The summit of the years

Front matter

oe s 8

| he Life and Letters of »* JOHN BURROUGHS

By Clara Barrus

Preface

N publishing another volume of mixed essays, most of them written in the over-time I have made since I passed the Scriptural limit of threescore and ten years, I am cherishing the hope that my reader will not wish I had stopped at the boundary set by the Psalmist.

There is no other joy in life like mental and bodily activity, like keeping up a live interest in the world of thought and things. Old age is practically held at bay so long as one can keep the currents of his life moving. The vital currents, like mountain streams, tend to rejuvenate themselves as they flow.

One reaps his harvest, and it looks as if his acres would never yield another, but lo! as the seasons return, there springs a fresh crop of ideas and observations. It seems as if one never could get to the end of all the delightful things there are to know, and to observe, and to speculate about in the world. Nature is always young, and there is no greater felicity thangto share in her youth. I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. But I will confide to my reader that there is one thing I am quite cer-

Vv

PREFACE tain I have got to the end of, and that is the vexed question of the animal mind. Whether the dog, the cat, and the cockroach reason or not, shall trouble me (and them) no more. While I write these lines in my outdoor study, a chipmunk whose den is near by, comes in and eagerly selects the hard, dry kernels of pop-corn from the soft unripe kernels of sweet corn which I have sprinkled upon the floor at my feet, stuffs his cheek pockets with them and hurries away to his den as if he knew that the dry corn would keep in his retreat, and that the green would not. After he has collected all the dry kernels, he falls to eating the green ones. [ also sprinkle chokecherries among the corn. These he finally proceeds to strip of their pulp and skins, and stuff his pockets with their pits, and rushes off to his den — thus putting no perishable food in his winter retreat. Does the pretty little rodent reason about all this? Ah! my reader, ask some one else! As for me, I will content myself with his companionship as he runs along my study table, pokes his nose into the arch made by my hand, under which the kernels lie, and even climbs to the crown of my head. He sets me to thinking, and I, if I do not set him to thinking, at least aid him in adding to his winter supplies. We are both learning something; day unto day uttereth knowledge, and even a chipmunk shares a little of the wisdom that pervades the universe.

2b ve cee meee

Contents

Tur SuMMIT OF THE YEARS

In “tHE Circuit or THE SuMMER Hits”

Tue Hit-anp-Miss Meruop or NATURE .

II In “the Circuit Of The Summer Hills”

I

O sit on one’s rustic porch, or at the door of one’s tent, and see the bees working on the catnip or motherwort or clover, to see the cattle grazing leisurely in the fields or ruminating under the spreading trees, or the woodchucks creeping about the meadows and pastures, or the squirrels spinning along the fences, or the hawks describing great spirals against the sky; to hear no sound but the voice of birds, the caw of crows, the whistle of marmots, the chirp of crickets; to smell no odors but the odors of grassy fields, or blooming meadows, or falling rain; amid it all, to lift one’s eyes to the flowing and restful mountain lines — this ‘is to get a taste of the peace and comfort of the summer hills. This boon is mine when I go to my little gray farmhouse on a broad hill-slope on the home farm in the Catskills. Especially is it mine when, to get still nearer nature and beyond the orbit of household sounds and interruptions, I retreat to the big hay-barn, and on an improvised table in front of the big open barn doors, looking out into the sunlit 24 fields where I hoed corn or made hay as a boy, I write this and other papers.

The peace of the hills is about me and upon me, and the leisure of the summer clouds, whose shadows I see slowly drifting across the face of the landscape, is mine. The dissonance and the turbulence and the stenches of cities — how far off they seem! the noise and the dust and the acrimony of politics — how completely the hum of the honey-bees and the twitter of swallows blot them all out!

In the circuit of the hills, the days take form and character as they do not in town, or in a country of low horizons. George Eliot says in one of her letters: “In the country the days have broad open spaces, and the very stillness seems to give a delightful roominess to the hours.” This is especially true in a hilly and mountainous country, where the eye has a great depth of perspective opened to it. Take those extra brilliant days that we so often have in the autumn — what a vivid sense one gets of their splendor amid the hills! The deep, cradle-like valleys, and the long flowing mountain lines, make a fit receptacle for the day’s beauty; they hold and accumulate it, as it were. I think of Emerson’s line: —

“Oh, tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire.”

