Rambles with John Burroughs

by R. J. H. De Loach

From this grave yard we went over the hill to the east, following the public road, till we came to a large patch of raspberries on the left of the road, which were growing in a hole surrounded by heaps of stone and brickbats. Mr. Burroughs did not tell me why his fancy led him there, but I knew when he told me that his father was born there, and that it was his grandfather's place. He was loath to leave here, but sat down on one of the old timbers in the centre of the place where the house stood and ate raspberries for some time. "How delicious these berries are! Far better it seems to me than any cultivated berries that ever grew." Having said this, he gave me a handful that I might try those he himself was gathering. From this place we went to the site of his grandfather's barn, where Mr. Burroughs discovered a few years ago his father's initials cut in a slab of stone. "These letters, 'C. A. B.' stand for Chauncey A. Burroughs, my father, born in 1803, who must have cut them here many, many years ago. I was very glad to make the discovery."

Just as we began our journey toward the nearby woods, he pointed out to me the little red school on the edge of the opposite hillside, where he got most of his education. "That school and the grounds about it, are about as they were when I was in school there over sixty years ago. The house was painted red then as it is now, and on some of the old seats I can see where some of my schoolmates cut their names." The call of a sharp shinned hawk attracted our attention from the school house, to the woods. Now we halted for several moments in the lower edge of the meadow. Mr. Burroughs thought they must have found some prey and that we might see what it was if we kept still and quiet. But the hawks went across the valley in the direction of the school house and we never saw what was the cause of the disturbance.

Going south from here, we came to some beautiful woods, at the bottom of which flowed a clear cool brook. At the upper edge of the hill was an outcrop of stratified rock. This was of the greatest interest to the naturalist, who, just back from the petrified forests of Arizona and the Yosemite valley, where he had enjoyed the companionship of John Muir, was chuck full of Geology and the Geological history of the earth. "You can see the effects of water in this perfect stratification here," he would say, as he pointed out the leaves of stone so perfectly marked there in the hillside. "If we could just roll back the pages of history a few millions of years, we could read some interesting and wonderful stories of the formation of Mother Earth's crust. Just look at the wave marks of the sea along the edges of the hill! How I wonder if old Triton did not have a great task allaying the waves that folded these pages! O what a small part man plays in the history of the earth! The creature of the hour and a mere speck on the face of nature." There is a sadness and sweetness in the associations with a man like this, and I could not help but think of Wordsworth's little poem as I listened to John Burroughs tell about his idea of the earth in its relation to man, and of how little man studies Mother Earth.

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bears her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."

There is kept before your mind the unquestionable seriousness of the influences of cosmic forces; the effects of an intimate relationship with Nature. Burroughs always sees the better and larger side of things. You never hear any of the nature prattle so common among the less serious students.

At this moment the red-eyed vireo burst in full song only a few feet from us and a Rubenstein would not have commanded our attention quicker. "The little fellow is doing almost the work of two," said the naturalist, so fluent was the song. He came within close range and softened down into a low mellow song, whereupon Mr. Burroughs remarked: "His audience is not quite as large as he first thought, so he is tuning his harp down accordingly." Here we came into the settlement roadway and returned to the Lodge for dinner.

III

In the afternoon, we set out early from Woodchuck Lodge for a long tramp through the pasture south of the Burroughs farm and in the direction of the Nath Chase farm. Back through the woods between the Lodge and the old farm, were scattered apple trees, which had some apples on them. Mr. Burroughs told something of the history of some of these apple trees, that they had been grafted many years ago by his father, and that others had been planted by the cattle as they followed the pathway through this pasture. There were signs that the gray squirrels had been eating the apples. We saw several piles of chips and a few apple seeds scattered on the wall fence, which the squirrels had chosen for a festal hall. On this wall, the naturalist would lean and look off over the hills toward the town of Roxbury, and tell of the neighbors who had settled this field and that. His mind sometimes seemed to be on,

"Far-off things,
And battles long ago."

Suddenly he looked around and said: "It's sweet to muse over one's early years and first experiences. I was just thinking of the many times I had gone through these woods. But O, how I dislike to see these trees cut down for wood, when so many are already down and rotting. This patch of woods extended to the bottom of the hillside, when I was a boy, and I think it was much prettier then than it is now." A very interesting piece of natural history pointed out to me beyond this pasture, was the tendency of birch to trace its roots over large areas of stone almost barren of soil. It has a preference for rocky places. The root of this tree will sometimes trace a small crevice in the stone twenty or thirty feet and does not seem to reach into any soil throughout its whole length.