Back to Walden

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nature, Thoreau, winter

I read Walden about once a year, or at least dip into it for refreshment. Lately I’ve been reading the “winter” chapters: “Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors,” “Winter Animals,” and “The Pond in Winter.” These are much quieter chapters than the showy, occasionally verbally extravagant flourishes of “Economy” and “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” and they tend to get overlooked, I think. But I’m appreciating them anew this time around.

The “former inhabitants” section is a quiet catalogue of the abandoned houses and waste places Thoreau encounters as he walks around his Concord neighborhood, and a recollection of what he knows about the families who once lived there – which in some cases is very little. One might wonder what he’s up to with this melancholy inventory. I wondered, too, until I noticed, this time around, that the people he memorializes are almost all Black, poor, or both. All that is left of their life’s labor is an overgrown hummock, a portion of a cellar wall, a vague tale of their occupation.

This section of the book is a meditation on disappearance and loss, and it’s especially telling that this meditation focuses on the poor. Thoreau approaches their stories with his usual wry humor. In one instance he tells of a comical adventure with the volunteer fire department, when they respond to an alarm and mistakenly think the fire is some distance away, when it actually turns out to be an abandoned hut just down the road. But that scene is followed by the poignant description of the sole remaining member of that hut’s last family, who returns to the home of his childhood and pokes through the ashes for any remnant of his family’s existence, turning up only the hook from which the well-dipper was fastened. “I felt it,” Thoreau writes, “and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family.”

Disappearance, withdrawal, diminishment. These chapters are full of such things. The visitors are few; the animals go into hiding; even the pond itself, frozen over, is sawn into blocks and carried away, ice to cool the beverages of the privileged in distant cities. But this condition also yields new perspectives. Thoreau takes advantage of the winter to go out on the ice of the pond and observe, to take measurements and to peer to the bottom, activities that would be impossible during warmer times.

Winter brings clarity as the essential parts are revealed. There is melancholy in this, of course, but also opportunity for a deepened understanding. And of course, the chapter that follows “The Pond in Winter” is “Spring.”

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Words to Remember

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autumn, beauty, children, education, nature

A friend of mine, retired teacher/principal/superintendent Terry Adams, recently wrote this:

“I think this is the most beautiful fall I have ever experienced. The colors are still beautiful if a bit muted, and leaves are falling everywhere. The cattle herd settled under a huge oak tree and the cows were covered with leaves (a sure sign that fall is coming to an end).

“It seems that everything is beautiful in its own time. The peach trees are bare now, but in the spring when they flower, just before the frost kills the buds, they are at their best. The autumn blaze maple trees were at their peak a couple of weeks ago but today they look a little sad and adjusting to the concept that winter is coming. The burning bushes just keep getting more attractive. All the plants have plenty to offer, they just give you their best at different times and in different ways.

“People, it seems to me, are much the same way. As a young school administrator, a very wise experienced special education teacher told me that the special children learn just as well, it just takes them longer. When you pop popcorn, the temperature is the same for all the kernels but they tend to pop at different times. We would do well to accept that and try our best to help all children learn as much as possible in their own time. Some are lucky and seem to be able to do everything well. Some have special gifts in music or sports, or can build works of art in wood working classes. It is our responsibility to help all children and appreciate what they have to offer. Just like the trees, they are all beautiful in their own way and in their own time.”

Favorite Ozarks Places – 18

Tags

meditation, Missouri Conservation Department, nature, Osage, Osage River, Painted Rock Conservation Area, prehistory

Osage River from north overlook – Painted Rock Conservation Area

The “painted rock” of the Painted Rock Conservation Area isn’t much to look at, and I’ve never seen it. You shouldn’t try, either; an archaeologist who documented the painted rock (actually, a Native American pictograph) in 2006 noted that the site is closed to the public “because of the extreme risks of drowning, falling rocks, and poisonous snakes.” But that’s not why people visit Painted Rock anyway.

They go there because it has some of the most sweeping overlooks of anywhere in the Missouri Ozarks. The Osage River forms the western edge of the conservation area, nearly 1,500 acres owned by the Missouri Conservation Department, and a loop trail takes hikers to a couple of magnificent viewspots. The river sweeps in a large curve beneath the bluffs there, known as the “Osage Bend,” so visitors can see for miles in both directions and can have as a bonus a view across the river of some of the finest-looking farmland in the state.

Mountaintop meditation is some kind of basic human impulse, and the Conservation Department has placed benches at several locations to meet that need. I doubt if this use is officially approved, but you might well see some evidence of cremation scatterings. Frankly, for a local nature lover it’s hard to imagine a better place to have your crumbs spread out.

The use of this high location as a funereal spot, in fact, goes back perhaps more than a thousand years. Along the hiking trail is a Native American burial cairn, a reminder that this area was an important, perhaps even sacred, spot long before Europeans arrived. Sadly, the site bears signs of having been looted in years past.

