Knowing What the Mountain Knows
Kathleen John-Alder
Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, 1899.
Prints and Phorographs Division, Library of Congress
“Thoreau loved Homer.”[1] I stopped, re-read the sentence by Annie Dillard, and the two years at Walden Pond began to make sense. Writers delight in the words of other writers. This is how they learn their craft. Environmental writers also treasure the sights and sounds of the land. This is where they find their stories. The pairing is equal parts prose and poetry. “Heaven is under our feet,” Thoreau wrote, “as well as over our heads.”[2]
Dillard’s sentence also tells us something about environmental writers who love Thoreau. In a few short words it reveals how they, in emulation of his life and writing, seek to unearth the infinite in the everyday through personal journeys of discovery that move outward toward the majesty of the world and inward to plumb the depths of the psyche. Although the narrative paths of these authors, which in addition to Dillard famously include Aldo Leopold and Loren Eiseley, diverge in response to personality, experience, and social and scientific change, several threads tie them together. The first thread is their intent, following Thoreau, “to regard man as an inhabitant, or part and parcel of Nature.”[3] The second thread is their deployment of the same visual metaphors, allegorical symbols, and anecdotal experiences to illuminate the parts and parcels of human habitation. The third thread, which is indivisible from the first two, is the specificity of the American landscape in these adventures and the way these particularities induce rare but powerful moments when life seems to stop, and for infinitely brief moments things that were unimaginable become suddenly imaginable.
Dillard’s declarative linkage of Thoreau and Homer emphasizes the enduring, mythic quality of this mercurial bard’s sustained endeavor to see the world as it is, for what it is. Even a cursory reading of Thoreau, who is generally considered a quintessential American author, reveals this historical debt. It is evident, for instance, in the way he sees himself as an inhabitant of a world set in motion by powerful, otherworldly forces beyond his control. Yet at the same time, and this is critical for what follows, he also held the belief that his values, decisions, and the way he lived his life were equally important determinates of his fate. But this is not surprising given the fact that Thoreau, inspired by the possibility of giving voice to a vision of Nature that had yet to be committed to paper, heroically fashioned himself a writer who would “impress the winds and streams into his service.”[4]
Thoreau enriched his classical reading of the world with a study of the Hindu Vedas. He found spiritual kinship between their animate vision of mind and matter and his engagement with the New England landscape, as vivified by the fixed certainty of rock and the fluid existence of water. Thoreau also imbibed the teachings of his illustrious Concord neighbors, including the transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poet and child educator Amos Bronson Alcott. For these gentlemen, enlightenment came upon us unexpectedly, in quiet moments, and usually outdoors as long as we kept our eyes and minds open to our surroundings and retained the ability to view the world with childlike innocence. He leavened these thoughts with the detailed empiricism practiced by naturalists such as Humboldt, Agassiz, Lyell, and Darwin.[5] And yet as he noted in the essay “Walking,” none of these individuals “not withstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated knowledge of mankind, enjoys an advantage over Homer.”[6]
To exemplify his vision of the heroic life, Thoreau embarked on an experiment in simplicity. On July 4, 1845, he moved to Walden Pond, and on land owned by Emerson he constructed a small cabin, planted beans, cut wood, observed the plant and animal life, and plumbed the depth of the water.[7] Although this story is well known, it is worth repeating because it has charted the course, both literally and figuratively, for similar journeys by authors, such as Dillard, seeking to more fully experience life’s daily revelations.
Walden Pond was the place where Thoreau withdrew from society and made himself scarce, but not too scarce. Unlike Odysseus, he did not have to travel far to see old friends and neighbors, catch-up on gossip, or receive a handout of food. His close proximity to the amenities of civilized life and the refreshing tonic of wilderness provided a lot to think about, in spite of, or not inconceivably because, the relative safety of his retreat challenged the assumption that mythic quests must entail hardship and physical danger.
