The earliest recollection that I have of Father was of one spring day
when he was chasing and stoning the cat, our pet cat, who had caught
a bluebird. I remember the fierce look in the cat's eyes, and her nose
flattened over the back of blue, her nervously twitching tail, and the
speed and strength with which Father pursued her, and the language he
used, language that impressed me, at least, if not the cat, and which
discredited the cat and her ancestry as well. As I remember it we
rescued the bluebird, and there the picture fades. Just how Father
himself looked then I do not know; doubtless, childlike, I accepted him
as a matter of course, along with all the other interesting things in
this world in which I was finding myself. Again I remember riding on
his shoulder in the downstairs hall, as he skipped about with me, and of
being face to face, on equal terms, with the hall lamp, and of telling
Father that when I grew up I was going to be a king, and of Father
telling me at once that they hung kings on a sour-apple tree. It was
always a sour-apple tree, never a sweet one, used for hangings. So I
was glad to relinquish the idea of being a king and to become instead
a "finder-out of things." How Father did laugh at that! He had been
telling me something of his readings in astronomy and the sciences, just
at that time coming into their own, and I was so impressed and fired
with emulation that I, too, declared for wanting to be "a finder-out of
things," and Father would repeat it and laugh heartily. It is a joy
to think of him as he was then, virile in body, full fleshed, active,
leading in walking and skating and swimming--what a flood of memories!
What an interest he took in all the things I did, and how often a most
active part. One day in May I had gone out with our one shot of shad
net, and was to try an experiment. I had told Father that I would row a
ways up the river and throw out the net and then row on up to the mouth
of Black Creek and fish for perch, and when the tide turned would row
out and take up the net, which would catch the flood slack not far
above. What he thought I do not know, for he went to Dick Martin, an
experienced shad fisherman, and told him what I was going to do. Dick
hastened to tell him, in alarm, that what I intended was impossible,
that there was a row of old stakes out from the black barn just below
the mouth of Black Creek and that my net would get fast on these and I
would lose it, and perhaps come to harm besides. So Father walked the
two miles, hurrying up along the steep and rocky shore, and found me
just coming out from the creek. He told me what Dick had said and
got into the boat and we rowed out to the net, which was acting very
queerly.
"You're fast now, boy, it's just as Dick said," he exclaimed as I rowed
as hard as I could for the long line of buoys. Never can I forget the
hour of alarm and distress, for me, that followed. The tide turned and
the loitering flood gave way to the sweeping ebb, the dark water from
the creek came rushing down on us, the buoys swirled and twisted in the
running water and began to disappear one by one. We quickly got hold
of the end and I picked up as much as I could; then Father got hold and
tried to pull the net loose. He pulled and pulled until he literally
pulled the stern of the skiff under water.
"You'll have to cut the net, it is the only way," he said finally,
red-faced and panting, so we did cut the net, leaving a middle section
there on the old stake in the bottom of the river. There is no denying
that it was thoughtful of him to come, and that he had my safety and
welfare at heart. Though I was always cautious and wise to the way of
the river, something might have happened and my bones might be there
beside the old stake--and what a lot I would have missed!--or as Father
once so aptly expressed it: "I'm not afraid to die, but I enjoy so much
living!"
He was always cautioning me, and worrying about me when I was out on
the river, especially at night, and yet he took chances that I would not
take. In the early days here at Riverby there was no railroad on this
side of the Hudson, and to get a train one must cross the river. In
summer one hung out a white flag from West Park dock and Bilyou would
row over for you, but when there was ice in the river one must walk or
stay home. In zero weather it was only a matter of a long walk over the
ice, often facing a blast of below-zero wind, but when the March thaws
had begun one took one's life very lightly to venture on the ice. The
thawing water cut away the ice from underneath, leaving no mark on the
surface, weakening it in spots, and if one went through, the tide swept
him under the ice, where the water was at least cold enough to chill one
and make death easy. On such a day Father crossed the river on a crack,
for, strange to say, one of the big cracks that always come in the ice
had pushed or folded down, and not up, and the water had frozen over,
making a streak of triple-thick ice, and on this streak he crossed the
Hudson, the ice so far gone from the sun, so honeycombed and rotten,
that he could stick his cane through on either side of his crack!
Another time he was crossing in early April with his dog, and when in
the middle of the river, which is a full half mile wide at Riverby, busy
with his thoughts, he suddenly saw his dog running for the shore, which
apparently was moving away rapidly toward New York! But the shores were
standing eternally still; the ice it was that moved, and was moving up
with the flood tide, moving just the width of a big canal that the ice
harvesters had cut above. When the tide turned, about an hour later, all
the ice went out of the river.
