The earliest recollection that I have of Father was of one spring day when he was chasing and stoning the cat, our pet cat, who had caught a bluebird. I remember the fierce look in the cat's eyes, and her nose flattened over the back of blue, her nervously twitching tail, and the speed and strength with which Father pursued her, and the language he used, language that impressed me, at least, if not the cat, and which discredited the cat and her ancestry as well. As I remember it we rescued the bluebird, and there the picture fades. Just how Father himself looked then I do not know; doubtless, childlike, I accepted him as a matter of course, along with all the other interesting things in this world in which I was finding myself. Again I remember riding on his shoulder in the downstairs hall, as he skipped about with me, and of being face to face, on equal terms, with the hall lamp, and of telling Father that when I grew up I was going to be a king, and of Father telling me at once that they hung kings on a sour-apple tree. It was always a sour-apple tree, never a sweet one, used for hangings. So I was glad to relinquish the idea of being a king and to become instead a "finder-out of things." How Father did laugh at that! He had been telling me something of his readings in astronomy and the sciences, just at that time coming into their own, and I was so impressed and fired with emulation that I, too, declared for wanting to be "a finder-out of things," and Father would repeat it and laugh heartily. It is a joy to think of him as he was then, virile in body, full fleshed, active, leading in walking and skating and swimming—what a flood of memories! What an interest he took in all the things I did, and how often a most active part. One day in May I had gone out with our one shot of shad net, and was to try an experiment. I had told Father that I would row a ways up the river and throw out the net and then row on up to the mouth of Black Creek and fish for perch, and when the tide turned would row out and take up the net, which would catch the flood slack not far above. What he thought I do not know, for he went to Dick Martin, an experienced shad fisherman, and told him what I was going to do. Dick hastened to tell him, in alarm, that what I intended was impossible, that there was a row of old stakes out from the black barn just below the mouth of Black Creek and that my net would get fast on these and I would lose it, and perhaps come to harm besides. So Father walked the two miles, hurrying up along the steep and rocky shore, and found me just coming out from the creek. He told me what Dick had said and got into the boat and we rowed out to the net, which was acting very queerly.
"You're fast now, boy, it's just as Dick said," he exclaimed as I rowed as hard as I could for the long line of buoys. Never can I forget the hour of alarm and distress, for me, that followed. The tide turned and the loitering flood gave way to the sweeping ebb, the dark water from the creek came rushing down on us, the buoys swirled and twisted in the running water and began to disappear one by one. We quickly got hold of the end and I picked up as much as I could; then Father got hold and tried to pull the net loose. He pulled and pulled until he literally pulled the stern of the skiff under water.
"You'll have to cut the net, it is the only way," he said finally, red-faced and panting, so we did cut the net, leaving a middle section there on the old stake in the bottom of the river. There is no denying that it was thoughtful of him to come, and that he had my safety and welfare at heart. Though I was always cautious and wise to the way of the river, something might have happened and my bones might be there beside the old stake—and what a lot I would have missed!—or as Father once so aptly expressed it: "I'm not afraid to die, but I enjoy so much living!"
He was always cautioning me, and worrying about me when I was out on the river, especially at night, and yet he took chances that I would not take. In the early days here at Riverby there was no railroad on this side of the Hudson, and to get a train one must cross the river. In summer one hung out a white flag from West Park dock and Bilyou would row over for you, but when there was ice in the river one must walk or stay home. In zero weather it was only a matter of a long walk over the ice, often facing a blast of below-zero wind, but when the March thaws had begun one took one's life very lightly to venture on the ice. The thawing water cut away the ice from underneath, leaving no mark on the surface, weakening it in spots, and if one went through, the tide swept him under the ice, where the water was at least cold enough to chill one and make death easy. On such a day Father crossed the river on a crack, for, strange to say, one of the big cracks that always come in the ice had pushed or folded down, and not up, and the water had frozen over, making a streak of triple-thick ice, and on this streak he crossed the Hudson, the ice so far gone from the sun, so honeycombed and rotten, that he could stick his cane through on either side of his crack! Another time he was crossing in early April with his dog, and when in the middle of the river, which is a full half mile wide at Riverby, busy with his thoughts, he suddenly saw his dog running for the shore, which apparently was moving away rapidly toward New York! But the shores were standing eternally still; the ice it was that moved, and was moving up with the flood tide, moving just the width of a big canal that the ice harvesters had cut above. When the tide turned, about an hour later, all the ice went out of the river.
When first Father saw some smokeless powder he was surprised at its appearance, and would not believe it was powder, until he threw some on the hot stove. I used it in our old shotgun and he was much alarmed, yet he told me that in his hunt for Thomas's Lake, of which he speaks in "Wake Robin," he loaded his little muzzle-loading gun with an entire handful of powder and then, for he felt it would burst, he held it at arm's length over his head to fire. This he did time after time, in his attempt to signal to his companions. The little gun survived the ordeal and hangs now in the gun room. With it is the little cane gun, a small shotgun that looked exactly like a cane, but which was quite effective for small birds, and which he used when making collections of birds about Washington. Strangely enough for those days, it was against the law to shoot birds, and mounted guards enforced this law. Father would tell with glee how he would shoot a bird he wanted for his collection, and in a moment the guard would come rushing up, asking who fired the shot, and Father would tell him it was just over the rise of ground, or behind those trees, or something, and off would hurry the guard while Father picked up his bird and reloaded his cane. It seems queer to us now—to think of John Burroughs as shooting and mounting song birds, making collections to be set up on a tree behind glass, but he did, for in those days they were quite the proper thing, cases of them, fitting enough for museums, often being seen in private homes. I can remember taking lessons in taxidermy from Father, and of skinning and mounting wildfowl, and today there are a loon and a prairie chicken here in the house at Riverby that he mounted in those early years. The collections of birds he made are scattered far and wide or were destroyed long ago. All of them were shot with the little muzzle-loading cane gun or with a little muzzle-loading fowling piece: those were the days of the ramrod and wasps' or hornets' nests gathered and used for wadding, and the superstition, which Father often expressed, that if you spilled or dropped a shot in loading, it was your game shot, the one that would have killed and without which the shot would miss. I can see the fascinating-looking black powder now, scintillating as Father poured it from the palm of his short brown hand into the muzzle of the gun.
