(All photos herein are copyrighted by Raymond Wiggers and require permission to be reproduced or otherwise used.)
Dear Friends,
While it seems as though at least two years have passed since I did it, it was just ten months ago when I fulfilled a longstanding dream and launched a new organization dubbed the Natural History Exploration Guild. (See the August 2004 Newsletter for my reasons for doing so.) At that time, I wasn't sure whether the Guild or its approach to nature education would be of any interest to anyone else. Fortunately, it turned out that it was, and is. For that I am encouraged and grateful.
To me, two major defining aspects of the Guild are that it is a member-supported entity and that it offers levels of certified proficiency for enrolled students and tour-takers who prefer to have structured, well-defined goals to guide them as they learn more about the natural world and our relationship to it. To help accomplish the latter goal, the Guild offers these three educational stepping-stones. From beginning to most advanced they are Student of Natural History (SNH),Integrative Naturalist (IN), and Master Integrative Naturalist (MIN). For more on what is required to achieve these goals, see the Programs Page of the Guild Website.
So here we are, in the Guild's second summer, and I'm delighted to lead off this issue with the news that Guild member Stephen Cloutier has just become the first person to earn the SNH certificate. Steve, who was born and raised in Michigan's character-building Upper Peninsula, is now a resident of Buffalo Grove, Illinois and works as a process-safety expert for the UOP Corporation. His academic degrees -- a bachelor's and also a master's in chemical engineering, and a master's in divinity -- are one indication of his intellectual attainments and wide-ranging interests. So, too, is his involvement in naturalist courses offered by a variety of Chicago-area educational institutions.
Since joining the Guild, Steve has proven to be one of the most engaged and dedicated adult-education students I've had the pleasure of knowing. In 2005 alone, Steve has attended two of the Guild's "Nature's Classroom" courses and the four-day Redbud Tour to southernmost Illinois. Besides having a deep affinity for different aspects of natural history, he has a terrific sense of enthusiasm that beneficially infects those around him. And -- note my somewhat professorial tone here -- he asks very insightful questions that help reveal the deeper significance of the subjects we're discussing.
PART I. NONLINEAR SOLILOQUIES & SERMONS
A. Dreams of High Water
Back in the late 1950s, when I was a young lad living with the rest of my family in a Pseudo-Tudor house just off the crest of Ridge Road in Wilmette, Illinois, I had, interspersed among sailing-ship voyages, missions to Mars, apocalyptic visions, and wish-fulfilling episodes of Godzilla attacking my elementary school, a rather bucolic and recurring dream. In it, I was walking up the incline from my home to the crest of Ridge Road, only a few houselots away. On reaching Ridge, I faced east and saw the water of Lake Michigan gently rise from its bed, about a mile away, till it covered Green Bay Road, the nearby train station, and all the houses along the downward slope of Park Drive. And there I stood on the road pavement, with the waves of this inland sea gently lapping at my feet, while the bird still sang and the trees on highest ground rustled uncomplainingly in the light breeze.
Such dreams of rising water are by no means rare. A much more frightening version of this flooding motif occurred to the great German painter Albrecht Dürer in early June of 1525:
PART II. REVIEWS IN THE REALM OF NATURAL HISTORY
A. Books: Historical Fiction
Given the huge quantity of books both popular and technical on various aspects of natural history, a diversion into this seemingly unconnected genre might seem a little too lateral-brained even for me. But I know of nowhere else where a reader can crawl deeper into the mind of the Age of Enlightenment naturalist -- the classifying, collecting, and joyously omnivorous mindset of a Joseph Banks, Cuvier, or Darwin -- than in the superbly written Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian. While those who haven't read them tend to dismiss them as the province of nautical-history buffs and Horatio Hornblower groupies, this series of twenty completed volumes contains some of the best prose and keenest psychological insight offered by any novelist in the twentieth century. (I say this having read only the first fourteen books, but if the last six don't measure up, I'll let you know.) If you're new to the series, start with the first title, Master and Commander(W.W. Norton. paperback, ISBN 0393307050), and prepare yourself for a beneficial addiction. The exquisitely rendered contrasts, sympathies, and political allegiances in the two main protagonists -- the English Royal Navy officer Jack Aubrey and the Irish physician and polymath-naturalist Stephen Maturin -- make this extended saga one highwater marks of enduring literature. And I mean it. (Incidentally, the recent spinoff movie of the same name is a remarkably proficient and well-acted pastiche, in the best sense of that word, of at least several of the O'Brian novels.)
