Far up the cliff a brook, which had worked patiently downard from the soil on the summit of the mountain, appeared in a circular opening, and dashed its small spray seaward. Most brooks must fight their way over boulders and fallen trees, through dark ravines, by hot waysides and sleepy meadows, at last to win only a right to merge their lives in the greater life of the river. This brook had gone straight to its mother ocean, unchecked, unturned, and when its clear, cool drops fell towards the sea they were as pure as when they left the sky. The brook seemed symbolic of some lives, which, though living out their appointed time, go back to the source of life without ever having been polluted by society, or lost in its sullen and ill-regulated current.
I FOUND FRANK BOWLES’ LAST BOOK A DIFFICULT ONE TO READ. It was not specifically that the book was assembled posthumously from four essays about a vacation trip to Nova Scotia augmented by all Bowles’ essays (on birds) that had previously appeared in periodicals. Though I am not tremendously keen on birds and bird behavior (I am working on this, considering how prominently birds figure in early nature writing.), that was not the primary obstacle. I had already read two volumes of Frank Bolles’ work and therefore knew what to expect, but while Bolles’ work lacks the stunning mysticism of Henry Beston, he had become a familiar friend over the previous two volumes of his I had read, and his occasional gems of insight are a joy to encounter. No, what I found most difficult was that the book contained essays written mostly in the last year or so of an all-too-short life, chronicling Bolles’ summer adventures before the winter of his death by pneumonia. I experienced at once both the bittersweet appreciation of how fully he invested himself in engaging with nature (particularly birds), and also the realization that his gifts as a writer and scientist have been mostly lost to the world, thanks in good part, I suspect, to his early death. And I thought, naturally, of my late father, and our summer outing together to Nova Scotia many years ago to some of the very same places Bolles visited. I also thought back to the summer in Maine that Dad felt compelled to document in his tidy black ink handwriting; I have that work now, though have only read it once.
TO THOSE NOT FAMILIAR WITH BOWLES LIFE, THERE IS LITTLE TO FOSTER INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY IN THE READER. The only direct indications that this book was Bolles’ last are in the form of a brief opening note about the book’s contents by EQB, and the fact that it is copyrighted Elizabeth Quincy Bowles instead of the author himself. Elizabeth is mentioned only a couple of times in Bolles’ essays; readers learn that she paints watercolor scenes of Chocorua Lake, and that, clearly, she has an inordinate level of patience for Bolles’ menagerie of pet owls. Reading this book, I could not help but wonder what became of her. I know they had children, and one daughter donated the family’s White Mountain land (or at least a good portion of it) to the Nature Conservancy in 1969. Still, I wish Elizabeth had illustrated this volume (at least the frontispiece) with her artwork, so that readers might get to know her better.
THIS BOOK MAY HAVE A CLUNKY TITLE, AND MAY BE UNEVEN, BUT IT STILL CONTAINS A FEW INSPIRING PASSAGES. One of my favorites describes Frank’s experience rowing a small boat in a bay near Ingonish with his family, and encountering a marvelous phosphorescence in the water. It leads him quickly on a cosmic path:
In the sky, bright masses ploughed their way through our air, impelled by an unknown force, driven from an unknown distance, and aiming for an unknown fate. In the sea, bright atoms ploughed their way through the water and glowed in soft splendor. The meteors are inorganic, dead mysteries. The phosphorescence is an organic, living mystery. Yet it is not more impossible to imagine the history and future of a body perpetually traveling through endless space than to try to count the numbers of these phosphorescent myriads. Generally I have the feeling that science is bringing us nearer to a perception of what the vast creation is which surrounds us, but at times the greater truth flashes before my eyes — that what we are really learning is not more than a drop in the limitless ocean of fact.
In another section, describing a forested gorge not far from Ingonish, Bolles speaks of the spiritual beauty of wilderness in a way that seems almost to mirror John Muir. Was Bolles acquainted with Muir’s writing? I cannot imagine otherwise:
Since leaving the open meadow by the sea and entering the dark forest, I had felt the spell of the wilderness resting upon me, the sense of age, beauty, purity, persistent force; all existing or working without man’s knowledge or approval, yet being the very essence of this dewy land of twilight. On coming to this grotto of rushing waters, Nature seemed for the moment to find a voice with which to tell of her wonderful power….