There was one quality which Father possessed to a marked degree and which I always envied him, a thing small in itself, yet which enabled him to accomplish what he did in literature, and that was the ability to lay aside the business or cares of life, as one would hang up one's hat, absolutely and completely, and turn to his writing. The world will think of him as a poet naturalist, as a gentle sage and philosopher, when he was in truth a literary craftsman, and one who could never give but a portion of his time and effort to his life's work until he was sixty years of age. I first remember him as a bank examiner. I remember his going away for trips to examine banks, of his packing his valise and putting on a white or "boiled" shirt, the gold cuff buttons, his combing his beard, the wonder and mystery of it all. Then he became a "mugwump" and the new party gave his bank-examining to someone else; and, as he expressed it, "I had to stir my stumps," and he took up the raising of fine grapes.
Just as his boyhood had the cow for its centre of interest, mine had the Delaware grape. And Father made a success of his vineyards. I can see him now summer pruning, he on one side of the row, I on the other, "pulling down" as we called the summer pruning, or he was stamping lids or tying up bundles of baskets. Many of the lids had sawdust on them which had to be blown or brushed off before they could be stamped. Father acquired the habit of blowing, and he got so used to it that he would blow anyway, whether or not the lid needed it; if it did not he would blow straight ahead and I would laugh at him for it, and he would raise his eyebrows and half smile, meaning, that it was something he could indulge himself in. He once wrote of his grandson:
"I had the rare good fortune to be born in the country upon a farm and to share in the duties and responsibilities of farm life. My poor grandson John is not so lucky in this respect and he has not had to pick up potatoes and stone and gather apples and husk corn and hoe corn and spread and rake hay and drive the cows and hunt up the sheep in the mountain and spread manure and weed the garden and clean the cow stables, and so on, and go two miles through snow-choked fields and woods to school in winter and have few books to read and see no illustrated papers or magazines. John has the movies by night and his bicycle by day and a graded school to attend and a hundred aids and spurs where I had none. My fate was better than John's and I can but hope he has advantages that I did not have that may offset the advantages I had."
In this case I know that time and distance lend enchantment, for of the hard work in the vineyards Father did very little—the cultivating with a horse on days so hot that the horse was covered with lather and the dust rose in a cloud over one's perspiration-soaked clothes, the days following the spray cart with the lime and blue vitriol flying in one's face and running down one's legs, the tying in March and early April until one's fingers were raw and one's neck ached from reaching up—of all these and other tasks he knew nothing. Often he said of himself that he was lazy; and, though what he accomplished in his life stands like a monument in one sense of the word, he was lazy. Routine work, a daily grind at tasks for which he had no liking, would have shortened his days and perhaps even embittered him. Yet with what eagerness he went at his writing! For sixty years and over he found his greatest joy in his craft—as he once wrote me, "There is no joy like it, when sap runs there is no fun like writing." As he said of his books in a preface to a new edition, "Very little real 'work' has gone into them." One day out at La Jolla, California, up on the hillside overlooking the blue Pacific there was a gathering in one of the biological laboratories and the school children came trooping in. Father was asked to talk to them and among other things he asked them if a bee got honey from the flowers. "No," he said, "the bee gets nectar from the flower, a thin sweetish liquid which the bee, by processes in its own body, turns into honey." I have always suspected that Father liked to think of himself as a bee, out in the sunshine and warmth, in the fields and woods, among the flowers, gathering delightful impressions of it all which with his handicraft he could preserve in an imperishable form that others might also enjoy. And does a bee really work? Is it not doing exactly what it enjoys or wants to do? Does it have to make any conscious effort to fare forth among the flowers? Does it have to keep on doing what it dislikes to do long after it is tired out? So whether the life of John Burroughs was one long life of happiness and lazy play, or whether it was one of hard work, depends, like so many other things, on the point of view. I like to think of his long and happy life as one in which he turned all work to play, and in so doing he accomplished mightily.
Often Father tried to account for himself, how he happened to break away from the life of his family and early environment so absolutely and completely and become, not a weak, easy-going, though picturesque farmer in the farther Catskills, but a man of letters, a unique and picturesque literary craftsman. "I had it in my blood, I guess," he once said. With it he had what most of us have, the love of the woods and fields and the hunting and fishing. Trout fishing, the most delightful of all, had for him a perennial charm, and bee-hunting, too, and camping out, exploring new streams and woods. All this was fostered and developed by his farm life and early associations, and then when he became vault keeper in the Treasury Department in Washington he was shut up away from it all with nothing to do but look at the steel doors. Almost without being able to do otherwise he began to live over again the delightful days he had spent afield by writing of them. He was like an exile dreaming of his native land. Nature has a trick of casting a spell over those who spend their days with her so that when the day is gone only the memories of the delights of it remain and these become ever more beautiful and highly coloured with time. To the homesick young man, shut up in the vault in Washington, the scenes of his native hills took on a beauty and charm they never could have done had he remained there among those very hills where his eyes and senses could drink their fill every hour. It seems to me like a lucky chance that his ambition to write, already manifest and firmly fixed, took the course it did, writing about Nature.