Burial cairn at Painted Rock – from Wayfaring.com

The recent history of Painted Rock is less exalted. While researching this location, I came upon an excellent blog entry from Julianna Schroeder, who blogs under the name The Opulent Opossum. Here’s a link to her post, and I’ll try to link to her blog on my sidebar, if I can remember how to do that. For my purposes, though, I’ll quote from her entry:

“The Missouri Department of Conservation acquired the land in 1981, but it’s been used as a park and preserve since the last quarter of the 1800s. At that time, the land was leased and used by a group of affluent citizens of Jefferson City for hunting purposes. In 1907, when the land appeared to be in danger of being subdivided and sold, the group of hunters organized formally into the Painted Rock Country Club and purchased the property—1,086 acres.

“The country club, whose members included Governor Herbert Hadley, had a clubhouse on the land, gathered there on the weekends, and had fall and winter hunts for deer, turkey, squirrels, rabbits, quail . . . this at a time when game was becoming increasingly scarce in the state due to the lack of centrally organized conservation efforts.

“Again, these were prominent people; in 1909 the group’s annual banquet was held at the Governor’s Mansion, and it’s widely agreed that this club’s members were instrumental in developing and supporting Missouri’s first statewide hunting laws as well as creating (in 1936) the state’s department of Conservation.

“The club’s heyday was in the 1920s, but it declined somewhat during the Depression; the land was sold in the mid-1940s and then sold again in 1952 to Sam B. Cook, a prominent Jefferson City banker who was the son and grandson of men who had been members of the country club. In 1981 he sold the property to the Missouri Department of Conservation, which developed the trail overlooks, interpretive signs, and other information, and worked to improve the quality of the area’s oak-hickory forests.”

View from south overlook – Painted Rock Conservation Area

Painted Rock sits at the northern edge of the geographic Ozarks, and the area around it (Westphalia, Freeburg, Koeltztown, Meta) is not what is commonly considered the “cultural” Ozarks; it’s predominantly German and Catholic/Lutheran in its heritage. Geologically, though, it fits right in, with dolomite bluffs intermingled with chert and sandstone. And if there are lessons to be drawn from nature - and I think there are - perhaps the best lesson, sitting on a bench contemplating mortality, with ancient graves behind you and the mooing of a cow or clattering of a tractor floating up from the fields below, is that our notion of what is culturally “in” or “out” of the region probably needs continual expansion and reconsideration.

Restoring the Forest

Tags

chinquapin, conservation, forests, Missouri Conservationist, National Geographic, nature, Robert Macfarlane, Wallace Stegner, wildness

Ozark-St. Francis National Forest – photo from National Forest Service

Here’s an interesting new article on the attempt to re-establish the Ozark chinquapin into the forest. It’s a close relative of the chestnut, which was essentially wiped out in the chestnut blight that swept North America from 1904 to the early 1940s, and the chinquapin proved susceptible to that same blight. (There was an earlier article on this effort in the Missouri Conservationist as well.)

By coincidence, I’ve been reading Robert Macfarlane’s essay on forests in his wonderful book The Wild Places, in which he seeks out the remaining wild places of the British Isles and details his experiences in them – islands, valleys, moors, forests, and the like. Macfarlane combines rich and precise description, personal and social history, and a strong literary sensibility to try to give a sense of the significance of each wild place he visits, not just its significance to himself but to the wider culture. Underlying his depictions of these Irish, Scottish, English, and Welsh wild places, with their marvelous ancient names (Rannoch Moor, The Burren, Bin Chuanna, Ynys Enlli, the Isle of Raasay – doesn’t simply reading their names make you want to go see them?) is the recognition that as wild as they are, they are not untouched. Macfarlane climbs a mountain and finds a forester’s hut; he camps on a windswept ridge and awakens to the sound of a lanyard clanking on a yacht in the bay below.

And thus it is with the Ozark chinquapin. The efforts to bring it back from the brink of extinction are admirable in the utmost; and according to the experts, there’s a good chance of success. But we know that the forest to which it will be re-introduced is not the 19th- and early 20th-century forest from which it disappeared.

Photo by Eric Hunt, republished under Creative Commons license from Wikimedia Commons.

Will that changed circumstance make the new Ozark chinquapins any less precious or valuable an addition to the diversity of the forest? Not in my mind. Is the deer I see on my hike on the Katy Trail, or the fish I watch on my float on the Black River, any less “wild” because I’m seeing them from the roadbed of an old railway or a stream that is floated by thousands of people a year? Not in any meaningful sense of the word.