B. Books: Cartography & Geography
Maps are one of the most powerful of all human tools. They can also be dangerous and misleading. For one thing, no three-dimensional entity -- the curved surface of the globe, for example -- can be rendered on a two-dimensional surface, be it a roadmap or computer screen, without some distortion of area, shape, or both. For another, mapmakers insert, consciously or not, their own biases. This can be done in a multitude of ways -- by placing one's own country or region in the center, by selectively leaving out information that weakens one's own assertions, and so forth. Mark Monmonier's How to Lie with Maps (Second Edition, University of Chicago Press, paperback, ISBN 0226534219) addresses these issues in a most informative way. While the style, sporadically engaging and even witty, waxes rather technical and statistical in some chapters, the book's many illustrations do much to drive home the main points of this illuminating and mind-opening work.
PART III. WIGGERS' WONDERS
(Dedicated to to the Principle That Whatever
Springs to Mind Must Be Worth Something)
PART V. THIS ISSUE'S PARTING QUOTATION
With best wishes,
Ray Wiggers
Nice Temperament; Makes a Great Pet. All real Americans know that it's not too early to start shopping for those winter-holidays gifts. For those of you with children who deserve something less predictable than than a new puppy or other high-maintenance vertebrate, might I suggest a Physarum polycephalum slime mold? This adorable if enigmatic organism -- it combines certain traits of animals, plants, and fungi -- periodically merges its individual cells into to one giant, multinucleate super-cell (the plasmodium) that forages for food. Just feed it oat flakes -- seen here already partially digested -- when it's yellow and actively moving about. Afterward it goes dormant for as many weeks as you desire before you reawaken it with a little distilled water and some more munchies. Imagine trying that with Kitty.
In my never-ending quest for thematic tie-ins I present this photo of a very short spit (see Section I A, above) that connects the mainland a small island. Geologists call the resultant landform (spit + island) a tombolo. In my travels over the years I've seen some eminent examples of these interesting features: the old quarter of Gaeta, Italy, fronting the Tyrrhenian Sea (see Photo 21 in my Mediterranean Geology Gallery); World's End Reservation, south of Boston; and this locale, on Lake Superior at Little Two Harbors in Split Rock State Park, Minnesota. As is often the case with tomobolos, it almost looks as though the mainland has lassoed the island and is trying to pull it back to the shore.
Fragrant Harbinger of the Northern Spring. This humble, unkempt, ground-hugging plant has litte impact on gardeners intent on ordered showiness, but when in flower it is the glory of the North Woods. It's trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens), a member of the Heath Family whose generic and specific epithets mean, in a curious mixture of Greek and Latin, "Creeping on the surface of the Earth." Its appeal lies in its olfactory rather than visual qualities. To crib from what I myself wrote in The Plant Explorer's Guide to New England, the fragrance produced by its flowers is a special-delivery gift from heaven.
Steve Cloutier, the first person to win the Natural History Exploration Guild's Student of Natural History certificate, participating in Guild activities earlier this year. In the larger photo, Steve (right) explores the Midwest's largest natural bridge at Bell Smith Springs, in Shawnee National Forest. In the inset at lower right, Steve (red cap and botanically appropriate shirt) examines the upland plant community of Flora Dolomite Prairie with other class participants.
For all these reasons, I feel both honored and proud that Steve is the first Guild member to be awarded the SNH. He makes a great role model for other members who are now rapidly approaching that goal.