The valleys are vast blue urns that hold a generous portion of the lucid hours! 25

To feel to the full the peace of the hills, one must thoose his hills, and see to it that they are gentle and restful in character. Abruptness, jagged lines, sharp angles, frowning precipices, while they may add an element of picturesqueness, interfere with the feeling of ease and restfulness that the peace of the hills implies. 'The eye is disturbed by a confusion of broken and abrupt lines as is the ear by a volume of discordant sounds. Long, undulating mountain lines, broad, cradle-like valleys, easy basking hillslopes, as well as the absence of loud and discordant sounds, are a factor in the restfulness of any landscape.

My landscape is very old geologically, as old as the order of vertebrate animals, but young historically, having been settled only about one hundred and fifty years. The original forests still cover the tops of the mountains with a dark-green mantle, which comes well down upon their sides, where it is cut and torn and notched into by the upper fields of the valley farms.

I call my place Woodchuck Lodge, as I tell my friends, because we are beleagured by these rodents. There is a cordon of woodchuck-holes all around us. In the orchard, in the meadows, in the pastures, these whistling marmots have their dens. Here one might easily have woodchuck venison for dinner every day, yea, and for supper and breakfast, too, if one could acquire a taste for it. I tried to dine on a woodchuck once when I was a boy, but never have felt inclined to repeat the experiment. If one were born in the woods and lived in the woods, maybe he could relish a woodchuck. Talk about being autochthonous, and savoring of the soil—try a woodchuck! The feeding habits of this animal are as cleanly as those of a sheep or a cow; clover, plantain, peas, beans, cucumbers, cabbages, apples — all sweet and succulent things — go to the making of his flabby body; yet he spends so much of his time in pickle in the ground that his flesh is rank with the earth flavor. He is not lean like a rabbit or a squirrel, nor so firm of muscle as a’coon ora *possum; he is little more than a skin filled with viscera. He is busy all summer storing up fat in his loose pouch of a body for fuel during his long winter sleep. This sleep appears to begin in late September, or after the first white frost. This year I saw my last specimen on the 28th of the month as he was running in great haste to his hole. Evidently he does not like the pinch of the cold. He is a fair-weather, animal and is the epicure of the meadows and pastures. While the apples are still mellow on the ground, while the red thorn is still dropping its fruit, and the aftermath is still fresh in the meadows, my woodchucks turn their backs upon the world and retreat to their underground chambers for their six months’ slumber. I know of no other hibernating animal that retires from the light of day so early in Q27 the season. His active life stretches from the vernal equinox to the autumnal equinox, and that is about all. Half the year he is under ground, and at least half of each summer day. No wonder his flesh is rank with the earth flavor. He appears to live only to accumulate his winter store of fat. Apparently he comes out of his den in summer only to feed, and maybe occasionally to bask in the sunshine. He is never sportive or discursive like the birds and squirrels. Life is a very serious business with him, and he has reduced it to the lowest terms — eat, breed, and sleep. If woodchucks ever engage in any sort of play, like other wild creatures, I never have seen them, though I once had a tame young ’chuck that would play with the kitten.

The woodchuck probably sleeps more than half the time in summer; he economizes his precious fat. Only once have I seen his tracks on the snow. This was in late December; and, following them up, I found the woodchuck wandering about the meadow like one half demented. Something had evidently gone wrong with him. Apparently he had not succeeded in storing up his usual amount of fat. He showed little fight, and we picked him up by the tail, put him into the sleigh, and brought him home. <A place under the barn floor was given to him, but he did not long survive. All the glory of the fall, the heyday of the ’coon and the squirrels, the woodchuck misses. No golden

October, no Indian summer for him; he has had his day.

Though the woodchuck’s muscles are flabby, his heart is stout. The farm-dog can kill him, but he cannot make him show fear or dismay; he is game to the last. Twice I have seen him from my porch at Woodchuck Lodge put on so bold a front and become so aggressive, when surprised in the middle of a field by a big shepherd-dog, that the dog did not dare attack him, but circled about, seeking some unfair advantage, only to be met at every point with those threatening, grating teeth. The woodchuck was far from his hole, and he kept charging the dog and driving him nearer and nearer the stone wall, where his own safety lay. An observer inoculated with the idea of animal reason would have said that the tactics of the ’chuck were premeditated; but I am sure he was too much engrossed with the task of defending himself from the jaws of that dog to do any logical thinking or planning. It was only the fortune of battle that finally brought the hunter and the hunted near the hole of safety, when, seeing his chance, the woodchuck made a sudden, successful dash, too hurried, I fancy, even to whistle his usual note of defiance. In the other case, the dog was of a still more timid nature, and when the surprised woodchuck showed fight, he concluded that he had no business at all with that particular ’chuck, which actually chased him from the meadow. I can still see the woodchuck’s bristling, expanded tail as he drove fiercely after the fleeing dog, which, with a tail anything but threatening, escaped over the wall into the road.

