A Word for Thoreau
I
TELLING about his visit to Baker Farm, Thoreau writes in Walden, ‘Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow’s arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and the leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin.’
John Burroughs, in the last book he ever wrote, takes in hand the correcting of a number of Thoreau’s statements — ‘Not that I love Thoreau less, but that I love truth more’; and this rainbow episode comes in as a climax to the lot. The rest are treated as errors in observation or defects in knowledge, but this is simply one of those things that cannot be believed.
He goes on to remark: ‘Is it possible, then, to reach the end of the rainbow? Why did he not dig for the pot of gold that is buried there? How he could be aware that he was standing at the foot of one leg of the glowing arch is to me a mystery. When I see a rainbow it is always immediately in front of me, I am standing exactly between the highest point of the arch and the sun, and the laws of optics ordain that it can be seen in no other way. You can never see a rainbow at an angle. It is always facing you squarely. Hence no two persons see exactly the same bow, because no two persons can occupy the same place at the same time. The bow you see is directed to you alone. Move to the right or left and it moves as fast as you do. You cannot flank it or reach its end. It is about the most subtle and significant phenomenon that everyday Nature presents to us. Unapproachable as a spirit, like a visitor from another world, yet the creation of the familiar sun and rain.
‘How Thoreau ever found himself standing in the bow’s abutment will always remain a puzzle to me.’
As one who has studied the rainbow both at Niagara Falls and with the garden hose, I will venture to say that Thoreau was telling the truth. If there were a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow I am certain that I could have dug it up long ago with any longhandled shovel.
At Niagara the mist is fairly pregnant with rainbows. They spring up and follow you about in all sizes and all stages of completion. Little ones come and go, and big ones appear partially and float away from you in fragments. Each passing body of mist is a new curtain on which some part of a rainbow is sure to be projected.
Of all the bows I saw last summer, there were three that I select for particular mention. One appeared to me while I was sitting in the bows, at the very prow, of the Maid of the Mist. We had just visited the foot of the Canadian Falls on a very windy day, and then turned and ran straight away from it with the afternoon sun directly behind us. In this position a rainbow that seemed to be about forty feet in width took its place before the bows and ran along ahead of the boat for a considerable distance. It did not extend up in the air, but lay out over the water so that we looked down upon it as we stood in the prow. It was quite complete, with myself or the prow for the centre of its half circle. I only lost it when the boat turned and headed for the American side.
When we had made the landing, and I stood at the edge of the wharf looking out over the water, I saw a bow that was quite different. This one had its foot directly in front of me and so near that I could have tossed a pebble into it or reached it with a short fish pole. From this point in front of me it arched to the left; it was entirely to the left of me. This bow was much larger than the one we had seen from the boat and it was incomplete in the sense that you could not see all of it at one time. The foot of it was quite steady, but the other parts of it came into view and faded from sight as bodies of mist and stray wisps of vapor came sailing along and passed through it. By seeing it thus in parts one could form an idea of the arch as a whole. When any of it passed out of sight you knew it was still there. One might almost say that there is always a rainbow attendant upon any man; but it takes this floating vapor and a westering light to make it visible.
This was about the middle of September, with the sun in the west and a strong wind blowing from the falls; and it must always be there under like conditions. It was no doubt gazed upon by the first inhabitants of America, and it will be there for centuries to come. It holds its place there as a part of the established order of things, more permanent than a rock; and this makes it quite convenient for purposes of controversy. It is not one of those things which a writer can claim to have seen under some unusual set of circumstances, but which cannot be verified. Any man in the world may go to see it; and he will find the foot of the rainbow right in front of him and not far away. But he will have to look upward and to the left if he wants to see the rest of it.
The greatest profusion of rainbows, and feet of rainbows, and aerial fragments of rainbows, is to be seen from the Maid of the Mist, or its landing place, or at the Cave of the Winds. Crossing over to the Canadian side, one sees the third sort of rainbow. This is a large complete bow arching the river just below the falls and holding its unflickering place so long as the sun is right. It is not as large as the bow we see after a summer shower, but one fitted to the size of the falls. Here, I told myself, is one of those bows whose centre is straight before you; but on giving this matter conscious attention it seemed that the right foot of the bow was straight before me, though far away.
Having completed my study of rainbows at the Falls, I went on a trip to Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay and then back home, only to discover — as is so often the case with me— that I had not studied the matter enough. The bows whose feet were straight before me always swung off to the left, absolutely and without doubt. But why was it that I had seen no righthanded ones? Was it due to my position on the American side with relation to the sun? That was what I now wanted to know. I determined to make a rainbow of my own and find out.
