downing, and Janet Potter from Milne Library; Mary Lou Ryan, Ruth Weston, and Mary Moubray from SUNY Oneonta’s Morris Conference Center; seminar instructors Susan Bernardin, Roger Hecht, Christine Nadir, and Stephen Mercier; English Department chairs Gwen Crane and Richie Lee; Chris Burgher, our wonderful department secretary; and Tobin Bush, Lindsay Albright, and Anne Payne, who helped in many vital ways during the conferences. Administrative support was also provided by SUNY College at Oneonta President Alan Donovan, Provost F. Daniel Larkin, and Dean Michael Merilan. Special thanks are due also to the seminar students at SUNY College at Oneonta, whose energy and enthusiasm help make each conference so enjoyable and dynamic. Thanks are due also to those who have helped preserve the literary legacy of John Burroughs, including Elizabeth Burroughs Kelley; Joan Burroughs, Lisa Breslof, and Frank Knight from the John Burroughs Association; John Lutz, Julianne Lutz Warren, and Tom Alworth from Woodchuck Lodge, Inc.; Frank Bergeron and H. Daniel Peck from Vassar College; and SUNY Oneonta’s Al Hall and Charlotte Zoë Walker, the founders of the conference.

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Finally, I’d like to thank the wonderful editorial staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing—Amanda Millar, Carol Koulikourdi, and Dr. Andy Nercessian.

INTRODUCTION

At the time of his death in 1921, John Burroughs (1837-1921) was America’s most beloved nature writer, a best-selling author whose friends and admirers included Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison. Burroughs was second only to Emerson in fostering the nature study movement of the nineteenth century and the popularity of his work encouraged Houghton Mifflin to publish or reissue the work of several other nature writers, including that of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. It might fairly be said that without the enormous audience John Burroughs attracted through his essays on natural history, the political success of the early conservation movement would have been delayed or diminished. Born on a small dairy farm outside Roxbury, New York, which is located in the northern foothills of the Catskill Mountains, Burroughs’s rural upbringing was the initial basis for his love of nature. His parents, Chauncey and Amy Kelly Burroughs had ten children—six boys and four girls—of which John was the seventh child. Their lives revolved around the family farm, and neither Burroughs’s parents nor his siblings ever received or aspired to more than a rudimentary formal education. As Burroughs later recalled, “I was born of and among people who neither read books nor cared for them…what I most needed was what I had,—few books and plenty of real things.”1 While books would soon become a primary focus of Burroughs’s life and career—he would later identify “books, friends, and nature” as the three most precious resources of life2 — it was the “real things,” things rooted in nature and the land, that were the inspiration for his literary work. It was not only his growing love of books and literature that distinguished Burroughs from the rest of his family, but his imaginative and questioning mind. Chauncey Burroughs was an old school Baptist, who believed that the Bible was the ultimate authority and who harbored a quiet dread that his bookish son might someday become a Methodist minister. Burroughs later described his father as a good man, albeit 1

John Burroughs, Indoor Studies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 264. John Burroughs, “The Art of Seeing Things” in Leaf and Tendril (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 3.

2

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“bigoted and intolerant in his religious and political views.”3 Despite the intellectual and philosophical differences between Burroughs and the rest of his family, his ties to them were enduring, and in the many essays he wrote on his youth and upbringing he invariably referred to his family and their life on the farm with deep affection. When he was seventeen, Burroughs left Roxbury and took a series of short term teaching positions in various country schools in upstate New York. It was while teaching at one such rural school that he met Ursula North, the daughter of a farmer in Tongore, New York. They were married in 1857, and adopted a son, Julian, who was born in 1878. Despite some rough patches their marriage endured a remarkable sixty years, until the death of Ursula in 1917. During his youth Burroughs read widely, and was inspired by the essays of his first great literary influence, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Many years later, upon hearing of Emerson’s death, Burroughs recalled the importance of the great philosopher on his own intellectual growth, writing, “Emerson was my spiritual father in the strictest sense. It seems as though I owe him all, or whatever I am, to him…I fell in with him just in time. His words were like the sunlight to my pale and tender genius which had fed on Johnson and Addison and poor Whipple.”4 Emerson’s literary influence was so strong that when Burroughs sent his essay “Expression” to the Atlantic Monthly in 1860, James Russell Lowell, the editor of the magazine, wouldn’t publish it until he had satisfied himself that Burroughs hadn’t plagiarized some obscure essay written by Emerson himself. This experience was partly responsible for the turn toward nature writing that Burroughs soon took, publishing his first nature essays the following year in the New York Leader. As he later wrote in Indoor Studies (1889), “It was mainly to break the spell of Emerson’s influence and to get upon ground of my own that I took to writing upon outdoor themes…The woods, the soil, the waters, helped to draw out the pungent Emersonian flavor and restore me to my proper atmosphere.”5 In the same essay, Burroughs writes that during this same period he also read Thoreau’s Walden, but states “I am not conscious of any great debt to Thoreau.”6 Burroughs then goes on to say that he envies what he perceives as Thoreau’s indifference to human beings: “He seems to have been as insensible to people as he was open and hospitable to 3

Clara Barrus, Our Friend John Burroughs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 56. Clara Barrus, ed. The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 87-88. 5 Burroughs, Indoor Studies, 268. 6 Ibid., 268-69. 4

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nature. It probably gave him more pleasure to open his door to a woodchuck than to a man.”7 In 1863, Burroughs moved to Washington, D.C., where he found work as a clerk in the Department of the Treasury. More importantly, when considered from the perspective of his budding literary career, he formed a close and enduring friendship with the poet Walt Whitman. As Burroughs’s literary executor and first biographer, Clara Barrus writes in The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, “outside of Nature herself, nothing throughout his life had anything like the effect…that was wrought by Whitman and his work.”8 Among other things, Whitman reinforced and strengthened Burroughs’s conviction in the Emersonian belief that nature study was, in large part, a spiritual endeavor. The relationship between Burroughs and Whitman was mutually beneficial, as Burroughs soon became one of Whitman’s most ardent literary champions. His first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), was a whole-hearted celebration of the poet and was written with substantial editorial input from Whitman himself. Whitman benefited from Burroughs’s expertise in natural history, using imagery provided by Burroughs in poems such as “The Dalliance of the Eagles” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In 1871, the thirty-three year old Burroughs published his first collection of nature essays, Wake-Robin. The critical response was almost universally positive, with William Dean Howells writing in an unsigned review for the Atlantic Monthly, “It is in every way an uncommon book that [Burroughs] has given us, fresh, wholesome, sweet, and full of a gentle and thoughtful spirit; a beautiful book.”9 Emboldened by his literary success, Burroughs resigned his position as a treasury clerk the following year, and bought land at West Park, a rural community on the west bank of the Hudson River, just south of Kingston, New York.10 At West Park, Burroughs built a stone house he christened “Riverby,” returned to farming—chiefly grapes and other fruit— and took up his career as a professional writer in earnest. Success was not long in coming—by 1878

7

Ibid., 269. Clara Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1925), 1:133. 9 Unsigned review, Atlantic Monthly, August 1871, 254. 10 Not too emboldened, however—Burroughs got an appointment as a special bank examiner, which provided him with a financial cushion until his success as a writer made it possible for him to officially resign from this appointment in 1885. 8

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Burroughs was able to write in his journal, “My writing has brought me more fame and money than I ever dared hope.”11 Over the next fifty years Burroughs wrote almost two dozen books, and hundreds of essays—not only on nature, but on literature, travel, philosophy, religion, and science. It was, however, always to nature he returned in his essays, primarily from his own inclination, but also of the public’s insatiable demand for more of his literary “rambles” through the woods and fields. In 1895, Burroughs built a cabin he dubbed “Slabsides” near his home in West Park, which became both a writing retreat for Burroughs and a pilgrimage site for his many admirers. By the turn of the century, Burroughs was America’s most beloved nature writer, and had attracted a following that would form a key constituency for the nascent conservation movement. In the spring of 1903, Burroughs was invited by Theodore Roosevelt to accompany the President on a tour of Yellowstone National Park (Roosevelt followed this with a tour of Yosemite National Park with John Muir), and he hosted the President at Slabsides later that summer. Despite his key role in attracting people to nature and his close friendship with many of the most influential leaders of the conservation movement, including Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir, Burroughs himself was reluctant to take an active role in the political battles waged on behalf of conservation and wilderness preservation in the early twentieth century. By nature Burroughs was quiet and deferential, and not temperamentally suited for the rough and tumble world of politics; still, as Clara Barrus asserts, “what he might have done in a militant way…was but a drop in the bucket to what he did do, in his own way, for more than fifty years.”12 Burroughs died in 1921 while on a train ride back to his New York from California. His final words—“Are we home yet?”13—were a remarkably fitting coda to the career of a writer so closely identified with his native Catskill region. In many of his essays, Burroughs explores the woods and fields of home, and in doing so, he (like Thoreau and his explorations of Concord, Massachusetts) transcends the local and examines the universal theme of our relation with nature and our native landscape. Burroughs’s emphasis on “place” and the local now seems modern once again, as the current interest in bioregionalism demonstrates

11

Barrus, ed. The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 75. Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2:312. 13 “Burroughs Began His Study When Buffalo Still Overran the West,” The New York Times, March 30, 1921, 12:3. 12

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and it becomes increasingly evident that “thinking locally” is “thinking globally.” The first part of this collection, “John Burroughs and his Legacy” is comprised of essays that primarily concentrate on John Burroughs, the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountain landscape about which he wrote so often, and his influence on American nature writing. It is fitting, therefore, to open this section of the book with an essay that provides us with a geological history of the land itself. Geologist Robert Titus vividly describes a hike up Slide Mountain, the highest peak in the Catskills and one of Burroughs’s favorite hikes. Titus examines some of the theories regarding the impact of glaciation on the Catskills, and presents a remarkable description of what the view from the peak of Slide may have been like during the last ice age. At the time of first contact with the Europeans, the aboriginal people of the Hudson Valley and Catskill region primarily consisted of the Lenape (or Delaware), the Mahican (also referred to as Mohican or Mohegan), and the five nations of the Iroquois. Even after Dutch, and later English settlement of the region in the 1600s, a fairly sizeable and culturally distinct native population remained until the American Revolution, by which time war, disease, and displacement had greatly diminished their numbers. Conflicts over the land of this region, however, did not end with the revolution or the dispersal of the native peoples. In “John Burroughs and the Anti-Rent War,” Roger Hecht examines the conflict between the great landholders of the Hudson Valley/Catskill region and their tenant farmers that took place in the 1840s and 1850s. As Hecht cogently argues, the antirent war was not only an epochal conflict for the farm communities of this region it was also one of the formative experiences of Burroughs’s boyhood, one which helped forge “his commitment to a place, his place, and the culture of small farmers that nourished him.” Any thorough study of Burroughs would have to consider his relationship to the other great genius loci of the era, Henry David Thoreau. While Burroughs claimed in an 1889 essay on Thoreau, “I am not conscious of any great debt to Thoreau,”14 in “John Burroughs and Henry Thoreau: Traveling Widely at Home,” biographer Edward J. Renehan, Jr. shows that, despite their marked difference in temperament, there are numerous intriguing similarities found in the way the two great naturalists

14

John Burroughs, Indoor Studies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 268-269.

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studied and wrote about their native landscapes, and the ability of both writers to find “the cosmic in the local.” In “The Insolence of Social Power: Bovine Nonchalance, Gentle Persuasion, or What?” Jeff Walker addresses the rather vexing issue of Burroughs’s reluctance to use his considerable power as a writer to criticize the excesses of America’s “Gilded Age” and to contribute more directly to environmental reform. Burroughs, Walker writes, “is often chastised in retrospect by those who believe he could have, and should have, done more to advance environmental and social causes through his writings.” Walker examines Burroughs’s relationships with men such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone and finds that Burroughs was not awestruck in the presence of men of great wealth and power (pointing out, in fact, that these men sought out Burroughs, not the other way around), but found in each of them something—unrelated to wealth or political power— that was worthy of respect. Stephen M. Mercier draws a fascinating link between Warwick Fox’s philosophy of “transpersonal ecology” and the manner in which Burroughs encouraged his audience to “identify with the nonhuman” when they went out into nature. Burroughs’s emphasis on forging an attachment to place, suggests Mercier, has direct links to the work of modern environmental writers such as Wendell Berry and Arne Naess. In “Emerson’s Natural Theology: John Burroughs and the ‘Church’ of Latter Day Transcendentalism,” Daniel G. Payne also makes a connection between Burroughs’s work and modern environmentalism, examining the line of descent from Burroughs to literary environmentalists of today, and making the case that Burroughs was instrumental in transmitting the Emersonian “link between science, nature, and the sacred…to the twentieth-century.” In the eighty years since Burroughs’s death, the Catskill region has faced numerous environmental and economic challenges that have changed the landscape, some of which are described in “Burroughs Country: The Catskills Then and Now.” As Tom Alworth, director of the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, writes, “[t]he Catskills…are a story of wilderness lost and wilderness regained, economic booms and busts, and a source of valuable resources.” In his essay he provides us with a concise history of land use and wilderness preservation in the Catskills, and an expert appraisal of some of the current development issues facing those who live in and love this unique region. He also makes a compelling argument that since more than half of the Catskill Park is privately owned, the issue of how (and not whether) to proceed with future development is of paramount importance, and that

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“the Catskills should serve as a model for how people can live with nature and a model for how we can maintain healthy ecosystems adjacent to socially and economically vibrant communities.” The second part of this collection focuses on the work of several nature writers who, like Burroughs, are linked closely through their work to a particular landscape or region. For comparative purposes, we begin with two nature writers whose work preceded that of Burroughs, William Bartram and Susan Fenimore Cooper. In “Treaties and the Ecological Perspective of William Bartram and John Burroughs,” Ian Stapley points out how both writers “see the natural world in terms of relations that unfold according to ineluctable laws, these relations between species unfolding in terms of what is necessary to maintain these laws, and both note instances of man’s activities that violate these laws.” Stapley argues that not only does this indicate a shared sense that nature and the spirit are linked, but suggests that both writers saw the relationship between humankind and nature as a type of treaty, and that this construct prefigures modern concepts such as ecological balance. In “The Use of Metaphor and Metonymy in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours: A Structural Analysis,” Nancy Metzger presents an insightful textual analysis of Rural Hours, examining and expertly identifying the strategies that Cooper (and by extension, other nature writers) employs to make her home landscape familiar to her reading audience. As Michael Buckley points out in “Reworking Literary Natural History: Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals,” when Thaxter wrote her book about these islands off the coast of New Hampshire in 1873, only one precedent existed for a book-length study of geography, natural history, and social history by an American woman,” and that book was Cooper’s Rural Hours. Buckley makes a strong case for Thaxter’s inclusion in the predominantly male canon of the nineteenth-century’s great nature writers. Likewise, in “Buying the Farm: Jewett’s ‘A White Heron’ and Nature as Commodity,” Robert A. Beuka argues that Sarah Orne Jewett should not be seen simply as a regionalist writer, but as a proto-environmentalist who employs her skill as a fiction writer to make “a direct plea for the sustaining of those things fated to impermanence— summertime, childhood, the woodlands themselves.” George Washington Sears, who wrote under the pseudonym “Nessmuk” is best known for a series of letters he wrote in the early 1880s to Forest and Stream magazine, chronicling a series of canoe trips he took through upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. In “Nessmuk’s Log of the Bucktail: ‘The Effect of this Constant Depletion of Green Timber,’”

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T.P. Murphy examines a lesser known series of articles written by Sears, Log of the Bucktail, that describe a canoe trip by Sears through the same area in Tioga County, Pennsylvania where Murphy lives today. He closely examines Sears’s descriptions of the landscape of the region, which was heavily logged in the nineteenth-century, and compares those observations and some of Sears’s predictions about the landscape to its present day state. In “Libby Beaman: Creating a Role for Herself as Naturalist in the Pribiloff Islands,” Wendy A. Weaver draws a fascinating portrait of Libby Beaman, who is one of only a relative handful of nineteenth-century women (particularly from the privileged classes of the eastern United States) who successfully overcame cultural bias against women who sought out a genuine wilderness experience. As Weaver points out, by “restoring women’s voices to the tradition of wilderness experience writing,” additional light may be shed on the tradition in general and to the unique history of women in the American wilderness. The second part of this collection concludes with essays that reexamine the work of three early twentieth-century writers—Liberty Hyde Bailey, Willa Cather, and Louis Bromfield—from modern critical perspectives. In “An Oblique Prophecy: A Re-Examination of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s The Holy Earth,” Richard Hunt examines a short work by a writer who has been largely neglected by literary critics. The Holy Earth, as Hunt discusses, contains what many will find to be a startlingly radical—if ultimately unworkable—social and environmental agenda. In Christine Nadir’s essay, “Phases of Farm Life and Senses of Place: Environmental Ethics as Home Economics in John Burroughs and Willa Cather,” Nadir assesses her subject’s work from the perspective of modern ecocriticism, arguing that Cather’s “celebration of pioneers and cultivated landscapes” should not be misread as anti-environmentalist, but as a “critique of modernization processes that disembed social relations from local places and cultures.” Finally, David Seamon’s “Place, Belonging, and Environmental Humility: The Experience of ‘Teched’ as portrayed by American Novelist and Agrarian Reformer Louis Bromfield” takes a phenomenological approach to the work of Bromfield, a Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist. In this essay, Seamon suggests that Bromfield’s work should be reconsidered as an insightful “real world expression of environmental humility…in our cynical postmodern time.” The third and final section of this book features invited essays by three distinguished scholars who consider the topic of what writing about the land and nature means from three different perspectives—urban, suburban, and rural. John Tallmadge, the author of Under the Cincinnati

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Arch: Learning from Nature in the City, begins his essay on “John Burroughs’s Contrarian Path” by noting that Burroughs’s career as a nature writer began while he was working as a Treasury Department clerk in Washington, D.C., and that his first book, Wake-Robin (1871), includes an essay on urban nature, “Spring at the Capital.” This essay, writes Tallmadge, “exemplifies Burroughs’s gently contrarian impulse with respect to both nature and culture. Instead of mystifying the remote and exotic, he chooses to celebrate the local and small; instead of regeneration through violence, he promises redemption through intimacy and attentiveness.” In this way, Burroughs work appealed not just to rural readers but to “an urban readership…worn out by war, class struggle, and the economic injustice and turbulence of laissez-faire capitalism.” It was not until after the Second World War that a combination of prosperity, widespread automobile ownership, high-speed roadways, and a middle class exodus from the cities created the impetus for a boom in the growth of the suburbs in the United States. Neither city nor country, as Robert Beuka, the author of SuburbiaNation (2004) points out in “Our Big Backyard: Nature in Suburban Writing,” any attempt to analyze nature and culture in the suburbs must include “a larger perception of a more generalized suburban ‘artificiality.’” While there is a substantial body of late twentieth-century fiction, such as that of John Cheever, John Updike, and Richard Ford, that portrays a sterile, alienating suburban landscape, as Beuka points out, the rise of suburban studies and suburban nature writing in particular has made a more nuanced vision of the suburban landscape possible. Charlotte Zoë Walker’s “’Rural to the Last Drop’: Writing Rural Land from John Burroughs to Ourselves” is a lyrical, often poignant, essay on the relationship between human beings and their home landscapes, written from the perspective of a Burroughs scholar and longtime inhabitant of the Catskill region. Like Burroughs, Walker understands that in order to write about the land, one must first learn to read it—and that one who has taken the time to learn the language of nature becomes in turn a part of that landscape. Gracefully moving from a scholarly discussion of writers such as John Burroughs, Hal Borland, and Wendell Berry to personal memoir, Walker gives us a moving sense of what it means to read “the book of nature” and, in turn, imparting its lessons to others by writing about the land.

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Figure 2: Lantern slide of Burroughs, 1903. Milne Library, State University of New York at Oneonta

PART I: JOHN BURROUGHS AND HIS LEGACY

AN ISLAND IN A SEA OF ICE: AN AUTUMN VISTA ROBERT TITUS

John Burroughs, the pre-eminent New York State natural history writer, is closely associated with the Catskills, where he was born and raised.1 Burroughs certainly knew his way around all of the Catskills, and he wrote extensively about their natural history, but the one mountain he is linked to the most is Slide Mountain. Burroughs first wrote about Slide when he described his hike to its top in his essay “The Heart of the Southern Catskills.”2 There is a historical marker in recognition of him at the base of the mountain, and he is honored by a memorial plaque at its summit. Slide Mountain, along with Cornell and Wittenberg mountains, makes up the Burroughs Range of the Catskills. At 4,180 feet in elevation, the peak offers the loftiest climb in all of the Catskills and is a favorite goal for many hikers. From the western trail head, the climb is an easy one, and on a beautiful fall day, the view is beautiful. On one such day, the weather was clear, warm and sunny, with the best fall foliage in years. But when I got to the top, it was early winter; the foliage was gone and there was ice on the trail puddles, and even a little snow on the ground. It was breezy and very cold. The climb had taken me from one season to another. And, while that is a common experience for a mountain climber, it is, nevertheless, always an unsettling one. The rewards of “conquering” Slide are many. As a geologist, the fine ledge of rock at the top was of particular interest to me. This rock is composed of Slide Mountain Sandstone, and has a story of its own to tell. To most people, however, interest focuses on the several excellent vantage points at or near the top, which offer views in differing compass directions. You can look east and see Cornell and Wittenberg mountains with the Ashokan Reservoir below them. Then there is the northeast with

1 2

Reprinted by permission of Purple Mountain Press, Ltd., Fleischmanns, NY. John Burroughs, Riverby (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 37-66.

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Plateau, Indian Head and Overlook mountains. To the north is Panther Mountain and so on. Slide is well situated for the seeker of views.

Figure 3: Burroughs Memorial atop Slide Mountain (photograph by Daniel G. Payne).

The mountain’s birds were of great interest to John Burroughs and it was a pleasure to follow in the footsteps of the great writer. There were, however, two other men I was also trailing on that climb. They were Catskill geologists, almost as well known in their own professions in their day as Burroughs was in his. The purpose of my trip was to investigate for myself one of the interesting problems in the history of the study of Catskill glaciations. I was curious about a minor debate which occurred during the first half of this century; one which I am not sure was ever settled. The question was this: did the most recent glaciation, a great continental ice sheet called the Woodfordian advance, cover all of the Catskills, or did one or more of the mountains remain poking through the ice? A peak sticking through a continental glacier is called a nunatak. Had Slide Mountain been a nunatak while all around it was buried in ice? Had Slide been an island in a sea of ice, or had it, too, been submerged by the great glacier of about 22,000 years ago? The question is not a very critical one; no important theories hang in the balance, but we geologists wonder about such things. The story began in 1916, when John Lyon Rich, a glacial geologist, was surveying Slide. He noted that the slopes of the Mountain were clearly scoured by glaciers. That was no surprise; all of the Catskills show the effects of passing glaciers. They have been scraped, gouged and generally ground up by the passing ice; the soils are thin and only poorly developed. But that was not entirely the case with Slide Mountain. At 3,900 feet in elevation, the landscape changed. Above that level, Rich noticed that the ledges of rock were much less sharply defined; their corners, once sharp

4

An Island in a Sea of Ice: An Autumn Vista

fractures, seemed to have been softened by long ages of chemical weathering. The bedrock ledges were often stained with the yellow and red of iron oxides, a weathering phenomenon not found in the lower elevations. Loose boulders were rounded, and they displayed weathering rinds, also stained by iron, again something which should take a lot of time. He thought that the high elevation soils were thicker than those below. They were certainly rich in quartz pebbles, which could only have been derived from the extensive, long term weathering of local bedrock. Rich deduced that the upper three hundred feet of Slide Mountain had escaped the grip of the Woodfordian glacier which, otherwise, had inundated the rest of the peak, and maybe, all the rest of the Catskills. In short, the soils and bedrock at this high elevation are extensively weathered because they have lain there for a very long time, undisturbed by the glaciers which passed below.

Figure 4: View from Slide Mountain (photograph by Daniel G. Payne).

A differing point of view was developed in 1928 when an observation tower was constructed at the summit of Slide. Excavations for the tower's foundation uncovered glacial striations in the freshly exposed bedrock. A passing glacier will drag with it boulders and cobbles, which often gouge long straight striations into the bedrock. George Halcott Chadwick, who devoted his entire career to the study of Catskill geology, was the first to notice them. He immediately concluded that the mountain had indeed recently been covered in ice. A great glacier had buried the tallest peak of the Catskills. How deeply, Chadwick did not know, but the glacier must have been enormous. Rich was not persuaded by the evidence presented by Chadwick. In 1935 he retorted that the Slide striations must have dated back to an older episode of glaciation; he stuck to his view that Slide had been a nunatak during the recent Woodfordian advance. And that’s where the debate

Writing the Land: John Burroughs and his Legacy

5

ended; scientific juries don’t render verdicts, and nobody was declared the winner of the little debate. I am not sure, but I think that there is a consensus among most of today’s glacial geologists to accept Chadwick's argument. Nevertheless, John Lyon Rich was an experienced glacial geologist and his views cannot be easily dismissed. And so, on my climb, I would see for myself. The first thing that I noticed was that there were indeed changes at 3,900 feet in elevation. Quartz pebbles do become very prominent on the trails. Also, I found no iron stains until 3,900 feet. But what about those glacial striations near the fire tower’s foundation that had been noted by Chadwick and formed such an important part of his belief that Slide had been covered in ice during a recent glacial period? I knew where the observation tower had been (a bit of its foundation remains), but I could not find the striations. I am sure they were there in 1928. Chadwick was too fine a geologist to have made a mistake about that, but today they do seem to be gone. My guess is that these striations had been so softened by long term weathering that they have disintegrated since 1928. This suggests that they might well have dated back to an earlier glaciation, which is what Rich thought. On the way down the mountain I pondered the issue. On this day at least, the views of John Lyon Rich had prevailed. The top of Slide Mountain does match his descriptions and does seem more weathered than the rest of its slopes. But still, I had doubts about whether the older glaciation ever reached the top of the mountain. Hard answers are hard to come by in this type of science. I shall, from now on, be looking very carefully at the tops of the other tall Catskill Mountains. Maybe the answers are there. October 14th, the year 19,771 B.C., just before dawn. The night is moonless, and the eastern horizon is still completely dark. The sky is clear and the stars display themselves with an unusual clarity. They have an intense but strangely icy twinkle to them. The surroundings cannot be seen very clearly. The surface is smooth and reflects the starlight with a silvery sheen of surprising brilliance. It is quiet; the predawn atmosphere is completely still. That only renders more audible the few soft sounds which are heard emanating from a short distance to the north. These are low, deep groaning and creaking sounds which are not animal but mechanical in nature. They are intermittent; one is followed by several sharp cracking sounds which echo across the darkness. Now, just before the sun’s light will begin to appear, there is a breeze. It is gentle but it gradually picks up and intensifies into a steady wind from the east. A very slight glow gradually appears in the far southeast. It hugs

6

An Island in a Sea of Ice: An Autumn Vista

the horizon from which it grows. The light is soon bright, and the eastern horizon has broadened and its glow now dominates the vista. All stars, except the brightest, have disappeared. The sunlit horizon blurs into a bright tangerine stratum lying between a thin, gray, ground fog below, and the blue gray sky above. Now a few wind driven snowflakes blow against the jagged and barren mass of sandstone that makes up the foreground. As the sun continues to rise, the birth throes of this dawn subside, and the winds die down again. The snow settles and the high arctic plateau which, in these times, comprises the Catskills, emerges from the white. The nearby landscape can now be seen as a large mass of sandstone mantled in a gravelly soil, with its light color forming little contrast to the surrounding ice. The sandstone rises a few hundred feet above the ice. It is stepped, with sedimentary layers making each of the “stairs.” The steps rise to the small summit very near the northern edge of this “island.” A few very weathered tree stumps do little to relieve the barrenness of the scene. Just over the edge, beyond the summit, a large jumble of broken ice abuts upon this island of rock. The great sheet of ice is very actively advancing out of the north and its flow is breaking against the rocky impediment. That’s the source of most of the noise. The current of ice splits around the rock and flows along the eastern and western slopes. Each current carries with it the dirty plume of sediment it scraped off the rock. To the east, other currents of ice are breaking against the unseen summit of Cornell Mountain. Of lower elevation, this peak does not rise above the ice, but there is another plume of dirty brown ice to mark its location. A little east of north, other broken masses of ice can be seen in the far distance. More streamers of dirty ice trail away to the south, marking the locations of the taller ledges of Panther Mountain. The rest of the horizon is a bleak, seemingly unending, plain of ice. The sun rises higher in the sky and the day brightens. The peak of Slide is not entirely bare; there are some pockets of snow. And, surprisingly, some of this snow is bright red. Just a few weeks earlier the red patches were a dirty green. The color is from snow-dwelling algae, and red is the color they take on in preparation for winter. It is, after all, autumn in the Catskills— twenty two thousand years ago.

JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE ANTI-RENT WAR ROGER HECHT

The theme of this collection is “writing the land,” which, of course, evokes a number of possible approaches to the subject. One could write of the natural setting—the flora and fauna of a region and the intricate interrelationships between species and landforms that make a region biologically unique. One could write of the landscape—the way the shapes and colors and textures of a place can be composed into aesthetically pleasing or provocative scenes. One can write of a stretch of land with a sense of the mystical, sensing in the behaviors of plants and animals a correspondence to a parallel reality, an allegory of a greater Truth. All of these are ways that John Burroughs wrote about the western Catskills, his home region in Delaware County, a place that has come to be known as “Burroughs Country.” But a given land has many stories, many histories that can be told. One such story that is an essential part of “Burroughs Country” is that of a struggle between farmers and landlords, between the poor and the rich, the powerless and the powerful, a period known as upstate New York’s Anti-Rent War. But this conflict was not some piece of forgotten lore in the country where John Burroughs lived, it was a conflict that, as a young boy, Burroughs witnessed first-hand. The Anti-Rent War was more than just a blip in upstate New York’s history. It was a genuine uprising, an attempt by tenant farmers to overturn the power of some of the most prominent families in the state. During the 1840s and 50s, the Anti-Rent War was seen by many as a crisis heralding the destruction of American society itself, and drew the attention of some of the country’s most prominent writers. James Fenimore Cooper, for instance, in a series of novels known as the Littlepage trilogy, represented the Anti-Renters as not a merely threat to democracy, but the embodiment of all that was wrong with democracy itself—a society ruled by the masses, motivated by base concerns (like making a living) rather than high ideals (like preserving the property rights of the wealthy). Cooper was not the only writer to weigh in on Anti-Rent question. Editorialists from journals as far afield as Boston’s New Englander and New Orleans’s DeBow’s Review saw in the Anti-Rent war evidence of a coming anarchy.

8

John Burroughs and the Anti-Rent War

Not all writers were so hostile, however. Herman Melville clearly sympathizes with the distressed farmers when he magnifies the tyranny and rapaciousness of the landholding class in his novel, Pierre. Numerous Anti-Rent newspapers printed scores of poems and songs exalting the antirent cause and castigating the landlords. Add to this list such persons as the ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the novelist and playwright James Kirke Paulding, and political philosopher Karl Marx, and we can see that the Anti-Rent War generated quite a bit of interest among writers and thinkers of the day, and a substantial body of literature was dedicated to the conflict. So what, exactly, was the Anti-Rent War, and why did it stir so many passionate pens? Historians date the conflict from 1839 to 1846, although tenant discontent goes back at least a century before and continued sporadically into the decades after the Civil War. The Anti-Rent War was a sustained rent-strike carried out by tenant farmers in the Hudson Valley and Catskill regions of upstate New York. Huge tracts of lands in these regions were owned by a small coterie of families, such as the Rensselaers and the Livingstons, families who wielded a great amount of social and political power in the state. The Rensselaer family alone held over 750,000 acres in the region that includes present Albany and Rensselaer counties. In addition to the 160,000 acre Livingston Manor, the Livingston family owned a controlling interest in the million-acre Hardenburgh patent that includes all of present day Delaware County. Most of these lands were acquired during the colonial period of Dutch and English settlement. During this time, large parcels of land, or patents, were granted to individuals by land companies or the Crown on the condition that they then settle the lands. These families intended to use their vast landholdings to create, in the words of historian Reeve Huston, “benevolent hierarchies that would provide them with income, deference, and a material base for genteel performance.”1 In other words, they wanted to monopolize control over the land in order to establish an aristocratic dominion over the state. These aristocratic ambitions are reflected in the leases they offered prospective farmers. The landlords offered several different kinds of leases. Stephen van Rensselaer offered a “durable lease,” or an incomplete sale, where the tenant (or “freeholder”) “owned” the property in perpetuity as a freehold estate with certain restrictions.2 The tenant paid a perpetual rent of 10 to 14 1

Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 21. 2 David Maldwyn Ellis, Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, 1790-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1946), 26.

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bushels of wheat, four fat fowls, and a day’s labor, commodities that were eventually commuted into cash payments based on the year’s market value of wheat.3 The Livingston family rented lands for terms of two or three lives (the number of people whose names were on the lease). Unlike the perpetual lease, which allowed a tenant to pass his farm on to his children, life leases kept land in the landlord’s hands: upon the death of the last person named on the lease, the lands reverted to the landlord.4 While the landlord might well lease the land back to the tenant’s family, this was not guaranteed and families frequently faced eviction. Both kinds of leases added additional restrictions that limited the ways tenants could make use of their farms. Rensselaer and Livingston reserved all rights to mines and mill sites on their property, thus limiting the tenants’ range of economic activities and guaranteeing that tenant farmers would have to utilize mills the landlords monopolized. Most important (and most hated) of these restrictions was the “quarter sale,” a fine on alienation in which tenants, upon selling their freehold to another individual, had to pay twenty five per cent of the sale price to the landlord, an amount that could equal a year’s rent. Quarter sales and life-leases made it difficult for farmers to benefit from the improvements they made to the land, and made it nearly impossible for tenants’ children to benefit from their parents’ labor. Landlords, however, drew great benefit by releasing improved land to new tenants at an increased price.5 Under no circumstances, however, were landlords willing to allow the farmers to buy their lands outright. The overall effect of these leases was to keep land, wealth, and power in the hands of the landlords. Most farmers, however, had the ambition to be small land owners themselves. Adhering to the Jeffersonian ideal that placed moral, economic, and political virtue in the hands of small farmers, the anti-renters believed that the conditions of their leases robbed them of their wealth and that the monopolization of land violated the spirit of the American Revolution which they or their forefathers had fought. The conflict started with tenants on the Rensselaer estate, in 1839, following the death of Stephen van Rensselaer III. His estate was inherited by his two sons, who divided the property between them. Also inherited was $400,000 in debt, which the younger Rensselaers tried to cover by collecting back rents from their tenants. However, many of these tenants were not able to pay these rents due to the collapse of crop prices following the panic of 1837. The tenants formed a committee to meet with 3

Ellis, Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, 1790-1850, 227. Ibid., 228. 5 Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York, 126-128. 4

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John Burroughs and the Anti-Rent War

Stephen van Rensselaer IV to discuss their concerns with their new landlord. Their goal was to seek relief for destitute farmers in order to prevent their eviction. They also wished to renegotiate their lease obligations, to replace labor requirements with cash payments and to adjust their rent downward to account for depressed crop prices. Most important, they hoped to negotiate a buyout of their farms and achieve their dream of being independent freeholders. Stephen van Rensselaer’s imperious refusal to meet with his tenants to discuss their concerns triggered the farmers’ indignation and is considered to be the event that ignited the AntiRent conflict. The Anti-Rent War was fought in several ways. Primarily, it was a very effective rent-strike. Farmers formed Anti-Rent associations and agreed to withhold rent from their landlords until their demands were met. When the landlords sent their agents or law enforcement to collect back rents or evict the farmers, they were met with force. Some of the striking farmers formed militias to defend their compatriots from eviction and to enforce the strike. They called themselves “Indians” and wore disguises of calico smocks and sheepskin masks. Their efforts were alternately menacing and playful. For instance, in one case an agent was seized by Indians and threatened with violence if he didn’t burn his warrants. Later he was taken to a tavern, compelled to buy several rounds of drinks for the Indians and told to shout “down with rent.” In the end, he was scolded and then sent away. Soon the Indians became more aggressive: some agents had their horses and carriages sabotaged and others were even tarred and feathered. When the Sheriff of Albany was sent to reinstate the force of law, he was met by a mob of more than 1,500 farmers. In 1840, Governor William Seward called out the militia to put down the initial uprising in Albany County. This was not the end of the conflict, however. Quickly, the tenant revolt spread over six counties. Scores of Anti-Rent associations were formed, as well as half a dozen newspapers to propagate the anti-rent message. The Anti-Renters also fought legal and political battles in the courts and the statehouse. The farmers believed that the landlords’ titles to the land were illegitimate to begin with. Stories of shady dealings behinds the large proprietors’ land acquisitions fed this belief. The most famous of these stories involved the Hardenburgh patent in Delaware County. The original grant defined the western border of the patent as the “main branch” of the Delaware River. However, the Delaware River has two branches of equal size. By some cartographic sleight of hand, the boundary of the patent was shifted from the east to the west branch of the river, adding hundreds of thousands acres to the Livingston’s holdings.

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The farmers sued the landlords in court, hoping that they could extinguish their titles and create the opportunity to purchase their farms from the state at a reasonable price. This effort was, ultimately, unsuccessful. The farmers found more success in the political field. This was the age of Jacksonian democracy, when suffrage was extended to all white males, regardless of their status as property owners, and politicians became acutely sensitive to the popular electorate. Factions of both the Democratic and Whig parties sought the Anti-Rent vote. Joining forces with the FreeSoil movement, the farmers created their own Anti-Rent party, which was instrumental in electing two state governors and affecting changes in the state constitution that outlawed some of the more egregious conditions of their leases. Delaware County, where John Burroughs lived out his boyhood, is where the Anti-Rent war was most fiercely fought. The county was split between “up-renters,” small landowners and shop owners who opposed the anti-rent activities, and “down-renters,” anti-rent activists and their sympathizers. One of those down-rent sympathizers was John Burroughs’s father. The tension between up- and down-renters was strong. Anti-Rent Indians directed their intimidation tactics not only at sheriffs and their deputies serving warrants against farmers, but also at citizens who didn’t support the cause. In one of these incidents a group of Indians assaulted John Gould, the father of future financier, Jay Gould, to compel him to stop using his tin dinner horn to call in his field hands. The Anti-Renters had adopted the tin horn as their means to call out together their forces. Apparently, Gould’s use of his own tin horn sent out false alarms to the Indians. The Indians accosted Gould on several occasions, but he never gave in. In another instance, the Indians tarred and feathered another uprenter, Hiram More, but for unspecified reasons that may not have pertained directly to the anti-rent movement.6 At the same time, the County Sheriff organized posses to arrest the anti-renters and break the strike. These posses targeted both active strike organizers and their supporters. In his autobiography, My Boyhood (1922), Burroughs describes how his own father was caught up in one of these posses. Fleeing to a neighbor’s house, he tried to take refuge, but he was caught with his feet sticking out from under the bed.7 Clara Barrus, in her biography of Burroughs, describes him reminiscing on how he and his family detested the landlord’s agent. The young Burroughs joined the down-rent boys at his school in taunting and fighting the up-rent boys. He attended Anti-Rent 6

Dorothy Kubik, A Free Soil—A Free People: The Anti-Rent War in Delaware County, New York. (Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1997), 41-42. 7 John Burroughs, My Boyhood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 59.

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John Burroughs and the Anti-Rent War

meetings with his father and knew personally at least one of the Indians, one of his neighbors. The Anti-Rent war reached a tragic climax in 1845 with the shooting of a sheriff’s deputy, Osman Steele, near the town of Andes. Steele and another deputy were attempting to enforce the sale of farmer Moses Earle’s cattle for back rent. A large band of Indians were in attendance to interfere with the sale. While the details of just how the events unfolded remain unclear, shots were fired and Steele was killed. In the days following the shooting on Earle’s farm, Governor Silas Wright declared a state of emergency in Delaware County and the state militia was sent in to round up the calico Indians and their supporters. Hundreds of anti-renters were arrested (regardless of whether they were in fact present at Moses Earle’s farm) and were kept in log stockades next to the Delhi courthouse. Nearly 250 men were indicted for crimes related to Steele’s death. Two men were sentenced to death, though it was never proven that they fired the fatal shot; they were later pardoned by the governor once public outcry over the murder settled down.8 While the Anti-Rent movement continued its legal and political activities well into the next decade, the death of Steele effectively squelched the most radical elements of the movement. While John Burroughs does not make extensive reference to the AntiRent war in his works, I think the influence the conflict had on him can be felt in his writing. First, and most important of all, there is his commitment to a place, his place, and the culture of small farmers that nurtured him. In “An Egotistical Chapter” Burroughs writes, If a man is not born into an environment best suited to him, he, as a rule, casts about him until he finds such an environment . . . . I was born of and among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and my closest associates since have been with those whose minds have been alien to literature and art. My unliterary environment has doubtless been best suited to me.9

Burroughs goes on to attribute the “primal sweetness” of his books to his rural, unsophisticated world; a world geared to the cycles of nature and agricultural work. Burroughs’s land is the land the down-rent farmers defended, and to these farmers Burroughs has a special dedication. He sings sweet praises to pre-industrial farming in “Phases of Farm Life” and My Boyhood.” In “The Faith of a Naturalist” Burroughs writes with a deep 8

Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York, 150. 9 John Burroughs, Indoor Studies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 264.

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sense of skepticism toward received beliefs and traditions, a skepticism I imagine that must have been born from his exposure to radical questioning of the landlords’ social order.10 When Burroughs writes from the Book of Nature, he is looking for stories to tell. Some stories he places in the foreground, others remain in the background. The Anti-Rent War of the 1840s is certainly one of those stories.

Works Cited Barrus, Clara. John Burroughs, Boy and Man. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1920. Burroughs, John. My Boyhood, with a Conclusion by His Son, Julian Burroughs. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1922. —. Indoor Studies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889. Ellis, David Maldwyn. Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, 1790-1850. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1946. Huston, Reeve. Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kubik, Dorothy. A Free Soil—A Free People: The Anti-Rent War in Delaware County, New York. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1997. Walker, Charlotte Zoe. The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

10 John Burroughs, “The Faith of a Naturalist in Accepting the Universe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 112-133.

JOHN BURROUGHS AND HENRY THOREAU: TRAVELING WIDELY AT HOME EDWARD J. RENEHAN JR.

Writing in The Nation magazine during the 1870s, Henry James described John Burroughs as “a more humorous, more available and more sociable Thoreau.”1 James was the first to compare the two philosopher naturalists, but by no means was he the last. Indeed, Burroughs's only child, Julian, when in his dotage in the late 1940s and early 1950s, made something of a cottage industry out of giving illustrated talks during which he spoke of similarities and dissimilarities between the two writers. The dissimilarities were many, and were mostly in the realm of personal temperament. John Burroughs crafted just two major pieces of writing on Thoreau. The first, an extended essay originally written for The Century magazine of July 1882, was subsequently reprinted in Burroughs's first major book of collected criticism, Indoor Studies (1889). This piece took the form of a reaction to Thoreau's never-before-published journals as brought to press by Thoreau's friend Harrison Blake. In this essay, entitled simply “Henry D. Thoreau,” Burroughs provided the Concord rambler, writer and philosopher with somewhat backhanded praise as the ultimate Emersonian: in other words, the ultimate contrarian, so intent on going his own way that he—in Burroughs's estimation—put himself at odds with the world. Burroughs wrote that Thoreau was: a man devoid of compassion, devoid of sympathy, devoid of generosity, devoid of patriotism, as these words are usually understood, yet his life showed a devotion to principle such as one life in millions does not show; and matching this there runs through his works a vein of the purest and rarest poetry and the finest wisdom. For both these reasons time will enhance rather than lessen the value of his contributions. The world likes a 1

“Winter Sunshine,” The Nation, January 27, 1876. This review was published anonymously, but was later included by Henry James in Views and Reviews (1908).

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good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and acceptor, only it likes him farther off.2

While there was much to be admired in such devotion to principle, Burroughs found the unyielding lines of Thoreau's devout ethics to be, in many ways, too firm: The outlines of Thoreau's moral nature are strong and noble, but the direct face-to-face expression of his character is not always pleasing, not always human. He appears best in profile, when looking away from you and not toward you—when looking at Nature and not at man. He combined a remarkable strength of will with a nature singularly sensitive and delicate—the most fair and fragile of wood-flowers on an iron stem. With more freedom and flexibility of character, greater capacity for selfsurrender and self-abandonment, he would have been a great poet. But his principal aim in life was moral and intellectual, rather than artistic. He was an ascetic before he was a poet, and he cuts the deepest in the direction of character and conduct. He had no caution or prudence in the ordinary sense, no worldly temporizing qualities of any kind, was impatient of the dross and alloy of life—would have it pure flame, pure purpose and aspiration; and, so far as he could make it, his life was so. He was, by nature, of the Opposition; he had a constitutional No in him that could not be tortured into Yes. He was of the stuff that saints and martyrs and devotees, or, if you please, fanatics are made of and, no doubt, in an earlier age, would have faced the rack or the stake with perfect composure. Such a man was bound to make an impression by contrast, if not by comparison, with the men of his country and time. He is, for the most part, a figure going the other way from that of the eager, money-getting, ambitious crowd, and he questions and admonishes and ridicules the passers-by sharply. We all see him and remember him, and feel his shafts. Especially was his attitude upon all social and political questions scornful and exasperating. His devotion to principle, to the ideal, was absolute; it was like that of the Hindu to his idol. If it devoured him or crushed him—what business was that of his? There was no conceivable failure in adherence to 3 principle.

Burroughs’s aim in literature—as he himself pointed out—was also something quite different than that aspired to by Thoreau. “There is little or no resemblance between us,” he once wrote. “Thoreau’s aim is mainly ethical, as much as Emerson’s; my aim, as far as I have any, is entirely

2 3

John Burroughs, Indoor Studies, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 6. Ibid., 12-14.

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John Burroughs and Henry Thoreau: Traveling Widely at Home

artistic.”4 Burroughs claimed he cared nothing for the ethical, that he would not preach one word: “I paint a bird or trout or scene for its own sake, truthfully anyhow, picturesquely if I can.”5 Still, Burroughs and Thoreau did have their shared traits. Both men, as their writing clearly reflects, were great pedestrians. As Burroughs pointed out in his 1882 essay, Thoreau was “no fair-weather walker. He delighted in storms, and in frost and cold. They were congenial to him. … He rejoices greatly when, on an expedition to Monadnock, he gets soaked with rain and is made thoroughly uncomfortable. It tastes good. It made him appreciate a roof and a fire. The mountain gods were especially kind and thoughtful to get up the storm.”6 Burroughs added, as an aside, that this passion for storms and drenchings no doubt helped shorten Thoreau’s days. Thoreau’s mediation “Walking” is a clear forerunner to Burroughs’s “Exhilarations of the Road,” the latter published in The Galaxy of June 1873, and later in Burroughs's 1875 book Winter Sunshine. In that paper, Burroughs notes tellingly: “When you get into a railway car you want a continent, the man in his carriage requires a township; but a walker like Thoreau finds as much and more along the shores of Walden Pond.”7 In addition to walking, both men loved mountains: Thoreau his Monadnock, Burroughs his Slide Mountain and other such Catskill summits. Each took away from mountains a distinctly spiritual value. In a letter to his son, Burroughs noted that the Arabs believed mountains steadied the earth and held it together. For the Chinese, mountains were more often than not the abodes of divinities. The Gods of Greece had lived on Mount Olympus, and in the Bible, mountains were repeatedly used as symbols for all that was great and holy. Jerusalem was spoken of as a Holy Mountain. It was on Mount Horeb that God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, and on Mount Sinai that He delivered to him the Ten Commandments. Writing in much the same vein in an early draft of Walden, Thoreau noted that “on the tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.”8 Thoreau wrote that climbing mountains allowed one to experience one's own “higher latitudes,” one would be “elevated and etherealized” with Transcendental awareness. Further, in the solitude of a mountain vastness one could find God in 4

Clara Barrus, vol.1 of The Life and Letters of John Burroughs (New York: Russell & Russell, 1925), 212. 5 Ibid. 6 John Burroughs, Indoor Studies, 24-25. 7 John Burroughs, Winter Sunshine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1875), 37. 8 Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, Holograph manuscript with revisions. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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nature and perceive the world as living and divine; for “mountains thus seen are worthy of worship.” 9 The idea of God in nature was of course another realm, another concept, where Burroughs and Thoreau met on common terrain. Indeed, among the literary remains of Burroughs’s last few weeks of life we find the following fragment: I have not tried, as the phrase is, to lead my readers from Nature up to Nature's God, because I cannot separate the one from the other. If your heart warms toward the visible creation, and toward your fellow men, you have the root of the matter in you. The power we call God does not sustain a mechanical or secondary relation to the universe, but is vital in it, or one with it. To give this power human lineaments and attributes, as our fathers did, only limits and belittles it. And to talk of leading from Nature up to Nature’s God is to miss the God that throbs in every spear of grass and vibrates in the wing of every insect that hums. The Infinite is immanent in 10 the universe.

Elsewhere, writing in 1883, Burroughs noted the Bible’s lesson which said: “In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” In this instance, Burroughs—who had early on rejected his own fundamentalist Baptist roots—urged his readers nevertheless to take this passage of the Bible literally. “How childish this talk is,” he wrote, “that we can be nearer God, nearer heaven, in some other world, than we are here! What irreligion and atheism it is! The child in its mother's womb is no nearer its mother than you and I and all men are at all times near God.”11 Further to this point, Burroughs recommended to his readers that they go to the woods to develop a personal relationship with nature that did not vulgarize it and rob it of its divinity. Thoreau’s religious view was much the same as Burroughs's, albeit one generated a generation before. In his book Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness, Alan D. Hodder explains that Thoreau’s Transcendent God is not personalized like the scriptural Jehovah, but is instead an immanent and divine IT. “This divine reality,” Hodder writes, “is neither he nor she, above nor beyond, past nor future, but is now timelessly here. Even more unusual is the mediating role performed by the senses. Not only is sensory experience affirmed, here the senses serve as the veritable channels of 9

Ibid. John Burroughs, The Last Harvest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 233-34. 11 John Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, Clara Barrus, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 92. 10

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John Burroughs and Henry Thoreau: Traveling Widely at Home

divine inspiration.”12 Thus, Hodder concludes, Thoreau originated “an ecstatic religion of nature for which there had been no precedent till that time in American religious history.”13 Well, perhaps some precedent. Thoreau, like Burroughs, took a great deal away from Emerson. And wasn’t it Emerson who said Pantheism magnifies rather than belittles God? Similar in their predilections for nature, for hiking, for Emerson, and for the real revelation of the infinite in nature, Thoreau and Burroughs also shared in common their skepticism of the machine, machine culture, and cities as a phenomenon. Writing in The Brown Decades, Lewis Mumford said that Thoreau, by embracing “the totality of the natural environment,” was a forerunner of a “fresh effort and action” against the “relentless spread of venal and mechanical civilization.”14 Thoreau himself, in passage after passage throughout the range of his writings, expresses consternation over the ravages of industrialization. Consider, if you will, this particularly telling paragraph from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: Salmon, shad, and alewives were formerly abundant here, and taken in weirs by the Indians, who taught this method to the whites, by whom they were used as food and as manure, until the dam, and afterward the canal at Billerica, and the factories at Lowell, put an end to their migrations hitherward; though it is thought that a few more enterprising shad may still occasionally be seen in this part of the river. It is said, to account for the destruction of the fishery, that those who at that time represented the interests of the fishermen and the fishes, remembering between what dates they were accustomed to take the grown shad, stipulated, that the dams should be left open for that season only, and the fry, which go down a month later, were consequently stopped and destroyed by myriads. Others say that the fish-ways were not properly constructed. Perchance, after a few thousands of years, if the fishes will be patient, and pass their summers elsewhere, meanwhile, nature will have leveled the Billerica dam, and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground River run clear again.15

Burroughs, in turn, chafed at the rising, post-Civil War industrial monolith and the poisoned, crowded towns that flourished within that 12

Alan D. Hodder Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.) 27. 13 Ibid. 14 Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America,18651895. 1931. (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 71. 15 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack, 32.

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seething thing. In one essay, Burroughs noted that the idea of the city was an ancient one born of fear and sin, and that rude and barbarous people had always needed cities. The necessity of defense had built the first cities—Ur, Babylon and Carthage. The weaker the law, the stronger the city. After Cain slew Abel, he went out and built a city. Burroughs insisted that calculated greed and a crude lack of faith had laid the foundation for every city since. Hence, Burroughs argued that the city was in fact “older” than the country. As Burroughs noted, a key aspect of the rise of cities was the abdication of individual and family links to locale, region and landscape. In a letter to his dear friend, the Dutchess County farmer and poet Myron Benton, Burroughs suggested that the removal of populations from the country to the city was “nothing short of a spiritual catastrophe.”16 During the booming 1880s and 1890s, the migration from rural districts to urban neighborhoods and pursuits signaled for Burroughs the loss of a sense of place—that all-important umbilical between people and land with which he believed the soul thrived, and without which it withered. Sense of place was a very real and very vibrant thing in both the life of Henry Thoreau and the life of Burroughs. Like Gilbert White of Selbourne—or, for that matter, like Muir in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada—Burroughs and Thoreau each took a particular delight and interest in very specific terrains: Thoreau, greater New England with the epicenter of Concord, and Burroughs the Catskills and Hudson Valley, with the most reasonable epicenter being the farm near Roxbury where he was born and where he today lies buried. Thoreau boasted of having “traveled widely in Concord.” In the book Walden, he enumerated—half humorously—his various unpaid occupations, such as inspector of storms, surveyor of forest-paths and woodlots, and shepherd and herder to the wild stock of that village. In his 1882 essay, Burroughs applauded Thoreau's local focus: From his journal, it would appear that Thoreau kept nature about Concord under a sort of police surveillance the year round. He shadowed every flower and bird and musquash that appeared. His vigilance was unceasing; not a mouse or a squirrel must leave its den without his knowledge. If the birds or frogs were not on hand promptly at his spring roll-call, he would know the reason; he would look them up; he would question his neighbors. He was up in the morning and off to some favorite haunt earlier than the

16 John Burroughs to Myron Benton. 11 October 1887. Henry and Albert Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

20

John Burroughs and Henry Thoreau: Traveling Widely at Home day-laborers, and he chronicled his observations on the spot as if the case was to be tried in court the next day and he was the principal witness.17

Thoreau's emphasis on the local represented a focus with which Burroughs was poised to relate, both personally and philosophically. In his 1877 book Birds and Poets, Burroughs explained how he felt the “home instinct” affected his experience of nature for the better by making him a part of the landscape, one in tune and “in sympathy” with the mountains, fields, and streams in a way that no casual visitor could be: When I go to the woods or fields, or ascend to the hilltop, I do not seem to be gazing upon beauty at all, but to be breathing it like the air … what I enjoy is commensurate with the earth and the sky itself. It clings to the rocks and trees; it is kindred to the roughness and savagery; it rises from every tangle and chasm; it perches on the dry oak stubs with the hawks and buzzards … I am not a spectator of, but a participator in it. It is not an 18 adornment; its roots strike to the center of the earth.

It was, Burroughs argued, not just any random chasm or peak that could inspire such vision and emotion. The landscape for which one felt a “wholesome, home impulse” and in which one made an investment of years, sweat, and love—that was the only landscape one could find real joy and understanding in. In the 1886 essay “A Sharp Lookout” he wrote: “Nature comes home to one most when he is at home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also. One’s own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, he bleeds; mar those hills, he suffers.”19 Elsewhere in the same essay, Burroughs noted how St. Pierre had written that a sense of the power and mystery of nature would spring up as fully in one’s heart after he had made the circuit of his own fields as after returning from a voyage round the world. “This home feeling,” wrote Burroughs, “this domestication of nature, is important to the observer…the place to observe nature is where you are; the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday. You will not just find the same things; both the observer and the observed have changed; the ship is on another tack in both cases.”20 As 17

Burroughs, Indoor Studies, 43. John Burroughs, Birds and Poets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1877), 63. 19 John Burroughs, Signs and Seasons (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 5. 20 Burroughs, Signs and Seasons, 5-6. 18

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these words imply, there was nothing provincial or limiting about Burroughs's regional bias—no more than there had been about Thoreau’s local perspective. Like Thoreau, Burroughs found the cosmic in the local. As he wrote in his journal on January 13th, 1882: The universe, eternity, the infinite are typified by the sphere. The earth is the symbol of the All, of the riddle of riddles. We speak of the ends of the earth, but the earth has no ends. On a sphere every point is a center, and every point is the highest point … There is no end to Space, and no beginning. This point where you stand, this chair, this tree, is the center of Space; it all balances from this point. Go to the farthest fixed star and make that distance but the unit, one in millions and sextillions of such distances, and you have only arrived at Here. Your own doorstep is just as near the 21 limit, and no nearer.

In one of the last pieces to come from his pen, the second of just two essays on Thoreau, the elderly Burroughs chose to place particular emphasis on Thoreau’s home feeling: Thoreau became a great traveler—in Concord, as he says—and made Walden Pond famous in our literature by spending two or more years in the woods upon its shore, and writing an account of his sojourn there which has become a nature classic. He was a poet-naturalist, as his friend Channing aptly called him, of untiring industry, and the country in a radius of seven or eight miles about Concord was threaded by him in all seasons as probably no other section of New England was ever threaded and scrutinized by any one man. Walking in the fields and woods, and recording what he saw and heard and thought in his Journal, became the business of his life. He went over the same ground endlessly, but always brought back new facts, or new impressions, because he was so sensitive to all the changing features of the day and the season in the landscape about 22 him.

