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Gerald Schwartz
Sentimental Deception High-mindedness is not curiosity. It may have led us to our wide-spread, current assumption that a beaver lodge is one of the wonders of nature but that human dwellings are somehow separate from nature and possibly poisonous to it. When Ralph Waldo Emerson came to the Adirondacks in August, 1858, he felt that dichotomy strongly:
Look to yourselves, ye polished
gentlemen! The “they” of whom Emerson wrote were native guides, and the “polished gentlemen” his Boston friends, who had come to the Adirondacks. The organizer of the excursion was William James Stillman (1828-1901), at various times a painter (he studied landscape painting with Frederick E. Church), a journalist, an outdoorsman, and a diplomat (U. S. Consul to Rome in 1861-1865, and to Crete in 1965-69). He was a variously able man who never chose one ability to pursue full bore. In 1857 he took some notables from the Boston-Cambridge-Concord axis to the Adirondacks: James Russell Lowell, Lowell’s brother-in-law, two of Lowell’s nephews, and John Holmes (brother to Oliver Wendell Holmes). The next summer the group expanded to include Emerson, Louis Aggasiz, Judge Hoar (later, attorney general in Grant’s cabinet), Dr. Jeffries Wyman, Dr. Estes Howe, Horatio Woodman and Amos Binny. Of the ten, only one was not a member of the Saturday Club. Four belonged to the Whist Club. And they all became on the sylvan spot members of the Adirondack Club of Boston. The encampment was known as Follansbee Pond (the term lake being, in the section, reserved for a sheet of several miles in length), and it lies in a cul-de-sac of the chain of lakes and streams named after one of the first of the Jesuit explorers of the northern states, Pere Raquette. Many things were requisite for a good camping-ground. First and indispensable was a spring of water nearby; then a dry and elevated plateau, wooded with hard wood—beeches, birch, and maple—with level ground for the camp, free from the tangle of undergrowth which made the fir thicket impenetrable; then a smooth, sandy beach on which the boats could be drawn at night, and which could be approached without danger from the rocks, and on which loading and unloading were easy. Theirs was the best place they had ever seen—at the head of the lake, with beach, spring, and maple grove. In his Autobiography of a Journalist (1901), Stillman wrote: The rumor of the advent of the party spread through the country all around Saranac, and at the frontier town where we began the journey into the woods the whole community was on the qui vive to see, not Emerson or Lowell, of whom they knew nothing, but Agassiz, who had become famous in the commonplace world through having refused, not long before, an offer from the Emperor of the French of the keepership of the Jardin des Plantes and senatorship if he would come to Paris and live. Such disinterested love for America and science in our hemisphere had lifted Agassiz into an elevation of popularity which was beyond all scientific or political dignity, and the selectmen of the town appointed a deputation to welcome Agassiz and his friends to the region. A reception was accorded, and we went, having taken care to provide ourselves with an engraved portrait of the scientist to guard against a personation and waste of their respects. The head of the deputation, after having carefully compared Agassiz to the engraving, turned gravely to his followers and said, “Yes, it’s him;” and they proceeded with the same gravity to shake hands in their order, ignoring all our other luminaries. But it was Emerson who most fascinated Stillman: And Emerson was such a study as can but rarely be given any one. The crystalline limpidity of his character, free from all conventions, prejudices, or personal color, gave a facility for study of the man limited only by the range of vision of the student. Here’s Emerson on his fellow campers:
Wise and polite,—and if I drew Pretty lofty stuff! Stillman had hoped to enlist Longfellow for the trip: Longfellow did indeed ask: Is it true that Emerson is going to take a gun? He asked me, and when I said that he finally decided to do so, Longfellow ejaculated, Then somebody will be shot! And would talk no more of going. In all other accounts of the gathering, the gathering became known as “The Philosopher’s Camp,” a name which moved Emerson to the center of the group. Emerson:
…we swept with oars the Saranac, The poet had painted his picture with the grouping of an artist’s imagination. The drenching day of arrival, the night of discomfort at the hut on the carry, and the carry itself, the journey through the ponds. He makes no mention of Agassiz’s discover of a fresh-water sponge. To Emerson, as to many perhaps who are receptive to nature’s message, the forest was an overpowering fact.