A friend who lives on a hill near Milwaukee has a lawn sprinkler that just suited my purpose; it throws up a fine mist to a fair height so as to make a very definite rainbow near at hand. We turned it on late in the afternoon of a sunny day and it made a beautiful bow, or rather the foot of a rainbow whose curve swung off to the left. Then I walked around it slowly and the curve suddenly went up in the opposite direction. This was a right-handed rainbow. Evidently there was no preference in nature. If the sun shone over my left shoulder there was a bow curving to the right, and if the sun came over my right shoulder there was a bow extending off to the left.
Well, then, I am quite prepared to take my stand on the side of Thoreau. When I consider the little bow that sometimes runs right ahead of the Maid of the Mist, lying out over the water, I am inclined to think that such a light effect, shining upon wet sparkling grass in the late afternoon, would cause such iridescence as Thoreau says it did. And if a low fog or wisp of vapor came floating along I do not doubt that Thoreau could have seen the foot of the rainbow right in front of him.
A reader of Thoreau ought to know that he was not subject to hallucination or given to the invention of beautiful literary material. As for Burroughs, is it possible that he lived so long in the State of New York and never took note of what is to be seen at Niagara Falls? Or that he never had an eye for the beautiful three-color effects that arc to be seen when one sprinkles the grass? Then too, as bearing upon this matter, it must be remembered that there is such a thing as a foambow. It is like a recumbent rainbow, but is caused by light shining on an area of clear foam.
II
In this same review of Thoreau’s shortcomings as a nature observer Burroughs writes, ‘Every farmer and fox-hunter would smile if he read Thoreau’s statement , made in his paper on the natural history of Massachusetts, that when the snow lies light and but five or six inches deep, you may give chase and come up with the fox on foot. Evidently Thoreau never tried it.’
There are men who make a regular practice of following the fox on foot. Here in Wisconsin the fox is trailed usually by two men, one to drive him on steadily and another to go on ahead and outflank him. But many good hunters have preferred to take the trail alone. I have known several of them. I think that when a man starts out for a walk on the trail of a fox and comes back some hours later with the fox on one shoulder and his gun on the other, it is pretty good evidence that a man afoot may ‘ come up ’ with a fox. In his chapter on ‘Winter Animals’ Thoreau says that if a fox would take to a burrow or run straight away no hound could overtake him, ‘but having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up.’ That is the whole case in a nutshell; and here is the reason that a man afoot can get him.
No hunter, or fox-hunting farmer, would smile at what Thoreau says. It was fox hunters that told him these things. While Thoreau prided himself on his ability to stand what some people call solitude, he profited by the company of interesting men and was full of questions. If Burroughs did not know the fox at first hand he should have talked more with fox hunters, or else he should have read Thoreau more closely.
In one of his own comments on the fox Burroughs tells of a fox that was running along a country road in winter, and instead of traveling through the snow kept strictly to the track of a farmer’s sleigh. And Burroughs notes this only to ask whether the fox did not follow this course with the shrewd idea that some sleigh would come along shortly in the same track and wipe out his scent in the snow!
Anyone who has walked much in the snow must have noted that the fox, t he collie dog, and all such animals let their feet fall in a straight line. They are finely balanced creatures that keep their footsteps right under their centre of gravity; consequently they run as on a single track. And the fox in this present case ran in the track of the farmer’s heavy sledge simply because that track was a whole sidewalk to him. A fox, like a man, will naturally prefer a smooth sidewalk to the rougher going.
One could wax eloquent at this point about ‘nature fakers’ who humanize animals too much and make them think like men; and it would be ungracious to press this point against Burroughs were it not that he is the very one who took up the campaign against the socalled nature fakers, sponsored and abetted by Colonel Roosevelt. It was a merry campaign, and one of the live incidents of the Roosevelt administration. Listen to Burroughs as he attacks Mr. Thompson Seton.
‘Thus a fox pursued will run through a flock of sheep. This dodge probably delays the hound a little, but it does not often enable the fox to shake him. Mr. Thompson Seton goes several better and makes the fox jump on the back of a sheep and ride several hundred yards. Of course no fox ever did that. Again the fox will sometimes take to the railroad track and walk upon the rail, doubtless with the vague notion of chiding his pursuers. Mr. Thompson Seton makes his fox so foxy that he deliberately lures the hounds upon a long trestle where he knows they will be just in time to meet and be killed by a passing train, which they are.’
If Thompson Seton makes his fox reason too much, it is wit h the same kind of reasoning, and the same human foresight, which Burroughs attributes to the fox that ran in the track of a farmer’s sledge. One is just as flagrant as the other. As for a fox riding upon the backs of sheep, anyone who has herded sheep on a large scale knows that a collie will get up on the backs of a crowded flock and not only ride but run. There is no reason why a fox that has run into a flock should not do the same.
Continuing his famous attack, Burroughs said: ‘Any country boy knows that the rabbit takes no account of barbed-wire fences or of briers and brambles as a means of punishing the dog that is pursuing him. If these things were universal it is possible that in the course of long generations rabbits might learn to interpose them between themselves and their enemies — possible but not probable.’