Revise the region and that same description could be applied to Burroughs, who knew Black Creek, the Esopus and the East Branch of the Delaware so intimately, and who inventoried the wildlife and fauna at West Park on the Hudson, and at Roxbury in the Catskills, for so many long and devoted decades. Near the end of his days, Burroughs looked out across the landscape that had witnessed his birth and wrote the following: 21 22

Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs's Journals, 85. Burroughs, The Last Harvest, 119.

22

John Burroughs and Henry Thoreau: Traveling Widely at Home The peace of the hills is about me and upon me; the leisure of the summer clouds, whose shadows I see slowly drifting across the face of the landscape, is mine. The dissonance and the turbulence and the stench of cities – how far off they seem! The noise and dust, and the acrimony of politics – how completely the hum of the honey-bee, and the twitter of the swallows blot them out! In the circuit of the hills the days take form and character ... The deep, cradle-like valleys, and the long flowing mountainlines, make a fit receptacle for the day's beauty ... The valleys are vast blue 23 urns that hold a generous portion of lucid hours.

A generous portion of lucid hours are what Thoreau and Burroughs each harvested and chronicled in their diverse years of rambling across their respective terrains. Devoting themselves to different places, and to subtly different approaches to literature, they nevertheless shared a common and most vital home in which they both traveled widely.

Works Cited Barrus, Clara, ed., The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1925. Burroughs, John. Birds and Poets. Boston: Hurd & Houghton, 1877. —. The Heart of Burroughs's Journals, Clara Barrus, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1928. —. Indoor Studies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1889. —. The Last Harvest. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1922. —. Signs and Seasons. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1886. —. The Summit of the Years. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1913. —. Winter Sunshine. Boston: Hurd & Houghton, 1875. Hodder, Alan D. Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Mumford, Lewis. The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America,1865-1895. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1931. Renehan, Edward J. John Burroughs: An American Naturalist. Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 1998. Thoreau, Henry. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1906. Thoreau, Henry D. Walden. Holograph manuscript with revisions. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

23 Burroughs, John, The Summit of the Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 37.

THE INSOLENCE OF SOCIAL POWER: BOVINE NONCHALANCE, GENTLE PERSUASION, OR WHAT? JEFF WALKER

John Burroughs is often chastised in retrospect by those who believe that he could have, and should have, done more to advance environmental and social causes through his writings. In the same breath is usually leveled the charge that part of the problem was that Burroughs stood in awe of the rich and powerful people who befriended even as they ransacked the country for natural resources and cheap labor to exploit. The most evocative characterization of Burroughs in this light is found in the introduction to Bill McKibben’s Birch Browsings: Burroughs had a tendency to stand gazing in bovine nonchalance at environmental destruction he should have been able to foresee. He was a friend not only of Henry Ford but of Edison and Firestone, and he seems not to have given a thought to the havoc their inventions might produce.1

In the prologue to his biography of Burroughs, Edward Renehan has a different, though related, view: John Burroughs gently suggested in his writings that he thought it better for one to live in the country, on a farm, than in the city. He quietly let it be known that industrial pursuits were probably not very healthy for either mind or body. He occasionally proposed that only local, agricultural economies could be counted on to forge a way of life that honestly tended toward the good of all and did not, as Burroughs’s acquaintance Henry Demarest Lloyd put it, pit “wealth against commonwealth.” But

1

Bill McKibben, Birch Browsings A John Burroughs Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), xviii.

24

The Insolence of Social Power: Bovine Nonchalance, Gentle Suggestion or What? Burroughs never made it his mission to sing the message too loudly; he never made it his business to drive the point home in unequivocal terms.2

My contention is that Burroughs was not awestruck in the presence of rich and powerful people, nor was he afraid to speak out honestly about things that bothered him. Over a 60-year writing career we might expect an evolution in his ideas to be reflected in his writings. We can find inconsistencies, certainly, but Burroughs was never arbitrary in his beliefs or in his writings. He may not have “made it his business to drive the point home in unequivocal terms,” but this is because he did not hold unequivocal beliefs on many issues. In fact, his ability to equivocate may have been part of what endeared him to his audience. John Burroughs had a tendency to be categorical. During World War I, he often remarked that he disliked Germany and the German government, but liked individual Germans. The same could be said about his feelings on industrialism and social power: while he did not like industrial society or excessive displays of influence, he found that he liked individual industrialists. I am not going to psychoanalyze the famous men that Burroughs was friendly with, nor am I going to try to second guess their own motives for befriending him. Rather, I want to examine John Burroughs’s relationships with people like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone in light of what we know about Burroughs’s personality and convictions. To do this, I will use evidence from his writings and from the observations of others. From journal entries and correspondence we know that Burroughs genuinely liked and admired Roosevelt, Ford, Edison, and Firestone. In contrast, he seems to have felt less warm toward E. H. Harriman, and rather cold toward Andrew Carnegie. Jay Gould presents an interesting situation because the two were boyhood friends, having grown up on nearly adjacent farms and attended the same one-room school in the Catskill Mountains of New York; yet Burroughs did not seek out Gould in later life. From the well-thumbed copies of Burroughs’s work in Gould’s library it is evident that he was an admirer of Burroughs, but Burroughs never attempted to capitalize on that fact. We also know that these feelings of friendship were often mutual. Roosevelt, Ford, and Edison went out of their way to visit Burroughs, and welcomed Burroughs as a guest at their homes, as did Harvey Firestone. The relationships with Ford, Edison and Firestone began during the First World War which, by his own admission, preoccupied Burroughs’s 2

Edward J. Renehan, John Burroughs: An American Naturalist, (Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992), 2.

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thoughts for the better part of four years, so the new acquaintances provided a welcomed distraction. These friendships came in the last decade of Burroughs’s life, and the famous camping trips offered a respite from the almost constant stream of visitors to Riverby, Slabsides, and Woodchuck Lodge (as many as 100 in a day). John Burroughs’s granddaughter, Elizabeth (Betty) Burroughs Kelley, adds that another reason he enjoyed camping so much was that it “offered an escape from ‘things,’” his mildly contemptuous term for “petty chores or tasks or the paraphernalia of living.”3 Burroughs did not spend time with Ford, Edison, and Firestone simply because they were famous or rich; he did as much for people who were unknown and of modest means. In one example, a schoolteacher from near Boston arrived in Roxbury virtually unannounced, yet Burroughs spent the better part of ten days studying birds with his unexpected visitor.4 Betty Kelley further characterizes her grandfather by saying: He was always at ease with working people. Though he might dine with the President of the United States in the White House...or be the house guest of a great industrialist in his magnificent home in Detroit, he could sit on a board fence and pass the time of day with a man who was working on the road.5

We must also keep on mind the fact that these famous men sought out Burroughs, not the other way around. It has been suggested that Burroughs may have been included on these trips as a public relations ploy to disguise the real purpose of the outing, or to make its purpose more acceptable to the general public. However, more often than not the public thought that the honor ran the other way. One magazine editor, commenting on Burroughs’s trip with Roosevelt to Yellowstone, said “There is perhaps no nature lover in this land of ours who did not envy the President of the United States his good luck in the prospect of a few weeks’ companionship with rare old John Burroughs.”6 Burroughs accepted these men as friends, but he also believed that they represented forces of good in society. The evolution of this idea is complex, and developed along three very different lines: Burroughs’s ideas on the application of Darwin’s theory to society; Burroughs’s 3 Elizabeth Burroughs Kelley, John Burroughs, Naturalist (West Park, NY: Riverby Books, 1959), 85. 4 Ibid., 159. 5 Ibid., 122. 6 Ibid., 175.

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The Insolence of Social Power: Bovine Nonchalance, Gentle Suggestion or What?

appreciation for what made Walt Whitman a uniquely American poet; and Burroughs’s feelings about the negative effects of corporations. All of these developments can be traced through his writings and correspondence during the 1890s. In the early 1890s, Burroughs made a lecture tour presenting a talk entitled “The Biological Origins of the Ruling Class.” Other speakers on the same circuit addressed similar topics, and the overall impression is that the presentations were designed to assuage the guilty conscience of the rich, and to convince the less fortunate that the rich were endowed with superior intellects and were especially blessed by God. According to historian Rebecca Edwards such speeches were common in the second half of the nineteenth century, where the message often was that those who failed to get rich “could only blame themselves.”7 Edwards quotes Baptist minister Russell Conwell’s bald statement “there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings.”8 John Burroughs tended to disbelieve in a god that was personally interested in the affairs of individuals. He found his god in Nature, and therefore, looked to the natural world for an explanation of the disparity between rich and poor. In his talk he asserted that Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” axiom could be applied to social as well as biological systems.9 This notion, which was popularly known as “social Darwinism,” was not uniquely Burroughs’s (he was assigned this topic by his agent), yet he embraced it. However, societies are imperfect analogs for the natural world. Social Darwinism equates great riches and social power with “fitness,” whereas in nature, “fitness” is a matter of how a particular organism “fits” into its environment and what important role it plays in the ecosystem; competition in the natural world does not result in a world of “top carnivores” but a world of cooperative living arrangements in a functioning ecosystem. Whether Burroughs, the naturalist, realized this inconsistency is not clear, but he seems to have recognized the tendency of social Darwinism to encourage elitism in the way that it rationalized social disparities, and so he included in his talk an admonition to the rich to look out for the needs of the less-fortunate, and to resist the temptation to accumulate wealth at the expense of others.10 In this way, he echoes the sentiments of Andrew Carnegie who, in his essay “Wealth,” wrote that although the 7 Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 89. 8 Ibid., 88-89. 9 Renehan, John Burroughs: An American Naturalist, 199. 10 Ibid.

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capitalist system inevitably concentrated wealth in the hands of a few, the situation is good because a better society results. However, the wealthy person is obligated to redistribute their wealth where it will do the most good. The result is that: the surplus wealth of a few will become, in the best sense the property of many, because administered for the common good, and this wealth, passing through the hands of a few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.11

About this same time, Burroughs was completing his second book on Walt Whitman, and was taking the opportunity to explore not only the poet but the milieu that produced him. Burroughs was enamored with the democratic spirit that characterized America in his mind, a spirit founded in throwing off the chains of history and moving forward without an inherited aristocracy. The American experience would be based on “the emancipation of the people, and their coming forward and taking possession of the world in their own right,...[on] the growth of individualism and nonconformity.”12 To support this argument, Burroughs made the following comparison: Everything in modern life and culture that tends to broaden, liberalize, free; that tends to make hardy, self-reliant, virile; that tends to widen charity, deepen affection between man and man, to foster sanity and selfreliance, that tends to kindle our appreciation of the divinity of all things, that heightens our rational enjoyment of life, that inspires hope in the future and faith in the unseen–are on Whitman’s side... On the other hand, the strain and strife and hoggishness of our civilization, our trading politics, our worship of conventions, our millionaire ideals, our high-pressure lives, our pruriency, our sordidness, our perversions of nature, our scoffing caricaturing tendencies, are against him.13

This passage presents an interesting juxtaposition in the context of the current discussion because someone like Ford could be described by either paragraph: either by the broadening, liberalizing and freeing ideals to be admired or by the “millionaire ideals” to be avoided. As discussed below, Burroughs saw Ford in terms of the positive ideals, for despite the fact that 11

Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth” North American Review, June 1889, 660. John Burroughs, Whitman: A Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 259. 13 Ibid., 266. 12

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The Insolence of Social Power: Bovine Nonchalance, Gentle Suggestion or What?

Ford was a millionaire, he was also the product of that same American individualism so important to democratic principles, and that made his success somehow sacred in Burroughs's mind. The third thread is Burroughs’s reading in 1896 of Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth. This book, describing the political and economic corruption of the railroads and oil producers supporting the growth of the Standard Oil Company, aggravated Burroughs to the point that he said “I can’t read it long at a time.” He even proposed to one magazine that they publish articles along the same lines (although he did not volunteer to author them), chastising the editor: ...as an editor you are far less outspoken on the wrongs of the people, the greed of the monopolies, the insolence and tyranny of the railroads and other corporations than I should be. I would pour hot shot into them all the time...I am glad to hear what the wealth of New York is doing and proposing to do for the poor there – if only the wealth of N.Y. and other places would not make them poor in the first place!...the wealth, the learning, the conservative [persons] of a country are nearly always on the side of the oppressor.14

Lloyd’s book “briefly radicalized” Burroughs, in the words of Edward Renehan, and although he did not produce any essays which specifically addressed the issue, the feelings of outrage remained. It is important to note that the mid-1890s were a time a great unrest in America, with strikes, unemployment, and economic depression, and in some ways Burroughs was reflecting the national mood of pessimism and the tendency to blame corporations for the country’s ills. The 1890’s, then, saw Burroughs wrestling with the social disparities of modern American society, and finding himself coming down on both sides of the controversy over the so-called “Gilded Age” he was living in—he supported the moral righteousness and social Darwinism that justified a “natural” aristocracy, and he admired the democratic qualities that allowed powerful expressions of individualism, yet he was shocked and dismayed by the liberties taken by specific individuals and organizations to achieve these goals. His writings and actions suggest that he agreed with the 1901 speech by his friend Teddy Roosevelt in which the President stated: “Captains of industry...have on the whole done great good to our people...[yet, because of] real and grave evils...combination

14 Clara Barrus, ed., The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 1:360-361.

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and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and, within reasonable limits, controlled.” 15 When, nearly two decades later, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone came into his life, Burroughs’s ideas were put to the test. Reading his description of Henry Ford helps us appreciate how the automaker fit Burroughs’s principles. Ford is “always thinking of the greatest good for the greatest number...[of ways] to place his inventions within the reach of the great mass of people.”16 His inventions are “not imposing, nor complex, less expressive of power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability, and universal service, they typify the combination of powers and qualities which make him a beneficent, a likable, and a unique personality.”17 People flocked to Ford not because he was a successful automaker, but because he was a: beneficent human force, a great practical idealist whose good will and spirit of universal helpfulness...has...written large upon the pages of current history a new ideal of a business man -- that of a man whose devotion to the public good has been a ruling passion, and whose wealth has inevitably flowed from the depth of his humanitarianism. He has taken the people in partnership with him, and has eagerly shared with them the benefits that are the fruits of his great enterprise -- a liberator, an emancipator, through channels that are so often used to enslave or destroy.18

In Henry Ford, then, Burroughs found the embodiment of more than just the American individualism and spirit that he praised in Whitman: A Study. Ford epitomized the charity and kindness of wealthy people that Burroughs had urged in “The Biological Origins of the Ruling Class.” Furthermore, Ford was a successful businessman who resisted the temptation to enslave the people and rob the public. Burroughs had similar praise, albeit less effusive, for Edison, “his first and leading thought has been, What can I do to make life easier and more enjoyable to my fellow man?” and for Firestone, “a manufacturer who has faithfully and honestly served his countryman.19

15

Theodore Roosevelt, “First State of the Nation Address, December 1901.” The Works of Theodore Roosevelt: National Edition (20 vols.). State Papers as Governor and President 1899-1909. (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1926). 16 John Burroughs, Under the Maples, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 124. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 124-125.

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The Insolence of Social Power: Bovine Nonchalance, Gentle Suggestion or What?

If, therefore, “bovine nonchalance” is not the right descriptor, how appropriate is “gentle suggestion?” Does Burroughs speak gently or powerfully about the problems associated with industrial society? First of all, there is nothing wrong with being gentle. In fact, being quietly persuasive is more in keeping with some people’s personalities, and can be just as effective. For example, Daniel G. Payne has made the case that Burroughs may have been a more effective lobbyist for conservationist ideas with President Roosevelt than the more flamboyant Muir: Burroughs’s solid knowledge of natural history (especially birds), and his low-key manner endeared him to Roosevelt, and may have factored into Roosevelt’s conservation initiatives even more effectively than the direct, often confrontational style characteristic of Muir.20 Although “gentleness” describes the tone of many of his nature essays, Burroughs was not a timid writer. As one example, consider these expressions of his increasing concern over the physical and social turmoil which accompanied technological innovation and the industrial society it spawned. Burroughs well knew that the products of technology could make life easier, and that made them appealing. At the same time he realized that they could be emotionally and spiritually dangerous. In 1889, Burroughs lamented: Time has been saved, almost annihilated by steam and electricity, yet...the hurry of the machine passes into the man. We can outrun the wind and storm, but we cannot outrun the demon Hurry. More work is done but in what does it all issue? Certainly not in beauty, in power, in character, in good manners, in finer men and women.21

In 1913, 24 years later, he stated emphatically, “where there is no vision, no intuitive perception of the great fundamental truths of the inner spiritual world, science will not save us. In such a case our civilization is like an engine running without a headlight.”22 The evolution in Burroughs’s ideas about technology and industrialism culminated in 1921 with this description of Andrew Carnegie’s Pittsburgh:

20 Daniel G. Payne, “Camping and Tramping With Roosevelt: The Influence of John Burroughs on Theodore Roosevelt.” Wake-Robin, Newsletter of the John Burroughs Association. November 2003, 1-3. 21 John Burroughs, Indoor Studies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 68. 22 John Burroughs, The Summit of the Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 53.

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[Pittsburgh is] a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake of Brimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of the hilltops...It might well be the devil’s laboratory. Out of such blackening and blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hellfire seem[s] fit and natural, but much more comes out of them—much that suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of the lake bottoms. We live in an age of iron, and it as all we can do to keep the iron from entering our souls.23

These passages are more than simply laments for an earth damaged by technology and human activity. They stress that the consequences of this activity are not just physical, but social and moral as well. Interestingly enough, however, the descriptions of Ford, Edison and Firestone cited earlier, and the description of Pittsburgh above, are taken from the same essay “A Strenuous Holiday” published in 1921, the year of Burroughs’s death. Because these contrasting views of industrialism and industrialists are found in the same essay, we can use that contrast to speculate on his feelings about the issue. The key passage relating the industrialists to industrialism is the analogy of the lily and the pond muck, an analogy that Burroughs often used to represent new life growing out of death and decay. In this final testament on the issue of industrialism, Burroughs implies that the many virtues of modern industrial society outweigh its several costs: because industrialism produces many good things and many good people, we must tolerate some destruction of the natural world. We must be vigilant to keep the iron from entering our souls, but we need not reject modern society altogether. However, if Burroughs was willing to accept the good produced by some industrial processes and the good in some industrialists, he had no patience for the rich person whose sole purpose was personal aggrandizement and conspicuous displays of wealth, the epitome of the “millionaire ideals” of which he was so disparaging earlier. This impatience manifested itself early in his career and stayed with him to the end. For instance, in Signs and Seasons (1886), there are a remarkable number of references to this subject in a book devoted primarily to nature essays. Some of these references, in fact, were from a least a decade earlier than the publication of the book. One early reference is found in “House Building,” the magazine precursor to the Signs and Seasons essay “Rooftree.” “House Building” 23

Burroughs, Under the Maples, 111.

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The Insolence of Social Power: Bovine Nonchalance, Gentle Suggestion or What?

was published in 1876, and in it Burroughs derides “white house architecture” (his word for a certain style of ostentatious building popular in his day) for the way that it “...makes the end of the spirit of friendliness and social interchange between neighbors. It inaugurates the period of jealousy, of coldness, of back-biting.”24 Another instance is found in “Picturesque Aspects of Farm Life,” first published in 1878 and the magazine precursor to “Phases of Farm Life” in Signs and Seasons. Here, Burroughs expresses his distaste for ostentation in this way “...when you see the house of the rich farmer or of the millionaire from the city, you see the pride of money and the insolence of social power.”25 Finally, in “A Spring Relish,” which first appeared in Signs and Seasons, Burroughs says: The new architectural place of the rich citizen, with the barns and outbuildings concealed or disguised as much as possible—spring is in no hurry about it; the seat of long years of honest labor has not fattened the soil it stands upon.26

In all three of these quotations we see reflected Burroughs’s belief that the house of a selfish rich person reflected the negative aspects of their lives: unfriendliness, unsociability, jealousy, coldness, back-biting, dishonesty, idleness, pride, and insolence. The fact that these quotations came from a early book of nature essays (and that two were published up to ten years before the appearance of the book), and the fact that he says much the same thing near the end of his career in “A Strenuous Holiday,” suggests that we may find many more such references throughout Burroughs’s work once we start to look for them. The relationship Burroughs had with industrialism and industrialists was quite complex. He found the rise of the ruling class acceptable only if the privileged few kept the best interests of society ahead of personal gain. He realized that the industrial progress promised by people like Ford, Edison and Firestone was not free of physical and social damage, but felt that the good to be gained by society justified some of those costs. Throughout his career, however, he had little time for the wealthy person whose only thought was to accumulate wealth and to show off the power that came with riches. 24

John Burroughs, “House Building,” Scribner’s Monthly, January 1876, 334. John Burroughs, Signs and Seasons, (1886; repr., Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 241. 26 Ibid., 185. 25

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Works Cited Barrus, Clara, ed., The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2 vols. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1925. Burroughs, John. “House Building.” Scribner’s Monthly. January 1876. —. “Picturesque Aspects of Farm Life in New York.” Scribner’s Monthly. November 1878. —. Signs and Seasons, 1886. Edited and with critical commentary by Jeff Walker. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. —. Indoor Studies. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1889. —. Whitman, A Study. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1896. —. The Summit of the Years. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1913. —. Under the Maples. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1921. Carnegie, Andrew. “Wealth” North American Review CCCXCI, June 1889, 653-665. Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Kelley, Elizabeth. John Burroughs: Naturalist. West Park, NY: Riverby Books, 1959. McKibben, William. Birch Browsings: A John Burroughs Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Payne, Daniel G. “Camping and Tramping With Roosevelt: The Influence of John Burroughs on Theodore Roosevelt.” Wake-Robin (Newsletter of the John Burroughs Association). November 2003. 1-3. Renehan, Edward J. John Burroughs: An American Naturalist, Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992.

JOHN BURROUGHS’S TRANSPERSONAL IDENTITY WITH PLACE STEPHEN M. MERCIER

John Burroughs’s method of persuading others to share his perspective toward flora and fauna shares similarities with Warwick Fox’s means of transmitting notions of identification in “transpersonal ecology.” Fox explains, Rather than dealing with moral injunctions, transpersonal ecologists are therefore inclined far more to what might be referred to as experiential invitations: readers or listeners are invited to experience themselves as intimately bound up with the world around them, bound up to such an extent that it becomes more or less impossible to refrain from wider identification (i.e., impossible to refrain from the this-worldly realization of a more expansive self.)1

Thus, Fox not only develops a philosophical perspective; he also shares his insights about the manner in which he hopes to disseminate transpersonal ecology among the masses. Burroughs’s texts fulfill Fox’s goal of offering invitations to readers rather than moral dictums to govern behavior. Burroughs not only shows his own intimacy with local places; he also coaxes his readers to share in the same joy and uplifting emotional experiences that he has. Burroughs thus hopes that readers will, through their own experiential involvement and immersion in natural contexts, engage in wider forms of identification, and, in effect, feel a “wider” sense of self. Fox further characterizes the types of “invitations” he sees as most suitable to the transpersonal ecologist’s enterprise: “invitations to experience a more expansive sense of self are experienced from the beginning as nonforceful and potentially liberating. … Can we resist

1

Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 244-45.

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taking a stroll outside?”2 It seems to me that Burroughs’s texts encourage readers to identify with the nonhuman in a manner precisely called for by transpersonal ecologists. Burroughs hoped that his writings would be powerful enough to encourage people to go out-of-doors to enjoy the emotional pleasures of bonding with creatures and landscapes. In his essay “The Exhilarations of the Road,” Burroughs writes of the experience of the pedestrian, as opposed to that of the fast-moving passenger in a vehicle (a horse buggy, or train) back in 1875: The vital, universal currents play through him [the pedestrian]. He knows the ground is alive; he feels the pulses of the wind, and reads the mute language of things. His sympathies are all aroused; his senses are continually reporting messages to his mind. Wind, frost, rain, heat, cold are something to him. He is not merely a spectator of the panorama of nature, but a participator in it. He experiences the country he passes through— tastes it, feels it, absorbs it.3

This passage illustrates the “personal” type of identification in transpersonal ecology: Burroughs identifies most strongly with those natural “entities” with which he comes into contact. He appreciates aspects of the natural world as part of his own identity. The ethic that is implied— rather than preached—in this intense transpersonal identification, is that, in the words of Fox, “An assault upon their integrity is an assault upon our integrity.”4 In this “personal” type of identification, people primarily form bonds through particular relationships with what is familiar. This remains the very heart of Burroughs’s ethical philosophy: love of the familiar. Through affiliating with nearby entities, he comes to care deeply about their protection. Personal identification with nonhumans may more often lead to an ecocentric perspective. Intense affiliations become longstanding emotional commitments to species and habitats in Burroughs’s texts. If one brings a loving attitude toward the birds, Burroughs promises, one may receive great rewards: “We cannot pursue any natural study with love and enthusiasm without the object of it becoming a part of our lives. The birds, the flowers, the trees, the rocks, all become linked with our lives and hold the key to our thoughts and emotions.”5 Interactions with birdsong and natural phenomena become part of one’s identity and

2

Ibid., 245. John Burroughs, Winter Sunshine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1875), 37. 4 Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, 249-50. 5 John Burroughs, Time and Change (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 253. 3

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essential to one’s well being. In fact, these relationships help mold Burroughs’s relation to place. Certainly, Burroughs’s deep attachment to places relies upon a deep sense of identification. Andrew McGlaughlin explains that in transpersonal ecology, “personal forms of identification begin with the experiences of identification with other individuals and particular places and move outward to the rest of nature.”6 Surely, Burroughs’s affiliations represent a model of interaction in which he identifies with specific individual species, and also places value upon the entire natural world. In Burroughs’s scheme, human bonding with creatures leads to the understanding of intrinsic value. This bonding is extremely important for ethics, as a “lack of identification leads to indifference.”7 In a lecture given on March 12, 1986, at Murdock University in Western Australia, environmental philosopher Arne Naess argues that in the traditional “conception of the maturity of the self, Nature is largely left out.”8 Naess thus attempts to broaden notions of identity to include aspects of the “outer” world: Our immediate environment, our home (where we belong as children), and the identification with nonliving human beings, are largely ignored. Therefore, I tentatively introduce, perhaps for the very first time, the concept of ecological self. We may said to be in, and of, Nature from the very beginning of our selves. Society and human relationships are important, but our self is much richer in its constitutive relationships. These relationships are not only those we have with other humans and the human community.9

As becomes apparent, Burroughs develops an “ecological self” as he forges familial bonds with local flora and fauna in his native Catskill region. Summarizing the relationship of Naess’s idea of species’ “intrinsic value” with Naess’s concept of “Self-Realization,” David Rothenberg writes:

6

Andrew McGlaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 187. 7 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, David Rothenberg, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 174. 8 Arne Naess, “Self- Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World,” in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism, George Sessions, ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), 226. 9 Ibid.

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Self-realisation is not self-centered. … If one really expands oneself to include other people and species and nature itself, altruism becomes unnecessary. The larger world becomes part of our own interests. …The word in Norwegian is Selv-realisering: Self-realising. It is an active condition, not a place one can reach.10

In his environmental aesthetics, Burroughs demonstrates the active process deep ecologists seek. We might think of Burroughs as actively “selfrealising” with the natural world. In his deep affiliations with other life forms, Burroughs continually learns, in the words of Rothenberg, “that parts of nature are parts of ourselves. We cannot exist apart from them. …Thus we cannot destroy them if we are to fully exist.”11 Ethical implications surmount, for we may, according to Rothenberg, “see the vital needs of ecosystems and other species as our own needs: there is thus no conflict of interests.”12 Identification with the nonhuman depends upon the recognition that people respect the “other” in its own right. Burroughs hopes to show readers how to develop and discover powerful attachments to particular natural places. Expeditions through wondrous landscapes or brook-scapes of youth constitute Burroughs’s very identity. In My Boyhood Burroughs recalls the personal landmark of “Old Clump with nostalgic enthusiasm: There was … something so gentle and sweet and primitive about its natural clearings and open glades, about the spring that bubbled up, from under a tilted rock just below the summit; about the grassy terraces, its hidden ledges, its scattered low-branching, moss covered maples, the cloistered character of its clumps of small beeches, its domestic-looking mountain ash, its orchard-like wild black cherries, its garden-like plots of huckleberries, raspberries, and strawberries, the patches of fragrant brakes like dense miniature forests through which one wades as through patches of green midsummer snow, its divine strains of the hermit thrush floating out of the wooded depths below you,—all these things drew me as a boy, and still draw me as a man.13

Burroughs recalls and catalogues all the traits of “Old Clump he finds beauteous. The entire passage conveys the sentimental mood of gentleness 10 David Rothenberg, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9. 11 Ibid., 10-11. 12 Ibid., 11. 13 John Burroughs, My Boyhood (Garden City N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922), 118.

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and sweetness Burroughs finds there. Interestingly, at the end of the passage, he tells us that these same natural characteristics that drew him “as a boy,” remain alluring. Domestic images blanket this passage as Burroughs figures the natural world in terms of human constructions, such as “terraces,” “orchard[s],” and “gardens.” This passage significantly demonstrates how love and interaction with natural places forms and develops Burroughs’s “subjectivity.” He knows this local landscape intimately; Old Clump’s soothing qualities are embedded into his memory. The very mentioning of the name Old Clump seems to awaken Burroughs’s feelings and senses; he describes its open glades as “gentle and sweet and primitive.” Old Clump reminds him of purity, youth, vitality, morality, and family, as Burroughs fully realizes the landscapes that have become charged with personal meaning for him. Burroughs thus exemplifies philosopher of place Edward Casey’s belief that cherished landscapes constitute “one’s most intimate identity.”14 In fact, one of Burroughs’s most powerful means of transpersonal identification with place is through recollections of childhood. Burroughs’s trope of sentimental childhood associations occurs especially when he recalls birdsong, as he demonstrates through placing “the divine strains of the hermit thrush” in the climax of the above passage. Burroughs binds particular places of his childhood to memories of specific birdsong. He recalls both the emotional atmosphere of his youth and also the bird’s physical habitat; feelings for these two are intertwined and, in a sense, inseparable. Thus, he forges an emotional kinship through this process of sentimental reflection. Significantly, this trope of childhood also includes a consideration of the child’s phenomenology in relation to natural phenomena. In youth, Burroughs forms many initial bonds with the natural world. Thus, the remembrances of sensory interactions become important touchstones of reflection. Prominent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan considers the role of sentiment in its relation to attachment to place: “Place can acquire a deep meaning for the adult through the steady secretion of sentiment over the years.”15 Tuan asserts that “the adult’s perceptual categories are from time to time infused with emotions that surge out of early experiences.”16 In “Strawberries,” an essay included in Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Burroughs writes: 14

Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 38. 15 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 33. 16 Ibid., 20.

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Oh, the strawberry days! how vividly they come back to one! The smell of clover in the fields, the blooming rye on the hills, of wild grape beside the woods, and of the sweet honeysuckle ... about the house. The first hot, moist days. The daisies and buttercups; the songs of the birds, their first reckless jollity and love-making over; the full tender foliage of the trees; the bees swarming, and the air strung with resonant musical chords.17

The passage magnificently demonstrates sensory and emotional engagement with the scents and sounds of the natural world. Burroughs includes phrases such as “sweet” and “tender” to depict the nonhuman world and bring it conceptually into the “domestic” sphere. One can even smell the flora “about the house.” Burroughs thus creates transpersonal bonds in an intimate fashion. By enthralling his visual and auditory senses, Burroughs saturates his psyche and is brought back to loving reminisces of youth. The cardinal reason Burroughs dwells on his emotional experience—as he basks in the zeal of his senses, or dreams upon his lost boyhood—is to create feelings and emotion in his readership. Burroughs wishes for his readers to reimagine interactions with native landscapes in a relaxed and serene, or joyful state. The figure of the child allows for the special sensibilities Burroughs wishes to sustain for the reader. The following passage from Burroughs’s journal also emphasizes his intense feelings of connection with his childhood landscapes: The lover of solitude sows himself wherever he walks—the woods and fields and lanes where he strolls come to reflect himself. There is a deposit of him all over the landscape where he has lived. He likes to go the same route each time, because he meets himself at every turn. He says to the silent trees, or gray rocks, or still pool, or waterfall: “We have met you before. My spirit has worn you as a garment, and you are near to me.” … [A] new landscape ... becomes colored, or, more properly, enriched, more or less by his spirit. ... The mountains where one was born remind him of his father and mother, and he has a filial longing for them. When father and mother are gone, I know I shall have a sad pleasure in the look of the hills where they have lived and died.18

Paul Shepherd throws light upon the soothing function that love for childhood places may have for individuals: “The play space—trees, 17

John Burroughs, Locusts and Wild Honey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1879), 60. Clara Barrus, ed. The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 71. 18

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John Burroughs’s Transpersonal Identity with Place

shrubs, paths, places to hide and climb—is a visible structured entity, another prototype of relationships to hold fast … . Individual trees and rocks that were also known to parents and grandparents are enduring counterplayers having transcendent meaning later in life.”19 One can easily see the connection between Shepherd’s belief in the solace of such intimate places where generations have shared experiences to Burroughs’s passages. Burroughs, projecting into the future and foreseeing the inevitability of his own parents’ death, knows he will find comfort in the mountains and hills in which they resided. In “The Work of Local Culture,” Wendell Berry recognizes the need for maintaining a “generational” bond with place. He critiques societal institutions, such as schools, that distance young people from their homelands and families: “The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community.”20 Berry finds the results disturbing. He claims that “love cannot exist … apart from the love of a place and a community,” and reminds us that “The only true and effective ‘operator’s manual for spaceship earth’ is not a book that any human will write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.”21 In fact, largely due to the work of Berry, love for one’s native region is now seen by a number of environmentalists as essential. Burroughs’s transpersonal identity with natural habitats and his “home” may thus productively be viewed as a strength which will lead people to become more attached to their own places of habitation. Many contemporary critics argue that attachment to place leads to a feeling of stewardship toward the land and is therefore one of the most powerful underlying forces toward protection of the environment. Thus seen, Burroughs’s immediate perceptions of his own surroundings may generate an ethic of caring. Critics often consider knowledge of general ecological interrelations the first step necessary toward protection of the natural world. Such ecological knowledge may increase when one becomes sensorially aware of specific flora and fauna. In this regard, environmental philosopher Val Plumwood places great importance upon identifying with specific aspects of place. For Plumwood, 19

Paul Shepherd, “Nature and Madness,” in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, Allen D. Kanner, eds. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995), 28. 20 Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 163. 21 Ibid., 166.

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“the deep and highly particularist attachment to place” is based “on the formation of identity, social and personal, in relation to particular areas of land, yielding ties often as special as those of kin, and which are equally expressed in very specific and local responsibilities of care.”22 Plumwood calls for a framework that concerns itself with individual identity in relation to the local or regional. In his essay, “The Coming of Summer,” Burroughs combines his childhood experiences with a recollection of piqued senses: One plucks the first blossoms tenderly and caressingly. What memories are stirred in the mind by fragrance of the one [red clover] and the youthful face of the other [daisies]! There is nothing else like the smell of clover; it is the maidenly breath of summer; it suggests all fresh, buxom, rural things. A field of ruddy, blooming clover, dashed or sprinkled here or there with the snow-white of the daisies; its breath drifts into the road when you are passing; you hear the boom of bees, the voice of bobolinks, the twitter of swallows, the whistle of woodchucks; you smell wild strawberries; you see the cattle upon the hills; you see your youth … rise before you.23

In this passage Burroughs in effect catalogues the stirring of his senses. At first, he introduces the sense of touch, as he gently “plucks”; then he imagines the smell, the “fragrance” of clover; next comes the aesthetically pleasing sight of the “face” of daisies and the view of cows; he hears the “boom,” “voice,” “twitter,” and “whistle” of fellow creatures; finally, the strawberries conjure up an association of taste. In a detailed manner, Burroughs shares his reactions to these stimuli, themselves recreated through his power of memory. Through a vivid imagination of past experiences in the natural world, his faculties re-receive multiple bodily impressions. The memory of sensory immersion recreates “gentle” emotions that remind Burroughs of youth. Such appreciation, even though based upon the “past,” may provide powerful means toward appreciating the “same” phenomena in the present. Burroughs’s previous joy over the smell of blossoms and clover and the sounds of bees and bobolinks is still available in his local environment. Furthermore, by crafting the conclusion of this passage in the third person (“you”), he invites the reader to similarly recall her or his own sensory perceptions from childhood. Burroughs has such great faith in the ability of sense-based memory to conjure a vision of youth, that he 22

Val Plumwood, “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism,” in Environmental Ethics, Robert Elliot, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 163. 23 John Burroughs, Leaf and Tendril (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 26-27.

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encourages the reader to engage in her or his own sentient journey into the past. In this way, his sensuous recollections may rekindle and induce environmental appreciation. As I have suggested, transpersonal identification with the natural world may have ethical consequences. Burroughs agrees with this view of the child’s sensuous perception and proclaims that through the sentimental we may perhaps retrieve our earlier and less culturally mediated relationship to the land. Realizing the significance of our direct sensory interactions with the landscape might allow the realization that human beings are intricately affiliated with the landscapes they inhabit. This transpersonal sensibility may foster more concern and respect for the environment. Burroughs’s transpersonal connections are actually powerful forces toward place-binding. As transpersonal bonds develop between people and place, the kinds of intimate connections Burroughs creates with local creatures and landscapes may have more political and legal application than anyone has yet imagined. Burroughs’s intense transpersonal bonding with his local region should thus be recognized as a great strength. The direction environmentally concerned persons have followed—toward the protection of “wilderness preserves” is very important—yet limiting. If those hoping to protect the environment shift their focus toward the familiar phenomena that surround people’s everyday experience, in the manner of Burroughs, they might foster a greater love toward many local regions. People may learn great lessons about the stewardship of landscapes from the very places in which they are directly involved. Like Burroughs, we should focus on our own love of the regional and specific attachments to place. For Burroughs, sincere empathy for and identification with local landscapes implicitly warrants their protection. He has developed highly sophisticated and endearing ways of bonding with local landscapes and species. Many ethical theories “preach” how we should perceive our relationship to the environment; Burroughs provides a clear model, allowing individual readers to identify with their own love of place.

Works Cited Berry, Wendell. What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. Burroughs, John. Leaf and Tendril. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908. —. Locusts and Wild Honey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1879. —. My Boyhood. Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1922. —. Time and Change. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912.

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—. Winter Sunshine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1875. Casey, Edward S. Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Fox, Warwick. Toward a Transpersonal Ecology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. McGlaughlin, Andrew. Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle. David Rothenberg, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. —. “Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World.” Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. George Sessions, ed. Boston: Shambhala Press, 1995. Plumwood, Val. “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Environmental Ethics. Robert Elliot, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Rothenberg, David. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Shepherd, Paul. “Nature and Madness.” Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, Allen D. Kanner, eds. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

EMERSON’S NATURAL THEOLOGY: JOHN BURROUGHS AND THE “CHURCH” OF LATTER DAY TRANSCENDENTALISM DANIEL G. PAYNE

At the time of his death in 1921, John Burroughs was universally regarded as America’s preeminent nature writer.1 Beginning in 1871, he wrote hundreds of essays that appeared in the nation’s leading periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Scribner’s, and The Century; he had over twenty books in print; and in his writing cabin near West Park, a tiny village in the mid-Hudson valley, the “Sage of Slabsides” played host to numerous friends and admirers, such as John Muir, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and President Theodore Roosevelt. As Hans Huth writes in Nature and the American, “Burroughs set a new standard for the nature essay, which soon occupied a definite niche in literature.”2 After Burroughs’s death, however, popular and critical interest in his work slowly waned. While he certainly wasn’t entirely forgotten—the John Burroughs Association was formed in 1921, and since that time has annually awarded a medal for an outstanding book in natural history— he was generally seen as belonging to the second tier of American nature writers, behind such nineteenth century contemporaries such as Henry Thoreau and John Muir, writers who had been far less popular in their time but were now generally considered to be more closely in touch with modern sensibilities. There are three primary factors which contribute to Burroughs’s diminished reputation over the past eighty years. First, despite Burroughs’s remarkable literary output, there is no single book—no Walden, no A Sand County Almanac, no Desert Solitaire—that epitomizes his work and has become a staple of college classrooms. Second, his 1

This article was originally published in ATQ, Volume 21, No. 3, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the University of Rhode Island. 2 Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 102.

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essays are often dismissed as old-fashioned; his fondness for rural settings and themes seen as evidence of his lack of topicality, of relevance, of a cutting edge. As Bill McKibben writes in a 1992 essay, “The Call of the Not So Wild,” to a modern audience Burroughs’s writings often appear “old-fashioned,” perhaps even “cloying or overdone.”3 Burroughs is sometimes also criticized for his personal association with some of the titans of the gilded age, such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and Burroughs’s old schoolmate from Roxbury, New York, Jay Gould—and it is certainly true that Burroughs was not a vocal critic of the industrial excesses of the period. Finally, Burroughs rarely took an active role in the political battles for conservation and wilderness preservation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Burroughs had a well-earned reputation for diffidence and a desire to avoid conflict, notwithstanding the rather odd exception of the “nature faker” controversy of the early 1900s.4 He was occasionally criticized by those who took a more active role in the early conservation movement, a charge to which he pled, at least in part, guilty: “I was never a fighter. I fear at times I may have been a shirker, but I have shirked one thing, or one duty, that I might the more heartily give myself to another.”5 For many modern critics this lack of political activism is a fatal flaw in Burroughs, and a contrast to writers such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, and Rachel Carson, all of whom had ties to environmental organizations that helped further their environmental legacies and ensure the enduring popularity of their literary works. Over the past fifteen years, however, a resurgence of scholarly interest in Burroughs has led to a reappraisal of his work that makes clear that Burroughs’s contributions to nature writing and modern environmentalism go remarkably, if sometimes subtly, deep. This renewed interest in Burroughs has resulted in two major biographical studies; two collections of his essays; reprints of several full length works, including a scholarly edition of Burroughs’s Signs and Seasons; and several full length critical studies, such as Charlotte Zoë Walker’s Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing (2000) and James Perrin Warren’s John

3

Bill McKibben, “The Call of the Not So Wild.” The New York Review of Books, May 14, 1992, 32-33. 4 See Ralph Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science & Sentiment (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1990). 5 Clara Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 2:312.

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Emerson’s Natural Theology: John Burroughs and the ‘Church’ of Latter Day Transcendentalism

Burroughs and the Place of Nature (2006).6 These studies have explored such topics as Burroughs’s literary criticism (particularly his work on Whitman and Emerson), his early form of bioregionalism, his indirect influence on the conservation movement through his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, his importance in attracting an audience for nature writing; his influence on nature education in the United States, and his enormous impact on the genre of nature writing generally. One fascinating aspect of Burroughs’s work that has been largely overlooked relates to his writings on the religious value of nature study and the “decay of creeds.” Burroughs’s religious opinions, as expressed in numerous essays on the topic, are often startling in their boldness. Not only do they show a “radical” side of a writer sometimes considered oldfashioned or dated, they clearly show that Burroughs was a key figure—in many ways, the key figure—in proselytizing for a religion of nature that reconciled the idealistic Natural Theology of Emerson’s Transcendentalism with the discoveries of modern science. In this, Burroughs has much in common with Thoreau and Muir, whose contributions to the development of modern environmentalism in this area have been exhaustively chronicled. Given the fact that Burroughs commanded a far larger popular audience in his time than either Thoreau or Muir, it becomes evident that the key role that Burroughs’s work played in the development of modern literary environmentalism, particularly as it pertains to natural theology, has not been accorded sufficient critical attention. Transcendentalism is seen by many, if not most, scholars of environmental history and literature as the fountainhead of modern environmentalism in the United States. As Donald Worster writes, Emerson’s Nature (1836) could be “described as a manifesto for an important strain of Romantic ecological thought.”7 What is signified by the word “Transcendentalism,” then and now, is notoriously hard to 6

Edward Renehan, John Burroughs: An American Naturalist (1992) and Edward Kanze, The World of John Burroughs (reprint edition, 1999); Bill McKibben, Birch Browsings: A John Burroughs Reader (1992) and Charlotte Zoë Walker, The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs (2001); John Burroughs, Signs and Seasons (2006: Jeff Walker, ed.). Significant recent doctoral dissertations include Stephen M. Mercier’s Revaluing the Literary Naturalist: John Burroughs's Environmental Aesthetics (University of Rhode Island, 2005) and Eric C. Lupfer’s The Emergence of American Nature Writing, 1860-1909: John Burroughs, Henry David Thoreau and Houghton, Mifflin and Company (University of Texas, 2006). 7 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 103.

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define—as Joel Myerson writes, “Defining Transcendentalism is a lot like grasping mercury: both are fluid and hard to pin down,” and, I would add, only partly in jest, that it sometimes seems as though undergraduates rank the relative toxicity of each as roughly equivalent.8 In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson’s rather glib definition of the term—“What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842”—is both incomplete and misleading, although his contrast of transcendentalist idealism with materialism is a useful point of departure for any consideration of the topic. More to the point, if only slightly less slippery, is his later statement in the same essay: The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connexion of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own.9

Critical definitions of Transcendentalism vary, but often refer to Perry Miller’s identification of the three primary themes of Transcendentalism: a search for faith, a reaction against Unitarianism, and a revulsion against commercialism.10 In Miller’s view, Transcendentalism was primarily a religious phenomenon, a belief shared by many scholars who have continued to accent the spiritual aspects of Transcendentalism. While some later scholars, such as Lawrence Buell, have emphasized the literary and intellectual bases of Transcendentalism few, if any, have disputed the claim that Transcendentalism is at its core a religious phenomenon. The philosophical and religious wellsprings of Transcendentalism are well traveled terrain, as are Emerson’s views on nature and its relation to God and the human soul. Calvinist and Unitarian religious doctrine, the Enlightenment, English Romanticism, and the German philosophers (particularly Kant) are all significant parts of the prehistory of Transcendentalism, but one of the most intriguing influences—particularly 8

Myerson, Joel,ed., introduction to Transcendentalism: A Reader. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xxv. 9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Collected Works, Riverside Edition, 11 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 1: 339. 10 Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 3-15.

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since it is still sometimes referred to in modern theological discussions such as those pertaining to the matter of creation and “intelligent design”—is the notion of Natural Theology. Natural Theology may be briefly defined as the belief that human intellect can discover truths about God by studying the natural (or created) world, and can be traced back to classical texts by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas merged Greek philosophy with Christian doctrine, and contrasted Natural Theology with the notion of revealed truth, arguing that while faith was still primary, the foundational truths of Christian belief were accessible to all, and could be established through a combination of human reason and religious faith. Natural Theology was rejected by the Protestant reformers of the seventeenth century, but following the Enlightenment it was revived in works such as Samuel Clarke’s The Being and Attributes of God (1704) and Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion (1705) and, perhaps most notably, William Paley’s Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802) in which he presents the famous metaphor of God as the great watchmaker. As Paley saw it, given the presence of the natural world and the miraculous way in which the parts all seem to fit together perfectly: the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker— that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.11

Emerson’s epochal Nature (1836) was his first major consideration of Natural Theology, and declarations such as those contained in the famous “transparent eyeball” passage make clear that Emerson had scant regard for the proposition that God could only be known through intermediaries. Emerson’s view that nature was a text that could be read was certainly not an unusual one (indeed, the Puritans believed much the same even if their interpretation of the text differed substantially from that of Emerson) but the holy trinity that Emerson sets up between God, Nature, and the individual human soul, was a radical proposition—radical enough, anyway, to get him banned from the podium of Harvard’s Divinity School for thirty years following his 1838 address. Emerson challenged the notion 11

William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. (London: Faulder, 1802), 3.

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that God’s will is, by definition, inscrutable to the human mind, and argued that it was to Nature—not to religious texts or clergy—that the individual should go for spiritual insight and a direct connection to God: faith should blend with the light of rising and setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers. But now the priest’s Sabbath has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are glad when it is done.12

Emerson expands on the link between nature and spiritual insight in numerous later essays, perhaps most notably in “The American Scholar” (1837) and the “Divinity School Address” (1838). The notion of correspondence, derived by Emerson from the writings of the Swedish philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg, is vital to understanding the central importance of nature study in Emerson’s teleology: A study of the natural world under a “spiritual light,” writes Emerson in “The American Scholar,” shall reveal: the law of more earthy natures,— when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.13

The modern precept to “study nature” cited by Emerson is reiterated often in his work; as Jerome Loving writes in Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse, Emerson believed that “The study of natural science leads man back to the ‘truth’ that nature is permanent only in its whole; indeed, that its permanence thrives upon the transitory nature of the particular.”14 This is not, however, to say that Emerson, for all his powers of observation, went to nature as a scientist. As John Burroughs himself

12

Emerson, 1:135. Emerson, 1:88. 14 Jerome Loving, Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 42. 13

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cogently states in Field and Study (1919), Emerson went to the woods not as a scientist but to “fetch the word of the wood-god to men.”15 Emerson’s challenge to established religious authority is made even plainer, and is more personally directed toward members of the clergy in his “Divinity School Address.” Although his actual audience at Harvard was minute—probably less than ten young scholars—the essay hit a nerve with the university administration, particularly when it was distributed widely in printed form. “Accept the injurious impositions of our early catechetical instruction,” declared Emerson, “and even honesty and selfdenial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear the Christian name. One would rather be ‘a pagan suckled in a creed outworn’ than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature.”16 It is in nature and the individual soul that true redemption must be sought, not in supplication to church doctrine or the ministry: The true Christianity,— a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man,— is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but in some person old and departed. Ah me! No man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding God who seeth in secret…They think society wiser than their soul; and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.17

John Burroughs was nineteen years old when he first discovered Emerson, and he was among the many readers who thrilled to Emerson’s inspirational words: “I read him [Emerson] in a sort of ecstasy. I got him in my blood, and he colored my whole intellectual outlook. He appealed to my spiritual side; his boldness and unconventionality took a deep hold upon me.”18 Burroughs didn’t really need Emerson to tell him to go to nature—growing up on a farm, he had been attracted to the woods and fields right from the start. It was Emerson’s melding of nature with ideal and spiritual themes that drew Burroughs to “nature for the soul’s sake.”19 As was the case with John Muir, Burroughs found Emerson to be a liberating influence from the religious beliefs of his father, who was a devout Old School Baptist with a fundamentalist view of the Bible and its teachings. Although Chauncey Burroughs wasn’t nearly as coercive as 15

John Burroughs, Field and Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 221. Emerson, 1: 130. 17 Emerson, 1: 142. 18 Barrus, Life and Letters, 1:41. 19 Clara Barrus, Our Friend, John Burroughs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 126. 16

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Daniel Muir was (in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, John Muir recalled that when he was eleven years old, his father used the bonfires in which they burnt the brush cleared from their homestead in Wisconsin as a warning lesson, comparing their heat to the fires of hell and the burning branches to bad boys subjected to everlasting torment), he was just as narrow-minded when it came to religion. Burroughs would later describe his father as a basically good man, “but bigoted and intolerant in his religious and political views.”20 As Burroughs biographer Ed Renehan writes, Emerson’s work expressed “a philosophy of daring and inspiring affirmation: a revolutionary natural theology that was the solvent of encrusted forms and traditions.”21 Burroughs’s sense of intellectual debt was such that when Emerson died in 1882, Burroughs castigated himself for not going to Concord for the funeral, writing in a journal entry dated April 30, 1882: I should have been there. Emerson was my spiritual father in the strictest sense. It seems as if I nearly owe all, or whatever I am, to him...I fell in with him just in time. His words were like the sunlight to my pale and tender genius which had fed on Johnson and Addison and poor Whipple.22

Indeed, Emerson’s early influence on Burroughs was so profound that Burroughs found himself unintentionally mimicking the master’s writing style. When Burroughs submitted his essay “Expression” to The Atlantic Monthly in 1860, James Russell Lowell, the magazine’s editor, was certain that it was a hitherto unpublished work of Emerson’s that Burroughs was attempting to palm off as his own. As Burroughs later recalled: The essay had some merit, but it reeked with the Emersonian spirit and manner….I quickly saw that this kind of thing would not do for me. I must get on ground of my own. I must get this Emersonian musk out of my garments at all hazards. I concluded to bury my garments in the earth, as it were, and see what my native soil would do toward drawing it out. So I took to writing on all manner of rural themes—sugar-making, cows, haying, stone walls. These, no doubt, helped to draw out the rank suggestion of Emerson. I wrote about things of which I knew, and was, therefore, bound to be more sincere than in writing upon the Emersonian themes.23 20

Barrus, Our Friend John Burroughs, 56. Renehan, 46. 22 John Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, Clara Barrus, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 87-88. 23 Barrus, Our Friend John Burroughs, 129-130. 21

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Not only was this decision more in keeping with Emerson’s dictum to study nature and the soul directly, and not to weakly parrot “a past utterance of genius”—even that of Emerson himself—but it was more in keeping with Burroughs’s deep love of nature and rural life. “Take that farm-boy out of my books,” he said, “and you have robbed them of something vital and fundamental.”24 From Wake-Robin (1871) to The Last Harvest (1922), his final and posthumously published collection of essays, Burroughs cited Emerson on countless occasions and over the years devoted several essays to his work. These references to Emerson generally cite him as an exemplar, inspiration, or authority—particularly when it came to matters pertaining to nature, religion, or literature. In “Emerson,” included in Birds and Poets (1877), Burroughs pays tribute to Emerson’s early work while pointing out that, “Emerson’s quality has changed a good deal in his later writings…He has now ceased to be an expansive, revolutionary force, but he has not ceased to be a writer of extraordinary gripe and unexpected resources of statement.”25 This should not be read as a slight toward Emerson, but an honest and insightful literary evaluation, as most modern critics would agree with Burroughs’s assessment.26 Recalling his own early reaction to Emerson, Burroughs writes: [O]ver and above everything else, Emerson appeals to youth and to genius. If you have these, you will understand him and delight in him; if not, or neither of them, you will make little of him. And I do not see why this should not be just as true any time hence as at present.27

In his later essays, although Burroughs now discerned the “flies in the Emersonian amber,” he was loathe to devalue his work: Though we may in a measure have outgrown him, and now find his paradoxes, his daring affirmations, his trick of overstatement and

24

Barrus, Life and Letters, 1:19). John Burroughs, Birds and Poets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1877), 182. 26 For example, Jerome Loving writes, “Emerson’s place in the front rank of American literature and as prophet of the American Renaissance lies with the addresses and essays he wrote between 1836 and 1842. This is the Emerson we appreciate most, not the Emerson of the 1840s and 1850s who saw nature as no longer penetrable, the Emerson who after the death of his first son, concluded in ‘Experience’ that the ‘mid-world is best’” (124). 27 Burroughs, Birds and Poets, 205. 25

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understatement less novel and stimulating than we once did, yet we cherish him in our heart of hearts.28

In an essay written near the very end of his life, Burroughs returned a final time to Emerson, writing: “Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people that attention cannot be directed to him too often.”29 It is fitting that in the penultimate entry of his published journals that Burroughs (who had been reading the recently published collection of Emerson’s letters) he once again paid tribute to his old literary inspiration, noting with approval Emerson’s “optimism and courage.”30 Emerson’s influence on Burroughs’s own “moral and religious development” was crucial, beginning with Emerson’s espousal of nature study as a path to religious insight. In 1874, Burroughs returned to his rural roots, leaving his position as a bank examiner in Washington, D.C. and moving to the mid-Hudson Valley in New York, where he farmed and chronicled his observations of nature in hundreds of published works. Like Thoreau, Burroughs went to nature not as a scientist—although both writers are astute students of natural history—but to discover facts that may someday blossom into truths, to use Thoreau’s felicitous phrase. Even more than that, however, Burroughs felt that nature was the wellspring from which humankind could draw all of the physical spiritual necessities of life: Nature we have always with us, an inexhaustible storehouse of that which moves the heart, appeals to the mind, and fires the imagination—health to the body, a stimulus to the intellect, and joy to the soul.31

Perhaps the most important thing that Burroughs had to teach when it came to nature study was the most fundamental—how to see. In essays such as “The Art of Seeing Things” and “Sharp Eyes” Burroughs teaches his readers how to observe nature, how to practice the art of “keeping your eyes and ears open.”32 By the late nineteenth century, Burroughs’s natural history essays had become familiar reading in classrooms across the nation, appearing in collections such as Mary Burt’s Little Nature Studies for Little People (1898) and Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers (1901), a 28

John Burroughs, Literary Values (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 211. John Burroughs, The Last Harvest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 1. 30 Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 338. 31 John Burroughs, Leaf and Tendril (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 3. 32 Burroughs, Leaf and Tendril, 10. 29

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collection of reissued essays by Burroughs brought out by his publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Had Burroughs been content to simply describe nature or to imitate Emerson’s philosophical essays, he would not have been a true disciple of Emerson—as was the case with Thoreau, the real genius of Emerson’s literary influence was to inspire others to go beyond Emerson himself. Emerson had the first great transformative effect on Burroughs and his writing, but the most important influence was undoubtedly that of another disciple of Emerson, Walt Whitman. After an exchange of correspondence in 1868, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote to Burroughs, “Your only two great American writers are Emerson and Whitman; mine are Emerson and Hawthorne.”33 Burroughs and Whitman became close friends while living in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, and as Clara Barrus states, “outside of Nature herself” Whitman had the greatest influence on Burroughs. Burroughs’s first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), was written with extensive editorial input from the subject himself, and over the course of his career, Burroughs referred to Whitman in countless essays and another full-length work, Whitman: A Study (1896). As was the case with Emerson, Burroughs was particularly drawn to the way in which Whitman referred to nature in his poems, even comparing him favorably to Emerson in this regard: [Whitman] did not humanize nature or read himself into it; he did not adorn it as a divinity; he did not see through it as a veil to spiritual realities beyond, as Emerson so often does….Yet he made more of nature than any other poet has done.34

