Читать книгу The Quiet Crisis - Stewart L. Udall - Страница 13
ОглавлениеThoreau and the Naturalists
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels!
—WALT WHITMAN “Song of Myself”
There was another kind of moccasin stalking the wilderness at the end of the eighteenth and through the nineteenth century. Its wearer was not Indian, though he quickly grasped the age-old insights of Indian living. Nor was he White Indian: the brain was too self-aware, the mind too attuned to overtones, the inner ear too acute. This stealthy foot belonged to a new breed of hunter, the naturalist, who sought the miracle of nature as the Red Indian sought a deer or the White Indian a westward pass.
The interests and personalities of such naturalists as Bartram, Audubon, Parkman, Emerson, and Thoreau were as varied as their origins: one was a pre-eminent philosopher, one a pre-eminent historian, and the others were regarded as more quaint than profound by their contemporaries.
But in different ways these five were land-conscious men who owed a debt to the Old World and shared a desire for fresh insights into the nature-man equation. Likewise, they shared a deep interest in, and respect for, America’s aborigines, and they rejected the common notion that the European emigrants had nothing to learn from the natives.
Some were basically pastoral men (although, by Jed Smith’s standards, most of them were greenhorns and backyard bird watchers); others were more at home in parlors; but as a group they were bent on seeking out the larger meaning of nature and making it part of the woof of life.
Only two of them were intimates, and the paths of some never crossed, but they shared a virgin continent as a common laboratory, and viewed it with an eye of discovery that probed beyond the obvious. In a much different way they were as individualistic as the mountain men, and each contributed to new currents of thought that reshaped our thinking about the American land.
It began, perhaps with the Bartrams. Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, and William Bartram, naturalist, were bom within ten years—and died within six—of each other. While Jefferson stood on the portico of Monticello contemplating the agrarian advance, while Boone shaded his eyes at the summit of Cumberland Gap, William Bartram was down in a valley somewhere, on shank’s mare, inspecting palmated chestnut leaves, bird nests, vines, and berries. Jefferson knew Europe, and spent a lifetime borrowing its sophistications; Boone had shed Europe as a spring snake sheds its old skin; William Bartram depended upon Europe for his bread and butter, and his self-appointed task was to win respect for the Old World’s new art of nature study.
Bartram’s father, John, once the King’s botanist, had created America’s first botanical garden on the banks of the Schuylkill River. After one five-week jaunt of over 1,100 miles, John complained that no one would “bear the fatigue to accompany me in my peregrinations.” He was elated when his son William acquired his thirst to witness and describe every facet of nature. William, whose long stride matched his inquisitive eye, wandered thousands of unfenced miles on the eastern side of the Appalachians, and his journals bubbled over with the richness of a countryside teeming with “frogs in springly places,” “gay, vociferous and tuneful birds,” “myriads of fish, of the greatest variety and delicacy, sporting in the crystalline floods,” and “Elysian springs and aromatic groves.”
He wrote so eloquently that his Travels, published in 1791, received high praise in Europe. Carlyle wrote Emerson that all libraries should have “that kind of book . . . as a kind of future biblical article.” Chateaubriand in France, and Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, used the Travels as a basic wild-land reference book. Jefferson turned to Bartram when he needed strawberries and other plants for Monticello, and years later asked him to join Lewis and Clark’s expedition, but William, old and walked-out, regretfully declined.
As a self-taught disciple of Professor Linnaeus, William Bartram made botany popular, and he broadcast abroad—through his writings and exchanges of plants and seeds—the wonder of the American scene.
Science and institutions like the Smithsonian had a chance to grow in the United States once his work was under way, and the generation of nature writers and nature students which followed had a frame of reference from which it could measure its own insights.
Of Jefferson’s contemporaries, none achieved more popular fame than Haitian-born Jean Rabin, the naturalist whose name evolved to John James Audubon. Unlike his modern followers, who hunt with binoculars, Audubon took pleasure in shooting birds in order to identify them, and he chose the best for painting. In Florida he poked through the bayous and keys and boasted of shooting enough birds to make a feathered pile the size of “a small haycock” in a single day. From 1820 to 1826, Audubon hunted species after species, securing specimens and painting them with regal distinction for his Birds of America books.
His bird paintings were no sooner completed in 1839 than he began an ambitious work on North American quadrupeds and made a trek far up the Missouri in 1843 to gather facts firsthand. For two months Audubon was a guest at Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone. He rode with buffalo hunters, thrilled to the sound of “wolves howling, and bulls roaring, just like the long-continued roll of a hundred drums,” and commissioned trappers to bring him odd and unusual species. Passing Indians yelled with delighted recognition at the drawings he showed them from his portfolio, and he sketched night and day.