When first Father saw some smokeless powder he was surprised at its
appearance, and would not believe it was powder, until he threw some on
the hot stove. I used it in our old shotgun and he was much alarmed,
yet he told me that in his hunt for Thomas's Lake, of which he speaks
in "Wake Robin," he loaded his little muzzle-loading gun with an entire
handful of powder and then, for he felt it would burst, he held it at
arm's length over his head to fire. This he did time after time, in his
attempt to signal to his companions. The little gun survived the ordeal
and hangs now in the gun room. With it is the little cane gun, a small
shotgun that looked exactly like a cane, but which was quite effective
for small birds, and which he used when making collections of birds
about Washington. Strangely enough for those days, it was against the
law to shoot birds, and mounted guards enforced this law. Father would
tell with glee how he would shoot a bird he wanted for his collection,
and in a moment the guard would come rushing up, asking who fired the
shot, and Father would tell him it was just over the rise of ground, or
behind those trees, or something, and off would hurry the guard while
Father picked up his bird and reloaded his cane. It seems queer to us
now--to think of John Burroughs as shooting and mounting song birds,
making collections to be set up on a tree behind glass, but he did, for
in those days they were quite the proper thing, cases of them, fitting
enough for museums, often being seen in private homes. I can remember
taking lessons in taxidermy from Father, and of skinning and mounting
wildfowl, and today there are a loon and a prairie chicken here in the
house at Riverby that he mounted in those early years. The collections
of birds he made are scattered far and wide or were destroyed long ago.
All of them were shot with the little muzzle-loading cane gun or with a
little muzzle-loading fowling piece: those were the days of the ramrod
and wasps' or hornets' nests gathered and used for wadding, and the
superstition, which Father often expressed, that if you spilled or
dropped a shot in loading, it was your game shot, the one that would
have killed and without which the shot would miss. I can see the
fascinating-looking black powder now, scintillating as Father poured it
from the palm of his short brown hand into the muzzle of the gun.
There was one quality which Father possessed to a marked degree and
which I always envied him, a thing small in itself, yet which enabled
him to accomplish what he did in literature, and that was the ability to
lay aside the business or cares of life, as one would hang up one's hat,
absolutely and completely, and turn to his writing. The world will think
of him as a poet naturalist, as a gentle sage and philosopher, when he
was in truth a literary craftsman, and one who could never give but a
portion of his time and effort to his life's work until he was sixty
years of age. I first remember him as a bank examiner. I remember his
going away for trips to examine banks, of his packing his valise and
putting on a white or "boiled" shirt, the gold cuff buttons, his combing
his beard, the wonder and mystery of it all. Then he became a "mugwump"
and the new party gave his bank-examining to someone else; and, as he
expressed it, "I had to stir my stumps," and he took up the raising of
fine grapes.
Just as his boyhood had the cow for its centre of interest, mine had the
Delaware grape. And Father made a success of his vineyards. I can see
him now summer pruning, he on one side of the row, I on the other,
"pulling down" as we called the summer pruning, or he was stamping lids
or tying up bundles of baskets. Many of the lids had sawdust on them
which had to be blown or brushed off before they could be stamped.
Father acquired the habit of blowing, and he got so used to it that he
would blow anyway, whether or not the lid needed it; if it did not he
would blow straight ahead and I would laugh at him for it, and he would
raise his eyebrows and half smile, meaning, that it was something he
could indulge himself in. He once wrote of his grandson:
"I had the rare good fortune to be born in the country upon a farm
and to share in the duties and responsibilities of farm life. My poor
grandson John is not so lucky in this respect and he has not had to pick
up potatoes and stone and gather apples and husk corn and hoe corn and
spread and rake hay and drive the cows and hunt up the sheep in the
mountain and spread manure and weed the garden and clean the cow
stables, and so on, and go two miles through snow-choked fields
and woods to school in winter and have few books to read and see no
illustrated papers or magazines. John has the movies by night and his
bicycle by day and a graded school to attend and a hundred aids and
spurs where I had none. My fate was better than John's and I can
but hope he has advantages that I did not have that may offset the
advantages I had."