I find that one may be the principal actor in a little comedy, and not see the humor of it at all at the time. I know the humor of a race I had with a *chuck last summer in my orchard was quite lost upon me till it was over, when the ’chuck was in his hole, and I was back upon my porch recovering my wind. The ’chuck was a hundred yards or more from his den when I leaped over the fence from the road and surprised him. I pressed him so closely that he took refuge in an apple-tree. Instantly seeing his mistake, as the missile I hurled struck the tree, he sprang down and rushed for his hole, a hundred and fifty feet away. But I got there first. The ’chuck paused twenty feet to one side and regarded me intently, defiantly. We stood and glared at each other a few moments, while I recovered my breath. I wanted the scalp of that “varmint.” I knew that he would make himself believe that I had planted my garden for his special benefit, and I wanted to anticipate that conclusion. I was weaponless. Twenty or more feet from me, on the opposite side from the ’chuck, I saw a stone that would answer my purpose. I calculated the chances; so did the woodchuck; I sprang for the stone and the ’chuck sprang for his hole, and was in it as my hand touched the stone. He had won! As I sat on my porch, the recklessness and absurdity of a man more than threescore and ten running down a woodchuck came over me; and I have not yielded to such a temptation since.

II

Where cattle and woodchucks thrive, there thrive I. The pastoral is in my veins. Clover and timothy, daisies and buttercups indirectly colored my youthful life; and if the dairy cow did not rock my cradle, her products sustained the hand that did rock it. Hence I love this land of wide, open, grassy fields, of smooth, broad-backed hills, and of long, flowing mountain lines. The cow fits well into these scenes. It seems as if her broad, smooth muzzle and her sweeping tongue might have shaped the landscape; it is certainly her cropping that has brought about the hourglass form of so many of the red thorn trees, which give a unique feature to the fields. Her fragrant breath is upon the air, her hoof-prints are upon the highway; she may not yet have attained to wisdom, yet surely all her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are paths of peace. Hence, when her ways and her paths coincide with mine, I thrive best. From Woodchuck Lodge I look out upon broad pastures, lands where dairy herds have grazed for a hundred years, never the same herd for many summers, but all of the same habits and dispositions. They all scour the pastures in the same way, scattering, searching out every nook and corner, leaving no yard of ground unvisited, apparently hunting each day for the sweet morsel they missed the day before, disposing themselves in picturesque groups upon the hills; never massed, except under the shade-trees on hot days; slow-moving, making their paths here and there, lingering under the red thorn trees, where the fruit begins to drop in September; tossing their heads above the orchard wall, where the fragrance of ripening apples is on the air; in the autumn lying upon the cold, damp ground and ruminating contentedly, with no fear of our ills and pains before them; wading in the swamps, converging slowly toward the pasturebars as milking-time draws nigh, with always some tardy, indifferent ones that the farm-dog has to hurry up; many-colored, — white, black, red, brown, — at times showing rare gentleness and affection toward one another, such as licking one another’s heads or bodies, then spitefully butting or goring one another; occasionally one of them lifting up her head and sending her mellow voice over the hills like a horn, as if to give voice to a vague unrest, or invoking some far-off divinity to release the imprisoned Io — what a series of shifting rural pictures I thus have spread out before me!

Such an atmosphere of peace and leisure over it all! The unhurrying and ruminating cattle make the days 32 long; they make the fields friendly, the hills eloquent, the shade-trees idyllic. I wake up to hear the farmer summoning them from the field in the dewy summer dawns, and [I listen for his call to them on the tranquil afternoons. One season an especially musical voice did the evening calling — a trained voice from beyond the hills. What a pleasure it was as we swung in our hammocks under the apple-trees to hear the free, sonorous summons, and to see the response of the herd in many-colored lines converging down the slope to the barway! :

When the meadows have gotten a new carpet of tender grass in September, and the cows are free to range in them, a newseries of moving pictures greets the eye. The grazing forms have a finer setting now, and contentment and satisfaction are in every movement. How they sweep off the tender herbage, into what artistic groups they naturally fall, what pictures of peace and plenty they present! When they lie down to ruminate, Emerson’s sentence comes to mind: “And the cattle lying on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts.” As a matter of fact, I suppose no more vacant mind could be found in the universe than that of the cow when she is reposing in a field chewing her cud. But she is the cause of tranquil if not of great thoughts in the lookers-on, and that isenough. Tranquillity attends her wherever she goes; it beams from her eyes, and lingers in her footsteps.

