Return of the Osprey

Like Bernd Heinrich’s Ravens in Winter, David Gessner’s Return of the Osprey is a book about watching birds. In different ways, both authors succeed in making a potentially tedious subject quite involving. Here is Gessner’s description of the osprey’s untidy nest.

An osprey nest is a giant pile of sticks, seaweed, grass, and whatever else the birds can get their talons on, a seemingly random mess of crosshatching and emphatic Jackson Pollack* splatterings and slashes. People have found everything in the nests from the heads of rag dolls to beer cans to toy sailboats to doormats. Alan Poole has compiled a list that includes “corn stalks, hunks of dried cow manure, empty fertilizer bags, and discarded rubber teat holders from milking machines,” as well as “sections of TV antennas, hula hoops, remnants of fish nets, old flannel shirts and rubber boots, styrofoam cups and buoys, a broken hoe, plastic hamburger cartons, and bicycle tires."… The early neighborhood prize for most original choice in building material goes to the pair at Chapin Beach, who have added a nearly naked Barbie doll to their nest’s northeast wall.

One of my favorite passages in the book describes Gessner’s brief career as a painter.

That year I painted not out of any desire to create great works of art or out of a belief that I’d actually become a painter, but from a simple need to react to the swirl of color around me.... I wanted not just to ooh and aah like the Sunday foliage viewer, or even to hoard color, but to live steeped in it. I stood and watched at the bluff burned red: the brilliant scarlet of Virginia creeper, the husky maroon of poison ivy, the peach color of sumac, and, in the lower pasture, the oddly patriotic red of the few cranberries left after the harvest. Below the bluff, more red: the ever-bleeding tips of the olive eelgrass. Thoreau called himself the “inspector of snowstorms,” and for that short while I became the examiner of eelgrass. Eelgrass was the bluff’s calendar, how I told seasonal time, and I recorded the changes day to day.

Gessner quotes Thoreau a few times in this time, but oddly, he does not quote from Thoreau’s many descriptions of the “fish hawk” or osprey in his Journal. (More on that later.)

*An interesting slip in a book about fish hawks, as Pollock is a painter but a pollack is a fish. Gessner is a wonderful writer but not a very good speller, and his proofreaders—in this book and especially in his essay collection Sick of Nature—let him down repeatedly. 

Gowing’s Swamp

Concord naturalist and photographer Cherrie Corey, whose walking tour in Great Meadows I joined last month, also leads walks in Gowing’s Swamp, Concord’s only surviving peat bog, which she has helped to protect from development. The excerpt below is from a long and extraordinary entry in Thoreau’s Journal.

The person who had recently received a lucrative appointment to Liverpool, prompting Thoreau to go in search of the cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus), was fellow author and Concord resident Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rupert’s Land refers to the region around Hudson’s Bay once owned by the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company. It includes all of Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, parts of Alberta, Nunavut, Ontario, and Quebec, and a small area of the northern U.S. Cherrie has noted that Thoreau’s comparison of Gowing’s Swamp with Hudson’s Bay is not just metaphorical but reflects his understanding of the similarities of the terrain and flora.

August 30, 1856. Better for me, says my genius, to go cranberrying this afternoon for the Vaccinium Oxycoccus in Gowing’s Swamp, to get but a pocketful and learn its peculiar flavor, aye, and the flavor of Gowing’s Swamp and of life in New England, than to go consul to Liverpool and get I don’t know how many thousand dollars for it, with no such flavor…. I left my shoes and stockings on the bank far off and waded barelegged through rigid andromeda and other bushes a long way, to the soft open sphagnous centre of the swamp.

I found these cunning little cranberries lying high and dry on the firm uneven tops of the sphagnum, — their weak vine considerably on one side, — sparsely scattered about the drier edges of the swamp, or sometimes more thickly occupying some little valley a foot or two over, between two mountains of sphagnum. They were of two varieties, judging from the fruit. The one, apparently the ripest, colored most like the common cranberry but more scarlet, i.e. yellowish-green, blotched or checked with dark scarlet-red, commonly pear-shaped, or more bulged out in the middle, thickly and finely dark-spotted or peppered on yellowish-green or straw-colored or pearly ground, — almost exactly like the smilacina and convallaria berries now, except that they are a little larger and not so spherical, — and with a tinge of purple….

