Have I proof of my contention here? Throughout this book, on many sides of the question, I have argued that the earth is as young as it ever was; that Nature, though it can all but be destroyed in spots, as in New York City, cannot be tamed; that we are still the stuff of dreams, if we could find rest for our souls and the chance to dream. We are not lacking imagination and the power for high endeavor. We master material things; we can also handle the raw materials of the spirit and give them enduring form. But how can we come by the raw materials of the spirit? And where shall we find new patterns on which to mould our new and enduring forms? Matter and pattern are still to be found in nature—substance, essence, presence, “Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.”
[206]I have had much to do with young people, especially with those of creative minds, divinely capable minds, could they be freed from the doubt of their times, and the fear of their own powers. Here let me give them a glimpse of an old man of their own times, these evil times when all of the raw material of books has been used up; an old man with a boy’s eyes and a child’s heart and a pen and a bluebird or two, and a woodchuck—and, of course, a magical chance.
It was an October day. And how it rained that day! An October day in the Catskills, and I was making my way, with my friend DeLoach, out of the little village of Roxbury by the road that winds up the hills to Woodchuck Lodge. Hardscrabble Creek knew it was raining, and met me noisily at a turn of the road, just before I came to the square stone schoolhouse (now a dwelling) where little Johnny Burroughs had gone for his book learning some seventy-five years before. Leaving the creek, I found myself on a roller-coaster road athwart the hills, making up with spurt and dip to a low, weathered farmhouse, thin and gray and old, that seemed[207] to be resting by the roadside thus far over the mountain on its way to the valley.
I knew it from the distance and through the rain, only it seemed even older, smaller, poorer than I had expected to find it. But how close it sat to the roadside, and how eagerly it gazed down into the valley where the store and the station and the meeting-house were—to see who might be stirring, I thought, down there in the valley! Or perhaps it sat here for the landscape. I was approaching Woodchuck Lodge, and it seemed very old and lonely in the rain that slanted along the wide gray slopes, and too frail to stand long against the pull of the valley and the push of the heights crowding hard upon it from behind.
A tiny kitchen garden at its corner, and across the road a stone wall, an orchard of untrimmed apple trees bent with fruit, and a small barn on the edge of a sharply falling field—this was the picture in the rain, the immediate foreground of the picture, which stood out on a field of hay-lands and pastures rolling out of the rainy sky and down, far down where their stone walls ran into the mists at the bottom of the valley.
[208]These were the ancestral fields. Burroughs was born a little farther along this road, the house no longer standing. Here at the Lodge he was now living, and in the old barn across the road he had a study. These were his fields by right of pen, not plough; these were his buildings, too, and they showed it. They sheltered him and gave him this outlook, but they utterly lacked the pride of the gilded weathervane, the stolid, four-square complacency, that well-fed, well-stocked security of the prosperous American farm. An old pair of tramps were house and barn, lovers of the hills, resting here above the valley. It was in that old barn, on an overturned chicken-coop, with a door or some other thing as humble for table, that Burroughs had written most of the chapters in “The Summit of the Years,” in “Time and Change,” “The Breath of Life,” and “Under the Apple-Trees.”
So a literary farm should look, I suppose,—a farm that produces books as abundantly as a prairie farm produces cattle and corn; yet every farm, I think, should have a patch of poetry, as every professional poet certainly needs to keep[209] a garden and a pig. For years Burroughs grew fancy grapes and celery for the New York market, along with his literary essays for the reading public.
As we came in on the vine-covered porch of the Lodge, we were met by Dr. Barrus, Burroughs’s physician and biographer, who told us with considerable anxiety that the old man was not at home.
“He is out visiting his traps, I suppose,” she said. “He’s just like a boy. I can’t do anything with him. He’ll come home wringing wet. And he’s not a bit well.”
He came home true to form. It was an hour later, perhaps, that I saw, from the steps, a dim figure in the blur of the rain: an old man plodding slowly down the hill road, a stick and a steel trap in his left hand, and in his right hand a heavy woodchuck.
