Ocean – CommonPlace Nature

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

book review, Books, Natural History, Ocean No Responses »

Jul 222023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In These Degenerate Days: “Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes” by Charles Wendell Townsend (1913)

Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Ocean, Sense of Place No Responses »

Jul 162022

Charles Wendell Townsend, MD was born in Boston in 1859, “of good old New England stock” (as an “In Memorium” piece by Glover Allen in The Auk puts it). He developed an early interest in birds, which at the time mostly involved collecting eggs and shooting “specimens”. In 1885, Townsend graduated from Harvard Medical School as a Doctor of Medicine. He married Gertrude Flint of Brookline, Massachusetts, and set up a private practice in Boston. In 1892, he built a summer house on a ridge overlooking a coastal marsh in Ipswich, Massachusetts, just north of Cape Ann. He would spend both summer vacations and weekends there over many years, increasingly opting to observe nature with binoculars and telescope instead of a gun. His particular interest was the land and shore birds frequenting the area, but he also closely observed changes in the dunes over time; the dunes took on a very different appearance in the summer than in the winter. He traveled extensively through the marshlands by boat, and became closely acquainted with the region’s natural history, including its geology (with its “pleasures and possibilities”). Remarking that “I have sometimes been asked what I found of interest in the dunes and marshes,” Towsend explained that “This little book [Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes] is the answer.” He published it in 1913, followed by Beach Grass in 1923. (That book will be explored in a future post.) Travel was another facet of Townsend’s life; he made several trips to Labrador, first by steamer and later by canoe, publishing several books about the region, particularly its human and bird life (at least one volume of which will also be covered in this blog at some point). He continued to travel extensively (including around the world) up to the time of his passing in 1934.

Taken as a whole, the book is a tribute to the rich natural history of the dunes and marshes of northern Massachusetts over one hundred years ago. While the text at times feels a bit dry (rather like the dunes themselves), Townsend’s photographs throughout are a delight. They depict landscapes at the time, animal tracks through the dunes, marsh haying operations, and a few images of the wildlife itself. Because he returned so frequently over many years, Townsend was able to document changes, such as the image below of a shipwreck soon after it happened and again a year later. For much of the book, I struggled a bit with his prose. I did enjoy his chapter on tracks in the dunes, where he identifies dune visitors by their tracks, and their meals by investigations of scats and bird pellets. He closes the chapter by declaring that “The study of ichnology and scatology in these sandy wastes is as absorbing as a detective story.” His bird chapters that followed were informative but so laden with bird descriptions (and, alas, no bird close-up photographs) that they were tough going. I think the main challenge to the reader is that Townsend himself is largely absent from most of the volume, stepping aside to report scientifically what he has seen. Oddly, though, the book is also interspersed with chunks of poetry — some identified by the author, others not (Townsend’s own writing?). Here, again, is that concept of the time, that effective nature writing combines both the scientific and the poetic sensibilities. Unfortunately, in this case, the two are mostly kept separate.

Townsend cooks a meal amid the dunes in winter.

The tone changes when Townsend reaches the salt marsh. Here, his voice strikes an enthusiastic, joyful tone that is uncommon in the rest of the book. Consider this passage describing the salt marsh in late summer:

All the marsh vegetation is at its height of luxuriance in mid-August. Then the marsh lies brilliant in the sunlight, a broad expanse, flat as a floor and glowing in yellow-greens, touched here and there with washes of buff and of chestnut.
Fringing its upper edge is the broad band of the mourning black-grass, while the rich dark green of the thatch threads invisible serpentine creeks, and borders the ribbons of water that wander hither and thither like tortuous veins through the marshes, reflecting the brilliant blue of the skies. There are wonderful plays of light and shade as cloud shadows chase each other over the surface of the marshes, or as the lengthening shadows of the hills extend their range with the declining sun. On windy days the tall thatch bends before the blasts, and shimmering waves like those on the surface of the water pass over it.
On such days, with the wind in the north- west quarter, the air is exceedingly clear, and every wooded island and distant hill stands out with great distinctness, while the creeks take on an intense blue which contrasts strongly with the light green of the marshes.
The tides creeping over the sand flats, swell- ing the creeks, obliterating the brown banks and drowning the tall thatch, bursting out in unexpected veins and pools throughout the marshes,-all this, notwithstanding its twice daily repetition, is never other than a miracle.

