Author Archives: Sandy Stott

Skating Upriver

In 1855 January was as variable as the one now winding down. Near its end, Henry Thoreau wrote, “What a Proteus is our weather,” and then went on to say, “Let me try to remember its freaks.” The list that follows tracks Thoreau’s close relations with all weathers, though I was heartened also to read this: “January 17. Forget.” Ah, even Henry Thoreau, he of the wide-bodied journal-memory, forgot things.

What also runs through Thoreau’s journal that month is his fondness for skating. At every opportunity, and they were many, Thoreau is out on the meadows and rivers on his skates; it seems his winter’s walking. So, it was unsurprising to reach Jan 31st and find Henry out early on that cold day, already attaching his blades to his feet and, after trying “my boatsail on the meadow in front of the house” setting out up the Sudbury. The boatsail got left behind because, though he could “go well enough before the wind,” he found “I could not easily tack.”

And so Thoreau set off, and as I followed his account of skating upriver, I thought, How different (as usual) from other skaters was Henry. That tossed me back to my own skating memories, mostly from childhood, and the way skating was often confined. Either it was rink-bound, or, even as we skated on our ponds and meadows, enclosed by land and/or conjured, snow-lined banks. And, enjoined still by our parents, we skated only on secure ice. So, we skated in circles and ellipses. Who among us skated upriver? Let alone followed its winding course for 12 miles?

Henry’s Highway – albeit, not quite icy enough

What caught and kept me in this day long ago was Thoreau’s sense that he was adventure-skating – where the bridges and causeways crossed the river he found “on every shore there was either water or thin ice which would not bear.” Okay, we’ve all seen how melt traces such the footings and beams of such structures. Time then to turn back. Instead I read this: “I managed to get on some timbers of a bridge, the end of a projecting “tie” ?, and off the same way, thus straddling over the bridges and the gulf of open water about them on the edge of the thick ice, or else I swung myself on to the causeways by the willows, or crawled along a pole or rail, catching at a tree which stood in the water, — or got in.” Ah yes, “in.” That too.

For me this small story is irresistible, both for its persistence and for its absence of complaint – nothing about soggy clothing, cold hands, uncooperative ice. No woe, o no. The day ends, however, with this advice applicable today, I think:

You were often liable to be thrown when skating fast, by the shallow puddles on the ice formed in the middle of the day and not easy to be distinguished. These detained your feet while your unimpeded body fell forward.

Just so.

By Corinne H. Smith

In the 19th century, they flew in flocks so enormous that they filled the entire sky and seemed to go on forever. They were Passenger pigeons, Ectopistes migratorius. And Americans considered them to be just as endless a natural resource as the water and the trees and the rest of the terrific bounty found on this continent. This opinion prevailed until the last individual, a captive pigeon named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. With her death, a once prominent species went famously extinct.

Henry Thoreau was quite familiar with these birds. In June 1861, he and traveling companion Horace Mann Jr. examined several wild pigeon nests that they had found in basswood, oak, and hop hornbeam trees in the prairie land near Minneapolis. When the men later steamed by riverboat up the Minnesota River, they passed through a remnant of the Big Woods, the noted old-growth stand that once covered 2000 square miles. Here the trees on either side of the water were “all alive with pigeons & flying across our course,” Thoreau wrote. You can almost imagine the sight and the sound of a thousand beating wings.

Ectopistes migratorius

Back in Concord, Thoreau saw smaller flocks and individual Passenger pigeons in the wild. But several men he knew also built “pigeon-places” designed to attract large numbers of birds. They offered good nesting spots and plenty of food … until large nets were strung up and dropped to catch and to kill as many birds as possible. Entries in Thoreau’s journal describe these local outposts.