The distance that Thoreau could easily traverse by foot in a day from his cabin defined the extent of the Walden Pond landscape. Although confined, the territory proved to be intellectually expansive. During his walks, he contemplated the land’s innate richness and its successive waves of inhabitants; pondered the incursion of the railroad and the mechanization of society; reveled in the regenerative, and rejuvenating, power of nature; and denounced what he perceived to be usurious resource harvesting by those who were already wealthy. The surface of the lake mirrored his changeable thoughts and moods, and its depth and purity served as a metaphor for the life he sought for himself and his readers. “Time,” he wrote to explain the elusive yet enduring qualities that his writing explored, “is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”[8]
During his sojourn, Thoreau wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and the first draft of Walden. He culled both texts from passages that appear in his plein air journals. The first, which recounts a youthful adventure with his brother, begins with the observation that he had often stood on the banks of the Concord River, watching the current move hastily “from the high places of the earth to its ancient reservoir.” Seized by a “yearning toward wildness,” he decided to launch his canoe into the river to “float whither it would bear me.”[9] Walden captured his experiences while they were still colorful and fresh, and condensed them into a seasonal tale of life.[10]
One of the most memorable discoveries detailed in Walden occurs late in the narrative when Thoreau mimics the behavior of ice fisherman on the pond and cuts a hole in the ice. As he describes the task, his awareness intensifies, inner thoughts awaken, and his writing moves effortlessly from the literal to the spiritual. “I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where kneeling I drink, I look down the quiet parlor of fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as summer.”[11] Suddenly, a fish common to Walden Pond distracts his gaze. This fish, generally considered of no real economic importance is nonetheless priceless to him.[12] “Ah, the pickerel of Walden!” he exclaims. “They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the pines, nor grey like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei of the Walden water.”[13]
There are also numerous passages in Thoreau’s writing when sound rather than sight signals the extent to which human habitation is a part and parcel of Nature. This is seen, for instance, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, when he makes note of hearing “a faint music in the air like an Æeolian harp” in which the sound, rather than originating from the movement of the wind, came “from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakened morning air.”[14] The sound signified the same themes of material agency and spiritual revelation that caught his attention while ice fishing. “It told of things worthy to hear,” he wrote, “and worthy of the electric fluid to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton and flour, but it hinted at the price of the world itself and of things which are priceless, of absolute truth and beauty.”[15] Although he found the vibrating song of the wire enchantingly beautiful, it was unsettling and he sought to distance himself from the experience. The next sunrise, as the troublesome memory faded in the morning light, he continued his journey and once again “tramped about the shore, waked all the muskrats, and scared up the bittern and all the birds that were asleep in their roosts.” [16]
In the early twentieth century, when the ecologist Aldo Leopold ventured out into the American landscape and drank the illuminating tonic of wilderness, he was similarly captivated by the sights and sounds of nature and what they tell us of human habitation and progress. By then, however, it was not just the trees around Walden Pond that had been harvested to provide fuel for the railroad and lumber for homes: the entire country’s natural resources had been considerably depleted. During the course of his life, Leopold witnessed the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, the near extinction of the bison and wolf, the Dust Bowl, and the clear-cutting of the northern forests. But he had also witnessed successful counter measures, such as the massive afforestation and soil conservation programs of the New Deal. Consequently, he couched his anecdotal experiences within an ecological ethic that was as much about sustainable resource management and the restoration of what had been lost as it was about the wisdom gained from intense observation of the land.
“Thinking Like a Mountain,” which tells the story of a hunting trip Leopold took in the American Southwest in the early decades of the twentieth century, begins ominously with the howl of a wolf. [17] “A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night.” To the coyote, the sound promised leftovers; to the rancher, it threatened the loss of livestock; to the horse, it meant possible death. “Yet,” he also observes, “behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.” For Leopold, however, the meaning of this wild, defiant, and sorrowful sound only becomes clear after he and his companion happen upon a wolf crossing a stream with her cubs. Seeing a chance to enjoy good sport and to rid the land of a worrisome predator, they let off a volley of shots and kill the mother. Leopold reaches her in time to see “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.”[18] The unsettling experience led him to question his actions and his place in nature:
I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes―something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.[19]
Power, control, and the animalistic urge for survival are fundamental to Leopold’s revelation on the mountain. Humankind, he argued, may seek to protect itself and thereby master its surroundings, but tragically this conduct did not guarantee safety, prosperity, comfort, or long life. Instead, it was necessary to strike a balance between what we desire and what the environment―the raw material of our lives―can safely supply. “Perhaps,” he wrote in an attempt to explain his efforts to preserve the land’s evolutionary heritage and ecological integrity, “this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: ‘In wildness is the salvation of the world.’ Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”[20]
Later in life Leopold purchased a derelict farm in Wisconsin’s Sauk (Sand) County and in atonement proceeded to restore its degraded landscape. He lived in a small cabin, studied the plants and animals, and like Thoreau before him condensed years of observation into a seasonal tale of life. His endeavor was posthumously published in 1949 under the title A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There.
The essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which appears in Sand County Almanac, is one of several vignettes that illustrate how the seemingly small decisions we all make in daily life―the ones we make inadvertently, often recklessly, and without thinking―have a cumulative, profound, and devastating impact upon the land. His hunting of the wolf was but one example. Without the predator the deer and sheep multiplied, over-grazed the land, and caused erosion that destroyed the soil’s natural fertility. Indeed, as he repeatedly cautioned in Sand County Almanac, what Americans were encouraged to view as inalienable environmental rights were in actuality social mores linked to a reward system that perceived the land as a nothing more than a commodity there for our use. According to Leopold the resulting pillage was analogous to the fate that befell the female slaves that Odysseus callously put to death upon his return home from his heroic quest in the wilderness.[21] He hoped that once informed of these facts, his readers would leaven impulse with knowledge and become competent, albeit still powerful and controlling, managers of the natural world.
But there is also something less explicit at work in Leopold’s tale of the mountain that has to do with the heightened sensitivity arising from a revelation so fundamental to being human that it sends shivers up the spine. The fierce green fire in eyes of the wolf not only illustrates that we live commensurately in this world and our actions have long-lived, and often unintended consequences; it provokes an emotional transference that allows us to atavistically become the wolf and for a brief moment respond instinctively to ancient rules operating at a time and scale beyond and above rational comprehension. Equivalent to a question mark, the signifying silence of the passage allowed Leopold to vocalize an alternative ethic governed by ecological interdependence rather than human self-interest. To live naturally and think like a mountain required self-awareness, humility, a long-view, the courage to act against expectation, and the willingness to acknowledge our innate wildness.
A few years before Sand County Almanac appeared in print, the anthropologist Loren Eiseley, writing from the comfort of his desk at the University of Pennsylvania, also looked to Thoreau for inspiration as he drew on his early fieldwork experiences in the western landscape to fashion an environmental philosophy that probed the primal and instinctual. However, his blend of science and memoir is also haunted by images of his mother deteriorating into a state of savage self-protection as a consequence of a degenerative hearing loss.[22] This formative influence shadowed Eiseley’s study of natural history and evolution, and gave rise to his belief that the skeletal remains of humankind’s primitive existence would forever disfigure the beauty of its quest for enlightened transcendence. “The truth is,” he wrote, that in spite of our learning we are in many ways still instinctive, snuffling animals who carry “within our bodies the crudities of former existences. The marks of a former world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.”[23]
Eiseley found affirmation for his fatalistic vision of humanity’s place in nature in the sedimentary deposits of the Scotts Bluff Badlands of western Nebraska.[24] Exploring the dark corners and deep crevices of this stark and eroded landscape, he shifted through layers of rock and eons of time, hunting for the evolutionary origins of humankind. He concluded that our existence, as witnessed by the fossils he found, was fleeting. Nothing in life was certain. Science, unlike religion, testified to that fact. Even more astonishing and unsettling for Eiseley, however, was how deeply embedded our lives were in the narrative stream of earth’s history. Homo sapiens did not inhabit a fixed place of prominence in the grand scheme of life, but were instead, like all other creatures, caught in a current of events “moving through time toward an endlessly diverging series of possible futures.”[25] Eiseley also knew the plot of this epic, constructed as it was from millions of random events and unique circumstances was beyond control and could never be repeated. Moreover, it defied reason. And yet he knew this uncertainty made the story of life extremely precious.
Eiseley’s uncanny ability to transfigure the commonplace with strangeness and wonder is on full display in “The Flow of the River”―an essay that recalls a summer afternoon adrift in the North Platte River after a morning of fieldwork. Standing in the shallow water and feeling the sand shift under his feet, he submitted to impulse and decided, even though he could not swim, to go gently with the “insistent water” and float down the river. After his fear abated, he surrendered his body to the experience.
Awash in time and space, he meandered through the strata of his mind and slid down “the tilted face of the continent” along the “ancient seabed where giant reptiles once sported,” and relived the long, slow ages of geologic time. “Once in a lifetime,” he wrote, “if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.” Transformed into the dazzling “animalized water” described by Thoreau in Walden, he emerged helpless, fishlike, into the harsh air―a living fossil “reluctant to break contact with the generative mother element.”[26] He then realized that conscious thought was a superficial deposit on the surface of the mind, and we should pay heed to older, less cerebral forms of understanding.