Burroughs was such an ardent supporter of Whitman, that after Emerson failed to follow up on his initial praise for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Burroughs’s enthusiasm for Emerson cooled. In fact, Burroughs seems to have taken Emerson’s reservations about Whitman far more seriously than did Whitman. In his journal, Burroughs relates an episode where Emerson told one of Whitman’s friends to “tell Walt I am not satisfied, not satisfied. I expect him to make the songs of the Nation but he seems contented to make the inventories.”35 When the message was relayed to Whitman,

33

Barrus, Life and Letters, 1:137. John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe (New York: Russell & Russell, 1920), 322-23. 35 Burroughs, Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 55-56. 34

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Walt laughed and said it tickled him much. It was capital. But it did not disturb him at all. “I know what I am about better than Emerson does. Yet I love to hear what the gods have to say.”36

Burroughs closely followed the scientific revelations and accompanying debate following the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), finding in Darwin’s work an intellectually satisfying substitute for “the old myths” of creation theology.37 After reading The Descent of Man in 1883, Burroughs wrote in his journal, “The book convinces like Nature herself. I have no more doubt of its main conclusions than I have of my own existence.”38 Over the last forty years of his literary career, Darwin’s work is cited often in Burroughs’s own, and often set off as a counterpoint to traditional religious belief: Christianity is a workable hypothesis; it solves the problem of life to vast numbers of persons; but how irrational and puerile its philosophy, founded upon the myth of the fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden! But do we not know, in the light of evolution, that man’s course has been upward and not downward, that his “fall” was, in fact, development into a higher state of being?39

Burroughs was eager to link Emerson and Whitman to Darwin, claiming in Field and Study, that Whitman was the one American poet who managed to reconcile religion with modern science: “He is prophetic and creative, while he is Darwinian and democratic.”40 In Whitman: A Study (1896) Burroughs argues that Whitman intuitively anticipated Darwin’s theory of evolution in “Song of Myself, as evidenced by lines such as these: I am an acme of things accomplish’d and I an encloser of things to be. My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs, On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps, All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount. Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me, Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even 36

Ibid., 56. Burroughs, Accepting the Universe, 121. 38 Burroughs, Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 98. 39 Burroughs, Accepting the Universe, 263. 40 John Burroughs, Field and Study, 230. 37

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Emerson’s Natural Theology: John Burroughs and the ‘Church’ of Latter Day Transcendentalism there, I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.41

Burroughs also sought to link Emerson to Darwin, devoting the better part of two essays, “Science and Poets” and “Emerson and Carlyle” to Emerson’s treatment of science, ranking him with Whitman as the two poets whose “attitude toward science is the most welcome and receptive.”42 He also claims that through his poetic insight Emerson, like Whitman, intuitively anticipated Darwin’s scientific work on evolution and was the “prophet and discoverer” of Nature’s secrets.”43 In reiterating this point in a later essay, however, he confessed that Emerson would probably be surprised and displeased by such a reading of his work as Burroughs had once heard him say that it was Agassiz, not Darwin, who was his teacher in such matters.44 Like Darwin himself, Burroughs did not deny the existence of God, but he was unwilling to anthropomorphize the creative impulse behind the universe, or to attempt to “describe the Infinite in terms of the finite,” saying that when we conceive of God in anthropomorphic ways, it is because “our experience gives us no other terms in which to conceive Him.”45 When we conceive of God in anthropomorphic terms, writes Burroughs, we are forced into a religious Hobson’s choice: Ah me! As soon as we make God out to be a person who interferes in the events of the world, into what strait we are forced! We are forced to conclude that either He is not omnipotent, or else that He is a monster of cruelty….No, he is not that kind of a God. The only way he interferes is through the eternal laws which He has established.46

In later essays Burroughs clarifies this statement, moving away from Paley’s early nineteenth century version of what is now often referred to as “intelligent design,” his image of the “great watchmaker,” and toward a view of creation that more closely resembles that of modern science. “There is no great lawgiver,” Burroughs flatly states, “Her laws are a

41

John Burroughs, Whitman: A Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 284-85. John Burroughs, Field and Study, 80. 43 Ibid., 82. 44 Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 305. 45 Burroughs, Accepting the Universe, 189. 46 John Burroughs, Indoor Studies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 248. 42

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sequence of events and activities; this sequence has worked itself out through countless ages.”47 These eternal laws were made manifest though the study of nature and science, and in Burroughs’s view it was Darwin who had probably done the most to provide a rational basis for understanding the on-going act of creation. Burroughs argues (with a rhetorical nod to Emerson) that Darwin’s work revealed humankind’s kinship with the rest of the natural world: Man has from the earliest period believed himself of divine origin….He has spurned the clod with his foot; he has denied all kinship with bird and beast around him, and looked to the heavens above for the sources of his life. And then unpitying science comes along and tells him that he is under the same law as the life he treads underfoot, and that law is adequate to transform the worm into the man.48

This revelation led Burroughs to reverse Emerson’s declaration in “The Method of Nature” that, “In the divine order, intellect is primary: nature secondary.”49 Burroughs flatly rejects the anthropocentric notion that God tailored creation for the express benefit of man. “Nature,” declares Burroughs, “is first and man last. Things are good to us because our constitutions are shaped to them; no absolute goodness is argued.”50 Burroughs is probably the first major American author to flatly state, “the personal, or anthropocentric, point of view must be abandoned.”51 As early as 1866, Burroughs was convinced that “Nature exists for man no more than she does for monkeys, and is as regardless of his life or pleasure or success as she is of fleas.”52 After reading Darwin, he became even more firmly convinced that the world had not been created for the benefit of man, but rather that humankind had evolved to fit our environment. On this topic he could sometimes be uncharacteristically strident, as in a letter to a reader who had contemptuously challenged his views on religion and evolution (calling evolution “that scientific lie”). Burroughs retorted: I should like to ask you how you think God made man—with his clothes on? His finger nails pared? And his hair cut? Did he say to man ‘Come

47

John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe, 79. John Burroughs, Time and Change (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 178. 49 Emerson, Collected Works, 1:188. 50 John Burroughs, The Light of Day (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 206. 51 Ibid., 53. 52 Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 45. 48

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Burroughs generally took some pains to emphasize that his criticisms were directed at theology, not at religion per se, writing that religion is a natural and necessary part of life. Furthermore, he wrote, “I am convinced that no man’s life is complete without some kind of an emotional experience that may be called religious.”54 Even a religion that had been discredited by reason and modern science was of some value if it lifted a person above selfish and material ends and convinced them to do right toward their fellows. Like Emerson before him, however, Burroughs frequently offered strongly worded criticisms of organized religion.55 In essays such as “Demonology,” Emerson had criticized the church for misleading men by shackling them to the teachings of the past, and by overlooking the present day in favor of bland assurances of future reward. In his own work, Burroughs picks up on this theme, bolstering and combining Emerson’s Transcendentalism with a scientific perspective, asserting that it was to nature that we should go to satisfy our religious yearnings, not to outdated creeds that were at odds with human reason. In The Light of Day (1900), Burroughs’s first extended collection of essays on the topic of religion, he stated in the introduction that his polemic was directed not so much towards religion as it was theology: “theology passes; religion, as a sentiment or feeling of awe and reverence in the presence of the vastness and mystery of the universe, remains.”56 In later essays such as “The Universal Beneficence” he tended to be far less guarded in his criticism of institutional religion: Our religion is at fault, our saints have betrayed us, our theologians have blackened and defaced our earthly temple, and swapped it off for cloud mansions in the Land of Nowhere.57

53

Barrus, Life and Letters, 2:401. Burroughs, Accepting the Universe, 107. 55 Although not, perhaps, quite as strongly worded as Thoreau’s, who said in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that religion in New England was so “full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced” (Boston: Riverside Press, 1961), 77. 56 Burroughs, Light ofDay, viii. 57 Burroughs, Accepting the Universe, 53. 54

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But while modern science and human reason may have stripped the old dogma of its intellectual underpinnings, Burroughs was fully aware that there was still a need for humankind to cloak ourselves against the “cosmic chill” and seek a spiritual connection to the universe. It was here, argued Burroughs, that a form of Natural Theology such as that championed by Emerson and epitomized by Whitman, but still consistent with modern science and intellect could fulfill this basic human need. Burroughs returns to this theme many times, particularly in his later essays, but his most complete and eloquent treatment of the topic is in “The Faith of a Naturalist” originally published in The North American Review in 1919 and then republished in Accepting the Universe (1920).58 He reiterates his often stated contention that “a man without religion falls short of the proper human ideal,” but defines religion as a “spiritual flowering,” not a creed or particular dogma. Men of science, he argues, “do well enough with no other religion than the love of truth, for this is indirectly a love of God.”59 For others, himself included, Burroughs states, it is to nature that one may look to satisfy one’s religious yearnings: Amid the decay of creeds, love of nature has high religious value. This has saved many persons in this world—saved them from mammon-worship, and from the frivolity and insincerity of the crowd….It has made them contented and at home whenever they are in nature—in the house not made with hands. This house is their church, and the rocks and the hills are the altars, and the creed is written in the flowers of the field and the sands of the shore….Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance….It is not an insurance policy underwritten by a bishop or priest; it is not even a faith; it is a love, an enthusiasm, a consecration to natural truth.60

While some might find the notion of a universe that is not constantly manipulated by a conscious intelligence to be frightening or without meaning, Burroughs argues that we need not fear alienation from God simply because we have discarded the old dogmas. In fact, he suggests, considerations of moral evil will begin and end with their true source, human vices, and not with an omnipotent God, and natural “disasters” will

58

“The Faith of a Naturalist” from Accepting the Universe (1920) also appears in The Palgrave Environmental Reader edited by Daniel G. Payne and Richard S. Newman (112-121) and The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs, edited by Charlotte Zoë Walker (221-231). 59 Burroughs, Accepting the Universe, 115. 60 Burroughs, Accepting the Universe, 116-117.

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be seen for what they actually are—the works of a natural world that does not revolve around the needs and desires of human beings: The faith and composure of the naturalist or naturist are proof against the worst that Nature can do…the ways of Nature are the ways of God if we do not make God in our own image, and make our comfort and well-being the prime object of Nature.61

It is this link between science, nature, and the sacred that Burroughs is instrumental in transmitting to the twentieth-century. Inspired by Emerson’s Natural Theology, it is a direct descendant of Transcendentalism yet does not reject the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but instead incorporates them into a modern form of Natural Theology. Just as Emerson directly transmitted a sense of the sacred in nature to nineteenth-century nature writers such as Thoreau, Muir, and Burroughs, so too did they impart this belief to succeeding generations of literary environmentalists. What Burroughs had once said of Emerson would apply equally well to his own influence today: His religious significance will not be so important to the next generation. He is being or has been so completely absorbed by his times, that readers and hearers hereafter will get him from a thousand sources, or his contribution will become the common property of the race.62

While it will have to be left to a future essay (or book) to trace the direct influence of Burroughs on specific modern nature writers, a preliminary and incomplete listing would certainly include Aldo Leopold, Henry Beston, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard, to name just a few. Unlike Thoreau and Muir, Burroughs will never be adopted as the avatar of modern eco-politics and environmental activism; and yet, it is hard not to detect something profound and lasting in the work of a writer who could declare late in life: Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all—that has been my religion. As I grow old, my joy and my interest in it increase. Less and less does the world of men interest me, more and more do my thoughts turn to things universal and everlasting.63

61

Ibid., 132-133. John Burroughs, Birds and Poets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1875), 205. 63 Burroughs, Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 257. 62

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Works Cited Barrus, Clara, ed. The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925. —. Our Friend, John Burroughs Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. —. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. Burroughs, John. Accepting the Universe. New York: Russell & Russell, 1920. —. Birds and Poets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1875. —. Field and Study. New York: Russell & Russell, 1919. —. The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, Clara Barrus, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. —. Indoor Studies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889. —. Leaf and Tendril. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. —. Light of Day. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. —. Signs and Seasons, Jeff Walker, ed. 1886. Reprinted with notes and commentary, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. —. The Last Harvest. New York: Russell & Russell, 1928. —. Literary Values. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902. —. Wake-Robin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1871. —. Whitman: A Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Collected Works, Riverside Edition, 11 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885. Huth, Hans. Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. 1957. Repr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Kanze, Edward. The World of John Burroughs. New York: Harry Abrams Publishing, 1993. Loving, Jerome. Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Lutts, Ralph H. The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science & Sentiment. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1990. McKibben, Bill. “The Call of the Not So Wild.” The New York Review of Books, 14 May 1992, 32-33. Miller, Perry. The Transcendentalists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950. Muir, John. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916.

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Myerson, Joel. Introduction to Transcendentalism: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Oelschlager, Max. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Paley, William. Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. London: Faulder, 1802. Renehan, Edward J. John Burroughs: An American Naturalist. Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992. Walker, Charlotte, Zoë. Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing. Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 2000. Warren, James Perrin. John Burroughs and the Place of Nature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

BURROUGHS COUNTRY: THE CATSKILLS THEN AND NOW TOM ALWORTH

A Brief History The Catskills have always been a place of dramatic change. They are a story of wilderness lost and wilderness regained, economic booms and busts, and a source of valuable resources. They have been a reflection of our impacts on the land across much of the United States from the 1700s until today. It is within this dynamic atmosphere of change that John Burroughs lived, wrote and interpreted the natural world through his articles and books. The beautiful Catskill Mountains, as well as the Hudson River Valley of New York State, are “Burroughs Country.” They were the stage on which Burroughs acted and interacted with the likes of poet Walt Whitman, preservationist John Muir and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford. Burroughs’s vantage point was unique. This paper will focus on the Catskill Mountain region as it was when John Burroughs lived there and since his death, with a glimpse into what the future may hold for this special place. John Burroughs was first and foremost a farmer. Born on a dairy farm in Roxbury (Delaware County), New York in 1837, young Burroughs developed a kinship with domestic animals, rolling pastures and the wildlife he encountered while doing his daily chores. It was there that he was captivated by his first glimpse of the Black Throated Blue Warbler dancing in the treetops above his head. The Catskills were a pastoral setting with open farm country for grazing cattle and raising crops. Burroughs flourished there. By the time John Burroughs was born, most of the forests in the Catskills had already been destroyed. The demand for lumber, along with the tanning industry and increased farming and grazing, had systematically changed the landscape of the Catskills. Catskill historian Alf Evers described the tanning industry, which used Hemlock trees as a source of tannic acid, as having destroyed trout habitat due to the loss of shading the

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Hemlocks provided. Evers vividly portrays how the tanning industry affected the Catskill region, as “the water became polluted with tannery wastes and ashes…the very earth of the Catskills was migrating to the valleys and sea below or slowly oozing down slopes.”1 By 1850, when Burroughs was just thirteen years old, railroads had pierced the Catskill Mountain countryside and the lumber, charcoal, bluestone and tanning industries had virtually denuded the Catskills of all their beautiful forests. America’s “first wilderness” was no more. The mid-1800s ushered in the Romantic Movement in America and the Catskills were a focal point. By 1870, when Burroughs was 33, the hotel industry was flourishing as people flocked to the Catskills from Philadelphia and New York to escape the balmy, hot summers before airconditioning was common. Washington Irving had created the famed character Rip Van Winkle and the Catskills began to be recognized as a charming place filled with beauty, mystery and adventure. The Hudson River School of painters flourished with the works of Cole, Durand and Church among others, capturing the Hudson Valley and the Catskills in beautiful landscape paintings that Eliot Vesell, a scholar of the Hudson River School described as “celebrating the wonders of nature in this country by elaborately describing the facts of natural landscape and by presenting seemingly endless vistas through clear uncontaminated air.”2 Most importantly, it was this romanticism towards natural landscapes, combined with a negative reaction to the impact of industry during the industrial revolution, that helped give rise to the early environmental movement in America. By the early 1900s, “Burroughs Country” had seen yet more change. As the hotel industry began to fade in the late 1800s, the wealthy began to purchase large tracts of land, and private hunting clubs became common as wild game was ardently sought after. Private “colonies or clubs” formed, which became communities of the wealthy living separate and apart from the rest of the people in the Catskills. Burroughs was a welcomed guest at most. But it was two events at the turn of the century that had the most significant impact on the future of “Burroughs’ Country”: the creation of the Catskill Forest Preserve and New York City’s quest for clean drinking water.

1

Evers, Alf. The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock (New York: The Overlook Press, 1982), 338. 2 Eliot S. Vesell, ed., introduction to The Life and Works of Thomas Cole by Louis Legrand Noble, (1964. Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 1997), xxvii.

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In 1895 the New York State Forest Preserve was created. As stated in Article XIV of the State’s constitution “the lands of the state now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the Forest Preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands.” These lands included both the Adirondacks and the Catskills, which effectively protected the core of “Burroughs Country” forever. Ten years later, in 1905, the State and Municipal Water Commission was formed, which permitted the City of New York to purchase lands in the Catskills to quench the ever growing thirst of New York City for potable water. By 1907, plans were complete to build the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskills, the first of six reservoirs that would be needed to meet the water demand of the city. In 1908, when John Burroughs was 71-years old, the industrial revolution was in full swing and Burroughs’ fame was at its peak. At this point in his life he had a longing for his homestead and returned to Roxbury to spend the rest of his summers on his boyhood farm in an old farmhouse he purchased from his brother, which he named “Woodchuck Lodge.” He renovated the front porch, furnished it with beds, and spent much of his time there both day and night. He was a disciplined writer and would work most mornings writing not at Woodchuck Lodge, but rather in the doorway of an old barn a short distance up the road. He called it his “Hay Barn Study.” Also at this time art colonies were forming in and around Woodstock, and a renaissance once again began to take root in the Catskills. With the protection of thousands of acres of open space by the State and the City of New York, Catskill forests were soon to come full circle. There would be a second hotel boom in the southern part of the region through the mid 20th century, which hosted famous entertainers who performed for thousands of visitors from New York City on weekend geta-ways. However, most of these hotels, like their counterparts back in the 1800s, are gone.

“Burroughs Country” Today Today, the Catskill Mountain region of New York State remains a unique place where human and natural communities mingle peacefully and collide abruptly; it is as complex as it is beautiful. Because of the Forest Preserve and the protection of New York’s water supply, the forests have returned to the mountains, and as a result, animal populations have rebounded, making hunting and fishing premiere activities once again. Indeed, there is significantly more forest cover in the Catskills today than at anytime in Burroughs’ life. The Catskill Forest Preserve has increased

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in size from 49,000 acres in 1927, to 300,000 acres today. The Catskill Park (formed in 1904) and designated by the “Blue Line,” encompasses 705,500 acres and includes all of the “forever wild” lands of the Forest Preserve. Thousands of acres of land in the Park, however, are privately owned; in fact, the largest contiguous forest in Catskill Park encompasses 80,000 acres of which 30% (24,000 acres) is in private ownership. The City of New York currently owns or holds conservation easements on well over 100,000 acres of land in the Catskills. They will continue to protect open space to reduce development pressure ensuring the high quality, unfiltered water supply remains protected, in an attempt to prevent, or at least delay, the need for constructing an expensive water filtration plant. With a 1.2 billion gallon per day water demand, a filtration plant would cost the City of New York an estimated six billion dollars. But the Catskills are more than forest preserves and water reservoirs. They include over 150 communities including two cities, 114 towns, and 40 villages across seven counties. The region is anchored by the City of Kingston (population 23,000) on the Hudson River in Ulster County, and the City of Oneonta (population 14,000) in southern Otsego County, along with a diverse mix of small, unique rural communities. Nearly a half million people call the Catskills home year-round, up roughly five percent since 1990. Although the population is increasing, the region continues to struggle economically and in some cases, the average per capita income remains below the state average. Many of these communities face serious challenges including the disappearance of farming and agriculture, decaying downtowns, a decline in the developable land base, all of which serve to make communities vulnerable to newly increased development pressures. In fact, the possibility exists that up to five Las Vegas-style casinos could be built in the region. There are other threats. According to The Nature Conservancy, a recent study conducted by Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies measured the conversion of privately owned forests to non forest uses in the Catskills, from 1992 to 2001. The results of this study indicate a one percent loss of forest land per year and predict that this trend will continue over the next ten years. Based on these predictions, the Catskills will lose 162,000 acres of forest land by 2011. Invasive plant and animal species also pose a serious threat to the continued vitality and diversity of both the environment and the economy of the Catskills. Currently, invasive species such as the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, Japanese Knotweed and Purple Loosestrife are drastically altering the forest and stream corridors across the region. Some of these

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species have already spread beyond the point of eradication efforts and are best suited for containment and monitoring. Acid rain and toxic airborne pollutants, especially mercury, are among the most pervasive and severe threats to forests in the eastern United States. Although the Clean Air Act and other regulations and programs have achieved some success in controlling these emissions, the level of pollution remains too high, threatening the biodiversity, health and longterm sustainability of these forests, including the Catskills, with both ecological and economic impacts.

The Challenging Future In 1975, a State Commission appointed to study the Catskills concluded that “…a combination of the beautiful natural environment, proximity to large population centers, and ready access makes the Catskill region exceptionally desirable for development.” Given that more than half of the land in the Catskill Park is privately owned, how they are developed is of great significance. Future development patterns must promote economic viability without compromising ecological health. The unique combination of private and public ownership within the Catskills should serve as a model for how people can live with nature and a model for how we can maintain healthy ecosystems adjacent to socially and economically vibrant communities. John Burroughs’s Catskills are more than a story of wilderness lost and wilderness regained. They remain a microcosm of our world as we wrestle with the challenge of how to protect vital natural resources and ecological treasures, while promoting economic stability and equality. We will never fully know how the Catskills impacted John Burroughs as both writer and person, but I’m confident that his connection to this place was profound and the source of great inspiration and joy for the man.3 Most encouraging is that John Burroughs could step off his front porch at Woodchuck Lodge today and once again get a glimpse of the Black Throated Blue Warbler just as he did when he was a young boy. Hope springs eternal.

3 For a discussion of “place” and Burroughs, see James Perrin Warren’s John Burroughs and the Place of Nature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

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Works Cited Evers, Alf. The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock. Hensonville, NY: The Overlook Press, 1982. Galusha, Diane. Liquid Assets: The Story of New York City’s Water System. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1999. Kanze, Edward. The World of John Burroughs. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993. New York State Temporary Commission to Study the Catskills: The Future of the Catskills. April, 1975. Olney, Christopher W., and Norman J. Van Valkenburgh. The Catskill Park: Inside the Blue Line, The Forest Preserve and Mountain Communities of America’s First Wilderness. Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 2004. The Nature Conservancy. Catskill Mountain Conservation Update. Winter, 2005. Vesell, Eliot S. ed., introduction to The Life and Works of Thomas Cole by Louis Legrand Noble, 1964. Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 1997. Warren, James Perrin. John Burroughs and the Place of Nature. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. 2006.

PART II: WRITING THE LAND

TREATIES AND THE ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE OF WILLIAM BARTRAM AND JOHN BURROUGHS IAN STAPLEY

Although born close to a century apart, William Bartram (1739-1823) and John Burroughs (1837-1921) share a number of similarities. Of course, Bartram, as a major influence on the English Romantics and Ralph Waldo Emerson, influenced Burroughs. Both have a major role in shaping the genre of natural history, their writing combining deep religious faith and scientific exactitude with a carefully crafted literary style. Both were deeply religious, but their beliefs were unfettered by stultifying dogmatism.1 Burroughs describes his own religious beliefs in a way that applies equally to Bartram’s: he considered his religion “not religion at all in the old sense of the spiritual at war with the natural.”2 For both Burroughs and Bartram, the spirit is revealed through the natural world. Both think of the natural world in terms of complex, aweinspiring, if often elusive relations, relations that require careful observation in order to see let alone begin to comprehend. Indeed, Bartram refers to all species of plants and animals as “tribes,” suggesting not only identifiable groups based on similarities, but also implying relations between these groups. Similarly, Burroughs refers to 1 For background on Bartram’s religious views, see Larry R. Clarke, “The Quaker Background of William Bartram’s View of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas. 46 (1985): 435-48. For background on Burroughs’ religious views, see Daniel G. Payne, “As the Angels Have Departed: John Burroughs and the Religion of Nature,” Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996): 68-83; and “The Enduring Legacy of John Burroughs’s Religion of Nature,” Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing, Charlotte Walker, ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000): 201-208. 2 John Burroughs, Whitman: A Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896); repr. The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs, Charlotte Zoë Walker, ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 208.

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“communities” of birds, and describes their relations, often with more anthropomorphic whimsy than natural science, as when he describes the domestic life of bluebirds: “There never was a happier or more devoted husband than the male bluebird.”3 Regardless, Burroughs’ take on birds is one example of his emphasis on relations as the basis of the natural world, a perspective reflected in his more general observation that once an individual focuses on one aspect of nature, when “that one thing is really known” then “you possess a key, a standard; you effect an entrance, and everything else links on and follows.”4 Clearly, a key correspondence between the writers is their preoccupation with the relations between aspects of the natural world, a set of relations as carefully aligned as relations stipulated by a treaty. These points of comparison draw together to suggest a major connection between the writers: both writers see the natural world in terms of relations that unfold according to ineluctable laws, these relations between species unfolding in terms of what is necessary to maintain these laws, and both note instances of man’s activities that violate these laws. In other words, both men view the natural world as functioning according to a type of treaty, the tenets of which we would today understand as the laws of ecology. Bartram is much more explicit in his sense of the natural world operating according to a treaty than is Burroughs. However, this line of thinking is prescient for both in the sense that the concept of ecology was fairly new when Burroughs was writing. The notion that the natural world operates according to a type of treaty would be an easy connection for Bartram to make given the connection between the Treaty of Augusta (1773) and his travels that form the basis of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida. Without this treaty, there would be no Travels. One way that the significance of the treaty to Bartram becomes readily apparent is to consider Bartram’s timeline once he left Philadelphia in April of 1773 intending to go on his ramble through the southeast. He arrived in Savannah a little over a week later. He departed for Augusta at the invitation of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, John Stewart, who arranged for Bartram to meet the Cherokee and Creek chiefs who were involved in the treaty. Stewart made the chiefs aware of Bartram’s wish to explore the area of the New Purchase and recommended Bartram to their

3

John Burroughs, “The Bluebird,” Wake-Robin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1871), repr. The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs, Walker, ed., 52. 4 Quoted in Ralph Black “John Burroughs (1837-1921)” American Nature Writers. John Elder, ed., 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1996), 1:122.

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“friendship and protection” while he was on his travels.5 Stewart also arranged for Bartram to travel with a party under the leadership of Colonel Edward Barnard, with which he left Augusta on June 7, four days after the signing of the treaty. Before the treaty was signed, Bartram occupied some of his spare time by ambling “along the coast of Georgia and northern border of Florida, a deviation from the high road of my intended travels.”6 Without the treaty in place, Bartram clearly felt compelled to stay out of “the Indian Territories.”7 Not until “the treaty of Augusta came on” did Bartram feel that he had reasonable assurance of his safety, let alone official clearance from Stewart to begin his intended travels.8 From thinking of the significance for Bartram of this particular treaty, it is a short step to thinking of ecology as a type of treaty. Bartram would have had plenty of time to realize his dependency on the treaty and on his relationship with Stewart before he embarked on his travels, while he was on his travels, and during the years he worked on revising his field-notes leading up to the publication of Bartram’s Travels in 1791. At some point, Bartram would have discerned the similarity between the way that the Treaty of Augusta specifically, and treaties in general, stipulate a set of relations among the involved parties and the way the natural world dictates a set of relations among the elements of the terrain that he studied. Ironically, we are still learning the conditions of this treaty even while we are beginning to experience the penalties for violating it. Bartram’s stated goal for writing the book was to present “new as well as useful information to the botanist and zoologist.”9 By attesting to the treaty that is the natural world, the outcome of the book is far more significant than this statement of purpose would suggest. Treaties clarify relationships and grant the world at least the veneer of rationality. Indeed, Travels is permeated with the mindset of its author’s preoccupation with treaties, contracts, agreements, covenants, vast and binding grids of words comprising a coherent and amiable worldview, one that Bartram neatly overlaid on thinly populated swamps, various species of plants and animals, including the two-legged variety, trees, rivers, plains, and mountains, the varied and vast terrain of his wanderings. If in practice treaties held up to the ideals that prompt them, the world could be written into stability and order. But always with Bartram is the realization that 5

William Bartram, Travels of William Bartram, Mark Van Doren, ed. (1791. New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 36. 6 Ibid., 35. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 11.

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such a perfect ordering of the natural world, specifically human life, is irretrievably lost; indeed, sorrow that paradise is already lost in America of the late 1700s permeates Travels. The sense of the denigration of the natural world as an ineluctable consequence of violating the treaty that is ecology is a prescient insight that Bartram shares with Burroughs. In this chapter, I will focus primarily on Bartram’s reflections on this treaty, returning to Burroughs in my conclusion. The Treaty of Augusta compelled Creeks and Cherokees to cede to traders of Augusta close to two million acres of their land “north and west of Augusta…and all claim to land east of the Ogeechee River.”10 In return, the Creeks’ and Cherokee’s debts to white traders of Augusta were canceled. This treaty marked the first cession of Cherokee land to Georgia, a pattern that would ultimately culminate with the Cherokee being evicted on the forced march of the Trail of Tears in the winter of 1838-39. The Treaty was a land for debt swap. Between 1761 and 1763, the Creeks and Cherokees had run up such overwhelming debt that they were not able to make payments on it through, as the treaty reads, the “usual way by Hunting and getting Deer Skins.”11 As the usual way of exploiting the resources of the land, even at an intensified rate, proved futile to resolve this debt, now the land itself would have to be traded away. The treaty assures the Creeks and Cherokees that with this restitution, the traders would again be able to supply them “with Goods as usual.”12 As no mention is made in the treaty of measures to prevent such crushing debt from reoccurring, such debt seems not to be an unfortunate and unforeseeable consequence of commercial relations between the traders and the Creeks and Cherokees, but the purpose behind it, a little like so many IMF loans to Third World countries today. Bartram was present at the signing of the Treaty. His familiarity with the document is evident from not only his discussion of it in Travels, but also in his occasional echoing of phrases from the document. As a result of his knowledge of the treaty itself and the events leading up to its signing, he is clearly ambivalent about this treaty. Despite the animosity 10

Sanders, Brad. “’Beautiful’ Oconee River, ‘immense’ cane swamps greeted early naturalist William Bartram in what would become Clarke County.” http://www.onlineathens.com/stories. Rpt. from Athens Banner Herald, Sunday, June 17, 2001. 11 John T. Juricek, ed. Georgia and Florida Treaties, 1763-1776. Vol. 12 of Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607-1789. (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 2001), 118. 12 Ibid.

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that preceded and proceeded the signing of the treaty—young Creek warriors were particularly resistant to “listen to reason and amicable terms” and the Cherokee staunchly supported the British during the Revolutionary War—Bartram insists early in Travels that the treaty “concluded in unanimity, peace, and good order.”13 Late in the text he discusses the treaty again, this time emphasizing that the treaty exacerbated conflict between the Cherokees and Creeks, and he dwells on the eruption of conflict during the treaty discussions. The Creeks become enraged when they learn that the Cherokees had secretly sold the land of the New Purchase to the Georgians without consulting the Creeks, despite Bartram’s baseless assumption that the Cherokee had the exclusive right to sell the territory by “right and sanction of [previous] treaties.”14 When Bartram finally sets out from Augusta with the surveying crew, is he doing so, as part of an ongoing, in Bartram’s own striking phrase, “invasion of the Europeans.”15 The crew of “surveyors, astronomers, artisans, chain-carriers, markers, guides, and hunters, besides a very respectable number of gentlemen, who joined us, in order to speculate in the lands, together with ten or twelve Indians” is intent on carving up the New Purchase.16 Indeed, if the actions of this surveying crew are parts of an invasion, they are small parts of the ongoing historical epic of invasion that Bartram reads on the land. Wherever he travels, he sees remains of long vanished nations. Just a few days out of Augusta, the surveying crew comes across “many magnificent monuments of the power and industry of the ancient inhabitants of these lands…the work of a powerful nation, whose period of grandeur perhaps long preceded the discovery of this continent.”17 In Part II, while traveling with an old trader in Florida near the remains of the “ancient town of Alachua,”18 Bartram notes he has no reason to doubt his companion’s report of finding with “every step we [took] over these fertile heights…remains and traces of ancient human habitations and cultivation.”19 While this land may have been invaded and settled before, this surveying crew, with its resources and the scale of its ambitions, represents something quite different. 13

Bartram, Travels, 54. Ibid., 382; see also, Thomas Hallock, From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 17491826 (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 159-60. 15 Bartram, Travels, 62. 16 Ibid., 55. 17 Ibid., 57. 18 Ibid., 169. 19 Ibid., 173. 14

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Perhaps emboldened with the efficacy of treaties in assuring his safety in Part I of the Travels, Bartram begins his depiction of the events of Part II, which occurs less than a year after the signing of the Treaty of Augusta, with a second instance in which the tenets of treaties influence his actions. While sailing up St. Simon’s River, the party with whom Bartram is traveling meets the captain of the schooner from one of the trading houses on St. John’s who tells them that “the Indians have plundered the upper store, and the traders have escaped only with their lives.”20 The captain of the schooner on which Bartram was sailing, fearing Indian attack, decides immediately to turn around and head south for Frederica. Bartram, however, decides to continue on to the trading houses on St. John’s because he wishes to retrieve a chest full of “valuable books and papers …which I could not do well without.”21 So, he has the captain put him on shore, and he makes his way, over twenty-five pages, back to recover his chest. On his trip up St. John’s River, Bartram’s makes light of this threat of violence, as if the relations set in place by a set of trading houses and the forts and treaties that undergird them could not so easily be turned over. For while en route he receives “harsh treatment from thorny thickets, and prickly vines,” he observes the “ravages of the common grey caterpillar,” and he suffers “stings of musquetoes,” his journey upriver does not involve scary encounters with marauding Seminoles.22 Indeed, he encounters exactly one Seminole between St. Simon’s and a Mr. Marshall’s hospitable plantation. Far from being hostile, the nameless Seminole is completely, even heartbreakingly, servile, informing Bartram, in English, as Bartram emphasizes, that he lives on Marshall’s plantation where he is employed as a hunter. He assures Bartram that “his master” would send out some “trusty Negroes” to see to it that Bartram’s boat and effects would be safely brought to the plantation’s landing.23 After enjoying Marshall’s lavish hospitality, Bartram continues up the St. John. Ultimately, he finds his precious chest with the help of more friendly Seminoles who are anxious to confirm the “amicable treaty of St. Augustine,” which had been agreed to at some point during Bartram’s upriver odyssey.24 As it turns out, the chiefs did not endorse or orchestrate the attacks, which are now characterized as “mischief” against the trading houses; rather, the attacks are attributed to a handful of young warriors, 20

Ibid., 75. Ibid., 76. 22 Ibid., 76-8. 23 Ibid., 84. 24 Ibid., 98. 21

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who believed themselves “ill treated in their dealings with the traders and [emphasized that] the chiefs of their bands were anxious to make restitution and resume trade.25 Once again, conflict is “amicably adjusted,” and Bartram resumes his upriver venture.26 The relations between Seminoles, slaves, and whites along the St. John River sort out to be, at least for Bartram, reliably hierarchical. His faith in the efficacy of treaties is steadfast enough that he feels safe enough from the supposedly disturbed relations among the human tribes to focus his attention on the relations between non-human tribes inhabiting the river. In particular, he becomes fascinated with the benign tribe of the Ephemera, to whose life cycle he devotes close to three full pages.27 The ultimate role of the Ephemera seems to be to provide food for fish and frogs. Yet, noting that their beauty and delicacy is “perhaps as complicated as those of the most perfect human being,” Bartram concludes that these insects bear witness to the need to be wary of the “vanity of our own pursuits,” the comparison between short-lived bugs and humans deflating our sense of importance.28 Bartram has, after all, just weighed the value of his life against the value of a chest of books and papers. He also implicitly compares his own personal safety on this leg of his trip with that of the Ephemera. While he passes serenely up the St. John River, hassled only by briars and mosquitoes, the Ephemera “must be perpetually on its guard, in order to escape the troops of fish and shrimps watching to catch it.”29 Clearly, as a result of the network of trading houses, plantations, and forts, the dangers he faced on the St. John are laughably trivial to the dangers the Ephemera faces throughout its short life. Bartram contrasts the Ephemera’s fate, having only “a few moments [to] take a transient view of the Creator’s works…and that, only from the shores of this river”30 with his own: continually impelled by a restless spirit of curiosity, in pursuit of new productions of nature, my chief happiness consisted in tracing and admiring the infinite, majesty, and perfection of the Almighty Creator, and in the contemplation, that through divine aid and permission, I might be instrumental in discovering, and introducing into my native country, some original productions of nature, which might become useful to society.31 25

Ibid., 86. Ibid., 88. 27 Ibid., 87-89. 28 Ibid., 89. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 88-89. 31 Ibid., 82. 26

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In this contrast between the fate of all other tribes in the natural world with the human capacity for, the luxury and sheer joy of contemplating God’s created world, Bartram seems to suggest that our treaty with God allows for leisurely observation, study, and contemplation, and therefore it would be shameful for the human tribe to live as though we were Ephemera, “perpetually on guard” against those other tribes whose goal is to eat us.32 To Bartram, one tenet of treaties is that the world is a reasonably secure place, and with that security comes an obligation to observe it closely, learn about it, and revel in its complex, intriguing beauty. Bartram’s brief affirmation that the young Seminoles who attacked the trading houses did so because they had been “ill treated in their dealings with the traders” illustrates his awareness that the treaties of Augusta and St. Augustine were inequitable even though he does not explicitly dwell on this fact.33 However, he does suggest that the consequences of such inequities serve none of the interested parties well. One illustration of this occurs in August of 1776, over three years after the Treaty of Augusta. As Bartram nears Fort James from Wrightsborough, named for the Royal Governor James Wright, who with John Stuart concluded the Treaty of Augusta, he juxtaposes two images that drive home the point about the consequences of inequitable treaties between cultures. Of the recently constructed Fort James, which bristles with weapons and, like the Treaty of Augusta, is riddled with “loopholes,” out of which peer “small arms,” Bartram notes that it was established expressly “for the security and defence” of the New Purchase.34 In fact, one of the drawbacks to the Treaty of Augusta was that the military siphoned off funds from the land sale to build forts and pay occupying troops, leading John Stuart to doubt that “the Traders will reap much benefit” from the cession.35 Two miles from the fort, a site had already been surveyed for a town to be named Dartmouth, in honor of the Earl of Dartmouth who was instrumental in arranging for the Creek and Cherokee secession of the land in the Treaty of 1773. However, just before Bartram crosses the Broad River, he notes a disturbing sight which darkens any optimistic notions of forest clearing and civilization founding. This is not the cheery bustle of Dido building Carthage. In the “chains of hills which recall the chain-carriers” of the surveying crew, emphasizing that the crew’s work, the necessary first step 32

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 86. 34 Ibid., 264-265. 35 Juricek, ed. Georgia and Florida Treaties, 1763-1776, 117. 33

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in this phase of the “invasion,” has been completed, Bartram finds heaps of bones that actively bear witness to past “injustices”: heaps of white, gnawed bones of ancient buffalo, elk, deer, indiscriminately mixed with those of men, half grown over with moss, [that] altogether, exhibit scenes of uncultivated nature, on reflection, perhaps, rather disagreeable to a mind of delicate feelings and sensibility, since some of these objects recognize past transactions and events, perhaps not altogether reconcileable [sic] to justice and humanity.36 .

These unhallowed heaps are juxtaposed with the fort and town built on part of the land won through a more recent transaction that is “perhaps not altogether” just and humane. This juxtaposition leads one to wonder how Bartram would judge men who act on treaties that are clearly not in the best interests of all if to become part of a bleached and gnawed heap is the fate of their remains. What is Bartram implying about the larger failure of right action if actions condoned by, indeed required by, treaties impoverish place? These heaps of bones remind the reader that the Treaty of Augusta resulted from the Creeks’ inability to pay off their debts to the traders through increased hunting. By mid seventeenth century, various species—buffalo and elk among them—had long departed from Georgia, leaving Bartram, as he gazes at piles of bones, to anticipate the loss of even more “tribes” in the area of the New Purchase now that it has been opened up to large scale settlement and exploitation. Consistently throughout Travels, Bartram draws a direct causal connection between the diminishment of the richness of the land and Native American commerce with white traders, the very type of inequitable exchange that places like Fort James and Wrightsborough encourages and defends. Bartram points out that Native Americans, in order to trade for “foreign superfluities,” “wage eternal war against deer and bear”; the harmful effects of exploitive trading practices and the treaties which shore them up radiate out from the human to non-human tribes.37 So, from Bartram’s perspective, when treaties are markedly inequitable, all the tribes, both human and non-human, suffer. He wonders in the opening pages of Travels if the encounter between the Indians and Europeans would be “productive of real benefit” to the Indians, and he cannot, by the end of Travels suggest that it will be.38 One scene suggests how such contact will denigrate both Indians and traders, indeed 36

Bartram, Travels , 263-64. Ibid., 184. 38 Ibid., 220. 37

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highlighting the corrupt and corrupting nature of such trade. Forty Seminole warriors had just traded a large number of their renowned horses, horses which originally came over with the Spanish and under Seminole breeding and training had steadily improved in quality, for “a very liberal supply of spirituous liquors, about twenty kegs, each containing five gallons.”39 A days-long bush party follows this swap: “White men and red men and women without distinction, passed the day merrily with these jovial, amorous topers, and the nights in convivial songs, dances, and sacrifices to Venus.”40 When the liquor runs out, “the wenches”—red and white I assume, as Bartram does not specify—then “make their market.”41 During the previous days’ drinking, they had, through a “singular stratagem” spat their draughts into a bottle they hid under their mantle, and “by repeating this artifice soon fills it.”42 Then “the wench retails this precious cordial to them at her own price.”43 So, while the Seminoles have improved the Andalusian horses, the effect of the trade of these horses is the denigration of both the Seminoles and the traders. This particular stratagem, as small time as it is nauseating, neatly captures the pathetically limited response the relatively powerless—in this case women, both red and white— develop in response to the juggernaut of traders, land speculators, and troops, each bearing their own array of “wicked instruments.”44 In a text written by a Quaker that is predicated to such an extent on treaties, contracts, exchanges, and relations, that the original treaty, that between God and Adam and Eve, should be invoked is not surprising.45 In one such allusion, an “inchanting and amazing crystal fountain” that empties into Lake George, is a “paradise of fish [that] may seem to exhibit a just representation of the peaceable and happy state of nature before the fall.”46 After describing in detail this version of Eden, however, Bartram then dismisses it as a “mere representation,”47 a fiction yes, but a sacred myth that he had lovingly dwelt on in detail, revealing the extent to which this representation retains a powerful emotional and psychological pull for 39

Ibid., 214. Ibid. 41 Ibid., 215. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 58. 45 See Larry R. Clarke, “The Quaker Background of William Bartram’s View of Nature.” Journal of the History of Ideas. 46 (1985): 435-48. 46 Bartram, Travels, 151. 47 Ibid., 151. 40

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him. As beautiful as the image is, though, night descends and Bartram has to leave this representation of Eden. The next morning, he walks rocky terrain, his thoughts now on post-lapsarian concerns. The stone, he observes, is “hard and firm enough for buildings …or light hand millstones.”48 To observe a part of the natural world as a reminder of Eden is one thing. However, Bartram also casts himself into the drama of the fall. In one instance, he not only walks away from another representation of Eden, but then also walks through a representation of the fallen environment that was one of the consequences of the breaking of the original treaty. The White King of Talahasochte feasts Bartram and smokes tobacco with him “according to the usual forms and ceremony.”49 At the request of the chief trader, the White King announces that a trading house would again be established in the town. In sentiments familiar from the scene of the Treaty of Augusta, Bartram concludes that the “treaty terminated friendly and peaceably.”50 At the close of this “council and treaty,” the White King assures Bartram that he is considered one of “his own children or people, and should be protected accordingly.”51 This assurance is not to welcome his son home, but to assure him on his travels. The loving father must send his son out into the world, for what sin is not clear, yet he does with words—“Our whole country is before you, where you may range at pleasure,”52 that at once echo Milton as Adam and Eve are escorted out of Eden—“The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest”53—and emphasize not dwelling (“place of rest”) but ranging.54 Is this to suggest pilgrimage or exile? Out of the “whole country,” the chief trader chooses to guide Bartram first to “barren plains…endless wastes…ruins of villages…several miles …of these deserts” before leading him to a “most pleasing contrast and wild Indian scene of primitive unmodified nature, ample and magnificent,” presenting to

48

Ibid., 152. Ibid., 200. 50 Ibid., 201. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 210. 53 John Milton, Paradise Lost. (1667. London, 1795), 12.647-48. 54 Pamela Regis argues that the White King’s quoting of Milton is one of Bartram’s strategies for development of, in Roy Harvey Pearce’s phrase, the “noble savage” in Travels. See Regis 71-72. I see Bartram using the allusion to Milton to suggest the loss of an ecological paradise being enacted in America as a result of breaking the covenant between man and the natural world. 49

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Bartram’s view, perhaps, land after and before it feels the effects of the types of treaties that have lead Bartram this far.55 Almost a century after Bartram, Burroughs echoes Bartram, not only in seeing the natural world as a series of relations, but also in grasping what happens when the treaty that is ecology is violated. In “The Grist of the Gods” Burroughs articulates a powerful sense of the interrelatedness of all things: “All things are alike or under the same law—the rocks, the soil, the soul of man, the trees in the forest, the stars in the sky. We have fertility, depth, geniality, in the ground underfoot, on the same terms upon which we have these things in human life and character.”56 In the same essay, he articulates a powerful sense of the consequences of violating this understanding: What a sucked orange the earth will be in the course of a few more centuries. Our life doubtless exhausts its stores more than a millennium of the life of antiquity. Its coal and oil will be about used up, all its mineral wealth greatly depleted, the fertility of its soil will have been washed into the sea through the drainage of its cities, its wild game will be nearly extinct, its primitive forests gone, and soon how nearly bankrupt the planet will be!57

It is as if the local struggle that Bartram saw Native Americans waging a century before for “superfluities”58 at the cost of the collapse of populations of “deer and bear,” is now the global struggle, consumerism, that the entire tribe of humanity is caught up in at the cost of all aspects of the natural world. In suggesting that Bartram and Burroughs see the natural world as analogous to a treaty, we gain a sense of their perspective of the natural world not as narrowly legal, but moral, the treaty transcending civic law to stipulate a sacred set of relations. Bartram and Burroughs, in seeing this before the concept of ecology was widely understood, were not so much prophetic as sharp-eyed.

55

Bartram, Travels, 204-205. John Burroughs, “The Grist of the Gods,” in Leaf and Tendril (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 206. 57 Ibid., 204. 58 Bartram, Travels, 184. 56

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Works Cited Anderson, Douglas. “Bartram’s Travels and the Politics of Nature.” Early American Literature. 25:1 (1990): 3-17. Black, Ralph W. “John Burroughs (1837-1921).” American Nature Writers. John Elder, ed. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1996. Burroughs, John. Leaf and Tendril. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. Clarke, Larry R. “The Quaker Background of William Bartram’s View of Nature.” Journal of the History of Ideas. 46 (1985): 435-48. Feder, Helana. “Ecocriticism, New Historicism, and Romantic Apostrophe.” The Greening of Literary Scholarship. Steven Rosendale, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Hallock, Thomas. From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 17491826. Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Juricek, John T., ed. Georgia and Florida Treaties, 1763-1776. Vol. 12 of Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607-1789. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 2001. 79-121. Irmscher, Christopher. The Poetics of Natural History, From John Bartram to William James. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999. Looby, Christopher. “The Consitution of Nature: Taxonomy as Politics in Jefferson, Peale, and Bartram.” Early American Literature. 22:3 (1987): 252-72. Regis, Pamela. Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crevecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois UP, 1992. Sanders, Brad. “’Beautiful’ Oconee River, ‘immense’ cane swamps greeted early naturalist William Bartram in what would become Clarke County.” http://www.onlinathens.com/stories. Rpt. from Athens Banner-Herald, Sunday, June 17, 2001. Slovic, Scott. “Nature Writing and Environmental Psychology: The Interiority of Outdoor Space.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds. Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press. 351-70. Walker, Charlotte Zoë, ed. Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. —. ed. The Art of Seeing Things: Selected Essays by John Burroughs. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

THE USE OF METAPHOR AND METONYMY IN SUSAN FENIMORE COOPER’S RURAL HOURS:A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS NANCY METZGER

Whether wandering along wooded paths or across plowed fields, plumbing the depths of a pond or observing the complex rhythms of waves, nature writers entrance readers so effectively that the audience ambles along comfortably, paying little attention to the careful pruning of the narrative pathway, and the measured evenness of the furrows. As “natural” as a Heritage Rose, the result of years of breeding, nature writing is highly crafted; yet one measure of its aesthetics is how seemingly natural and unaffected its narrative seems as it wanders back and forth among various topics. What has captured my interest in trying to determine what the latent structure of nature writing may be is this beguiling quality in the style of nature writing—one that entices the reader along, seemingly without design, as Susan Fenimore Cooper does with her reader, as she describes her daily walks around Cooperstown in Rural Hours. One of the most problematic—and exciting—traits of nature writing is its hybridized form which absorbs a wide variety of literary genres, including autobiography, travel writing, essay, science writing, and history. While each of these has its own strategies for development, usually a sequential progression in autobiography; a spatial progression in travel writing, based on the movements of the traveler; a logical development of a unified thesis in essay; cause /effect analysis in science; and a sequential, cause-effect relationship in history; in contrast, nature writing, by borrowing from all these different genres, also incorporates the broad diversity of development strategies. This is particularly the case in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours, which is organized as a daily journal, reporting on walks and observations six days out of seven. Within nature writing, I would assert that there are two main structural paradigms: that of the essay, which has a central thesis or main idea and is unified around that, and a second form, which is more

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wandering in its nature, and may pivot between observations of what is immediately at hand and broader implications or general principles or philosophical insights, but in ways that are not organized as logically or that come across as argumentative or persuasive, as we may expect in a traditional essay structure. In this paper, I want to focus on this second, more wandering structural paradigm, rather than the more obviously unified structure of the essay structure; I will term this meandering structure the “walk-of-consciousness,” which proceeds through a conjunction of literally ‘walking’ and observing nature and the conscious reflections that arise as a result of these observations.1 According to Thomas J. Lyon’s “A Taxonomy of Nature Writing,” the type of structure I am describing would correlate most strongly with what he identifies as the “Ramble”—exemplified by much of John Burroughs’ writing, as well as Susan Fenimore Cooper’s. Just as “streamof-consciousness” writing purports to be the ‘unvarnished’ mental processes of a given narrator, though we as critics understand it to be highly designed, I propose that “walk-of-consciousness” writing is equally ‘transparent’ in its projection, though highly styled in its production. It is the seemingly ‘natural’ and artless development of this “walk-ofconsciousness” paradigm that I will analyze for its underlying structure. The primary pursuit of my analysis, then, is to try to determine a means by which to analyze how nature writing unfolds, particularly that type which seems less formally directed and, therefore, least essay-like. I want to begin by reviewing a couple of the major narrative theory paradigms that critics have developed in analyzing fiction, and show why they are not adequate to explore how nature discourse unfolds, provide some background on Susan Fenimore Cooper and her literary recovery, and finally I will examine Cooper’s text closely in light of David Lodge’s theory of “Metaphor and Metonymy.” In fiction, a number of different theorists have examined the means by which fictional narratives unfold. Since nature writing is likewise ‘narrative,’ even if it is non-fiction, I looked to the field of narrative theory to find models from which to establish a similar structural analysis of nature writing; however, I have not yet found a critical undertaking of such a structural analysis that is adequate to describe and reveal how nature writing unfolds.

1

My terminology of “walk of consciousness” is partially derived from my reading of Scott Slovic’s Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992) and the emphasis he puts on the focused consciousness of nature writers.

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In the classic work of narrative theory S/Z, Roland Barthes discusses a number of ‘codes’ by which the action in a novel unfolds. Chief among these are the hermeneutic code, by which an enigma is formulated with its answer held in suspense, before its solution is finally disclosed.2 Although one leading ‘enigma’ or riddle may drive the main plot, additional questions or subordinate enigmas may be raised along the way, creating subplot. The pacing of answering the smaller riddles, while new secondary riddles are introduced, helps to build a progression toward answering the primary enigma, as in the development of a mystery or suspense novel. This pacing must also be negotiated in such a manner as to supply the reader with a sufficient number of answers to the secondary riddles so as to provide enough satisfaction that the reader continues to read; otherwise, if the primary enigma is not engaging or the secondary riddles not intriguing enough, or frustration builds at not having enough riddles answered quickly enough, the reader may stop reading from either lack of interest or irritation at not getting any of the riddles answered. This primacy of the hermeneutic code in fiction, by which enigmas are posed and solved, has no counterpart in nature writing since any questions that arise in nature writing are either almost immediately answered, or are raised to be the springboard for philosophical discussion. Thus, posing enigmas or riddles does not provide a driving force of narrative to sustain the reader’s attention in nature writing as it does in fiction. Another narrative theorist, Peter Brooks, chooses a different avenue of approach in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, by examining the importance of audience and the function of desire within text – the desire to tell a story and the desire to listen to a story – and Brooks examines narrative as a means of transaction. Because the hermeneutic code itself does not function as a primary driving force in nature writing, carrying the reader along in the text, Brooks’ emphasis on the interplay between narrator and narratee is not particularly effective for examining nature discourse, especially because certain strains of nature discourse read more as a journal or diary, written seemingly for the purpose of self-reflection rather than focused externally on an audience separate from the self. Gerard Genette, in his Narrative Discourse, chooses to analyze novels via their temporal organization, assuming a distinction between “story,” the “events” as they actually happened, and “discourse,” or the narrative constructed that retells the “story.” Some of Genette’s terminology, such 2

Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 19.

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as prolepsis, to leap forward in time, or analepsis, to jump backward in time, could be useful in describing some of the temporal moves which occur in nature discourse, and provide a framework for future study. Another feature of Genette’s theory that could prove fruitful for analysis is his discussion of frequency, particularly his definition of singulative scenes versus iterative sections, which have the effect of condensing individual instances into paradigmatic treatment.3 What Genette doesn’t provide, however, is a central framework to explain overall how nature discourse unfolds. Moreover, the underlying assumption of the distinction between “story” (the order of events) and “narrative” (the order of telling of the events) does not serve well to describe nature discourse because there is not a separate “story,” or a separate order of events, by which the narrative is directed. Rather, the discourse itself takes primacy, an emphasis that Genette himself would approve, but which results primarily because the only “story” in nature writing is that which the discourse brings into being. Since there is no enigma being held in suspension, the answer to which the narrative might hopscotch around in order to maintain suspense and reader interest, there is no separate story, meant in the traditional sense in fiction as discussed by Genette. Or, if there is a separate story, then the overall context for this story is all of nature, or the whole long story of a place, both of which are vaster than the size story the typical reader digests. Also, such a vast “story” would lack the constructed and recognizable traditional architecture of conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. Because these major narrative theories, developed on the basis of fiction, are insufficient to the task of understanding how ‘walk-ofconsciousness’ writing unfolds, I sought out different theoretical approaches. One theorist who provides a different means to discuss the unfolding of narrative, and one which is more adaptable to non-fiction, is David Lodge in his discussion of metaphor and metonymy as structural devices in The Modes of Modern Writing. Lodge asserts that “Prose […] is ‘forwarded essentially by contiguity,’”4 or what comes next via some physical association. This primacy of contiguity contrasts with poetry, which is “based upon relationships of similarity and cut across the logical progression of discourse.”5 Lodge parallels poetry and its use of substitution with metaphor, which requires a certain distance between 3 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Levin. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 116-118. 4 David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: E. Arnold, 1977), 88. 5 Ibid., 88.