Northward the length of Follansbee
we rowed, It’s all too easy to poke fun at Emerson, of course; nobody’s ever been great without being silly. All the same, these were urbane intellectuals who went to the wilderness as tourists. In an editorial on August 9, 1864, titled “A Central Park for All the World,” the NEW YORK TIMES rhapsodized about the extension of rail lines into the Adirondacks, northward from Saratoga, “aimed directly at the heart of wilderness.” The jaded merchant or financier or litterateur or politician, feeling ignited within him again the old passion for nature and longing for inspiration of physical exercise and pure air and grand scenery, has only to take an early morning train in order to sleep the same night in the shadow of kingly hills and waken with his memory filled with pleasant dreams, woven from the ceaseless music of mountain streams. Alongside the jaunty, acquisitive tone of the Time’s editorial, there’s shadow, fear of human enterprise… Isn’t there always! Here are a few lines from Emerson, capturing the giddy pleasures of the 1858 expedition:
Lords of this realm, There’s an unquestioned access in these lines, isn’t there? Not only to the wilderness but also to the most grandiose emotional states—represented by the religious diction of lords, miracles of pomp, sylvan gods, and dwellers of the zodiac—that the wilderness could inspire in Emerson and his breathless friends. To be a little delirious in the midst of such beauty makes perfect sense. But the grammar of the first sentence in that passage provides another reason, besides the inflated rhetoric, for suspicion: “Lords of this realm, … we must be proud…” Once the pride has slackened, the camp will sag to ruin and the taxes go unpaid. If a similar group of worthies today could make such an expedition and have it so assiduously recorded, the tone would of course be quite different. There would be none of Emerson’s cheerful patrilineal optimism, but instead the melancholy frisson of things coming to an end, or at least to be the beginnings of an end. Someone would surely say the phrase, “a place we haven’t ruined yet,” as if nature were where we go to think of where we fell from. Whatever art, whatever poetry, whatever music, we’re going to have the rest of our lives, and beyond, had better find a way not to use nature as a whip to scourge ourselves, but rather to imagine how we might live in it, rather than set ourselves apart from it like bad children. It was only a few years after the Philosopher’s Club’s brief life that the poet/philosopher Matthew Arnold made, from England, his melancholy prediction that art would replace religion. He was wrong. Nature’s replaced—for many—religion. Nature had not fared so well under the old dispensation, for was not the very creation fallen? Was not the earthly span of humans a kind of debriefing for the confused soul, at the end of which humans would shuck off their “vile bodies,” as the Book of Common Prayer calls them, and like chicks stepping out of their eggs move to our weightless, immaterial destinations. But to worship something, you make it bigger, better, far away. God used to be like that, for no slumlord lives in the slums. Now nature has been set apart from us—so much so that we use the phrase “the natural world” without asking ourselves the obvious question: what might the unnatural world be? We tend to love nature for what it isn’t—tainted by us, its sentimental deception. This is a dangerously long way from the situation the poet Robert Frost discovers in the beautiful last line from his “Hyla Brook,” We love the things we love for what they are. How did the Philosopher’s Club pass their time? Stillman: In the main, our occupations were those of a vacation, to kill time and escape from the daily groove. Some of us took our guides and made exploration, by land or by water; after breakfast there was firing at a mark, a few rounds each, for those who were riflemen; then, if venison was needed, we put the dog out on the hills; one boat went to overhaul the set lines baited the evening before for lake trout. When the hunt was over we generally went out to paddle on the lake, Agassiz and Wyman to dredge or botanize or dissect the animals caught or killed; those of us who had interest in natural history watching the naturalists, the others searching the nooks and corners of the pretty sheet of water with its inlet brook and bays and recesses, or bathing from the rocks. Lunch was midday, and then long walks… Here’s Emerson’s take:
Ask you, how went the hours?
