New York was called the Empire State because the waterways that formed it—the Hudson, the St. Lawrence, the Mohawk, the Susquehanna—like human veins, rapidly enabled the penetration of the American continent.
When the eye studies a map of the eastern coast of North America, taking in the larger patterns, ignoring straight lines and boundaries and what they signify, what it sees is an arc—not a small accidental arc stranded in the sea, but part of a great formation, a ragged archipelago spanning the northern seas. Under the water from Ireland to Newfoundland along this curve, vast submarine plateaus run back to back across the Atlantic, forming a ghostly underwater chain that mirrors the land above. A gradual interaction developed over years and was part of a greater continuum, a topographical one. Water was the primary element in what became one of the most rapid transformations of land and culture in the history of the world. The sea brought fishermen from the northern coasts of Europe to the Grand Banks (where they brought back the fish that fed Catholic Europe for centuries). The fishermen made camps on the shore, where they dried the fish in the summer months to take back to Europe. The Indians came down to the shore, willing to trade even the clothes on their own bodies for the iron they saw in the hands of the fishermen, which instantly outmoded all of their painstakingly crafted implements of bark and bone and clay. The Europeans followed the sources of Indian fur inland, decimating as they went the beaver meadows along the waterways.
What became New York State in the nexus of these waterways was like a frame frozen in the process. Fort Orange at Albany was the dominant fur-trading outpost of the Dutch. The first wave of wealth built fortunes on beaver felt. The earliest state monograph, in 1844, reported that the beaver had entirely vanished from the state, which retained it as a state symbol denoting the creation of a financial center built on the back of the fur trade. In the decades that followed, the question became how to recognize and document what was native, how to bring the beaver back.
A 1918 study of New York native plants began:
One who is upon the gray ocean at this season of the year, when, in the woods and at the roadsides in the State of New York, the wild flowers are beginning to redeem their promises of life, appreciates as never before how much these quiet, persistent pioneers of the fields contribute in scent, color and form to the making of that which is summed up in the name New York . . . The sight of a spray of these native flowers, such as many a page in this book carries, would be as a twig borne back in ancient times to the ark—a sign that, though the flood of war has overwhelmed many valleys, the elemental processes of life go forward undisturbed in the “Empire State.” (John Finley, New York State Museum Memoir 15, Wild Flowers of New York 1918)
The long progression of water plants, from cattails and sedges to pickerelweed and butter yellow spatterdock, showed how the primitive spiraling form of the water lily contained the gradual development of the flower—as though the practical use of beauty was thought out in a slow deliberate effort by the organism of the plant itself.
The water lily affords the best illustration of the evolution of blossoms we have in the world today. In the several species of the family we may see sepals being transformed into petals, and petals into stamens; the transition is so gradual and insensible that many intermediate bodies are neither petals nor stamens, but partly both.
The plates that follow display every subtle gradation of blue in the color spectrum, from the soft blue grays of wild flags to the deep indigo of the closed gentian—its blossoms sealed like lips—and the pale violet-tinged cerulean of the roadside bluebell with its tough fibrous stems and leaves. The scarlet lobelia, the cardinal flower, was already a rare sight in the woods, and people were told to stop picking them before they disappeared.
The Fishes of New York (1903) contains a peculiar photograph of a boy straddling an immense dead sturgeon. The sturgeon was so common in the Hudson at the time that it was called Albany beef and formed the basis of a caviar industry that eclipsed the caviar industry of Russia. The fish was a living fossil from the Devonian, six to twelve feet long, and often breached:
This is a species concerning which so many stories have been related as to leaping into boats and injuring the occupants.
Of its eyes:
the pupils are black; the iris golden.
Of the books in my grandfather’s office, the one I prized the most was Memoir 12, the two-volume Birds of New York, by Elon Howard Eaton, illustrated by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. For years I kept odd fragments of Eaton’s text like pieces of beautiful ribbon tucked away in books:
Here the kingfisher forms her nest of fish bones and scales ejected from her stomach.
The Jack or Hudsonian curlew: like the long-billed curlew it exhibits much sympathy for wounded companions, often sacrificing its life by returning in answer to their cries. Its flesh is much inferior to that of the Eskimo curlew, being quite unpalatable, except in the fall when it has fed for some time on berries and grasshoppers.
The willet, woodcock (scolopax), phalarope, turnstone, plover, snipe or sandpiper are all variations on the same theme, whether they resemble pebbles or leaves.
The observations recorded in the books from not fifty years before astonished us: of white pelicans on Seneca Lake; of a winter rookery on East Lake Road in 1910 that was estimated to contain thirty thousand crows; of a golden eagle trapped in Rochester and taken to the zoo; of the “Niagara trap”—the placid waters of the Niagara River that every year swept hundreds of unsuspecting whisding swans over the falls; of the meticulously recorded disappearance of the passenger pigeon, which only a few decades before still darkened the sky with a flapping of wings that sounded like thunder or the noise of the ocean or an approaching train. The birds came down in the millions at the salt licks of the Montezuma Swamp on the Seneca River.
