A Lot Can Happen in 1 Billion Years

Wayland Country Club, on the Sudbury River, courtesy of Google.







Glacial vocabulary is seductive and mysterious, at least for the non-geologist. Eskers, moraines, drumlins, kames, pitted outwash plains—none of these terms appear in everyday usage. Even the word “kettle” becomes somehow less homey and more uncanny when it is used to define how ponds come to be formed on a glacial plain. First, an enormous chunk of ice breaks off from a glacier, like an iceberg almost, but stranded without an ocean around it. Then the ice is covered by accumulating sand and gravel until it appears as a hill. Underneath the hill, the ice melts and the sediment collapses into a kettle-like indentation in the landscape. If these kettles have filled with water, we now know them as lakes or ponds.

Walden Pond is a kettle, as are many of the ponds to be found in the Sudbury area. Thoreau tells a story of its naming:

…that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one… [1]

Such a story, while not to be mistaken for “science” corresponds pretty well with the geological narrative that also explains how “once there was no pond here, and now there is one.” It also asks us to reconsider the prejudices of our own definitions of historical and prehistorical periods, suggesting a capacity for human recollection that reaches back much further than the moment of European contact, to a time when what is now known as Walden Pond was a mountain of sediment-covered ice that melted, if not within the span of one human’s memory than at least within the scope of ritual remembering held within one society’s oral culture.

Oral traditions are not very strong in modern culture. They’ve been crowded out by the isolating distractions of the mass media; a preference for the disjointed “truths” of real-time news-feeds has largely supplanted the kind of local knowledge that is taken in with the senses and passed from person to person, family to family, community to community, in the slower, transformational time of story-telling. But there are other, unspoken and maybe even unconscious ways of remembering and reproducing “what was” in the landscape. A number of country clubs line the Sudbury River, their golf courses a popular attraction for residents and visitors alike. The modern game of golf was invented in Scotland, a land whose topography is also much marked by glacial activity. The geologist Anita Harris has observed that “all over the world, when people make golf courses they are copying glacial landscapes,” sculpting an undulating terrain of greens, fairways, roughs, bunkers, gullies and water features to provide tactical challenges and the pleasures of a distinctively glacial “natural” beauty for the players. [2] Given its own glacial history, it’s perhaps not surprising that golf seems especially at home on the eastern seaboard.

What can we learn by looking at golf courses as ready-made monuments to our glacial past? Maybe it’s precisely the sensation of a past that seems so long ago as to be out of reach (the deep past of geological time) doubling into the familiar, physical shapes of the present ground where we are now standing. Of course, golf courses produce a different sort of “flow” than glaciers. Although their movement across the landscape is not literal, their impact within a watershed can be considerable—the runoff of fertilizers and pesticides from golf greens is an ongoing challenge for river ecology. Seeing golf courses as part of an unwritten history of glaciers perhaps allows us a different way of understanding how our human interventions, their movement and reach, can equally affect the land, their consequences reaching into a more immediate future that may be no less earth-shaking even as it does not afford us the luxury of unfolding over more glacial, geological “eras” and “epochs.” And the shock of realizing the ways in which human time has displaced geological time in the magnitude of its effects may come upon us no less suddenly than it seemed to the cursing “Indians” who felt the “ground” of what would become Walden Pond unexpectedly give way beneath their feet.

“A lot can happen in 1 billion years—supercontinents can collide and then rift apart several times—and mountains the size of the Swiss Alps can form and then erode away. Scientists devised the geologic timescale to help sort out these momentous events.”
James Skehan, Roadside Geology of Massachusetts, 1

[1] Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or a Life in the Woods, (The Ponds), 468.
[2] John McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, 10.

[The Bureau apologizes to its readers for the lapse in time from the last post to this one. It was not quite a billion years, but it may have seemed like it. During February we were called away to complete another experiment in time travel on Lovers Lane in the Presidio of San Francisco National Park. Some documentation from that experiment can be found on the Bureau’s Facebook page, and the original files conveyed by our Field Agent to our home office can be accessed on the Presidio Trust website. We promise to do better in the future, at least at the moments when we find ourselves there.]

To Sleep Where You May Hear the Whip-poor-will in Your Dreams!