or this passage about exploring the salt marsh creeks by boat at low tide:

To float down in a canoe with the ebb tide, to explore the narrow channels now sunk deep below the marsh level, to surprise the marsh birds on the broad sand and mud flats, to push over the waving forests of eel grass and their varied inhabitants, affrds much enjoyment, and opens up an entirely different world from that of the same water courses when they are brimming over onto the marsh. Partly from prejudice, partly from ignorance, dead low tide is not appreciated as it deserves. The clean sand of the estuaries and the fine mud of the smaller creeks and inlets, and the clear water of the sea, are all very different from the foulness to be found at low tide in the neighborhood of sewer-discharging cities.

For the reader of today, a clear theme throughout this book is the impact of humans upon nature, already underway in the 1910s and 1920s. Townsend notes the ongoing increase of invasive species, including beach wormwood (a plant), and the European periwinkle (a snail). He notes that deer numbers are up in the region, compared to their total absence in Thoreau’s day (1853), partly due to highly protective hunting laws in eastern Massachusetts, but also resulting from the extirpation of wolves, lynxes, panthers, and Indians from the region. Harbor seals, Townsend observes, are starting to return to the coast; until 1908, Massachusetts placed a bounty on them, intended as a boon to fishermen afraid of seals jeopardizing their livelihoods. Finally, there is mention of the impacts of the millinery trade on birds, specifically common terns:

Not so many years ago various fragments and the whole skins of these beautiful birds were fastened on women’s hats, just as scalps and feathers are fastened on the head-dresses of savages. Thousands of the birds were shot down where they could be most easily obtained. namely, on their breeding grounds, for they are plucky little birds and valiantly attack any marauder who intrudes on their homes, and they do not seek to escape. These, as well as other species of birds, were greatly reduced in numbes by this cold-hearted combination of fashion and slaughterers, when, through the strenuous efforts rof the Audubon Society ad of ther bird lovers, the killing was stayed, and, too the great joy of all naturalists, the graceful birds are again increasing.

Meanwhile, the situation for piping plovers and other shore birds remained grim. Consider the tragic fate of the immature sanderlings, who endure a barrage of guns every fall:

In the middle of August the young, sadly inexperienced, arrive, and in their tameness fall an easy prey to the gunner. They are beautiful birds, with faint smoky bands across their white breasts. It is a great pleasure to watch a flock as they crowd together along the shore, probing every spot of sand for the small molluscs and crustaceans which consti- tute their food. As the season advances our pleasure is somewhat dimmed by the fact that cripples, with a foot shot away or blood-stained sides, are common in their ranks.

The piping plovers, another shorebird species, are on the path to extinction:

Up to half a dozen years ago the piping plover bred regularly in the dunes and laid its eggs in the sand. It belongs to a dying race, and although it is protected by law at all seasons, I fear this is not sufficient to stop its path to extinction. So long as the law permits the shooting of other plovers of the same size and the small sandpipers, one cannot expect the ordinary gunner to discriminate, as in fact he is unable to do, and the piping plover is shot with the rest. Only by stopping all shooting, or by the creation of bird refuges, can the tendency to extinction of this and other shore birds be prevented.

The 1925 “New Edition” of this book (which I read) adds a hopeful footnote: “The passage of the Federal Migratory Bird Act has since stopped the shooting of most of our shore birds.” Indeed, despite its grim moments (for instance, disparaging “these degenerate times” for all the wanton shooting of wildlife), even the first edition of 1913 manages to strike a somewhat hopeful note, at least in regards to seabird protection:

What a joy it would be to have a return of the old conditions, when terns and piping plover bred in the dunes, and when shore birds large and small thronged the beaches, and when the sea teemed with water fowl. Many of the birds I have mentioned in this chapter are on the way to extinction, some have already disappeared forever; a few, happily as a result of protection, are increasing. In Japan it is said that when travelling artisans see an eagle, they take out their sketching tablets and record its beautiful shape and attitudes. The barbarians of this part of the world try to shoot it, a fate they have often meted out to every large or unusual bird they came across, even if it were of no value to them, and they left it to rot where it fell. Fortunately times are changing and the people are gradually awakening to the idea that money value in food or plumage, or even in work done for man, is not the only thing for which birds should be protected. We are also beginning to realize that the interest which finds pleasure in the sport of bird destruction is a very limited and a very selfish one, and that the claims of the sportsman are not paramount to those of the nature student or even of the lover of natural beauty.