In this case I know that time and distance lend enchantment, for of the
hard work in the vineyards Father did very little--the cultivating with
a horse on days so hot that the horse was covered with lather and the
dust rose in a cloud over one's perspiration-soaked clothes, the days
following the spray cart with the lime and blue vitriol flying in one's
face and running down one's legs, the tying in March and early April
until one's fingers were raw and one's neck ached from reaching up--of
all these and other tasks he knew nothing. Often he said of himself that
he was lazy; and, though what he accomplished in his life stands like
a monument in one sense of the word, he was lazy. Routine work, a daily
grind at tasks for which he had no liking, would have shortened his days
and perhaps even embittered him. Yet with what eagerness he went at
his writing! For sixty years and over he found his greatest joy in his
craft--as he once wrote me, "There is no joy like it, when sap runs
there is no fun like writing." As he said of his books in a preface to
a new edition, "Very little real 'work' has gone into them." One day out
at La Jolla, California, up on the hillside overlooking the blue Pacific
there was a gathering in one of the biological laboratories and the
school children came trooping in. Father was asked to talk to them and
among other things he asked them if a bee got honey from the flowers.
"No," he said, "the bee gets nectar from the flower, a thin sweetish
liquid which the bee, by processes in its own body, turns into honey."
I have always suspected that Father liked to think of himself as a
bee, out in the sunshine and warmth, in the fields and woods, among
the flowers, gathering delightful impressions of it all which with his
handicraft he could preserve in an imperishable form that others might
also enjoy. And does a bee really work? Is it not doing exactly what it
enjoys or wants to do? Does it have to make any conscious effort to fare
forth among the flowers? Does it have to keep on doing what it dislikes
to do long after it is tired out? So whether the life of John Burroughs
was one long life of happiness and lazy play, or whether it was one of
hard work, depends, like so many other things, on the point of view. I
like to think of his long and happy life as one in which he turned all
work to play, and in so doing he accomplished mightily.
Often Father tried to account for himself, how he happened to break
away from the life of his family and early environment so absolutely and
completely and become, not a weak, easy-going, though picturesque farmer
in the farther Catskills, but a man of letters, a unique and picturesque
literary craftsman. "I had it in my blood, I guess," he once said. With
it he had what most of us have, the love of the woods and fields and the
hunting and fishing. Trout fishing, the most delightful of all, had for
him a perennial charm, and bee-hunting, too, and camping out, exploring
new streams and woods. All this was fostered and developed by his farm
life and early associations, and then when he became vault keeper in the
Treasury Department in Washington he was shut up away from it all with
nothing to do but look at the steel doors. Almost without being able
to do otherwise he began to live over again the delightful days he had
spent afield by writing of them. He was like an exile dreaming of his
native land. Nature has a trick of casting a spell over those who spend
their days with her so that when the day is gone only the memories
of the delights of it remain and these become ever more beautiful and
highly coloured with time. To the homesick young man, shut up in the
vault in Washington, the scenes of his native hills took on a beauty and
charm they never could have done had he remained there among those very
hills where his eyes and senses could drink their fill every hour. It
seems to me like a lucky chance that his ambition to write, already
manifest and firmly fixed, took the course it did, writing about Nature.
"I must have been a sport," he says of himself--a born word worshipper,
a man fired with unquenchable literary ambition, a lover of the best of
the world's books, born of parents who knew not the meaning even of the
words. I doubt very much that any of his immediate family, that is of
his own generation, read a line in any of his books. His sister told him
not to write, that "it was bad for the head"--how different he was from
them all is shown in an incident Mother once related, and which can be
told only with a word of explanation. During the war he and Mother
had gone "out home," as he always spoke of visiting the parents on the
homestead, and during dinner Grandfather exclaimed: "I'd like to see Abe
Lincoln hung higher than Haman and I'd like to have hold of the rope!"
Father sat speechless with pain and amazement, then silently pushing
back his plate he rose and silently walked from the room. Then
Grandmother "went for" Grandfather. But Grandfather did not realize
what he was saying, and he would have been one of the very last to have
harmed Lincoln, or any one else for that matter. The incident shows how
different those passionate, intense, and bitter-feeling times were from
ours, and how the spread of the magazines and the illustrated papers has
broadened and mellowed the feelings of the people.