(or Songs of Ordinary Prevalence 2.0)

But really, how can the Bureau of Urban Secrets be expected to resist the whip-poor-will? The Birds of North America Online describes it as “a beautifully cryptic bird” whose “well-camouflaged eggs and young, its crepuscular or nocturnal foraging and breeding behavior, and its large woodland territories have made it one of the least-studied members of the North American avifauna,” concluding that, “What we do know about its behavior, physiology, and ecology is often anecdotal, at best.”

Cryptic is our business, and anecdotal evidence is our stock in trade. That’s why the Bureau’s work has long been informed by an interest in (re)awakening people’s observational skills and generating more anecdotes, creating a fuller sense of the “now” through which to think back to the past or forward to the future (as time travelers, we’re very comfortable with the notion that all three—past, present and future—exist simultaneously in the landscape). We think a lot about how sound seems like noise to us when we can’t name it or follow its logic (and this is true as much of city sounds as country sounds, as much of human-made music as bird song). Or about how the ocean or the sky is just “blue” if we don’t understand how color refracts through different depths of water or through different layers of atmosphere (just ask sailors or pilots why they might want to know this, let alone painters from Courbet to Constable). But we are also forced to admit that there may just be less to listen to, or to see or smell or taste that there was in Thoreau’s or Brewster’s time. This may be the case with the whip-poor-will. According to the Audubon Society, whip-poor-will populations have declined by fifty-seven percent in the last forty years.

Reading the birding lore of Concord is another way to follow an anecdotal trail:

“The whip-poor-will suggests how wide asunder are the woods and the town. Its note is very rarely heard by those who live on the street, and then it is thought to be of ill omen. Only the dwellers on the outskirts of the village hear it occasionally. It sometimes comes into their yards. But go into the woods in a warm night at this season, and it is the prevailing sound. I hear now five or six at once. It is no more of ill omen therefore here than the night and the moonlight are. It is a bird not only of the woods, but of the night side of the woods.”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals (June 11, 1851)

“The song can be heard nearly if not quite a mile away when the air is still and damp, as is usually the case in the summer evening. When there is no moon the bird sings but little if at all after the sunset light has wholly faced in the west. As twilight deepens, the Whippoorwills come out of the woods and sing in orchards and on stone walls near houses. They wander over wide areas in this way.”
William Brewster, October Farm (July 20, 1892)

“Formerly a common summer resident, greatly decreased with lumbering and woodcutting; now erratic, scattered pairs appearing and disappearing as woodlots develop or are cut.”
Ludlow Griscom, The Birds of Concord (1949)

“This species was a common summer resident in Thoreau’s time. As the woodland acreage declined, so did this species. It has never returned to our area in its former numbers—despite the regrowth of the forests.”
Richard K. Walton, Birds of the Sudbury River Valley (1984)

It’s sobering to think that it’s not just that human sounds drown out the sounds of nature, but that human incursion has actually silenced the wild. Re-forestation has not brought back the whip-poor-will in any significant numbers. In the Presidio of San Francisco, coastal scrub and oak habitat is restored, but it’s an ongoing struggle to sustain a population of California quail (another distinctive-sounding bird—playing its call on the Cornell website has just made the Bureau dog go crazy. You can make your dog go crazy too). Here’s the quandary: the “wildernesses” that we painstakingly reconstruct and preserve at our urban edges are still much quieter places than the historic wildernesses they are meant to represent. People used to be able to tell their children it was time to come inside for the evening when they heard the whip-poor-will sing. Let’s hope that we aren't left only hearing the whip-poor-will in our dreams.

“New beings have usurped the air we breathe, rounding Nature, filling her crevices with sound. To sleep where you may hear the whip-poor-will in your dreams!”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals (June 11, 1851)

Sounds of Ordinary Prevalence

William Brewster’s October Farm chronicles the patient use of his senses. It’s not a book to read if you are in a hurry (most nature writing isn’t). But it’s instructive as much for asking us to confront the general loss of sensory acuity that is a fact of early twentieth-first century urbanized life, as it is in trying to reconstruct the rural soundscape of Concord, Massachusetts a century earlier. If Brewster is in any way typical of his age, we don’t have the time or inclination to listen even half as well as we used to, even if our hearing is probably no worse.