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tenor and vehicle, wherein the world is the tenor and the text the vehicle.6 For example, in the metaphor “Ships ploughed the sea,” “plough” is substituted from a different context in the world, that of farming, to mean “cut through water.”7 Further, Lodge parallels prose and its use of condensing context with metonymy, which relies on deleting some of the more logical connectors – as in the example, “Keels across the deep” as a metonymic figure for “The keels of the ships crossed the deep sea.”8 Lodge’s discussion of metonymy includes synecdoche as a type of metonymy. In Lodge’s theory, his particular focus on the importance of context and on logical deletions as the means to forward the text seem very pertinent to an analysis of nature discourse. Particularly since nature writing is inherently concerned with examining landscape, and naturally organizes itself at least somewhat spatially, the concept of narrative development as a result of divergence based on contiguity serves as a promising springboard from which to launch a close analysis. Lodge claims of realistic fiction that “the realistic author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time.”9 Logically, this concept transfers easily from fiction writers to non-fiction writers who inherently have as their goal the depiction of the natural world and the characters in it (bees, bears, loons, trees, etc.) in as “realistic” a manner as possible. Of further interest is Lodge’s definition that metonymy and synecdoche “are produced by deleting one or more items from a natural combination, but not the items it would be most natural to omit: this illogicality is equivalent to the coexistence of similarity and dissimilarity in metaphor.”10 It is particularly these deletions which provide the invisible lubricant that enables the easy slide from one topic to another, so effortlessly that the reader glides from small lakes in New York to steep Alps, with ease despite the gulf of the Atlantic and the deleted transitions that make the connections. Such pivot points provide the transitions that shift from topic to topic, often moving at least superficially along lines of contiguity, with the logical connections assumed. This structural development via metonymy, or digressions that exploit connections based on context and contiguity, is what I want to identify clearly, partially 6

Ibid., 109. I.A. Richards, quoted in David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, 75. 8 Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, 76. 9 Ibid., 80. 10 Ibid., 76. 7

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because it would provide one base point, when examining how such “walk-of-consciousness” nature discourses develop, that would lend itself to establishing a broader, potential spectrum of alternatives for development by which writers could be analyzed and compared. Not only is a theoretical framework for discussing nature writing still developing, but so is the scholarship about Susan Fenimore Cooper. Although not included in the first edition of The Norton Book of Nature Writing, editors Robert Finch and John Elder amended this in their newest 2002 edition. In the introductory note to an excerpt from Cooper’s Rural Hours, Finch and Elder identify the recovery of Susan Fenimore Cooper as one of “the most dramatic of these instances” of recovery of forgotten or neglected early authors.11 Michael Branch, in “Saving All the Pieces: The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticsm,” attributes the relative obscurity of Rural Hours to its textual history, asserting “its immense value to ecocritics” both because it serves as an early examplar of women writing natural history and because of the bioregional perspective she develops in Rural Hours.12 Rural Hours had a strong popular following in its own time and garners favorable critical attention today. Originally published in 1850, Rural Hours quickly went through several printings; nine had appeared before 1887. A revised edition in 1887 reduced Rural Hours in length by omitting (1) brief weather reports, (2) some of the longer moralizing passages stemming from Biblical quotes, (3) comments on local conditions updated from 1850 to 1887, and (4) tables of statistics that were no longer current.13 Cooper’s work is now recognized as a significant work in the genre of nature writing. As Finch and Elder write in The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing: An increasing number of scholars and critics now celebrate Cooper not only as a significant early figure but also as an author whose sustained focus on one small community and on the interaction between its human and nonhuman inhabitants anticipates our contemporary bioregional movement.14 11

Robert Finch and John Elder, eds. The Norton Book of Nature Writing (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 163. 12 Michael P. Branch, “Saving All the Pieces: The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticism.” The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory and the Environment. Steven Rosendale, ed. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 18-19. 13 Thomas F. O’Donnell, “Foreword.” Rural Hours by Susan Fenimore Cooper. (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1968), ix. 14 Finch and Elder, The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing (2002 ed.), 163.

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Vera Norwood devotes one of the early chapters in her book, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature, to discussing Cooper’s Rural Hours. Norwood identifies Cooper as the “first woman to enter [the] company” of early American writers describing the American landscape, which included William Cullen Bryant, her father James Fenimore Cooper’s nature poems and novels, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, soon to be followed by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and John Burroughs’s popular essays.15 Norwood claims that Cooper “sets the stage for women nature essayists” and provokes questions regarding how these other writers will “handle this new woman’s public voice.”16 Especially because Cooper is identified as a foundational writer within these traditions, who helped to establish the conventions of the tradition, I find her a compelling author to study structurally and stylistically. The macro structure of Cooper’s Rural Hours, in its short journal format, provides a prototype followed by subsequent authors. In some cases, subsequent authors likewise follow the rotation of the year from spring to spring, as Sue Hubbell does in A Country Year, or replicate its short daily journal entries, as evidenced also in Edwin Way Teale’s Circle of the Seasons and Rick Bass’s Winter. A further effect of this journal format is to facilitate a close structural analysis due to the brevity of many of the entries. Leaving aside the larger macrostructure of Rural Hours, which follows the course of the natural cycle of a year, I want to examine more closely the microstructure within individual journal entries and how Cooper’s style unfolds within this discourse, focusing especially on the types of transitions she chooses to use, particularly to incorporate information beyond her immediate observations. Cooper develops the structure within individual entries by means of metonymy, with instances of metaphor more isolated to individual events being related. For example, in an early passage she begins with the observation of three birds which prompts discussion that leads to other points until she is quite distant in place and time from the initial sighting. Within the excerpted text, I identify the types of rhetorical moves that Cooper makes on a micro level to move outward from her initial sighting at Otsego Lake, across the Atlantic to the Alps. An analysis of these transitional strategies will follow. Tuesday, 7th – […] Walking near the river saw three large waterfowl moving northward ; we believed them to be loons; 15

Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 26. 16 Ibid.

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The Use of Metaphor and Metonymy in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours: A Structural Analysis they were in sight only for a moment, owing to the trees above us, but we heard a loud howling cry as they flew past, like that of those birds. It is early for loons, however, and we may have been deceived. They usually appear about the first of April, remaining with us through the summer and autumn until late in December, when they go to the seashore ; many winter above Long Island, many more in the Chesapeake ,. Not long since we saw one of these birds of unusual size, weighing nineteen pounds; it had been caught in Seneca Lake on the hook of what fishermen call a set-line, dropped to the depth of ninety-five feet, the bird having dived that distance to reach the bait . Several others have been caught in the same manner in Seneca Lake upon lines sunk from eighty to one hundred feet . It may be doubted if any other feathered thing goes so far beneath the water . There is, however, another , and a much smaller bird, the Dipper, or ousel, which is still more at home in the water than the loon, and that without being web-footed, but is probably less of a diver .17

Cooper continues by describing the means by which the Dipper travels over water, and refers to Mr. Charles Buonaparte who also has observed them, but in the brooks of the Alps and Apennines. Thus, by minor steps, Cooper has moved the reader from walking near a river in the vicinity of Cooperstown, New York, to the distant fabled Alps, one loon, bait-hook, lake surface at a time. Note that the presence of water throughout this passage is not being used metaphorically. The water, in Cooper’s detailed natural description, only ever means – the water; however, for this day’s passage, it does serve as a unifying image, from which the text continually branches out, first describing one bird, then another. In describing the Dipper’s unusual survival tactic of “drop[ping] into the water below for safety,”18 Cooper shifts to a corollary: they are not only unusual in their survival strategy, but also unusual in their rarity, uncommon even in their native lands. However, she concludes the day’s passage by stating that, contrary to the common assumption up to that time, the Dipper has recently been discovered to inhabit North America, in the western U.S. 17

Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours (1850; repr. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968), 1-2. 18 Ibid., 2.

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Of the types of transitions Cooper uses, spatial transitions, based on a contiguous relationship between what is observed and what she discusses, dominate the journal entries. Such a rhetorical move, to exploit a topographical node as a transitional point, occurs in a variety of ways. This type of topographical node can serve as a pivot between topics, or it can also serve as a “place” or image to which the discourse returns, in order to explore an alternate topic. Using a topographical node can also provide a situation of observation that, by pivoting on the object observed, shifts between different observers. For example, when Cooper swings from a discussion of the types of places where she has observed loons to places other people, such as Charles Buonoparte, have observed the same bird, the bird serves as the fulcrum against which the place and observer pivot, the bird which originates the discussion. Since what is contiguous to the writer as she strolls serves both as a means of originating topics and as a transitional point from which to launch other topics, Lodge’s description of metonymy, as a device to forward a narrative, is very suitable to describe the means by which Cooper’s discourse unfolds. Other methods of discourse development that Cooper employs are based on the following types of relationships: x compare and contrast; x general example to specific, and vice versa; x cause and effect; and, related to cause/effect, x predictions of what an effect may be. In this last instance, prediction may include speculating on what caused something she currently observes, or alternately, predicting forward a future effect from an activity she currently observes around her. Although many of these types of relationships seem to follow a more logical basis, such as what one may expect in an essay format, they are often still grounded in the spatial dimension of the geography of Lake Otsego, where Cooper walks, and what she observes, making Lodge’s theory based on metonymy pertinent to an overall analysis. When utilizing compare/contrast as a strategy for development, Cooper often utilizes the occasion of one situation that she experiences first hand to provide the opportunity for a broader discussion. For example, “A bunch of ten partridges brought to the house” is mentioned in order to contrast it to an opposing situation: “they are occasionally offered singly, or a brace or two at a time, but ten are a much larger number than are often seen together.”19 Thus, the occasion of receiving a bunch of partridges (a singulative instance) serves as the pivot for reflecting on 19

Ibid., 3.

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what the more typical custom is (an iterative paradigm), in contrast to this singular instance of receiving ten partridges. Yet it is the arrival of these partridges within Cooper’s household, the space “contiguous” to herself, from which the whole discussion arises. When utilizing the rhetorical movement from general to specific, or the reverse, as a strategy for development, it likewise originates first in the observation of something local, and then unfolds either from a general observation to a specific instance, or, arising from one instance, the discourse moves to a generalization. For example, after Cooper observes that a particular noble stand of pines in the neighborhood had been felled over the course of the winter, she states: “it often lies within the power of a single group of trees to alter the whole aspect of acres of surrounding land.”20 Thus, she moves from an individual instance to a general truth. Such transitions from the local instance, again based on a spatial relationship, to a universal truth often set up the final conclusion of an entry. In order to gain a broader sense of the extent to which Cooper deploys each of these various strategies of development, I generated ratios based on samples of entries from each of the four sections of Rural Hours. As might be expected of nature writing, in which context and setting figure so prominently, transitions that pivot using location or time as a fulcrum predominate heavily, rather than rhetorical moves, such as cause/effect. Of these, spatial forms tend to be dominant in comparison to temporal transitions in a 3:2 ratio. Thus, Cooper is somewhat more likely to make a transition based on a shift between talking about the same creature in a different place, or by using different physical points on the same path to provide a transition between different places, than to use time as a means to transition, most commonly by moving forward or backward along a natural cycle. One idiosyncrasy in this type of temporal movement is that, rather than moving forward or back along a linear time line, as described by Genette in regards to “story time,” or as we might expect in creating a time line in fiction, Cooper typically moves forward or back along the timeline of a repeating cycle, so that this type of temporal jump does not directly correlate with temporal moves as described by Genette. Rather, a single instantiation is located within iterative time, as represented by the larger natural cycle of the year. Cooper uses shifts between general and specific situations about as often as she uses temporal shifts, though less often than spatial shifts. Most commonly, this type of transition takes place either when Cooper 20

Ibid., 4.

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moves from a specific incident, such as observing a playful squirrel on one of her daily walks, to stating a generalization, such as what types of food appeal to this breed of squirrel.21 The reverse, of general to specific, also occurs. Another transition Cooper uses about as often as temporal shifts and general-to-specific shifts are those that depend on compare / contrast relationships. Fairly often, when she describes one type of bird or animal, she will compare their presence in a region with their presence or absence in another region. For example, in her discussion of weeds, she identifies the provenance of a variety of invading weeds brought over from the Old World, and contrasts their hardiness with the number of native weeds she can identify.22 Often the more immediate hinge that seems to link different breeds is the fact that they both occupy the same habitat, again a transition that is based on spatial contiguity rather than on logical rhetorical devices, such as cause/effect. This use of spatial contiguity as the basis of the narrative to unfold correlates with metonymy as described by David Lodge. Rather than clearly identifying a logical point of comparison, Cooper commonly utilizes “relationships of similarity,” with the point of comparison based on shared habitat or physical contiguity.23 Such dominance of metonymic transitions doesn’t preclude Cooper’s use of logical transitions, however; it merely limits them. Utilized one-third less often than spatial shifts, and half as often as temporal shifts, Cooper also uses cause / effect relationships as a means of progression. In her discussion of the placement of burial grounds, and whether or not they are located in or near churchyards, Cooper also discusses the effect of early settlements being spread out across the countryside, thus producing more early burial plots on family-owned farmland, rather than in centrally located cemeteries.24 Although this example is cultural, she also uses cause and effect development to discuss changes in the population of local animals, from panthers to beavers. Again, all of these examples, whether cultural or zoological, have in common an underlying basis in spatial relationships of what is present in the local community, or, if not present, where is it to be found, with the object of discussion again serving as the fulcrum of the transition. As common as Cooper’s utilization of cause/effect relationships is her development of her journal entries along the lines of moving from a point 21

Ibid., 190-91. Ibid., 72-73. 23 Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, 88. 24 Cooper, Rural Hours, 192-94. 22

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of physical observation to that of cultural folklore or custom connected to the object of observation. In such instances, rather than moving from singulative instances to iterative cycles in nature, she moves from the singulative observation to the iterative cycle of human story or action. For example, she identifies folk traditions for naming flowers, such as the Dutch name for azaleas, and its derivation from its habit of blooming around Whit-Sunday.25 Not only does she account for the cultural heritage of her own geographical area, but she also includes common observations about other ethnic cultures, such as “The Icelanders are very partial to the whistle of the wild Swan.”26 In this way, she participates in the cultural melding of the United States, by including a diverse sample of cultural folklore in her text as it related to the various flora and fauna she describes. Though her purpose may be cultural, Cooper’s topics are still governed by her local observations and what plants share the common environment of the Lake Otsego region with her, maintaining the dominance of the underlying spatial component of structure. Half as often as Cooper uses cause/effect or cultural folklore as transitions, she states an assumption that is confirmed or denied in its answer. Thus, in comparison with her most common point of transition, the spatial shift, she uses assumption/negation or confirmation in a ratio of 6:1. Most often, the type of assumption she states is in regard to the presence or absence of an animal or plant in a particular habitat or region. For example, she might state an assumption that a particular animal does not inhabit America, and then deny it by naming an American site where it has been seen. While the postulating of a hypothesis to be proved or disproved is a natural structural dimension of science writing, it is evident that again, the spatial context of Cooper’s observation is most defining in organizing her nature writing. Thus overall, Cooper uses forms of transition based on what Lodge identifies as “metonymy,” or specifically, shifts in topic that are most strongly correlated to contiguous connections, along a spatial axis, much more often than unfolding along the lines of logical development, such as cause/effect or stated assumption/negation. Even when Cooper includes cultural information, she often introduces it as a result of contiguity. For example, the basis of Cooper mentioning that Icelanders like the call of the swan is that Cooper has already been discussing having seen such a swan, again providing evidence of the primacy of the spatial axis in directing the discourse. 25 26

Ibid., 74. Ibid., 263.

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Cooper’s strategy, of remaining on the level of metonymy and keeping her text unified by developing it along the lines of contiguities, serves the purpose of helping to acquaint the reader more closely with the landscape of the United States and its native inhabitants of plants and animals. As Norwood claims in Made From This Earth, Cooper does so, not only by identifying the particular traits of the American landscape, but also by identifying the different cultural influences at play within the United States, such as the Dutch, the Icelandic, and others. Moreover, as Norwood states, Cooper “conserved traditional American country life because the gardens and woods of Otsego were an extension of her domestic sphere.”27 In describing different plants, she often identifies both what companion plants they grow with, as well as their growth cycles, which helps other rural women to know when and where they might find certain types of plants. Because Cooper’s purpose is so closely tied to making the landscape itself more familiar to her reading audience, her strategies for development are tied closely to those types of transitions which depend on contiguous relationships, or metonymic relationships, as described by Lodge. Whether spatial, for example, to help a reader identify where to find a particular plant, or temporal, to help a reader understand the natural cycles of the local area, transitions based on contiguity dominate. Other nature writers who have a different purpose in mind, for example to argue a point, may instead marshal the details of their observations to serve this rhetorical purpose; in doing so, other means of progression for their text, such as Lodge’s description of metaphor, or the use of substitution, may provide better means for including diverse and far-ranging topics. In contrast, Cooper, whose purpose in writing is closely tied to the physical landscape itself, allows the land to provide both a springboard of topics as well as the points of transition that direct her discourse in recording her daily “walk-of-consciousness.” To develop a spectrum of these different types of narrative unfolding and analyze the different means by which nature writers use them would be the subject of a much longer investigation. If we utilize Lodge’s theory of metaphor and metonymy, we may set up a spectrum against which to analyze different nature writers’ structural development. For example, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Cooper we could position Annie Dillard. In two pages, Dillard moves swiftly from star-gazing to providing statistics on the rotation of the earth, mentioning the distance of stars, and quoting Van Gogh, before moving to 27

Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature, 31.

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kayak sickness in Eskimos, optical illusions and meteor showers. In shifting among these diverse topics, Dillard relies on implied similarity: the Eskimos’ panic as a result of gazing at water is similar to the panic Dillard experiences as a result of an optical illusion. This example correlates best with “metaphor,” according to Lodge, whereby substitution is utilized to direct how a narrative unfolds. Examining the degree to which various nature writers rely on metonymy or contiguity versus using metaphor and substitution may provide a strategy to gain greater understanding of the structure of nature writing, particularly those examples which are least essay-like and most rambling in their “walk-of-consciousness.”

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Bass, Rick. Winter [Notes from Montana]. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. Branch, Michael P. “Saving All the Pieces: The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticism.” The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory and the Environment. Steven Rosendale, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Cooper, Susan Fenimore. Rural Hours. 1850; repr. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968. Finch, Robert and John Elder. The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990. Finch, Robert and John Elder. Nature Writing: The Tradition in English. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Levin. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1980. Hubbell, Sue. A Country Year: Living the Questions. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. Jones, David. “Introduction.” Rural Hours. by Susan Fenimore Cooper. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968. Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: E. Arnold, 1977. Lyon, Thomas J. “A Taxonomy of Nature Writing.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

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Norwood, Vera. Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. O’Donnell, Thomas F. “Foreword.” Rural Hours. By Susan Fenimore Cooper. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1968. Teale, Edwin Way. Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist’s Year. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1987.

REWORKING NATURE WRITING: CELIA THAXTER’S AMONG THE ISLES OF SHOALS MICHAEL BUCKLEY

One of the most memorable pictures of the nineteenth-century writer Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835-1894) comes from the brush of Childe Hassam, the American impressionist. Hassam’s oil on canvas, In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden), commemorates Thaxter’s renowned garden at her family’s resort hotel on Appledore Island, Maine. Hassam paints Thaxter standing in front of a fence, just to the side of a gate. She is dressed all in white. Her hands are cupped, cradling a large red blossom. Her head is bowed slightly, eyes directed to one patch of flowers to her left. A thin path runs by her feet, barely visible through the flowers that occupy the foreground as a swirl of greens, yellows, pinks, oranges, and reds. In the distance, a thin haze of cloud covers the sky above a denim blue sea interrupted by the sail of one boat. Today, many readers first encounter In the Garden as the frontispiece to An Island Garden (1894), Thaxter’s simultaneously lyrical and pragmatic exposition of the toils and rewards of the gardening life. Notably, In the Garden is not a portrait; it is a scene that carefully evokes a balanced relationship where the garden is as much the focus as the gardener. Thaxter, who could very well be up front, beaming with pride about her artistry, is placed in the middle ground to one side, and her face is obscured. From a greater distance, she would appear to be just one tall—but not even the tallest—flower. Just as importantly, Hassam does not show Thaxter and the garden in isolation but includes a glimpse of its island setting. In the Garden does not celebrate the garden as simply a product of human artifice. Instead, Hassam shows the gardener enjoying her work in a moment of peace. If she has created the garden, it now creates something for her. The relationship is reciprocal. As frontispiece, Hassam’s painting encapsulates the pages that follow as Thaxter writes eloquently of her love of nature and unfolds a complex, shifting relationship that evolves as the year progresses and the plants grow. In fact, An Island Garden and an earlier prose work, Among the

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Isles of Shoals (1873), a guide to the local social and natural history for tourists, have earned Thaxter a reputation as an insightful but often overlooked nature writer. Judith Fetterley, discussing Thaxter in the context of women’s regionalist writing, describes her work as an “exploration of the connection between person, place, and writing.”1 Jane E. Vallier, writing in the second edition of her biography Poet on Demand, sees Thaxter’s “status as an environmentalist of the first generation” as an emerging area of Thaxter scholarship.2 In his influential study of American nature writing, The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell identifies Among the Isles of Shoals as “the first extended work of environmental nonfiction produced by the late nineteenth-century regional realist movement.”3 Such work represents a critical reassessment and revitalization of Thaxter’s literary reputation that has occurred during the last twenty years.4 In general, the scholarship has successfully contextualized Thaxter’s environmental writing in terms of the literary genres that were most open to women during her life, particularly the vibrant regionalist movement. Surprisingly, though, less attention has been paid to the corollary question of how Thaxter’s prose relates to the maledominated genre of nonfiction nature writing as represented by such contemporaries as John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and John Muir. When Thaxter wrote Among the Isles of Shoals, only one precedent existed for a book-length study of geography, natural history, and social history by an American woman, Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours 1

Judith Fetterley, “Theorizing Regionalism: Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals.” Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, eds. Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 41. 2 Jane Vallier, Poet on Demand: The Life, Letters and Works of Celia Thaxter (Portsmouth, NH: Peter E. Randall, 1994), ix. 3 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, And the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 233. 4 See also Leah Blatt Glasser, “’The Sandpiper and I’” Landscape and Identity on Celia Thaxter’s Isles of Shoal.” American Literary Realism 36 (Fall 2003): 1-21; Marcia B. Littenberg, “From Transcendentalism to Ecofeminism: Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett’s Island Views Revisited.” Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards, eds. Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon. (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1999), 137-152; Vera Norwood “Celia Thaxter.” American Nature Writers (2 vols.), John Elder, ed. (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996); Vera Norwood, Made from this Earth (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

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(1850). With the exception of Cooper and a few lesser-known writers, nature writing primarily focused on male experiences in the woods, either as a hunter-naturalist, like Audubon, or as a philosopher-poet, like Thoreau. However, as Leah Blatt Glasser has shown, such roles were unavailable to Thaxter as a wife, mother, hostess, and professional poet. Consequently, Celia Thaxter’s relationship to nature writing as a genre is simultaneously one of identification and difference. Like her male counterparts, Thaxter evokes the importance of the relationship with the natural environment, as can be seen with a statement in Among the Isles of Shoals, “for these things make our world,” that resonates with Thoreau’s question from Walden, “why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?”5 Unlike her male counterparts, Thaxter needed to consider the limitations placed on women in the late nineteenth century and adapt the discourse of nature writing for her gender. Her predecessor, Cooper, quietly and subtly wrote around the conventions that she inherited. Thaxter, on the other hand, confronted those conventions head on and succeeded in introducing a new narrative into the genre, one that suggests that ecological awareness can develop through shifts in perspective in the course of daily work. Thaxter was keenly aware of how gender shapes the experience of nature, and in two letters to friends she critiques the masculine approach to nature writing. The most famous example comes in an often-quoted letter to Feroline Fox in March, 1874, where Thaxter draws a striking contrast between her perspective and that of the transcendentalists: It takes Thoreau and Emerson and their kind to enjoy a walk for a walk’s sake, and the wealth they glean with eyes and ears. I cannot enjoy the glimpses Nature gives me half as well, when I go deliberately seeking them, as when they flash on me in some pause of work. It is like the pursuit of happiness; you don’t get it when you go after it, but let it alone and it comes to you. At least this is my case. In the case of the geniuses (now is that the proper plural) aforesaid, it is different. So I industriously filled my basket with the pretty, wet transparent clusters lying all strewn about the beach.6

Thaxter continues the letter by describing her day collecting stones and shells and narrating how at one point she impulsively attacked a strip of sea ice that clung to the shore with a club of driftwood. Analyzing this 5

Henry David Thoreau, Walden. J. Lyndon Shanley, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 225. 6 Ibid., 54.

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passage, Lawrence Buell comments on the argument that Thaxter makes: “Thaxter implies that they [Emerson and Thoreau] were such obstinately purposive significance-mongers that they did not know the more spontaneous pleasures of nature encounter that she does.”7 Buell, however, doesn’t note a second difference that Thaxter draws: that her flashes of insight into nature come during pauses in the daily chores. Unlike Thoreau, who spends much of Walden reminding his readers how little time he needs to hoe his beans, Thaxter defines her nature epiphanies in relation to work. If Thoreau’s walk is a quest for wildness, Thaxter’s is practical as she “industriously” fills her baskets and waits for the enjoyable diversions that came in the course of the day. While Thoreau seeks leisure in order to pursue wilderness and wildness, Thaxter works her way toward nature within the confines of a busy life. In a letter to E.C. Hoxie in 1865, Thaxter considers the experience of nature offered by writers like John James Audubon and his fellow hunternaturalists: The boys and Levi [Thaxter’s husband] have guns and go murdering round the country in the name of science till my heart is broken into shreds. They are horribly learned, but that doesn’t compensate for one little life destroyed, in my woman’s way of viewing it.8

Thaxter’s objection here is to the historical practice of shooting birds for the purpose of identification. Like Sarah Orne Jewett’s character Sylvia in “A White Heron,” Thaxter senses that the gain in scientific knowledge doesn’t compensate for the loss the life. This passage, however, is more than an argument for sentiment in one’s dealings with nature. Taken together, the letters hint that the goal of the naturalist and the goal of the philosopher are not as distant as they might seem at first, for both step into nature seeking a prize, the trophy of the epiphany. Thaxter dismisses both approaches and offers a vision of spontaneity arising from work as an alternative. The emphasis that Thaxter places on work is her solution to the problem of writing in the masculine genre of nature writing. She is well aware that the roles of philosopher-poet and hunter-naturalist are closed to her as a woman, but she sees others possibilities through her experience in the garden. As Vera Norwood has said, “To Thaxter, the garden 7

Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, 235. 8 Letters of Celia Thaxter. Annie Fields and Rose Lamb, eds. (Boston: The Riverside Press, 1895), 29.

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represented the opportunity to create a world, to engage in meaningful work, to bring her talents to bear on nature’s canvas.”9 The same is true for her prose. The garden provides a space to remap the genre by substituting work for leisure. To borrow Thaxter’s words from above, it is a “woman’s way” that introduces a feminist narrative into American nature writing. Thaxter’s presentation of work as a means of environmental experience is clearest in An Island Garden. More than anything else, An Island Garden is a chronicle of work. Its romantic moments come during the rare moments of repose and pauses in Thaxter’s work. Otherwise, the reader repeatedly sees Thaxter rising before dawn to attend to the garden, restlessly worrying through the night about the damage being caused by slugs, weeding, and searching out the finest manures. Consequently, Thaxter ends up portraying a diverse range of thoughts and emotions about her garden and the wilder realm of nature that surrounds it. There are moments of traditional natural theology in Thaxter’s “little old-fashioned garden” where “the flowers come together to praise the Lord and teach all who look upon them to do likewise,”10 but it is notable that these moments do not come until high summer when the garden is well established. Prior to this, the moods of the gardener reflect her struggle. Thaxter writes of the battles in harsh and specific terms: The cut-worm, the wire-worm, the pansy-worm, the thrip, the rose-beetle, the aphis, the mildew, and many more, but worst of all the loathsome slug, a slimy shapeless creature that devours every fair and exquisite thing in the garden,—the flower lover must seek all these with unflagging energy, and if possible exterminate the whole.11

Fellow gardeners are likely to sympathize with Thaxter on this point. Those looking for a straight forward ecological lesson, though, might note that Thaxter’s portrayal of the combat in the garden, particularly the battle with the hated slugs, apparently aligns with the “Nature red in tooth and claw” image so prevalent in Victorian thought. Unlike Thoreau or Muir, who argued that nature shouldn’t be judged by its usefulness or peskiness, Thaxter seemingly advocates the instrumental view of the cultivator. Further reading, however, reveals that Thaxter actively works to divest the battle in the garden of such traditional moral baggage. At one point, she steps out of the gardener’s role and looks at the garden from the 9

Vera Norwood, “Celia Thaxter.” Made from this Earth, 110. Celia Thaxter, An Island Garden, 1894. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988), 71. 11 Ibid., 6. 10

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perspective of marauding birds and asks, “how should they know that the garden was not planted for them?”12 The shift that Thaxter makes here is effective. The garden ceases to simply be the product of the gardener’s labor. Instead, it becomes an ecosystem of its own with its own web of independent interests and subsequent conflicts. Such shifts of perspective become Thaxter’s most valuable tool for elucidating the complexities of a life working with and against nature. The arrival of the house martins provides another example: Beautiful creatures, with their white breasts and steel-blue wings, wheeling, chattering, and scolding at me, for they think I stand too near their little brown house on the corner of the piazza eaves, and they let me know their opinion by coming as near as they dare and snapping their beaks at me with a low guttural sound of displeasure. But after a few days, when they have found they cannot scare me and that I do not interfere with them, they conclude that I am a harmless kind of creature and they endure me with tranquility.13

In this case, it is Thaxter who is the perceived intruder, the pest; the birds become the empowered agents who eventually accept her. Nor does Thaxter limit herself to the fauna. As interesting change of roles is figured linguistically when Thaxter considers her relationship with the flowers: As I work among my flowers, I find myself talking to them, reasoning and remonstrating with them, and adoring them as if they were human beings. Much laughter I provoke among my friends by doing so, but that is of no consequence. We are on such good terms, my flowers and I!14

To her credit, Thaxter is the first to point out the humor in the situation, but from a nineteenth-century rational standpoint, the “friendship” of flowers is silly. As a means of expressing an ecological ethic, however, the personification blurs the boundaries between human friends and floral friends, between the seemingly disparate community of human beings and the rest of the creation. Taken together, these examples reveal an intense but nuanced relationship between Thaxter and nature. The natural world is a significant actor, with all its own impulses and interests, which are perceived and respected by the human interpreter. Just as importantly, this is a revision of the traditional nature narrative that celebrates wilderness

12

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 19. 14 Ibid., 92. 13

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found in leisure. Thaxter finds plenty of wildness—and interacts with it— while doing daily chores just outside her kitchen door. An Island Garden is a microstudy, a penetrating examination of one small, 50 u 15 foot patch of cultivated nature and its interaction with the ecosystem around it. In Among the Isles of Shoals, Thaxter wanders over the whole extent of the islands and presents their natural and human history. Despite the difference of scale, however, Thaxter represents environmental relationships in much the same way as she does in An Island Garden. The same nuanced view of nature as being both generous and dangerous prevails, and the narrator engages in similar shifts of perspective between the human and the natural. The story that emerges is one of residents who are shaped by the land and the weather in profound ways as they go about their work. Thus, like the ever-present force of the sea, Among the Isles of Shoals is constructed on a base of indeterminate relationships, working relationships that shift dynamically, ultimately problematizing inherited ideas about nature. One of the key environmental relationships that Thaxter actively seeks to undercut, one that binds the subsistence economy of the Isles, is that of the seasons. Lawrence Buell has pointed out that seasonality as a literary device has a double existence as an actual physical cycle and as a cultural construction. The difference between the two, especially in a country such as the United States with a diversity of climates, can stimulate environmental reflection or even shatter expectations. Buell notes, if one measure of able environmental writing about the seasons is the ability to generate cameos like Thomson’s swallows or Thoreau’s pickerel that will convince or surprise, a further measure of the higher skills we call genius is the ability to do at least as much strategic violence to the expected boundaries as any particular iteration of the seasons is bound to do.15

Thaxter pursues both strategies in Among the Isles of Shoals, gently disrupting our expectations and violently reorienting us as readers. Thaxter scatters her quiet deconstructions of our culturally conditioned view of the seasons throughout her account. Against the background of the progress of spring, detailed down to the dates of the emergence of vegetation and the return of species of birds (in the tradition of Susan Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau), Thaxter narrates how the weather can suddenly display a disturbing recidivism: 15 Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, 232.

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But though the birds come and the sky has relented and grown tender in its melting clouds, the weather in New England has a fashion of leaping back into midwinter in the space of an hour, and all at once comes half a hurricane from the northwest, charged with the breath of all the remaining snow-heaps of the far mountain ranges,—a “white-sea roarin’ wind” that takes you back to January.16

Seeking balance, however, Thaxter also asserts, “as the winter is doubly hard, so are the gentler seasons doubly sweet and delightful.”17 In this statement, Thaxter reveals her propensity for comparing the seasons on Appledore with those on the mainland. Distinct, the Isles of Shoals possess a different seasonal rhythm, and Thaxter comments at times how the summer lingers longer on the islands. Her readers, of course, will interpret the island’s seasonality from their knowledge of the passing of spring, summer, autumn, and winter at their own homes. Thaxter, however, does not shy from playfully inverting the analysis and reinterpreting the whole year on the coast from an islander’s perspective. An extended passage near the end of the book even shifts the signs of summer: “Crickets are never heard here till after the 1st of August. On the mainland they begin, about the 28th of May, a sad and gentle autumnal undertone.”18 One almost feels sad for the mainlanders; their summer, so much earlier, is prefigured to end so much sooner. Thus, through surprises and reinterpretation, Thaxter gently rouses the reader to awareness of the complexity of natural cycles and their endless variability. Thaxter also employs a more radical seasonal device, which Buell labels “time travel.” Buell describes how Thaxter’s original inclination was to have the second half of Among the Isles of Shoals move from autumn to winter to spring to summer. The seasonal progression, however, is interrupted by a flashback that presents autumn then summer on the Shoals from the perspective of a child growing up there. One year suddenly becomes inscribed within another. Buell acutely notes the power of the recursion: “the swerve has had its effect. Thaxter has made the seasons reverse themselves—the seasons of the year and the seasons of life”19 For Buell, the effect ritualizes life on the islands: “the imagination’s triumphs over the iron law of season takes place within a Wordsworthian reverence for the infinite depth of minute phenomena made luminous by 16

Celia Thaxter, Among the Isles of Shoals, 1873. (Portsmouth, NH: Peter E. Randall, 1994), 158. 17 Ibid., 163. 18 Ibid., 168. 19 Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, 236.

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repeated experience.”20 Such an escape is a double move. It affirms the seasonal specifics as moments of ecological meaning while surprisingly maintaining freedom from normative constructions. The seasons are not the only set category that Thaxter destabilizes in Among the Isles of Shoals. From the opening of the book, Thaxter attributes an ambiguity to the Isles that distinguishes them from the mainland. At times this is figured geopolitically: The dividing line between Maine and New Hampshire passes through the group, giving Appledore, Smutty-nose, and Duck islands to Maine, and the rest to New Hampshire; but their allegiance to either is a matter of small importance, the few inhabitants troubling themselves but little about what State they belong to. Till within a few years no taxes were required of them, and they enjoyed immunity from this and various other earthly ills as completely as the gulls and loons that shared their dwelling-place.21

The conflation between the birds and islanders is not simply a figure of speech in this case. As we have seen, Thaxter’s ecocentrism relies on blurring the lines between humans and the natural world. The characteristic indefiniteness of the Isles is foreshadowed when Thaxter describes the “indescribable influence in their atmosphere”: the eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception; sharp outlines become blurred and softened like a sketch in charcoal; nothing appeals to the mind with the same distinctness as on the mainland.22

Coming as it does so early in the book, this is unmistakably an appeal to the tourist, advertising the refreshing spirit of Appledore and offering relief from the stresses of mainland life. However, in the context of the rest of the book and its ecological ethic, it can also be read as a proclamation of the intention to destabilize the assumed boundaries between nature and culture. Indeed, Thaxter deliberately positions the residents of the islands on this dividing line: “the people along the coast rather look down upon the Shoalers as being beyond the bounds of civilization.”23 The Shoalers themselves “find it almost as difficult to tear themselves away from the islands as do the Swiss to leave their mountains,” a point that Thaxter converts into a principle of human nature: 20

Ibid., 237. Celia Thaxter, Among the Isles of Shoals, 13. 22 Ibid., 8. 23 Ibid., 78. 21

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“but to wild and lonely spots like these isles humanity clings with an intense and abiding affection.”24 The intense attachment that the Shoalers have to their islands opens a space for Thaxter to explore lives spent laboring in a harsh environment. The influence of the islands on people and their work is revealed in how often Thaxter reminds her readers of the omnipresence of the sea and of its dangers and graces. She describes the islanders as a “cautious people” shaped by their environment: “having the terror and might of the ocean continually encircling them, they become more impressed with it and distrust it.”25 Importantly, the relationship of the Shoalers to the sea is a working one, a matter of subsistence: The sea helps these poor people by bringing fuel to their very doors; the waves continually deposit driftwood in every fissure of the rocks. But sad, anxious lives they have led, especially the women, many of whom have grown old before their time with hard work and bitter cares, with hewing of wood and drawing of water, turning of fish on the flakes to dry in the sun, endless household work, and the cares of maternity, while their lords lounged about the rocks in their scarlet shirts in the sun, or “held up the walls of the meeting-house,” as one expressed it, with their brawny shoulders. I never saw such wrecks of humanity as some of the old women of Star Island, who have long since gone to their rest.26

This is an evocative picture of the harshness of the lives of women by the sea. The sea gives, but it demands a great deal in return. Striking for its feminism, the passage is easily read as an indictment of the lazy men. But it also evokes a real concern for the rigors of women’s lives in a demanding climate. Conceptually, Thaxter blends gender critique and a sensitivity to human ecology to point to the harsh, darker side of nature just as she highlights the conflict with nature in her garden in An Island Garden. But Thaxter’s imagery is not consistently bleak, for she later connects negative nature with the season and finds strength in women: But the best-balanced human mind is prone to lose its elasticity, and stagnate, in this isolation. One learns immediately the value of work to keep one’s wits clear, cheerful and steady; just as much real work as the body can bear without weariness being always beneficent, but here indispensable. And in this matter women have the advantage of men, who 24

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 65. 26 Ibid., 66. 25

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are condemned to fold their hands when their tasks are done. No woman need ever have a vacant minute,—there are so many pleasant, useful things which she may, and had better do.27

Although the passage rings with the stereotypical celebration of the woman’s place in the domestic sphere, given Thaxter’s celebration of work as a path to insight into nature, it can also be interpreted as a move toward a gendered environmental subjectivity. All people, male and female, are subjected to the environment, but it is women who have the means, through work, to endure. It is difficult to reconcile the positive tone at the end of the passage with the phrase “wrecks of humanity” that is used to describe the former residents of Star Island. The answer to that seeming contradiction lies in Thaxter’s belief, much like Emerson’s and Thoreau’s, that nature has the power to transform and spiritually elevate the individual. The power of the environment to transform the self is seen in two tales that Thaxter narrates in Among the Isles of Shoals. One is a seemingly stereotypical ghost story about a man who repeatedly sees a female spirit on the shore waiting for her lover. Outside of being local color, the story seems out of place relative to the contents of the rest of the book. Thaxter’s introduction, however, connects it to the overall environmental theme when she has the man confess, “But here in the recesses of these eternal rocks, with only a cloudless sky above and an ocean before me, for the first time in my life have I shaken off the fear of the death and believed myself immortal.”28 Thaxter connects the transformation, the man’s spiritual realization, directly to the location and the climate. In short, the story is placed, and as such it resonates with the picture of the Isles that she has drawn. Most importantly, the ghost herself, lost in an indefinite space between life and death, reflects the indefinite, impossible-to-categorize nature that she ascribes to the Isles of Shoals in general. Thaxter offers a second, more important story of nature’s ability to transform the human soul, that of the initiation of her own desire to write. Coming during the recursion to childhood summer, Thaxter links the passion to write directly to nature: . . . in storm or calm, by day or night, the manifold aspects of Nature held me and swayed all my thoughts until it was impossible to be silent any longer, and I was fain to mingle my voice with her myriad voices, only 27 28

Ibid., 100. Ibid., 177.

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aspiring to be in accord with the Infinite harmony, however feeble and broken the notes might be.29

This passage resonates with two ideas. Thaxter begins by articulating her sheer passion and desire to express nature, but then immediately confronts the difficulty of that task. Tellingly, Thaxter depicts the dilemma as one voice attempting to harmonize with many others, an attempt to expand artistic and ecological sensitivities. She even associates the very issue of representation with the origins of her artistic impulse, thereby magnifying the power of the environment to reshape her subjectivity. Indeed, Thaxter later gives writing a physical incarnation: As the darkness gathers, the ripples begin to break in pale flame against the rocks; if the tide is low enough, it is charming to steal down in the shadow, and, drawing aside the curtain of coarse sea-weed that drapes the face of some smooth rock, to write on the surface beneath; the strange fire follows your finger; and there is your name in weird flame, all alive, quivering and trembling, and finally fading and disappearing.30

The change in narrative voice here is startling. The seeming self-definition in the act of writing one’s own name on the rocks is blurred through the use of the second person. Certainly, this is one of the moments that Buell recognizes as becoming ritualized. Thaxter did this; you can, too. Yet the act is notably transient. It is in this passage, then, that Thaxter unites all the shifts in the text. The self is represented briefly through the name, then lost. Humanity, symbolized through writing, crosses into the medium of nature. The established categories that we take for granted are not fixed but shift and exist only in dynamic relationship with others and other things. Even the work of the writer, like that of the gardener, is transient. As Thaxter traces her inspiration to nature in these passages, she sounds much like Thoreau and Emerson. The difference lies in how she reached that point of seeing the connections between herself and the rest of the world. Thoreau celebrates leisure and four-hour walks as the ideal path. Thaxter, who never had that luxury, suggests that it is much simpler: step out into the garden. The same ecocentric shifts of perspective that can be found in the wilderness are there as well, and they spontaneously lead to same sort of inspiration to the imagination. The portrait of Thaxter and her garden that Hassam painted is not as distant as we might think. Thanks to the restoration of Thaxter’s gardens 29 30

Ibid., 141-2. Ibid., 166.

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on Appledore by the Shoals Marine Laboratory, anyone can stand where Thaxter stood and view her inspiration. I believe that Thaxter would be pleased by this turn of events. She wrote Among the Isles of Shoals and An Island Garden to share her passion for that land and that sea and those winds with others. But I also suspect that she would want us to read carefully and recognize that our nature junket to her island is not just leisure. There is a gardener—or an author—lurking in the back somewhere, working, shaping, battling, celebrating, and being changed herself by a lived and labored relationship with nature. Thaxter presents the ecology of such a life, its numerous contingencies and uncertainties, its slippages and shifts of perspectives, and ultimately its potential to transform the imagination.

Works Cited Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. Cooper, Susan Fenimore. Rural Hours. 1850. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson, eds. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1998. Fetterley, Judith. “Theorizing Regionalism: Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals.” Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, eds. Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. 38-53. Glasser, Leah Blatt. “’The Sandpiper and I’: Landscape and Identity on Celia Thaxter’s Isles of Shoals. American Literary Realism 36 (Fall 2003): 1-21. Hassam, Childe. In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden). 1892. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Jewett, Sarah Orne. “A White Heron The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981. 227-239. Littenberg, Marcia B. “From Transcendentalism to Ecofeminism: Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett’s Island Views Revisited.” Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards, eds. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1999. 137-152. Norwood, Vera. “Celia Thaxter.” American Nature Writers. 2 vols. John Elder, ed. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996. 905-917. —. Made from this Earth. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

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ThaxterCelia. Among the Isles of Shoals. 1873. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Peter E. Randall, 1994. —. An Island Garden.1894. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988. —. Letters of Celia Thaxter. Annie Fields and Rose Lamb, eds. Boston: The Riverside Press, 1895. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. J. Lyndon Shanley, ed. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971. Vallier, Jane. Poet on Demand: The Life, Letters and Works of Celia Thaxter. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1994.

BUYING THE FARM: JEWETT’S “A WHITE HERON” AND NATURE AS COMMODITY ROBERT A. BEUKA

It is appropriate to begin by pointing out the affinities between Sarah Orne Jewett and John Burroughs: the fact that they were contemporaries, that nature played a prominent role in their writings, and that both were writing at a time when their beloved natural landscapes were vulnerable to the rapid and inexorable march of urban society’s outward “progress.” Indeed, it is awfully tempting to begin by suggesting how much a naturalist like Burroughs must have enjoyed a story such as Jewett’s “A White Heron.” After all, for a man whose careful and sensitive observation of birds helped make him a revered writer and national celebrity, this tale would seem irresistible. In the story, Jewett’s protagonist, nine year old Sylvia, faces a fateful decision over whether or not to disclose the location of a rare white heron to a newfound acquaintance, a young hunter and collector of birds who is out to shoot the treasured creature and eventually display it in his collection. In ultimately deciding to keep the heron’s location a secret, Sylvy not only saves the bird’s life but also, in a broader sense, takes a stand to defend her rural home from the encroachment and destruction posed by the hunter, an urban outsider. The story is a naturalist’s dream, and surely Burroughs must have delighted in it. Or did he? As part of his education as a naturalist, Burroughs hunted and trained himself to become an amateur taxidermist, one who took pride in the lifelike presentation of his stuffed birds. And consider this statement on the general topic from Burroughs, taken from an 1865 letter to a young admirer: “as to shooting . . . birds, I think a real lover of nature will indulge in no sentimentalism on the subject. Shoot them, of course, and no toying about it.”1 So much for a simplistic take on Jewett’s and Burroughs’s shared vision. The fact that Burroughs, one of our great naturalists, would seem to hold as much of a connection to the villain of 1

Clara Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1925), 1:105.

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Jewett’s great story as its protagonist suggests the breadth of sensibilities reflected in nature writing. What is more, it reflects the extent to which nature itself, as both a living environment and a cultural artifact, can assume complex and even contradictory roles. One arena in which the depiction of nature tended to be complex and dense was the regionalist or local color fiction popular during the first part of Burroughs’s long career, the late 19th century. Regionalist authors who rose to prominence in the final three decades of the century created short stories and novels that characteristically offered nostalgic visions of landscapes and communities from a fading, if not bygone, America; inasmuch as such works tended to offer counter-narratives to the ongoing processes of industrialization and national consolidation, they have traditionally been thought of as reflecting an inherently conservationist ethos. Nonetheless, as “local color” writing became a bankable literary style in the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s, its authors also—knowingly or not— traded on the exchange value of both nature and traditional, regional communities, selling stories and novels about commodities whose value rose with their increasing scarcity. Richard Brodhead, in viewing regionalist writing of the period as an opportunistic form of “cultural elegy,” has suggested as much, arguing that nostalgic visions of landscapes both physical and social were tailored to a modern audience eager to identify with a “pre-modern” moment and place.2 Similarly, Amy Kaplan has argued that regionalist writers like Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Hamlin Garland, in presenting isolated, seemingly timeless landscapes and communities, expressed in their fiction a “Janus-faced nostalgia” fashioned toward the desires of a modern reading audience. 3 “A White Heron” is a classic regionalist short story that centers on the very issue of viewing nature as a salable commodity. Jewett relays the ethical dilemma of young Sylvia, who must choose between preserving her beloved woodland sanctuary and betraying it for the sake of personal and financial gains. Complicating the story is the fact that the antagonist, the young hunter, also wishes to preserve nature, albeit in packaged, commodified form. In this story, Jewett seems to comment in a larger sense on the complexities of maintaining a purely innocent defense of nature during a time when the landscape itself had become a part of a bourgeoning consumer culture. Indeed, it may not be too much to suggest 2

Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 120. 3 Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire.” The Columbia History of the American Novel, Emory Elliott, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 242.

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that this story highlights, even enacts, the conflicts and contradictions of the regionalist literary endeavor. That is, while the fictional narrative culminates in a resounding embrace and defense of the natural world, a steadfast refusal to allow nature to be turned into a mere commodity to be bought and sold, the story itself, as a cultural artifact, accomplishes exactly the opposite feat. This is not in any sense to indict Jewett or this beautiful story, but rather to suggest the “double life” of nature in regionalist fiction. This is a notion that has been raised by recent critics working to invigorate the study of this important genre and period of American literary history. As Karen Kilcup and Thomas Edwards suggest in their recent survey of contemporary Jewett criticism, the author’s early admirers, particularly F.O. Mathiessen and Van Wyck Brooks, did Jewett an unintentional disservice by “sentimentalizing” her and focusing too squarely on the “backward-looking element of her work.”4 The point is well taken: if, as Alexander Buchan suggests, Jewett was “the great pastoral artist of her generation,” she was also clearly interested in more than merely nostalgic, pastoral reveries.5 As “A White Heron,” The Country of the Pointed Firs, and other works aptly demonstrate, Jewett was often looking forward as well as backward in her writing, using her physical and social settings as a means of negotiating the changes that were leaving their mark on her beloved rural Maine landscape. While recent critical discourse on Jewett has been anything but sleepy, with the author’s masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, at the center of a firestorm over class, race, and gender issues, the central importance of natural settings for Jewett and her contemporaries bears continued examination. One reason to pay attention to the natural landscape in regionalist fiction is that doing so helps to draw attention to the rapid evolution in our national landscape during the late nineteenth century, a reality that served as a catalyst for regionalism’s appeal. Nostalgia for fading natural landscapes—while certainly a staple motif in American literature—was at a peak in this time period, precisely because the late-nineteenth century was a time of urbanization and incorporation of previously isolated communities and landscapes. In this regard, it is no coincidence that regionalism would rise during a time of national consolidation in the aftermath of the Civil War. Nor is it surprising that regionalism would be superseded by naturalism as a prevailing literary mode, or that this 4

Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards, eds. Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1999), 4. 5 Alexander M. Buchan, “Our Dear Sarah”: An Essay on Sarah Orne Jewett (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1953), 7.

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changing of the guard would occur at about the same historical moment when the U.S. census and Frederick Jackson Turner declared the American frontier closed. While regionalism had romanticized natural landscapes of the past in the face of a precarious future, naturalism would look squarely at the teeming present, having little use for the past or sense of the future. Hence, an irony of regionalist fiction lay in the fact that its celebration of landscapes of the past was geared toward the pleasure of and consumption by the very urban society that was in the process of rendering regional identities obsolete. Amy Kaplan has argued this point, claiming that regionalist literature of the period performed a kind of “literary tourism,” allowing urban readers to locate in regionalist landscapes both “a nostalgic point of origin and a measure of cosmopolitan development.”6 Even readers of today, living as we are in a post-regional society, can look to classic regionalist literature for such “nostalgic points of origin,” the fictive, stable landscapes of the past. Still, for Jewett and her contemporaries, the landscape was anything but stable, and celebrating it in writing posed dangers as well as rewards. As Donna Campbell argues, the “exposure” of such isolated worlds “to an outside audience threatens [their] existence, for drawing attention to a place risks the incursions of others, either the figurative incursions of unsympathetic readers or the actual invasion of travelers.”7 This point bears consideration in the case of locales such as Jewett’s coastal Maine villages, places that would evolve throughout the coming century from secluded terrain to vacationers’ paradise, from unmolested nature to glittering commodities. And, in a sense, this is the conflict Jewett sets up in “A White Heron.” From the outset, this is presented as a tale of city versus county, a conflict embodied in the young protagonist. Sylvia, whose very name suggests her identification with the woodlands, spent the first eight years of her life unhappily in a “crowded manufacturing town” before her grandmother brought Sylvy to her farm.8 Now Sylvy feels “as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm” and reflects that “she never should wish to go home.”9 The grandmother, Mrs. Tilley, further emphasizes the young protagonist’s connection to nature when she claims, “There ain’t a foot o’ ground she don’t know her way over, and the wild

6

Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” 251-252. Donna M. Campbell, Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1997), 12. 8 Sarah Orne Jewett, A White Heron and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 3. 9 Ibid., 4. 7

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creaturs count her one o’ themselves.”10 And yet, despite her conversion to the rural life, Sylvia has not lost all connection to the wider world outside, as she dreams during her woodland adventures of “triumph,” “glory,” and the ability to “see all the world.”11 Critic Marilyn Mobley has correctly suggested that Sylvia “craves more space than her grandmother’s home provides,” a reality that makes the worldly hunter’s attentions all the more attractive to her.12 As for the hunter himself, he is clearly a figure from a world far outside Mrs. Tilley’s farm; Jewett almost seems to present him as an ironic version of the sophisticated outsider figure common to local color writing, particularly when she shifts narrative focalization to provide a sense of the hunter’s perspective. After inviting himself to spend the night at the Tilley farm, the hunter unctuously compliments Mrs. Tilley’s hospitality while inwardly belittling the class of country folk he finds himself now stuck with: It was a surprise to find so clean and comfortable a little dwelling in this New England wilderness. The young man had known the horrors of its most primitive housekeeping, and the dreary squalor of that level of society which does not rebel at the companionship of hens.13

The contrast between Mrs. Tilley’s gracious country hospitality and the hunter’s duplicitous acceptance of it suggests broader contrasts between fading rural sensibilities and insurgent urban ones. As Richard Cary has pointed out, in this and other Jewett works, “The country represents a treasury of all that is good in the past; the city, all that is dreadful in the present.”14 Similar to her great work The Country of the Pointed Firs, which presents a nostalgic vision of a unique community, yet one made fragile by its sheer age and lack of a succeeding generation, in “A White Heron” the rural life is also imperiled.15 Signs of the fragility of Mrs. Tilley’s way of life are everywhere, starting with the lack of direct descendants to take over the farm from Mrs. Tilley: she has buried four 10

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 14. 12 Marilyn E. Mobley, “Rituals of Flight and Return: The Ironic Journeys of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Female Characters.” Colby Literary Quarterly 22.1 (March 1986), 36. 13 Jewett, A White Heron and Other Stories, 7-8. 14 Richard Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962), 44. 15 Susan Allen Toth, “‘The Rarest and Most Peculiar Grape’: Versions of the New England Woman in Nineteenth-Century Local Color Literature.” Regionalism and the Female Imagination: A Collection of Essays. Emily Toth, ed. (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985), 25. 11

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children, and of the other two, Sylvy’s mother lives in the city and tends to a “houseful of children,” and son Dan, the other character in the story associated with nature, has disappeared and not been heard from again. This leaves only Sylvy, the granddaughter who, in Mrs. Tilley’s words, “takes after” Dan, the “great wand’rer.”16 Jewett also suggests the fragility of this rural environment through details from the natural setting: the heron’s solitude and his home in a dead hemlock tree, the great pine tree that Sylvy climbs, described as “the last of its generation” and, most tellingly, the songbirds who drop silently to the ground, felled by the hunter’s gun. Clearly, the world of the farm and woodlands is presented as delicate and vulnerable, while modern, urban culture, as embodied in the hunter, is characterized as aggressive and insurgent. This contrast sets up both Sylvia’s heroic action and, on a different level, the story’s metacommentary on nature, artifice, and commerce. Both of these trajectories of the story are set when the hunter attempts to buy off Sylvia’s affections with a reward/bribe of ten dollars for information concerning the heron’s whereabouts. The offer makes Sylvy’s head spin with thoughts of the treasures such a sum could buy, it prompts her adventurous and ultimately life-changing climb up the great pine tree, and it nearly leads her to sell out the white heron. George Held has pointed out that the hunter, by introducing “into a subsistence economy the instrumentality of money…bespeaks his alien presence at the farm and suggests the possibility of corruption from without.”17 In a related vein, Josephine Donovan has argued that the hunter, who represents “patriarchal civilization” and is out to “colonize nature,” demonstrates with the bribe that “he is interested in the young girl only for exploitative reasons.”18 Tellingly, Sylvia never seems to realize the hunter’s manipulations; even in the moment before her decision not to tell the heron’s secret, she is still reflecting on the generosity of his monetary offer: “He can make them rich with money; he has promised it, and they are poor now. He is so well worth making happy, and he waits to hear the story she can tell.”19 Given the chance to trade her pristine rural home for financial reward, to join—in Elizabeth Ammons’s terms—“the great late-nineteenth-century game of

16

Jewett, A White Heron and Other Stories, 8. George Held, “Heart to Heart with Nature: Ways of Looking at ‘A White Heron.’” Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett. Ed. Gwen L. Nagel, ed. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 63. 18 Donovan, Josephine. “Silence or Capitulation: Prepatriarchal ‘Mother’s Gardens’ in Jewett and Freeman.” Studies in Short Fiction 23.1 (Winter 1986), 44. 19 Jewett, A White Heron and Other Stories, 21. 17

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buying and selling the world,” Sylvia refuses.20 She is motivated not by knowledge of the hunter’s duplicity but simply, as Jewett’s climactic passage beautifully demonstrates, by her pure love of nature and identification with it: No, she must keep silence! What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? Has she been nine years growing and now, when the great world for the first time puts out a hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird’s sake? The murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron’s secret and give its life away.21

More than one critic has expressed disappointment that the story did not end at that point, with Sylvia’s profound silence. Instead, a closing paragraph tells of Sylvy’s lingering disappointment over the departure of the hunter from her life; the passage notably features violent images of the hunter that Sylvy has tried to forget, specifically, “her sorrow at the sharp report of his gun and the sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood.”22 The story closes with an apostrophe to nature itself, in which the narrator exhorts the natural world to compensate the young girl for her loss: “Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summertime, remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child!”23 The ambivalence of this closing passage is striking, particularly for a story that had presented a classic ethical dilemma that had appeared to be fully resolved within the narrative proper. If there is something of a pleading tone at the end of the tale, that may well have to do with the story’s ethical dilemma spilling out beyond the boundaries of the narrative and bearing on the story itself as a cultural product. Earlier I had halfjoked that Jewett’s contemporary John Burroughs might have felt as much of a kinship to the villain of this story as to its protagonist; I will close by pointing out Jewett’s own connections to both of these figures. The similarities to the protagonist seem clear enough: Sylvy’s dedication to preserving the landscape and the old ways recalls her author, who in turn 20

Elizabeth Ammons,.“The Shape of Violence in Jewett’s ‘A White Heron.’” Colby Literary Quarterly 22.1 (March 1986), 9. 21 Jewett, A White Heron and Other Stories, 21. 22 Ibid., 22. 23 Ibid.

