Homesick Yankee Ramblings Part 5 - Cape Cod

I just checked Dr. Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and New York out of the library and it's got me plenty homesick. Dwight was a Congregationalist minister and the president of Yale from 1795-1817. He was also the grandson of the famous Northampton minister, Jonathan Edwards of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God fame. Travels, which spans four volumes, reads like a journal. Dwight stitches together detailed notes of many, many towns, villages, cities, natural sites, and various short biographies of notable people. The book was published in 1822, a few years after Dwight's death in 1817. Needless to say, I'll be posting some more quotes from Dr. Dwight here in the near future.

From Travels in New England and New York, Vol. III, Letter X:
"It has been a frequent opinion that this beach, and not improbably the whole township of Provincetown, will one day, and that at no distant period of time, be swept away by the ocean. I was not able to obtain satisfactory information concerning this subject, particularly as judicious persons differed entirely both as to facts and probabilities. Some averred that the beach has been greatly diminished within a moderate period. Others, particularly one, a discreet man, insisted that what it lost on one side it regularly gained on the other. It is now more than one hundred yards wide, and appears to the eye of a stranger as if every vestige of it might be easily swept away within two or three years."

"This remarkable object is an enormous mass of sand, such as has been already described, fine, light, of a yellowish hue, and the sport of every wind. It is blown into plains, valleys, and hills. The hills are of every height from ten to two hundred feet. Frequently they are naked, round, and extremely elegant; and often rough, pointed, wild and fantastical, with all the varied forms which are seen at times in drifts of snow."



Luckily for us, Dwight's fear that Provincetown would be washed away was never realized. Sitting out here in the desert, I'm sure the Cape's as beautiful now as it was when the Nauset lived there, or in 1620 when the Puritans arrived, or in 1800 when Timothy Dwight stood speculating on the beach, or when Thoreau called it a "wild, rank place", or when Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, and Jackson Pollack hung out there, or when Scott and Connie loved the water, boats, and stores in 1967, or when Erin and I and her family had a fire on the beach in 2007.

Destiny of Cats

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats? - Henry David Thoreau



According to Thoreau, we might not know the destiny of cats, but I'm pretty certain that knowing Ishmael's destiny would reveal something about my own. And, based on yesterday's visit to the vet, I hope that's true. After his terrible episode of kidney failure over a month ago, yesterday's blood test at the vet showed that Ishmael's levels are nearly back to normal. Considering how high they were, the drop is unprecedented and really astounding. The vet said she had never seen a cat with such high levels live, let alone recover to near normalcy. We can cut down on his medicine and he now only gets subcutaneous fluids twice a week. He's more energetic than he's been in months. Only his medical routine and shaved forelegs remind us of his sickness. I feel truly happy when I look at him, even when he's preventing me from doing my work.

My brother bought me the photo at the top. The back says the cats' names are "Buff, Juno, and Sappho." Apparently, Buff and Juno are not Sappho's muses...

10 Works - List 2 - American Greats on the American Great Outdoors

A couple weeks ago I decided to periodically post lists of works of literature that could comprise the syllabus for a college literature course. It's fun and I'd really dig it if folks shared some works with me in the comments section. My first list was American Nature Writing before 1900. If you didn't read that list, check it out too.


List 2 - American Greats on the American Great Outdoors 

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature - 1835 - Emerson looms large in the New England Renaissance. He was a Unitarian minister and his combination of naturalism and spiritualism later came to be known as Transcendentalism. We may have lost some of Emerson's starry-eyed (and transparent eyeballed) idealism, but he set the tone for the nature writing that followed him. I can't read John Muir and not think about Emerson.

 2. Henry David Thoreau - Walden: of Life in the Woods - 1854  -  Emerson lent the land to Thoreau, so he gets some credit here too. I was initially disappointed when I learned how close Thoreau was to civilization. While living near Walden Pond, he'd sometimes take the short walk to downtown Concord, Massachusetts to visit his mother. I've re-read Walden several times now and I realize that it's not how far you live from people, but how close you live to nature.

3. Mark Twain -  Life on the Mississippi - It's not enough to say that Mark Twain loved the Mississippi River. The river appears throughout his works. I even consider it a character in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When Twain became famous and moved to Hartford, Connecticut, he designed the office in his house to resemble the bridge of a steamboat.

4. Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass - Leaves of Grass explores America in the space between nature and civilization. For example:

I WILL take an egg out of the robin’s nest in the orchard,
I will take a branch of gooseberries from the old bush in the garden, and go and preach to the world;
You shall see I will not meet a single heretic or scorner,
You shall see how I stump clergymen, and confound them,
You shall see me showing a scarlet tomato, and a white pebble from the beach.

5. John Muir - Studies in the Sierra - John Muir was Scottish, but did more for American conservation that anyone before the Roosevelts. In fact, when Theodore Roosevelt visited northern California, he requested to go camping with John Muir. He and Muir snuck away from the presidential entourage and spent a night around a campfire.

6. Jack London - The Call of the Wild - For some reason middle school teachers like to torture their students with this book; it's not for sensitive animal lovers. Though a dog is the protagonist, we're left to question if, like Buck, we could revert to something more primitive. I think we'd like to think so.

7. Ernest Hemingway - In Our Time - Includes Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, including "Big Two-Hearted River."

8. William Faulkner - Go Down, Moses - A collection of semi-interrelated short stories including "The Bear" and "Delta Autumn." Isaac McCaslin is Faulkner's Nick Adams.

9. John Steinbeck - Travels with Charlie - When Steinbeck was older and living in New York, he read a review that said he was out of touch with America. Dismayed, he built a camper out of his pickup, packed up his standard poodle, Charlie, and headed out on the road. It's a great road trip memoir.

10. Tim O'Brien - Northern Lights - One of O'Brien's earlier works, it's the story of two brothers on a snowshoe trip in Minnesota. There are some very Nick Adams-like themes going on.

N.C. Wyeth and Henry David Thoreau - "Men of Concord"

I've been thinking a lot about the books I have at home in Massachusetts. I didn't bring most of them with me to Arizona because I was afraid they'd get ruined with all the moving. For example, I have a beautiful copy of Henry David Thoreau's "Men of Concord" illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. I'd seen Wyeth's illustrations before, but only recently did I realize that he's an American icon. Every time I visit my family I end up bringing a couple books back that I miss too much to part with. I think "Men of Concord" will be coming back this time. 

10 Works - List 1 - Nature Writing before 1900

I've been teaching English language and literature for seven years now and I noticed that my mind tends to organize things I read into potential syllabi. I thought it might be fun to share some of the lists I come up with, so here goes:

List 1 - American Nature Writing Before 1900

1. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur - Letters from an American Farmer - 1782 - Crèvecœur was a French immigrant to the America who recorded his experiences with the colonial/republican political experiments, but also his experiences with the natural world he discovered in Orange County, New York.

2. Thomas Jefferson - Notes on the State of Virginia - 1787 - One of Jefferson's best known works, "Notes" discusses cultural and natural issues. Jefferson engages in what modern readers recognize as questionable pseudo-science, particularly his remarks on Native Americans and African-Americans, but his scientific mind shines when he talks about nature.

3. Meriwether Lewis - The Journals of Lewis and Clark - 1804-1806 - though the Lewis and Clark expedition laid the way for westward expansion and the dispossession of the Native Americans, those on the expedition didn't know it at the time. Poor Lewis committed suicide in 1909, but the work he left behind paints an fascinating portrait of the American west before expansion.

4. John James Audubon - Ornithological Biography or An account of the habits of the birds of the United States of America  - 1831 - This is the accompanying text to Birds of America. Ornithological Biography tells stories of the birds Audubon depicted in Birds of America and describes his own dangerous experiences in the wilderness.

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature - 1835  - The ultimate work of Transcendentalism.

6. Susan Fenimore Cooper - Rural Hours - 1850 - Though I couldn't quite justify including her famous father, James Fenimore Cooper, in the list, Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours is a beautiful work of nature writing. Thoreau consulted it when writing Walden.

7. Henry David Thoreau - Walden: of Life in the Woods - 1854 and The Maine Woods - 1864

8. John Wesley Powell - Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries. - 1875 - John Wesley Powell only had one arm, but he sure got a lot done. The parts about the Grand Canyon are amazing.

9. Walt Whitman - Specimen Days - 1882 - This is some of Whitman's prose. It's really beautiful.

10. John Muir - Just read everything you can by John Muir.

So that's what I got. I did this mostly off the top of my head, so I'm sure I missed some great stuff. I know I I also didn't really define nature writing, but I'm relying on the content to do that for me. Also, I didn't include Native American nature writing here because that deserves its own list rather than being lumped in with the Euro-American stuff. Oh, and all the links go directly to the works because it's all off copyright!

What did I miss? Fill me in. Post your own list.