These books always keep contact with nature. That’s one of the things I love about them. Canoeing the rivers of the Pine Barrens, John McPhee notes the color of the water:
The characteristic color of the water in the streams is the color of tea – a phenomenon, often called “cedar water,” that is familiar in the Adirondacks, as in many other places where tannins and other organic waste from riparian cedar trees combine with iron from the ground water to give the rivers a deep color. In summer, the color is ordinarily so dark that the riverbeds are obscured, and while drifting along one has the feeling of being afloat on a river of fast-moving potable ink. For a few days after a long rain, however, the water is almost colorless. At these times, one can look down into it from a canoe and see the white sand bottom, ten or twelve feet below, and it is as clear as an image in the lens of a camera, with sunken timbers now and again coming into view and receding rapidly, at the speed of the river.
Paddling a Meadowlands marsh, Robert Sullivan sees two carp:
Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.
Driving the Red Shirt Table Road, Ian Frazier sees a pheasant: “A pheasant stepped from the grass, set his white-ringed neck forward like a gearshift lever, and ran across the road.” Traveling the dusty back road from Oglala to Chadron, he describes the prairie grasses (“pale ginger-brown just the color of antelopes”) and the cottonwoods (“The big cottonwoods standing here and there by themselves in the fields lose every leaf in winter and then you can see how contorted their branches really are; they look as if they had decided never to grow leaves again and were tormented by the decision”). He sees an eagle:
Once, in the sky just west of the road I saw, two or three hundred feet up, a bald eagle holding almost motionless. The white band of its tail was visible when it turned, and gently turned again. It flew offhandedly, with careless, recreational ease, the way a winged human might fly.
These books brim with birds: “The whippoorwills dust themselves in the sand roads, and when they are approached at night their eyes blaze red” (The Pine Barrens). “We saw more carp, more muskrats, mudflats covered with sandpipers, and the frozen-in-time remains of a snapping turtle that appeared to be decapitated by a train just as it has crawled up out of the marsh” (The Meadowlands). “Black cows topped with snow stood breathing steam in the whitened fields while hawks sat in cottonwoods above, their feathers so fluffed out against the cold they looked like footballs” (On the Rez).
There’s an abundance of wildflowers:
Wherry pointed out rattlesnake ferns, cinnamon ferns, papery blueish-gray marsh ferns, bold and lacy royal ferns. Before the outing was over, the group had found Indian shoestrings, Turk’s-cap lilies, some rare pogonias, swamp azaleas, swamp hyacinths, wild magnolias, cassandras, and prickly pears – the only cactus that is native east of the Mississippi River. [The Pine Barrens]
In the spring of 1819, John Torrey, the father of American botany, toured the Jersey meadows and reported patches of white, yellow, and purple violets. In other springs around that time, there was yellow floating arum, blue veronica, and white saxifrage. In summers, botanists reported seeing blue iris, pink meadowsweet, pink marshmallow, pale purple wild hibiscus, white ladies’ tresses, purple snake’s mouth, and green and purple orchids. In the fall, there were yellow goldenrod, bright red cranberries, and the tops of the cattails turned a dark, burned-out-looking brown, anticipating future area land uses. [The Meadowlands]
After a few minutes I walked back down the incline to the fatality marker and sat beside it in the grass out of sight of traffic. When I did, I noticed wildflowers – little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins. Mid-June must be these flowers’ peak season: among the roadside grasses, lost hubcaps, and scattered gravel, the spiderwort and creeping jenny grew abundantly. [On the Rez]
The culminating paragraph of Frazier’s magnificent elegy for Suanne Big Crow is all about nature:
On down the slope, across the corner of a wheatfield, was a grove of cottonwood trees. I climbed back over the highway fence and walked to it. Perhaps because of the rolling topography, I could hardly hear the traffic here. Just a couple of hundred yards away, the twenty-four-hour-a-day noise of the interstate had disappeared into its own dimension. The cottonwoods stood in a grove of eight or ten, all of them healthy and tall, around a small pool of clear water bordered with cattail reeds and dark-gray mud. Herons, ducks, raccoons, and deer had left their tracks in the mud not long before. From the cattails came the chirring song of red-winged blackbirds, a team whose colors no other team will ever improve on. Old crumpled orange-brown leaves covered the ground around the trees, and false morel mushrooms of a nearly identical shade grew in the crotches of the roots. The cottonwoods had appeared a deep green from the highway, but seen from underneath, their leaves were silvery against the blue sky. High above the trees bright white cumulus clouds piled one atop another. They went on and on, altitude upon altitude, getting smaller as they went, like knots on a rope ladder rising out of sight.
That is one of my favorite passages in all of literature. Note the vivid figuration in the last sentence – “like knots on a rope ladder rising out of sight.” Figuration is a prime tool of all three of these writers. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.
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