The Nature of Massachusetts!

Our book today is the gorgeous 1996 volume The Nature of Massachusetts, written by Christopher Leahy, John Hanson Mitchell, and Thomas Conuel to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the Massachusetts Audobon Society, and given that the volume is lavishly illustrated with the wistful, evocative artwork of Lars Jonsson, it's hard to imagine a better tribute-volume.

Conuel's precision and Leahy's all-encomassing passion drive the book, but it's the quirky, passionate prose of Mitchell (author of the immortal nature classic Ceremonial Time, which we'll get to one of these days here at Stevereads) that lifts the volume to the status of a classic – one that all nature-lovers should own whether they've set foot in Massachusetts or not.

The book starts off exactly as it should: with a lengthy tribute to the indomitable Boston women who got the whole business of wildlife preservation started, properly organized, and properly funded. The essays is called “Founding Mothers” and pays heartfelt tribute to such pioneers as Olga Owens Huckins, Rachel Carson, and most of all Harriet Hemenway, and the playful perception the reader encounters here stays the same throughout the book:

Proper Boston women, it used to be said, liked getting old. They could wear their hair in the Queen Mother style with impunity, ignore fashion altogether, and say what they wanted. The Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and lived to be ninety-one, confided in her diary at the age of eighty-seven that she hoped the coming year would bring her useful work. Aging was like a cup of tea, she believed. The sugar was at the bottom.

The book takes us on a leisurely tour of all the various “rooms” to be found in the Bay State's “House of Nature” - streams and floodplains, grasslands, red maple swamps, oak-conifer forests, coastal heathlands, and many others. Each of these very different ecological niches is examined in vigorous detail, and each chapter comes with its own mini-bibliography. When our writers tells us that “The peaceful grandeur of the large estuarine salt marsh masks the orgy of biological activity taking place in and around it,” they're not pandering to sensationalism – their enthusiasm is as genuine as it is infectious. To them, the most commonplace physical setting invariably hides great riches:

Despite the characteristically depauperate plant and animal communities, a good bog is a naturalist's dreamland: often secluded by a surrounding wall of forest; the vegetation, water, and reflections laid out in a pleasing arrangement of planes and horizons; an unparalleled assortment of greens spotted with orchid pink in spring and splotched with moorland crimson in the fall; an assemblage of strange plants such as sundews and pitcher plants that must catch and digest insect food to survive; great multicolored dragonflies patrolling the water's edge; perhaps the ethereal piping of a hermit thrush floating on the spice-scented air; and of course the magic of walking on waves as you cross the undulating mossy mat.

And there's an appealing immediacy to all of it that seems to put the reader right into the imagined location – with our authors standing nearby, equally spellbound:

If you have never stood by a marsh before dawn during the breeding season and listened to the wails, moans, cackles, and lunatic laughter with which rails, bitterns, gallinules, and other marsh birds express their territorial jealousies and sexual longings, you have missed one of nature's strangest performances.

Of course, everybody has their own favorite ecological setting (those who favor a nice sinus-clearing desert will be out of luck in this volume), and I've surely made no secret of my own throughout the years. Yes, I'm fond of the ocean and its tidal pools, and of course I've poured affection on ponds right here at Stevereads, and I very much enjoy a patch of old-growth forest, but my heart will always belong to salt marshes, so I was particularly pleased by prose poetry they invoke here :

Anyone who lives near these sea-drowned prairies has internalized a host of indelible impressions: canoeing into the silent heart of the marsh via a meandering creek; squadrons of tree swallows hawking for mosquitoes in August; a snowy owl perched on a hay straddle in January; an unmistakable sweet tang in the nostrils; the dawn song of the seaside sparrow; the surprisingly painful bite of the greenhead fly; catching mummichogs with a dip net; watching a merlin plunge into a mixed flock of shorebirds; the mechanical jousting of fiddler crabs; the October scarlet of samphire ...

[caption id="attachment_1532" align="aligncenter" width="269" caption="northern harrier over miacomet plains, nantucket"][/caption]

Of course, content is the twin of context; you could hardly open this book knowing it's an Audobon Society production and not expect one of its strongest themes to be wildlife preservation and conservation, and that's certainly the case here – but not intrusively so. The volume was written ten years ago, at the very cusp of the modern 'green' movement that has seen such huge strides in Massachusetts since then (despite wide-scale Bush-era depredations elsewhere in the country) – the dark tidings our authors have to impart – about the fishability and swimmability of Massachusetts lakes and streams, among other things – have in many cases actually improved in the ensuing decade.