Between Bend and Burns: “Where Rolls the Oregon” by Dallas Lore Sharp, 1914

Birds, book review, Books, Landscape History, Native Plants, Ocean, Sense of Place 2 Responses »

Oct 032020

The utter nowhereness of that desert trail! Of its very start and finish! I had been used to starting from Hingham [Massachusetts] and arriving — and I am two whole miles from the station at that. Here at Mullein Hill I can see South, East, and North Weymouth, plain Weymouth, and Weymouth Heights, with Queen Anne’s Corner only a mile away; Hanover Four Corners, Assinippi, Egypt, Cohasset, and Nantasket are hardly five miles off; and Boston itself is but sixty minutes distant by automobile, Eastern time.
It is not so between Bend and Burns. Time and space are different concepts there. Here in Hingham you are never without the impression of somewhere. If you stop, you are in Hingham; if you go on you are in Cohasset, perhaps. You are somewhere always. But between Bend and Burns you are always in the sagebrush and right on the distant edge of time and space, which seems by contrast with Hingham the very middle of nowhere. Massachusetts time and space, and doubtless European time and space, as Kant and Schopenhauer maintained, are not world elements independent of myself, at all, but only a priori forms of perceiving. That will not do from Bend to Burns. They are independent things out there. You can whittle them and shovel them. They are sagebrush and sand, respectively. Nor do they function there as here in the East, determining, according to the metaphysicians, the sequence of conditions, and positions of objects toward each other; for the desert will not admit of it. The Vedanta well describes “the-thing-in-itself” between Bend and Burns in what it says of Brahman: that “it is not split by time and space and is free from all change.”
That, however, does not describe the journey; there was plenty of change in that, at the rate we went, and according to the exceeding great number of sagebushes we passed. It was all change; though all sage. We never really tarried by the side of any sagebush. It was impossible to do that and keep the car shying rhythmically — now on its two right wheels, now on its two left wheels — past the sagebush next ahead. Not the journey, I say; it is only the concept, the impression of the journey, that can be likened to Brahman. But that single, unmitigated impression of sage and sand, of nowhereness, was so entirely unlike all former impressions that I am glad I made the journey from Boston in order to go from Bend to Burns.

AT ITS BEST, “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON” REVEALS THE REFLECTIONS OF AN EASTERN NATURALIST COMING TO GRIPS WITH THE ARID AND IMMENSE LANDSCAPES OF THE WEST. He is the archetypal Outsider, struggling to relate his experiences in the woodlands and fields of New England to the canyons, mountains, and empty country of Oregon. Here, Dallas Lore Sharp writes of his glimpse of a raven soaring over Deschutes Canyon, against a vast backdrop of emptiness and silence:

As our train clung to its narrow footing and crept slowly up the wild cañon of the Deschutes, I followed from the rear platform the windings of the milk-white river through its carved course, We had climbed along some sixty miles to where the folding walls were shearest and the towering treeless buttes rolled, fold upon fold, behinds us on the sky, when, of from one of the rim-rock ledges, far above, flapped a mere blot of a bird, black, and strong of wing, flying out into midair between the cliffs to watch us, and sailing back upon the ledge as we crawled round a jutting point in the wall and passed from his bight of the deep wild gorge.
…And I knew, though this was my first far-off sight of the bird, that I was watching a raven. Beside him on the ledge was a gray blur that I made out to be a nest — an ancient nest, I should say, from the stains below it on the face of the rock…..
Or did I imagine it all? This is a treeless country, green with grass, yet, as for animal life, an almost uninhabited country…. Such lack of wild life had seemed incredible; but no longer after entering the cañon of the Deschutes. A deep, unnatural silence filled the vast spaces between the beetling walls and smothered the roar of the rumbling train. The river, one of the best trout streams in the world, broke white and loud over a hundred stony shallows, but what wild creature, besides the osprey, was here to listen? The softly rounded buttes, towering above the river, and running back beyond the cliffs, were greenish gold against the sky, with what seemed clipped grass, like to some golf-links of the gods; but no creature of any kind moved over them. Bend after bend, mile after mile, and still no life, except a few small birds in the narrow willow edging where the river made some sandy cove. That was all — until out from his eyrie in the overhanging rim-rock flapped the raven.