Well, let us see. Jordan and Kellogg, in their textbook entitled Animal Life, make definite observations along this line. They write: ‘On the open plains of Merced County, California, the jackrabbit is the prey of the bald eagle. Not long since a rabbit pursued by an eagle was seen to run among the cattle. Leaping from cow to cow, he used these animals as a shelter from the savage bird. When the pursuit was closer, the rabbit broke for a barbed-wire fence. When the eagle swooped down on it, the rabbit moved a few inches to the right, and the eagle could not reach through the fence. When the eagle came down on the other side he moved across to the first. And this was continued till the eagle gave up the chase.’
Of course, as one of Roosevelt’s approved writers, Burroughs was naturally expected to do something for the cause. Apparently he did his best. And it would have added riotously to the interest of things under the sun if someone had taken the pains to point out that Burroughs, in every instance, was wholly or partially wrong.
Here I am reminded of the words with which Anthony Hamilton opens the Memoirs of the Comte do Gramont. He says, ‘Those who read only for their amusement seem to me more reasonable than those who read only to discover errors.’ Well, there is a great deal to agree with in that. And why do the nature writers look for mistakes in one another except it were with the Burroughs attitude, ‘Not that I love Thoreau less, but that I love truth more.’
III
But this has taken me a little aside from my theme, which is Thoreau himself. Besides being a poet-naturalist and an occasional humorist, — which Burroughs says he was not, — Thoreau was capable of the most painstaking routine of the scientist. With a stick he measured the snow all around Walden and calculated the average depth; he plumbed the lake in all its parts and kept a record of the figures; he counted the rings on pitch-pine stumps and gauged the irregular circumferences and found that the average annual increase in girth was one seventh of an inch. He took apart pensile nests, such as that of the oriole or vireo, and made note of the material used in their construction.
All this activity Burroughs mentions as showing what useless matter Thoreau’s mind could engage itself upon. ‘He must get the girth of every tree he passed and some hint of all the local conditions that had influenced its growth. Over two hundred pages of his Journal are taken up with barren details of this kind. He cross-questions the stumps and trees as if searching for the clue to some important problem, but no such problem is disclosed. He ends where he begins. His vast mass of facts and figures was incapable of being generalized or systematized. His elaborate tables of figures, so carefully arranged, absolutely accurate, no doubt, are void of interest, because no valuable inferences can be drawn from them.’
Or again: ‘ Thirty-four measurements on Walden disclosed the important fact that the snow averaged five and one-sixth inches deep. He analyzes a pensile nest which he found in the woods — doubtless one of the vireo’s — and fills ten pages with a minute description of the different material which it contained. Then he analyzes a yellow-bird’s nest, filling two pages. That Journal shall not go hungry, even if there is nothing to give it but the dry material of a bird’s nest.’
Thoreau had the faculty, which Burroughs does not seem to admire or understand, of the modern research worker. It consists of a faith in facts. There is no such thing as an unimportant fact. Its significance may depend upon how it fits in with other facts; but you have to get your facts first. Therefore science does look askance at any truth or ask it what excuse it has for being. It lays hold of facts on all sides and knows that eventually something will come of them.
Let us consider, for instance, how interesting the mere ‘ dry material of a bird’s nest ’ may be.
The horse came to America in 1519 along with the Spanish conquerors. Before that there were no horses on this continent since the disappearance of the little horselike animals of evolution. That admirable nest builder, the oriole, which had been in this country from the first, had need of a strong filament with which to swing its cradle from the storm-tossed bough, and it discovered that the long horsehair had qualities that were superior. And so it came to prefer that material and to search for it. The oriole and horsehair are always mentioned together in bird books, so universal is the use of the hair by these birds.
The last two oriole nests I have found had no horsehair in them, the reason being that there are no horses within a considerable distance from my house. The coming of the automobile and the farm tractor has made horsehair a rare commodity even out in the country.
Such a state of affairs, however, ought to be no great drawback to a bird that was here so long before the horse. With the passing of this convenient animal, the bird would naturally resort to the use of its original, pre-horse material, whatever that was; or else it would make use of a substitute. The substitute is, and long has been, grocer’s string. The last nest I found, a deep pouch of beautiful workmanship, was suspended with a long piece of soft white cotton string.
But with the invention of gummed paper tape, and its growing use for the sealing of bags and packages in general, cotton string has largely passed out of use. You might look a long while nowadays without finding any good grocer’s string lying about on the grass.
Inasmuch as an oriole has got to have cordage of some sort, and the man-made supply is passing, it may be necessary for the bird to depend entirely upon those stringy barks and natural filaments that it presumably used in the first place; and so there would be a new interest in analyzing the nests of orioles. That string-suspended nest which I have spoken of had its bottom lined with what seemed at first to be grayish human hair, but proved upon closer examination to be of vegetable origin. It was evidently long fibre from the stalk of the milkweed, finely frayed off and then neatly coiled and packed down in the bottom of the nest. The body of the nest was felted together with material as fine as cotton, and probably from the same milkweed.