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treasured the innocence of youth and once famously remarked that she wished always to be nine years old, Sylvia’s age. On the other hand, as an artist exploiting the treasures of a natural landscape, Jewett bears a striking resemblance to the hunter/collector; like his author, the antagonist of this story collects the raw materials of nature and fashions them into works of art, commodities made to be displayed, appreciated, and consumed. Given this connection, Jewett’s pairing in the closing passage of the story’s most violent imagery with its most direct plea for the sustaining of those things fated to impermanence—summertime, childhood, the woodlands themselves—speaks volumes. In her groundbreaking work on regionalist fiction, Amy Kaplan has argued that “Regionalism in its many forms both fosters and thwarts the desire for a retreat from modern urban society to a timeless rural origin…The regions…are ultimately produced and engulfed by the centralized capitalist economy that generates the desire for retreat.”24 In the exchange economy Kaplan identifies, artists occupy a paradoxical position as both chroniclers and advertisers of a vanishing world. Another way of looking at the paradox is like this: surely on some Friday evening this summer, a pair of road-weary travelers from the city will disembark from their gas guzzler, check into a quaint bed-and-breakfast in coastal Maine and discover a copy of Jewett’s A White Heron and Other Stories on the imitation-antique bookshelf; it will, most likely, reside uncomfortably next to a copy of Chicken Soup for the Upwardly Mobile Professional’s Soul. Assuming the travelers are in a reading mood, and at least one of them makes the right choice, they will be transported into a beautiful, seemingly timeless rural world, into a work of art and artifice where the heroine will always make the right choice and save the day, into a place where nature remains unmolested—a place that does not exist, and never has.

Works Cited Ammons, Elizabeth. “The Shape of Violence in Jewett’s ‘A White Heron.’” Colby Literary Quarterly 22.1 (March 1986): 6-16. Barrus, Clara. The Life and Letters of John Burroughs. 2 vols. New York: Russell & Russell, 1968. Buchan, Alexander M. “Our Dear Sarah”: An Essay on Sarah Orne Jewett. St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1953.

24

Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” 256.

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Campbell, Donna M. Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1997. Cary, Richard. Sarah Orne Jewett. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962. Donovan, Josephine. “Silence or Capitulation: Prepatriarchal ‘Mother’s Gardens’ in Jewett and Freeman.” Studies in Short Fiction 23.1 (Winter 1986): 43-48. Held, George. “Heart to Heart with Nature: Ways of Looking at ‘A White Heron.’” Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett. Gwen L. Nagel, ed. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. 58-68. Jewett, Sarah Orne. A White Heron and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914. Kaplan, Amy. “Nation, Region, and Empire.” The Columbia History of the American Novel. Emory Elliott, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 240-266. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards, eds. Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon. Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1999. Mobley, Marilyn E. “Rituals of Flight and Return: The Ironic Journeys of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Female Characters.” Colby Literary Quarterly 22.1 (March 1986): 36-42. Toth, Susan Allen. “‘The Rarest and Most Peculiar Grape’: Versions of the New England Woman in Nineteenth-Century Local Color Literature.” Regionalism and the Female Imagination: A Collection of Essays. Emily Toth, ed. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985. 1528.

NESSMUK’S LOG OF THE BUCKTAIL: “THE EFFECT OF THIS CONSTANT DEPLETION OF GREEN TIMBER” T. P. MURPHY

It is a commonplace that the past makes sense when we view it from the perspective of its present outcome; sometimes the path from one event to the next seems almost inevitable. But at any point along that clear path from the past, the traveler is never quite sure where it is headed and experiences that moment in a more subtle and complex way than someone from the future who can snap it into what has become its “proper” place. The potential subtlety of that point of view—when an author deals with an unknown future that has itself become the past—is part of what draws me to reading older literature, and it is what drew me to the series of articles about Pine Creek near Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, written by George Washington Sears at the end of the nineteenth century. George Washington Sears lived from 1821 to 1890, and writing under the name “Nessmuk” he was best known for his letters to the magazine Forest and Stream about his canoe trips through the Adirondacks in lightweight canoes from 1880 to 1883. He chronicles the tourism of the time as well as his own experience on the lakes.1 But from 1840 Sears lived in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, in Tioga County, the same place where I live, and in 1884, he wrote a series of six articles—“The Log of the Bucktail”— that appeared in Forest and Stream, and describe the Pine Creek area, where he had lived and camped for over thirty years. Four years later, in 1888, he wrote another article about Pine Creek for Forest and Stream entitled “What shall be the Outcome?” 1

He wrote three series of letters to the readers of Forest and Stream about canoe trips through the Adirondacks: “Rough Notes from the Woods” (1880); “Cruise of the Susan Nipper.”(1881-1882), and “Cruise of the Sairy Gamp” (1883). All are reprinted in Canoeing the Adirondacks with Nessmuk: The Adirondack Letters of George Washington Sears, Dan Brenan, ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993).

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He describes a trip down Pine Creek by canoe during the summer of 1884 when he was sixty-three years old. He puts in at Ansonia, just above Marsh Creek, on Tuesday, June 3 and goes downstream a short way to “The Eddy,” and camps until Saturday morning. He sets out again through the Owassi rapids to Round Island (Tiadaughton Station), where he leaves his canoe in the care of a friend and takes the train back home. On Tuesday, June 17, he picks up the canoe at Tiadaughton and sets out for a week of canoeing. He paddles to Blackwell, a tough trip (“Overboard a dozen times”), and stays over night in a hotel there.2 The next morning he paddles down to an island above Slate Run, where he stays again until Saturday, when he continues down to Slate Run, stores his canoe in the basement of a hotel there, and hops the train home again. On the following Tuesday, he sets out from Slate Run in high water. He stays overnight in Cammal and the next day reaches the West Branch of the Susquehanna and heads for Jersey Shore, where he stores the canoe in a friend’s cellar and heads home. It is not until July 22 that he returns to pick up the canoe and finish the trip to Williamsport. Later in the summer he doubles portions of the trip, and in October, he takes the train from Ansonia to Williamsport, watching the streams and taking notes on the illegal dams and fishtraps. Nessmuk sets the scene for us as he begins his trip down Pine Creek. It begins in the steep-sided gorge where Marsh Creek enters Pine Creek: It is thirty-six years since I first chose this wild, beautiful, stream, as my stamping and camping ground. At that time there were six sawmills, with their consequent boarding houses between Marsh Creek and Round Island. Each mill employed twenty to forty hands the year round. . . . So long as the “clear pine” lasted this region was quite lively. The axe resounded from hill to hill. The clank and clang of the gang saw was incessant. When there came a “rafting flood,” there was a constant procession of board rafts going down stream from daylight till dark The whoop of the raftsmen was a constant quantity of hoodlum racket. It is quiet enough now. Of the 200 choppers, sawyers, hunters, etc., not a one is left. Of the six mills and the boarding houses there is not a vestige remaining save one heavy timber . . . and two tumble-down stone chimneys . . . . It seems so strange that this region should be more wild, more lonely and silent to-day than it was thirty odd years ago. But such is the fact.3

2

George Washington Sears (Nessmuk), “The Log of the Bucktail: Down the Tiadatton.” Forest and Stream 23 (1884) 202. 3 Ibid., 122.

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For Sears the old-growth pine-hemlock forest that he experienced in the mid- nineteenth century was a site of industrial production. When the land was left alone, after the fires cleared away the debris and the weeds and briars covered the ground, trees began to grow, and the Pine Creek Gorge became more truly wild than he had known it. But as Nessmuk notes, “The original timber is seldom or never reproduced. In less than twenty years there is a more dense growth of cover than was cut off by the lumberman.”4 But there is a catch to this regeneration aside from the loss of the majestic pines: “But the springs, the trout streams, the trout, the deer, have all suffered in the interim. They may and do recover to some extent, but the recovery is very slow.”5 As Sears canoes down Pine Creek and camps along its shores; two contemporary industrial realities directly affect his trip—the railroad and log drives. After the background on logging and its effects on the Pine Creek landscape that I quoted from, he sets out on his trip, stopping a few miles down stream to set up camp, which Nessmuk always does with great relish. As he says in Woodcraft, “if there is a spot on earth where trifles make up the sum of human enjoyment, it is to be found in a woodland camp.”6 Sears is looking for the same kind of simplicity as Thoreau, where the distracting demands of social, commercial, and political daily life are stripped away, and the present moment and its demands and pleasures stand out in sharp relief. He settles into his bed of hemlock boughs and drifts off to sleep watching “the graceful motion” of his canoe in the water. But he awakens from a dream of paddling desperately in the rapids above Niagara Falls: [A]nd still the roar of the falls is in my ears; but only for a few seconds. My head gets level, and I remember where I am—at the Eddy, in camp for the first night of the season, after a long and bitter winter. And below, on the opposite bank, a bright flashing light comes glinting and gleaning athwart the open spaces among the trees followed by a bucking clattering noise of wheels, and a dimly seen line of coal cars limned against the opposite mountain. Then comes the red stern-light of the caboose, and in less than a minute the whole affair has faded into distance and silence. Yes, the Pine Creek Railroad is an accomplished fact. . . . It is like a chapter from the Arabian Nights.7

4

Sears (Nessmuk), “The Log of the Bucktail,” 122. Ibid. 6 George Washington Sears (Nessmuk), Woodcraft and Camping (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), 52. 7 Sears (Nessmuk), “The Log of the Bucktail,” 122. 5

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What Nessmuk emphasizes in this description is the almost explosive nature of the train’s presence: it roars out of the silent darkness and disappears back into it. Nessmuk compares it to the sound of the Niagara rapids, but he emphasizes how quickly it disappears; this characteristic contrasts sharply with the “incessant” “clank and clang of the gang saw.”8 But the rails run through the gorge next to the stream nearly to the Susquehanna. As local editor of the Tioga County Agitator, Sears had expressed concern in 1871 about the imminent coming of the railroad to the town of Wellsboro. But by the time he is writing in 1884, his attitude has mellowed. He notes “almost hourly heavily laden coal trains go rattling and roaring up stream, while log trains of bark, timber, boards, and merchandise go down stream where they will do the most good.” He also notes the six to eight passenger trains a day. Given the tone of his comment, it is not a surprise when he says, “And do I, an old woodsman, regret this? On the whole, I rather like it.”9 He talks of how trains don’t steal things the way loggers did, how the train will stop at various locations to drop off campers and will even haul a canoe for a small additional fee. The train enables him to break his trip down Pine Creek into four sections taking the train home each time. At the end of the first week, he stashes his canoe at a friend’s house at Round Island, boards the train and is home in an hour, a trip that would have taken almost all day before the railroad. He even uses the rip-rap of the rail bed as a place to cache his food. “And,” says Nessmuk, “I cannot see that the railroad interferes with the game or fish.”10 In the morning a passenger train goes by and he exchanges waves with the passengers (he shakes a bucktail attached to a rod he has planted on the shore) and concludes, “. . . the train goes on its way leaving all silent and lonely as before.”11 The train is an interruption, but it does leave him alone. We must also understand that as he moves downstream, aside from the railroad, he is surrounded by the evidence of the extractive activity in the forest. When he camps on the island above Slate Run, where there was still an active sawmill in 1884, he describes how he makes a six-foot by two-foot frame for his bunk using “such slabs and edgings as I could pick up handily.”12 Later, when his fire goes out, he notes he had been too lazy “to get substantial night-wood, wherefore the fire was made of chips, bark, 8

Ibid. Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 202. 9

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and the hewing left by men who squared timber for the railroad.”13 He gives so much detail because he is setting up a story about an encounter during the night with a rattlesnake who takes up a position right next to the slab that his elbow is resting on. He concludes the story about the rattlesnake’s departure by noting that: Thirty years ago it was not unusual for a rattler to crawl into an open camp in warm weather. But there were ten of the reptiles then where there is one at present. Forest fires have pretty well thinned them out.14

When Nessmuk took his canoe down Pine Creek, however, the railroads had just begun to dominate the logging operations. After the time of the rafts, logging companies would float logs in great log drives, when the water was high in Pine Creek and its tributaries, down to Williamsport on the Susquehanna River. On his trip, he encountered logs on two occasions. The first is when he set out from Cammal heading for Jersey Shore, the point where Pine Creek feeds into the West Branch of the Susquehanna. He describes it in this way: Heavy rains at the head of the Tiadatton [i.e., Pine Creek] had swelled the stream to logging flood, and a big drive of logs that had been “hung up” by low water in the spring was now afloat, bound for Williamsport. Six teams, an ark or two, several bateaus, and a hundred stalwart log drivers were busy following up the logs, rolling in such as got stranded, and keeping the drive in motion. I cruised in company with sawlogs for the last half of the run and found them harmless company.15

He ends his trip at Jersey shore not because of the logs but because of the roiling muddy water; although, of course, part of the reason for the extreme swells of muddy runoff was the loss of the forest cover When he returns a month later to finish the trip, he encounters logs again, this time at the boom at Williamsport. The boom is designed to capture logs floating down river: between huge stone-filled cribs, floating logs were chained to form a barrier. Logs gathered behind the booms and were sorted by the marks placed on their ends and sent to the appropriate sawmill. After a pleasant ten miles from Jersey, Nessmuk describes the encounter:

13

Ibid. Ibid. 15 Ibid., 222. 14

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Nessmuk’s Log of the Bucktail: “The Effect of This Constant Depletion of Green Timber” I begin to run in on cribs, piers, booms, and immense timber rafts, with a solid pack of logs six miles long, two-thirds of the width of the river, and jammed firmly together, with the top ends slanting downstream and the lower ends resting of the bottom. I have run into the works lf the Williamsport Boom Company. I forget just how many million feet of lumber this pack is estimated to contain. But, I remember vividly the perspiration and exhaustive labor it cost me to get clear of the bewildering tangle and reach Williamsport dam.16

The chute through the dam was also “jammed full of logs, stumps, dead trees, etc., from end to end, and above the dam there was a wide line of impassable debris that reached across the river.”17 The boom was built in 1849, about eight years after Sears moved to Wellsboro, and continued in operation until 1909. During 1884, when Sears took his trip, about 240 million board-feet of lumber (12 x 12 x 1 inches is a board foot) passed through the boom to the mills.18 Despite the history of logging and the presence of the railroad when Nessmuk took his trip down Pine Creek in 1884, the landscape still held some majestic beauty and was not entirely new second-growth forest; there were still many old growth hemlocks. But by 1888, when Nessmuk writes again about Pine Creek, the situation is changing and his tone is darker. The primal forest is disappearing as by magic. . . . the lumberman cleared the white pine from the high, sterile mountain spurs, and the scattered pines were soon replaced by a dense growth of “small stuff,” making better game cover than before. The dark, dank hemlock ranges were left to nature; and we—the mossbacks of today—gathered round our campfires by the bright crystal springs in their gloomy shadows, and hugged ourselves in the belief that, come what might come there was nothing in the in the sour, rocky soil or brash, slivery timber to tempt the cupidity of man; and the hemlock was safe for the next hundred years.Why it stood to reason!19

Notice how Nessmuk makes fun of himself in this passage for assuming the world will stand still in the midst of the changing forest: hiding in the damp forest turns him into a mossback—a slow moving turtle upon whom 16

Ibid. Ibid. 18 Thomas T. Tabor, Sunset Along Susquehanna Waters. No.4 of Logging Railroad Era of Lumbering in Pennsylvania. (Privately printed, 1972), Tabor 410. 19 George Washington Sears (Nessmuk), “What Shall be the Outcome?” Forest and Stream 31 (1888) 142. 17

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the moss grows—a term that by analogy is extended to those who resist change. Of course, he discovers he is spectacularly wrong when the railroad and the high demand for leather combine with the invention of the round nail to make both the bark and the lumber of hemlock valuable.20 Because of its high tannin content, hemlock bark was the premier source of tannin for the leather tanning process. There had been a few tanneries along Pine Creek, and they had cut down the trees for their bark and left the wood to rot. But this was small scale and the forest was large. As Nessmuk put it, “It did not seem credible that a cargo of hides could be sent around Cape Horn to New York, run up into the mountains of northern Pennsylvania by rail, tanned into sole leather there and sent back to the Pacific coast at a profit. It seems wonderful to me, even at this date. But cold facts cannot be melted by theories.”21 Nessmuk was experiencing the effects of the beginnings of the global economy, living in an underdeveloped area whose natural resources were being exploited. So, as Nessmuk describes, the ancient hemlocks were felled: The tannery village, that unique production of modern days, springs up at a month’s notice on every considerable stream where bark is available, and the long, low tannery with its labyrinth of vats and villainous refuse, commences its vocation of poisoning and depleting the purest trout streams in the land. The horrible roar of the gong whistle is a constant quantity and a diabolical mystery to the dazed and frightened deer, that they flee from as if it were a pack of wolves.22

The tanneries spring up out of nowhere, but those that run the tanneries make the same mistake about themselves as Nessmuk did about the hemlocks. A tannery boss tells Sears, “’We have come to stay. We are utilizing timber that has been quietly rotting down for a thousand years. A tree doesn’t last forever.” Nessmuk responds, “But the tanneries have not ‘come to stay.’ When the bark is exhausted, they will be left to rot and decay.”23 And what of the forest? Nessmuk outlines a forest succession process that has played out just as he predicted: “First of all, fire will sweep through the dry hemlock tops and debris of the ‘job.’ This will be 20

Steven E. Owlett, Seasons Along the Tiadaghton: An Environmental History of Pine Creek Gorge. (Privately published, 1993), 57-58. 21 Sears (Nessmuk), “What Shall be the Outcome?” 142. 22 Ibid., 142. 23 Ibid., 142.

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succeeded by a dense growth of briers, fire weeds, bird cherry and poplars. These will gradually be supplanted by a more substantial growth of maple, beech, pine, or oak, according to soil or location.”24 Nessmuk’s trips through the Adirondacks were on flat water through a generally protected, stable environment, but for his trip down Pine Creek he places himself in a dynamic environment. Canoeing in rivers and streams is different from flatwater canoeing. The water of Pine Creek is what the biblical authors refer to as living water, water in motion: Even if you do nothing, the canoe moves and any effort to control your motion must be in relation to the water’s own movement. Throughout these essays, whose basic structure is a journey, Nessmuk describes a landscape in motion through time; the setting is the plot, and its duration is a critical dimension of everything in the landscape, including Nessmuk himself. In these essays Sears is not a conservationist, thinking that he can stop change; he is riding the stream of time, enjoying the sense of suspended time in the camp, but aware that the time in the camp floats “in a graceful motion” on the larger stream of time that builds logging camps and mills and tanneries and brings down forests and then wipes away those camps and mills and tanneries and regrows forests. He deals with past, present, and future even within the smaller elements within the essays. When he passes Flat Rock at the beginning of his trip he recalls the time he and a friend took between them seven hundred trout in one day. He admits it was a greedy thing to do, but in his defense he says that it was the June rise and fish were plentiful, all the fish were used, and if they had not taken them then, there would have been no more alive in 1884 than there were because the streams had been affected by the logging and tanning industries. But later in the trip, he criticizes the man who takes seventy-one fish less than five inches long (so they were undersized) then because such overfishing did affect the survival of the scarce trout.25 In 1888, he observes that: You may fish Flat Rock to-day from sunrise to sunset without getting a nibble” but after the hemlocks run out, the tanneries will close, the woods will grow back, and “the dried up streams will be restocked and a wiser generation will conserve the game and fish instead of destroying.26

24

Ibid. Sears (Nessmuk), “The Log of the Bucktail,” 222. 26 Sears (Nessmuk), “What Shall be the Outcome?” 142. 25

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While Sears was not fully aware of the harm the trains would do, his insights about duration have proved out. The railroads, with the addition of the temporary logging railroads snaking through the mountains during the 1880’s, would accelerate the deforestation process since lumber could be extracted and shipped out year round. Nessmuk did not anticipate the most serious threat to the environment—coal. He notes that for many years people bought and held land in the Pine Creek watershed with coal on it, but no one could get at it until the railroads came. The mining that resulted came to interfere with the game and fish in the form of acid rain and acid mine drainage, both still significant factors in Tioga County. The Pine Creek Railroad, however, is gone. It last operated in 1988 as the Corning Secondary Branch of Conrail. And in a final ironic twist, after its abandonment it has, through the Rails to Trails Program, become a hiking and biking trail which will eventually run sixty-two miles along Pine Creek from Ansonia to Jersey Shore through mature protected forest. But large forces are at work in the landscape and we do not know how effective that protection will be, and someday we may again find ourselves with the bushes having dominion over the landscape.

Works Cited Sears, George Washington (Nessmuk). Canoeing the Adirondacks with Nessmuk: The Adirondack Letters of George Washington Sears. Dan Brenan, ed. with rev. by Robert L. Lyon and Hallie E. Bond. Blue Mountain and Syracuse, NY: Adirondack Museum and Syracuse University Press, 1993. —. “The Log of the Bucktail: Down the Tiadatton.” Forest and Stream 23 (1884) 122, 183, 202, 222, 242-43. —. “Our Village.” Tioga County Agitator (August 23, 1871) 3. —. “What Shall be the Outcome?” Forest and Stream 31 (1888) 142. —. Woodcraft and Camping. New York: Dover, 1963. Owlett, Steven E. Seasons Along the Tiadaghton: An Environmental History of Pine Creek Gorge. Privately Published, 1993. Tabor, Thomas T. Sunset Along Susquehanna Waters. No.4 of Logging Railroad Era of Lumbering in Pennsylvania. Privately Printed, 1972.

LIBBY BEAMAN: CREATING A ROLE FOR HERSELF AS NATURALIST IN THE PRIBILOF ISLANDS WENDY A. WEAVER

I begin this journal with many misgivings. My brother Charles gave me this diary at the moment of parting from my family in Washington D.C. I can hear his voice even now, husky for Charles, as he handed it to me. “Keep a record, Libby, everything as it happens to you. Promise me you will. What you will be doing will be so strange to us, so foreign, so unusual. Where you are going lies far beyond our comprehension. Write it all down. One forgets too quickly.” Forget? How can I forget a single moment of this? I could not write the first night, nor could I yesterday. I do not know how to weep in words. Pribilov. Pribylov. Pribylof. Prybilof. Pribyloff. Prybiloff. Pribilof — 1

In 1879, Elizabeth Gertrude DuBois, or “Libby,” Beaman traveled with her husband, John, to the Pribilof Islands and resided there for over a year. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes had personally appointed John Beaman as a Junior Agent for the Treasury Department at the request of his family friend, Libby Beaman. As Junior Agent, John Beaman was sent to the Pribilof Islands, St. Paul and St. George, to oversee the seal industry in that remote region. Libby Beaman, in spite of severe opposition, insisted on accompanying him. That opposition came from every quarter—her husband, her family, her friends, and society in general. Yet, she would not be discouraged, and so Libby Beaman, born to a life of affluence and influential society in Washington D.C., traveled with her husband to the Pribilof Islands of the Alaska Territory. Upon her departure, Libby’s brother Charles exhorted her to keep a record of “everything.” Part of the “everything” that Libby would record would be 1 Libby Beaman, Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 18791880 (1887. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 1.

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her natural surroundings. Over one hundred years later, Libby Beaman’s granddaughter, Betty John, assembled and published the book entitled Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 1879-1880. The events recorded occurred just a dozen years after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia. In her article for the journal Frontiers, Susan Kollin writes that “during the late nineteenth century, as the possibilities for adventure appeared to be at an end, Alaska emerged as an important blank spot on the map,” and was “often depicted as one of the world’s only remaining wilderness areas.”2 It was cold, distant, and alien, referred to in the newspapers as “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’s Icebox.” In fact, when President Hayes, a friend of Libby’s family, offered her husband a position in the Pribilofs, he quite naturally assumed that John Beaman would go alone to this barely accessible outpost located in an arctic wilderness about which little still was known.3 Libby Beaman’s transcript of their conversation shows the surprise of his response: “If he accepts, I will go with him.” How bold I must have sounded! “You apparently do not know where these islands are. I should have explained that I was not speaking of Nantucket or Long Island.” “Oh, I know where they are. St. Paul and St. George are about 57 degrees north and 170 degrees west, almost within the Arctic Circle.” Mr. Hayes looked at me keenly then, not believing that this delicately reared hothouse orchid of Washington could dream of being transplanted to the frigid zone.4

Clearly, President Hayes did not expect Beaman to know that the Pribilofs were not on the eastern shore—or to have the ability to recite their names and exact geographical coordinates off the cuff. President Hayes’ response, as well as Beaman’s reference to hothouse flowers, confirms what Vera Norwood has said about women in nature, that “[w]omen were thought to be more comfortable in rural, cultivated nature—in civilized gardens.”5 In her essay, “Heroines of Nature,” 2

Susan Kollin, “‘The First White Women in the Last Frontier:’ Writing Race, Gender, and Nature in Alaska Travel Narratives.” Frontiers 18 (1997): 107. 3 Libby Beaman, Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 18791880. Betty John, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), 29-30. 4 Ibid., 38. 5 Vera Norwood, “Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 324.

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Norwood argues the reason that “[w]omen’s responses to nature have been given attention only very recently” is because few women were allowed access to wild places and so their responses were, consequently, few and far between.6 Norwood attributes this exclusion of women from the raw experiences of nature to “cultural stereotypes as well as physical hardships.”7 Readers see this very clearly in Libby Beaman’s work as she faced vitriolic protests against her accompanying her husband to the Pribilofs. The very notion of a lady doing such a thing was inconceivable.8 Critics, including every member of her family and nearly every person she encountered en route, attempted to dissuade her through both verbal and non-verbal means. Her wisdom and even her sanity were called into question as she was labeled, from the very mild “unwise” and “foolhardy,”9 to the more accusatory “cursed”10 and “provoking,”11 to “only slightly less than insane.”12 When Norwood speaks of a “documented, deep-seated bias against women moving freely into unsettled landscapes,” one would think she had Libby Beaman in mind.13 While most of the arguments hurled at Beaman amount to little more than “this is no place for a woman,” what undergirds this premise is subtly derogatory and several-fold. The Pribilof Islands represent an especially inhospitable wilderness. John Beaman anticipates the islands and their inhabitants to be “icebound, rockbound, [and] weather-bound,” because they are so remote and because the geographic and weather conditions are so fierce.14 While these are considered challenging obstacles to men, they are assumed insurmountable to women. Listen to the Senior Agent’s emphatic opposition to Beaman’s presence: Why, Mrs. Beaman, I would no more think of bringing my wife into this life than I would of taking her to the moon or of subjecting her—or anyone I love—to such a hazardous adventure on a treacherous sea, to the Arctic climate, and to such primitive living conditions. Living on the Pribilofs, 6

Ibid. Ibid. 8 Beaman, Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 1879-1880, 4. 9 Ibid., 5. 10 Ibid., 9. 11 Ibid., 39. 12 Ibid., 41. 13 Norwood, “Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape,” 325. 14 Beaman Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 1879-1880, 45. 7

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Mrs. Beaman, means an attempt to survive against the worst possible conditions any of us Americans have yet had to face. Many of the hardiest men have not survived. I explained all this to your husband in no uncertain terms. I described what was in store for him—the weather, our living arrangements with the company, the bestial nature of the work we have to supervise, work that makes beasts of the men who do it. No lone white woman should ever be permitted on the islands.15

Note that the Senior Agent still refers to the Pribilofs as an “adventure,” just one that she, as a woman, should be protected from. Unfortunately for women, while “[s]urvival in a hostile natural environment is an egogratifying achievement for men,” as Norwood phrases it, it is a danger to women.16 In addition to arguments appealing to the fact that a woman should not face hostile terrains nor encroach upon traditionally male arenas, both the senior agent and her husband allude to another, more uncertain danger, which should prevent her expedition to the Pribilofs. Upon first hearing that his wife intended to accompany him on his tour-of-duty in the Pribilof Islands, John Beaman, while not expressly forbidding her, did advise sternly against it: In a flood of words more eloquent than his usual succinct way of expressing himself, he told me all the reasons why I, as a woman, could not go. The reasons were consideration for my health and well-being, my happiness, and my safety. He hinted explicitly at the provocation my presence would cause men who were hungrily denied their own wives for the years they had to spend in such places.17

During their six years of marriage and previous ten years of courtship, the Beamans had often been separated for several years at a time while John worked on survey crews as far away from Washington D. C. as California and the Northwest Territories. John Beaman was both intimately aware of and particularly concerned with the implications of a woman’s presence in such a remote and male-dominated area. Scholar Linda Bergmann, in her article for American Studies, cuts to the heart of this anxiety: “As the only white woman at the base and as a woman whose sole purpose on the island was as a companion for her husband, it seems almost inevitable that her 15

Ibid., 58. Norwood, “Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape,” 323. 17 Beaman, Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 1879-1880, 39. 16

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presence would be construed sexually and that she would be aware of the sexual construction that was made of her presence.”18 Clearly, the hostility Beaman experienced as a result of her trespass into wilderness areas was intensified because she had no clearly defined role, outside of conjugal relations, to justify her presence. Historically, western women had been protected (read prevented) from wilderness experiences. As Bergmann asserts, Libby Beaman’s: very presence in the North violated the expectations of American culture about the proper roles and natural capacities of women and necessitated attempts to explain and justify their encroachment onto this masculine terrain.19

In fact, other women who encroached on a male-dominated, arctic wilderness had to create roles for themselves to justify their encroachment. Roles for such women were few: Mrs. Perry adopted the role of “camp mother” for her husband’s expedition in the arctic; years later, Hannah Breece took a position as teacher in remote arctic villages. Both of these women were viewed as mother figures. Libby Beaman, on the other hand, considerably younger than either Perry or Breece and not yet a mother, was too young and attractive to fill a maternal role for the men at camp. Further, since the camp already had a man to cook and an Aleut woman to do the housekeeping, both at the lodge and at the cabin the Beamans will share with the Senior Agent, no domestic role was available to her. Therefore, it was assumed that her only role was as her husband’s consort. Although objections were made with respect to the cold, the isolation, and the untamed nature of this region, it is actually this final controversy, in which Beaman is regarded as a sexual provocation, which initiates her lengthy justification for traveling with her husband. Her detractors never consider her natural interest in and inclination toward the natural environment. An interest in nature, and Alaska in particular, certainly justified the presence of other men, such as Henry Wood Elliott and Frederick A. Walpole, but was suspect when alleged by a woman. Kollin notes, as any reader would, “Beaman took great pains to establish a basis for her presence in the region.”20 Libby Beaman details experiences and 18

Linda S. Bergmann, “Woman against a Background of White: The Representation of Self and Nature in Women’s Arctic Narratives.” American Studies 34 (1993): 63. 19 Ibid., 66. 20 Kollin, “‘The First White Women in the Last Frontier:’ Writing Race, Gender, and Nature in Alaska Travel Narratives,” 112.

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qualifications that have equipped her for this expedition and therefore justify her encroachment. Unlike many women of her class and era, she had training in art,21 “which has always accompanied the science of natural history, often serving as the most effective means of communicating newfound information,”22 nursing,23 an essential skill on any expedition; and mapmaking,24 which had already proved useful as mapmakers, at that time, were inundated with requests for accurate maps of the new territory.25 In another attempt to create a role for herself, and thereby justify her presence, she even considers teaching English to the Aleut children.26 Beaman’s primary interest, however, is the intersection between nature and art. As a young girl, she faced obstacles in pursuing training in this field. Remembering those experiences she records the reactions of her friends and family: “No lady ever studies painting!” Next to the theater, art was the most degrading, unladylike career a female could follow. I would disgrace the entire family. I’d be shunned by all the nice young men. I’d never find a proper husband. But I didn’t care. I was blissfully happy doing what no young lady ever had done before. I had become the first female entrant at the Corcoran. The all-male student body ignored me. My male teachers resented my presence in their men’s world and set onerous tasks before me. 27

After some reflection she assesses herself: I think I’ve a good mind, my own and not easily swayed. I think I think like a man. My talents are a man’s: careful, meticulous, exacting in detail. I’ve a scientific curiosity about natural phenomena, more intense zoologically than botanically (the latter being the only ladylike field). God

21

Beaman, Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 1879-1880, 23-24. 22 Smithsonian Institute, “Natural History Revealed.” http://www.150.si.edu/chap3/nathis.htm 23 Beaman, Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 1879-1880, 24. 24 Ibid., 28-30. 25 Ibid., 29. 26 Ibid., 126. 27 Ibid., 23.

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In spite of these cultural restrictions, upon arrival, she “explore[s] every inch” of St. Paul Island and records her observations meticulously with both drawings and writings.29 Her enthusiasm for nature, particularly seals, is quite evident. To her family she writes, “I find that it is impossible to write you of our lives here without referring to the seals or some phase of their lives which affects ours.”30 An earlier entry also demonstrates her enthusiasm: I must revisit Novastoshnah and try to sketch it in a way that others can catch its drama. It is a majestic scene. Seals line the shore in an unbroken chain from Novastoshna down the entire eastern shore to the southernmost tip of the island, with great rookeries . . . . I’ve not seen them all. Each has its special characteristics, each its own fascinations. I’d like to visit them often—and long enough to study them.31

Subsequent entries, incidentally, show that she followed through on her desire to study them. Henry Wood Elliott is now considered to have been a renowned Alaska artist and Smithsonian researcher. As a former Pribilof Treasury Agent, Elliott revisits the islands during Beaman’s tenancy there. While there he acknowledges both Beaman’s interest in nature and her talent in depicting it. Beaman writes: I shall be spending a great deal of time with Mr. Elliott while he is here. He is quite interested in the seal book I have begun and has asked me to make specific observations for his book at times when he cannot be here. I am flattered.32

Elliott compliments her work, so similar to his own, and leaves her with “tasks that will keep [her] busy all winter,” which, since they are so suited to her own tastes and talents, she takes great pleasure in.33 Unfortunately, Libby Beaman’s interest in observing the seals conflicts with the male agenda to keep her protected, both physically and 28

Ibid., 12-13. Ibid., 90. 30 Ibid., 97. 31 Ibid., 95. 32 Ibid., 121. 33 Ibid., 121. 29

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mentally. This protection is not solely from the “ugly work” of sealing, but also from provocative images prevalent in nature.34 At the outset of her journey she realizes why they have embarked on their voyage on the earliest possible date: . . . most of the company men aboard were anxious to get to the Pribilofs as soon as possible. They wanted me to get there before the female seals hauled up to have their pups and before the breeding season began. I colored at this last statement.35

The crewmembers and company men (sealers) want to spare her the image of mating seals as the ship approached the islands. Once on the island, the village and Government House would protect her from this sight, sparing everyone both embarrassment and the obvious sexual connotations of Beaman’s presence. One incident vividly expresses the conflict between her desire to participate in nature and the men’s desire to keep her from its more prurient aspects. The men have warned her that “[s]eal mating is no sight a lady should have to witness,” but her interest in their pups, the “little kotickie,” brought her close to the seal’s mating grounds.36 It is here, while concentrating on another scene, that she becomes aware of a scene unfolding nearly at her feet.37 Just below her a bull and matka began the mating process. After describing the scene she writes: Slowly I began to realize the enormity of what I had stopped to watch and was ashamed of myself for succumbing to such an unladylike experience, so contrary to my careful upbringing and even my own convictions. I wanted to run from my shame. I stood up, bent on going back to the dunes and away from this mass of mating, fighting seals. I turned to face the Senior Agent standing silent, just behind me!38

The Senior Agent had seen her set out alone to sketch, and because some new, violent men had just arrived on the island, had followed her, ostensibly to ensure her protection. What had begun as an innocent and valid investigation of seals turned into a lurid source of mortification for Beaman.39 34

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 6. 36 Ibid., 132-133. 37 Ibid., 133. 38 Ibid., 134. 39 Ibid., 134-39. 35

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The public does not have access to Libby Beaman’s seal book or sketches, only the posthumously published collection in which her granddaughter fashioned Beaman’s various sketches, letters, and diary entries, missing pages and all, into a cohesive, novel-like journal. From what her husband includes in his report, it is obvious that the bulk of Beaman’s nature sketches and observations have been omitted (this is a paper topic in itself). In spite of this omission, the thread of Libby Beaman’s intense connection to nature and art remain. Her detailing of botanical and zoological information, especially of seals, evident even in the portions of the journal we do receive, attests to her connection with the arctic wilderness. She explored it, observed it, described it, wrote about it, sketched it, painted it, and mapped it. In doing so, Libby Beaman was able to create roles for herself, as an artist, a writer, and a naturalist. Before concluding, I would like here to return briefly to Vera Norwood. Norwood claims that the basic issue confronting women in the wilderness is “freedom.”40 She cites a number of scholars and theorists to support her premise that “proscriptions against women’s mobility in nature continued into the nineteenth century,” thus prohibiting women from participating fully in the “wild American landscape.”41 Libby Beaman’s journal presents a case study for such theories. She herself was not reluctant to participate in nature, but society’s interdictions made that participation often difficult and occasionally shameful. In recognizing this historical bias against women in the wilderness, we may be able to determine whether some residual bias remains. Anne LaBastille, in her work Women in the Wilderness, indicates that women are still underrepresented in fields pertaining to nature and its sciences.42 Furthermore, restoring women’s voices to the tradition of wilderness experience writing may both shed light on the tradition in general, by questioning some of its masculine assumptions, and encourage additional women to add their voice to the tradition by validating their unique history, their unique contributions.

40 Norwood, “Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape,” 343. 41 Ibid., 324-325. 42 Anne LaBastille, Women and Wilderness (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1980), 65-88.

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Works Cited Beaman, Libby. Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 1879-1880. Betty John, ed., 1887. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Bergmann, Linda S. “Woman against a Background of White: The Representation of Self and Nature in Women’s Arctic Narratives.” American Studies. 34 (1993): 53-68. Kollin, Susan. “‘The First White Women in the Last Frontier:’ Writing Race, Gender, and Nature in Alaska Travel Narratives.” Frontiers. 18 (1997): 105-24. LaBastille, Anne. Women and Wilderness. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1980. “Natural History Revealed.” Online. Smithsonian Institute. 18 April 1998. Available: http://www.150.si.edu/chap3/nathis.htm Norwood, Vera. “Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

AN OBLIQUE PROPHECY: A RE-EXAMINATION OF LIBERTY HYDE BAILEY’S THE HOLY EARTH RICHARD HUNT

As a writer Liberty Hyde Bailey is no John Muir, no John Burroughs. Let us be generous and say that his writing is pedestrian. No wonder, then, that over the years he has received little or no attention from literary scholars. Why, then, am I looking at his work today? Because of an interesting little idea he once had, that’s why. In The Holy Earth, published in 1915, Bailey calls for what amounts to the full redistribution of land in the US. Is the plan realistic? Alas, it is not: not today, and not in 1915. Yet whatever his writing skills, the man is no fool; he had to know his plan could go nowhere. Besides merely presenting his plan, Bailey also explains why he would like to see this redistribution accomplished. And those reasons were then and remain today a powerful statement about the human connection to the natural world. A dozen years before he wrote The Holy Earth, Bailey brought together a series of articles and essays, written over more than a dozen years, on what he terms “Nature-Study.” Though the term appears to resist his efforts at definition, Bailey begins by saying what it is not: “mere accessory” to science; banal “sentiment” or “entertainment”; or, worst of all, “a tickler of the senses.”1 Rather, he writes, Nature-Study “will transform our ideals” of how to live in the world.2 Such a transformation is necessary, he notes, because of “how indirect and unrelated to the lives of pupils much of our education has been.”3 In particular, he cites the attention to minutiae in both the physical and social sciences—a condition that persists into our own time, a century later. 1

Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Nature-Study Idea: Being an Interpretation of the New School Movement to Put the Child in Sympathy with Nature. (New York: Doubleday, 1903), 18. 2 Ibid., 18. 3 Ibid. 18-19.

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Indeed, a similar complaint emerges in David Sobel’s 1996 book, Beyond Ecophobia.4 Nature education in the primary grades, Sobel argues, must stress the connection each individual might make with the natural world, and how the parts all fit together. The theory is that once she learns to appreciate, say, the stream that runs through the field behind a school, the more likely the student is to desire the preservation of that stream. Sobel’s contention here echoes that of Australian philosopher Warwick Fox, who argues for a similar kind of identification with the natural world; he believes that expanding one’s sense of the personal self beyond one’s private “box of skin,” so that the self also encompasses the rest of creation, is the way to develop an enlightened preservation.5 This is exactly the point Bailey wishes to make concerning NatureStudy, which had, even in his own time, degenerated into a matter of listmaking that would be quite familiar to anyone who’s taken one of those basic natural science survey classes so beloved by undergraduates everywhere. Let me offer an example from my own experience. As an undergraduate I took “Introduction to Botany,” and spent the semester peering through a microscope at the parts of stems and roots, diligently memorizing the names of each of those parts to regurgitate on the weekly quiz. I learned nothing in the course; nor did I take from it any particular reason to love plants in the first place. In a sense, the course wasn’t really about plants at all, despite its “botany” label. We never looked at a live plant, or even at a photograph of one; nor at more than one plant at a time to see how their lives intertwine. We all could likely tell such stories; such complaints derive from the unhappy phenomenon of “indirect” experience, which Oregon writer John Daniel likens to “sightseeing,” as distinct from a full and satisfying “direct” engagement.6 Bailey is adamant in opposing such indirect connection to the natural world. The problem, though, is that it’s easier to teach nature—or most anything else—via list-making, charts, and vapid memorization. (That it’s easier to assess as well may account for the problem’s longevity.) Bailey believes that we might interpret nature through either fact or what he calls “fancy,” for which term we might today substitute “imagination” or “creativity.” While fact may indeed offer the only “truthful way of knowing the external world,” he writes, some of us are not scientists and might more effectively approach nature not 4

David Sobel, Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education. (Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society, 1996). 5 Ibid., 3-6. 6 John Daniel, “The Impoverishment of Sightseeing.” The Trail Home (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 35-46.

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through detail but through what he terms “a poetic interpretation of nature.”7 The clear sentimentality of Bailey’s approach here appears to recall the inventive nature of Seton, or even the fanciful, scientifically inaccurate “nature” Glen Love or David Petersen have recently begun to decry in present-day nature writing. A “poetic” nature, after all, might easily include elves and griffins, wonderful stuff if you like that sort of thing, but hardly likely to elicit a reverence for the nature that is. Bailey says as much: “poetry,” he notes, “is misleading if [the poet’s] observations are wrong.”8 Thus, Nature-Study begins with facts: “we must have the desire to be definite and exact” in presenting nature to children. By facts, though, Bailey refers to things directly observable, not just to the facts as found in books: “there can be no textbooks for Nature-Study,” he writes, “for when one studies a book he does not study nature.”9 The foregoing exploration of Bailey’s ideas about Nature-Study comes from his book by that title, published in 1903, a collection of essays and articles drafted throughout the preceding decade. Neither the term “Nature-Study” nor its general idea is unique to Bailey, of course, but Bailey was among its foremost proponents. Among the important points he makes about Nature-Study is that it will teach students the fundamental truth that “no two objects are alike.”10 And although that thought may appear fairly simplistic, it is the root of any successful relationship with the natural world. “Fundamentally,” Bailey writes, “Nature-Study is seeing what one looks at and drawing proper conclusions from what one sees.”11 To recognize that each “object” in nature, whatever its similarities, is also unique results from the careful observation that Bailey cites as the chief skill learned through Nature-Study. The result of such careful observation, he suggests, will be “a sympathy between ourselves and the world in which we live.”12 As it turned out, Bailey was unable to halt the calcification of NatureStudy in the schools—the turn from wonder to list-making. Coincident with this failure was the demographic shift of the early twentieth century, from farm to city. Fewer people, and not merely children, would have the sort of ready access to—and, significantly, the constant presence of— nature in their lives. Bailey argues for a correspondence between a happy 7

Bailey, Nature-Study 19-20. Ibid., 21. 9 Ibid., 21-22. 10 Ibid., 27. 11 Ibid., 14. 12 Ibid., 28. 8

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life and “the deepest feeling and sympathy for nature”; the growing sense of despair that came along with city life he saw as resulting—at least in part—from the disconnection from the natural world.13 Among the benefits he projected from Nature-Study was to be a populace both connected and dedicated to the preservation of nature. He wished, quite rightly, to start the process with children; but with the increasing urbanization in the decade or so following publication of The Nature-Study Idea in 1903, fewer adults had had the opportunity to experience the excitement of Nature-Study, at least without the dry detail and rote-memorizing, with its emphasis on drill and method over observation and experience, privileged by the “science education” of the day. By 1915, then, Bailey was likely a bit disillusioned—or perhaps disappointed—by the results of the Nature-Study movement. Surely, he was not alone in recognizing that what Thoreau famously called “the solid earth! the actual world!” was coming apart before him. In that sense, then, I read The Holy Earth in part as a statement of faith against that disengagement—not merely a jeremiad but also a proposal for what turned out to be a rather radical solution to the ills of the world. Echoing the basic notions underlying his Nature-Study, Bailey now writes, “To live in right relation with his natural condition is one of the first lessons that a wise farmer or any other wise man learns.”14 NatureStudy was intended to stimulate just that “right relation” with the natural world; but where Nature-Study was specifically directed toward children, Bailey now addresses his concerns to all adults, or at least all the “wise” ones. His primary concern is with farmers, however. The relation farmers have with the land leads him to another recurring theme, that of “dominion” over the land, a troublesome problem in both Bailey’s time and our own. Bailey is not opposed to the basic idea of dominion—he will not break from biblical sources—but in a move typical of his overall thinking style shifts the focus of the issue, noting simply that “dominion does not carry with it personal ownership.”15 Besides merely deflecting the whole question of dominion over nature, Bailey’s seeming rejection of the whole notion of private property, the idea he refers to as merely a “new formulation” opens the door for a rather audacious plan, for redistributing the land.16 Since he equates the way land is divided up among citizens with “a question of morals,” it is 13

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 11. 15 Bailey, The Holy Earth, 14. 16 Ibid., 14. 14

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hardly a surprise that he then argues that “a society that is founded on an unmoral partition and use [of the land, that is] cannot itself be righteous and whole.”17 The first step is to acknowledge that the form of dominion over nature, as currently practiced, “has been mostly destructive.”18 Curiously, perhaps, it’s worth noting that although Bailey wrote a century ago the catalogue of wasteful practices here is no less accurate today: farming, logging, mining methods that leave “the earth raw and sore,” a “habit of destructiveness,” he tells us, that “is uneconomic in the best sense, unsocial, unmoral.”19 This brings us to the plan itself, which is intended to provide “a clearer sense of relationship with the earth.”20 In order to ensure, he writes, that “all the people, or as many of them as possible, shall have contact with the earth,” each person would have “his own plot for his lifetime,” without the right to “despoil” it for the future.21 To accomplish this, Bailey hopes to “divide and redistribute” the earth into “many small parcels of land.”22 It is hard to see any entity other than the sort of big government Bailey opposed, though, accomplishing such a feat. Yet while Bailey is not in favor of “big government” owning the land, he also worries that we will “suffer overwhelming bondage if the land is tied up in an aristocratic system.”23 Rather than either government or aristocracy determining land distribution, Bailey favors using what he terms “neighborliness” for the moral basis of its distribution. “Recognizing the right of any people to its own life,” he writes, “we must equally recognize its right to a sufficient part of the surface of the earth.”24 This is pretty heady stuff—an explicit call for the wholesale redistribution of land ownership. Lest he be misunderstood, Bailey further argues that “Every person should have the right and privilege to a personal use of some part of the earth.”25 A nice sentiment, you might say, but hardly practical. There’s just not enough good farmland for each of us to return to some bucolic pre-industrial existence. And while Bailey’s abiding interest is always with farmers, he also warns that his partition 17

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. 19 Ibid., 16-17. 20 Ibid., 19. 21 Ibid., 19, 32. 22 Ibid., 34. 23 Ibid., 33. 24 Ibid., 33. 25 Ibid., 34. 18

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plan is not exclusively for farmers. For some, personal use may involve nothing more than “land merely to live on,” or perhaps merely “a wood to wander in.”26 The whole scheme revolves around what it means to own land. Bailey believes that ownership, as distinct from mere occupancy, enhances a “close moral contact with the earth.”27 His “new way of partitioning the surface” of the earth, then, becomes a matter of “access to the holy earth” as well.28 Clearly, Bailey’s plan is not intended to be directly beneficial to the land, so much as to its inhabitants; the argument presupposes what we might with tongue slightly in cheek think of as a truly “wise use” policy for the land. (This is funnier if you’re from the west.) Nor are farmers— Bailey’s constant touchstone and the focus of his earlier Nature-Study idea—the centerpoint of this scheme. They do, however, form its clear scaffolding; farmers are the true stewards of the land, he believes. Farmer or not, we must all develop a personal, individual (as distinct from group-based) relationship with the land: reforms less vast than what he proposes, Bailey reminds us, often fail “because they express only a group psychology.”29 It is an Emersonian moment, of course; just as Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” had been perverted by the culture of greed and selfishness that Bailey so ardently opposes, so too might his land redistribution plan be perverted by the so-called “laissez-faire” doctrine. So although he is not in favor of vast government, Bailey does recognize the necessity of organizing the redistribution so that it would not result in the greedy or powerful snapping up the “personal use” lands of weaker or less powerful—or less well-connected—individuals, as happened with the Dawes Act in 1887. Think of it: a piece of land for every soul. Think hard, though, because that’s about as close as you’ll get. Bailey’s plan had no chance of success in 1915, and none today. It’s really a bit silly, a bit simplistic anyway, isn’t it? The land is good, the land is the locus of holiness. Humans lose both the good and the holy as they lose contact with the land. Therefore if everyone were to have a personal piece of the land, all would be well, or at least be better than if they did not. Please. And yet . . . many of us do speak of nature as sacred; we often seek contact with the earth as a remedy for or a respite from the ills of a world becoming ever more human-centered. Moreover, Bailey’s finer points 26

Ibid., 35. Ibid., 37. 28 Ibid., 38. 29 Ibid., 88. 27

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often veer into the discourse of nature-preservation. He believes in the value of wild places, where nothing of “value” is ever produced, no less than do Rick Bass or Terry Tempest Williams. He argues that one need not live on, or even go to, one’s personal land holding: the fact of that holding is sufficient—just as John Daniel or Kathleen Dean Moore would write nearly a century later. And for all the romanticized farmers, indeed for all his archaic referents, there are also some truly modern ideas here as well. To cite just one example, Bailey argues against the idea that land that provides no “goods for sale” is thus “useless.”30 Ultimately, I believe Bailey’s Nature Study idea is far more compelling than the plan he sketches in The Holy Earth. He was frustrated by the absence of nature in the lives of everyday people, more so with the increasing urbanization in the decade that separates his two formulations. That plan, though it was and is without the least chance of success, is an indication of one way we might, not only in Bailey’s time but also in our own, make up for lost opportunity—to make up, in a very literal sense, for lost ground.

Works Cited Bailey, Liberty Hyde. The Holy Earth. 1915. Ithaca: New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, 1980. —. The Nature-Study Idea: Being an Interpretation of the New School Movement to Put the Child in Sympathy with Nature. New York: Doubleday, 1903. Daniel, John. “The Impoverishment of Sightseeing.” The Trail Home: Nature, Imagination, and the American West. New York: Pantheon, 1992. 35-46. Fox, Warwick. Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism. 1990. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Love, Glen. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003. Moore, Kathleen Dean. “Where Should I Live and What Should I Live For?” ISLE 11.1 (Winter 2004): 215-218. Petersen, David. Writing Naturally: A Down-To-Earth Guide to Nature Writing. Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 2001. Sobel, David. Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education. Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society, 1996. 30

Ibid., 3.

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Thoreau, Henry. The Maine Woods. 1864. Dudley C. Lunt, ed. New York: Bramhall House, 1950.

PHASES OF FARM LIFE AND SENSES OF PLACE: ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AS HOME ECONOMICS IN JOHN BURROUGHS AND WILLA CATHER CHRISTINE NADIR

The most recent phase of Willa Cather scholarship comes from ecocriticism, the relatively new field of cultural and literary criticism concerned with representations of nature, environment, place, and ecology. Although Cather is received favorably by many ecocritics, her celebration of pioneers and cultivated landscapes can lead those defining nature as wilderness to the mistaken conclusion that her work is decidedly antienvironmentalist. For example, Joseph W. Meeker argues: There is no environmental ethic that emerges from her work but rather an ethic of development that supposes that land fulfills its destiny when it is successfully farmed. The land provides a background for her stories of human growth and development, but it is not loved and studied to find its own integrity and value, let alone its own story.1

Meeker is correct that Cather is uninterested in preserving nature as a space or concept separate from human beings. As ecocritics have begun to demonstrate in recent years, her essays and literary works contain a wide range of environmental motifs that presuppose human interaction with nature, including scientific ecology, phenomenology of place, pastoralist representations of the country and city, and the settlement of the American West and Nebraska, among others.2 As the scope of ecocriticism shifts from deep ecological to social ecological theoretical frameworks, such 1

Joseph W. Meeker, “Willa Cather: The Plow and the Pen.” Cather Studies, Volume 5: Willa Cather’s Ecological Imagination. Susan J. Rosowski, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 88. 2 See Cather Studies, Volume 5: Willa Cather’s Ecological Imagination (2003) for a representative collection of ecocritical readings.

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approaches are increasingly considered viable explorations of ecological ethics despite their non-ecocentrism. Contrary to logic like Meeker’s, this essay argues that Cather’s focus on human-nature interactivity not only expresses an ethics but also presents a critical analysis of modernization’s effects on the environment. Two of her best-known novels, O Pioneers! (1913) and The Professor’s House (1925) draw on the figure of the home and its management in a manner reminiscent of the late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury U.S. nature writing of John Burroughs. These works adopt Burroughs’ celebration of the homestead but reconfigure it for the modern era. For both writers, home is the space where one can relate to the singularity of the immediate environment, but for Cather, home is also the space where the effacement of local ecology by growing cultural commercialism is experienced most profoundly. To that end, Cather contributes to what is now a definitive task of ecocriticism and modern environmentalism: the critique of what Anthony Giddens calls modernization’s “disembedding” of social relations from local places and cultures. For many decades before Cather began writing her most popular novels, Burroughs was publishing his social commentaries, literary criticism, and naturalist essays for a wide audience. Although nature writing is often associated with wilderness and wildlife observation, Burroughs, a farmer himself, extends his comments to agriculture and, more generally, to how humans interact with their environments to reproduce their lives. In fact, Burroughs showers farming and rural life with such high praises that it becomes clear that he not only recognizes nature’s intrinsic value but also finds value in its development for human use. His 1886 essay “Phases of Farm Life” opens with the following announcement: I have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life. Where country life is safe and enjoyable, where many of the conveniences and appliances of the town are joined to the large freedom and large benefits of the country, a high state of civilization prevails.3

To illustrate this lifestyle, Burroughs lists a number of activities that shape country life: barn construction, maple sap collection, sugar-making, rock wall building, and care for animals, among others. Far from advocating a primitivist return to a state of nature or proclaiming a preference for 3

John Burroughs, “Phases of Farm Life” in Signs and Seasons, 1886. Jeff Walker, ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 233.

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wilderness untouched by the human hand, “Phases of Farm Life” exalts the life balanced between the local benefits of the rural with the pleasures, comforts, and technologies produced by human invention and labor. Aware that this equilibrium can be undone by “the more elegant pursuits, or the ways and fashions of the town,” Burroughs reminds his readers that the farmer has “many resources,” including an “intimacy with nature,” because in the country one “live[s] with nature”: “the farmer has the most sane and natural occupation… He alone, strictly speaking, has a home.”4 The relationship of the home to an “intimacy with nature” comes to the foreground of Cather’s writing as she traces modernization’s effects of the American sense of place. A 1923 essay tracks the changes taking place that are causing this bond to disappear in her childhood state Of Nebraska: “The generation that subdued the wild land and broke up the virgin prairie is passing, but it is still there, a group of rugged figures in the background which inspire respect, compel admiration.” These pioneers, she continues, “came into a wilderness and had to make everything, had to be as ingenious as shipwrecked sailors.” With new national and international networks of commodity production and consumption rearranging everyday life, the settlers’ descendants “[buy] whatever is expensive and ugly”: “The generation now in the driver’s seat hates to make anything, wants to live and die in an automobile, scudding past those areas where the old men used to follow the long corn-rows up and down. They want to buy everything ready-made: clothes, food, education, music, pleasure.”5 Cather is referring to the earliest stages, in Nebraska, of what Anthony Giddens calls “disembedding,” which he argues is the definitive process of modernity: it is “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”6 For Cather, creative work in local contexts is replaced by the ease of purchasing ready-made commodities, traveling swiftly in cars, and participating in a mass-marketed American culture with no affinity for place. Many of Cather’s stories transpire in this context, and O Pioneers! and The Professor’s House suggest that the homestead might be the space most affected by the rapid social and economic change in the earlytwentieth century; in these works the home is also the site of resistance to modernization’s effects on human-environment relationships. As the 4

Ibid., 233, 260. Willa Cather, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle.” The Nation 117 (5 Sept. 1923): 236, 238. 6 Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21. 5

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meaningful structures of everyday life become embedded into unidentifiable networks of exchange, as local economies are pervaded by an expanding capitalist market, characters like Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! become special—yet anachronistic. Unlike her family members who are ever more seduced by products arriving from afar, like high heels, bath tubs, and exotic pianos, her estate is ordered meticulously in relation to its immediate surroundings. The following itemized description recalls Burroughs' detailed illustration of the economy of farm life in “Phases”: When you go out of the house into the flower garden, there you feel again the fine order and fine arrangement manifest all over the great farm; in the fencing and hedging, in the windbreaks and sheds, in the symmetrical pasture ponds, planted with scrub willows to give shade to the cattle in flytime… You feel that, properly, Alexandra’s house is the big out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself best.7

The interior of Alexandra’s home is indistinguishable from the space beyond it. In her kitchen, preserving her garden produce for the winter was “almost a mania.” 8 Rather than rely on winter supplies brought from afar through modern systems of travel and technology, her “three young Swedish girls chatter and cook and pickle and preserve all summer long.”9 As Burroughs might say, Alexandra is “intimate” with nature, “cooperat[ing] with the clouds, the sun, the seasons, heat, wind, rain, frost.”10 In “Phases of Farm Life” living rurally rather than choosing “the various distempers [of] the city and artificial life” is a matter of preference yet Burroughs recognizes that farmer-settlers’ descendents, much like those in Cather’s works, “are looking to the town and its fashions, and only waiting for a chance to flee thither.”11 Still, despite the fact that the “railroad has found its way through or near every settlement,” Burroughs is confident that “the essential charm of the farm remains and always will remain.”12 By the time Cather publishes her novels, some thirty years later, the stakes change. Cather’s characters do not have an easy time maintaining this lifestyle as a simple preference. While Alexandra is successful in managing her 7 Willa Cather, O Pioneers! 1913. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 49-50. 8 Ibid., 17-8. 9 Ibid., 49. 10 Burroughs, “Phases of Farm Life,” 260-1. 11 Ibid., 239. 12 Ibid., 247.

