The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Let him go softly through the May twilight and wait at the edge of the swamp. A voice serene and pure, a hymn, a prayer, fills all the dusk with peace. Let him watch and see the singer, a brown-winged wood thrush, with full, spotted breast. Let him be glad that it is not a white-winged spirit, or a disembodied voice. And let him wonder the more that so plain a singer knows so divine a song.

Our philosopher mistakes his own dominant mood for the constant mood of nature. But nature has no constant mood. No more have we. Dawn and dusk are different moods. The roll of the prairie is unlike the temper of a winding cowpath in a New England pasture. Nature is not always sublime, awful, and mysterious; and no one but a philosopher is persistently contemplative. Indeed, at four o’clock on a June morning in some old apple orchard, even the philosopher would shout,—

“Hence, loathèd melancholy!”

He is in no mind for meditation; and it is just possible, before the day is done, that the capture of a drifting seed of the dandelion and the study of its fairy wings might so add to the wonder, if not to the sweetness, of the flower, as to give him thought for a sermon.

There are times when the companionship of your library is enough; there are other times when you want a single book, a chapter, a particular poem. It is good at times just to know that you are turning with the earth under the blue of the sky; and just as good again to puzzle over the size of the spots in the breasts of our several thrushes. For I believe you can hear more in the song when you know it is the veery and not the wood thrush singing. Indeed, I am acquainted with persons who had lived neighbors to the veery since childhood, and never had heard its song until the bird was pointed out to them. Then they could not help but hear.

No amount of familiarity will breed contempt for your fields. Is the summer’s longest, brightest day long enough and bright enough, to dispel the brooding mystery of the briefest of its nights? And tell me, what of the vastness and terror of the sea will the deep dredges ever bring to the surface, or all the circumnavigating drive to shore? The nature-lover is a man in a particular mood; the nature-student is the same man in another mood, as the fading shadows of the morning are the same that lengthen and deepen in the afternoon. There are times when he will go apart into the desert places to pray. Most of the time, however, he will live contentedly within sound of the dinner horn, glad of the companionship of his bluebirds, chipmunks, and pine trees.

This is best. And the question most frequently asked me is, How can I come by a real love for my pine trees, chipmunks, and bluebirds? How can I know real companionship with nature?

How did the boy along the starlit lake come by it,—a companionship so real and intimate that the very cliffs knew him, that the owls answered him, that even the silences spoke to him, and the imagery of his rocks and skies became a part of the inner world in which he dwelt? Simply by living along Winander and hallooing so often to the owls that they learned to halloo in reply. You may need to be born again before you can talk the language of the owls; but if there is in you any hankering for the soil, then all you need for companionship with nature is a Winander of your own, a range, a haunt, that you can visit, walk around, and get home from in a day’s time. If this region can be the pastures, woodlots, and meadows that make your own door-yard, then that is good; especially if you buy the land and live on it, for then Nature knows that you are not making believe. She will accept you as she does the peas you plant, and she will cherish you as she does them. This farm, or haunt, or range, you will come to know intimately: its flowers, birds, walls, streams, trees,—its features large and small, as they appear in June, and as they look in July and in January.

For the first you will need the how-to-know books,—these while you are getting acquainted; but soon acquaintance grows into friendship. You are done naming things. The meanings of things now begin to come home to you. Nature is taking you slowly back to herself. Companionship has begun.

Many persons of the right mind never know this friendship, because they never realize the necessity of being friendly. They walk through a field as they walk through a crowded street; they go into the country as they go abroad. And the result is that all this talk of the herbalist and birdlorist, to quote the philosopher again, seems “little better than cant and self-deception.”