This week we’ve been in West Marin. When we are out in the pine forests of Inverness Ridge, we try to teach ourselves to listen attentively, as we imagine Brewster might have done. It is rare not to hear the sound of something motorized—a plane overhead, a motorcycle on the road below, a chainsaw. These are the large-scale sounds of the modern world, the result of human imperatives to move quickly through space, cut efficiently through time, decisively reconfigure matter (throughout most of the book Brewster is still hitching up the horses). So we try again, listening around the motors to other smaller-scale sounds—a rustle in the underbrush just off the trail, a branch snapping under the weight of last night’s rain, the long, low calls of the milk cows clear across Tomales Bay, the birds we can recognize (robin, quail, osprey, blue jay, hummingbird, woodpecker, towhee) and the birds we can’t (this list is shamefully longer). We think about Gordon Hempton’s effort to create One Square Inch of Silence in Olympic National Park—marking a place in the world, no matter how small, where the natural soundscape is proactively managed and preserved.

It’s not only that we listen less well. We have also lost the habits of language needed to describe what we have seen, heard, tasted, felt or smelled. As Brewster is so good at reminding us, this is not a question of a bigger or more specialized vocabulary, as it is a matter of economy and precision—carefully seeking nuance, shades of variation, degrees of difference, and choosing the simplest, clearest, most concrete words to express them. Simile and metaphor are used sparingly (a pied-billed grebe floating on the river looked “like a brown withered lily pad”). But sometimes, Brewster finds the sonic repertoire of the English language to be accommodating enough in its own way. He spends several paragraphs describing the finer points of the call of the whippoorwill, only to conclude that “it would be difficult to improve on the popular and long-established rendering of the song…whether the sound comes from afar or from within a few rods, the bid says ‘whippoorwill’ with almost perfect distinctness, emphasizing the first and last syllables strongly.”

It may seem perverse to use today’s portable audio players and cell phones as a way to invite people to be more fully present in the landscape—they are so often used otherwise (tune in, tune out—this is why Gil Scott-Heron warned us that the revolution would not be televised). But the important thing about these devices is that after you’ve turned them on, you can also turn them off. The off-switch gives them the potential to become little schools for the senses, giving the listener a taste of what to keep an ear or eye open for, and then asking them to listen or look for themselves. The knowledge that proceeds directly from the senses is often the hardest to share with others. Maybe these modern tools might make it a little easier. In such a spirit, we offer the call of the whippoorwill, a mostly eastern bird which we have not yet heard for ourselves, but which we hope to recognize when we do, courtesy of William Brewster and the Cornell Ornithological Laboratory.

"So perfectly hushed were all sounds of ordinary prevalence that the chuck of a chipmunk came distinctly to the ear from the opposite side of the valley below and even the rustling of leaves stirred by his bush ramblings were faintly audible. Voices of men engaged in collecting some scattered cattle in a pasture across the river and nearly a mile distant were plainly heard and some few words even distinguished, though they talked in tones not louder than common."
William Brewster, October Farm

Not Solitary

The Bureau is pleased to publish this very preliminary list of sources and welcomes suggestions from agents far and wide:

Louisa May Alcott, Moods in The Portable Louisa May Alcott (New York: Penguin, 2000).

William Brewster, October Farm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).

Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).

William Cronin, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983).

Ludlow Griscom, The Birds of Concord (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949).

Jill Phelps Kern, Hiking the SuAsCo Watershed: Exploring the Woods and Waters of the Sudbury, Assabet and Concord Rivers (North Amherst, MA: New England Cartographics, 2004).

Ron McAdow, The Concord, Sudbury and Assabet Rivers: A Guide to Canoeing, Wildlife and History (Marlborough, MA: Bliss Publishing, 1990).

Philip McFarland, Hawthorne in Concord (New York: Grove, 2004).

John McPhee, In Suspect Terrain (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1982).

James W. Skehan, Roadside Geology of Massachusetts (Missoula, MO, 2001).

Henry David Thoreau, 1851: A Year in Thoreau’s Journal (New York: Penguin, 1993).

Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (New York: Library of America, 1985).

Richard K. Walton, Birds of the Sudbury River Valley—An Historical Perspective (Lincoln, MA: Massachusetts Audubon Society, 1984).

Ann Zwinger and Edwin Way Teale, A Conscious Stillness: Two Naturalists on Thoreau’s Rivers (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).

“I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

The Work of Today is Present

The Bureau is new to the work of Henry David Thoreau. So we begin to read A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in the Library of America edition, and we stare at his photograph on the cover. It is from a daguerreotype taken by Benjamin Maxham in 1856 at the Daguerrean Palace in Worcester, Massachusetts. Daguerreotypes required lengthy exposures to achieve their jewel-like detail so we can assume that Thoreau had to sit still for a long time for his portrait. All that bird watching would have made him particularly good at this, we think. Thoreau stares back at us, not giving anything away.

And then we notice, looking through various books and websites where this image appears again and again, that it is often flipped in reproduction. Crowsfeet are visible on Thoreau’s right temple, then his left. The incredible forelock curls sometimes one way, sometimes the other. Every time we look at another version of Thoreau, he’s just a little bit out of sync with the one before. Of course it would be possible to go back to the daguerreotype original and figure out which is right. Daguerreotypes were direct positive images—no negatives and no multiple prints. But we like this ever-so-slightly animated, Janus-faced Thoreau even better. If only by accident it seems to allow him to keep looking forward, then looking back.

Daguerreotypes are time traps of sorts—looking at them one can feel the present stretch into an utterly stilled eternity. They are as close as we might be able to come to seeing the living dead. Small wonder that Thoreau himself much preferred to leave the future to nature--the future cast not an endgame, not imbued with a profoundly technological horror of the obsolete, but as cycles “outside to time,” perennially renewed, the same come back again but slightly different. That slight difference is everything. As in photography, it’s what keeps nature from becoming its own kind of mausoleum.

“As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of to-day is present, so some flitting perspectives, and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.”
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Playing in Earnest

The Bureau is always excited to start a new project (which is really nothing more than an excuse to poke our noses into business that is not, strictly speaking, our own). But this project is especially exciting. The Bureau is based in San Francisco, and its usual territory has been the urban centers and urban edges of the west coast of the United States—it’s a landscape where nature and the city can still seem surprised to encounter one another. In many places the “pre-historical” landscape, or at least what passes for prehistorical from a euro-centric perspective) is just a few feet below the surface, or even less. When we stand on the forested cliffs of Lands End and look across the Golden Gate to the windswept coastal scrub of the Marin Headlands, we look not only across space, but through time, seeing a glimpse of what would have been beneath our own feet a mere one hundred years ago.

So we try to picture this: as the Spanish captain Juan Bautista de Anza is arriving in what will become the city of San Francisco, and the Presidio of San Francisco and Mission Dolores are being constructed from mud adobe and rough timber, Washington, Jefferson and their colleagues are putting their signatures to the Declaration of Independence inside the elegant colonial colonnades of the Pennsylvania State House. Harvard University has already been in business for well over one hundred years. Even as San Francisco struggles to become something more than a small backwater town, Thoreau retreats to the woods near Walden Pond to get away from it all (the relatively few so-called "settlers" in San Francisco are still trying to get to something and the rapidly diminishing population of so-called "natives" are mostly trying to stay away from the settlers). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the histories of east and west can seem completely parallel, with little overlap until the energy of gold rushes, land rushes and railroads connects the two coasts.

Synchronizing the times across such real and imaginative distance is a game to be played in earnest. The Bureau won’t travel to Sudbury until April 2009. In the meantime, our field of exploration is literary and cartographic, wading through the words of naturalists, novelists and poets, tracing a finger along the Sudbury River as drawn by one map-maker after another, following trails of information and images through the world wide web. Even before our feet touch the ground, there are still plenty of places to get lost.

“’Playin’ in earnest, Frenchy?’ William Brewster always maintained that this salutation from a boy who approached a game of marbles in progress on a Cambridge sidewalk in the spring of 1861 marked the beginning of our acquaintance…”
(from the “Introduction” to William Brewster, October Farm)