It was John Burroughs, the real Burroughs, for I knew as I watched him that I had never seen, never clearly seen, this man before—not exactly this simple, rain-soaked man with the snow of more than eighty winters on his head, with the song of eternal springtime in his[210] heart, and a woodchuck, like a lantern, in his hand.
This figure in the rain should be seen coming down every page of Burroughs’s books. Every line should be read in the light of this lantern in his hand, for its wick is in his heart, and its flame shines from “Wake-Robin” to “The Summit of the Years.” Burroughs was the eternal boy—splashing through the puddles, wet to the skin; the boy for whom these fields of his father’s farm were as wild as the jungles of Africa; and this woodchuck in his hand (it was a big one!) a very elephant, except for the tusks. But to be like this is to be both boy and philosopher—boy and writer, I should say. And to see him thus—falling with the rain, whirling with the dust, singing with the birds, growing with the grass, his whole being one with the elements, earth and wild-life and weather—thus to see the man is to know how to read his books.
As he came up to the porch, his slouch hat spouting like an eaves-trough, he greeted me cordially, but as a stranger, not recognizing me for an instant; then dashing the rain from his[211] eyes, he dropped the woodchuck, drew off, and with a quick righthander to my chest, which almost took me off my feet, he cried, “Sharp, we’ll have woodchuck for dinner!”
And we did—not the one he had just dropped on the floor, for that one he skinned and salted and gave me to bring home to Boston. We had canned woodchuck that noon at the Lodge. It was Burroughs’s custom to serve his guests a real literary dinner; and of course it must savor of the locality.
This called for woodchuck, or “Roxbury Lamb,” as you preferred; and for roast Roxbury Lamb the rule for rabbit-stew prevails: first get your woodchuck; not always readily done, for the meat-market down at the village is sometimes out of woodchuck. So the Laird of the Lodge keeps them canned ahead.
The clouds cleared in the afternoon, the sun came down upon the mountains, and we looked out from the porch over a world so large and new and lovely that I remember it still as a keen pain, so unprepared was I for it, with my level background of meadow and marsh and bay.
[212]Endless reaches of river and bay, of wavy marshland and hazy barrens of pine, were my heritage of landscape as a child. And I have never been able to measure up to the mountains, nor to this scene, here from the porch—this reach without level; space both deep and high as well as wide; this valley completely hiding a village below you; ridges above you where stone walls climb over the sky; mountains far across with forests flung over their shoulders, and farms, like colored patchwork, stitched into the rents of the forests; runnels singing down the pastures; and roads, your road to school, so close to the verge that only the stone wall stays you from stepping off the edge of the world!
None of this had I known as a boy. “Who couldn’t write,” I muttered, “born into this glorious world!” I have seen much grander mountains. “Not a rugged, masculine touch in all the view,” Burroughs said to me. “It is all sweet and feminine, and doubtless has had a feminizing influence upon my character and writing.” It may be so. There is a plenty of wilder, stormier landscape than this in these Western[213] Catskills, but certainly none that I ever saw that is lovelier for a human home. And here Burroughs now sleeps, under the boulder where he played as a child, and where all this beauty of winding valley and blue, bending sky upon the mountains lies forever about him.
There is something terribly important and lasting about childhood. Almost any environment will do, if only the child is happy. It is the child who counts. In every child the world is recreated and in his memory stays recreated. More and more, as the years lengthen, do we find ourselves longing—for the pine barrens, for the vast green reach of the marshes; and were my feet free this summer day, they would run with my heart to the river—not to the mountains; to the river, the Maurice River, where the bubbling wrens build in the smother of reed and calamus, and where this very day the pink-white marshmallows make, at high noon, a gorgeous sunset over miles of the meadows. I love and understand those great, green levels of marshland as I shall love and understand no other face of nature, it may be. I know perfectly what Lanier means when he sings,
[214]
“Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.”
I said the clouds cleared late that afternoon, but it was still raining when, after dinner, I brought a box from the woodshed to the front porch for Burroughs to skin the woodchuck. Here we sat down together, the flabby, flaccid marmot between us, the whole October afternoon our own.