During a walk along the same river in the depths of winter Eiseley observed that the world was both a material reality and a latent universe deep within us that is at once amazing and terrifying: “There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from the mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains―if anything contains―the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.”[27] Thus Eiseley’s watery journey led from doubt and uncertainty to stability and security, and then to mystery and wonder. However, unlike Thoreau who found God-like affirmation in the pearl-like body of a pickerel, there was no rock of certitude for Eiseley. [28] A solitary, introspective child of the twentieth century, he followed a path that ultimately led to the ambiguity of Einstein and Freud. “The living river,” he wrote, “flowed out of nothing to nowhere.”[29] Haunted by his mother’s annihilating deafness, the vagaries of evolution, the uncertainty of perception and the inevitability of death, he feared the time when “the waters are still, when along the frozen river nothing cries, nothing screams or howls.”[30]
In 1974 when the writer Annie Dillard decided to walk in Thoreau’s footsteps and chronicle a seasonal tale of life, her journey was less a lamentation about past actions and struggles with fate than it was an exploration of the seemingly limitless creativity of the world itself. More humorous and forgiving than her male counterparts and yet equally provocative, Dillard depicts the world as an experimental laboratory―a vast hotbed of transformative energy spewing an orgy of plants and animals in mindless disregard of the outcome, or whether or not its products, at least to human eyes, are beautiful or repulsive. In her hands, nature’s supreme indifference is a senseless, and sometimes horrifying, joke repeated over and over until the timing and punch line are perfected.
Writing with baroque exuberance, Dillard snared the ineffable through speed, juxtaposition, and atomized detail. Nothing was too minute for her notice. In her far-from-grand, but nevertheless epic tale of life, the laws of nature revolved rapidly around the twin poles of repulsion and attraction. She looked with awe and wonder upon everyday things so shocking and awful that she couldn’t stop watching or thinking about them. In one case, she recalled the “very small frog” that “slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed” as it was devoured by a giant water bug that had liquefied its insides before sucking the poor animal dry. She does, however, counter this mesmerizing horror with rare moments of spiritual beauty as when she witnessed a tree at sunset transform into a revelatory shower of light.[31]
Dillard’s base of operation was a house along a small tributary of the Roanoke River at the base of Tinker and Dead Man Mountain.[32] Here she withdrew from society, but also not too far, and followed Thoreau’s dictum to look around, see clearly, open new channels of thought, and return to her senses.[33] The neighborhood around Dillard’s house, much the same as the landscape of Walden Pond, was not pristine wilderness. During her excursions she walked past a wobbly wire fence, jumped muddy ditches, chanced upon a broken aquarium, and made use of trails created by local youth on dirt bikes.[34] Nonetheless, this small suburban enclave provided a lot to think about, once again indicating that insight is not necessarily dependent upon the actual size and nature of the territory in question, or how far we journey from the comfort of home. Instead, revelation was, as Dillard observed, simply “a matter of keeping my eyes open.”[35] It is not surprising, then, that sometimes, while knee deep in mud, observing with childlike curiosity (and occasionally with a child as guide) she accidently uncovers “the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.”[36]
Dillard named her adventures Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in honor of the stream where she went a-fishing for life’s mysteries. The waters of the creek, unlike the smooth clarity of Walden Pond, were turbulent and contradictory―simultaneously fresh and dissolute, fixed and uncertain, and always overflowing. In a passage that echoed the words of Leopold, the enclosing mountains that gave birth to the stream were silent and passive:
Theirs is the simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.[37]
One of Dillard’s favorite pastimes was stalking the muskrats that lived in stream. This obsession began while she was standing still and “looking deep into the amber depths of Tinker Creek watching a group of bluegills stare and hang motionless near the bottom of a deep, sunlit pool.” Suddenly, a young muskrat floating on its back, forelegs crossed with the sun shining on its belly, caught her attention. “Its youthfulness and rodent grin,” she wrote, “coupled with a ridiculous method of locomotion, which consisted of a lazy wag of the tail assisted by an occasional dabble of a webbed hind-foot, made an enchanting picture of decadence, dissipation, and summer sloth. I forgot all about fish.”[38]
During one of these excursions, a muskrat looking for a bite to eat crawled up the bank of the stream next to where she was standing. As the muskrat carefully went about the task of feeding itself, munching on sweet grass and clover, and failing to notice her because of dim eyesight, Dillard began to wonder what a creature with vestigial eyes and instinctive reactions could tell her about life. In a flash of understanding she “retreats outside herself,” surrenders superiority, emulates the muskrat and enjoys the pleasure of the moment.[39] In this landscape, knowledge, power, and money hardly matter. What did matter to Dillard, however, was the isolation of living at the margins of the world, as an outsider to an amazing dinner party. Only then did she understand how our conscious powers of projection―our ability to fashion grand metaphors and analogies from even the most mundane and witless experiences―enrich our perceptions and our lives.