Eaton taught at Hobart. Fuertes lived in Ithaca. The two men marked the north-south boundaries of the Finger Lakes, and their detailed local observations centered the books there. They began with water birds—not sea birds, but the freshwater birds of the Great Lakes.
The heavy plates of the illustrations were carefully faced in opaque sheets of tissue paper, as though they were something precious that needed to be wrapped to keep from fading away.
Louis Agassiz Fuertes was named after the Swiss naturalist Agassiz, whose view that there was an underlying pattern in nature, and that the pattern and its inherent beauty were a manifestation of the divine, was rendered obsolete by Darwin. Agassiz discovered the Ice Age and used the layering of the exposed rock face of the Helderberg escarpment outside of Albany to establish its chronology. He developed his expertise as a naturalist and paleontologist with his work on the fossil fish of the Devonian. When Agassiz was teaching at Harvard and a young man would come to his office to ask if he could apply to be his student, Agassiz would set before him a fish preserved in formaldehyde. He would leave the young man alone there for hours with the instruction, “Look at your fish.”
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The New York State Museum on the fifth floor of the old state education building was one of the joys of my childhood. The elevator doors would open, and there you were in the Gilboa Forest, the Devonian forest of giant fern trees found in the fossil river delta of heaped mud that formed the Catskill Mountains. It was the oldest remnant forest in the world.
The Devonian was the age of rising up, away from the water, the age of bones and stems. In the Devonian the moon was half the distance to the earth that it is today. The tides, drawn up by the closeness of the moon, pulled the earth faster in space. The four hundred days of the Devonian year were recorded in the carbonate skins of horn corals formed in the shallow tropical sea of the Finger Lakes, whose evaporates would ultimately become a salt formation hundreds of feet thick. The bodies of once living things trapped in layers of mud became the oil pools of Cuba Springs south of Seneca Lake. The drilling equipment from the salt mines was used to drill the first simple oil wells when petroleum began to replace whale oil during
the blockades of the Civil War. Petroleum, like whale oil, is fat, fossil fat—the decayed, transformed fat of living things trapped in mud and clay, oozing forth with either a green or reddish cast, depending upon whether its host matter was animal or plant.
The discovery of petroleum in the United States is credited to the Jesuit D’Allion, who in the early seventeenth century saw the Seneca use as medicine the black material that bubbled up from the ground in western New York.
Sullivan’s men had similar reports and in 1750 the French officer Contrecoeur wrote to Montcalm of the Seneca ceremonially setting fire to the oil on the surface of the Allegheny River.
John D. Rockefeller grew up two lakes east of Seneca, on Owasco Lake. His grandfather had been a snake oil (“Seneca Oil”) salesman out of Richford south of Ithaca.
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The first sound you heard coming into the Gilboa Forest was water. The central feature of the reconstruction was a waterfall, like the falls at Slate Rock, Taughannock, or Watkins Glen—the water pooling beautifully down through layers of mud stone, broken symmetrically into layered blocks. Among the blocks were the ossified trunks of the giant fern trees.
In glass-faced dioramas on either side were the giant celadon dragonflies of the Devonian, and the first amphibians coming out on the shore with their bare softcolored skin, some speckled, some scarlet. These were the first delicate land animals, which would become huge carnivores and shrink again into living flowers.
Behind the waterfall were glass cases in the walls showing the brilliantly colored depths of the Devonian sea—the ammonites, with their flowing colored bodies, straight and curled in spiral shells; a shard of the shell of a giant squid found in the earth near Watertown; the living trilobites, whose fossil bodies would click out of the blue-gray stone on our cottage shore in perfect ovals, finely lined as though in carved relief. Then the early fish, whose fins ultimately became hands; and the Albany rhipidistrian, with scales delicately outlined in red, whose body explained the development of lungs—a stomachlike sac to hold air during the dry periods when the water was gone, just as the vascular insides of rising plants developed, when blue-green algae from the ancient seas washed exposed surfaces of dry rock, to hold moisture away from the water.
The first fragments of life were scraps of color, pieces of pigment that by way of the color itself could draw in and transform light into life. Thus color and physical form were intimately bound, form deriving from color. The color turned the light into sugar, the substance of life.
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I sometimes feel I am living the life of my great-aunt Dorothy, who lived with her husband, a World War I vet, and her dog in a house in the woods in the lake country of southern Ontario. I can still hear her old Scots voice in my head:
Notice the ends of their wings—whether they’re jagged or smooth. They fly around like that for miles till one of them finds a carcass, and they all come for the feast. I think they’re turkey vultures, ’cause that’s typical of turkey vultures. There were a bunch of them eating a dead skin when I was on my way to church one day. They waited till we were oh, twenty feet away or so and then they took off, slow as you please, and sat in a plane tree nearby. Oh, they’re horrible-looking things, with their red necks. They nest in just a pile of rocks on the ground.
That little lake was so clear when we moved here. Now it’s all weeds from one end to the other. Likely the pollution in the water is killing it. All these hideous hydro-things. They annihilate life.
“I don’t know about that, Aunt Dorothy,” Mother says. “I don’t want to live without electricity. I’m too old and set in my ways.”
Oh, I lived that way for years. I don’t mind it at all. We loved the lamps. Ern and I.