The spell of the wilderness grew stronger upon me, and when, suddenly, I thought how many wearied souls there were in great cities who would love to see this beautiful, hidden spot, something akin to shame for my own race came also into my mind. If man came here, would he not destroy? His foot would trample, his hand deface, and finally he would cut down the firs, blast out the rock, choke the salmon with sawdust, and leave the glen to fire and the briers which follow flame. It is always so; those of us who love nature and the beautiful are only the few, soon to be thrust aside by the many who value bread or riches higher than the fair earth’s bloom.
Later in the same essay, standing beside a flowing stream within the gorge, Bolles returns to this subject. In the passage below, he seems to reject , the dominant anthropocentrism of his era for an appreciation of how humans are only one facet of Earth’s life, and the recognition that nature can have value in and of itself.
This sense of beauty is a focus of nature’s deepest and purest life; and though in it man has no place, it does not on that account lack meaning or significance. Man is a masterful figure in the drama of creation, but he is not all, nor even half, what the world has long been taught to consider him. Perhaps he has been studied too much; certainly Nature, unspoiled by his greed, has not been studied enough or loved enough. Standing alone in that fair solitude, as much alone as on some atoll in a distant sea, I felt as though I might know man better, see him in stronger contrasts and clearer lights, if I could live apart from him longer in such still, calm, holy places as Indian Brook cañon.
THE FINAL TWO-THIRDS OF THE BOOK CONSISTS OF BOLLES’ PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ESSAYS. These were tougher slogging (for me, at least), because they were all concerned with birds, either wild or tamed. Bolles tamed a number of owls (obtained partly by shooting the parents and partly as gifts from others who had presumably done the same), and also raised three yellow-bellied sapsuckers (again, after dispatching the parents). Accompanied by one of the owls, Puffy (named by his children), Bolles found himself able to get wild birds come to him out of curiosity. Thus, he was able to include still more lists of birds observed. In terms of particular observations, Bolles played the role of the amateur scientist; particular interests included the diet of yellow-bellied sapsuckers (tree sap, insects, or a combination of the two) and the personalities of owl species.
FROM WHAT I HAVE READ, I WOULD PROPOSE THAT BOWLES’ GREATEST CONTRIBUTION TO CONSERVATION EMERGED FROM HIS OBSERVATIONS ON INDIVIDUALITY IN BIRDS. Strange as it may seem to the modern reader, there clearly was a time post-Descartes when animals were viewed as machines, incapable of developing unique personalities. As such, they could be freely shot without remorse. And Bolles did quite a bit of that, early on.
With me, belief in the individuality of birds is a powerful influence against their destruction. Like most men familiar with out of door life, I have the hunting instinct strongly developed. If a game bird is merely one of an abundant species, killing it is only reducing the supply of that species by one; if, on the contrary, it is possessed of novel powers, or a unique combination of powers, and can be distinguished from all its fellows, killing it is destroying something which cannot be replaced. No one with a conscience would extinguish a species, yet I already feel towards certain races that their individuals are as different from one another as I formerly supposed one species of bird to be from another. At one time I should have shot a barred owl without a twinge of conscience; now I should as soon shoot my neighbor’s Skye terrier as kill one of these singularly attractive birds.
In his next paragraph, Bolles considers his own work in the light of biological investigations at the time, and puts out a prescient plea for early citizen science to address the deficit:
Sentiment aside, bird individuality, if real, is of deep scientific interest. If we knew more of the influence of individuals, we might have a clearer perception of the forces governing evolution. Serious science is now so fully given up to laboratory as distinguished from field study that but little thought is given to problems of this kind. This fact makes it all the more possible for amateurs to work happily in the woods and fields, encouraged by the belief that they have innumerable discoveries still to make, countless secrets of nature still to fathom.
Like Christopher Robin leaving Pooh at the edge of the Hundred Acre Wood, it is in the wooded patches around his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I will leave him — observing birds and recording their behaviors. As we part company, Bolles reminds me to keep observing nature and making discoveries:
A Sunday afternoon in May spent in the groves and fields of suburbs gives acquaintance with more species than there are hours in a day, and close watch for an hour of any one bird may yield a fact which no naturalist has ever recorded.