All this begins to fit in with other facts, and leads us, as I now see it, to a consideration of the squirrel’s way of life. But this expansion of my knowledge came as a surprise to me.
In December, a year ago, I was sitting in my study thinking over the nest I had just examined and sent dowm East; and as my mind played upon orioles, and horses, and Spaniards, and history in general, it occurred to me that I ought to get a number of the most modern oriole nests and take note of them. This is easier said than done. An oriole’s nest is almost impossible to reach, being high up on the periphery of some lofty elm and suspended from the very final fork of some slender branch. It then occurred to me that I could get any nest I might find by taking my rifle and shooting off the branch. This thought interested me at once.
At the edge of my yard, overlooking the lake, there is a beautiful elm with a multiple trunk and a great profusion of drooping branches; and I now recalled having seen an oriole’s nest hanging up there shortly after the leaves had fallen. I went to the window to look, and it was still there.
In fact, there now seemed to be two. A little distance above it was another object of about the same size and shape; and when I got my field glass to make sure I found that this other object was a fox squirrel. He was sitting up quite motionless, and on the same drooping branch a little nearer to the trunk. He was no doubt one of the fox squirrels that inhabit the woods about a quarter of a mile from my house. They never spend any time in the line of trees along my shore, but in severe winter weather they will sometimes cross the intervening field of ploughed land to see what nubbins of corn may be remaining on the stalks in my garden. Once in a time of deep snow they came repeatedly to the roof of my shed and garage, and kept looking all around the cornice for an opening, as if they suspected there was treasure inside.
Being interested in this unwonted visit, I now went outside and drew still closer with the field glass. At a distance of a hundred feet I could look over every detail of his body, including his dark watchful eye. At the same time I took a good view of that other object of my interest, the oriole nest.
I went in the house again to get the rifle in order to shoot down the nest. I had gone out hurriedly in my shirt sleeves in spite of the weather, which had suddenly turned cold. By the time I had spoken about the squirrel to my wife, who went to the window to see him, and changed to warmer clothes, and got my rifle out and ready for action, about ten minutes had elapsed. When I went out, rifle in hand and ready to point upward, there was no squirrel there. And there was no nest!
When I had recovered somewhat from my surprise, not to say my disbelief, I began to think things over. When a fox squirrel wants something that is out of his reach, as a nut at the end of a branch, he will bite off the branch. Then he will go down and get it where it has fallen. With this in mind I looked about under the tree to find the nest; but there was no nest there. The squirrel had evidently taken it away to his own woods. And for what purpose? Probably to build a winter nest. For his summer use a squirrel constructs a big nest of twigs and leaves such as are often to be seen in the trees of city parks, but for the cold days of winter he needs a bed in a hollow tree.
Here was something to think about. Does the fox squirrel get his bed material in this wholesale way, making use of all the hard work of the oriole? From the evidence in the case I should say he did. Consider all the trips he would save, up and down his tree, with bits of vegetable fibre and fine shredded material!
But I did not see this done. I did not see the nest cut down or carried away, though I wish I had. I should like to be able to report just what the fox squirrel looked like as he made his way across the ploughed field with that, nest thrown over his back and shoulder as a fox does with a goose, or dragging it alongside, or holding it bodily up. When a squirrel steals a big heavy ear of corn from a farmer’s field he just takes it by the middle and holds it up clear of the ground; and probably this was the way our fox squirrel handled the oriole’s nest, a much lighter burden.
To answer this question definitely as to whether squirrels use birds’ nests — especially those of the oriole, so easily cut down — to line their winter beds, one would need to have in mind a careful analysis of an oriole’s nest and compare this with the squirrel’s nest every time a hollow tree was felled. Right here one could make use of such an analysis as Thoreau made. What interesting points in human history and in natural history can be thus connected with the mere ‘ dry material of a bird’s nest’!
All facts are important, and eventually all facts are interesting. Thoreau had this point of view, and with it a workman’s enduring patience. He was a pencil maker by trade; and he had, moreover, ‘ a trade for each of his fingers.’
Burroughs tells us: ‘I recall how Emerson fairly bristled up on one occasion when in conversation with him I told him I thought Thoreau in his trips to the Maine woods had confounded the hermit with the wood thrush, as the latter was rarely or never found in Maine.’ Burroughs was puzzled by this attitude toward his own particular kind of information; but I can imagine just how Emerson felt.
Thoreau was different from other nature writers. His writing has proved to be more vital than that of any of his New England contemporaries except Emerson; and there must be a reason. He put that into his sentences which keeps his facts fresh.