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property, the leave-no-trace style of Crazy Ivar in O Pioneers! proves unsustainable because Ivar dismisses the Homestead Act’s demand for development; eventually, he loses his land to “mismanagement.”13 In The Professor’s House, Prof. Godfrey St. Peter tends toward depression and suicide as he refuses to vacate his old house and garden in exchange for upward mobility. His friend and student Tom Outland is devoted to the study of the Blue Mesa as a symbol of primordial human need for a home, yet he inhabits the novel only as a ghost and a memory—as though he were not an admissible presence in this novel of modern life. Modernization thoroughly displaces each from place and earth, and staying in touch with their environments requires rituals, memories, pilgrimages, and sacrifice—rites of passage that Burroughs might never have predicted necessary. I will show how this works in particular in The Professor’s House through the characters of Prof. St. Peter and Tom Outland. In this work as well as O Pioneers!, Cather constructs the pre-modern home as a pure, natural, ordered economy—faithful, in fact, to its etymological Greek roots in the management of the home, the hearth, and the household. In contrast, for her, the global market that modernization brings to rural sites contaminates the relationship between the self and environment by introducing an intentionality of calculation and investment, making nature a means to an end. It is an “artificial” economy much like Burroughs’ “artificial” city, threatening or even forbidding environmental ethics much in the same way that Leo Marx describes the machine’s threat to the garden: it is “shocking intruder[s] upon a fantasy of idyllic satisfaction.”14 In many of Cather’s works, positively coded characters reject money, conspicuous consumption, and class aspirations, all of which she associates with the effacement of local places, the erasure of cultural differences, and a lack of feeling for outdoors environments. Even Alexandra Bergson, who makes quite a bit of money through her land development, is distanced from the modern frenzy of consumerism preoccupying her community because she “knows nothing” about shopping for “useless and utterly unusable objects.”15 Of all Cather’s characters, though, Prof. St. Peter is, as Lisa Marie Lucenti writes, “the most profoundly exiled.”16 Increasingly alienated from 13

Cather, O Pioneers!, 53. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 1964. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 29. 15 Cather, O Pioneers!, 58. 16 Lisa Marie Lucenti,. “Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House: Sleeping with the Dead.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41.3 (Fall 1999): 236; orig. 14

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his roles of husband, father, and father-in-law, St. Peter observes his family’s disturbing immersion in commodity culture. The novel is filled with his family’s longings for the travel, jewels, furs, houses, furnishings, and proper performances of their new upper-class status, and it tellingly opens with the Professor “alone in the dismantled house where he had lived ever since his marriage.”17 His class-climbing wife and daughter disapprove of his unwillingness to move out of this “old house” where he loves his thoroughly “improper” office.18 The house as a whole, we are told in the first paragraph of the novel, is quite unattractive, almost garish: It was almost as ugly as it is possible for a house to be… the front porch just too narrow for comfort, with a slanting floor and sagging steps… the Professor regarded thoughtfully the needless inconveniences he had put up with for so long; the stairs that were too steep, the halls that were too cramped, the awkward oak mantels… crowned by bumptious wooden balls.” Furthermore, the old house’s steps creek, faucets drip, windows stick, and closet doors don’t fit.19

As a result, the refusal to move that opens the novel amounts to his determination to remain grounded in his ugly, inconvenient, uncomfortable old home, to work in his garden, to drink wine in his beloved office, to maintain relations with his neighbors, to keep his memories of his children’s childhoods spent there—behavior his family can only see as “irritable and unreasonable” and “not fitting.”20 His proper place—his ugly old home—has become inappropriate to his upwardly mobile family, and their new, classy, proper home is inappropriate to him. In the midst of his crisis, the Professor finds solace in the memories of his deceased friend and student, Tom Outland, who did not subscribe to the materialism the Professor abhors; instead, Tom understood the need for a sense of home. Through Tom’s account of his discovery of the ancient Anasazi city of the Blue Mesa—located at what is actually Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado—the Professor believes he rediscovers not only the earth in his own environment but his youth, “the realest of his lives.”21 As the Professor remembers it, his childhood involved a “primitive” relation to nature and place, and when he welcomes the primitive back into his life, he reunites with the earth: “He was only ital.). 17 Cather, The Professor’s House, 3. 18 Ibid., 8. 19 Ibid., 3, 4. 20 Ibid., 81, 47. 21 Ibid., 240.

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interested in earth and woods and water. Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him… He was earth, and would return to earth.”22 However, the Professor’s return to the earth as his proper place is not as simple a choice as it was in Burroughs' “Phases of Farm Life.” Rather, in The Professor’s House, the Professor must excavate his memories and sacrifice modern comforts, and as we shall see in the figure of Tom Outland, faithfulness to place and resistance to the modern market’s disembedding force also requires extensive rituals and pilgrimages. The Professor’s alienation from place and home makes up parts I and III of The Professor’s House and is interrupted by part II titled “Tom Outland’s Story.” This “pastoral interlude,” as one critic puts it, invokes the premodern in its turn to an ancient American civilization for answers to the questions modernity raises about place and home.23 “Tom Outland’s Story” resurrects Tom from the dead to act as a narrator at the moment of the Professor’s most intense memories, taking both the Professor and the reader away from the disembedded frenzy of the commodification and homogenization of culture that Cather portrays. In his story, Tom reflects on what it might mean to be human—home-making and reproducing life grounded in place—and on what can cause such a primordial process to go wrong. However, he also explains that he initially did not appreciate the true beauty of the Mesa and he describes the pilgrimage that put him in the position to do so. After his discovery of the Anasazi city, Tom tells us that, confident the United States would see great value for its people in the remains of an ancient American civilization, he embarked on a journey to Washington, seeking scholarly and government interest. He and his friend Roddy rationalized freely paying for expenses of the trip out of his own pocket because he believed his efforts would secure some type of reward for the costs of his discovery: All our further expenses on the mesa would be paid by the Government. Roddy often hinted that we would get a substantial reward of some kind. When we broke or lost anything at our work, he used to smile and say: “Never mind. I guess our Uncle Sam will make that good to us.”24

22

Ibid., 241 (my italics). Glen A. Love, “Place, Style, and Human Nature in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House.” Practical Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 89. 24 Cather, The Professor’s House, 200 (my italics). 23

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Tom was making an economic investment—whether it be for money, honor, and/or prestige is unclear—and “Uncle Sam” was to act as a form of insurance protecting the self-evident value Tom sees in the remnants of this lost civilization, a value beyond “any question of money.”25 But as we might expect, Washington disappoints Tom. When he is forced to circulate his Native American relics in what he comes to realize is a market economy governed by law, his faith in the government is shattered. So unlike the family (protected by an “Uncle”) that he imagined, this economy is brokered by corrupt people obsessed with salaries, titles, and promotions. Like Tom, these brokers function within a system of economy: they are seeking rewards for themselves. However, unlike Tom, they understand only market value and the accumulation of capital (even if symbolic). In fact, the only D.C. characters who appreciate Tom’s discovery are poor and powerless. In The Professor’s House, care for money, prestige, and power precludes the attribution of value to place and home. After his disillusionment with Washington, Tom returns to the Mesa “dead broke”—a particularly apt figure in this story of economies—but he is “wiser” now, seeking “a free life” and “free air.”26 In this oft-quoted passage, Tom relates his renewed experience of the Mesa upon his return: [T]hat was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all—the first night that all of me was there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole… something had happened in me that made it possible for me to coordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness... The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to this one. For me the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion… It had formerly been mixed up with other motives; but now that they were gone, I had my happiness unalloyed.27

This quotation is often read as a euphoric realization of the significance of place. This approach, though, fails to read the economics underlying Tom’s epiphany. In this passage, Tom’s environmental ethics and his experience of place are contingent upon purity from his prior economic motives, which included his intention to invest in the ruins as a way to secure a return (a “substantial reward”). No longer suffering from impure intentions, Tom experiences religious and happy feelings in the Mesa, and 25

Ibid., 220. Ibid., 213. 27 Ibid., 226-27. 26

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his new “unalloyed” or uncontaminated perspective enables his presence as well as the Mesa’s. He tells us that “all of me was there” as is the Mesa “as a whole.” In this description of communion with nature, Tom’s sacrifice of an investment intentionality brings him transcendence. Traveling to Washington was a type of pilgrimage, purifying him of all ulterior motives, grounding him in place, and producing the Mesa’s eventual presence. After this ritualistic cleansing, Tom does not live long, but he does live long enough to embark on an education, leading him to Prof. St. Peter. O Pioneers! and The Professor’s House, like Burroughs’ “Phases of Farm Life,” focus not on wilderness but on the ways in which nature and the rural are developed and transformed to create a sense of home and place. In each of Cather’s texts, this approach to environmental ethics is articulated through distinct economies: a sense of place and affection for nature is figured through the home and its economics—managing local resources efficiently, gardening, loving one’s old home, homesteading, and exploring the ancient homes of indigenous Americans. However, unlike Burroughs, these works do not portray unmediated interaction with nature and one’s immediate ecological setting as an uncomplicated lifestyle choice. If Cather were to use Burroughs’ words in her capacity as a modernist writer, she might argue it is not only “the farmer [who] has the most sane and natural occupation”; rather, the gardener, the homesteader, the appreciator of local ecosystems and cultures, or anyone who resists the market economy as the only standard of value and maintains or embraces a home economics, “He [or she] alone, strictly speaking, has a home.” But only after ritual, pilgrimage, memory, and sacrifice—and sometimes only temporarily.

Works Cited Burroughs, John. “Phases of Farm Life.” Signs and Seasons. 1886. Jeff Walker, ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. 233-261. Cather, Willa. “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle.” The Nation 117 (5 Sept. 1923): 236-38. —. O Pioneers! 1913. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995. —. The Professor’s House. 1925. Vintage Classics. New York: Random House, 1990. Giddens, Anthony. Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

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Love, Glen A. “Place, Style, and Human Nature in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House.” Practical Ecocriticism. University of Virginia Press, 2003. 89-116. Lucenti, Lisa Marie. “Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House: Sleeping with the Dead.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41.3 (Fall 1999): 236-61. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 1964. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Meeker, Joseph W. “Willa Cather: The Plow and the Pen.” Cather Studies, Volume 5: Willa Cather’s Ecological Imagination. Susan J. Rosowski, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 77-88. Susan J. Rosowski, ed. Cather Studies, Volume 5: Willa Cather’s Ecological Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

PLACE, BELONGING, AND ENVIRONMENTAL HUMILITY: THE EXPERIENCE OF “TECHED” AS PORTRAYED BY AMERICAN NOVELIST AND AGRARIAN REFORMER LOUIS BROMFIELD DAVID SEAMON

I am an environment-behavior researcher working in a program of architecture and landscape architecture. My major teaching responsibility is to make design students more aware of the importance of the natural and built environments in human life. As a phenomenologist, I am interested in understanding peoples’ experiences with environments, places, landscapes, and the natural world. By phenomenology, I mean most simply the exploration and description of things and experiences as human beings experience those things and experiences. For instance, why are places important for people, or how might we find ways to foster a deeper concern and care for nature so that people might think and act in a more environmentally responsible way? This question of facilitating respect and reverence for nature in general and specific places in particular explains my interest in American novelist, agricultural writer, and agrarian reformer Louis Bromfield (18961956), who in 1939 at the age of forty-two ended a fourteen-year sojourn in France and returned to his native rural Ohio to begin one of the mid-20th century’s most significant agricultural and ecological experiments— Malabar Farm, a 1000-acre property located in east-central Ohio about ten miles southeast of Mansfield.1 1

Between 1924 with The Green Bay Tree, his first published work, and ending in 1951 with Mr. Smith, Bromfield wrote eighteen novels, one of which—Early Autumn—won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926. In his early career, Bromfield was praised by critics, but the 19th-century, “genteel” style of his novels quickly fell out of critical favor, though some of his later works received positive reviews, especially The Farm (1934), The Rains Came (1937), and Mrs. Parkington (1943).

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At Malabar, Bromfield set out to demonstrate that misused, unproductive farmland could be renewed and again made profitable, mostly through topsoil restoration. His experiment continued until his death in 1956 and succeeded in restoring Malabar’s depleted soils through easy-to-follow practices that Bromfield hoped would be duplicated by other farmers in the United States and abroad. The result of these practices, Bromfield claimed, would be land that produced “the maximum of its potentiality without loss of fertility.”2 Phenomenology is concerned with the wholeness of human action and experience. As a phenomenologist, I am intrigued by Bromfield’s belief that efforts at agricultural and place restoration must be comprehensive existentially and incorporate both intellect and feeling, both knowledge and intuition, both scientific understanding and an instinctive sense of what is right for nature and for particular places. At Malabar, Bromfield regularly made use of many of the latest advances in agricultural science and technology—for example, contour plowing, cover crops, legumes as green fertilizer, water resource management, hybridization, disk plows, and tillers (though he seriously questioned the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides).3 At the same time, however, he believed that none of these technical tools and knowledge would make a successful farm unless the farmer felt an instinctive relationship with the land that included respect and empathy: A good farmer, Bromfield wrote, must have “that feel of all with which nature concerns herself…. He is the man who learns by farming, to whom the very blades of grass and stalks of corn tell stories.”4 Among the reading public, his writings have remained popular, and it is estimated that, worldwide, his books have sold more than twenty million copies (Scott, 1998, 648). Several of his works remain in print today. Bromfield’s Malabar Farm is now owned by the State of Ohio and operates as an Ohio state park and historic site, drawing some 200,000 visitors annually. 2 Louis Bromfield, Pleasant Valley (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), 117. 3 In their excellent history of the “alternative agriculture” movement in 20thcentury America, Beeman and Pritchard devote considerable discussion to Bromfield, whom they describe as “the most effective voice for permanent ecological agriculture” (50). At Malabar, these efforts meant “restoring the land and streams to a pre-1800s condition by halting erosion, using a minimum of manufactured agricultural chemicals, rebuilding the pastures and grasslands by planting grass or nitrogen-fixing legumes, using generous amounts of green manures, organic mulches, and composts, and gaining an overall scientific and psychic knowledge of the intricacies of the land…” (ibid., 52). On his view of chemical fertilizers, see chapter 4 of Bromfield’s Out of the Earth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950). 4 Bromfield, Pleasant Valley, 157.

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This instinctive, unself-conscious awareness of and caring for nature and place is what Bromfield often referred to in his writings as “teched” (rhymes with “fetched”)—a colloquial word he used to describe a capacity for experiencing an intuitive intimacy with the natural world’s things, creatures, landscapes, and places. Bromfield believed that this kind of direct openness to the world leads to a truer, more sincere understanding of nature and an instinctive wish for working with and using the natural world in a more thoughtful, responsible way.

Up Ferguson Way Perhaps Bromfield’s most thorough portrayal of teched is in “Up Ferguson Way,” a 1944 short story grounded in Bromfield’s childhood experience.5 Set in rural Ohio at the start of the last century, the story begins with the young Bromfield’s first encounter with Zenobia Ferguson, an eccentric, independent elderly woman who lives on a desolate hilltop farm. Locals call Zenobia’s farm “up Ferguson way” because the place, looking down to the valleys below, projects an unusual, ethereal ambience. “So you’re going out of this world for a time?” says a valley neighbor to the seven- or eight-year-old Louis and his father Tom as they head their horse and buggy up the rough, narrow, tree-canopied road to Zenobia’s farm.6 When they arrive at Zenobia’s weathered, unpainted cottage, Tom and Zenobia go inside to visit, while Louis explores “the jungle of a garden” around her house, accompanied by three large dogs and a white colt named Willie, who all “became suddenly old friends.”7 Shortly, there arrive a Jersey cow, her new-born calf, many birds, and a squirrel that “sat without fear… and chattered and made faces at me.”8 The friendly proximity of these animals, writes Bromfield, “made the heart of that small boy sing, I think because all these living things seemed so near and so without strangeness or fear.”9 Zenobia invites Louis and his father to lunch, after which Tom takes a nap and Louis returns outside to play by a pond fed by a spring near the garden. All of the earlier animals plus others gather at the pond with Louis, who suddenly experiences a moment of deep insight: 5

Louis Bromfield, “Up Ferguson Way,” in The World We Live In (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 240-72. 6 Ibid., 242. 7 Ibid., 245. 8 Ibid., 246. 9 Ibid.

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…suddenly the calf became my brother, a small creature for whom I felt a sudden intense love, quite different from the sort of love I felt for any person…. It was if we were both a part of something which other people did not understand, a whole world apart in which there were sounds which no human could understand.10

Louis then realizes that someone is watching him, and he turns to see Zenobia, for whom he has “the same feeling of fathomless understanding.”11 They stare at each other for a long time, and then Zenobia points to the squirrel, named John, who she says is an “impudent bad character but very comical.”12 She calls him and he scampers up her dress to sit on her shoulder and chatters. Zenobia looks at Louis and says, “You see what they’re like. We can talk to each other.” She turned her head a little way and said, “How about it John? Can’t we?” The squirrel made a chattering noise and Zenobia said, “He’s asking who you are and what you’re doing here.” Then to the squirrel she said, “It’s all right. He knows what we know. He may forget it some day but in the end, it will come back to him. He’s one of those that is teched like us.”13

Later, as Tom and Louis drive away from Zenobia’s, the boy asks his father what “teched” means. Looking quizzically at Louis, Tom says it means that “somebody’s a little crazy” then asks him why he wants to know. Louis replies that Zenobia told the squirrel it was all right, that he was teched like her. The father laughs, teasing that maybe she’s right but then saying more seriously: “‘Most people think Zenobia is teched but I think she’s a mighty smart woman’. And then he sighed. Why, I did not know then. I only suspected there was something he envied Zenobia.”14

Teched as an Experience The Oxford English Dictionary identifies “teched” as a version of “tetched,” which is a colloquial variation of “touched,” in the sense of “mentally deranged to a slight degree.”15 This is the definition that Louis’ father provides, though his sense of envy as he speaks of Zenobia’s intelligence suggests that he knows much more about this kind of 10

Ibid., 248. Ibid., 249. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 250. 15 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v “Teched.” 11

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experience than he lets on. Significantly, the OED gives no definition of teched as young Bromfield knows the experience—a fullness of encounter in which he and the natural world meet in a feeling of wholeness and care, to such a degree that he understands, sees, and converses with the inanimate and living things of nature in a vivid, other-worldly way: I began to feel… the sensation… of coming… into another strange world that somehow existed on a different plane from all other human life. I did not fall asleep yet the sensation was that of being suspended between sleep and consciousness when everything becomes amazingly clear and one’s senses are awake to things which at other times go unseen and unrecorded.16

To others hearing of the experience secondhand, such a way of being with nature might suggest, as the OED definition claims, a mild derangement but, for Bromfield, as the firsthand experiencer rather than the vicarious observer, this encounter seems much more real and sane than ordinary, typical experience—what Bromfield describes as “the world of dull reason and what we call perhaps oddly and wrong ‘reality’.” 17 In his book-length study of Bromfield’s writings, David Anderson defines teched as “capable of experiencing a mystic kinship with and understanding of nature and of animals to the extent that intuition and empathy transcend physical and biological barriers.”18 Anderson notes that, for Bromfield, teched was “essential to understanding nature and to using it by serving it through the laws that cannot be learned except through experience and desire.”19 Bromfield himself defines teched as “that inner sense of mystical feeling which makes [people] one with Nature and with animals and birds.”20 The fact that this definition appears in the last book he completed before his death suggests that the notion continued to be an important part of his personal environmental ethic.21 16

Bromfield, The World We Live In, 265. Ibid., 261. 18 David D. Anderson, Louis Bromfield (New York: Twayne, 1964), 154. 19 Ibid. 20 Louis Bromfield, Animals and Other People (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955), xi. 21 In his extensive biography of Bromfield, Ivan Scott speaks somewhat critically of Bromfield’s “romantic urge to achieve the self-sufficiency once known in America’s traditional agriculture” (642) and, curiously, makes no mention of teched in his 671-page study. I would argue that teched is central to Bromfield’s life and work and should be a hallmark theme in understanding who he was and what he contributed to ecology and sustainable agriculture. 17

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Throughout his writings, Bromfield suggests that the best farmers, in their passion for the land and its life, are teched, though his writings give few indications as to why the experience happens or whether it can be learned. In some places, he seems to suggest that one is born with this sensibility: “I do not believe that these traits can be acquired; they are almost mystical qualities, belonging only to people who are … very close to Nature itself.”22 Elsewhere, however, he emphasizes the possibility of others, already teched, passing on the experience to children. One person he thanks is his father who “was always a little teched…” and “encouraged in me a love for all that had to do with animals and the outof-doors”23 In all his writings, the encounter with Zenobia Ferguson in “Up Ferguson Way” is perhaps the most memorable and extensive description of the teched experience. A year after that short story, in Pleasant Valley, the first of his five books describing the Malabar experiment, Bromfield explains that the real-life model for Zenobia was a local woman named Phoebe Wise, whose identity he hoped to disguise while she was still alive. He makes it clear that Wise did not live “Up Ferguson Way” nor did she shoot her lover. She did, however, call the young Bromfield teched and was an influential figure in his life, even though he met her only a few times: “I think I never met any individual who left upon me so profound an impression.”24 He describes their first encounter in a way that vividly evokes the effect she had on him: “As I turned, I saw her watching me with her burning black eyes, and suddenly there passed between us a strange current of sympathy and knowledge, which bound us together forever afterward. Because of that look I remembered her in strange, faroff places. Sometimes I dreamed of her.”25

22

Bromfield, Pleasant Valley (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), 56. Ibid., 98. In her memoir of her father, Ellen Bromfield Geld suggests that he passed on the experience of being teched to her. She describes how he would regularly take her and her two sisters out into the Malabar landscape and bring their attention to the sights, sounds, smells, and goings-on of the natural world around them. She writes: “One has simply to come clean from the river, lie in the warm sand, look up at the trees and find heaven all about. It is a trick I have often since used to lift myself out of intolerable depression, one that I learned from my father when he taught us our first lessons about living on the farm.” Geld, The Heritage: A Daughter’s Memories of Louis Bromfield. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 119-120. 24 Bromfield, Pleasant Valley, 90. 25 Ibid., 94. Before 1944, Bromfield had created other versions of Zenobia Ferguson that are much more sketchy and much less moving than the portrayal in 23

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This empathetic understanding joining people and creatures before unrelated is the experiential crux of teched, strikingly encapsulated here by Bromfield’s phrase, “a strange current of sympathy and knowledge.” Some critics have interpreted such an experience as illusory, romantic, or impractical, a nostalgic longing for the agricultural independence and selfsufficiency of the rural Ohio landscape in which he grew up. For example, conservationist Charles E. Little wrote in 1988 that: Farms are becoming fewer and fewer, with greater and greater capital requirements, and there is less need for those such as he, who are “teched.” It would now be better to know how to run a computer than to run your hands lovingly over a tall stalk of corn.26

As a phenomenologist, I see the significance of teched in a much different light from Little, partly because the notion points toward the possibility of experiencing an intuitive intimacy with things and creatures such that the boundaries of self and Other are replaced by a deepened understanding and, in Bromfield’s case, a lived foundation for restoring and caring for the soil, land, plants, and animals.

Teched and Place In other writings, Bromfield makes clear that a teched relationship can also be had with place. In many of his works, a particular place plays a central role in the story’s development. Typically, the motivating factor is a character’s love of a particular place that he or she has come to know intimately through firsthand encounter, sometimes over a life time, other times for a short period involving some kind of deep personal encounter. Bromfield presents one of his most powerful evocations of a teched relationship with place in the “The Pond,” a short story included in the same 1944 collection in which “Up Ferguson Way” appears. Although Bromfield never uses the word “teched” in this short story, many of the situations and experiences he presents involve the same sense of lived intimacy encountered by the young Bromfield in “Up Ferguson Way.” Set in the Dakota prairie and the South Pacific during World War II, the story focuses on the last days in the life of Tom Peterson, a young Mid-Western fighter pilot who, growing up on the flat, open Dakota plains, had never “Up Ferguson Way” in works such as “The Life of Zenobia White,” a short story in Awake and Rehearse (1929), and The Farm (1934). 26 Charles E. Little, ed. Louis Bromfield at Malabar: Writings on Farming and Country Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988), 232.

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seen an ocean until his flight training a year before. In sharing his personal history with friend and fellow fighter pilot Jimmy as they relax on a Pacific island beach at twilight, Tom returns again and again to his fondness for one place—a small farm pond that sometimes nearly dried up in hot weather. The pond, Tom tells Jimmy, was “the only water for miles around” and became the spatial and lived center of Tom’s childhood and teen years.27 He explains to Jimmy: The country’s kind of flat up there, no trees to speak of… it just stretches away as far as you can see. It’s kind of lonely. A pond like that made a lot of difference. When I was a little kid it was like a whole ocean to me. I used to wade in it and sail boats on it. When I began to learn geography I used to pretend it was the Atlantic—one side was America and one side Europe. I used to pretend the boats were ocean liners.28

Jimmy leaves to sleep, while Tom stays to swim. He stands in the ocean water with his feet planted in the warm sand and suddenly becomes aware of “a faint sense of ecstasy, as if he were no longer himself, an individual… but only an atom, one infinitesimal particle belonging to this whole universe of palm trees and white sand and space and stars and phosphorescent water, an atom forever immortal and indestructible because he was part of something far greater than himself.”29 Later in the night as he tries to sleep, Tom can only think of his mother Annie and his newly-wed wife Sally, who both care for the pond as much as he does: He kept seeing again the pond and his mother and Sally. But he saw the two women always in relation to the pond. They were standing beside it feeding the ducks… or Sally was cutting the wild iris…. And sometimes he saw Sally and himself as children playing on the shallow, muddy edges of the pond…. And he thought how much the pond had been a part of his life and Sally’s, how they had grown up there beside it taking each other quite for granted until one day his body told him what love was…. It was beside the pond he had first touched Sally’s hand in a new way…. It was beside that pond that he had said, “I’m going to air cadet school. Maybe we’d better be married before I go away.”30

27

Bromfield, The World We Live In, 3. Ibid. 29 Ibid., 5. 30 Ibid., 7. 28

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If Tom, Annie, and Sally represent individuals who, through place, engage their world with integrity and care, Tom’s father, Axel Peterson, represents a human type for whom Bromfield has little sympathy: individuals disengaged from the everyday wonderment and joy that their place might offer if they could fully encounter it. Bromfield describes Peterson as “a hard man who squeezed every penny—a man who didn’t seem to have much human feeling. He’d never understood about the pond or why his wife and his son loved it so deeply.”31 The three most important things in Peterson’s life are his land, his cattle, and his bank account. His wife, whom he no longer loves, comes fourth. Having drilled water wells on his property, he no longer has practical need for the pond and, when Tom is seventeen, Peterson begins to talk about draining it, since he could use the reclaimed land to plant more crops. About the time that Tom is on the Pacific beach telling Jimmy about the pond, Annie and Sally travel to Iowa for three weeks to visit Annie’s family. While they are away, Peterson bulldozes the pond and dynamites the stumps of the cottonwood trees that had grown at the pond’s edge. As Annie and Sally return home, Annie looks expectantly for the silhouettes of the cottonwoods, which seem not to be there. Suddenly, terrified, she realizes her husband has destroyed the pond. She stumbles into the house, and that night there was no sound of frogs or night birds: “In all the hot interminable flatness there was only an oppressive silence.”32 A few days later, Annie sends Tom, now on an aircraft carrier headed for battle, a “tired letter,” and near its end he realizes why: She explains his father has drained the pond. In a postscript, she tells him not to worry: “It makes less difference than I thought it would.”33 But Tom knows the falseness of her words and that “the last thing she had to hang on to was gone from her life.”34 He hopes the baby will help take the pond’s place for his mother, though he suddenly realizes that his child will not have the pond, and is filled with hatred for his father. The next day, as Tom’s fighter-plane squadron prepares to take off and attack enemy positions on nearby Pacific islands, a radio operator runs out to Tom’s plane to give him a radiogram message—that Sally has given birth to a boy. Tom flies off to battle, downs one enemy plane, is hit, and crashes into the sea. As the plane plunges out of control, he has the same teched feeling he experienced earlier on the beach—“being only a part of the universe, no more than a grain of the powdered coral beneath his 31

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 15. 33 Ibid., 16. 34 Ibid. 32

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feet.”35 In the moment before his death, he envisions the pond, “seeing it very clearly as he had seen it as a boy.” Then he remembers it is no longer there and thinks desperately, “‘The boy must have a pond! The boy and Ma must have it back again!’”36 Five days after the baby is born, Annie wakes fitfully “at the still hour of the morning when tired, old people die.”37 As she listens to the sounds outside, she seems to hear lapping water as it was before the pond’s destruction. She looks out a window toward the place where the pond had been. There “in the moonlight was the pond like a burnished sheet of silver.”38 She rushes from the house, weeping hysterically, not believing what she sees until she wades into real water. “How glad Tom will be!” she thinks. “He would be almost as happy as he’d be about the baby.”39 The news of the pond’s reappearance spreads quickly, with the county engineer hypothesizing that an underground spring was always beneath the pond, and Peterson’s blasting the cottonwood stumps loosened shale underneath so the spring water could flow upward. Local people are “filled with the kind of mystical awe and excitement which touches drycountry people at the sight of running water, for water is a source of life and ties all living things together.”40 Peterson decides not to try to remove the pond again: “It wasn’t any good fighting a spring,” he thinks.41 Two weeks after the reappearance of the pond, Annie and Sally are sitting at its edge when the mailman in his old battered car delivers the letter informing them that Tom is dead. Annie spots the envelope and “almost at once she knew…”42 Sally is watching, and she knows too. The women stare out at the pond, then Annie looks again at the letter and “a strange look of wonder” comes into her face. In a quiet voice filled with awe, she says, “Sally, it happened on September 16… that was the night of the full moon—the same night the pond came back.”43

35

Ibid., 22. Ibid. 37 Ibid., 23. 38 Ibid., 24. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 25. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 27. 43 Ibid. 36

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Teched, Place and Belonging What to make of Bromfield’s intertwining of life, death, time, and place? Whether Tom’s willing the pond to reappear in the moment right before he dies has anything to do with the reappearance of the pond, who can say? More so, for the issues at hand—teched and place—Bromfield’s story lays bare a penetrating immersion-in-world where, through a deep affection and involvement with place, people are given back a simple but remarkable fulfillment. What Bromfield seems to be suggesting is that human-being-in-the-world is much more elaborate and mysterious than we usually suppose—that love of place, in its power to concentrate human intention and concern, can hold a world together, even as individuals of that world come and go. Place, Bromfield indicates, offers one foundation for a lived continuity in the midst of continual temporal, personal, and life change. How does Bromfield’s presentation of place relate to teched? Partly, it is through moments of being teched that one feels a sense of what Bromfield terms “belonging”—“of being a small and relatively unimportant part of something vast but infinitely friendly.”44 People come to belong to place as they realize they are not isolated selves but an integral part of a much larger lived continuum. A year before his death, Bromfield wrote: “I have come to understand that from earliest childhood, this passion to belong, to lose one’s self in the whole pattern of life, was the strong and overwhelming force that unconsciously has directed every thought, every act, every motive of my existence.”45 Tom, Annie, and Sally find this passion to belong through their deep lived involvement with the pond as a place, which often, through a feeling of teched, answers back in a kind of quiet, unspoken confirmation. Bromfield suggests that, in such teched moments, one moves away from a sense of isolation toward a melding of self and world out of which one may feel joy and compassion for the greater good—for example, as Tom has his teched moment standing in the warm ocean water, he feels “a sudden desire to weep, not out of any personal sorrow, but out of a sadness that was vast and incomprehensible—the sadness of the whole human race.”46 When we allow ourselves to let go of our separateness, we feel humbled in the fragility and suffering of a world from which typically we feel apart. 44

Louis Bromfield, From My Experience (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955), 12. 45 Ibid. 46 Bromfield, The World We Live In, 6.

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In turn, loving place may be one vehicle for allowing this letting go. Throughout the story, Tom and Annie find themselves experiencing or contemplating teched moments in relation to place. For example, Tom cannot really explain to Jimmy why the pond is so important in his life— “he would never be able to tell anyone really how he felt about the pond, how much he loved it, how much it was a part of himself, how much it had to do with his life, as if he himself had been born out of its very depths.”47 Likewise, Annie, as she sits by the pond for hours at a time, often becomes completely a part of that place, and this heightened encounter includes a sadness she feels for her husband’s way with his world: “She was filled with a sudden rush of pity that he was so hard and so narrow, that he knew and understood so little of the richness of life, that he never saw the beauty that lay in the sheen of a mallard’s wing, in the lettuce green of the cottonwood leaves in spring or the warmth that came of a calf’s nose nuzzling your hand. He had made all of his land and the animals that lived upon it no more than a factory.”48 For people who can give to place by shifting their selfness aside, place gives back in return. Peterson understands place only as a thing to do his bidding, thus the place cannot reveal its deeper presence or joy. Place, in other words, both nourishes and is nourished by the people who help it to be. “It was like a cycle,” thinks Annie, “the cycle of the life of the pond. There was order and rhythm to it.”49 Or as Tom imagines it, “being only an infinitesimal part of something vast and splendorous which had to be carried on.”50 Bromfield suggests that to connect and so merge intensively with place is to participate in a lived cycle whereby, through the experience of belonging, people, world, and time are finally a whole.

Teched and an Environmental Humility In Bromfield’s suggestion of a lived reciprocity between people and world facilitated experientially by teched and grounded existentially by belonging, there is a connection with phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger’s notion of appropriation—i.e., realizing that all things have value simply because they exist and understanding that this

47

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 11. 49 Ibid., 14. 50 Ibid., 7. 48

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realization implies a responsibility to care for and protect what exists so that this value is not squandered or destroyed.51 Phenomenological geographer Edward Relph writes that “Appropriation lies in that moment of insight that reveals beings for themselves, the moment in which we know that this is.”52 In this sense, Heidegger’s appropriation has relation to Bromfield’s teched in that the young Bromfield’s encountering the animals “Up Ferguson Way” allows him to know the animals as they themselves are, just as Tom and Annie’s openness to the pond allows the pond to be what it is, a presence that, reciprocally, heightens their sense of life. In contrast, Tom’s father only understands his farm and pond in terms of what he can make them produce materially and monetarily. There is no possibility that he can just let the pond be so that, in return, he might find a deeper kind of understanding or personal fulfillment. He remains “a hard man.”53 Relph develops Heidegger’s notion of appropriation further by speaking of an environmental humility—i.e., a way of seeing and understanding that is responsive to the best qualities of the Other and that might foster a compassion and gentle caretaking for places, people, and the things of nature. Relph’s call is “for guardianship, for taking care of things merely because they exist, for tending and protecting them. In this there is neither mastery nor subservience, but there is responsibility and commitment.”54 Near the end of his life, Bromfield realized that his philosophy of life and nature was well described by what Albert Schweitzer called “reverence for life,” by which Schweitzer meant that “Man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.”55 Relph’s “environmental humility” is closely 51

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); also, see Edward Relph Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981), 20. 52 Relph, Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography, 186. 53 Bromfield, The World We Live In, 11. 54 Relph, Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography, 187. Two other useful discussions of a Heideggerian approach to a lived environmental ethic are contained in Robert Mugerauer’s Interpretations on Behalf of Place (1994) and Ingrid Stevanovic’s Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking Sustainable Development (2000). 55 Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought (New York: Henry Holt, 1933), quoted in Bromfield, From My Experience, 304. In Louis Bromfield (1964), David Anderson explains that Bromfield recognized in the principle of reverence for life “what had dominated his life from the beginning and had sent him back to the

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related to Schweitzer’s “reverence for life,” though goes further in the sense that it calls for putting first the entire “Other” outside the person, both living and non-living. In other words, we have an obligation to look after things, creatures, people, and places the best we can simply because they have the right to be and to become. Though phrased in a different language, Bromfield’s teched presupposes and fosters the environmental humility of which Relph speaks, and the most miraculous thing is that it simply happens, without the need for conscious intent. I would argue that Bromfield’s writings dealing with the nature of teched, including the way it underlies a more intimate and comprehensive experience of place, are a venue offering valuable insights for describing and understanding one real-world expression of environmental humility and perhaps even for helping it to happen in our cynical postmodern time.56

Works Cited Anderson, David D. Louis Bromfield. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964. —. “Louis Bromfield and Ecology in Fiction: A Re-Assessment.” Midwestern Miscellany, 1997. Vol. 25: 48-57. —. “Louis Bromfield’s Cubic Foot of Soil.” Midwestern Miscellany, 1999. Vol. 27: 41-47. Beeman, Randal S. “Louis Bromfield Versus the ‘Age of Irritation’.” Environmental History Review, 1993. Vol. 17: 91-102. Beeman, Randal S. & James A. Pritchard. A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. Bratton, Daniel, ed. Yrs, Ever Affly: The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Louis Bromfield East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000. —. “Ruined Landscapes in Three Novels by Louis Bromfield.” Comparative Culture, 1999. Vol. 5: 1-11. farm; this principle, he realized, was what had given his life meaning. In seeking to understand nature and to work with it instead of against it, he had been unconsciously following the principle that Schweitzer expressed so succinctly in a phrase” (168). Also see Anderson 1997, 1999. 56 Phenomenologically, a central question is whether “environmental humility” can be taught. One useful possibility is Goethe’s way of science, which can be called an early phenomenology of the natural world. See Seamon 1993, 2000, 2005; Seamon and Zajonc, eds. 1998.

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Bromfield, Louis. The Green Bay Tree. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1924. —. Early Autumn. New York: Ferderick A. Stokes, 1926. —. The Farm. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1934. —. The Rains Came. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937. —. Mrs. Parkington. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943. —. The World We Live In, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944. —. Pleasant Valley. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945. —. Malabar Farm. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948. —. Out of the Earth. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950. —. Animals and Other People. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955. —. From My Experience. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955. Carter, John T. Louis Bromfield and the Malabar Farm Experience. Mattituck, New York: Amereon House, 1995. Geld, Ellen Bromfield. The Heritage: A Daughter’s Memories of Louis Bromfield. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962. Reissued with epilogue, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, and Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Little, Charles E., ed. Louis Bromfield at Malabar: Writings on Farming and Country Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988. Mugerauer, Robert. Interpretations on Behalf of Place. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994. Relph, Edward. Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981. Scott, Ivan. Louis Bromfield, Novelist and Agrarian Reformer: The Forgotten Author. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1998. Seamon, David, ed. Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993. —. “A Way of Seeing People and Place: Phenomenology in EnvironmentBehavior Research.” Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research S. Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto, and H Minami, eds., New York: Plenum, 2000 (157-78). —. Goethe's Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature. Seamon and Arthur Zajonc, eds., Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998. —. “Goethe’s Way of Science as a Phenomenology of Nature.” Janus Head, 2005. Vol. 8: 86-101. —. “A Phenomenology of Inhabitation: The Lived Reciprocity between Houses and Inhabitants as Portrayed by American Writer Louis

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Bromfield.” Seeking the City: Proceedings, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture National Meeting, Houston, TX, 2008. [forthcoming]. Washington, DC: ACSA Press, 2008. Schweitzer, Albert. Out of My Life and Thought. New York: Henry Holt, 1933. Stefanovic, Ingrid Leman. Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking Sustainable Development. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000.

PART III: WRITING ABOUT NATURE: URBAN, SUBURBAN, AND RURAL PERSPECTIVES

JOHN BURROUGHS’S CONTRARIAN PATH JOHN TALLMADGE

When ecocriticism rediscovered John Burroughs in the 1990s, everyone wanted to know why he had fallen into obscurity so soon after his death in 1921. How could a writer as popular as Mark Twain simply vanish from view, especially when other nature writers, such as Muir and Thoreau, continued to grow in appeal? Until recently, you could pick up a complete edition of Burroughs’s collected works for less than a hundred dollars at almost any used book store. But tastes have changed, our views of nature have evolved, and the environmental movement has matured. After eighty years the time is ripe for a reconsideration of Burroughs in both literary and historical terms. I believe he has much to teach us about sustainable living in a postmodern world, especially with respect to urban nature, and for suggestive insights on this score we need look no further than his first book, Wake-Robin (1871). James Perrin Warren considers this the best known of Burroughs’s thirty-odd volumes, and indeed it sets the tone for the entire œuvre.1 It not only exemplifies all the features of Burroughs’s persona and style, but also establishes the characteristic themes, subjects, and genres of his nature writing. It also contains, most conveniently for our purpose, an essay on urban nature, “Spring at the Capital.” Burroughs considered himself a writer first and foremost, and he came to the study of nature initially while seeking a distinctive voice and niche. He was trying to disentangle himself from the influence of Emerson, and he concluded it would be better to write on something he knew from firsthand experience, namely outdoor subjects. He began writing nature essays while living in Washington, D.C. and working as a clerk in the Treasury Department, where, as he relates in the 1895 introduction to his collected works, he wrote the book while “sitting at a desk in front of an iron wall.”2 His aim, he explains, was to counteract the depressing effects 1

James Perrin Warren, John Burroughs and the Place of Nature (Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 42. 2 John Burroughs, Wake-Robin. 1871. Volume 1 in The Writings of John Burroughs, Riverby Edition. (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), xiii.

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of his surroundings by remembering and celebrating the outdoor experiences of his youth, especially his encounters with birds. The act of composition, he says, helped him relive each cherished moment and take it fully to heart: “not till the writing did it really seem to strike in and become part of me.”3 So this type of writing begins with an absence or dislocation, a sense of nostalgia, and an intentional act of memory that has both a therapeutic and a professional motive. In short, even though the ostensible subject is nature, and birds in particular, there’s also a great deal of “human interest” located in the person and situation of the narrator. Nostalgia was a recognized medical condition in the nineteenth century. We infer that this narrator suffers, lending a tinge of melancholy to his devoted observations and vivid recollections. In his introduction, Burroughs confesses as much when he stresses that nature writing consists of more than mere facts: just as the bee gives her honey its “delicious sting” by adding a trace of formic acid to the nectar that passes through her body, the nature writer imparts to the facts his own flavor in order to “heighten and intensify” them for the reader.4 In other words, it is the transaction between the writer and the bird that gives rise to art. In a Burroughs essay the reader is invited to experience this healing transaction vicariously. In his 1871 introduction to the first edition of Wake-Robin, Burroughs had merely averred that his book was about birds, with the aim of interesting the reader in ornithology as an avocation and leisure pursuit rather than an exact science. He describes the book as an “invitation,” and indeed gives that title to its concluding chapter. He dwells much less on literary technique or the relation between facts and feelings, yet the modesty, freshness, and candor of his voice inspire trust and confidence from the very first page. Themes developed in the later introduction are already implicit: the sense of place, the importance of direct observation, and the therapeutic effects of nature study, even as an amateur. We expect instances and examples, and the subsequent essays do not disappoint. These introductions suggest, I think, how much of Burroughs’s charm arises from his engaging persona, his writing style, and his vision of nature. Burroughs presents himself as an amateur bird-lover rather than a professional ornithologist, relying more on his own observations than on the reports or opinions of experts (though he is not above citing them at need). He presents birding as something that anyone can do, given a 3 4

Ibid., xiii. Ibid., xv.

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modicum of knowledge, abundant curiosity, and a large dose of devotion. He is not interested in systematic study, nor in integrating his observations into categorical structures of knowledge. Indeed, knowledge per se appears not to be a goal; rather he seeks to savor, deepen, and celebrate the character of each encounter, place, or creature that he describes. Intimacy and delight seem more important to him than theory or understanding. He is certainly curious and inquisitive, but hardly methodical: it’s difficult to imagine him writing a scientific paper. There’s a peripatetic, almost random quality to his observations, which, in a typical nature essay, are loosely gathered under the heading of one bird after another. Apart from this topical unity, there’s a unity of tone and sensibility but seldom one of plot or argument. Many of the essays in Wake-Robin end abruptly, as if his pen had simply run out of ink; they lack any sort of conclusion or sendoff. These essays appeal not by telling a good story or advancing a compelling thesis, but by presenting a model for living richly and well through sustained interaction with nature. Burroughs’s persona invites imitation and offers hope, a modest yet engaging relation with the reader quite different from those advanced by other contemporary nature writers. In the tradition of nature writing, construed broadly to include natural history, travel, or exploration, Burroughs gravitates more toward the modest, local, amateur end of the scale where we find such precursors as Gilbert White. He does not venture into remote, exotic places nor aspire to grand syntheses in the manner of Humboldt or Darwin. He eschews the dramatic adventure we find in Parkman and Roosevelt. He does not present himself as a heroic scientist taking risks for the advancement of knowledge, in the manner of Fremont, Powell, or King; nor does he venture to combine serious science with gripping narrative and high literary culture, as King does in depicting Sierra Nevada landscapes with allusions to Ruskin and Dante. Unlike Thoreau, particularly the early Thoreau, Burroughs does not use nature as a springboard for moral philosophy or social critique; he seems drawn to nature for its intrinsic interest. Nor, like Muir, does he thematize nature or work an evangelical design upon the reader; if he seeks to inspire or convert, it is only by example, and a pretty low-key one at that. This is true even in the chapters that hew most closely to popular genres of travel and adventure, such as “In the Adirondacks” or “Birch Browsings,” which deals with the Catskills. Despite the remote wilderness locale, Burroughs downplays the usual hardships and dangers (getting lost, getting soaked, getting eaten by no-see-ums) and focuses on near-at-hand things like birds and flowers rather than on grand landscapes and the strong emotions they inspire. In other words, he brings the same curiosity and affection to nature in

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whatever form and place it presents itself; the effect is to color each essay with a uniformly genial and reassuring mood. The narrator appears to be drawn forward by a good-natured, innocent curiosity that is more than amply rewarded. He finds one delight after another, and returns–or so we imagine–feeling refreshed, inspired, and fulfilled. This is an attractive and accessible condition. All we have to do is follow the narrator’s example. In the case of the other nature writers I mentioned, imitation is not so easy. You need remote and exotic places to follow Darwin or Humboldt, not to mention specialized training and vast erudition. To imitate King or Powell, you also need an expedition, not to mention ferocious courage and ambition. To imitate Muir, you need religious passion, prodigious strength, and indifference to physical suffering. These writers inspire awe, wonder, respect, and gratitude; their writings compel with a combination of exotic curiosities, cultural chauvinism (especially in the case of Darwin), visionary inspiration, scientific optimism, heroic adventures, narrow escapes, picturesque characters, and vivid description. For most of us, imitation is not an option. Muir may have insisted that his aim was to get people up into the mountains, but even the editors of a recent edition of his Yosemite guidebook cautioned readers not to attempt the day trips he described. These writers all adopt the classic pose of the travel writer: one who returns from adventure in exotic places to report for the edification, valorization, and entertainment of readers back in the home culture. The reader is always an armchair traveler in this transaction. But Burroughs is different. He can be imitated, because his expertise is self-generated through personal observation, and because his nature is modest, near-at-hand, humanly scaled, and intertwined with culture. In The Return of the Birds,” the first essay of Wake-Robin, he explains that birds seem to flourish in proximity to human society: “We cannot conceive of their existence in a vast wilderness and without man.”5 One cannot imagine such a statement coming from Muir or Thoreau. As James Perrin Warren points out, Burroughs writes not from the remote wilds, but from the edge where culture and nature mingle.6 This is in fact the place where most of us live. A few lines later, Burroughs points out that the birds migrate while human beings stay put, and their songs that correlate with the changing seasons make them appear to us as “master artists” whose performances we can enjoy. If this is anthropomorphism, it is a mild form, and not exactly anthropocentric, for the birds were not created for, nor do they perform for, our benefit. But with a little practice and 5 6

Burroughs, Wake-Robin, 13. Warren, John Burroughs and the Place of Nature, 67-68.

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attention, we can tune in and appreciate their artistry. Burroughs goes on to evoke a variety of birds and compare their songs, using evaluative terms. The cuckoo’s behavior is “quite unsophisticated, or royally indifferent,” his plumage is “unrivaled in beauty … remarkable for its firmness and fineness”7; the vireo is a “performer … displaying for his audience”8; the hermit thrush “displays different degrees of proficiency in the exercise of his musical gifts”.9 It almost sounds as if Burroughs were writing a review. He savors each performance and makes the sort of fine, discriminating judgments that we would expect from a connoisseur. The review is an urban genre, designed to help readers decide where to go and what to do in their off-hours. It presupposes a reader empowered to make judgments and act on them, as well as an environment where the restaurants, books, movies, and concerts are ready to hand. Substitute nature for these man-made entertainments, and you have the makings of a Burroughs essay. Burroughs’s persona, then, presents an engaging guide whose curiosity and delight in nature invite emulation. He’s a happy soul, and we thirst for such happiness ourselves. He promises us that it can be found in devotion to a nature that is scaled to our abilities and located right next door. Burroughs prose style reinforces this fundamental arrangement. He alternates between the third and first person, using just enough of the latter to create a feeling of candor and intimacy but never so much that our attention is drawn toward the narrator instead of toward the subject. His tone is conversational, the mood genial, the manner candid and desultory, as if he were noticing everything for the first time. Varied sentence structures, and a relatively simple syntax, give the impression of spontaneity, as if he were speaking off the top of his head. Apt metaphors and similes create vivid impressions, yet there’s no thematic consistency to them, no patterns of symbolism or leitmotif to reveal some deeper agenda or design upon the reader. Contrast the ecclesiastical imagery that pervades Muir’s work, especially My First Summer in the Sierra, where boulders are compared to altars, glacial striations to lines of scripture, and waterfalls to chanting choirs. Likewise, Leopold’s metaphors in A Sand County Almanac repeatedly reference World War II and the speeches of Roosevelt to suggest that wild things deserve honor, respect, and protection. And Abbey construes the Utah desert in terms of ascetic discipline, suffering, and mystical visions to explain, in part, why it draws him away from the materialism, oppression, and hypocrisy of Cold War 7

Burroughs, Wake-Robin, 16. Ibid., 21. 9 Ibid., 27. 8

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America. But with Burroughs, the metaphor always seems to spring from the immediate situation. One finds little irony in his work. Needless to say, his prose also lacks the cross-grained, paradoxical quality that Thoreau perfected in Walden, where the reader is teased into probing the white spaces between the words, to think about what they don’t say as much as about what they do. With respect to Burroughs’s subject matter and overall vision of nature, however, it is instructive to note some of the things he does not write about. When Burroughs lived there, Washington, D.C. was a capital at war, full of troops, hospitals, and the bustle of military supply. None of this appears in his writing, not even a trace; it’s as if the Civil War didn’t exist. Instead we have tranquil nature, seemingly unaffected and durable in its innocence and beauty. Likewise, in Wake-Robin and later works of nature writing, he seldom mentions the frontier, Native Americans, slavery, technological progress, or anything directly related to business or politics, all of which were going full blast at the time and would surely have loomed large in the minds of his readers. From this viewpoint, his work appears as a countercurrent to major cultural and political trends. You would never know that he lived through the Gilded Age and went to school with Jay Gould. By the time Burroughs began to write, people had already sensed that the frontier was disappearing, and with it the Indians, the buffalo, the forests, and the wilderness in general. America faced the prospect of losing its identity as “nature’s nation.” Calls for preservation of American wilds with their resources and native peoples had begun more than three decades before from artists like Audubon (1827), Catlin (1832), and Cole (1836), and writers like Cooper (1827), Irving (1837), Parkman (1846), and Thoreau (1859). In 1864 George Perkins Marsh had published Man and Nature, exposing the danger of human impacts to the landscape. In 1869 William H.H. Murray’s hugely influential Adventures in the Wilderness; or Camp Life in the Adirondacks gave traction to the idea, first proposed in 1856, of enshrining wilderness in the New York State Constitution. In 1871, the year Wake-Robin was published, the Hayden expedition returned from Yellowstone bringing reports of its natural wonders to eastern magazines; Grant made it a national park the following year.10 You would think that Burroughs would have jumped on the conservation bandwagon just as it began to roll, yet his vision of nature 10 See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 97-116.

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departs from the heroic stereotypes of wilderness and the West advanced by Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Irving, and Parkman. It does not celebrate the frontier as a victory of civilization over barbarity, cultivation over barrenness, or discipline and creativity over laziness and desuetude. Nor does it glorify wilderness as an abode of beauty, truth, health, and natural virtue. Instead, Burroughs’s nature is a mixture of wildness and civilization: small farms, mosaics of pasture and woods, second growth forests, tangled banks and woody edges along roadways, thickets in urban parks, recovering tracts of “barkpeelings” in the hemlock regions of the Catskills, logged-over hillsides and abandoned iron works in the Adirondacks. Despite the severe human impacts in such areas— comparable, I would suggest, to the cultural traumas of the war— Burroughs finds birds, flowers, and small animals flourishing. Nature endures, and to connect with it can be refreshing, healing, and redemptive. In “Spring at the Capital” Burroughs describes Washington, D.C. in terms of its abundance of nature rather than what it was and is best known for, namely power, money, and politics. Instead of advancement or clout, he goes looking for birds, finding his first “novelty in Natural History” on his second day in town. The mild climate and late-blooming flowers seem exotic to a northerner, and he adopts the tone of an explorer: what seems commonplace to the hurrying masses seems wonderful to him. Oddly, he finds more birds in the city than in the surrounding woods. Crow blackbirds abound near the government buildings, and he views a scene or two of high drama unfolding right outside his office window. Rock Creek Park enchants him with its abundance of plant, animal, and bird life. “There is, perhaps, not another city in the Union that has on its very threshold so much natural beauty and grandeur, such as men seek in remote forests and mountains,” he exults.11 The whole essay exemplifies Burroughs’s gently contrarian impulse with respect to both nature and culture. Instead of mystifying the remote and exotic, he chooses to celebrate the local and the small; instead of regeneration through violence, he promises redemption through intimacy and attentiveness. One can easily imagine, therefore, how Burroughs’s work would appeal to an urban readership located far from the heroic wilderness and worn out by war, class struggle, and the economic injustice and turbulence of laissez-faire capitalism. Burroughs’s nature is egalitarian, delightful, accessible, enduring, and nonsectarian, rather like that of his mentor Walt Whitman. His essays provide models for an attentive practice that can lead to happiness and serenity, the true goals of the amateur as opposed to 11

Burroughs, Wake-Robin, 158.

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the professional. In this respect, he is a voice for hope, and his writing works like a kind of medicine. This may be one reason why he fell out of favor so quickly after his death. His kind of writing needs to keep coming, like weekly columns from a trusted commentator. Sometimes Burroughs’s essays remind me of today’s blogs, which captivate by virtue of their authors’ interesting personalities and unusual, insightful takes on life and work. Both have the same spontaneous and open-ended quality, lacking both structure and plot; both appeal to the amateur tradition; both show the mind and heart at work. And both are bound up inextricably with the personality of the author–indeed, it could be said that they are that personality, projected into a text–so that when the author goes, a light goes out in the text. We always read in the expectation of more to come. Another reason for Burroughs’s eclipse can be found, I believe, in the ascendancy of modernism, which reached its intellectual and artistic crest in the decades just before and after his death. Modernism has an urban, industrial sensibility, delighting in the mechanics of theory, in sublime abstractions and monumental geometry; it rejects sentiment, organic complexity, messiness, ornament, elaboration, vegetative forms, anything that smacks of “nature.” Modernism is about energy, dynamics, straight lines, plane surfaces, and right angles. It’s about form and abstraction, not about growth and ambiguity. It’s about cities, not gardens, about physics and engineering rather than biology, about bullets rather than birds. Burroughs and modernism were not compatible, either in sensibility or in art. To a modernist, I believe, the term “urban nature” would make no sense at all. And Burroughs’s methods would appear sentimental, reactionary, and bourgeois. It might seem strange, from this perspective, that Burroughs was not embraced by the conservation movement as it gained traction in the 1920’s and 1930’s. But during this period conservation was focusing on wilderness preservation and the establishment of gigantic national parks in places like the Sierra Nevada, the Colorado Rockies, and the Olympics. The major wilderness activists, including Robert Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and Sigurd Olson, were all men who believed in the virtues of frontier life and valued wilderness as a place where those primitive, manly arts could be preserved. The national character was at stake; ecology and biodiversity came much later. Even as late as 1968, Ed Abbey could argue in Desert Solitaire for wilderness preservation as a matter of character and masculine virtue. The initial construction of wilderness as an absolute standard of value against which to measure both individuals and institutions appears from this perspective as a reaction against modernism and modernity in general; as Stephen Fox writes in John Muir and His

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Legacy, “Traced back to its ideological roots, conservation amounted to a religious protest against modernity.”12 John Muir’s wilderness paradise is merely the radiant antithesis of T.S. Eliot’s urban waste land. Both are equally extreme, and equally abstract. From a political viewpoint, such categorical, dichotomous thinking makes good sense; it helps charge up the rhetoric and stirs the masses to act; it breeds ideology and extremism. In the decades following Burroughs’s death, this was the prevailing mood, not just in America but in the world. So it’s little wonder that Burroughs was not widely read once he stopped writing. In America, the environmental movement seems to have unfolded in four major phases. First came conservation, with its emphasis on husbanding our natural resources: wise, provident use for the greatest good of the greatest number. Then came preservation, with its emphasis on wilderness for character building and, later, biodiversity: vast areas of remote public land were enshrined as national parks and wilderness areas. With the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, emphasis shifted to the human habitat, the local environment itself, which had to be cleansed and restored for everyone to have a decent quality of life; this is when the term “environment” entered the picture. And now, at the start of the twenty-first century, we have entered the phase of sustainability, where the local and global are integrated and the focus is on reshaping culture itself so that humanity and nature can become, in the words of Thomas Berry, “a mutually enhancing presence” to each other.13 Sustainability has reconciliation as its overall goal. It takes us beyond the dichotomous thinking and rhetoric of ideology, toward an inclusive and truly ecological set of relations. And this is why, I think, Burroughs has become topical once more. He offers a model for devotion to nature that is appropriate for a sustainable world. His nature is local, immediate, familiar, mixed, ambiguous, and real. People live and work there, in or near cities for whom nature provides not only food and commodities, but also wondrous beauty, variety, intricacy, and delight. The reader who follows Burroughs’s example discovers the happiness of savoring the musical performance of a bird. In this transaction, so vividly evoked in his writing, the human and the bird do indeed enhance each other. This is a good way to live. Who wouldn’t want to feel that way forever?