FOR SHARP, THE WESTERN LANDSCAPE WAS FUNDAMENTALLY FOREIGN TO HIS EXPERIENCE. Spaces were so immense and so desolate and so unfamiliar to a New Englander. Not always able to appreciate the monumentality of the West, on at least this one occasion he gave up, turning his focus instead on a more familiar sight, reminiscent of what he might encounter back home:

How often one becomes the victim of one’s special interests! I climbed to the peak of Hood, looked down upon Oregon and into her neighbor states, saw Shasta far off to the south, and Rainier far off to the north, and then descended, thinking and wondering more about a flock of little butterflies that were wavering about the summit than about the overpowering panorama of river and plain and mountain-range that had been spread so far beneath me. Or was I the victim, rather, of my inheritance? Was it because I happened to be born, not on a mountain-peak eleven thousand two hundred and twenty-five feet above the sea, but in a sandy field at sea-level? I was born in a field bordering a meadow whose grasses ran soon into sedges and then into the reeds of a river that flowed into the bay; and I found myself on the summit of Hood dazed and almost incapable of great emotion. So I watched the butterflies.

THIS BOOK HAD BEEN A RARE FIND FOR ME: a natural history study of the Pacific Northwest, written between 1862 and 1942. And several of its essays, particularly the ones quoted above, lived up to the expectation. But after reading Enos Mills’ accounts of his adventures in the Rockies, I also came to recognize that there is a considerable difference between the West as portrayed by a deep inhabitant of its wilds, and the West as encountered by an Eastern nature rambler visiting for a couple of months one summer. That difference continues to fascinate me. Alas, however, the book as a whole is highly uneven and its structure rather baffling. It opens with a visit to the seabird-covered crags of Three-Arch Rocks Reservation, just offshore west of Portland. The next section of the book is the most coherent, covering Sharp’s time in eastern Oregon, including the epic drive from Bend to Burns. He visits desert wetlands filled with birds (except for the white heron, driven nearly extinct at the time by the brutal millinery trade). Then he inserts a lengthy consideration of herd behavior, which begins with cows in the pastures of Hingham and ends with a cattle stampede in eastern Oregon. After the butterflies of Mt. Hood he shares about his encounter with a cony (pica) in the Wallowa Mountains. Then back to Shag Rock in Three Arch Rocks Reservation (on the same visit as began the book), then a long essay on animal mothers that again started in New England and ended back on Three Arch Rocks again. Then a final appreciation of Mt. Hood as seen from Portland (with some ponderings on Portland’s economic and cultural potential. And then the book closed.

THE FINAL RESULT IS A SERIES OF VIGNETTES, SNAPSHOTS FROM A PLEASANT RAMBLE THROUGH THE WESTERN WILDS. To his credit, Sharp advertises it as such in the Preface, where he explains that “…this volume is…a group of impressions, deep, indelible impressions of the vast outdoors of Oregon. Still, the reader is left longing he would develop his impressions of the West into a more coherent, richer, more extensive volume. The editor, too, might have encouraged him to save essays on animal behavior (mothering and herd instincts) for another book, and instead to concentrate on encounters with the Western landscape and its flora and fauna. Finally, most ironically of all, Sharp’s title, “Where Rolls the Oregon” (lifted from Thanatopsis, a poem by William Cullen Bryant) refers to an older name for the Columbia River, whose striking gorge along the Oregon/Washington border cuts through the heart of the Pacific Northwest. Yet Sharp does not mention the river even once in his book.

I WAS FORTUNATE TO LOCATE A VOLUME IN SUPERB CONDITION. It is a first edition from 1914, with cover art well preserved. It was signed by a previous owner, Henrietta A. Pratt, but without a date. My attempts to track down the owner via Google met with no success. At very least, I would like to thank her for caring for this book so thoughtfully.