Audubon began the “Quadrupeds” collection at a time when it was impossible for a single naturalist to encompass all the fauna of the country. But he was indefatigable and saw his plan fulfilled after the Smithsonian was founded in 1846 and government survey parties shipped ponderous collections to Washington for analysis and classification.
Though Audubon never seems to have regretted his own big kills, in his later years he lashed out at the reckless raids on wildlife. He lamented the disappearance of deer in the East and denounced the “eggers of Labrador,” who slaughtered sea birds for fish bait. On witnessing the depredations of one fur company killing large numbers of mink and marten, he cried out “Where can I go now, and visit nature undisturbed?”
Audubon’s work heightened American interest in nature, and stirred the protective instincts of sensitive men. He was not a moralizer, nor did he seek to organize a crusade, but he became a symbolic figure in the fight for the preservation of wildlife, and after his death the society organized in his name set up a continuing protest against the slaughter he abhorred.
Audubon was a link between the mountain men and the naturalist-philosophers. Like the former, he was primarily a man of action rather than a prophet or profound thinker. Like the latter, he took delight in the systematic observation of wildlife and considered nature to be an object of study, not of conquest. His work is a manifestation of that same bedazzled love of the American scene that turned up in John Filson’s Kentucke and the works of William Bartram. Audubon did not merely record his creatures; he endowed them with his own enthusiasm. The best of his birds not only reflect their own beauty, but are alive with his excitement.
Three years after Audubon’s foray up the Missouri, amid the wagons-west tide of 1846, Wyoming was host to another Easterner—a Boston-bred collegian of twenty-three, Francis Parkman—who was to become America’s foremost interpreter of the encounter between Iron Age men and a virgin continent peopled with powerful native tribes. Wrapped up in his complicated life and character are all the contradictions and attractions of civilization and wilderness and their tragic, inevitable collision.
Francis Parkman, in his own words, was a man “haunted by wilderness images day and night.” This fact alone is an indication of how deeply the wilderness experience was beginning to invade the American consciousness. In background he shared nothing at all with outdoorsmen like Boone or Jed Smith. He had grown up among the merchant princes of Beacon Hill in the hub of American civilization, played beneath the benign eyes of portraits of Puritan and Revolutionary ancestors, and was clearly destined, from an early age, to enter the academic halls of Harvard College.
His life might have been rigidly conventional had he not found a wonderland of rocks, gorges, and pine woods near his grandfather’s farm when he was eight years old. This glacier-hollowed dell, ignored by colonial farmers, bore the intriguing name of Middlesex Fells. Here a protected city boy could shuck off his shoes and ramble around, could trap woodchucks and shoot at birds with an arrow, could poke his nose and fingers into all sorts of rocky recesses, and could put some timber in his spine. Francis had a second cousin, Henry Adams, who described the contrast of city and country as “the most decisive force he ever knew.” So it was for Francis, who learned all that the Fells had to teach him and later put it to good use.
In his college years he ventured into the more sizable wilderness of the Magalloway River, where he and a fellow sophomore made a canoe exploration, “seeking a superior barbarism, a superior solitude, and the potent charm of the unknown.” The Magalloway was a miniature Wild West, and it fixed Parkman’s attention on the great New World drama of men and land. There he saw his first Indian, first slept under the stars, and first shot big game.
Soon after, he obtained letters of safeguard from the American Fur Company and headed West on the Oregon Trail to find some Sioux. The Brahmin held himself aloof from the emigrants in covered wagons along the trail, for “this strange migration” of zealots and land-hungry farmers perplexed him. To his Boston tastes, the emigrants were unkempt, homespun people, oblivious to the magnificence of the country. He saved his admiration for the old frontiersmen who seemed to have the breath of the wilderness in them.
The climax of Parkman’s trip came when he was accepted by a band of Oglala Sioux, who were roaming the high plains with primitive vigor. Sick from alkali water and the rigors of his trip, Parkman stayed at the side of Chief Big Crow seventeen days as his tribe hunted buffalo and prepared for war. This Oglala interlude, at twenty-three, was the summit of Parkman’s active life. The simple ways of the Sioux and their attachment to the land reverberated in his mind as long as he lived.
It was surely some sixth sense that had sent Francis Parkman to the wilderness in 1846 before his body failed him. He saw and felt the open land before it was too late and met the rival forces that were contesting for dominion. The following winter he was felled by a nervous breakdown and, a half-blind invalid, turned his imagination inward and began his life’s work.