I sympathize with Whitman as he expressed himself in these lines: — “T think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d.

I stand and look at them, long and long.

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. ©

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or happy over the whole earth.”

II f

If one has a bit of the farmer in him, it is a pleasure in the country to have a real farmer for a neighbor — a man whose heart is in his work, who is not longing for the town or the city, who improves his fields, who makes two spears of grass grow where none grew before, whose whole farm has an atmosphere of thrift and well-being. There are so many reluctant, half-hearted farmers in our Eastern States nowadays, so many who do only what they have to do in order to survive; who leave the paternal acres to run to weeds or brush; the paternal fences to fall into ruins; the paternal orchards untrimmed and unploughed; the paternal meadows unfertilized, while the fertilizer wastes in the barnyard; who get but one spear of grass where their fathers or grandfathers got two or three; and whose plaint always is that farming does not pay. What is the matter with our rural population? Has all the good farming blood gone West, and do only the dregs of it remain?

It is the man who makes the farm, as truly as it is the man who makes any other business; it is the man behind the plough, as truly as it is the man behind the gun, that wins the battle. A half-heart never won a whole sheaf yet. The average farmer has deteriorated. He may know more, but he does less, than his father. He is like the second or third steeping of the tea. Did the original settlers and improvers of the farms, and the generations that followed them, leave all their virtue and grip in the soil? It is certainly true that in my section the last two generations have lived off the capital of labor and brains which their ancestors put into the land; only here and there has a man added anything, only here and there is a farmer who does not wish he had some other business. If such men had that other business, they would reap the same poor results. In the long run, you cannot reap where you have not sown, and the only seed you can sow, in any business that yields tenfold, is yourself — your own wit, your own industry. Unless you plant your heart with your corn, it will mostly go to suckers; unless you strike your own roots into the subsoil of your lands, it will not bear fruit in your character, or in your bank account — all of which is simply saying that thin, leachy land will not bear good rrops, and unless a man has the real farming stuff in him, his farm quickly shows it.

My neighbor makes smooth the way of the plough and of the mower. Last summer I saw him take enough stones and rocks from a three-acre field to build quite a fortress; and land whose slumbers had never been disturbed with the plough was soon kneehigh with Hungarian grass. How one likes to see a permanent betterment of the land like that! — piles of renegade stone and rock. It is such things that make the country richer. If all New England and New York had had such drastic treatment years ago, the blight of discouraged farming never would have fallen upon them, and the prairie States would not have so far distanced the granite States. A granite soil should grow a better crop of men than the silt of lake or river-bottom, though it yields less corn to the acre.

The prairie makes a strong appeal to a man’s indolence and cupidity; it is a place where he can sit at ease and let his team do most of his work. But I much doubt whether the Western farms ever will lay the strong hands upon their possessors that our more varied and picturesque Eastern farms lay. Every field in these farms has a character of its own, and the farms differ from one another as much as the people do. An Eastern farm is the place for a home; the Western farm is the place to grow wheat, pork, and beef. Oh, the flat, featureless, monotonous, cornstalk-littered Middle West! how can the rural virtues of contentment and domesticity thrive there? There is no spot to make your nest except right out on the rim of the world; no spot for a walk or a picnic except in the featureless open of a thousand miles of black prairie — the roads black, straight lines of mud or dust through the landscape; the streams slow, indolent channels of muddy water; the woods, where there are woods, a dull assemblage of straight-trunked trees; the sky a brazen dome that shuts down upon you; there are no hills or mountains to lift it up. The prairie draws no strong distinct lines against the sky; the horizon is vague and baffling. Ah, my mountains are very old measured by the geologic calendar! Yet how foreign to our experience or ways of thinking it seems to speak of mountains as either old or young, as if birth and death applied to them also. But such is the fact: mountains have their day, which day is the geologist’s day of millions of years.

