We open another eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of things–whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision.
Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes were added.
Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees. The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key.
Here, in what is undoubtedly the finest essay in this volume (“Sharp Eyes”), Burroughs hints at possessing an ecological vision, half a century before the term “ecosystem” was coined in 1935. (Although Ernest Haeckel came up with “ecology” in 1866, that concept, too, awaited the 20th century to develop much further.) Yet here, in this passage, lies the beginnings of a transition from merely identifying living things (birds, plants, etc.) to seeing living things in relationship to each other and the landscape. The more naturalists enhance their base of knowledge, the more “words” they can glimpse, and the better authors they can become, assembling the words into meaningful sentences that can tell wonderful tales: “Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes, are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them.” Wonder emerges when we look beyond the name of the bird, to begin exploring its behaviors at a particular moment.
Later in the same essay, Burroughs offers further guidance on seeing the natural world deeply:
…the habit of observation is the habit of clear and decisive gazing. Not by a first casual glance, but by a steady deliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic things discovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The sharp-shooter picks out his man and knows him with fatal certainty from a stump, or a rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to locate, not only form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but also a faculty which they call individuality–that which separates, discriminates, and sees in every object its essential character. This is just as necessary to the naturalist as to the artist or the poet. The sharp eye notes specific points and differences,–it seizes upon and preserves the individuality of the thing.
These insights (in a literal and figurative sense) comprise the highlight of this volume. I think of this work as one of transition; he moved to a farm in the Hudson Valley in 1873, so these essays mark his first encounters with a landscape he would grow to know even more deeply over the next 48 years. Many of his delightful works deeply rooted in the Hudson landscape and adjacent regions of New York State (such as the Catskills) were yet to be penned in 1879. I found these writings pleasant enough, I suppose, and certainly diverse; they covered beekeeping, trout fishing, weather prognostication, wild strawberries, traveling, an expedition to Canada, and, of course, birds of all kinds. (One essay, comparing British birds to American ones, is even entitled, “Birds and Birds”. Cue Monty Python’s infamous “Spam Song”.)
A couple more passages will suffice, I think, to offer a satisfactory sampling of Locusts and Wild Honey. In his “Birds and Birds” essay, Burroughs reminds us of how long ago the book was written. In 1879, passenger pigeons were still fairly abundant. This led Burroughs to wonder, “The pigeon lays but two eggs, and is preyed upon by both man and beast, millions of them meeting a murderous death every year; yet always some part of the country is swarming with untold numbers of them.” A tragic footnote, dated 1895, adds that “This is no longer the case. The passenger pigeon now seems on the verge of extinction.” Even Burroughs didn’t see that coming.
Next, a lovely, rich description of Rondout Brook in the Catskills, complete with some 19th century geological terms:
If there ever was a stream cradled in the rocks, detained lovingly by them, held and fondled in a rocky lap or tossed in rocky arms, that.stream is the Rondout. Its course for several miles from its head is over the stratified rock, and into this it has worn a channel that presents most striking and peculiar features. Now it comes silently along on the top of the rock, spread out and flowing over that thick, dark green moss that is found only in the coldest streams; then drawn into a narrow canal only four or five feet wide, through which it shoots, black and rigid, to be presently caught in a deep basin with shelving, overhanging rocks, beneath which the pheebe-bird builds in security, and upon which the fisherman stands and casts his twenty or thirty feet of line without fear of being thwarted by the brush ; then into a black, well-like pool, ten or fifteen feet deep, with a smooth, circular wall of rock on one side worn by the water through long ages; or else into a deep, oblong pocket, into which and out of which the water glides without a ripple.
The surface rock is a coarse sandstone superincumbent upon a lighter-colored conglomerate that looked like Shawangunk grits, and when this latter is reached by the water it seems to be rapidly disintegrated by it, thus forming the deep excavations alluded to.
My eyes had never before beheld such beauty in a mountain stream. The water was almost as trans- parent as the air, — was, indeed, like liquid air; and as it lay in these wells and pits enveloped in shadow, or lit up by a chance ray of the vertical sun, it was a perpetual feast to the eye, —so cool, so deep, so pure; every reach and pool like a vast spring. You lay down and drank or dipped the water up in your cup, and found it just the right degree of refreshing coldness. One is never prepared for the clearness of the water in these streams. It is always a surprise… Absolutely without stain or hint of impurity, it seems to magnify like a lens, so that the bed of the stream and the fish in it appear deceptively near. It is rare to find even a trout stream that is not a little “off color,” as they say of diamonds, but the waters in the section of which I am writing have the genuine ray; it is the undimmed and untarnished diamond.
If I were a trout, I should ascend every stream till I found the Rondout. It is the ideal brook. What homes these fish have, what retreats under the rocks, what paved or flagged courts and areas, what crystal depths where no net or snare can reach them!—no mud, no sediment, but here and there in the clefts and seams of the rock patches of white gravel, — spawning beds ready-made.
The finishing touch is given by the moss with which the rock is everywhere carpeted. Even in the narrow grooves or channels where the water runs the swiftest, the green lining is unbroken. It sweeps down under the stream and up again on the other side, like some firmly-woven texture. It softens every outline and cushions every stone.
Oh, for the days when naturalists out in the wilds would drink the waters of mountain streams with delight (and impunity)!
I close with this marvelous quote, from the same essay as above (“A Bed of Boughs”), on the virtues of immersing oneself in wild nature: “It is our partial isolation from Nature that is dangerous; throw yourself unreservedly upon her and she rarely betrays you.”
Three volumes of my 23-volume Burroughs collection down, and 20 more to go. Stay tuned…