From the Tide Pool to the Stars: “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” by John Steinbeck, 1941

book review, Books, Natural History, Ocean, Sense of Place No Responses »

Aug 282020

Our own interest lay in relationships of animal to animal. If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational to a point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And then not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it. Then one can come back to the microscope and the tide pool and the aquarium. But the little animals are found to be changed, no longer set apart and alone. And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known as unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things — plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

JOHN STEINBECK HAD AN EYE FOR THE QUOTIDIAN AND AN EYE FOR THE COSMIC, AND IN “THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ” HE MOVED COMFORTABLY BETWEEN THE TWO. Ostensibly the account of a several-week boat excursion down the California coast and into the Gulf of California to collect marine specimens, it is actually a journey into the fundamental questions of (as Douglas Adams would say) life, the universe, and everything. From the beginning, Steinbeck cautions us that this will be no ordinary account of a voyage, with this nod to the recently-discovered Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

We said, “Let’s go wide open. Let’s see what we see, record what we find, and not fool ourselves with conventional scientific strictures. We could not observe a completely objective Sea of Cortez anyway, for in that lonely and uninhabited Gulf our boat and ourselves would change it the moment they entered. By going there, we would bring a new factor to the Gulf. Let us consider that factor and not be betrayed by this myth of permanent objective reality. If it exists at all, it is only available in pickled tatters or in distorted flashes. Let us go,” we said, “into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a field of eelgrass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too.” And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn’t terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn’t very important to the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.

NONE OF IT IS IMPORTANT OR ALL OF IT IS. Perhaps that sums up this book well. Steinbeck’s thought roams freely from one topic to another, constantly seeking out interconnections. At one moment, he is recording the shapes and colors of the marine invertebrates he encountered; in the next, teasing apart the threads of what we have woven together to call reality. From the near edge of my blog’s chronological scope, the world is a lot more uncertain than it was nearly eighty years previously. It is a world at war, a World War that Americans would join following Pearl Harbor in December of that year. And it is a world where the latest scientific upheaval is not the result of Darwin’s musings, but is instead the revolutions in Physics that produced both an Uncertainty Principle and a Relativistic Universe. The ground (or water, in this case) is constantly shifting beneath Steinbeck’s feet, and in-between downing beers and pickling marine specimens, in the midst of a relatively wild seascape teeming with life and energy (which Steinbeck calls (tuna water — life water), Steinbeck tries to make sense of his part — and our part — in it all. Ultimately, his biological work and philosophical thinking enable him to arrive at the meaning of life — or, at least — a meaning for all life — to survive:

In the little Bay of San Carlos, where there were many schools of a number of species, there was even a feeling (and “feeling” is used advisedly) of a larger unit which was the interrelation of species with their interdependence for food, even though that food be each other. A smoothly working larger animal surviving within itself — larval shrimp to little fish to larger fish to giant fish — one operating mechanism. And perhaps this unit of survival may key into the larger animal which is the life of all the sea, and this into the larger of the world. There would seem to be only one commandment for living things: Survive! And the forms and species and units and groups are armed for survival, fanged for survival, timid for it, fierce for it, clever for it, poisonous for it, intelligent for it. This commandment decrees the death and destruction of myriads of individuals for the survival of the whole. Life has one final end, to be alive; and all the tricks and mechanisms, all the successes and all the failures, are aimed at that end.

And in all of this, who are we? How does the individual human make sense of his or own life? Here, Steinbeck has little to offer — at least, communicated directly to the reader. Meanwhile, a couple of Indians he meets up with offer us one possible answer: we are caught up in a dream — part of everything, imagining a separateness which is not really there.

Their dark eyes never leave us. They seem actually to be dreaming. Sometimes we asked of the Indians the local names of animals we had taken, and then they consulted together. They seemed to live on remembered things, to be so related to the seashore and the rocky hills and the loneliness that they are these things. To ask about the country is like asking about themselves. “How many toes have you?” “What, toes? Let’s see — of course, ten. I have known them all my life, I never thought to count them. Of course it will rain tonight, I don’t know why. Something in me tells me I will rain tonight. Of course, I am the whole thing, now that I think about it. I ought to know when I will rain.”