My mountains were being carved out of a great plateau by the elements while the prairies were still under the sea, and while most of the Rocky Mountains and the Alps and the Himalayas were gestating in the vast earth-womb. In point of age, these mountains beside the Catskills are like infants beside their great-grandfathers. Yet it is a singular cons 37 tradiction that in their outlines old mountains look young, and young mountains look old. The only youthful feature about young mountains is that they carry their heads very high, and the only old feature about old mountains is that they have a look of repose and calmness and peace. All the gauntness, leanness, angularity, and crumbling decrepitude are with the young mountains; all the smoothness, plumpness, graceful, flowing lines of youth are with the old mountains. Not till the rocks are clothed with soil made out of their own decay are outlines softened and life made possible. Youthful mountains like the Alps are battle-marked by the elements, and their proud heads are continually being laid low by frost, wind, and snow; they are scarred and broken by avalanches the season through. Old mountains, such as the Appalachian System, wear an armor of soil and verdure over their rounded forms on which the arrows of Time have little effect. The turbulent and noisy and stiffnecked period of youth is far behind them. Hundreds of dairy-farms nestle in the laps of the Catskills; and their huge, grassy aprons, only a little wrinkled here and there, hold as many grazing herds. Woodchuck Lodge is well upon the knee of one of the ranges, and the fields we look upon are like green drapery lying in graceful curves and broad, smooth masses over huge extended limbs. Patches of maple forest here and there bend over 38 a rounded arm or shoulder, like a fur cape upon a woman. Here and there also huge, weather-worn boulders rest upon the ground, dropped there by the moving ice-sheet tens upon tens of thousands of years ago; and here and there are streaks of land completely covered with smaller rocks wedged and driven into the ground. It used to be told me in my youth that the devil’s apron-string broke as he was carrying a load of these rocks overhead, and let the mass down upon the ground. The farmers seldom attempt to clear away these leavings of the devil.

IV

My interest in the birds is not as keen as it once was, but they are still an asset in my life. I must live where I can hear the crows caw, the robins sing, and the song sparrow trill. If I can hear also the partridge drum, and the owl hoot, and the chipmunk cluck in the still days of autumn, so much the better. The crow is such a true countryman, so much at home everywhere, so thoroughly in possession of the land, going his way winter and summer in such noisy contentment and pride of possession, that I cannot leave him out. The bird I missed most in California was the crow. 1 missed his glistening coat in the fields, his ebony form and hearty call in the sky.

One advantage of sleeping out of doors, as we do at Woodchuck Lodge, is that you hear the day ushered in by the birds. Toward autumn you hear the crows first, making proclamation in all directions that it is time to be up and doing, and that life is a good thing. There is not a bit of doubt or discouragement in their tones. They have enjoyed the night, and they have a stout heart for the day. They proclaim it as they fly over my porch at five o'clock in the morning; they call it from the orchard, they bandy the message back and forth in the neighboring fields; the air is streaked with cheery greetings and raucous salutations. Toward the end of August, or in early September, I witness with pleasure their huge mass meetings or annual congress on the pasture hills or in the borders of the woods. Before that time, you see them singly or in loose bands; but on some day in late summer, or in early autumn, you see the clans assemble as if for some rare festival and grand tribal discussion. A multitudinous cawing attracts your attention, when you look hillward and see a swarm of dusky forms circling in the air, their voices mingling in one dissonant wave of sound, while loose bands of other dusky forms come from all points of the compass to join them. Presently many hundred crows are assembled, alternately lighted upon the ground and silently walking about as if feeding, or circling in the air, cawing as if they would be heard in the next township. What they are doing or saying or settling, what it all means, 40 whether they meet by appointment in the human fashion, whether it is a jubilee, a parliament, or aconvention, I confess I should like to know. But second thought tells me it is more likely the gregarious instinct asserting itself after the scatterings and separations of the summer. The time of the rookery is not far off, when the inclement season will find all the crows froma large section of the country massed at night in lonely tree-tops in some secluded wood.

These early noisy assemblages may be preliminary to the winter union of the tribe. What an engroseing affair it seems to be with the crows! how oblivious they appear to all else in the world! The world was made for crows, and what concerns them is alone important. The meeting adjourns, from time to time, from the fields to the woods, then back again, the Babel of voices waxing or waning according as they are on the wing or at rest. Sometimes they meet several days in succession and then disperse, going away in different directions and irregularly, singly or in pairs and bands, as men do on similar occasions. No doubt in these great reunions the crows experience some sort of feeling or emotion, though one would doubtless err in ascribing to them anything like human procedure. It is not a definite purpose, but a tribal instinct, that finds expression in their jubilees.