12

Stephen Fox, John Muir and his Legacy; the American Conservation Movement (Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1981), 359. 13 Thomas Berry, The Great Work; Our Way into the Future (New York, NY: Bell Tower, 1999), 11.

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Works Cited Berry, Thomas. The Great Work; Our Way into the Future. New York NY: Bell Tower, 1999 Burroughs, John. Wake-Robin. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1871. Fox, Stephen. John Muir and his Legacy; the American Conservation Movement. Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1981 Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1977 Warren, James Perrin. John Burroughs and the Place of Nature. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006

OUR BIG BACKYARD: NATURE IN SUBURBAN WRITING ROBERT BEUKA

Each month, my four-year-old son eagerly awaits the arrival of the latest issue of “his” magazine, a publication of the National Wildlife Federation called Your Big Backyard. Each issue features articles and photos on different species of wildlife, as well as several recurring features aimed at encouraging youngsters to identify with the natural world. As the name of the magazine suggests, coverage is not limited to remote wilderness and distant, exotic locales, but also focuses on the nature that is a part of our everyday lives in contemporary suburban America. While I doubt young Malcolm would concern himself too much with the paradoxical aspects of Your Big Backyard’s approach to nature appreciation, a more seasoned observer of life in the suburbs just might. Historians of the suburbs tell us that the desire to escape the teeming, crowded city in favor of clean air and green countryside has been a driving factor in American suburbanization, from its nineteenth-century roots, through a spurt of suburbanization in the 1920s, and on into the massive wave of suburbanization that has remade the countryside over the course of the past sixty years. Still, if the lure of a green, unspoiled world has been part of the appeal of the suburbs, the unavoidable fact remains that the process of suburbanization itself entails the destruction of the very countryside with which it is associated. Here is where the paradox of suburban nature is most evident, a feeling recognizable to any suburban homeowner whose heart sinks as another nearby wooded lot is sold and cleared for more development. The paradox is perhaps best captured in the pithy bumper sticker that made the rounds some years back: “Welcome to suburbia: Where they chop down all the trees and then name streets after them.” The humor of such a statement derives not only from its recognition of the inexorable march of suburban sprawl, but also from its depiction of the suburban environment as somehow artificial, possessing an “unnatural” form of nature.

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This understanding of suburban nature is part of a larger cultural perception of a more generalized suburban “artificiality.” As I argued in my book SuburbiaNation (2004), our cultural ambivalence in the United States toward the suburban life and environment owes much to the depiction of the suburbs in the fiction and film of the past half-century or so.1 For many writers of the post-World War II years, the massive growth of the new suburban landscape in the 1950s and 60s signaled the replacement of more elemental environments with the ersatz and prefabricated. Some lampooned suburbia’s version of “nature” from the perspective of the city dweller. Philip Roth, for example, in his debut novella, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), uses a suburban family’s intense devotion to sports and recreation not only as a comic device but also as a trope to help express the alienation experienced by a young man of the city who finds himself thrown into their suburban milieu. Neil Klugman, Roth’s narrator, after falling in love with Brenda Patimkin, the teenaged daughter of nouveau riche suburbanites, brings his Newark sensibility to their suburban Short Hills surroundings; despite his profound attraction to what he feels to be an almost “heavenly” landscape, Neil is repulsed and frightened by the Patimkin family’s suburban lifestyle, embodied in their fanatical interest in backyard sports. Noting that various family members tend to gorge themselves on store-bought fruit in order to sustain their endless backyard competitions, spirited events that lead to various sporting goods becoming permanently lodged in the branches of their trees, Neil makes a wry observation that suggests the artificial, nonsensical, even inverted order of things in suburbia: “Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!”2 For other writers in the postwar years, the beauty of the suburban environment proved insufficient to offset the alienation of their protagonists. The writer most consistently associated with the depiction of suburban life is John Cheever. In his 1958 short story sequence, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, Cheever introduced a setting to which he would return in the best of his subsequent stories and novels. Based on Cheever’s adopted suburban town of Ossining, New York, Shady Hill is a place of manicured lawns, backyard swimming pools, and well-tended, generously sized lots. It is also a place of isolation, despair, and untold sorrows, and Cheever often suggests a connection between his characters’ environment and their personal crises. Shady Hill residents dwell in a setting where the persistent display of class prerogative creates a 1

Robert A. Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in TwentiethCentury American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 2 Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 53.

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materialistic, but ultimately unfulfilling, sense of place. Johnny Hake, the protagonist of the title story, reveals as much as he reacts to his burglarizing of his neighbors’ home. Dismayed by his actions, Hake sits alone in his kitchen and rhapsodizes about his lost connections to the natural landscape of his youth: Oh, I never knew that a man could be so miserable and that the mind could open up so many chambers and fill them with self-reproach! Where were the trout streams of my youth, and other innocent pleasures? The wetleather smell of the loud waters and the keen woods after a smashing rain; or at opening day the summer breezes smelling like the grassy breath of Holsteins — your head would swim — and all the brooks full then (or so I imagined, in the dark kitchen) of trout, our sunken treasure. I was crying.3

Pastoral reveries such as this are common in Cheever’s fiction, and they consistently suggest a sense of alienation from the natural world occasioned by the commodification of the suburban landscape. Cheever characteristically uses nostalgia for lost natural landscapes as a means of critiquing the materialistic environment of the affluent suburb. We see the same yearning for a return to the garden in Cheever’s classic story “The Swimmer” (1964), when protagonist Neddy Merrill tries, unsuccessfully, to regain his life through the symbolic gesture of reimagining a string of his neighbors’ backyard swimming pools as a river. But for Neddy, as for Johnny Hake, there can be no escape from the materialistic and return to the natural. Cheever presents the suburban environment, in fact, as a pale imitation of the “real thing,” a place where nature itself is subsumed under “zoning” considerations and becomes merely another element of maintaining visual evidence of dominant class status. And yet there are moments when Cheever celebrates the natural beauty of his setting. These lyrical descriptions, though, are often undercut by the reminder of the fragility of this suburban paradise, as is the case in this passage from “O Youth and Beauty”: Then it is a summer night, a wonderful summer night. The passengers on the eight-fifteen see Shady Hill — if they notice it at all — in a bath of placid golden light....On Alewives Lane sprinklers continue to play after dark. You can smell the water. The air seems as fragrant as it is dark — it is a delicious element to walk through....Mrs. Carver — Harry Farquarson’s mother-in-law — glances up at the sky and asks, “Where did all the stars come from?” She is old and foolish, and yet she is right: Last night’s stars seem to have drawn to themselves a new range of galaxies, 3

John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Knopf, 1978), 258.

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and the night sky is not dark at all, except where there is a tear in the membrane of light. In the unsold house lots near the track a hermit thrush is singing.4

Seen from the perspective of the passing commuter train, itself both the community’s lifeline and a reminder of the constant rush of urban activity, Shady Hill appears an idyllic landscape in this passage. There are, however, incongruities in the description as well: The contradictory interplay of light and darkness is only reconciled at last with the mention of an occasional “tear in the membrane of light,” an image whose violence disrupts the otherwise pastoral imagery. Even more telling is the closing image of the passage: the hermit thrush, whose warble provides the soundtrack for this lyrical moment, can be found only “in the unsold house lots near the track,” places which—given the ongoing process of suburban development—cannot remain the last outposts of the natural world indefinitely. Indeed, the thrush’s home is even at that moment already compromised and is only masquerading as “nature”; already parceled out into “house lots,” the fate of the remaining natural landscape is sealed. The devolution of nature into real estate is a notion that other suburban novelists have entertained as well. Another of the great suburban writers, John Updike, explored this theme in his Rabbit novels, most notably in the second novel in the series, Rabbit Redux (1971). This novel finds Updike’s cantankerous everyman protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, relocated to a suburban development named “Penn Villas,” on the outskirts of the city where he works, Brewer, Pennsylvania. Harry’s new suburban neighborhood is first described, rather flatly, as a “ranchhouse village of muddy lawns and potholed macadam and sub-code sewers.”5 When Harry takes the bus home from Brewer and walks from the bus stop toward his house, Updike’s description of his housing development underscores the alienating nature of this environment, the collapse of the pastoral dream of the suburbs into an unsettling space of homogeneous facelessness: Rabbit gets off at a stop in Penn Park and walks down a street of mock Tudor, Emberly Avenue, to where the road surface changes at the township line, and becomes Emberly Drive in Penn Villas. He lives on Vista Crescent, third house from the end. Once there may have been here a vista, a softly sloped valley of red barns and fieldstone farmhouses, but more Penn Villas had been added and now the view from any window is as into 4 5

Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever, 215. John Updike, Rabbit Redux (New York: Knopf, 1971), 15.

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Updike’s description, with its telling metaphor of the “fragmented mirror,” emphasizes the alienating physical homogeneity of the neighborhood. More specifically, the passage pairs suburban development with the loss, or replacement, of a more abiding landscape of the past. Updike pursues this thought further in a passage that finds Harry contemplating his oddly sterile suburban backyard, a place that, [W]ith its vaunted quarter-acre lots and compulsory barbecue chimneys does not tempt its residents outdoors, even the children in summer: in the snug brick neighborhood of Rabbit’s childhood you were always outdoors, hiding in hollowed-out bushes, scuffing in the gravel alleys. . . . Here, there is a prairie sadness, a barren sky raked by slender aerials. A sky poisoned by radio waves. A desolate smell from underground. 7

The focus on childhood memories in this passage reveals a nostalgic mode, a characteristic gesture in suburban fiction. Updike, like Cheever, invokes the resonance of lost landscapes from the past to suggest a lack of connection to nature in the contemporary suburban landscape. The suburban environmental critique raised by Cheever and Updike decades ago has hardly gone out of style; contemporary suburban novels have often reflected a similar sensibility. Richard Ford’s Independence Day (1995), the second book in his Frank Bascombe series, begins with an idyllic description of the protagonist’s old-fashioned suburban hometown of Haddam, New Jersey—“In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems”—only to unfold into a study of the protagonist’s efforts to find buyers for unwanted suburban homes set on uninspiring lots.8 The contrast the novel builds between idealized landscapes and bland suburban development neighborhoods is one of the many ways in which it recalls Updike’s Rabbit novels. Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides, later made into a successful film, resurrects the suburban alienation theme and sets it amidst a group of teenagers. Eugenides picks up on the paradox of suburban beauty in this novel, placing his characters in a well-heeled community whose picturesque landscape he describes in lyrical prose throughout. And yet this beauty, as well as the lives of material comfort his protagonists lead, 6

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 60. 8 Richard Ford, Independence Day (New York: Knopf, 1995), 3. 7

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does not provide solace for the Lisbon sisters, teenaged siblings who all commit suicide over the course of a two-year span. Eugenides ties the girls’ downfall to their suburban setting, at one point describing an environmental phenomenon that seems to parallel the decay of the protagonists’ lives: It was full-fledged summer once again, over a year from the time Cecilia had slit her wrists, spreading the poison in the air. A spill at the River Rouge Plant increased phosphates in the lake, producing a scum of algae so thick it clogged outboard engines. Our beautiful lake began to look like a lily pond, carpeted with an undulating foam. Fishermen tossed rocks from the bank, knocking holes to lower their lines through. The swamp smell that arose was outrageous amid the green elevated paddle tennis courts and the graduation parties held under illuminated tents. Debutantes cried over the misfortune of coming out in a season everyone would remember for its bad smell.9

One clever family comes up with the solution to this untenable environmental situation, hosting a debutante party built around the theme of “asphyxiation.” When he depicts party guests arriving attired in “tuxedos and gas masks,” Eugenides completes his critique of a suburban environment poisoned both literally and figuratively. Like their predecessors of a generation before, contemporary suburban novelists have represented a landscape of empty affluence, a place whose surface-level natural appeal belies a sort of hollowness, or decay, at the core. When major contemporary novelists like Ford and Eugenides—and other writers of successful contemporary suburban novels, such as Rick Moody (The Ice Storm) and Tom Perrotta (Little Children)—replay the suburban environmental critique handed down from the first generation of postwar suburban fiction writers, it may seem as if not much has changed in our assessment of this important landscape. Indeed, this is precisely an argument put forth by another writer who has delved specifically into the suburban environment, the poet D. J. Waldie. Waldie, whose 1996 book Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir offers a personalized look at the history of suburban Lakewood, California, points out another key paradox of our cultural perception of suburban nature, the fact that we have taken a fixed, unchanging view of an environment that has evolved continuously, and dramatically, since the postwar years. In one section of his book, after describing the impressive variety of trees 9

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 234.

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that adorn his small suburban yard, Waldie notes the similar vitality throughout the neighborhood, while pointing out how this reality contrasts starkly with a static cultural image of suburbia as an unnatural, barren landscape: Some houses on my street have a tree planted in the front lawn. Most houses have at least one tree in the backyard. Most of the trees are thirty or forty years old. Some of the trees tower over the houses. Aerial photographs of this suburb from 1950 and 1951 are reprinted in textbooks on urban design and landscaping. The photographs show rows of light-colored houses in a treeless waste.10

In his pithy style, Waldie here points out that an unchanging, exaggerated view of the natural landscape of suburbia transcends the world of popular fiction and has indeed informed the larger cultural discourse surrounding the landscape in which most Americans live. If we consider Waldie’s complaint in light of the typical fictional depiction of the suburbs, then it would seem that the paradoxical view of suburban nature remains the prevailing mode of understanding this important terrain. At the same time, it is worthwhile to note that in the past decade—as critical interest in suburbia has become reinvigorated—a number of non-fiction works have appeared which, taken together, serve to challenge inherited notions about the suburban environment. Several writers, for example, have created in-depth studies of that crowned-jewel of the American suburbanite’s world, the lawn. Environmental historians Virginia Scott Jenkins—in The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (1994)—and Ted Steinberg—in American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (2006)—have provided complex sociological histories of the American lawn, deepening and complicating our understanding of this primary suburban environment, our collective big backyard. The founding assumption of these works, that there is in fact something worth studying in the phenomenon of the American lawn, has provided a much needed contrasting view of a landscape which for too long has been thought of, and depicted, as if it were a transparent, obvious environment unworthy of critical scrutiny. These studies of the American lawn point toward another genre that has begun, if one may be forgiven the pun, to flower: suburban nature writing. Over the course of the past ten years, a number of naturalists have 10 D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005), 58.

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turned their attention to the suburban landscape. Many of these studies begin with the understanding that the inexorable march of sprawl has fundamentally changed our relationship with the natural world. The point is summed up by Peter Friederici in his recent work, The Suburban Wild (1999): Most Americans live in cities and suburbs where it is…likely that in a walk of ten or fifteen miles (and who walks that far anymore?) one will cross no extensive tracts of wild land. Our towns are parking lots, four-lane highways, strip malls. The countryside is cut into fields and woodlots and fenced-in pastures. Barbed wire slices the Great Plains and the deserts. Clear-cuts shave national forests into blocks. Almost everyone I know of college age or above can relate the same litany of favorite childhood fields and woods and sylvan hideouts converted to buildings or roads. Even where there are parks and preserves they are studded with oft-mowed lawns, cut by roads and trails, littered with discarded bottles and plastic bags. American suburbs, with their piecemeal grid of grass and asphalt, small remnant woodlots and maintenance-heavy gardens, are becoming an increasingly accurate model of the ecological state of the entire country, and indeed the world.11

For Friederici, and his fellow suburban naturalists, the ubiquity of the suburban landscape poses a challenge to the nature lover and naturalist alike: not to confine one’s study and experience of nature to an ever-moredistant wilderness, but instead to seek an understanding of the nature before us in contemporary, suburban America. “If we wish to learn how our lives are mirrored in the natural world,” Friederici writes, “we are going to have to do it in landscapes like the suburbs: patches, fragments, a quilt of intensively but inconsistently managed swatches of land.”12 Friederici’s injunction to find nature beneath our own feet has been taken up in a variety of different styles by a range of contemporary nature writers. Hannah Holmes, in the recent Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn (2005), chronicles the results of a year spent closely examining the biodiversity present in her small suburban yard. Homes claims that she “had been led to believe that lawns are the abomination of the natural world,” but her findings—which tend to be relayed in a breezy,

11

Peter Friederici, The Suburban Wild (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 5. 12 Ibid., 6.

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conversational tone—give the lie to that claim.13 For Holmes, unlike for our suburban novelists, the suburban lawn is not a manicured imitation of nature, but rather its own microcosm of the natural world. While Holmes’s anthropomorphic take on her subject matter might not appeal to all readers, she succeeds in depicting this environment in a new light. In contrast to Holmes’s approach, Frederick Gehlbach, in Messages from the Wild: an Almanac of Suburban Natural and Unnatural History (2002), takes a more strident stance in calling for suburban environmental reform and conservation. His closely observed almanac of suburban nature builds to a closing section in which he calls for our reconciliation with the natural world, and an end to our tendency toward building suburbs that guarantee our “isolation from our natural and cultural neighbors.”14 While Gehlbach’s idealistic call for suburbanites to get in tune with nature may seem too much to ask, and Holmes’s relaying of her cute relationships with her backyard squirrels may in some way seem too little, in a broader sense they represent contrasting approaches to a common goal: creating the recognition of the suburbs as a site of nature, rather than something removed from the natural world. Lisa Couturier, in her recent work The Hopes of Snakes (2005) reminds us of the urgency of this realization: “If, as predicted by the United Nations, an astonishing 80 percent of the population of the United States will live in cities in the year 2010, our urban and suburban landscapes will need to be reenvisioned as the primary places to sustain our passion for the wildlife living among us.”15 The insights of this new breed of suburban naturalist are perhaps best summed up by birder Robert Winkler in his recent book Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness (2003). Winkler, like Friederici, Holmes, Gehlbach, and Couturier, sets his sights on the nature that surrounds us in everyday life. His book chronicles the vast diversity of bird life he has tracked through birding expeditions conducted entirely within the haute bourgeois confines of suburban Fairfield County, Connecticut. He concludes his study with a reminder that the wages of sprawl are more complex than merely a mourning for lost “nature”; in our postlapsarian state, Winkler argues, we must also recognize and celebrate our connection to the nature quite literally in our own backyard: 13 Hannah Holmes, Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), 4. 14 Frederick R. Gehlbach, Messages From the Wild: An Almanac of Suburban Natural and Unnatural History (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), 200. 15 Lisa Couturier, The Hopes of Snakes and Other Tales from the Urban Landscape (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 69.

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In the few years I’ve lived here…I’ve seen the troubling signs: dirt roads paved, old fields turned to landscaping for fat houses, motorists grown tense, state forests scarred with the tracks of all-terrain vehicles. There’s no future anywhere in Fairfield County, I often think. But then I’ll drive along Route 136 late at night—no headlights on the back of my neck, good songs on the radio, the deep woods of the reservoir watershed unfolding on either side of me—and the optimist in me soars. Although I view the suburb with ambivalence, I’ll always believe in the glory of its wild places. With each chipping away of them, our neighborhoods become less livable. The suburban wilderness is where birders, nature writers, and environmentalists are made. Life may take us

farther afield, but this is where the adventures begin.16

Winkler’s comment, taken in the context of the rise of suburban nature writing in particular, and the emergence of suburban studies as a viable field of inquiry in general, suggests a new direction we may possibly be headed in our understanding of the suburban environment. At the very least, this line of thought would seem to represent a healthy way out of the impasse that has characterized our thinking and writing about suburban nature to date. Marketed and sold by real estate agents as a personalized natural paradise, while derided by novelists, social critics, and bumpersticker philosophers as an artificial stand-in for a vanishing natural world, the suburb has for decades remained a contentious terrain. That suburbia has also become the dominant landscape of the United States is one good reason for thinking—and writing—about suburban nature not as a paradox, but as the vital environmental reality that it is.

Works Cited Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. Couturier, Lisa. The Hopes of Snakes and Other Tales from the Urban Landscape. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. Ford, Richard. Independence Day. New York: Knopf, 1995. Friederici, Peter. The Suburban Wild. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999.

16 Robert Winkler, Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2003), 204.

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Gehlbach, Frederick R. Messages From the Wild: An Almanac of Suburban Natural and Unnatural History. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002. Holmes, Hannah. Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Updike, John. Rabbit Redux. New York: Knopf, 1971. Waldie, D. J. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005. Winkler, Robert. Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2003.

“RURAL TO THE LAST DROP”: WRITING RURAL LAND FROM JOHN BURROUGHS TO OURSELVES CHARLOTTE ZOË WALKER

“My blood has the flavor of the soil in it; it is rural to the last drop.” —John Burroughs, My Boyhood

Finding Our Way Home We are driving home from a visit to friends. Though we have good friends and neighbors in the nearby village, others are about forty minutes’ drive away—so that our rural community is spread quite far, a thinly woven web of resilient strands. As we drive the lovely upper Catskill roads at dusk, we pass a couple of dairy farms that are still functioning, despite the terrible dairy herd buyout of a quarter century ago. There are few sights more alluring to me than the glowing windows and open doors of a barn at milking time. But we are not doing the milking, we are not even stopping to visit as my children and I used to do before our friends had to give up their dairy herd a quarter of a century ago. We are simply driving by a country road in the early evening, glimpsing a switching tale or two in the golden light through the open barn door, glimpsing hay spread on the barn floor, hearing the low sound of the milking machine. Yet I never pass the golden lights of a barn at milking time without fervently wishing blessings on everyone there—the farmers working so faithfully, the cows standing so patiently. Certainly I realize each time that they are blessing all of us by their persistence and endurance. We drive on, past other farms that have stopped their milking forever, past a barn that crashed in upon itself under last winter’s snow load, after years of sagging more and more dramatically; past another barn where a silo has been leaning out at a Pisa-like angle. Each time we drive by we rejoice to see that it hasn’t yet fallen. If we were tourists, and not “locals,” perhaps we’d get out and have our picture taken with our backs against it, as if we are the force holding it up.

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Gradually, as our road takes us over the hills and around the bends, we travel from dusk to darkness. Still, of course, we know our way. No one ever questions that people should know their way home through the network of country roads, and yet it often strikes me as amazing. Here we are in our small speck of a place on the great wrinkled skin of the planet, and we know which turns are coming up, where the road winds so much that you must slow down, where that sudden left turn will take you on your way for another five miles, past the house you lived in twenty years ago perhaps, past the turnoff to the house of a friend who died a decade ago; you cannot pass it without remembering the steep path down to the stream where you used to sit together on boulders and talk, as Sand Hill Creek ambled by. Then a little later you come to another lazy Y turn, and you know that the left branch will take you home, and you know exactly which nearly invisible driveway to turn into, the gravel crunching under the tires as you drive the last few feet toward home, past the wild raspberries on the right, and the tall silhouettes of the pole beans in the garden on your left. A full moon stands right in front of you as you step out of the car, and after you gaze at it for awhile, you turn again, stepping across a little bridge over a gully where the spring runoff rushes, and walk to your door. How ever did you get here? When I read Hal Borland’s memoir High Wide and Lonesome, I had the same question. Borland describes his first journey with his father to the land they are homesteading on the high plains of Colorado in 1910. How ever did they find their way? His father has been there only once before, and yet he unerringly drives the wagon not just down rough roads, but onto a vast, trackless grassy plain. Off to the south was another high hill, faint green and gleaming sandgold in the sun. I sat up and pointed, and Father smiled and said, before my question came, “Still farther than that, son.” There were no more fences, now. On a distant hill there was a house, a lonely house without even a barn. Then, as we drove on and on, that last house was out of sight. The road had become a trail, two faint ruts in the greening sand grass. Then we came to the far edge of the sand hills and hard land was under us again. There we left the wagon tracks, turned southwest onto a high flatland. We climbed a long gentle slope and were alone in a vastness and a distance that were like nothing I had ever seen or imagined. In all directions I could see the horizon, not a hill between that interrupted the smooth, round bowl-rim of blue. It was like being a very tiny ant on a

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table under Mother’s very biggest mixing bowl, a blue and silver bowl and a tablecloth all greeny-tan and full of little wrinkles.1

Hal Borland’s father must have studied that land deeply when he first laid claim to it, and inscribed it in his heart and brain, to find his way back with his son so unerringly. To the young Hal Borland it was as if the vastness his father led him to was both miraculous and, more simply, just something that a father could do.

John Burroughs: “Rural to the Last Drop” American literature includes a precious vein of writing about farm life and rural life. We have, of course, a great literature of wilderness experience, nature writing, and conservation; an equally powerful literature of Native American culture and experience; and lovely works of village and small town life in the tradition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs. All of these might well be considered in a comprehensive view of “rural” writing. Perhaps it’s those collapsing barns and that leaning silo seen on our country drives that engage me to consider especially here our experience of rural land through the family farm. Or perhaps it’s the complexity of questions that the history of farming poses that interests me—questions that range from the personal and spiritual, to the cultural and political—along with a persistent hunch that there is something important here for understanding our moment in history as well, and how to proceed from where we are. From fiction that is deeply rooted in the land, such as Willa Cather’s My Antonia and O Pioneers!, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Mildred Walker’s Winter Wheat, and the great children’s books by Laura Ingalls Wilder; to memoirs like John Burroughs’s My Boyhood, Hal Borland’s High, Wide and Lonesome, and Ronald Jager’s Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm, Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America and his many other agrarian writings, or more recently, David Mas Masumoto’s Elegy for a Peach and Leila Philip’s A Family Place—this vein of our literature looks at the continent’s vast rural landscape in a multitude of ways. In addition, American attics, trunks and desks contain many an unpublished memoir, journal, or collection of letters telling vivid stories of life on the land. A fine example of this is Adele Crockett Robertson’s The Orchard, a fascinating “lost” work about one woman’s struggle to save her family’s 1

Hal Borland, High, Wide and Lonesome: Growing Up on the Colorado Frontier (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 18-19.

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orchard during the Great Depression, a book that did get published thanks to her daughter, who discovered the manuscript after her mother’s death.2 Even in this technological age, we are not so many generations removed from our farming ancestors, and it enriches us to remember them, letting them draw us closer to the land in whatever ways are possible for us, and perhaps gaining insights that will help us solve some of the ecological and social problems of our time. It seems equally important to honor those who continue to farm today, despite all the odds placed against them by a government that favors the big agribusiness firms at the expense of the family farm—and those who write about these issues. When we speak of “writing the land,” some of our most important writers today are those who offer encouragement and support for today’s revival of small organic farms and gardens, for “cottage farmers” as Gene Logsdon puts it, and the growing movement for eating locally grown food.3 Even as these and many other writers continue and expand the discussion of rural writing and living in America, I find John Burroughs an illuminating focal point, a long-ago voice still taking part in the conversation. John Burroughs states in his autobiography My Boyhood: “I was the son of a farmer, who was the son of a farmer, who was again the son of a farmer . . . my blood has the flavour of the soil in it; it is rural to the last drop.”4 In his maturity, he called himself a “literary naturalist,” and his writing makes clear that his relationship to nature was many-faceted—the poet and the scientist were powerfully interwoven in him. But braided in with these, and an essential part of how he observed, lived with and understood nature, was his lifelong experience as a farmer. Burroughs could not have developed his style or accomplished his many essays on the natural world without that deeply felt connection to farm life. We know Burroughs best for his writings about “wild” nature—the birds, animals, rocks and springs, often within walking distance of his home—and sometimes of a yet wilder nature, on higher treks into the Catskills (his description of Slide Mountain shows how close to home real wilderness could be for him), the Adirondacks, and on more distant journeys, such as the Harriman expedition to Alaska, that he made in his lifetime. But he also wrote at some length about his own farming roots, and related aspects of human life in the countryside. In this essay, I want to 2

See bibliography for references to some of these writers’ works. Gene Logsdon, The Contrary Farmer (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 1994), 34, passim. 4 John Burroughs, My Boyhood (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922), 94. 3

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look at the ways John Burroughs’s approach to writing the land from his determinedly rural perspective might still be meaningful to us, as we seek to understand the “rural” in nature literature and in our world; and I’d like to consider his writing not only in relation to a few of the many writers who came after him—but also to a few of the writers who influenced him, and in relation to the greater influence of the farming experience itself. I’ll also tell a little of my own journey, as I try to understand how the thorny and emotional issues of a personal relationship to the land fit in with this literature and these larger social issues.

Writing Tips Gleaned from Gilbert White, Thoreau, and Whitman. Anyone who wants to write about their experience of rural life today may find in Burroughs much that is instructive. If one includes his observations on the writers who influenced him or from whom he took at least some kind of nourishment or example, we find clues to his own writer’s toolbox. Burroughs’s passion for literature was far-ranging, allencompassing; perhaps because he had so little opportunity for formal education, he found his teachers in the writers who went before him and in those contemporaries that he most admired. Although any complete discussion of Burroughs’s literary influences should obviously include Emerson and Darwin as well, his discussions of White, Thoreau and Whitman reveal some of the main threads that Burroughs wove into his understanding of how to write about the rural world he loved so much. In White he found affirmation of how fascinating the natural world can be just outside one’s door; in Thoreau, by contrast, he found the allure and tonic of a wildness that beckoned from not so far away; in his close friend Walt Whitman, he found an expansive, spiritual sense of nature and a generosity of spirit that met with similar impulses in Burroughs himself. Burroughs opens his essay on Gilbert White by noting that White is one of those writers one needs to discover at the right time in one’s life or in the right mood: “One summer day . . . at the foot of a waterfall in a very secluded place I suddenly discovered that the essays had a quality and a charm that I had never suspected they possessed.” In addition to the right time and place, however, Burroughs speculates on the personal characteristics one might need in order to appreciate Gilbert White: It is necessary, in the first place, that you be a born countryman, capable of a certain fellowship and intimacy with your brute neighbors and with the various shows of rural nature. Then a quiet, even tenor of life, such as can

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Rural to the Last Drop: Writing Rural Land from John Burroughs to Ourselves be had only in the country, is also necessary—a way of life that goes slow, and lingers upon the impression of the moment, and returns to it again and again, that makes much of little things, and is closely observant of the face of the day and of the landscape .. . . Being thus surrounded and thus inclined, in the fall, when you first build a fire in your grate and begin to feel again like browsing along the old paths, open White’s Selborne, and read a chapter here and there, and bend your ear attentively to his quiet, cheerful, but earnest talk.5

Burroughs identifies one of his own most engaging qualities, when he says of White that “Each letter shall seem addressed to you personally with news from the fields and byways you so lately visited.”6 And when he describes in White’s writing “the pastoral quiet and sweetness and harmony of the English landscape “ tinged with “that flavor of human sympathy and human absorption, that English fields suggest,” it is easy to think of the Catskills and Hudson Valley landscapes as they appear to us in Burroughs’s writing.7 Typically, Burroughs uses a nature metaphor to describe White’s writing: The style is like a rich, gentle sward, simple and unobtrusive, with scarcely a flower of rhetoric anywhere, but very pleasing and effective and entirely adequate. . . . Its brevity, its directness, its simplicity, its dealings with familiar and near-at-hand objects, shows, occurrences, make it a book which never sates and never tires the reader.8

White’s writing, says Burroughs, evokes “an air of summer-day leisure and sequestration,” in which The great world is far off. Its sound is less than the distant rumble of a wagon heard in the midst of the fields. The privacy and preoccupation of the author are like those of the bird building her nests, or of the bee gathering her sweets. He was eager for news, but it was only for news from the earth and the air, or from the dumb life about him.9

These qualities that Burroughs found endearing in White, and that we may recognize in his own writing at its most familiar, are, however, not 5

John Burroughs, “Gilbert White’s Book,” Indoor Studies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 179. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 180-81.

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sufficient to Burroughs’s vision for writing the land. “It is little more than an appetizer,” he says, “but as such it takes high rank.”10 Burroughs finds in White the keen observation, the “sharp eyes” and “art of seeing things” that he valued in his own work and prescribed to others who would get to know nature better: His mind transmitted clearly; the image is exact. To be a good observer is not merely to see things: it is to see them in their relations and bearings.11

In Henry David Thoreau, Burroughs found elements missing in the almost-too-comfortable company of Gilbert White. His long essay on Thoreau in Indoor Studies, the same volume that contains the essay on White, provides clues to some lesser known aspects of Burroughs’s values. Burroughs dwells at length on Thoreau’s independence of thought, his love of “wildness,” and his moral courage—especially in Thoreau’s passionate defense, in a speech he gave in 1859, of the abolitionist John Brown, who was on trial in Virginia: It was proposed to stop Thoreau’s mouth, persuade him to keep still and lie low, but he was not to be stopped. He thought there were enough lying low . . .and in an address delivered in Concord he glorified the old hero in words that . . . it thrills the blood to read. This instant and unequivocal indorsement of John Brown by Thoreau, in the face of the most overwhelming public opinion even among anti-slavery men, throws a flood of light upon him. It is the most significant act of his life. It clinches him; it makes the colors fast. . . . It is of the same metal and has the same ring as John Brown’s act itself. It shows what thoughts he had fed his soul on, what school he had schooled himself in, what his devotion to the ideal meant. His hatred of slavery and injustice, and of the government that tolerated them, was pure, and it went clean through; it stopped at nothing.12

For this reader, fond as I am of John Burroughs, it is a comfort to read this passage as an antidote to a few paragraphs from earlier in his career that seem too complacently to accept the discourse of race that was generally indulged in the nineteenth century. Burroughs may, through upbringing and environment, have had less political astuteness and courage than Thoreau, but it’s clear that he admired theses qualities and “fed his soul” on them, and indeed “schooled himself” through what he admired in

10

Ibid., 179. Ibid. 12 John Burroughs, “Henry D. Thoreau,” Indoor Studies, 8-9. 11

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Thoreau. If he could not give a public speech in defense of John Brown, at least he was an ardent defender of Henry David Thoreau: Indeed, Thoreau was Brown’s spiritual brother, the last and finer flowering of the same plant—the seed flowering; he was just as much of a zealot, was just as gritty and unflinching in his way; a man whose brow was set, whose mind was made up, and leading just as forlorn a hope, and as little quailed by the odds… In the great army of Mammon, the great army of the fashionable, the complacent and churchgoing, Thoreau was a skulker, even a deserter, if you please—yea, a traitor fighting on the other side.13

Burroughs’s writings on religion and his championship of Walt Whitman are two instances that show his independence of thought and make clear that he was also, in his own way a “skulker,” a deserter, and on the same side as Thoreau. Though he made clear that he respected the way religion had been helpful to his forebears, and still was for others, he also made clear that it was not for him. Of all the major influences on Burroughs’s approach to writing the land, Whitman may be crucial to what is most original and interesting in his work. Indeed, Burroughs begins his Whitman: A Study (1896) with a description of the “wild place” around Slabsides that he named Whitman Land, because in many ways it is typical of my poet . . . elemental ruggedness combined with wonderful tenderness, modernness, and geniality. There rise the gray scarred cliffs, crowned here and there with a dead hemlock or pine, where, morning after morning, I have seen the bald-eagle perch.14

In the afterword to Whitman: A Study, Burroughs expresses even more ardently, not only the inspiration he takes from Whitman, but his own passionate need to meld words and nature: What is he like? He is like everything. He is like the soil which holds the germs of a thousand forms of life; he is like the grass, common, universal, perennial, formless; he is like your own heart, mystical yearning, rebellious, contradictory, but ever throbbing with life.15

In Burroughs’s recognition of Whitman’s greatness, and in their close and long-standing friendship, he found and nurtured some of his own greatest strengths as a writer and as a human being. His admiration of the wildness 13

Ibid., 9. John Burroughs, Whitman: A Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 3. 15 Ibid., 296. 14

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of both Thoreau and Whitman are balanced by his admiration and emulation of the gentle, pastoral, and “at home” qualities of Gilbert White’s writing. Too often, however, readers of Burroughs tend to emphasize the Gilbert White side of him (without specifically mentioning White), when actually all three influences, or affinities, contribute to understanding what is most spirited, interesting and enduring about his writing.

Figure 5: Slabsides (photograph by Daniel G. Payne).

From Reading Nature to Cultivating It How did John Burroughs write the land? Even more important than his reading of other writers was his reading of the land itself, of course. For him this was a sacred task, not in the traditional religious metaphor of interpreting the “book of nature” as a reflection of the Bible. For Burroughs nature was filled with presence, but that presence was equally available to everyone, and took sides with no one in particular. To “read the Book of Nature aright” meant reading its particulars, its fine print, as he called it, without any biased assumptions, and with a love of science as well as the spirit of the incarnate world: There are no heretics in Nature’s church, all are believers, all are communicants. The beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time, you do not have to seek it far off in myths and legends, in catacombs, garbled texts, miracles of dead saints or wine-bibbing friars. It is of today, now and here; it is everywhere. The crickets chirp it, birds sing it, breezes chant it, thunder proclaims it, streams murmur it, the unaffected man lives it . . . The frosts write it in exquisite characters, the dews impearl it and the rainbow paints it in the sky. It is not an insurance policy underwritten by a

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Rural to the Last Drop: Writing Rural Land from John Burroughs to Ourselves bishop or priest; it is a love, an enthusiasm, a consecration to natural truth.16

To Burroughs all these things were evident, and the “exquisite characters” of nature’s writing were met in him by a passionate desire to express what he saw. He had the poet’s visionary need to bear witness to what he sees and to increase his understanding by putting it into words; and he recommends the same process for his readers: If my reader thinks he does not get from Nature what I get from her, let me remind him that he can hardly know what he has got till he defines it to himself as I do, and throws about it the witchery of words. Literature does not grow wild in the woods. Every artist does something more than copy Nature; more comes out in his account than goes into the original experience.17

Clearly, the almost sacred process of writing nature, not just writing “about” nature was key to his approach to writing, for without that concentrated effort, how do you know what you’ve seen, how do you understand it without the “witchery of words”? A distinctive feature of Burroughs’s writing is the pleasure he seems to take in metaphors that dwell in that borderland between reading nature’s text, and writing it. For instance, he takes the paper-making of the hornet quiet literally as something related to the written word: “The paper it makes is about like that of the newspaper; nearly as firm, and made of essentially the same material . . . And there is news on it, too, if one could make out the characters.”18 When Burroughs examines the flight patterns of birds, or follows the tracks of animals in the snow, one feels that he is seeing a kind of calligraphy sketched fleetingly before his eyes with disappearing ink, while he attempts, with his sharp eyes and sympathetic mind to find the best possible words of translation. Many examples of that ardent tracking of nature can be found in his journals. In the winter of 1900, for instance, his “reading” of the tracks in the snow made by a few young quail shows how actively he seeks to interpret and translate what he sees. From those tracks that another might not even notice, he observes the actions of a vulnerable group of young

16

John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 117. John Burroughs, Wake-Robin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1871), intro. to 1904 Riverby Edition, xiv-xv. 18 John Burroughs, “Touches of Nature,” Birds and Poets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1877), 57. 17

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birds and enters into a sympathetic imagination of the trials they have been through together: In my walk in the woods I saw where a small flock of quail had passed, six of them. What a pretty trail they made in the thin snow! In places where the woods were densest, they seemed to huddle close together like scared children. I could almost fancy them taking hold of hands—real babes in the woods. How alert and watchful they have been! Owls, foxes, minks, cats, hunters—all had to be looked out for. In the more open places they scattered more, no doubt looking for food. In the fall there were twelve or fifteen of them, now only six.19

By April of that year, Burroughs’s joyful response to spring energy is mingled with images of farm work. He begins with the voice of the meadowlark, but the meadowlark sings not only of the beauties of spring; it also exhorts the farmer to joyfully get to work: It is a voice out of the heart of April—not a sweet voice, but oh, such a suggestive and pleasing one! It means so much; it means the new furrow, and the seed, and the first planting; it means the springing grass and the early flowers, the budding trees, and the chorus in the marshes. It is warm and moist with the breath of Middle April. “Wick, wick, wick, wick, wick,” he says, Come, be up and doing! Air your house, burn up your rubbish, scatter your compost, start your plow! The soft maples are blooming; the bees are humming; the robins are nesting; the chickadees are hatching; the ants are stirring; and I am here to call the hour.20

Finally, Burroughs abandons the voice of the meadowlark for his own, as he exclaims, “Oh, April, month of my heart! The soil never looks so inviting as in April; one could almost eat it; it is the staff of life; it lusts for the seed.”21 In an essay called “The Secret of Happiness,” Burroughs praises “the blessedness of work, of life-giving and life-sustaining work,” and describes his own solution to a period of his life in which he felt his life beginning to stagnate: What was to be done? Go to work. Get more land and become a farmer in earnest. Exchange the penholder for the crowbar and the hoe-handle. I already had a few acres of land and had been a fruitgrower in a small way; 19

John Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, Clara Barrus, ed. (1928. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1967), 215. 20 Ibid., 218. 21 Ibid.

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Once he has added nine new acres to double his land and has waited through the winter to begin farming it, “underdraining the moist and springy places” before he could ready it for plowing, Burroughs feels an immediate, satisfying change in his life: My health and spirits improved daily. I seemed to be underdraining my own life and carrying off the stagnant water, as well as that of the land. Then a lot of ash stumps and brush, an old apple orchard, and a great many rocks and large stones were to be removed before the plough could be set going. With what delight I saw this work go forward, and I bore my own part in it! I had not seen such electric April days for years; I had not sat down to dinner with such relish and satisfaction for the past decade; I had not seen the morning break with such anticipation since I was a boy. The clear, bright April days, the great river dimpling and shining there, the arriving birds, the robins laughing, the high-holes calling, the fox sparrow whistling, the blackbirds gurgling, and the hillside slope where we were at work—what delight I had in it all, and what renewal of life it brought me! I found the best way to see the spring come was to be in the field at work.23

His journal conveys how deeply Burroughs was involved in his farming. Several entries in 1891, for instance, tell us how much bad weather worried him—and how much satisfaction he took in a successful crop of grapes. On June 4, 1891, he writes his anguish over a bad storm: Terrible thunder-shower last night from 8 to 9:30 . . . Did irreparable injury to my vineyards—tons and tons of soil carried away. . . . A night of agony to me; slept barely an hour. After the rain, the wind arose, and I feared the young arms would all be stripped off the vines. Wind continues today, and the havoc with the arms is very great; some vines lose half. The worst blow I have yet had. I fear the vineyards will prove the death of me.24

Five days later he is serene again, enjoying beautiful weather, pleased to be hard at work repairing the damage:

22

John Burroughs, “The Secret Of Happiness,” Literary Values (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 283. 23 Ibid., 283-84. 24 Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 160.

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June 9 [1891]. Lovely June days, calm, warm, hazy. Clover and daisies and wild strawberries in the meadows, young birds calling, early grapes blooming, cherries ripening. It only needs youth to make the world very beautiful and winsome. Busy carting earth to repair damages done by the deluge; make but slow headway.25

And by October we learn that he has somehow had a good crop of grapes after all: Very busy with the grapes till September 20. A fine season for shipping, for the most part . . . Shipped twenty-one tons, over four tons Delawares, over four tons Niagaras, five tons and over of Wordens, nearly five of Concords, etc. Brought $2100…Am convinced that small baskets pay best.26

In these journal entries, we see Burroughs engaged in the minutiae of farming, the worries over weather, the hard work, the economics. Though his passion for literature and learning had made him eager to leave the family farm in his young manhood, Burroughs clearly loved and needed the work of farming. In “Making the Self at Home,” an essay on Burroughs, Wendell Berry and Homesteading (and also in her later book At Home in Nature), Rebecca Kneale Gould demonstrates convincingly that Burroughs’s return to farming was the cause for a new strength, vigor and maturity in his writings that followed.27 These mature writings include notably his essay “Phases of Farm Life,” published in Signs and Seasons,28 and his memoir, My Boyhood; both works are rich in detail about his experience growing up on his parents’ farm near Roxbury, New York. Additionally, a great many other essays refer to aspects of farm life, either as their main topic, or as digressions within other subjects. My Boyhood, which deserves a new edition for today’s readers, is filled with memories and descriptions of almost every aspect of nineteenth century farm life in the northeast. Because Burroughs addresses this 25

Ibid., 160-61. Ibid., 162. 27 Rebecca Kneale Gould, “Making the Self at Home: John Burroughs, Wendell Berry and the Sacred Economy,” in Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing, Charlotte Zoë Walker, ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). This essay is the foundation for one part of the larger discussion in Gould’s important and illuminating work, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 28 Now available in a new edition with critical commentary, edited by Jeff Walker (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005). 26

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memoir to his son Julian, it has a particular flavor that might make it attractive to children even today: “You asked me to give you some account of my life—how it was with me, and now in my seventy-sixth year I find myself in the mood to do so. You know enough about me to know that it will not be an exciting narrative or of any great historical value.”29 Yet Burroughs does manage to make it exciting and certainly for us now it is of considerable historical value. He also offers a reference to how much cultivating the land and writing the land are intermingled for him, when he mentions his farm on the Hudson, “where you were brought up and where I have since lived, cultivating the land for marketable fruit and the fields and woods for nature literature, as you well know.”30 My Boyhood not only conveys Burroughs’s memories of growing up on the farm, but describes in lively detail the work of haying, the care of dairy cattle, the churning of butter, the building of stone walls, and the joys of maple sugaring, his favorite farm chore: While tending the kettles there beside the old arch in the bright, warm March or April days, with my brother, or while he had gone to dinner, looking down the long valley and off over the curving backs of the distant mountain ranges, what dreams I used to have, what vague longings, and, I may say, what happy anticipations! I am sure I gathered more than sap and sugar in those youthful days amid the maples. When I visit the old home now I have to walk up to the sugar bush and stand around the old “boiling place,” trying to transport myself back into the magic atmosphere of that boyhood time.31

“I had come into a land flowing with milk, if not with honey,” Burroughs writes in My Boyhood, though he adds that “maple syrup may very well take the place of the honey.”32 He is grateful for his “good luck” at having been born on a farm, in springtime, in 1837, and much of that luck seemed to be entwined with the cows on his family farm: The breath of kine early mingled with my own breath. From my earliest memory the cow was the chief factor on the farm and her products the main source of the family income; around her revolved the haying and the harvesting. It was for her that we toiled from early July until late August, 29

John Burroughs, My Boyhood, 1. John Burroughs, My Boyhood, 1; repr. in The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 260. 31 Burroughs, My Boyhood, 42. 32 Ibid., 9. 30

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gathering the hay into the barns or into the stacks, mowing and raking it by hand. . . . Her paths were in the fields and woods, her sonorous voice was upon the hills, her fragrant breath was upon every breeze. She was the center of our industries.33

“Our Rural Divinity,” Burroughs’s essay in praise of the dairy cow is one of my own favorites—perhaps because it brings so readily to mind the many times my father told my siblings and me about how it felt to lie in his grandfather’s field with his head against the side of his own reclining rural divinity, Bessie, a cow whose memory meant peace and safety to him all his life. Burroughs’s descriptions of farm life take the reader from the milk given by the family’s dairy cows, to his mother’s churning of the butter that was one of their main sources of income, to his father’s custom of including each of the boys in turn on his annual journey to deliver the butter to a dealer near the Hudson River: It was a great event in the life of each of us. When it came my turn I was probably eleven or twelve years old and the coming event loomed big on my horizon. I was actually to see my first steamboat, the Hudson River, and maybe the steam cars. . . . Perched high on that springboard beside Father, my feet hardly touching the tops of the firkins, at the rate of about two miles an hour over rough roads in chilly November weather, I made my first considerable journey into the world. I crossed the Catskill Mountains and got that surprising panoramic view of the land beyond from the top.34

“Blessed Is He Whose Youth Was Passed Upon the Farm” Burroughs’s account of his joy at making that wagon journey with his father reminds me of Hal Borland’s story of driving to the family homestead in Colorado with his father, and of my own father’s unpublished memoir as well. My father was born in 1909, just nine years after Hal Borland (and 72 years after Burroughs); and just as we can read in Burroughs and Borland of the grand feeling a boy had riding in a horsedrawn wagon with his father, my Dad wrote in his own memoir of how it felt to ride beside his grandfather, a North Carolina farmer, as they took their produce into town. Charles Henry Walker had a difficult and often impoverished childhood in rural North Carolina, but the memoir he wrote in his seventies—along with all the stories he used to tell his children-33 34

Ibid., 9-10. Ibid, 20-21.

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made clear how deeply he felt that “the happiest memories of my childhood were there on the farm with Grandpa Grogan.” I recall riding in the buggy with my grandfather as he took eggs and produce to town to sell. What a privilege and honor it was to be permitted to do this. I can still see the muddy, rutted roads and hear Grandpa say “Now geddy up,” to old Charlie, the horse. He had two fine horses, Bob and Charlie. (He always told me I was named after Charlie the horse.) I can vividly recall the tantalizing smell of the horses and their harness, which to this day still delights me.35

My Dad’s memoir is full of affection as he tells about the cold attic bedrooms of the farmhouse in the winter, with the tin roof that made summers hot and rain noisy: It took several warm quilts to keep warm in the winter. Of course we slept in our long johns, and only took them off once a week to wash them and take a bath. We bathed in a galvanized wash tub set in the middle of the kitchen floor by the huge kitchen wood-burning range which had a reservoir of hot water on the side. In the summer we roasted under the tin roof, which had no insulation. The roof rafters were right over you. When it rained the steady hum of the rain beating against the roof was a great inducement to sleep—not that we needed any.36

Young Charlie Walker was a spiritual cousin of the young John Burroughs with his love of the family’s dairy cows. How fondly my Dad remembers bringing in the cows for milking! Grandpa Grogan had several cows and also kept other people’s cows for a modest rental fee. At milking time in the afternoon, the cows had to be rounded up and brought to the area of the barn for milking. John and I and sometimes Dorrett had to round up the cows. To help us in this endeavor we had a large, beautiful shepherd dog who was trained to bark at the cows’ heels without scaring them. He did a great job and we always enjoyed this chore. We had to cover some distance to bring all the cows in. Down through valleys, up hills, down hills and over ridges was routine. One beautiful area with rolling hills and broad meadows was named Back Cove. The cows loved this area and so did we. There was always the temptation to linger, but that we couldn’t do. Those cows had to be rounded up and driven in for milking time. Sometimes we could go over

35 36

Charles Henry Walker, “Roots and Consequences,” (unpublished memoir: n.d.). Ibid.

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to Back Cove and explore, looking for anything and everything that took our fancy.37

Dad’s rural memories went from edenic to hellish, though, when his mother remarried a man the children all hated—their own Mr. Murdstone—who took them to live on a miserable tobacco farm, where there was not only no toilet, but no running water of any kind. My father, at “eight or nine years old,” was expected to be his hated stepfather’s hardworking assistant, cutting and curing the tobacco leaves, staying all night in the smokehouse to keep things going; and perhaps most frightening of all, fetching buckets of water for the household, from a spring on the other side of a field full of water moccasins—a memory that seemed to hold more horror for him than anything he experienced in the Navy in World War II or the Korean War. Though John Burroughs is honest about the hard labor of farming and the difficulties of being a poetic daydreamer in a practical family with never-ending work to be done, he manages to locate much of his boyhood within the boundaries of Eden, and to justify his claim that “Blessed is he whose youth is spent upon the farm”: Our natural history we got unconsciously in the sport at noon time, or on our way to and from school or in our Sunday excursions to the streams and woods. We learned much about the ways of foxes and woodchucks and coons and skunks and squirrels by hunting them. The partridge too, and the crows, hawks, and owls, and the song birds of the field and orchard, all enter into the farm boy’s life.38

Like Burroughs, my Dad recalls (from the times before he was ejected from Eden), the joys of play when chores were done: John and I used to like to climb the steep hills behind the barn and other buildings and roll big rocks down the hillsides. Sometimes they would crash into one of the outbuildings. I think we were spanked or at least reprimanded for this several times before we got the message. One of our favorite play areas was an area close by consisting of several red clay banks. We built all kinds of tunnels, miniature villages, railroads, factories, etc. Another place we had a lot of fun, all four of us kids, was pine needle sledding. On some of the slopes covered with beautiful pine

37 38

Ibid. Burroughs, My Boyhood, 91; The Art of Seeing Things, 274.

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History: Swords and Plowshares How do we write the rural land, the land that has been loved and farmed and tended by generations, without also remembering that it was stolen from its original inhabitants, who were then sequestered, murdered and forgotten, so that later generations could forget the theft, and think only of the nourishing, forgiving land? How can we honor the land itself without also honoring those who walked on it first, in deep relation to it over centuries? How can we write our own relationship to that land without listening for all those voices that inhabited it before us, without weaving into our understanding the relationships our ancestors had with it, remembering especially those from whom it was taken not so very long ago, as well as those interloping, intervening generations who staked a claim on stolen land, yet in their own way did their best for it, tending it as best they could in the ways they had inherited from Europe? Eric Gansworth’s Indian Summers is a superb example of how important it is to include Native writers in our conversations about writing the land. This many-faceted novel is partly about young people’s relation to a reservoir that was built by flooding reservation land, community land: “It seems they picked the land they thought was going to be easiest to take. . . . they knew white people could be touchy about their land and, in the past, Indians had been so good about giving up theirs without much noise. So I guess it was a historical thing.”40 As the story unfolds, it works almost poetically to make the reader feel the significance of that loss and that history. In his essay, “A Native Hill,” Wendell Berry expresses in a personal way the dilemma that I think we must recognize in our relationship to our rural forebears and farming past and present: Here, now that I am both native and citizen, there is no immunity to what is wrong. It is impossible to escape the sense that I am involved in history. What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it; the lives of most of them diminished it, and limited its possibilities

39

Charles Henry Walker, “Roots and Consequences.” Eric Gansworth, Indian Summers (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 6. 40

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and narrowed its future. And every day I am confronted by what inheritance I will leave. . . . At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history. I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, by the evidence of their persistent failure to serve either the place or their own community in it.41

Berry’s realization that we cannot escape our involvement in history is apt also for our ongoing responsibility to the land, and to those who would farm it in a beneficial way. As a nation we have all but abandoned our food supply to the large agribusinesses, and now, with growing problems of obesity and disease, we begin to apprehend what we have lost. I believe we need to realize further that the more we allow our government and culture to emphasize a climate of war, the more we abandon our responsibility to the land, the people, and all that is nourishes us. Anyone who saw the movie Kandahar will not forget the image of amputee farmers, hopping along on crutches in the fields, where the land their families had cultivated for generations could not protect them from the mines that had been planted there. They vivify the long tension between war and farming that is surely one piece of the puzzle we now must solve. In the Roman story, the farmer Cincinnatus answered the call to leave his farm, at a loss of food and income for his family, in order to lead his country in battle. The story tells us that he performed his duty well, refused the reward of political power, and returned peacefully to his farm. But a general can do that far more easily than a private. How many rural young men, and now women, have become “cannon fodder” for the military because of economic circumstances resulting from the decisions of a government that prefers swords to plowshares? Leila Philip’s memoir, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family, describes several generations on her family’s apple orchard on the Hudson River. One of the most memorable sections is based on the letters her great grandfather and his brothers and mother wrote during the Civil War. Two of the sons of the family went off to the war (only one of them came back), while the youngest stayed home 41 Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002), 8.

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to run the farm as best he could. His elder brother worried about how the younger one could manage alone, and some of his letters offer advice as well as worries: I think upon the whole, the Raspbury’s herd better go. You can’t attend to them and situated as you are they will only be a bother and an expense. Make a nice patch at the bottom of the garden below that grape arbor where we have corn and potatoes for family use and let the rest go.42

It’s touching to read these words from 1861, and realize how much this young officer’s thoughts were with the farm at home. How vivid that grape arbor must have been in his mind! I am of the generation that grew up during World War II and the Korean War, and thought there were supposed to be no more wars—so that as young adults we were outraged by the Vietnam War; and now in our senior years, we cannot fathom how once again vast resources are being poured into an unnecessary war. I realize there is nothing new about this. Medieval peasants struggle valiantly with rocky soil or harsh weather, and just when the crops are ready to harvest, some army comes through on horseback, trampling the fields, setting fire to barns and houses. A peaceful Indian encampment is trampled by the U.S. Cavalry and the people killed. Cossacks invade a shtetl in Russia, destroying both food and lives. Israeli bulldozers level a centuries-old Palestinian olive grove to make room for a wall. Still, isn’t it important in our own time to see what the cost of our governmental and economic choices might be? What are the links between domestic policies favoring big agribusiness over the small family farmer, and a foreign policy that makes ongoing war profitable for some, while the people as a whole find their lives more fearful, their social services diminished, and their food less and less nutritious? As Wendell Berry puts it in an essay for The Essential Agrarian Reader: Forcing all agricultural localities to conform to economic conditions imposed from afar by a few large corporations has caused problems of the largest possible scale, such as soil loss, genetic impoverishment, and groundwater pollution, which are correctable only by an agriculture of locally adapted, solar-powered, diversified small farms—a correction that, after a half century of industrial agriculture, will be difficult to achieve.