“Saw a pigeon-place on George Heywood’s cleared lot, — the six dead trees set up for the pigeons to alight on, and the brush house close by to conceal the man. I was rather startled to find such a thing going now in Concord. The pigeons on the trees looked like fabulous birds with their long tails and their pointed breasts. I could hardly believe they were alive and not some wooden birds used for decoys, they sat so still; and, even when they moved their necks, I thought it was the effect of art. As they were not catching then, I approached and scared away a dozen birds who were perched on the trees, and found that they were freshly baited there, though the net was carried away, perchance to some other bed. The smooth sandy bed was covered with buckwheat, wheat or rye, and acorns. Sometimes they use corn, shaved off the ear in its present state with a knife. There were left the sticks with which they fastened the nets. As I stood there, I heard a rushing sound and, looking up, saw a flock of thirty or forty pigeons dashing toward the trees, who suddenly whirled on seeing me and circled round and made a new dash toward the bed, as if they would fain alight if I had not been there, then steered off. I crawled into the bough house and lay awhile looking through the leaves, hoping to see them come again and feed, but they did not while I stayed. This net and bed belong to one Harrington of Weston, as I hear. Several men still take pigeons in Concord every year; by a method, methinks, extremely old and which I seem to have seen pictured in some old book of fables or symbols, and yet few in Concord know exactly how it is done. And yet it is all done for money and because the birds fetch a good price, just as the farmers raise corn and potatoes. I am always expecting that those engaged in such a pursuit will be somewhat less groveling and mercenary than the regular trader or farmer, but I fear that it is not so.” ~ Thoreau’s journal, September 12, 1851

“Brooks has let out some of his pigeons, which stay about the stands or perches to bait others. Wild ones nest in his woods quite often. He begins to catch them the middle of August.” ~ Thoreau’s journal, July 18, 1854

“They are catching pigeons nowadays. Coombs has a stand west of Nut Meadow, and he says that he has just shot fourteen hawks there, which were after the pigeons.” ~ Thoreau’s journal, September 14, 1859

While Henry Thoreau kept in contact with the owners and operators of these pigeon-beds, he was most interested in what the birds ate. He wrote down what kinds of seeds the men used as bait, and what evidence could later be found in the birds’ stomachs. “It is a wonder how pigeons can swallow acorns whole, but they do,” he noted, on September 13, 1859. They must have been truly remarkable creatures. And because Heywood, Harrington, Brooks and Coombs were not the only folks who kept pigeon-places, the pigeons are now gone.

In 2014, we can use the centenary of the last Passenger pigeon as a time for contemplation about sustainability. Certainly we now understand that species come and go, within the natural dynamics of our earthen environment. But Martha’s kind suffered a man-made extermination. How many other deliberate and preventable extinctions have happened in our lifetimes? How many more will we tolerate? How and when will we memorialize the future disappeared: the last Cave salamander, the last American emerald dragonfly, the last polar bear? Now is the perfect time to reflect and consider and act, and to learn from the mistakes of the past.

To learn more about “Project Passenger Pigeon: Lessons for a Sustainable Future,” visit http://passengerpigeon.org, or “Like” its page on Facebook.

“The delicious soft, spring-suggesting air, – how it fills my veins with life! Life becomes again credible to me. A certain dormant life awakes in me, and I begin to love nature again. Here is my Italy, my heaven, my New England.”                     Journal – 1/7/55

January does have a way of making us look forward – to longer light, to easing cold, to the whole green future presaged by thaw. Thaw presses us ahead in time and imagination; we shift from our endurance shuffles with their little steps to avoid slippage and our necks pulled in toward bare-headed strolling. Even the sky seems to draw a little closer. We feel expansive. And, paradoxically, we also feel returned to the present moment; rather than trying to hide from it, we feel the very air.

So it was for Henry Thoreau during 1855’s January thaw, and so it has been for me. Along the nearby Sudbury River each morning a column of fog has mimicked the water’s passage, a gray and gauzy snake of tangible air. It flows; the water opens.

The other day, amid all this “spring-suggesting air,” I bumped into an article in the Boston Globe recommending that we attend to our “online lives,” with an eye toward what will happen to them after we die – offline that is.

Really?

That odd juxtaposition got me thinking about my growing unease with things-online, where one is never present, never alive in the very air of the moment. It’s bad enough to be distracted from the place where we live, but if we are now to begin planning for our online afterlives, how much wider will the split between our real and conjured lives grow?

As he walked on that January day in 1855, thaw brought this to Thoreau: “On the same bare sand is revealed a new crop of arrowheads. I pick up two perfect ones of quartz, sharp as if just from the hands of the maker.”

I think I prefer such a line of walking, where the past can join the present, to the leaping away and forward of online time. I prefer to be here rather than there.

Endnote: yes, there is the irony of hoping that you read this piece as online posting. I genuflect to that irony. Then I go out the door and down to the river.