On behalf of the whole Guild gang, our heartiest congratulations, Steve. We all look forward to seeing you back on the trail soon. Now, fix your eye on the next goal, that Integrative Naturalist certificate . . .
While I did not attempt to paint my own dream afterward, as Dürer so compellingly did for his, I certainly had it emblazoned on my memory. Only many years later did I discover that it was what many dreams purport to be -- a prophesy. But it was a prophesy in reverse, so to speak. Instead of foretelling some future catastrophe, it recounted, in a somewhat altered vocabulary of images, what in fact had already happened, fourteen thousand years ago and once again about a millennium later.
During the night between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsuntide, I had this vision in my sleep, and saw how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the ground about four miles away from me with such a terrible force, enormous noise and splashing that it drowned the entire countryside. . . . When I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long time. When I arose in the morning, I painted the above as I had seen it. May the Lord turn all things to the best.
Dürer's 1525 watercolor, Traumgesicht (Dream Vision) , and his accompanying commentary.
The Minnesota Point sand spit -- the thin arc of land just offshore -- as seen from the Enger Park observation tower in Duluth. Note how the spit serves as a natural breakwater that protects the harbor and its ore boats and pleasure craft
B. Music and Landscape
It was also in my youth, and in fact in that same Pseudo-Tudor house in Wilmette, that for some reason I decided to listen to an old LP album that had been lying ignored in the record rack by the family stereo. It was an RCA recording of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto -- Arthur Rubinstein the soloist, Erich Leinsdorf conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I have no idea why I decided to listen to it on that particular day. But this I do know: there has been no other expression of human creativity that has ever done half as much to kindle a revolution in my heart. Unexpectedly, the Beethoven spoke to me in a language that was at once more complicated, variable, unified, and comprehensible to a young mind that, though still swaddled in the formulistic simplicities of suburbia and mass culture, was trying to find links to other places and bigger things. In that music there was a universe of detail and an emotional range not to be encountered elsewhere. While I knew that that magnificent dialogue between orchestra and pianist had no explicit story line, it still seemed to offer concrete reasons for my being here -- for our being here -- that no book or conversation, however excellent and inspiring, has done before or since.
And ever since, I've been been engaged in the glorious adventure of exploring the many idioms of what we call, through want of a better term, "classical music." In doing so, I'm struck more and more by the intimate relationship that exists between some of the classical works I love and the landscapes I love -- as though the composition of music and the natural processes that sculpt our world are two aspects of the same greater phenomenon.
The verdant and fertile Connecticut River valley, from the summit of Massachusetts' Mount Sugarloaf. I've always been of the opinion that someone should hire an orchestra to perform at least the finale of Mahler's sprawling, pantheistic Third Symphony on this hilltop -- perhaps at harvest time, when this region's superabundance is most obvious. Farther upstream, where the Connecticut winds through the hill country on the boundary of New Hampshire and Vermont, it presents fleeting, sparkling views of its channel. There, I propose, Martinů's Concerto for Violin and Piano fits best, even if it is not as well-known a work as it deserves to be.
Here, from this vantagepoint in the heart of eastern California's Mohave Desert, the fault-block Providence Mountains rise abruptly above the ovenlike heat of a stony floor dotted with creosote bushes and other plants adapted to this harsh environment. This Basin-and-Range topography is too intimate and urgent for lush orchestral music. Here, such stark and searching chamber music as Shostakovich's Eleventh String Quartet comes to mind.
On the snowfield above Lake Agnes and its rock glacier, facing the Never Summer Range, Colorado. To musically adorn a vista as sublime as this, I'd choose an isorhythmic motet of Guillaume Dufay, whose career spanned late Medieval and early Renaissance choral styles. (To hear splendid examples of these motests, get the "O Gemma Lux" album performed by the Huelgas Ensemble on the Harmonia Mundi label.) The text of one of these works is particlarly pertinent: Supremum est mortalibus bonum / Pax, optimum summi Dei donum (The greatest good for mortal men / Is peace, the best gift of God on high). But the peace here is not a social or political quantity. Rather. it is the patient joy that comes at the individual level with the understanding that while the human body is dwarfed by this immensity, the human soul -- which I take to be the intersection of intellect and intuition -- is great enough to embrace it.