I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place that the very huckleberries grew hairy and were inedible. I feel as if I were in Rupert’s Land, and a slight cool but agreeable shudder comes over me, as if equally far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty? But why should not as wild plants grow here as in Berkshire, as in Labrador? Is Nature so easily tamed? Is she not as primitive and vigorous here as anywhere? How does this particular acre of secluded, unfrequented, useless (?) quaking bog differ from an acre in Labrador?… It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess in Concord, i.e. than I import into it…

Consider how remote and novel that swamp. Beneath it is a quaking bed of sphagnum, and in it grow Andromeda Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, menyanthes (or buck-bean), Gaylussacia dumosa, Vaccinium Oxycoccus, — plants which scarcely a citizen of Concord ever sees. It would be as novel to them to stand there as in a conservatory, or in Greenland.

Photo of Andromeda polifolia is by KingsbraeGarden at Flickr.

Saul Bellow and 9/11

I don’t know what Saul Bellow said about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Very likely I wouldn’t agree with it. Bellow was politically quite conservative, something I didn’t know until I had read most of his work. But in Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck, his friend and would-be biographer Mark Harris quotes him as saying something worth thinking about today.

Harris had just driven from Vermont to visit Bellow at his house in Tivoli, New York.

I remember best of all ... standing at a window with Bellow and feeling fearful of the silence, the solitude of his surroundings, and remarking, “I’d be nervous. Do you own a gun?”

“No,” he beautifully replied, “why should somebody die because I’m nervous?”

September 11 was a terrifying day in New York City, and in Washington, DC, and in the skies over Pennsylvania. But it was no more terrifying than the nights of “shock and awe” endured by the people of Baghdad. Because we were afraid—and because that fear was whipped up and exploited—hundreds more innocent people died for every person who was killed on 9/11. They too should be remembered.

The Explosion of the Radiator Hose

The Explosion of the Radiator Hose is actually the second book I’ve read about an ill-fated attempt to move a car across Africa. In Malaria Dreams, Stuart Stevens and a former fashion model drive a Land Rover from the Central African Republic northward to Europe. In this book, the narrator, who if we follow Proust and “give the narrator the same name as the author of this book” we may call Jean Rolin, sets out to drive an Audi from France to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The book is well reviewed by Emma Garman at Words Without Borders (where I blog from time to time). My only quibble with her review is that she describes it as “ostensibly a travelogue that I assume has been partially fictionalized/embellished.” In fact (at least in its English edition) it appears under the marketing-friendly rubic “a novel.” But as you read it, it is impossible not to conclude that it is mostly a travelogue or memoir.

I expected Explosion to be entertaining but a little shallow, as so many road books are. The first line promises comic disasters: “When the radiator hose burst, the car had done exactly nine-nine thousand four hundred meters, since its odometer was reset to zero.”

Rolin’s reaction to this setback makes you suspect at once that he doesn’t know much about the Congo. Rather than finding some duct tape and sheet metal (or better yet, having brought some with him) he sends his partner Patrice to a nearby village to look for an Audi dealership. Not surprisingly, Patrice doesn’t find one.

First impressions are deceptive in this case. Rolin knows his Proust and his W.G. Sebald (an essential guide to the boundary of fact and fiction), and he spent much of his youth in the Congo. Peppered throughout this little book of 162 pages are asides that convey more knowledge of Central Africa than you will find in some authors’ entire tomes. Stranded in his car as night falls, page 12 finds him worrying about what will happen to him, but in a world-historical context.

Among the images of torture and humiliation that now presented themselves for my consideration, one stood out from all the others, for its detail and historical importance alike. The scene is from the personal Calvary of Patrice Lumumba, the ephemeral president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the months immediately following its birth: of all the heroes of African independence, Lumumba is arguably the only one to have retained his heroic status, as much for the circumstances of his demise as for the brevity of his reign (slightly less than three months), even though the latter bore the stain of a handful of massacres carried out under his authority, mostly against members of the Luba tribe, in the province of Kasai.

Here in a single sentence we get not only a quick précis of the career of Patrice Lumumba but a more evenhanded one than you will find in some full-length works. 

A day in Great Meadows

I hadn’t been back to the Boston area, where I used to live, for more than seven years, but the opportunity to join a wildflower walk in Concord’s Great Meadows took me there last weekend. The walks are led every month by local naturalist and photographer Cherrie Corey, and August struck me as the last month in the year when wildflowers might be really plentiful.

Whether or not that’s so, it wasn’t too late to see the showy white and pink blooms of the swamp rose mallow, the branched spires of the blue vervain, the oddly named mad dog skullcap, and the pretty but aggressive purple loosestrife and American lotus. Not to mention a very mellow rabbit (no telephoto required).

More of my photos are here, but for some really good shots from the same day visit Larry Warfield’s Great Meadows blog. Cherrie and I can be seen pointing at something in the second photo.