“Wild” is a relative term. As the recent news about Mount Everest shows us, even the places considered to be the world’s wildest and most remote are subject to human intervention at all times, for better or worse. What matters is not the purity of the wild experience, but the mental state it brings us, the humility and reverence we feel when we come face to face with natural systems that predate us, exist without us, and in some form or another will outlive us. The “forest primeval” is gone forever; our task now is to appreciate, preserve, and (where possible) restore the pieces that are left.

At the end of his chapter on Rannoch Moor, Macfarlane quotes Wallace Stegner’s 1960 “Wilderness Letter,” and it’s worth quoting again here: “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

Thoreau

Tags

American literature, biography, books, literature, nature, Thoreau, Walden

Henry David Thoreau was my first literary hero. We had a hammock in our yard, and in summers I would lie in the hammock and read my ninety-five-cent copy of Walden and Other Writings (yes, that’s an image of it, now some forty-plus years old, complete with duct tape holding it together). In the winters I would move inside and read it while I perched over the furnace grate, the waves of superheated air wafting up around me as I readied myself for the inevitable farmhouse chill once we had shut our bedroom doors.

I only got about half of it, of course. A kid of fifteen will miss most of the dry humor, skip through much of the close and precise description, and fail to appreciate the vast range of references that are dropped into every paragraph with such ease. But I did get Thoreau’s immense and uncompromising individualism and his insistence on the primacy of his own conscience. Over the years, I’ve returned to Thoreau again and again, understanding him a little bit more each time, appreciating his formidable intellect and powers of observation. People look at me in disbelief when I say Thoreau is a funny author, but honestly, I always get a laugh when I read Walden.

So I was eager to read Laura Dassow Walls’ new biography of Thoreau, and it did not disappoint. Walls’ biography is subtitled “A Life,” and it does indeed focus on the life of Thoreau, rather than his philosophy or literary work, although those intellectual matters do figure into the book since they were central to Thoreau’s life. But we are constantly reminded of Thoreau as a living person, an individual with friends, detractors, passions, and faults, and reminded that far from being the solitary hermit of Walden Pond familiar from popular myth, Thoreau lived a vibrant and engaged life, full of aspiration and struggle. He loved many people and was loved by many.

Thoreau remains one of my literary heroes. The bicentennial of his birth was last month, and it’s hard to think of many other American writers who remain so essential and relevant, or who will remain so two hundred years after their birth.

Queen Anne’s Lace

Tags

Gerard Manley Hopkins, nature, weeds, Wildflowers, wildness

Photo courtesy Missouri Department of Conservation

The roadside has sent me to my copy of Missouri Wildflowers quite a bit lately. Summer flowers tend to be more nondescript than spring ones–the delicate pinks and purples are replaced by rangy, white or yellow flowers whose names, unfortunately, I forget from one year to the next: feverfews and teasels, the sort of plant that often has “weed” in its name.

Hedge parsley – Photo from Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, KS

These roadside plants rarely make anyone’s list of favorite wildflowers; we see them from our car windows as a blur. But as these close-up photos show, they have a delicacy of construction that rewards examination. Umbels within umbels, twining and wiry stems, curiously wrought flowers that often nest among brambles.

White snakeroot in extreme closeup.

What to say about these plants besides the obvious? That there is beauty in the common, beauty that repays attention, and that you have to get out of your car and stomp into the weeds in order to find it. On my wall hangs a watercolor with the marvelous verse from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Inversnaid”:

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Favorite Ozarks People – 13

Tags

Bud Schuller, Lesterville, nature, Piedmont, Taum Sauk

Bud Schuller (and me)

I got to know Bud Schuller when I was in high school, and had landed a summer job as a counselor at Camp Taum Sauk up the river from me. I still don’t know how I got that job; I think the owner, George Smith, hearing that I was a farm boy, thought I would be good with the horses, when in fact I have never been fond of horses and was quickly dispatched to other duties. In any event, I got the job, and that’s where I met this guy.

Bud (he acquired that nickname later) was the nature counselor, and while I fancied myself to be woods-wise, I quickly learned that there were people far more attuned to natural world than I was. A devotee of John Muir and Aldo Leopold, Bud went on to teach in the Clearwater school district for many years, imparting his love of nature and appreciation for its complexity to hundreds of young people in the region. And he continued his involvement with the camp, introducing many more hundreds of kids, mostly from the St. Louis area, to the pleasures of life in the Ozarks.

Kids are usually pretty quick to spot a fake, and I think that’s one of the reasons kids always take to Bud. They recognize that he is the genuine article and that his interest in them is real. He’s a master storyteller whose tales are usually about as tall as he is. But there’s always something worth paying attention to in his tales, even if they don’t get it at the time. He’s an indelible personality who leaves a lasting impact, and it was an absolute delight to reconnect with him while I was on a book-promotion trip to Poplar Bluff last weekend.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 7

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A Country Year, books, Jacks Fork, Missouri, nature, Ozarks, Sue Hubbell, Texas County, writing

I heard a presentation on Sue Hubbell’s A Country Year at the Ozarks Studies Symposium in West Plains last year, from Brian Hardman of the University of the Ozarks, and that presentation reminded me I had been intending to dig out this book and re-read it (I’m pretty sure I had read it years ago). But nearly a year passed before intention became act. Another reason to love books—they’re so patient with us!