AND ON THAT QUITE STRANGE PASSAGE, I WILL CLOSE OUT THIS POST. I admit that I struggled with classifying this book — does it qualify as a work of “nature writing”? I have puzzled over that category considerably in this project. Some titles fall completely into this genre. This one, though, is first and foremost a literary work. Nature is a part, but it is the entire weave that fascinated Steinbeck — the fish and the corals, yes, but the villagers and Indians, the sunlight and waves, the Japanese fishermen and the Mexican marine officials, the pickling jars and the skiff’s outboard motor (with a malignant mind of its own). None of it is important or all of it is. I will leave each reader to arrive at his or her own decision on that.

MY COPY OF THE BOOK WAS A NONDESCRIPT PENGUIN PAPERBACK, PAGES ALREADY WELL TANNED. This edition is copyrighted 1986, and I have been its sole owner. I purchased it in Fort Collins, Colorado, probably in 1987, on the recommendation of Dr. Ellen Wohl, my graduate and literary advisor. Although a native of Ohio, Wohl opened up my world to a host of remarkable authors of the American West, from Steinbeck to Stegner. I probably walked, or bicycled, from my rented room at 1016 Sycamore Street to purchase this book, back in the days before Amazon. I read it once, voraciously, and recall enjoying it greatly. I had not returned to it until the occasion of this blog.

What Wildness Still Remains: “The Log of the Sun: A Chronicle of Nature’s Year” by William Beebe, 1906

Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Insects, Ocean No Responses »

Aug 182020

In the fifty-two short essays of this volume I have presented familiar objects from unusual points of view. Birds-eye glances and insect’s eye glances, at the nature of our woods and fields, will reveal beauties which are wholly invisible from the usual human view-point, five feet or more above the ground.
Who follows the lines must expect to find moods as varying as the seasons; to face storm and night and cold, and all other delights of what wildness still remains to us upon the earth.

WITH THESE WORDS, THE EXPLORER-NATURALIST WILLIAM BEEBE SETS THE READER ON A JOURNEY THROUGH THE FAMILIAR WILDS OF THE NORTHEAST COAST, FROM JANUARY TO DECEMBER. Clearly inspired by John Burroughs, Beebe intended his first book to be another of many volumes published at the time tracing out seasonal changes in New England and environs (in this case, near New York City). His format: a weekly entry about nearby wildlife, especially birds, capped off with a bit of nature poetry as a nod to the temperment of the age. But at this project, Beebe largely failed. Yes, there are a number of brief pieces about looking at the familiar in new ways, such as studying pond life with a microscope or getting down close to the ground to see the winter world of tunneling mice close-up. But there are a number of chapters — his finest writing in the book, in my estimation — that seek out wilder places such as swamps and marshes or, better still, the open ocean. Indeed, the book’s longest chapter, at twenty-four pages, is Secrets of the Ocean. There is wanderlust in these pages — a world adventurer constrained, for a time, to a single place, seeking to make the most of it. In fact, at one point he celebrates the love of home as a source of abiding connection with the birds he so keenly observes:

This love of home, of birthplace, bridges over a thousand physical differences between feathered creatures and ourselves. We forget their expressionless masks of horn, their scaly toes, and looking deep into their clear, bright eyes, we know and feel a kinship, a sympathy of spirit, which binds us all together, and we are glad.

Clearly, though, while he may appreciate a sense of home, what he truly yearns for instead is wilder places, where humans have not ventured. In wetlands he found an approximation that was temporarily satisfying:

To many, a swamp or marsh brings only that very practical thought of whether it can be readily drained. Let us rejoice, however, that many marshes cannot be thus easily wiped out of existence, and hence they remain as isolated bits of primeval wilderness, hedged about by farms and furrows. The water is the life-blood of the marsh, — drain it, and reed and rush, bird and batrachian, perish or disappear. The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation, — melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man,
The ideal marsh is as far as one can go from civilization. The depths of a wood holds its undiscovered secrets; the mysterious call of the veery sends a wildness that even to-day has not ceased to pervade the old wood. There are spots overgrown with fern and carpeted with velvety wet moss; here also the skunk cabbage and cowslip grow rank among the alders. Surely man cannot live near this place — but the tinkle of a cowbell comes faintly on the gentle stirring breeze — and our illusion is dispelled, the charm is broken.
But even to-day, when we push the punt through the reeds from the clear river into the narrow, tortuous channel of the marsh, we have left civilization behind us. The great ranks of the cattails shut out all view of the outside world; the distant sounds of civilization serve only to accentuate the isolation….
The marsh has remained unchanged since the days when the Mohican Indians speared fish there. We are living in a bygone time. A little green heron flies across the water. How wild he is; nothing has tamed him. He also is the same now as always.

