Northern Woodlands

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Fo the Health of the Land & The River of the Mother of God

I first read Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac in 1971; every year since, I’ve scanned it, quoted from it, lost it, bought it again, moved it, traveled with it, given it as presents, worn it out, loaned it out, and reread it. In the past month, I’ve found two books of previously unpublished or lesser-known Leopold writings, including letters and essays. The first is For the Health of the Land and the second is The River of the Mother of God. Finding these books is like running into a dear friend separated by fortune a long time ago.

These books make clearer Leopold’s evolution from a utilitarian conservationist in the Gifford Pinchot mold to an aesthetic and moral conservationist closer to John Muir. Leopold was inspired by Pinchot to enroll in the Yale School of Forestry, but after receiving a forestry degree, he became a different kind of forest manager. The strictly utilitarian Pinchot supported removing the Hetch Hetchy Valley from the Yosemite National Park so a water supply dam could be built, and he was against preservation of land simply for wilderness or scenic reasons. As one of the founders of the Wilderness Society, Leopold supported preserving wilderness remnants so that we could understand how it develops in the absence of human environmental interference.

He had considerable foresight about potential problems, including his warning about DDT at least a decade before Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and his concern about the importation of exotic species. Long before the arrival of the emerald ash borer or the Asian longhorned beetle, he wrote: “World-wide transport is carrying new ‘stowaways’ to new habitats on an ascending scale.”

These books reveal the sturdy foundations that Leopold built on when writing Sand County Almanac. The essays range from two written as a schoolboy in New Jersey in 1904 to an address to the Conservation Committee of the Garden Club of America in 1947 that was later incorporated into “The Land Ethic” in Almanac. For the Health of the Land includes 40 articles written for the Wisconsin Agriculturalist and Farmer. Originally written as seasonal advice to farmers interested in improving wildlife on their farms, many of the essays were rewritten and used in Part I of Almanac. Some of them have never been published before, including “The Land-Health Concept and Conservation,” which was found at the time of his death in a pencil draft.

The Sand County Almanac is a polished, almost meditative volume that often omits specifics, such as place names, to make generalized statements. The essays in these two books often address a particular issue, place, and time, and illustrate a sharpness and impatience not seen in Almanac. His battles with state legislatures that overrode the good advice of conservation commissions were pointed. The articles “The Last Stand,” about the last uncut hardwood in Michigan’s Porcupine Mountains, and “Land Use and Democracy,” on the moral responsibility for conservation that consumers must shoulder, have an immediacy and bite that make you stand up and notice.

At times, Leopold’s writings leave me thinking that we’ve failed to be guided by his wisdom for the past 80 plus years. At other times, I see an idea of his and can say that we are truly working hard at it and quite often succeeding. As we make some small progress toward healing the land, we can perhaps be reminded that Leopold had “no illusions about the speed or accuracy with which an ecological conscience can become functional.”

Tom Prunier

© 2011 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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A is For Allagash: A Lumberjack’s Life

I’ve long been an admirer of Cathie Pelletier’s Mattagash novels. In The Funeral Makers, Once Upon a Time on the Banks, and The Weight of Winter, she creates a fictional territory as rich as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. She knows and loves the Mattagash country and its people; they’re so far north that the Acadian and Scottish influence is greater than that of the Yankees of southern New England. She is also capable of having sport with them; she is funny, wicked funny.

So I was intrigued to learn that another view of that life and those people had been published, this time in the words of her father, Louis Pelletier. Cathie’s name is on the book, not as the author but as the interviewer and compiler of the tales. The book is A is for Allagash, the place name proudly in title, not thinly disguised as in the daughter’s novels.

Louis, now at age 90, tells stories of a world long gone, a world without indoor plumbing, electricity, telephone, or even a bridge across the river. His father operated a ferry across the Allagash for 37 summers; in winter of course, they’d walk or drive across the ice. Louis describes with remarkable clarity and a certain wistfulness a world where moonlit ice skating (on homemade skates, mind you) and fiddle music were the entertainments. He tells of horses, crosscut saws, log drives, and boat building. In the section on yarn, which is primarily about the hand-made socks, mittens, and even long johns they wore, he writes:

A is for Allagash is in alphabet book format, which may confuse you as it did me. It’s not a learning tool for preschoolers, though it would be a delight for grandparents to read to youngsters. It will find an audience among anyone interested in revisiting the days of lumberjacks and lumber barons. And if it finds its way into the hands of young adult readers, they will be amazed at the simplicity of a world that is only two generations gone. Beautifully produced with art work by Lulu Pelletier and colorized period photographs, there’s much to enjoy in this book from the patriarch of the Pelletier clan.

Stephen Long

© 2011 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Elisabeth Tova Bailey was a vigorous, outdoorsy woman living in Maine when she contracted an enigmatic virus or bacterial infection, possibly while vacationing in a Swiss village or on the airplane trip home. Whatever that pathogen was, her illness progressed rapidly from flu symptoms to life-threatening “autoimmune dysautonomia,” which can cause paralysis of a person’s circulatory and gastrointestinal systems.

The aim of her beautiful and provocative new book is to explain why an illness that might have driven someone to the outer bounds of despair instead was bearable, mainly thanks to the companionship of a tiny companion.

Because her malady prevents her from maintaining viable blood pressure when upright, Bailey must remain prone. One day a caregiver, trying to cheer up an invalid who can no longer spend time gardening or hiking or sailing, brought Bailey a flowerpot containing some field violets and also an acorn-sized woodland snail.

At first alarmed at the thought of having a dependent when she could hardly feed herself, she soon discovered that the snail needed little care. And while the snail would sleep through much of the day, every night it would glide down the side of the flowerpot and explore its surroundings, foraging for edibles and returning each morning to the little patch of flowers in the pot.

Bailey observes the snail’s astonishingly diverse pursuits, through minutes and hours. With all her limitations, she can watch. She realizes that she probably wouldn’t even notice this subtle being, or be able to follow its panoply of activities, if she were leading a normal hectic life.

I feel eager to emphasize that there is nothing “cute” about the relationship between this storyteller and the object of her scrutiny, which she eventually determines to be a Neohelix albolabris, the white-lipped forest snail. Bailey has a poet’s skill with sensory description and textured phrasing, and in her graceful writing these are combined with a scientist’s attention to detail. And avid curiosity! In the midst of her sickness, Bailey is heartened and given a sense of purpose by the challenge of learning as much as she can about mollusks, which range from octopuses to minuscule shell-dwellers.

She is tremendously informative about gastropods, the snails and slugs that are mollusks with a single muscular foot, which are familiar to gardeners and naturalists in the Northeast.

For instance, the snail living at Bailey’s bedside had about 2,640 teeth. Snails estivate, which is a kind of trancelike resting state, or hibernate for longer periods of time. I found most startling that snails are hermaphroditic, so an individual may become a male or female as needed, depending upon the mate available, or may even self-fertilize their eggs if no mate is found. Bailey’s depictions of snails’ olfactory sensitivities and amorous “foreplay” behaviors are gorgeous, and she rhapsodizes quite persuasively on snails’ phenomenal capacity to produce mucus: “While my mammalian ancestors evolved dry skin to prevent dehydration, my snail’s gastropod clan went in a different direction, perfecting and luxuriating in the sticky thickness of slime.” Mucus is “the medium for everything in its life: locomotion, defense, healing, courting, mating, and egg protection.”

With discomfiting candor, Bailey confides,

And yet, gazing at the snail in the little terrarium beside her, she could see that:

Jim Schley

© 2011 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.