A Country Year may remind you of Walden in its seasonal structure (spring to spring), or of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for its devoted entomology, but those comparisons only go so far. For one thing, A Country Year is a quieter book, not as rhetorically extravagant; much of it was originally written for general-interest magazines, so the needs of the intended audience figure into that choice to some extent.

But something else that interests me about A Country Year is its practicality; it’s a working book, not the ruminations of a comfortable observer. When Hubbell writes about jacking up her truck to grease the wheel bearings, she’s not doing it to experience the rusticity of common tasks; she’s doing it because the truck needs greasing, and nobody else is around to take on the job. Real poverty runs through this book and informs it at every turn. For that reason, A Country Year speaks to the Ozarks experience in a particularly meaningful way. A transplant herself (who has since moved away), Hubbell wryly comments on the urbanites who relocate to a scenic patch of Ozark countryside, only to learn that their rural utopia comes with brown recluses and intermittent mail service.

A Country Year embraces both beauty and struggle. It’s unassuming but firm. And in those respects, it resembles a lot of the country folk I know.

 

A Hundred Years of Parks, More or Less

Tags

Conservation Department, Missouri, National Park Service, nature, Ozarks, parks, state parks

The National Park Service was established in 1916, a hundred years ago, and the Missouri State Park system has jumped on the bandwagon to celebrate as well. It was actually sort-of created in 1917 as part of the state fish and game commission, but the first actual park wasn’t created until 1924.

But who’s counting? It’s always a good year to celebrate our state park system, round numbers or not, and the parks department is doing so by offering prizes for people who get a “passport” and have it stamped at their locations. Will I get my passport stamped at all 88 locations by the end of October 2017 and thus be eligible for the best prizes? Probably not, but what the heck, it’s only five bucks and a fun challenge to take on.

The Missouri Legislature has not earned much of a reputation for intellect lately, with various harebrained proposals that just keep coming. But many are mere posturing for political reasons. What really troubles me lately, though, are the short-sighted attempts to interfere with the state park system and the Conservation Department, including efforts to prevent the purchase of land along the Current and Eleven Point rivers. Thankfully, the Current River park has made it through, but there are still efforts going on to derail the Eleven Point purchase. The opportunity to put this kind of land into public use comes very rarely, and once lost may not be regained for generations. I understand the concern of local officeholders about the loss of property tax revenue, but that’s a problem that can be solved. Most ironic is the argument that “we don’t have enough money to maintain the parks we currently have, much less additional ones.” And whose fault is that? The same kill-the-government legislators, of course!

If we want to see our state park system enter its second century with a positive outlook, we need to insulate its operations from political intrusions and see that it gets proper funding. Our park system is the envy of most other states and should be kept that way.

A New Cross-Missouri Trail?

Tags

Gasconade River, Missouri, nature, Osage River, Ozarks, parks, rivers, Rock Island Trail

The recent legal move by the Ameren Corporation to “abandon” a 145-mile stretch of rail line opens the way for a second cross-Missouri hiking and biking trail to be created. There’s a long way to go, but this is exciting news for anyone who loves the outdoors, especially in the Midwest.

The line, which was once part of the Rock Island Line (which as we all know, is a mighty good road), skirts the northern edge of the Ozarks, from Windsor southwest of Sedalia to Beaufort in western Franklin County. The Katy Trail also goes through Windsor, so the two trails would connect there.

I spent a while with my topographical maps today checking out the route of the rail line. It runs through some very wild country, nothing with special grandeur, but oh my goodness some of the vistas along this trail will be outstanding! There are crossings over the Osage River (above) and the Gasconade, and the line follows the Osage for several miles. These sections in themselves would be enough to make me celebrate. But I also think of the wild sections between so many quiet Ozark villages – Gerald, Rosebud, Owensville, Bland, Belle, Freeburg, Meta, Eugene, Eldon, Versailles, Cole Camp, Ionia – even the names are like a roll call of fascination. I don’t know this part of the country well, hardly at all really, but am excited to learn it.

Would this trail ever develop into the kind of serial B&B-and-winery trail that the Katy has become? I doubt it. It’s more remote, farther from urban centers, and the countryside is less hospitable to the casual visitor. But I think it will develop a character of its own, one that will appeal to a different sort of traveler, and will become a valued destination for people wanting to discover an overlooked part of the Ozarks.