Living in upstate New York after having already lived in Ohio and Indiana, I could fairly accurately gauge the time of year, sometimes calibrated to the week, by the state of flora and fauna. Skunk cabbage peeking through the snow? Late February, early March. Trilliums in flower? Late April. Catalpas blooming? Second week of May. Living in Houston is like inhabiting a world of broken clocks. I’ve never felt so detached from the natural world, out of sync with unfamiliar rhythms. My ignorance of Texas wildlife is appalling, and I’ve done little to remedy the situation – a case, in part, of self-sabotage.
Moving to Seattle means, among other things, proximity to a more familiar temperate zone but also exotic ecosystems – tide pools and rain forests among them. For now most of my pleasure in nature is vicarious, by way of books. The boom in nature writing in recent decades, however, has amounted mostly to a lot of New Age hot air and oh-so-sensitive mysticism. Edward Hoagland has his moments. So, too, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez. But none possesses Thoreau’s intricately balanced gifts – self-taught naturalist, self-taught writer – rooted in his acute visual and auditory strength. He wrote with lyrical precision. Some of his prose, scattered in Walden and the journal, is the best written by an American. On May 29, 1857, during the loveliest time of the year in the Northeast, with the last snow melted only weeks earlier, Thoreau writes in his journal:
“The sun came out an hour or more ago, rapidly drying the foliage, and for the first time this year I noticed the little shades produced by the foliage which had expanded in the rain, and long narrow dark lines of shade along the hedge or willow-rows. It was like the first bright flashings of an eye from under dark eyelashes after shedding warm tears.”
Often Thoreau is judged cold and emotionally thwarted. True, he was no bestower of gratuitous hugs, but his writing is emotionally rich in an unconventional way. The metaphor in the passage above is complicated, lovely and a little disturbing. He expresses the human by way of the natural world. This in not unfeeling but different-feeling. Here’s a brave, plaintive passage from the journal dated March 28, 1856:
“I think to say to my friend [Emerson?], There is but one interval between us. You are on one side of it, I on the other. You know as much about it as I, -- how wide, how impassable it is. I will endeavor not to blame you. Do not blame me. There is nothing to be said about it. Recognize the truth, and pass over the intervals that are bridged.
“Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that. For a long time you have appeared further and further off to me. I see that you will at length disappear altogether. For a season my path seems lonely without you. The meadows are like barren ground. The memory of me is steadily passing away from you. My path grows narrower and steeper, and the night is approaching.”
His finest biographer, Robert D. Richardson, understood and accepted this side of his subject with little compulsion to psychoanalyze him. In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, referring to Thoreau’s cessation of poetry writing around 1852, Richardson says, beautifully:
“Strictly speaking, his poetic spring had pretty much dried up, but his prose had grown stronger and tougher with time and discipline. He no longer ignored or made light of losses, disappointments, and regrets but made them into songs – prose songs, indeed, but songs nevertheless. The writer of Walden is one of our greatest poets of loss, along with Longfellow, Frost, and Eliot, but his songs are about sustainable losses, and how not to go down beneath them.”
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As both a professional biologist and a lover of literature, I've had a long and ambivalent relationship with nature writing.
My passion for the natural world was born in an Idaho stream, where, at age five or six, I watched my father pick through the insects in a trout's gut before choosing bait for the morning's fishing. I was fascinated by the idea that these animals had a life hidden from me in the deep eddies of the river.
A couple of years later, I received a microscope for Christmas. This miraculous device opened the door to an unsuspected universe in a drop of pond water, teeming with bizarrely-shaped creatures that wriggled and whirled across the field. I reveled in their exotic names: Hydra and Euglena, Volvox and Rotifer. Again, I was exhilarated by a sense of having discovered a strange, hidden world.
Through education and career, my knowledge of the natural world, from gene to ecosystem, has deepened and broadened greatly over the past fifty years. That knowledge has only heightened my impression of Nature's profound strangeness.
It's this shocking sensation of "otherness" that most nature writers, no matter how eloquent, fail to apprehend and communicate. By passing their observations through the filter of human analogy, writers like Thoreau somehow diminish the world they are trying to describe.
Although I've read all of the great naturalists, from Lucretius to Thoreau to Rachel Carson, I seldom return to them. Too often, I feel as if I am reading a description of a musical performance. I'd rather spend a few hours in the woods with binoculars and a hand lens, and then listen to Gergiev conduct "Rite of Spring".
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