Insatiate skill in water
or in air
Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss; The while, one leaden pot of alcohol Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds. Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants, Orchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus, Rosy polygonum, lake-margin's pride, Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge and moss, Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls. One Sunday morning, when the state of the larder made it necessary for the guides to get a deer, Emerson would have nothing of it, as he was then and there more disposed to quiet meditation. So he went boating with Stillman. It was a magnificent morning; in the silence of the forest the far off baying of the hounds as they took the scent on the surrounding hills above them and followed the deer. When the deer are in good condition, as in August, they generally take a long run before they come to water, and so Emerson and Stillman could hear the dogs sweeping round over the hills at the farther end of the lake, and coming back, ranging to and fro, till the excitement of expectation rose in Emerson, and he could resist no longer. “Let us go after deer!” he exclaimed; and suddenly all that effort to seek a place of meditation vanished. They had no gun, but they were soon flying down the lake from the one corner to the sounds of the hunt on the far shore. But they were too late; Lowell had already killed the deer before they made shore. Interesting to see how Emerson grew into camp life. At first, he wouldn’t carry a rifle, and decided to take one only because everyone else did, but took no part in hunting or fishing. But it didn’t take too long before he caught what (and sometimes, even today) was known as “buck fever”. But when he took part in the drives, luck (and, as we shall see, skill) failed him. Seems as though the deer always came into some other watcher. So Stillman decided to take Emerson night-hunting—i.e. stealing up on the deer as they browse in the pads along the shallow water, carrying in the bow of the boat a light to blind the animal, the lantern throwing all its light forward, with the hunter sitting invisible in the shadow. This manner of hunting is possible only on very dark nights, and the camp would resort only to doing this when venison was really needed. They took the best guide at the paddle, Emerson took the firing-seat behind the lamp, and Stillman sat in the middle, his rifle ready, in case the poet missed his shot. Stillman: We went down the lake to the large bay at the left of the outlet, which we had named “Osprey Bay,” from the osprey nest in one of the tall pines. The shore was an alternation of stretches of sandy beach where the white lily-pad thrived, offering food for deer. There was something weird in silently gliding along the spectral diorama of irrecognisable landscape, with rocks and trees slipping by like phantasms; for the motion of the boat was not indistinguishable, and the only sound was the occasional grating of the rushes on the bottom of the boat. It is, in fact, the most exiting form of deer-hunting for certain temperaments, and the poet was strongly impressed. Soon the guide caught the sound of the footfall of a deer making its way down to the shore, and he turned the glare of the lamp on the beach, moving directly on him till the deer was within twenty yards. Again and again the guide signaled to fire, but Emerson could distinguish nothing. “Shoot!” finally whispered the exasperated guide in the faintest of breath. “Shoot!” urged Stillman. But the deer was invisible to Emerson, and they drifted to a boat’s length from the deer before the animal was spooked and bolted for the woods. Stillman got off a hasty shot, but with no result. Emerson was stupefied. They rounded the next point and found another deer already on the feeding-ground, and the whole experience was repeated. The deer stood broadside to Emerson, in full view, in the shallow water; but, straining his vision to the utmost, he could see nothing that looked like a deer, and when they got so close that the whole thing was going to be another repeat performance, Stillman fired, and brought down the buck. “Well,” said Emerson, “if that was a deer, I shall fire at the first square thing I see”; but, and perhaps it was just as well, they saw no more deer that night. He recorded in the poem:
Or, later yet, beneath a
lighted jack, Each disappointment, however, plunged Emerson more deeply into the chase—so anxious was he to get his deer that he confided to Stillman: “I must kill a deer before we go home, even if the guide has to hold him by the tail.” Yes, the passion of the chase even overcame the philosophic mind of Emerson. But Emerson never had the gratification of his desire; the deer never came to him on the drive, and every time he went night-hunting, he was not successful. Lowell was the Magnus Apollo of the camp, his great humor, his unceasing play of wit—poetry and the best of the poets was always on tap at the table. When he sat on one side of the table, and Judge Hoar, a fiery wit, sat on the opposite side, they matched table-talk, with Emerson and Agassiz more often than not having to weigh in as umpires. No matter, though, it always ended in laughter, or went on until someone in the group heard an owl, which they all stopped to listen to. In the middle of all this, some of the members of the camp, in their wanderings outside, had met a traveler with the news of the laying of the first transatlantic cable, and came back to the camp with great news. Emerson:
One held a printed journal
waving high I have to say here, having climbed Mt. Marcy, those who use their cell-phones when they reach the peak, to call friends or relatives, seem to be an antecedent to this. They noted their paradise was no Eden. The world that crept in across the mountains came for them and the spell of their days at Follansbee were over; the summer dream, unique in the record of poetry, melted like a cloud-castle into its original elements, and Emerson was one of the first to turn back to the sterner use of time.
The holidays were
fruitful, but must end; The lake became for a time a place of pilgrimage. For years and years, to visit the Philosopher’s Camp was one of the items of an Adirondack trip. Some years after that, speculators had built a dam across the Raquette and flooded all the bottom-land, killing all the trees over the tract. Misguided dolts had put pike into the waters, and trout had become exterminated in every stream to which the ravenous fish had access. Stillman wrote that it “was well that the charm once broken, the desecration begun, it should be complete. The memories sacred to the few survivors can never be quickened by this ruin, and to the rest of the world it does not matter. Emerson has embalmed it; that is enough.” He continued, “In some eastern countries it is the custom to break the bowl from which an honored guest has drunk; nature had done this service to Follansbee Water.” But, in the spirit of hope and all its mystery, I’d like to end with Emerson’s end to his poem:
The fortunate star that
rose on us sank not; |