Burroughs pulled a rudimentary whetstone out of his coat pocket and touched up the blade of his knife—of his spirit, too, running his thumb along the blade of every faculty as he settled to the skinning, his shining eyes, his vibrant voice, his eager movements, all showing how razor-keen an edge the old man was still capable of taking. He got hold of a forefoot of the ’chuck and started to talk on the flight of birds, reviewing the various stages of the controversy on the soaring of hawks that he had been carrying on in the press, when, suddenly dropping his knife, he disappeared through the door and returned in a minute with a letter from[215] some scientist, whose argument, as I remember it, was wholly at variance with Burroughs’s theory, but which closed with a strange word, a word the old man had never seen before and could not find in his dictionary. It was some aeronautical term, I think. Handing me the letter, his finger, as well as his eyes, fastened to that stranger from beyond the dictionary, he said:
“That chap doesn’t know much about soaring hawks; but there’s a new word. See that! He knows a heap more than I do about the English language.”
He sat down to the skinning again. No cut had yet been made, nor ever would be made, apparently, unless he used the back of his blade, for it was plain that Burroughs kept that old whetstone for his wits only. He sawed away and talked as if inspired. I held the other forefoot, a short, broad foot, like a side-hill gouger’s, on the oldest, toughest ’chuck in the Catskills.
“Do you know what I am going to do?” he asked, switching the conversation into the hard-working knife. “I’m going to pickle this old rascal and send him by you to your family. I[216] want you all to have a dish of ‘Roxbury Lamb.’”
“But we have our own Hingham Lamb out on Mullein Hill,” I suggested cautiously. “And I don’t like to rob you this way.”
“No robbery at all. Besides, these are a better breed than yours in Hingham.”
“But my folks don’t seem very fond of ’em,” I protested. “They cook with a rank odor.”
“Oh, you don’t know how to prepare them,” he answered. “Let me show you a trick,” and deftly cutting in between the neck and the shoulder, he took out the thyroid glands.
“Now you’re going to take this one home. There’ll be no strong smell when you cook this fellow.”
Our talk turned to poetry—the skinning still going forward—the woodchuck brimming full of verse; for Burroughs, at every other turn of his knife, would seem to open up a vein of song. The beauty of nature to Burroughs had always been more than skin deep. He wanted the skin for a coat; the carcass he wanted for a[217] roast; but here was a chance for him to look into some of the hidden, fearful things of nature, and the sight inside of that woodchuck made him stop and sing.
But how old and frail he looked! And he was old, very old, eighty-four the coming April 9. And he was suddenly sad.
Resting a bit from his labor, he began to chant to the slackening rain:
“’Tis a dull sight
To see the year dying.
When winter winds
Set yellow woods sighing,
Sighing, O sighing.
“When such a time cometh,
I do retire
Into an old room
Beside a bright fire;
Oh, pile a bright fire!
“I never look out
Nor attend to the blast,
For all to be seen
Is the leaves falling fast,
Falling, falling!”
And he rubbed his thin hands together, spread them to the warmth, and repeated two or three times,
[218]
“Oh, pile a bright fire!”
“Oh, pile a bright fire!”
More than once, I heard him returning to those lines; and saw him several times reading the last stanzas of the poem from a typewritten copy on his porch table, chafing his hands the while, and extending them before the imaginary fire as if they were cold, or as if he felt through his hands, so sensitive was he physically, an actual fire in the written lines. The poem is Edward Fitzgerald’s “Old Song,” and I am sure Burroughs was learning it by heart, and making rather hard work of it, I thought, for one who had already in memory so much good poetry. But he was getting very old.
Then, at my request he said some of the lines of his own poem, “Waiting.” “The only thing I ever did,” he remarked, “with real poetry in it.”
“How about the philosophy in it,” I inquired, “Do you find it sound after all these years?”
There was an audible chuckle inside of him. Then rather solemnly he replied: “My father killed himself early trying to clear these acres of debts and stones. I might have been in my[219] grave, too, these forty years had I tried to hurry it his way. I waited. By and by Henry Ford came along and cl............