So when our authors geekishly inform us “River fishes are neurologically equipped to maintain a constant position in relation to the current without (so to speak) thinking about it – a trick called rheotaxis,” they're perhaps unaware of the neat little feat of rheotaxis they're documenting with their own efforts. Would that all upstream-swimming had monuments as nifty as this book.

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Three in the Backyard!

Our three books today - one by John Hanson Mitchell and two by our old friend Cathy Johnson (clicking on her keyword below will bring you to a celebration of her book The Nocturnal Naturalist) - all sing a central theme: you don't have to get in your car and drive to the Grand Tetons (or, if you live there, away from them) to experience nature. Except for the blighted lunar cityscapes so erotically filmed in "The Wire," virtually any urban area on Earth will provide ready access to at least some kind of natural space - even if it's a patch of waste ground, or some scrub wood in an abandoned lot. No matter what it is, our two authors assure us, some kinds of critters will be using it as a home, a hunting ground, or just a highway. With a little time and a lot of patience, you can find those critters and spend some peaceful time in their world.




Alternately, as Mitchell writes, you could just look up:

To my mind, this night passage [of migrating birds, seen against the light of the moon] - an event that takes place each year unbeknownst to perhaps 90 percent of the human population and yet accessible to almost everyone - is one of the greatest seasonal events of the natural world. There is something very comforting about the fact that, in spite of war, pollution, crime in the streets, and all the other ills that affect the human community, the sheer force of the migratory drive is still working well and the world is all right in the end.

Mitchell makes the central plea readily, and often:

A watchful eye, a little extra attention to detail, and a sharpened sensitivity to seasonal change can uncover a veritable Serengeti Park just beyond the bedroom window. All you have to do is learn to see.

Johnson's books urge the same thing on the sedentary, set-in-their-senses reader: get up, go out, find your healing wild place (no matter how humble it might be) and learn its ways - become a part of it. I'm lucky enough to live equidistant between a fair-sized woodland park and a fair-sized kettle pond, and I can attest to what she says: regularly spending time in such places, walking without a goal, watching everything (and, in my case, periodically stopping to wipe globules of spit off a basset hound's face) ... works a restorative change in you, no matter what's on your mind, no matter what kind of a day you've had.

In these two books, Nature Walks and The Local Wilderness, Johnson again advocates not only the proximity and beauty of the natural world but also a gentle kind of duty we owe it:

Go out after an ice storm. It is a frightening, sobering kind of beauty: when the morning sun strikes cold fire, frozen rainbows shine on each bush and twig. This is starvation time in park and backyard. Food stores are locked away under their coating of ice, and the birds and animals soon feel the pinch of hunger. Again, this is a time to see to your backyard birds and other visitors; who knows what hungry creature might visit the fallen grain under the feeder? I found a family of raccoons there one glittering winter night. They skated away across the ice, slipping and falling over each other in their haste to escape my light.

These quiet acts of kindness are sometimes contrasted in Johnson's books by more dramatic accounts. She cheerfully admits that she is sometimes "as crazy as a loon" - like the time she intentionally sought out tree cover in a thunderstorm, risking electrocution so she could feel the rest of it:

To say it was exciting to be there purposely and alone in the heart of the storm would be understating the case. It was terrifying, wonderful - outside of anything I'd ever done before. Giant trees I'd known as solid, upstanding citizens, normally motionless except for their uppermost limbs, now swayed almost to their roots. I laid my hand on a big oak and felt the vibration in its fibers; leaned against another and felt the movement of the tree against my back. I knew it was crazy to be there, insane to take such a chance. If my husband - ever cautious - could have seen me, I would never have heard the end of it.

I shouted just to discover if my voice would be audible against the storm; it was not.

My worry in praising these three fact-filled, charmingly illustrated (Johnson's with her own evocative work, Mitchell's with the graceful sketches of Laurel Molk) books is that they and their kind are themselves headed for starvation time. Who in today's publishing world would reprint such books for a general audience (and please - Kindle me no Kindles! Surely of all books, ruminative nature books are the least compatible with being read on a backlit electronic device that consumes battery power)? True, publishers still print new books of this type occasionally - but what about all the older gems, now awaiting re-discovery on used bookstore shelves? If these books are lost as those stores one by one close, I worry that the soft-spoken wisdom in these pages might be lost as well.

We need an American Nature Library - not only a building (natural timber, set in a small park), but an ongoing publishing project, designed to find the best of books such as these and preserve them. I'd subscribe.