Of course, musical scene-setting is nothing new: where would Hollywood be without it? And in my favorite genre there have been more than a few composers who have consciously linked their work to specific locales. One has only to think of Berlioz's Harold in Italy, Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, Beethoven's Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony, or that hokey and heartwarming port-of-entry for the uninitiated, Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite. Such works, referred to as program music, provoke the ire of purists as being too self-consciously literal. That literalness doesn't bother me a bit. Still, I must admit that it's usually the works without a program that best express the essence of the landscapes I've traveled through.
And there are also certain composers who works seem more directly related to the physical world around them. I can't explain why I find, for instance, that the works of the twentieth-century composer Bohuslav Martinů or the fifteenth-century master Guillaume Dufay have more relevance in this regard than some of their countrymen or close contemporaries. But they do. (Even when he was consciously dying of cancer, Martinů composed a landscape-masterpiece -- his ineffable Nonet, which transliterates any vista with more than one blade of grass into a sunlit allegory of all vegetative beauty.)
I begin to see that this subject of how certain pieces of music relate to certain places, at least in the minds of certain people, is an immense and open-ended one. It also invites comments and suggestions from you. Do you have a work -- it doesn't necessarily have to be classical -- that you identify with a particular locale? If so, let me know -- it would be interesting to keep a tally and see if any trends emerge.
Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,
Did after him the world seduce.
And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,
Where nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclosed within the gardens square
A dead and standing pool of air,
And a more luscious earth for them did knead,
Which stupefied them while it fed.
. . .
'Tis all enforced, the fountains and the grot,
While the sweet fields do lie forgot:
Where willing nature does to all dispense
A wild and fragrant innocence:
And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,
More by their presence than their skill.
Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,
May to adorn the gardens stand:
But howso'er the figures do excel
The gods themselves with us do dwell.
- Andrew Marvell , from "The Mower against Gardens"
At those two points in prehistory, meltwater from the not-too-distant Wisconsin glacier filled the southern end of the Lake Michigan basin, and the lake's surface, no doubt dotted with drifting icebergs, stood some sixty feet higher than it does today. In those days, all of what would later be downtown Chicago and O'Hare Airport lay under the waves. And in that turbid, sediment-laden water sweeping currents formed a spit -- a curving deposit of sand -- off the southeastern tip of the Highland Park moraine. (Geologists now call this landform the Wilmette Spit; you can easily locate it on the map at right.) Later, when the lake finally receded for good, the high ground of the spit make an excellent thoroughfare. The road that was eventually built on top of it does not conform to the usual north-south and east-west grid, but instead follows the graceful arc of the spit itself. It goes by different names in different places -- Gross Point Road in Skokie, Ridge Road in Wilmette and Kenilworth, and Church Road in southernmost Winnetka, where it connects to the moraine.
While this spit and others in the Chicago area are now high and dry, thanks to the regression of the lake, the modern Great Lakes have produced other, similar landforms that are still being built and modified by the surf and longshore drift. My favorite example of a modern spit lies at the Duluth end of Lake Superior. This long finger of sand, bisected by the state line, is predictably named Minnesota Point on its western side and Wisconsin
A diagram illustrating the ancient sand spits of the greater Chicago area. From Geology Underfoot in Illinois, copyright 1997 by Raymond Wiggers.
Point on its eastern. Though its highest ground lies only a few feet above the glowering, windswept waters that created it, it's now home to a long string of beach houses, restaurants, motels, and even an airstrip. If the day ever comes when the surface of Lake Superior drops, either through climate change or human greed for cheap fresh water, this spit will be a relict ridge, too, touching the waters of its parent lake only in the minds of those, who like Herr Dürer and I, are haunted by dreams of high water.
A gorge in the Jurassic-limestone terrain of the French Maritime Alps north of Nice.
Did after him the world seduce.