42 Leila Philip, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001), 104.

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The industrial economy thus is inherently violent. It impoverishes one place in order to be extravagant in another, true to its colonialist ambition. A part of the “externalized” cost of this is war after war.43

Vandana Shiva, in an essay titled “The War Against Farmers and the Land,” makes the analogy between war and the current state of agriculture. “Industrial agriculture,” she says, “…has become a war against ecosystems. It is based on the instruments of war and the logic of war, and it has warlike consequences. The chemicals on which industrial agriculture is based were originally designed for chemical warfare. That is why industrialists turned Bhopal into a war zone. That is why corporate agriculture converts our farms into war zones.”44 Shiva has founded “Navdanya,” an organization to preserve native seeds and biodiversity, and to protect farmers from the incursions of genetic engineering and patenting of seeds by corporations such as Monsanto. Her project in India, with its emphasis on organic farming and protecting the rights of small, local farmers, is profoundly interesting and hopeful. Landless Indian farmers and tribal peoples were recently in the news, when 25,000 of them gathered in Delhi at the end of a 200 mile march to demand land reform, and protest their displacement while the government granted land to large industrial firms. Michael Pollan wrote an op-ed piece for the November 4, 2007 New York Times, entitled “Weed it and Reap,” decrying the continuing subsidizing of the very agricultural industries, such as high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, that are undermining the health of the people. Though he is realistic about the forces against substantial change, he does conclude that: The politics of food have changed, and probably for good. If the eaters and all the other ‘people on the outside’ makes themselves heard, we just might end up with something that looks less like a farm bill and more like the food bill a poorly fed America so badly needs.45

43

Wendell Berry, “The Agrarian Standard” in The Essential Agrarian Reader. Norman Wirzba, ed. (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002), 26. 44 Vandana Shiva, “Globalization and the War Against Farmers and the Land,” in The Essential Agrarian Reader, Norman Wirzba, ed. (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002), 122. 45 Michael Pollan, “Weed it and Reap,” New York Times, op ed page, November 4, 2007.

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These movements for change on opposite sides of the world reveal how crucial the issues are, and they reflect how significantly writing about the land has changed in recent years. Wendell Berry, in his Epilogue to the twentieth-anniversary edition of The Unsettling of America chooses a powerful metaphor to express the continuing need for change, and the movements gathering strength to bring it about: “[If] throwing a rock into a frozen river does not make a ripple, . . . beneath the ice the waters are strongly flowing and stirred up and full of nutrients. . . . our national conversation about agriculture is more vigorous and exciting now than it has been since the 1930’s.”46 If the connections I am considering here, between the decline of small farms, the rise of agribusiness, and governmental policies that favor war profiteering, seem tenuous to some, a reading of David Mas Masumoto’s Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil might help strengthen them. Masumoto describes the lives of Japanese immigrant families who worked long and hard to acquire land in California and patiently develop their own fruit orchards—only to see their lives and their farms harshly interrupted by enforced evacuation and internment during World War II. One of his few relics of a grandfather who died en route to a relocation camp is a photo of his casket. surrounded by relatives, “in the summer of 1942, just after all the Japanese Americas were uprooted and relocated to desolate camps scattered across western America.”47 Masumoto pieces together what he can, though elder relatives still find that time difficult to speak of: “The confusion of evacuation mutes their stories and muzzles their voices.”48 As Ronald Jager observes in his brief history of American farming, from one perspective the movement away from optimal conditions for the small farmer has been going on for a very long time. Yet there can also be no denying the increasing ill effects of farm policies in recent years,49 Amanda Decker, a high school teacher who grew up on a farm in the 46

Wendell Berry, Afterword to Third edition of The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996; originally purblished 1977), 232. 47 David Mas Masumoto, Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 23. 48 Ibid., 25. 49 A recent article by Oxfam America reports research from Tuskegee University and the University of Minnesota indicating how minority farmers, in particular, are shut out by government farm policies. “Farmers of Color Shut Out from Farm Bill Programs,” Oxfam America, July 19, 2007; website: http://www.oxfamamerica.org/newsandpublications.

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Catskills expresses movingly the pain involved when her family was forced to close their 500 acre farm: In the 1980’s the government had found more economic and efficient ways to produce dairy products and the small time farmers were no longer being paid a fair price for their goods. This economic crunch affected many local farmers, us included. The government tried to relieve the farmer from the financial burden through a program called the Whole Herd Buy Out. They would purchase cows at a fraction of the market value, offering the farmers a chance to shut down their family farms, while minimizing the losses. My parents passed on this opportunity and set about keeping our farm with a new determination. But, it was not meant to be. A series of setbacks sealed the fate of the farm. In 1986, my parents made the heart breaking decision to sell the cows. I remember the day only vaguely. My father was herding the cows down from Upper Deck and I was aware that it was for the last time. I remember watching them being loaded unto cattle wagons, going to graze in another farmers fields. I watched my parent’s faces, but they revealed nothing. They stoically loaded the cattle and watched them disappear down the road. They were no longer farmers. I remember that summer was full of change. I watched my parents silently pore over the financial books. Never a word, never a complaint.50

With similar fortitude, Decker describes how her mother made the family laugh at the “strange adventure” when, for the first time, they had to buy their milk at the supermarket. But when she tasted it, she tasted their loss as well: “I still remember the first glass full. It was less creamy and not as sweet as our milk. I was very disappointed. How in the world was I going to drink this for the rest of my life?”51 The loss, of course, was not only hers, but all of ours. Skip Johnson, owner of Limestone Heights Farm, in upstate New York, remarks on current farm policy that I think we all need to pay more attention to what is categorized as a “farm.” With big business and the very wealthy taking farm exemptions, this is really hurting the "real" farms, the family farms. These corporations and individuals for the most part have never even put their hands in the soil! . . . Just because “we trust our government” with letting a corporation put on its label “Organically Certified by USDA,” we feel safe. We need to investigate our own food sources and make our own decisions . . .52 50

Amanda Decker, “An Indomitable Spirit,” and “Life on Prairie Hill Farm,” (unpublished memoir, n.d.). 51 Ibid. 52 Skip Johnson, interview, November 2007.

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Wes Jackson argues for an “agrarian mind” as we look to needed social changes, stating that: When we speak of the need for such a mind, we are not talking about mere nostalgia, but rather a practical necessity. Agrarianism requires no moral or spiritual language for justification; it grows out of a scientific understanding of how organisms interact within natural habitats, an understanding that is too greatly ignored in industrial approaches to agriculture.53

It is surely not too great a leap, to hope that by embracing the local once again, encouraging small farmers and farmers’ markets everywhere in the world, and working politically for the rights of small farmers, we will at the same time be working for a healthier and more equitable, a less violent and more peace-loving society. John Burroughs himself made the connection between war, industry and environmental degradation as he gazed upon the city of Pittsburgh, a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake of brimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of the hill-tops. I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than I ever did in an other city in this country. . . It might well be the devil’s laboratory. Out of such blackening and blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and of destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hellfire seemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them—much that suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of the lake bottoms.54

What was that pond-lily? And for whom was it rising? Was it merely Burroughs’s naïve hope that somehow industry would “bring good things to life”? Or was it a more abstract and spiritual hope, a more Whitmanlike hope, for future generations to bring about an evolutionary change and restore that “sweet country air of the hill-tops” to everyone?

Apples But let us return to Eden. 53

Wes Jackson, “The Agrarian Mid: Mere Nostalgia or a practical Necessity,” in The Essential Agrarian Reader, Norman Wirzba, ed. (Emeryville, CA:Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002), 140. 54 John Burroughs, “A Strenuous Holiday,” in The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs, Charlotte Zoë Walker, ed., 184. Originally published in Under the Maples (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921).

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The land my husband and I live on, an austere, north-facing hillside, has a somewhat smaller ration of sunshine than our south-facing neighbors, but we have loved it and lived upon it for twenty years—and now and then we are rewarded with a splendid view of aurora borealis, flaring along the northern horizon or even, occasionally, leaping toward the mid-heaven. We had to make a few false starts before we found and prepared the section of land that would get enough hours of sunlight for our vegetable garden. Yet my Dutch husband has flowers in abundance. And we are surrounded by wild apple trees that give us a bridal feeling in spring, and a sense of abundance in early autumn. This year a few afternoons of work yielded us eleven gallons of dark, spicy cider—and some lovely apple mash to spread as compost in the garden. Many of the trees are on a bi-annual schedule, but fortunately there are always some whose year it is to bear small, bright red apples with yellow brush strokes, or deeper red ones, or slightly larger green ones with crisp flesh and a sweet taste. The ritual of shaking the trees, dodging those thumping apples, then filling large burlap bags with them and driving to the cider mill is one of my favorite blessings of country life. It also takes me back to the years when my children and I, living in that old farmhouse, would drive on Sunday mornings to a local apple market and make our jubilant choices among the glowing bins of different varieties of apples. It was there that I had my first chance to buy the Northern Spies that I had read—was it in Laura Ingalls Wilder or somewhere else?—made the best pies. And indeed, they did.. It was partly because of our apple trees that I especially enjoyed reading the chapter on apples in Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire. His retelling, with historical accuracy, the story of John Chapman, or Johnny Appleseed, brought back one of my favorite childhood fantasies—to be Johnny Appleseed and leave such a grand legacy behind as a land rich in apples. John Burroughs begins his volume Under the Apple Trees (1916) with a description of the life to be found in an apple orchard: There are few places on the farm where there is so much live natural history to be gathered as in the orchard. All the wild creatures seem to feel the friendly and congenial atmosphere of the orchard. The trees bear a crop of birds, if not of apples, every season. Few are the winged visitors from distant climes that do not, sooner or later, tarry a bit in the orchard. Many birds, such as the robin, the chippy, the hummingbird, the cedarbird, the goldfinch, and some of the flycatchers, nest there. The great

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Rural to the Last Drop: Writing Rural Land from John Burroughs to Ourselves crested flycatcher loves the old hollow limbs, and the little red owl often lives in a cavity in the trunk.55

In an earlier essay, “Bird Life in an Old Apple Tree,” Burroughs takes up the same theme: Near my study there used to stand several old apple trees that bore fair crops of apples, but better crops of birds. Every year these old trees were the scenes of bird incidents and bird histories that were a source of much interest and amusement. Young trees may be the best for apples, but old trees are sure to bear the most birds.56

Burroughs’s description of the bird life in an apple orchard is certainly born out in our own experience a century later, though our trees are only the remnants of an orchard. Often the robins nest on cozy-looking branches just at eye-level, and don’t seem to mind a quiet visitor taking a quick look at them now and then. But what is the history of these wild apple trees? Ronald Jager give one possible explanation in his Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm, when he describes the fate of the apple orchards planted by European immigrants in the Midwestern area where he grew up: Nearly all the farmers who tamed Missaukee County between the years 1880 and 1920 had planted fruit orchards on their farms. The first farmers did this, a legacy for generations to come, as automatically as they built barns and preserved woodlots, and all the orchards we ever saw were carefully planted in straight rows—“on the square.” Yet very few of them were well tended by the next generation of farmers, most of whom knew little about the care of fruit trees. Many orchards had become decrepit or sickly or worse well before the middle of the twentieth century: most of the plum and pear trees were dead and unreplaced, the apple trees unpruned, unkempt.57

Jager’s own father did some rough pruning, “hacked off . . . what appeared to be surplus branches…,” and Jager observes that even that minimal effort made a difference, giving them a yield of apples that the totally neglected orchards of their neighbors no longer produced. Like Burroughs, Jager also speaks of the pleasant life that goes on in an apple orchard. He concentrates, though, on a different species—children: 55

John Burroughs, Under the Apple Trees (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 1. John Burroughs, Riverby (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 295. 57 Ronald Jager, Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 59-60. 56

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The orchard was a playground for children, a tree climber’s paradise, and a good place for youth to find and bury treasure. We got to know most of the trees intimately, almost personally, not just the taste of their fruit and the spectacle and fragrance of their blossoms but the skeleton and texture of the trees themselves, their individual contours, their worn and weak spots, their clumsy, wide-open, beckoning arms, their rough resistance to our climbing and embrace. By much experience we came to know and enjoy the strenuous contortions demanded of us by some trees for getting to certain of their far-flung branches to inspect the robins’ nests, or to reach our secret and windblown retreats where we hid from one another and fashioned heroic tales about giants of the forest who might have waylaid us had we not gotten them first. All around us wondrous varieties of apples ripened in sequence from midsummer onward: first Yellow Transparent, Early Harvester, Red Astrachan; then Duchess, Wealthy, and Winesap. After that came Snow Apple, Maiden Blush, Ben David, and Grimes Golden, followed by Wolf River and Russet. Last of all was the great and unforgettable Pewaukee, our principal winter apple.58

In The Orchard, Adele Crockett Robertson’s memoir that was rescued from oblivion by a loving daughter, she describes her brave struggle to save the family apple orchard during the Great Depression, with her dog Freya as her main companion. Her narrative relates in vivid detail the discomfort and exhaustion she endured, as well as the beauty she seemed ever responsive to. Perhaps that responsiveness is key to whatever it was that impelled her to write this remarkable narrative, unfinished though it was, and hidden away for the rest of her life: The cold autumn of 1933 had one good effect. The Spies, which were inclined to color poorly in streaks and splotches, fairly blazed under the touch of the frost. Spies are late in producing, late in blooming, and late in maturing their fruit. When we began picking them in mid-October, their leaves were still as green as in summer. The weather grew steadily colder, the sun weaker, and often there was a skim of ice on Freya’s water dish in the morning.59

Leila Philip begins her memoir A Family Place with a description of her father teaching her how to prune the trees in their apple orchard:

58

Ibid., 61. Adele Crockett Robertson, The Orchard A Memoir (New York: Dial Press, 1997), 160. 59

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Rural to the Last Drop: Writing Rural Land from John Burroughs to Ourselves “Here,” he says, holding the center section of a young tree in one hand and angling the clippers toward it with the other. “See these two terminals growing close together. That won’t do. They are competing. One has to go.” His large hands hold the clippers easily, almost carelessly as he bends his tall frame over the young tree. I watch his fingers squeeze over the orange grips. The blades snap. A long, slender branch slides down the length of the tree. “You have to find the leader, make a decision, then cut.”60

When Leila Philip takes her turn, though, she finds it difficult to make that decision, to make a cut that will affect the life and health of the tree. The remainder of her book takes her through the death of her beloved father, and a subsequent journey into history to understand the generations of her family that have owned the farm and its apple orchards since 1738. By the end of the book, Leila is again in the orchard, this time with her widowed mother, who has managed to save the orchards by her own clever management. Like Ronald Jager, Philip enjoys naming the varieties of apples her farm has produced: Back when my grandfather founded the first orchards, the farm produced apples with enticing, old-fashioned names like Opalescent, Baldwin, Wealthy, Spitzenburg, Newtown Pippin, Seek No Further, Northern Spy. They were early apple breeds that had been replaced on our farm in the 1930’s by more contemporary stock like McIntosh, Red Delicious and Macoun.61

By the end of the book, she makes clear that her hesitance about how to prune an apple tree has now been replaced by the model of her mother’s courage and firmness: “Look at that size,” I say, pointing to a large Ida Red as we pass it by. “That one’s headed for the fair,” my mother says decisively. She strains to see over the top of the steering wheel as the silver truck bounces along, her straw hat tilting like a windmill.62

Leila Philip’s quest in writing her book leads her not only into her family history, but as she says, “Like any journey, the traveling out had been accompanied by a parallel journey in. I understood better now who I was 60

Leila Philip, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family. (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001), 1. 61 Ibid., 247. 62 Ibid., 261.

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and what that meant.”63 One of the things she has learned is that “Once you stopped working the land, you lost your connection to it.”64 An Eve who grows her own apples need not worry about the serpent.

What Land Is This Beneath Our Feet? Some of our best contemporary writers have been considering the bold and challenging new ways we may discover for regaining what has been lost, and for reclaiming not only our culture, but our health and well being, from the agribusinesses. Some of the most significant new rural writing is prescriptive: what we can do to reclaim our relationship to the land, so that we may appreciate it again, so that it may be renewed and can nourish again. The agrarian writings of Wendell Berry, Ronald Jager, and Gene Logsdon have been especially meaningful in this regard. Jeff Walker, geologist and Burroughs scholar, editor of a new edition of Signs and Seasons, and director of the 2008 “Sharp Eyes” conference on John Burroughs at Vassar College, says about his and his wife Kathy and their family’s fifteen acre farm near Poughkeepsie, New York, that “We got serious after we came to the realization that a fossil fuel economy removed us, as a culture, from knowing much about where and how our food was produced. The final straw was realizing that western society was willing to cause death and misery to non-western societies to get the oil that supported their lifestyle.” He refers to their farm as “a way to know where some of our food comes from, to take responsibility for the raising, killing and preserving of it, and to remove ourselves just a little from a fossil-fuel based food industry.”65 Skip Johnson, whose organic Limestone Heights Farm covers 650 acres in Herkimer County, New York, is committed to feeding his animals and poultry only with feed that is grown on his land. A lot of Skip Johnson’s know-how comes from his having grown up on a farm, and some of his financial ability to buy his own farmland and set up Limestone Heights came from his having built a successful metal fabricating company first. But his dream of using the best new ideas and methods in organic farming, and creating new ones as well, comes from his own ingenuity and love of the land. His determination to grow all the feed for his animals, for instance, has required him to invest in more feed storage and related equipment. He says, “A lot more planning and physical work 63

Ibid., 269. Ibid., 271. 65 Jeff Walker, personal correspondence, November, 2007. 64

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are required to do this, but as you know, you can really taste the difference.” He believes he can make this way of farming work financially and hopes it may be an encouragement to others: “I would like to be able to show other farmers (and want-to-be farmers) how you can have this great life and make money doing it.” Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable Miracle, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, and Jane Goodall’s Harvest of Hope are valuable recent efforts in showing the connections between farmers, gardeners, and the community. They demonstrate some of the ways people who continue to live in urban and suburban settings can support farmer’s markets and local food sources. Both McKibben and Kingsolver describe their families’ experiments of trying to live only on locally grown food for a year. All three writers make clear that those of us who are not farmers, but have the privilege of living in a rural setting, or any setting where a bit of soil and a bit of sunlight are available, can do our part by growing our own food as much as possible; and how those who cannot garden still have the options of subscribing to Community Supported Agriculture, or buying from local farmer’s markets, which can be found these days even in Manhattan. One of my greatest satisfactions with my own garden is being able to give some of the overflow away. We have enjoyed sharing our small cornucopia of squash, cabbage and tomatoes with friends who do the cooking at a nearby Buddhist retreat; but until recently I hadn’t realized that there is a much-needed nationwide (and Canadian) organization and movement for moving surplus garden produce to local soup kitchens. Though everyone jokes about how hard it is to give away zucchini in August, the “Plant a Row” movement can help find a home for just about every summer squash that needs one. The movement began in Anchorage Alaska, when a former president of Garden Writers of America had the idea of contributing garden produce to “Bean’s Café,” a local soup kitchen. Indeed, in 2005, the well organized program distributed over a million and a half pounds of produce to help nourish five and a half million people in need. 66 A glance at the website for the Albany, New York regional food bank indicates, as well, inspirational planning for a large organic farm dedicated to the food banks.67 Such farms will have an empowering effect on those using the food banks, as well as those contributing to them—

66

See the website of the Garden Writers of America, http://www.gardenwriters.org/par, for more information on their PAR, or “Plant a Row” movement 67 http://www.regionalfoodbank.net

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especially as more people have a chance to get their hands in the healing soil! Though my youth was never spent upon the farm, my father’s stories of Grandpa Grogan’s farm must have had something to do with my lifelong attachment to living in the countryside. I was very late in realizing that when I was growing up, we almost always lived on land that had been farmed quite recently—and that this is probably true for many of us, wherever we may live. As a reminder of the diminishment of the farming in our culture, it may be cause for sadness and regret; but perhaps we can also take it as a reminder of what we cherish and can still find our way back to, in new ways that are appropriate not only for ourselves, but for future generations. The first home that my parents owned was part of a huge tract built on plowed-under sugar beet fields in Hayward, California, during World War II. My mother told us in the last years of her life about how frightened she was on the first night she and my little brother and I (our father was at sea on the U.S.S. Arctic) spent in the new little house on Haven Street. No one had told her that we would be the first people to move in, and that as she looked out our door after dark, there would be no light visible in any direction. But within a few days another light or two showed up in the darkness that had seemed as vast as that of the Colorado plain Hal Borland experienced. Other “settlers,” other wives and children of men away at war, were beginning to find their places on the grid that had once been a beet field. Our little stucco house had rich soil in the backyard. In addition to the occasional sugar beets that tended to come back up on their own when they got the chance (but looked more like weeds than candy), my mother planted fruit trees and a Victory Garden where vegetables and strawberries took advantage of the fertile soil, growing huge and glorious. Our next home was in the city, but because the city was San Diego, our little stucco house was on a cul-de-sac that curved against the edge of a glorious canyon—a taste not of farmland, but of wilderness, just beyond our door— horned toads, trapdoor spiders, and even the occasional rattlesnake buzzing behind the manzanitas. And the war was over! Even as an adult, my dwellings seemed to partake of what I might call “romancing the rural”—that is to say, I never developed the toughness or skills for serious homesteading or farming, but couldn’t conceive of living anywhere but in the country, and didn’t mind a measure of inconvenience or discomfort in exchange for that privilege. For one wonderful year, we lived in an eighteenth century stone house outside of New Paltz when my

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children were very young. Wasps buzzed in the rafters of our bedrooms in summer, but the children didn’t seem to mind too much, if I sang them to sleep with folk songs. There were ancient iron hooks in the fireplace, broad hickory planks on the floor, and a double-Dutch door looking out on the pond where we loved to watch an otter swimming. Years later, as a working single mother, I rented for us a farmhouse on a hillside next to a long-forgotten stagecoach road that climbed past a vigorous, broad waterfall. How we loved to look at the forms it froze into in January! I would contemplate the particular moment at which its turbulence suddenly stopped and was turned into a sculpture, time as frozen as the water, at least until spring. The German farmers who had built the house were long forgotten, but their glorious red currant bushes remained, and their dirtfloored root cellar, a separate room off the main basement, as neat as a chipmunk’s den, still had bins for apples, potatoes and onions, and rows of canning jars waiting to be filled. At last the children and I bought our own home for the first time—and it was a farmhouse too, built so early it showed up on a map dated 1832. The root cellar was not as charming as that of the German farmers, but there were old canning jars on shelves in the dirt-floored basement. Handhewn beams were still exposed in a small barn-like space attached to the house—so lovely that I had a door put in to connect to it, and made that space my bedroom. There was no waterfall, but a brook ran at the bottom of the land, making a lilting music in springtime, punctuated by the cries of a great blue heron. Hundred-year lilacs stood by the kitchen door, always making me think of Whitman, and the house seemed to have a friendly, protective energy. It’s true that my youngest daughter, Rachel, sometimes felt there was something scary in her closet, but we had found a portrait of a big, gentle dog elsewhere in the house, and I hung it over her bed to protect her. When I visit her in her own home in Oregon, I’m always touched to find the portrait of that gentle mastiff still protecting her. My older daughter Rebecca had the middle room with the dormer window. Years later she told me how her cat Athena would jump onto the roof and wait patiently until I had gone to bed—and then Becca would open the dormer window, and let her cat jump into bed. My son David would make himself a fat sandwich on a Saturday morning, pack a drink with it, and set out with our two dogs for a long day’s hike through the hills across the road from us. We loved that house, but being an underpaid, working single mother, I didn’t take proper care of it. I think it breathed its own sigh of relief when, years after my children grew up and moved away, I found a new owner for it.

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The Dutch ironsmith who is now my husband had bought 42 acres of north-facing hillside in the Butternut valley of upstate New York, and had built his smithy there, where he could stand at his forge watching the deer and the birds through the doorway, and re-creating their gestures in his wrought iron gates and fire-screens. We were too naïve then to realize that facing north—however lovely the view—would mean fewer hours of sunlight for our garden, and winter snows that are slower to melt in springtime. But facing north seemed bracing and inviting, somehow; and we soon learned that this too had been farmland. A neighbor showed us a photo of Roland’s land as it appeared fifty years ago, when it was hillside pasture for dairy cows. We asked my son David, who by then was a young father making his living as a builder in California, to build a little cabin for us on Roland’s land, a stone’s throw from the smithy, and David took to the idea, planning the lumber we’d need right down to the last board. The house had to be tiny, so that he could frame it up while visiting with his family on a two-week “vacation,” but I had no idea what I was asking of him— the heavy exertion during his much needed vacation, with only evening barbecues and late afternoon dips with his children in the local swimming hole for compensation. Yet he was always proud of the little home he had built, and loved coming back for summer visits with his children. I want to tell you about this, because it has to do with how deeply one can come to love a place, how loss deepens one’s connection to the land, and brings forth the mystery of it, and maybe the longing to somehow express that mystery. Sixteen years after building Hummingbird House, my beloved son David died at 46—having worked too hard all his life, like many another young parent. Despite the long hours of hard labor to support his family, David lived creatively and richly in his brief life—four children, two wives, an active life in community theater, a deep absorption in music-making, and many hours of hiking and camping in California and upstate New York. Even his death came outdoors, as he slept under the stars on his deck beside his oldest son, on a clear September night. One very small comfort to us after his death was to read in his will that he wanted some of his ashes to be scattered on this land where he had built Hummingbird House, on the hillside where he and his wife and children had lain under the stars late at night, looking up at the constellations. What had David found here that caused him to mention this land in his will? He asked that his ashes be scattered in three places: on his beloved Mt. Tamalpais, on whose lower slopes he lived for much of his adult life, and in the high meadows of Yosemite, from where he had once made a dangerous, solitary climb up Half Dome—and here on this

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Butternut Valley farmland that he had come to love, and where he had briefly a taste of the pioneer experience—building a house with just the help of family and a neighbor, with the most modest of tools and with a little slice of time stolen away from a seven-to-five job in construction work in California. Now I understand what it is to love a rough wooden beam for the hands that put it in place and are now gone from this earth. However the house has grown and changed, I can look up each day and see that roof beam. I can love the acres surrounding this modest shelter of ours, the wild ferns along the path, the jolly chickadees in winter, the hermit thrush in the summer woods with its haunting notes that John Burroughs used to hear and love in his time too, not so very far from here. In “Roof-Tree,” John Burroughs wrote: One of the greatest pleasures of life is to build a house for one’s self. There is a peculiar satisfaction even in planting a tree from which you hope to eat the fruit, or in the shade of which you hope to repose. But how much greater the pleasure in planting the roof-tree, the tree that bears the golden apples of home and hospitality, and under the protection of which you hope to pass the remainder of your days!68

What a morning it was, when David and our neighbor raised the roof beam of Hummingbird House! He had planned it as a surprise for us-- getting that roof beam in place at the last minute, just before he and his family left for their flight home. I watched in agony, excitement and worry—what if he hurt himself, making such a huge effort that early morning? But they hoisted the rough, hemlock beam up bit by bit. And then there was David, grinning, sitting astride that high beam, looking out over Butternut Valley with his arms crossed and his feet dangling. “Hey, Ma!” he yelled. Just at the end of summer this year, I thought I heard his voice out by the vegetable garden. “Hey, Ma!” I thought I heard him call. So I put down my book, and went out to weed a bit in the garden, and look into the glowing mini-world under the giant squash plants with their ever-renewing golden flowers, to see which of the summer squash had fooled me this time, and grown bigger than they were meant to. Then I watched the tomatoes in their first blush of ripening, and wished that I could share this largesse with my son. “Hey, David,” I said.

68

John Burroughs, Signs and Seasons (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 263.

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The Cow’s Poetic Cud: Burroughs as a Guide for Rural and Nature Writers Today How many memoirs of rural life and farm life have been written and forgotten? Certainly the land has been written and rewritten by many an earnest farmer or lover of the rural world, just as it has been plowed again and again, season after season. And what a debt we owe to the writers and thinkers who have striven to express their insights on the relationship between land and self and community, on the state of farming, the environment, and society! Few writers are as intensely and persistently metaphorical as John Burroughs in the fusion of nature and literature, but Hal Borland’s High, Wide and Lonesome evokes that mingling of literature and the land when he describes his first discovery of the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper. There he is, the only child of a homesteading couple on the high plains of Colorado, out alone in the snow with his new gun, proudly carrying the first rabbit he has shot with it— meat badly needed for his family’s table—when he stumbles upon the home of some new settlers who call him in for cocoa and conversation. Seeing that he is attracted to the books on her shelf, the wife offers him a chance to begin reading The Last of the Mohicans as he sits with them and drinks his cocoa. In the end, she lends it to take home with him across the snowy plains, and he is so thrilled, and so caught up in the literary world that he has just entered, that he forgets to bring home the rabbit he had been so proud of: I was halfway home before I emerged from the story of Uncas and a land I had never seen or heard of, before I really saw the Colorado plains and felt the numbing cold of that Christmas evening. Then I remembered that I had left my rabbit beside the Bromley doorway. The first rabbit I had shot with my new gun. The quick of a boy’s being is close to the surface. I began to cry, excusing the tears because my hands were cold and I was bitterly disappointed. I wanted so desperately to be a man and a provider. . . . I had just discovered a world of horizons beyond horizons, a world I couldn’t see even from the top of the haystack on a clear day. I had found something that would shape my whole life. It was too late now to go back for the rabbit, and as I trudged on I began to sense my discovery, a discovery even bigger than the plains. The tears stopped and I hurried on home, hugging both the gun and the book.69

69

Hal Borland, High, Wide, and Lonesome, 211-212.

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Borland, like so many other writers, traces the roots of his inspiration not only to the land itself, but also to literature, “a world of horizons beyond horizon.” John Burroughs’s great love of literature similarly invigorated his own writing about nature. In closing this essay, I’d like to return to the idea that Burroughs is of special value to the nature writer. Of course our historical context has changed; but the birds, the apple trees, the “friendly rocks,” and the fields are, as long as we can still find them and care for them, much the same. Burroughs never saw An Inconvenient Truth and could not have given a lecture on global warming; nor could he have known the shameful ways in which our government betrayed the family farmer in favor of giant agribusinesses, only half a century after his death—although he might not have been much surprised. The changes he saw in his own time seemed ample warning to him that important things were being lost. In an essay about soil, “The Grist of the Gods,” published in Leaf and Tendril in 1908, Burroughs remarked that: One cannot but reflect what a sucked orange the earth will be in the course of a few more centuries. Our civilization is terribly expensive to all its natural resources; one hundred years of modern life doubtless exhausts its stores more than a millennium of the life of antiquity. Its coal and oil will be about used up, all its mineral wealth greatly depleted, the fertility of its soil will have been washed into the sea through the drainage of its cities, its wild game will be nearly extinct, its primitive forests gone, and soon how nearly bankrupt the planet will be!70

In one of his late essays (published in Under the Maples in 1921), Burroughs reflected further on the dangers of industry and war for our environment and urges us to “keep the iron from our souls”—certainly an apt warning today: We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron from entering our souls. Our vast industries have their root in the geologic history of the globe as in no other past age. . . . When the coal and oil are all gone and we come to the surface and above the surface for the white coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and the sunshine, how much more attractive life will be! Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can hitch them to the mountain

70

John Burroughs, Leaf and Tendril (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 204.

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streams, and make the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the silver age will displace the iron age.71

He had no political remedies, no action networks or websites, but in the first quarter of the twentieth century Burroughs was already anticipating a time when the coal and oil would be gone, replaced with cleaner alternative energies. What we are more familiar with in Burroughs, and what may actually be of greater use to us today, is his advocacy of the kind of remedy individuals can find in living simply, close to nature, observing it thoughtfully and carefully. Indeed, he eagerly conveys the rewards of working hard and growing one’s own food, knowing the seasons as intimately as one knows the wildflowers along the path, or the birds at the backyard feeder. Burroughs’s injunction to observe with sharp eyes, to learn the art of seeing things, remains just as valid now as it was a hundred years ago. With all his emphasis on perceptive observation, however, his strongest prescription seems to be to love what one is writing about: In a journal entry of 1911, he wrote “I cannot write about the birds till they have entered into my life. I cannot write of anything well till I have lived it.”72 A dozen years earlier he had expressed a little more fully this aspect of his philosophy of writing: Unless you can write about Nature with feeling, with real love, with more or less hearty affiliation and comradeship with her, it is no use. Your words will not stick. They will awaken no response in the reader. There are two or three writers now making books upon outdoor themes that I find I cannot read. The page has no savor; it is dry and tasteless. The writers have taken up these nature themes deliberately, as they might any other; they have no special call to write upon them.73

Though he wrote so many books in his long life that it is hard to think of him having what we now call “writer’s block,” Burroughs did have a such a period of difficulty in writing—and solved it by returning to an active farming life, as we have seen in his essay “The Secret of Happiness.” It’s no wonder, then, that when Burroughs chose to give advice to writers, he found no metaphor better than the cud of his beloved “rural divinity”:

71

John Burroughs, “A Strenuous Holiday,” Under the Maples, 111-112; also The Art of Seeing Things, 184. 72 John Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, Clara Barrus, ed., 209. 73 Ibid.

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Rural to the Last Drop: Writing Rural Land from John Burroughs to Ourselves I once saw a cow that had lost her cud. How forlorn and desolate and sick at heart that cow looked! No more rumination, no more of that second and finer mastication, no more of that sweet and juicy reverie under the spreading trees, or in the stall. Then the farmer took an elder and scraped the bark and put something with it, and made the cow a cud, and after due waiting, the experiment took, a response came back, and the mysterious machinery was once more in motion, and the cow was herself again. Have you, O poet, or essayist, or story-writer , never lost your cud, and wandered about days and weeks without being able to start a single thought or an image that tasted good,—your literary appetite dull or all gone, and the conviction daily growing that it was all over with you in that direction? A little elder-bark, something fresh and bitter from the woods, is about the best thing you can take.74

As a writer, I have found Burroughs a fine teacher in many ways; I feel especially inspired by the exuberant and generous spirit of his work, and by the way that he saw literature and nature as “deeply interfused,” to use Wordsworth’s phrase. Burroughs’s gratitude for his good luck at being born in farm country, in April, may inspire some of us to similar gratitude, and win from us a pledge to do what we can to help preserve for others some of this “luck,” this grandeur of soil beneath our feet, clean air to breathe, cold, clear water from a deep well, just enough hours of sunlight—and the benevolence of The Big Dipper and Orion over our heads on a dark night. Part of that good luck, for me, is the privilege of living in the countryside; another part is the privilege of fellowship with the community of rural writers, past and present. Many of us are listening with keen attention to the words of those who are continuing to farm today, or beginning new farming or food-growing projects, or demanding change in government policies; some of us are entering upon those projects ourselves. We listen and converse with those who suggest ways to live in communities—rural, suburban and urban as the case may be— that offer support to the small farmer and to environmentally conscious and conscientious ways of living. We listen to the land itself and practice the art of seeing things. If some of us feel impelled to write, how do we define, and respond to, the challenges of our own moment? How do we write the richness of our experience, our relation to the land, our responsibilities? John Burroughs offers us “something fresh and bitter from the woods” to get us started or keep us going; our own sharp eyes and those of many thoughtful, perceptive and passionate writers take us further. Let’s chew 74

John Burroughs, “Touches of Nature” in Birds and Poets, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1877), 73-74.

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on that—along with all the fresh and bitter facts of our world—and find our own mix of pastoral and wildness, contrariness and community, perceptiveness and determination, as we share ideas and look for new answers to our relationship with nature.

Works Cited Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Norman Wirzba, ed. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002. —. “The Agrarian Standard” in The Essential Agrarian Reader. Norman Wirzba, ed. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002: 23-33. —. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977. Borland, Hal. High, Wide and Lonesome: Growing Up on the Colorado Frontier. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Burroughs, John. Accepting the Universe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920. —. The Art of Seeing Things. Charlotte Zoë Walker, ed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001. —. Birds and Poets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1877. —. The Heart of Burroughs’ Journals. Clara Barrus, ed. Cambridge, Ma: Riverside Press, 1928. —. Leaf and Tendril. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. —. Literary Values. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902. —. My Boyhood. With a Conclusion by His Son, Julian Burroughs. Garden City, New York, Toronto: Doubleday, 1922. —. Riverby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894. —. Signs and Seasons: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886. New edition, edited by Jeff Walker, from Syracuse University Press, 2006 —. Under the Apple Trees. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916. —. Under the Maples. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921. —. Wake-Robin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1871. —. Walt Whitman, A Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896. Cather, Willa. My Antonia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918. Gansworth, Eric. Indian Summers. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. Goodall, Jane. Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating. New York: Warner Wellness, 2006.

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Gould, Rebecca Kneale. At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. —. “Making the Self at Home: John Burroughs, Wendell Berry and the Sacred Economy,” in Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing, ed. by Charlotte Zoë Walker: 140-162. Jager, Ronald. Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. —. The Fate of Family Farming: Variations on an American Idea. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004. Jewett, Sarah Orne. Country of the Pointed Firs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896. Kingsolver, Barbara, with Stephen L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper Collins, 2007. McKibben, Bill. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. New York: Times Books, 2007. —. Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2007. Masumoto, David Mas. Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996. —. Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Philip, Leila. A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family. New York: Viking Penguin, 2001. Pichaske, David R. Late Harvest: Rural American Writing. New York: Smithmark, 1996. Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2002. —. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006. —. “Weed it and Reap,” New York Times, November 5, 2007. Vandana Shiva, “Globalization and the War Against Farmers and the Land,” in The Essential Agrarian Reader, Norman Wirzba, ed. (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002): 121-139. Steinbeck, John. Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking Press, 1939. Walker, Charles Henry, Roots and Consequences, unpublished memoir. Walker, Charlotte Zoë, ed. The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001. —. “Reading the ‘Fine Print’ in the Catskills: John Burroughs Reinterprets the Book of Nature.” In van Berkel, Klaas, and Arjo

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Vanderjagt, eds. The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History. Leuven, Paris, Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2006. Reprinted in ATQ: John Burroughs Special Issue, ed. by Stephen Mercier. New Series 21:3, September 2007, 175-189. —. ed. Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Walker, Mildred. Winter Wheat. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992 (reprint edition).

CONTRIBUTORS

Tom Alworth is the Executive Director of the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, located in Arkiville, New York. He is also on the Board of Directors of Woodchuck Lodge, Inc. Dr. Robert Beuka is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York-Bronx Community College. He is the author of SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Dr. Michael Buckley earned his Ph.D. in English from Penn State with a dissertation on literary naturalists from William Bartram to Henry David Thoreau. He has published articles on literary environmentalism in ATQ, ISLE, and Western American Literature. Dr. Roger Hecht is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY College at Oneonta. He is the author of Lunch at the Table of Opposites (poetry), and The Erie Canal Reader. He is currently conducting research for a book on New York’s Anti-Rent War. Dr. Richard Hunt is Assistant Professor of English at Delaware Valley College in southeast Pennsylvania. His essays have appeared in ISLE, Organization and Environment, and Weather Eye, and he has published articles on numerous nature writers such as Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Edmund Ware Smith, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jonathan Edwards, Chet Raymo, and Margaret Atwood. Dr. Stephen M. Mercier is a full-time Teaching Associate at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. His dissertation (University of Rhode Island, 2005) is titled “Revaluing the Literary Naturalist: John Burroughs's Emotive Environmental Aesthetics.” He recently edited a double special issue on John Burroughs for ATQ: 19th-Century American Literature and Culture (September and December 2007). He is a regular contributor to Wake-Robin: Newsletter of the John Burroughs Association. Dr. Thomas P. Murphy is Associate Professor of English at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania in the mountains of North Central

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Pennsylvania. He recently read one of his essays on “Living on Earth,” the NPR environmental news program and writes a monthly column reviewing books about nature for Mountain Home, a regional magazine. He is currently working on a series of essays about sugar maples. Nan Metzger obtained her M.A. in literature from Northern Illinois University and is currently completing a dissertation on nature writing at Marquette University Christine Nadir is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University where she is completing her dissertation on the role of sacrifice in twentieth-century environmental writing. She has taught at Columbia University and Oneonta State College and currently teaches courses on modernity, modernism, and new media history and theory as a Lecturer at Colgate University. Also an artist, Nadir exhibits digital and environmental art internationally with artist Cary Peppermint under the collaborative name of EcoArtTech. More information about this work can found at http://www.ecoarttech.net/. Dr. Daniel G. Payne is the author of Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics (1996), and co-editor of The Palgrave Environmental Reader (2005). He is Associate Professor of English at SUNY College at Oneonta, where he also directed the 2004 and 2006 “Sharp Eyes” conferences on John Burroughs and Nature Writing. His current project is a biography of American nature writer Henry Beston. Edward J. Renehan is the author of several biographical works, including John Burroughs: An American Naturalist (1992), The Secret Six (1995), The Lion's Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War (1998), The Kennedys at War (2002), and Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons (2005). His latest book, Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt was published by Basic Books/Perseus, in November 2007. He has also been a frequent guest on C-SPAN, PBS and The History Channel. Dr. David Seamon, is Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Trained in geography and environmentbehavior research, his teaching and research emphasize a phenomenological approach to place, architecture, environmental experience, and environmental design as place making. He has written A

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Geography of the Lifeworld (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979) and edited or co-edited Dwelling, Place and Environment: Toward a Phenomenology of Person and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993); and Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1998). He is editor of the Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter. Dr. Ian Stapley is Professor of English at Niagara County Community College in New York State, where he teaches composition, British Literature, and Shakespeare. Dr. John Tallmadge is an ecocritic and nature writer based in Cincinnati Ohio, where he maintains an independent practice of scholarship and literary consulting (www.johntallmadge.com). He has taught at the Union Institute, Carleton College, the University of Utah, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. He has written numerous articles on nature writing and is the author of Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher’s Path (1997) and The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City (2004). Dr. Robert Titus is a professor of Geology at Hartwick College. He is a paleontologist by training and has done a considerable amount of professional research on the paleontology of New York State. Over the last fifteen years, however, he has become the writer of many popular geology articles appearing in Kaatskill Life magazine, the Woodstock Times, the Columbia County Independent and other papers. He has written three books on Catskills geology for Purple Mountain Press. Dr. Charlotte Zoë Walker is the editor of Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing (2000), and The Art of Seeing Things: Essays by John Burroughs (2001), both published by Syracuse University Press: She also directed the first two “Sharp Eyes” conferences, in honor of John Burroughs, at SUNY Oneonta: “Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing,” and “Sharp Eyes II: Multicultural Approaches to Environmental Writing.” She has recently completed a book of essays, Letting in the Sky: Women Writers and the Book of Nature. She is also a former NEA Fellow in Creative Writing, author of Condor and Hummingbird, a novel published by Alice Walker’s Wild Trees Press, and in the UK by The Women’s Press. Her published short stories include an O. Henry Award story (1991) and an honorable mention in

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Best American Short Stories (1993). She is a professor emerita in the English Department of SUNY Oneonta, and recently served as Colgate NEH Professor of Humanities at Colgate University. Dr. Jeff Walker teaches earth science and environmental studies at Vassar College where he is also Sustainability Coordinator, and is Director of the 2008 “Sharp Eyes” Conference on John Burroughs and Nature Writing, which will be hosted by Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. His latest book is an edited reissue, with critical commentary, of John Burroughs's Signs and Seasons (Syracuse University Press, 2006). Dr. Wendy A. Weaver received her doctorate from Marquette University in Wisconsin and is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her areas of interest include spirituality and women’s issues in literature, especially in poetry and memoir.

INDEX A Sand County Almanac, 44, 180 Abbey, Edward, 45, 180 Adirondacks, 65, 121, 128, 181182, 200 Agassiz, Louis, 56 Ammons, Elizabeth, 117-118 An Inconvenient Truth, 232 Anderson, David, 162, 170 Anti-Rent War, 7-13; Anti-Rent party, 11; Calico Indians, 10, 12 Aquinas, Thomas, 48 Aristotle, 48 Bailey, Liberty Hyde, 140-146; The Holy Earth, 140, 143, 146 Barrus, Clara, 11, 16, 17, 28, 39, 45, 50-51, 54, 112, 207, 233; Our Friend John Burroughs, 51 Barthes, Roland, 85 Bartram, William, 70-81; Travels, 71-81 Bass, Rick, 89, 146 Beaman, Elizabeth "Libby," 130138 Benton, Myron, 19 Bergmann, Linda, 133 Bergmann, Linda S., 134 Berry, Thomas, 184 Berry, Wendell, 40, 60, 199, 214216, 218, 225 Beston, Henry, 60 Black, Ralph, 71 Borland, Hal, 198-199, 211, 227, 231 Branch, Michael, 88 Breece, Hannah, 134 Brodhead, Richard, 113 Bromfield, Louis, 158-171; "Up Ferguson Way," 160-164, 170; concept of "teched," 160, 161166, 168-171; Malabar Farm,

158-159, 163-164; Out of the Earth, 159; Pleasant Valley, 159, 163; The World We Live In, 160, 162, 165, 168, 170 Brooks, Peter, 85 Brooks, Van Wyck, 114 Brown, John, 203 Bryant, William Cullen, 89 Buchan, Alexander, 114 Buell, Lawrence, 47, 99, 101, 104105, 109 Buonoparte, Charles, 91 Burroughs, Chauncey, 50 Burroughs, John, 2-3, 7, 11-42, 4446, 49-60, 63-65, 67, 70-71, 73, 81, 84, 89, 99, 112-113, 118, 140, 148-152, 154, 156, 176184, 197, 199-213, 220-222, 225, 230- 234; "An Egotistical Chapter," 12; "Bird Life in an Old Apple Tree," 222; "Exhilarations of the Road," 16; "Our Rural Divinity," 211; "Phases of Farm Life," 12, 32, 149-151; "Roof-Tree," 230; "The Biological Origins of the Ruling Class," 26, 29; "The Faith of a Naturalist," 12, 59; "The Heart of the Southern Catskills," 2; "The Secret of Happiness," 207, 233; “A Sharp Lookout,” 20; “A Strenuous Holiday,” 31-32; “Birch Browsings,” 178; “House Building," 31, 32; “In the Adirondacks,” 178; “Spring at the Capital,” 182; “Strawberries,”; “The Coming of Summer,” 41; “The Exhilarations of the Road,” 35; “The Grist of the Gods,” 81;

Writing the Land: John Burroughs and his Legacy Accepting the Universe, 13, 5459, 206; Birds and Poets, 20, 22, 52, 60-61, 234-235; his boyhood in Roxbury, 19, 45, 63, 209; Field and Study, 50, 55-56; Harriman expedition to Alaska, 200; Indoor Studies, 12-16, 20, 22, 30, 33, 56, 61, 202-203; Leaf and Tendril, 41, 53, 81, 232; Literary Values, 53, 208; Locusts and Wild Honey, 38-39; My Boyhood, 11-12, 37, 51, 197, 199-200, 209, 210, 213; opinions on industrial society, 24, 30-31; religious views, 17-18, 46, 5059, 70, 205; Signs and Seasons, 20, 31-32, 45, 46, 149, 209, 225, 230; The Last Harvest, 17, 21, 52-53; The Light of Day, 57-58; The Summit of the Years, 22, 30; Under the Apple Trees, 221; Under the Maples, 29, 31, 220, 232, 233; Wake-Robin, 30, 52, 71, 176-182, 206; Winter Sunshine, 14, 16, 35 Burroughs, Julian, 14, 210 Campbell, Donna, 115 Carlyle, Thomas, 56 Carnegie, Andrew, 24, 26,-27, 30 Carson, Rachel, 45, 184 Casey, Edward, 38 Cather, Willa, 148-156, 199; O Pioneers!, 149, 156; The Professor’s House, 149-150, 152-156 Catlin, George, 181 Catskill Forest Preserve, 64- 65 Catskill Park, 66-67 Catskills, 2-7, 19, 63-67, 178, 182, 200, 202, 219; Burroughs Memorial, 2; Burroughs Range, 2; proposed casinos in, 66; Glaciation, 3-5; Slide Mountain, 2-6, 16, 200 Chadwick, George Halcott, 4 Chapman, John, 221

243

Cheever, John, 187-190 Cherokees, 73-74 Cicero, 48 Clarke, Larry R., 70 Clarke, Samuel, 48 Clean Air Act, 67 Cole, Thomas, 181 Conservation movement, 45-46, 183 Conwell, Russell, 26 Cooper, James Fenimore, 7, 89, 181, 231; Littlepage trilogy, 7 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 8-95, 99100, 104; Rural Hours, 83, 8890, 92, 93, 99 Couturier, Lisa, 194 Creeks, 73-74, 78 Daniel, John, 146 Darwin, Charles, 25-26, 55-57, 178179, 201; The Descent of Man, 55; The Origin of Species, 55 Dawes Act, 145 Decker, Amanda, 218-219 Deep Ecology, 36 Delaware County, 7-8, 10-12, 63 Desert Solitaire, 44, 183 Dillard, Annie, 60, 95 Donovan, Josephine, 117 Ecocriticism, 88, 148-149, 176 Ecology, 71-73, 81, 107, 110, 148149, 162, 183 Edison, Thomas Alva, 23-25, 29, 31-32, 44-45, 63 Edwards, Rebecca, 26 Edwards, Thomas, 114 Elder, John, 71, 88 Elliott, Henry Wood, 134, 136 Ellis, David Maldwyn, 8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15, 18, 44, 46-60, 70, 89, 100-101, 108-109, 145, 176, 182, 201; “Divinity School Address,” 49-50; “The American Scholar,” 49; Nature, 15, 17, 26, 36, 44, 46, 48, 84, 8889, 98, 100, 102, 142, 175 Enlightenment, the, 47-48 Environmentalism, 45-46, 149

244 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 190-191 Evers, Alf, 63 Fetterley, Judith, 99 Finch, Robert, 88 Firestone, Harvey, 23-25, 29, 31-32, 45, 63 Ford, Henry, 23-25, 27, 28-29, 3132, 44-45, 63 Ford, Richard, 190-191 Fox, Feroline, 100 Fox, Stephen, 183 Fox, Warwick, 34, 141 Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 113 Friederici, Peter, 193 Fromm, Harold, 131 Gansworth, Eric, 214 Garland, Hamlin, 113 Gehlbach, Frederick, 194 Genette, 92 Genette, Gerard, 85 Giddens, Anthony, 149, 150 Glasser, Leah Blatt, 99 Glotfelty, Cheryll, 131 Goodall, Jane, 226 Gould, Jay, 11, 24, 45, 181 Gould, John, 11 Gould, Rebecca Kneale, 209 Hallock, Thomas, 74 Hardenburgh patent, 8, 10 Harriman, E.H., 24 Hassam, Childe, 98, 109 Hayes, Rutherford B., 130-131 Heidegger, Martin, 169-170 Held, George, 117 Hodder, Alan D., 17-18 Holmes, Hannah, 193 Houghton Mifflin, 17, 54 Hoxie, E.C., 101 Hubbell, Sue, 89 Hudson River School of Landscape Painting, 64 Hudson Valley, 8, 19, 53, 64, 202, 215-216, 224 Humboldt, Alexander, 178-179 Huston, Reeve, 8-9, 12 Huth, Hans, 44

Index Industrialism, 24, 30-32 Irving, Washington, 181 Jackson, Wes, 220 Jager, Ronald, 199, 218, 222, 224 James, Henry, 14 Jenkins, Virginia Scott, 192 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 99, 101, 112119, 199; “A White Heron,” 112-116; The Country of the Pointed Firs, 114, 116 Johnny Appleseed. See Chapman, John Johnson, Skip, 219, 225 Juricek, John T., 73 Kandahar, 215 Kant, Emmanuel, 47 Kaplan, Amy, 113, 115, 119 Kelley, Elizabeth Burroughs, 25 Kilcup, Karen, 114 King, Clarence, 178-179 Kingsolver, Barbara, 226 Kollin, Susan, 131 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 60 Kubik, Dorothy, 11 LaBastille, Anne, 138 Leopold, Aldo, 45, 60, 183 Littenberg, Marcia B., 99 Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 23, 28 Local color fiction, 113 Lodge, David, 84, 86, 93, 95 Logsdon, Gene, 200, 225 Loving, Jerome, 49, 52 Lowell, James Russell, 51 Lucenti, Lisa Marie, 152 Lutts, Ralph, 45 Lyon, Thomas J., 84 Marsh, George Perkins, 181 Marshall, Robert, 183 Marx, Karl, 8 Masumoto, David Mas, 199, 218 Mathiessen, F.O., 114 McGlaughlin, Andrew, 36 McKibben, Bill, 23, 45-46, 226 Meeker, Joseph, 149 Meeker, Joseph W., 148 Melville, Herman, 8

Writing the Land: John Burroughs and his Legacy Mercier, Stephen M., 46 Miller, Perry, 47 Mobley, Marilyn, 116 Modernism, 183 Moody, Rick, 191 Moore, Kathleen Dean, 146 Mugerauer, Robert, 170 Muir, John, 19, 30, 44-46, 50-51, 60, 63, 99, 102, 140, 176, 178180, 183-184; My First Summer in the Sierra, 180 Mumford, Lewis, 18 Murray, William H.H., 181 Myerson, Joel, 47 Naess, Arne, 36 Nash, Roderick, 181 Natural Theology, 44, 46, 48, 59, 60 Nature faker controversy, 45 Nature-Study, 140, 142-143 Nessmuk. See Sears, George Washington New York State, 2, 63, 65, 146, 181; Anti-Rent War, 7-13 Norwood, Vera, 89, 95, 99, 101102, 131-133, 138 O’Donnell, Thomas F., 88 Olson, Sigurd, 183 Otsego Lake, 89 Owlett, Steven E., 127 Paley, William, 48 Parkman, Francis, 178, 181 Paulding, James Kirke, 8 Payne, Daniel G., 30, 70 Perrotta, Tom, 191 Phenomenology, 38, 148, 158, 171 Philip, Leila, 199, 215, 223-224 Plato, 48 Plumwood, Val, 40-41 Pollan, Michael, 217, 221 Powell, John, 178 Powell, John Wesley, 179 Pribilof Islands, 130-136 Regionalist fiction, 114-115, 119 Relph, Edward, 170 Renehan, Edward J.,23, 46, 51 Rensselaer, Stephen van, 9-10

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Rich, John Lyon, 3, 5 Richards, I.A., 87 Robertson, Adele Crockett, 199, 223 Romanticism, 47 Roosevelt, Theodore, 24-25, 28-30, 44, 46, 178, 180 Rosowski, Susan J., 148 Roth, Philip, 187 Rothenberg, David, 36-37 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 8 Schweitzer, Albert, 170 Sears, George Washington: 121129; "The Log of the Bucktail," 121; Woodcraft, 123, 129 Seminoles, 75-77, 79 Sessions, George, 36 Sharp Eyes conference, 225 Shepherd, Paul, 39 Shiva, Vandana, 217 Slabsides, 25, 44, 204-205 Slovic, Scott, 84 Sobel, David, 141 Social Darwinism, 26, 28 Steele, Osman: murder of, 12 Steinbeck, John, 199 Steinberg, Ted, 192 Stevanovic, Ingrid, 170 Suburban nature, 186-187, 191-195 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 49 Tabor, Thomas T., 126 Teale, Edwin Way, 89 Thaxter, Celia, 98-110; “A White Heron,” 101, 114; Among the Isles of Shoals, 98-100, 104, 105-106, 108, 110; An Island Garden, 98, 102, 104, 107, 110 The "Book of Nature", 13, 88, 205 The Origin of Species, 55 Thoreau, Henry David, 14-22, 44, 46, 53-54, 58, 60, 89, 99-105, 108, 109, 123, 143, 176, 178179, 181-182, 201, 203-205; "Walking," 16; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,

246 18, 58; Walden, 16, 19, 21, 44, 89, 100-101, 181 Transcendentalism, 44, 46-47, 58, 60, 99 Transpersonal ecology, 34-36 Treaty of Augusta, 71, 73, 75, 7778, 80 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 38 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 115 Twain, Mark, 176 Updike, John, 189-190 Vallier, Jane E., 99 Vesell, Eliot, 64 Waldie, D. J., 191 Walker, Charles Henry, 211-212, 214 Walker, Charlotte Zoë, 45-46, 59, 70, 209, 220 Walker, Jeff, 46, 149, 209, 225 Walpole, Frederick A., 134

Index Warren, James Perrin, 45, 67, 176, 179 Wealth Against Commonwealth, 28 White, Gilbert, 19, 178, 201-203, 205 Whitman, Walt, 26-27, 29, 46, 49, 54-56, 59, 63, 70, 182, 201, 204205, 220, 228; Leaves of Grass, 54 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 221 Williams, Terry Tempest, 146 Winkler, Robert, 194 Woodchuck Lodge, 25, 65, 67, 237 Wordsworth, William, 234 World War I, 24 Worster, Donald, 46 Wright, Governor Silas, 12 Yellowstone National Park, 25, 181 Yosemite, 179 Your Big Backyard, 186