Of the 59 books I read in 2022, two-thirds were nonfiction, and one-third were from the naturalist canon. Although this has been a focus for the past seven years, I continue to be surprised by new discoveries in this genre.
Among the authors I read for the first time were Terry Tempest Williams, in advance of her talk at the University of Rhode Island in November, Edward O. Wilson, and Sigurd F. Olson. I also finally read Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” Each of these in its own way broadened my appreciation of the natural world and inspired me to keep working on my own essays.
But I also returned to some revered authors, including Bernd Heinrich, Henry Beston, Edwin Way Teale and Joseph Wood Krutch. And the more I explored these writers, the more they began to talk to each other. Sometimes literally – Teale, for example, was an admirer of Krutch (and good friends with Roger Tory Peterson and Rachel Carson). Dillard quotes Teale extensively, especially from his debut, “Grassroot Jungles.” All of the above, at one time or another, invoke Henry David Thoreau. In fact, you could construct a Kevin Bacon game out of those references.
But these writers talk to each other figuratively, too. From the top shelves of my bookcase, where the honored naturalists reside, their books send out invisible filaments, like a spider rappelling to a new home. Wilson’s ant experiments make me think of the two hours Teale spent at the Cape Cod National Seashore, watching ants and recording their movements. I can’t think of Cape Cod, of course, without being reminded of Thoreau’s trips there and Beston’s stay at the Outermost House. As for the latter, a friend loaned me the delightful “Journey to Outermost House” by Nan Turner Waldron, who stayed longer at the house than its famous resident and provides an insightful history of its construction, its use by birders and eventual demise during the Blizzard of ’78.
And as their threads cross and recross, these authors complement one another. I believe that all naturalists contain three identities, in varying degrees. There is the naturalist-philosopher, like Thoreau, who uses the natural world as both counterpoint and metaphor. There is the naturalist-scientist, like Heinrich and Wilson, whose first allegiance is to observation and experimentation. Finally, there is the naturalist-writer, who comes to nature first as a chronicler and lyricist. Each of these writers contains elements of all three, with one trait usually dominating.
Heinrich, for example, is a biologist who taught for years at the University of Vermont. His accounts of living in a cabin in Maine – including “A Year in the Maine Woods,” “The Trees in My Forest” and “One Wild Bird at a Time,” among others – are girded in scientific observation. But Heinrich also is a writer of lyrical power, and his words sometimes transcend scientific fact. “Much of nature is subtle, and it is difficult to appreciate it if one is used to the grandiose,” he notes in “In a Patch of Fireweed.”
Teale (1899-1980) came to nature writing as a wordsmith. After obtaining a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia, he began work at Popular Science Monthly, a grinding job he grew to hate but which exposed him to scores of scientific ideas and anecdotes. This experience, combined with a love of Nature, served him well as he went on to write more than 25 books, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize. Like Heinrich, Teale’s prose can ascend into the lyrical and the philosophical.
After a frustrating day testifying on behalf of a conservation bill in Hartford, he returns home to walk in the rain. “… I feel myself expanding,” he writes in “A Walk Through the Year.” “I am returned to my proper habitat. Worlds away seem the cramped quarters of that narrow room as I strike out across our open land; worlds away the dead rebreathed air as I take in deep lungful after lungful of the moist, fresh air of the country.”
Other writers, like John Cowper Powys, are philosophers at heart. In “A Philosophy of Solitude” (1933), Powys explores the power of Nature to heal our souls. He offers it as a substitute for God in a Godless age. “Those thrice-fortunate persons whose dwelling is in the country have at their disposal, every day and every hour, a wide-open spacious gateway into the receding Unknown,” he writes. “These lucky ones have a scene at their very threshold, made up of earth and air and clouds and grass and trees, such as, isolated by the brooding mind from the rest of the landscape, is soon found to be impregnated, as they fling their spirit into it, with a lovely, withdrawing, recessive magic.”
But of the all the writers on my shelf, Sigurd F. Olson (1899-1982) impressed me the most this year. He also is the most difficult to categorize. A former college dean and professor of biology, he preferred to spend his time as a wilderness guide in Minnesota and the lake country of Ontario. More than any of these writers, Olson was a man who made a life in the wilderness.
He also was the finest writer in this elite group. In “Wilderness Days,” a compilation of his work published in 1972, he writes of the North Woods with an explorer’s knowledge and a seeker’s intensity. Emulating the voyageurs who opened the country to fur trading, Olson brings us into their world, and his, with an ear for sight, sound, and sensation.
“The movement of a canoe is like a reed in the wind,” he writes. “Silence is part of it, and the sounds of lapping water, bird songs, and wind in the trees. It is part of the medium through which it floats: the sky, the water, the shores. In a canoe a man changes and the life he has lived seems strangely remote.”
The chapter titles together form a sort of prose poem. Here are some: “Witching Hours,” “Silence,” “Stream of the Past,” “Ghost Camps of the North,” “Falling Leaf,” “Smoky Gold,” “Coming of the Snow,” “Dark House.”
As I look ahead to 2023, I am happy to have more nature writers on my shelf. I just picked up Olson’s “Of Time and Place” at a used bookstore, and have begun Joan E. Strassmann’s new guide, “Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard,” which promises philosophical as well as scientific insights. And if my to-be-read pile dwindles, I have Thoreau’s unabridged journals, which I picked up in Concord this summer. Nature is the mirror that shows us both ourselves and the world we live in, and as such is an inexhaustible subject.
