The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

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.

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 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 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 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!”