There’s still part of an Indian family around here. Dug up long before we ever came to Verona. They took out human remains, human bones. I don’t think that there’re any skeletons. It’s more likely to have been a skirmish.
The bare trees—they’re just like filigree. Where Marg lived there are thick woods and they see wolves or coyotes. I don’t know what they are. I could drive all day, just looking at rocks and trees. Are you still gathering rocks? Remember how we used to have to stop so you could pick up rocks? Look at all the spots on that rock. Lichen, is it?
When I graduated from college I was visiting Aunt Dorothy in her little house on Mud Lake. I asked her what she thought I should do. I wanted to go to graduate school to become an archaeologist. “If I were you, I’d take the money and make a down payment on a farm somewhere in New York State,” she said.
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Blue-green algae from the ancient seas washed exposed surfaces of dry rock and ultimately thickened into moss, the reproduction of which involves swimming particles that do not need to leave the watery element of the plant. In another three hundred million years woody plants would grow so far from their origin in water, and from each other as they rose up into the air that their reproduction would need to depend on something else, another kind of living being and the means to attract it. In the Cretaceous, as the flower developed and diversified in scent and color and form, populations of insects developed and diversified across the earth. The first known honeybee dates to a fossil from the Cretaceous found in Kazakhstan.
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My husband once gave me a painting of a white farmhouse beside a maple tree. Beyond its red barns and fields a ridge of blue hills rose through a green wash of forest. It was a familiar local scene that could have been anywhere in the open land of the hidden hill country of New York State, in the Hudson Valley or the Finger Lakes.
When I first came to the valley where we live now, I thought how like the painting it was. It was a quiet afternoon in early May and the apple trees in the orchard behind the house were blossomed over with white.
I walked up through the fields to the line of pines above and found an abandoned cistern, its sides matted with soft green moss. Water trickled in from a spring cut through a face of layered mud stone, swirled with silver and rust that crumbled at a touch.
The water was filled with silky masses of eggs. Newts hung loosely down below the surface. A bull-headed salamander ate one as I watched, tearing the flesh away as it held the newt firmly in its hands. Mottled black mink frogs with bright green masks watched as I slid into the cold water and swam.
As I lifted myself up on the side of cracked old cement, its ragged surface stinging my hands, I heard, then felt, the wind come across the valley. A blotch of white unfolded from the bare trees and circled down on the wind, a white hawk.
When we moved into the farmhouse, it had not been lived in for years. Inside we found only a leather-top card table with lime-green legs, and on it five large clay pots of red geraniums. At first we heard strange sounds in the night—footsteps like those of an old man pacing a slow familiar round, getting up to make coffee in the early morning dark, a ghost. One night we heard the rocking chair creaking back and forth in the next room. Lan walked warily in with his flashlight, and uttered a cry of delight. Curled on the narrow back of the chair was a flying squirrel watching him with huge round eyes as bright as black onyx. Folds of fur as soft as velvet were tucked along its sides. The little squirrel examined us in a placid, almost benevolent way. It hopped about our bedroom, climbing up to watch us in bed—where I sat drinking hot whiskey as Lan read Bleak House out loud to put us back to sleep. At last the squirrel climbed into a geranium by the open window, twitching its whiskers, clusters of soft white, like dandelion fluff. Out it ran. Then back it came to look again.
The year is a reliable circle: the bluebirds nesting in the apple trees in spring, the spiraling song of the veery in summer, the swarms of dragonflies hunting midges over the fields in the damp evenings of early fall, the black bear that comes down from the woods before the snow and smashes our beehives to pieces, neatly scraping off each comb and tossing them all in a broad white sweep up the hill. Every year something is a little different and plucks at our attention.
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p; It often seems that the things I looked for in the days of Bob and Gary, almost as though they were mysteries, are all around me now. The wild turkeys that began to appear on East Lake Road years ago are thirty strong in our field. I woke one day to see one walking down the road in the melting snow. As he turned into the sun I was amazed to see that the feathers puffed out over his breast and body had a bright metallic green sheen. His sky blue head and red wattle made him the most extraordinary apparition. The females scratching through the snow for seeds ignored him, however.
Once I walked along the edge of the field with our dog Fred, a slender red hound with velvet-soft ears. Someone once said that Fred was the dog of the Magyar hordes of Central Asia—poor companionable Fred, nudging me along through my daily routines with his little head. He has a habit of racing around me as I walk, running around and around in a figure eight. On the final loop he likes to run right toward your legs and just miss them, as a joke—though once in a while he will crash and knock you down. Then he picks up a heavy fallen branch and, growling, shakes and drags it along the ground, as he once might have dragged a wild boar.
I have seen a large old buck in the field locking antlers with younger ones that come to throw him. They dance back and forth, the tines of their antlers curled together, until the old one, who is slightly crippled in a back leg, throws the younger to the ground.
One winter Fred and I saw a wounded doe lying crumpled in the field. As we came near her the buck with the bad back leg bounded out of the trees below us and ran to the doe and nudged her to her feet with his anders. She stumbled and fell. He nudged her to her feet again, and again, slowly helping her reach the safety of the far trees.
Wolves & Honey Page 11