The darkness was closing in as he sat at home in Boston and wrote of his frontier adventures. He wrote blindfolded with the aid of a wire frame, but he could reach out and touch the buckskin, feathers, arrows, and lance of the Oglala and remember the exaltation of his Indian encounter. The result was his first book, The Oregon Trail, published in 1849.
The abiding significance of Parkman’s wilderness research unfolded in the forty-five years after his Oregon journey, as he wrote eight volumes of history. In his books he savored the excitement of the wilderness, yet his work eventually became a vast inquiry into geography and anthropology, a study of a virgin land and the competing cultures that struggled to master it. Parkman’s histories abounded in glowing descriptions of wild country: he was an avid reader of the earlier naturalists and once pirated passages from Bartram’s Travels to recreate the pristine aspect of the Florida savannas, but such words were mere background music, for once Parkman’s organ-toned prose began to flow, the land had found its historian. His language caught the melody of the red man and the Jesuits, of Pontiac and Frontenac, of Wolfe and Montcalm, and occasionally one even caught a glimpse of Parkman as he revealed himself through his word pictures of the shy priest, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.
Parkman wrote with the style of a novelist and the insight of a historian; to him the saga of American settlement had all the overtones and grandeur of classic tragedy. The European invaders, Parkman could see, would inevitably subjugate their Stone Age adversaries. Indian ways and Indian values would be eradicated by the onrush of a “superior civilization.” Here were the grand themes of Parkman’s books, and his contribution as a historian rests on his feeling for the land and his understanding of the irrepressible conflict over its future. In his last years, he took up his pen for the forests and for the Indians, and he died a city man who loved wild things, a sick man who esteemed physical prowess and saw that unspoiled nature had indispensable truths to tell.
While Parkman was a boy, preparing to enter Harvard, not far away a movement was developing that invigorated and reoriented American thought. It began in Concord and its captain was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who bade his countrymen to drop their imitation of Old World ways and strike out on their own.
To Emerson the nature discoveries of such men as Audubon and Bartram were valuable, but no substitute for his own discoveries. He was concerned not merely with the details that preoccupied the specialists, but also with developing some broad conclusions about man and his environment. To do so it was not enough to rely on books and secondhand experiences; every man should be his own naturalist and his own philosopher.
The principal thesis of his essay, Nature, published in 1836, was that the individual should “enjoy an original relation to the universe,” and that message became the cardinal article of faith in the philosophy of New England transcendentalism. “The inevitable mark of wisdom,” he advised, “is to see the miraculous in the common.”
To pursue his vision more intently, Emerson steeped himself in Plato, Goethe, and fresh air. The easiest way to develop Olympian insights was to turn the mind into an aeolian harp and attune it to the winds and sounds and rhythms of nature. Many of Emerson’s essays were forest prose poems and, for our purposes, the principal significance of the transcendental movement lies in the fact that it is rooted in nature. Solitude and meditation were Emerson’s meat and drink, and the inner harmonies of fife were clearest in his mind in the out-of-doors.
Emerson had many messages for his countrymen, but none was more profound than his conviction that they would find their own pathway only if they gave up their veneration of the Old World, cultivated self-reliance, and responded to the rhythms of the American earth:
Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past . . .? In the woods is perpetual youth. . . . In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity . . . which nature cannot repair . . . the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.
The transcendental philosophy needed poets to sing of the natural world and natural men, so Emerson wrote verse and was the first to hail the roughhewn images of young Walt Whitman. Before Emerson’s work was done, he became the first great American philosopher. His message was an affirmation of optimism, but in terms of land the optimism was the mote that marred his vision. Self-reliance was a quality that had defects, and already men who possessed it to excess—men who were solely concerned with immediate profits—were plundering their way through the forests and across the countryside.
Emerson, however, viewed such developments with unconcern. He was so attached to his hopes for America that he dismissed flagrant waste with the euphoric observation that pirates and rebels were the real fathers of colonial settlement, and men would adopt sound policies once the frontier was settled and the ennobling influence of nature took effect. This was sophistry, as Emerson would have realized had he roamed the back country as Bartram did, or traveled west with Parkman.
If Emerson made no major protest against resource waste dining his lifetime, his grand themes nevertheless helped arouse interest in the natural world, and inspired his Concord neighbor, Henry David Thoreau.
Fourteen years Emerson’s junior, Henry, in 1837, gave a Harvard commencement address in which he enlarged on Emerson’s Nature essay and offered the proposition that the order of things should be reversed: the seventh day should be a day of work, for sweat and toil; the remaining six days man should be free to feed his soul with “sublime revelations of nature.” He then proceeded straightway to turn his life into an object lesson of this expansive proposal.