Father often spoke of his joy when the _Atlantic_ accepted his first
article, the one on "Expression" which was attributed to Emerson--he
felt a new world had opened up for him, new worlds to explore and
conquer with unlimited possibilities. His ambition to write got a
tremendous incentive. At that time he was teaching school at a small
town near Newburgh and when Saturday came he wanted to go into the
parlour for his day's work. That was the time of the supremacy of the
parlour, the darkened room held sacred for special occasions, funerals,
and Sunday company and such, and Mother had no notion of its order
being disturbed and its sanctity profaned by such a frivolous thing as
writing--she locked the door. I think Father took it as an insult,
not to himself, but to his calling, a deadly insult to his god of
literature, and in what to me was a fine and noble and justifiable
frenzy he smashed and kicked the door into "smithereens." I applaud; I'm
glad he did it; he proved himself worthy of his chosen god. Mother no
doubt cried. Poor demolished door--a small and material sacrifice indeed
for the great god of letters!
Those years were hard ones in many ways for Father, the years in the
late '50's when he was teaching school and trying many things, trying
to find himself and make a living and appease the material ambitions of
Mother. One summer he spent on the old homestead and grew onions; the
seed he used was poor, few came up, and a summer of hard work, for both
him and Mother, came to nothing. For a time he studied medicine in the
office of Doctor Hull near Ashokan, and there, sitting in the little
office at a spot now just on the edge of the water of what is now the
great Ashokan Reservoir, he wrote his poem, "Waiting." One cannot but
marvel at the prophecy of it, the vision of the discouraged boy of
twenty-five every line of which has had such a fulfilment. He tried
several ventures, blindly groping, hoping for success which never came
to any of them. One of his ventures was a share in a patent buckle
from which he was to get rich, but from which he got losses and
discouragement--in fact, he had borrowed money to go into it and on his
non-payment he was arrested and brought up the river on a night boat.
Waking when the boat stopped at Newburgh and finding his guard was
asleep, he got up and dressed and went ashore. His arrest was not legal
anyway, and soon the matter was settled. He continued to teach, and
finally, in the early years of the war, drifted to Washington. A friend
of his wanted him to come, saying there were many opportunities and also
holding out the inducement that he could meet Walt Whitman. Finally
he got a position in the Treasury Department and from Hugh McCulloch,
Secretary of the Treasury, in his "Men and Measures of Half a Century,"
we get a picture of the young John Burroughs seeking a job, a picture
that Father said was not accurate, but which at least shows how he
impressed a man used to seeing many job-seekers:
One day a young man called at my office and said to me that he
understood that the force of the bureau was to be increased, and that
he should be glad to be employed. I asked him if he had any
recommendations. "I have not," he replied; "I must be my own." I
looked at his sturdy form and intelligent face, which impressed me so
favourably that I sent his name to the Secretary, and the next day he
was at work as a twelve-hundred-dollar clerk. I was not mistaken. He was
an excellent clerk, competent, faithful, willing.
And Father has said that of the hundred dollars a month he received, he
and Mother saved just half. And the real cost of living then was as high
as it is now; the actual cost of food and clothing and the manner of
living have changed. Father's first book: "Notes on Walt Whitman, Poet
and Person," published in 1867, now long out of print, a small brown
volume with gilt lettering, was brought out in those Washington
days. The book was not a success and though Father took a loss on its
publication, he did not have to deduct it from his income tax. Of
all that life there in Washington he has spoken so much in his books,
"Winter Sunshine," "Indoor Studies," "Whitman, a Study," and so on that
I will leave it and return to the vineyard here on the banks of the
Hudson.
It was in 1872 that Father and Mother came here and bought about a
nine-acre place, sloping from the road down to the water, living for a
time, nearly a year, in a small house up by the road, during which time
they were building the stone house, the building of which Father has
described in "Roof-Tree." He had wanted a stone house, and here was
plenty of stone, "wild stone" as a native called them, to be picked up,
weathered and soft in colouring, only a short haul and a few touches
with the hammer or peen needed to make them into building stone. He
has often spoken of Mother's first visit to her new home, just as the
foundation was nicely started, and of her grief and disappointment when
she saw the size of the building. The foundation of a house, open to the
sky, gives no idea of the size of the finished building, and it was in
vain that Father tried to explain this. "I showed her the plans," he
often said, "so many feet this way and so many that, such a size to this
room and such a size to that, but it was no use, she cried and took on
at a great rate." Father was bank receiver then, getting three thousand
a year, and on that he was building this big, three-story stone house.
He took great pleasure in it--he loved to tell of the Irish mason who
went off on a drunk just when he was working on the stone chimney.
Disgusted at the delay Father went up, and with hammer and trowel went
at the chimney himself, and the sobering mason could see him from Hyde
Park, across the river. When he was sober enough to come back and go on
with his work he carefully inspected what Father had done and exclaimed,
"and you are a hondy mon, ye are."