The chapter continues, and night settles in. Beebe revels in the wild sounds and presences all around him, until at least compelled to depart:

All sounds have ceased save the booming of the frogs, which but emphasizes the loneliness of it all. A distant whistle of a locomotive dispels the idea that all the world is wilderness. The firefly lams glow along the margin of the rushes. The frogs are now in full chorus, the great bulls beating their tim-toms and the small fry filling in the chinks with shriller cries. How remote the scene and how melancholy the chorus!….
The moon rises over the hills. The mosquitoes have become savage. The marsh has tolerated us as long as it cares to, and we beat our retreat….
A water snake glides across the channel, leaving a silver wake in the moonlight. The frogs plunk into the water as we push past. A night heron rises from the margin of the river and slowly flops away. The bittern booms again as we row down the peaceful river, and we leave the marshland to its ancient and rightful owners.

ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, IT IS TRUE WILDERNESS HE YEARNS FOR. A microscope or a canoe may carry him out of the familiar for a time, until “the charm is broken”, but the open ocean is far wilder, far more remote, and it calls to him:

We are often held spellbound by the majesty of mountains, and indeed a lofty peak forever capped with snow, or pouring forth smoke and ashes, is impressive beyond all terrestrial things. But the ocean yields to nothing in its grandeur, in its age, in its ceaseless movement, and the question remains forever unanswered, “Who shall sound the mysteries of the sea?” Before the most ancient of mountains rose from the heart of the earth, the waves of the sea rolled as now, and though the edges of the continents shrink and expand, bend into bays or stretch out into capes, always through all the ages the sea follows and laps with ripples or booms with breakers unceasingly upon the shore.

The oceans, too, set a boundary for human destructiveness, or so it seemed to Beebe over a hundred years ago, long before the invention of plastic:

The time is not far distant when the bottom of the sea will be the only place where primeval wildness will not have been defiled or destroyed by man. He may sail his ships above, he may peer downward, even dare to descent a few feet in a suit of rubber or a submarine boat, or he may scratch a tiny furrow for a few yards with a dredge: but that is all.

Alas, Beebe failed to predict so much, from commercial trawler fishing operations to single-use plastic grocery bags…. But in 1906, many years and journeys lay still ahead for him, around the world and into the ocean deeps. He would even return, almost half a century later, to another visit with the commonplace, publishing in 1953 “The Unseen Life of New York” As a Naturalist Sees It”. But for the moment, I will close with one last glimpse of the wilds of a marsh — in this case, a cypress swamp somewhere in the coastal plain of the American Southeast:

…in the mysterious depths of our southern swamps we find the strangely picturesque cypresses, which defy the waters about them. One cannot say where trunk ends and root begins, but up from the stagnant slime rise great arched buttresses, so that the tree seems to be supported on giant six- or eight-legged stools between the arches of which the water flows and finds no chance to use its power. Here, in these lonely solitudes, — heron-haunted, snake-infested, — the hanging moss and orchids search out every dead limb and cover it with an unnatural greenness. Here, great lichens grow and a myriad tropical insects bore and tunnel their way from bark to heart of tree and back again,. Here, in the blackness of night, when the air is heavy with hot, swampy odours, and only the occasional squawk of a heron or cry of some animal is heard, a rending, grinding, crashing, breaks suddenly upon the stillness, a distant boom and splash, awakening every creature. Then the silence again closes down and we know that a cypress, perhaps linking a trio of centuries, has yielded up its life.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. Not being overly drawn to costlier first editions, I purchased a 1927 copy of Beebe’s work. The book is without a mark, though the pages are considerably browned with age. Alas, apart from the wintertime scene frontispiece shown above (by Walter King Stone), the book is unillustrated.