By the same token, Dillard’s muskrat adventures laughingly debunk the Walden myth that we can fully plumb the depths of the world, commune with our fellow creatures, right wrongs, and control fate. When Dillard tramped the suburban landscape of Tinker Creek, stalking muskrats and leaving her footprints along its muddy banks, it wasn’t just resources that were in scare supply. The land’s transcendental potency had been sucked dry and divested of mystery. And yet, there was still something out there that drew her into the land to taste its colors and flavors, experience simple pleasures, and realize that the events we witness—no matter how destructive and senseless, beautiful and ennobling, or comical and endearing—teach us how to be more human.
Perhaps then, what is most important in Thoreau’s now mythic embrace of wildness is the fact that his attempt to see the world as it is, for what it is has remained imaginatively alive. Succeeding generations of environmental writers have played with the theme so often that it has now become firmly embedded within America’s psyche and vision of itself. Which, as Dillard acknowledged in her reference to Homer, makes environmental writing more of a lived practice than a definitive explanation. Rather than novelty, what is critical here is the nuanced vibrancy of multiple authors augmenting the plot of an already complex melody. These revisionist narratives pay tribute to Thoreau’s classical and enlightenment ideals, but their polyphonic harmonies extend his thinking beyond human agency and the dualisms that separate the animate mind from inanimate matter. This is most evident when these authors pay heed to less-cerebral impulses that upend what it means to be of Nature. The resultant stories recapitulate the now familiar depictions of life as the unchanging mountain and the constantly changing stream, with its corresponding vision of Homo sapiens as an integral part of nature—one of a stream of creatures—affecting, and being affected by their environment. It also has something to do with the ambiguity of speaking through written passages that oscillate between the reality of things and the comfort of custom. Knowing what the mountain knows may provide us with a lot to think about but not necessarily what we were looking for. Nevertheless, these authors urge us to heroically step outside ourselves and tramp this well-worn terrain until we have the courage to return to our senses and give nature/Nature its due. The reward, though rare and sometimes disturbing, will be moments of awe-inspiring resonance when we experience the world as it is, for what it is, and are stopped in our tracks, transfixed by the everyday prose of its sights and sounds and the unimaginable poetry of its landscape.
This text is a later version of the text that appears in the printed issue of Manifest.
[1] Annie Dillard, The Abundance (New York: Harper Collins, 2016), 109.
[2] Henry David Thoreau, “The Pond in Winter,” in Walden and Other Writings (1854; New York: Modern Library, 2000), 267.
[3] Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” in Walden and Other Writings (1862; New York: Modern Library, 2000), 627. See also: Sherman Paul. “The Wise Silence: Sound as the Agency of Correspondence in Thoreau.” The New England Quarterly Vol. 22 No. 4 (Dec., 1949): 511-527.
[4] Thoreau, “Walking,” p. 650.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Thoreau, 1862, p. 650.
[7] Thoreau, 1854, p. xv.
[8] Thoreau, 1854, p. 93.
[9] Henry David Thoreau. 1849. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1894; Cambridge: Riverside Press), pp. 11-12.
[10] Ibid., Publishers’ Advertisement.
[11] Thoreau, “The Pond in Winter,” p. 266-267.
[12] Thoreau, 1849, p. 86. Thoreau detailed the physical attributes of all the fish living in the Concord River, including the Pickerel, which he called the River Wolf.
[13] Thoreau, “The Pond in Winter,” p. 268.
[14] Thoreau, 1849, p. 230
[15] Ibid.
[16] (Cambridge, MA, Riverside Press, 1894), pp. 229-233.
[17] Aldo Leopold, “Thinking Like a Mountain” in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 129-133.
[18] Ibid., p. 129-130.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., p. 133.
[21] Ibid., “The Land Ethic,” p. 201.
[22] See: Gale E. Christianson, Fox at Wood’s Edge (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990).
[23] Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York: Vintage Books, 1946).
[24] Eiseley, 1946, “The Slit,” p. 3-14.
[25] Ibid., p. 6.
[26] Ibid., “The Flow of the River,” p. 18-20
[27] Ibid., 27
[28] Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time (1960; Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 129.
[29] Ibid., p. 165.
[30] Eiseley, 1946, p. 25.
[31] Ibid., p. 36.
[32] Ibid., p. 99.
[33] Ibid., p. 34. Dillard is here paraphrasing Thoreau’s dictum to journey locally and “open new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” See: Walden, p. 301.
[34] Dillard, 1974, p. 79.
[35] Ibid., p. 19.
[36] Ibid., p. 5.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid., p. 193.
[39] Ibid., p. 203.,