The southwest bedroom on the third floor Father was to have for his
room, his study, where he could write. This room he panelled to the
ceiling with native woods: maple, oak, beech, birch, tulip, and others,
and I like to think of his happy anticipation, his dreams of the happy
hours he would spend in this room, and of the writing he would do. But
he did no writing here, for a few years later he built the bark-covered
study down on the edge of the bank, then a few years later yet he built
Slabsides, two miles over the low mountain. It was there, especially in
the study, that he did the bulk of all his literary work.
Mother was a materialist; she never rated literary efforts very high;
she often seemed to think that Father should do the work of the hired
man and then do his writing nights and holidays. She could see no sense
in taking the best hours of the day for "scribbling," and it was only in
the later years when Father had a steady income from his writings that
her point of view softened. She was what they called in those days a
"good housekeeper" and she kept it so well that Father had to move out
for his working hours, first to the study, then two miles away. When it
came to housework, Mother possessed the quality called inevitableness
to an extraordinary degree. She had a way of fastening a cloth about
her head, a sort of forerunner of the boudoir cap of to-day, a means of
protecting her hair from any imaginary dust, and this became a symbol,
a battle flag of the goddess of housecleaning. Father was ordered out of
the library, where he did his writing, and his thread was rudely broken;
it was a day when sap did not run. For a high-strung, temperamental
being, hasty and quick tempered, I think he showed wonderful patience, a
patience that does him great credit. And yet in many ways Mother was
an invaluable helpmate, she was a balance wheel that kept their world
moving steadily, and I am sure saved Father from many mistakes and
extravagances.
It was only years afterward, when he began to ship grapes, that Father
named his place "Riverby." He had been reading a book of adventure
to me, Stevenson's "Black Arrow," and in it there was a place named
"Shoreby," or "by-the-shore." This suggested the name of "Riverby," or
"by-the-river," to Father for his place. So it was adopted and became
the trademark, "Riverby Vineyards," an oval stamp with a bunch of grapes
in the middle and the address below. It became the name of the place,
the name of one of Father's books, and was stamped on the lid of every
crate or basket of grapes.
Father was an absolutely honest man, honest not only in packing a crate
of grapes, but honest as to his own weaknesses and shortcomings. I can
never forget how he admired an exclamation attributed to General Lee at
Gettysburg. Pickett had made his famous charge and his veterans had come
back, a few of them, defeated, and Lee said to them, "It's all my
fault, boys!" "That is the true spirit of greatness," Father said,
thoughtfully. And when the _Titanic_ went down in mid-ocean with such a
loss of life, and the order was for the women and children first to the
lifeboats, men to keep back, Father said: "That took real grit. I hope
I'll never have to face such a crisis."
At another time the boys were stealing his grapes, the first Delawares,
not yet ripe enough, and then scattering the bunches they could not eat
along the road. Father wrapped himself in a waterproof and at dark sat
down under one of the vines to wait. Strange to say, he went to sleep,
and stranger still one of the boys did come, and came to the very vine
under which Father was sleeping. He was instantly awake and, watching
his chance, jumped up and grabbed the boy. There was a swift scrimmage,
the boy breaking away and fleeing. As he went over the stone wall Father
clinched him and they went over together, taking the top of the wall
over on them. Father being hampered by his coat, the boy was able to
break away and fled up the hill toward the road where he had left his
bicycle. He was unable to get away on it, however, and ran away into the
night, leaving his bicycle as hostage. In the morning when I came down I
found Father like a boy with a new toy. "Come out in the wash-house and
see my prisoner," he laughed, and could hardly contain himself for the
fun of it all. I came, and there stood the bicycle, and Father danced
a war dance about it. Later the boy came and owned up and insisted on
paying something, but in all kindliness Father would not of course take
any of the boy's hard-earned money. He simply explained the situation to
him and I am sure the boy never came back, as he might have done if he
had not been treated generously. At another time some boys from across
the river were caught red-handed stealing grapes. After scaring them for
a time, Father gave them some grapes and sent them home. He was always
cautioning us about cutting grapes, to cut only such as we would be
willing to eat ourselves not to mislead or cheat the purchaser. One
of his first letters, written thirty years ago, is mainly about the
vineyards--it is written on paper made to imitate birch bark, and
written in a swift, up and down hand that is almost as easily read as
the best printing:
Onteora Club, July 25, 1891.