A linguist, naturalist, and classicist, Morrow, whose previous book, The Names of Things (1997), celebrated the austere landscapes of Egypt and Sudan, has turned her discerning eye toward the history of upstate New York. For Morrow, to be human is to see the numinous in the ordinary, a gift she learned in part from two of her neighbors, a beekeeper and a trapper. The author describes the marshlands, meadows, and woods of the narrow lakes area--and its residents--as existing in a kind of metaphorical cross-pollination. Fittingly, it is the trapper who recognizes the misnamed eastern coyote as the Algonquin red wolf, and whose knowledge is "a rare and precious thing, a remnant of an older world." Each concise essay contains riches. A meditation on apples, for instance, outlines not only the history of William Smith and other nurserymen of the Finger Lakes, but also the rise of spiritualism, and the discovery of a rare strain of the fruit in the Tien Shan mountains in Kazakhstan. Rebecca Maksel
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"A sudden, loss-tinged memoir of upstate New York's Finger Lakes region...Willowy and beguiling." Kirkus Reviews
"Morrow's language is rich and sensuous, for she thinks like a poet." Publishers Weekly
"Each concise essay contains riches." Booklist, ALA
About the Author
SUSAN BRIND MORROW is the author of The Names of Things. A classicist, linguist, and translator of ancient Egyptian as well as contemporary Arabic poetry, she lives in Chatham, New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Wolves and Honey
A Hidden History of the Natural WorldBy Susan Brind MorrowMariner Books
Copyright © 2006 Susan Brind Morrow
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618619207
1
The Wood Duck
Last night i dreamt I saw Bob Kime. I knew we were saying
goodbye. I held him tight. Then he took off his jacket and gave it to
me. It was a hunting jacket, soft and old, sort of bruised, I thought,
and very dear. And then he was gone.
I always thought of Bob as my own particular friend, but at the
funeral home on Friday people were lined up down the block, people
I didn"t know.We waited in line for an hour and a half just to get
into the room to approach the open casket where his body lay. Shawn
was standing beside the casket, having very much his father"s face.
Had I seen the picture in the back? he said. A photograph tacked on a
board among dozens of others—of Bob with his dogs, with Shawn,
with snow geese on the ground at their feet—and with them one of
me and Bob in our bee suits in his old red pickup twenty years ago.
Last Sunday I almost called him up to ask about a hive. But then I
thought, Bob will think this is pathetic,my calling like this, as though
nothing has changed after all these years. If only I had called him. For
on Monday he shot himself.
Like the many times I have gone out to watch the moon rise,
only to ?nd it has risen, huge and gold and silent in a place where I
have failed to look, I had missed the point, and the point was aimed
deep into my own life, into the golden territory of the familiar.
At the funeral on Saturday morning Terry was there, sitting in
the back row a few feet from where I stood. At ?rst I didn"t see him.
Terry is in his sixties now. His black hair is white. But there were the
huge sloping shoulders, the same large head, the gold outline of the
glasses he has worn these last ten years as he turned to laugh with the
person beside him, some stranger on edge, as we all were, in the dim
yellow light of the crowded room, Bob"s soft pro?le, like something
set in stone, occasionally visible through the rows of people shifting
like rows of corn in the wind. When everyone rose to leave after the
service was over I leaned forward and slipped my ?ngers into Terry"s
large rough hand. "Well, Suzy," he said, "all your buddies are gone
now."
When I was growing up we thought Terry was a Cherokee Indian. It
turned out that he was simply from California, and even though he
had a crew cut and was something of a math whiz, and was also, it occurred
to me only later, all the while a scientist and a chemistry professor
at Cornell, he was our only real experience of the sixties, of an
unconventional person. For a large man, who could easily have been
threatening, he had an atmosphere of total ease, of kindness, and I
had taken refuge in the safety of his presence for maybe thirty years.
Later Lan and I drove down East Lake Road where the Kime
?elds lay in soft shining squares of pale green oats and darker soy and
golden wheat, patched like a lovely quilt in a rolling sweep down toward
the dark blue line of Seneca Lake. The Kime barns and dwarf
apple trees and farmhouse—large and white and square, the way the
farmhouses are there, with a square windowed cupola on top where
one can sit and see out over the ?elds—stood by the road lined with
maple trees, as they have stood from the earliest days of my life.
Beside the bluestone marker just beyond—a gravestone carved
in the shape of a dog, a curious antique—a dirt road leads down to
Anne and Terry"s cottage on a bluff above the lake, the burnt-out
shell of an old log cabin of dark wood, polished now and screened, so
that it recedes within a line of tall white pines and is almost invisible.
Anne has cancer, and has taken on a kind of translucence after
these last months of illness, as though her ?ne blond hair were re-
?ned to silver.Her blue-green eyes had a radiance that surprised us as
we walked in and saw her, for the ?rst time in maybe a year.
We sat and watched the sun go down across the lake below
through the broken black outlines of the trees. The faint ?icker of a
rainbow formed for an instant in the low sky to the north, as though
it were the rim of something suddenly visible, a shining fragment of
the rim of a halo. The last light fell in a wave of gold that swept
quickly around the room, settling for amoment on each of us in turn.
We sat quietly talking in the dark, in what seemed like a box of deep
blue light, as we had in summers past, so that the evening had about
it a sense of timelessness.
I reminded Terry of how once he said that everything operates
on the level of four basic elements, their combining and breaking
down, and that we are all "just some spectacular sideshow," as though
all the desperate suffering of life were simply an elaboration of this
basic principle.
"What is it that makes a human being?" he had said. "What
de?nes being human? Falling in love. And what is that? Seeing something
ordinary as . . .numinous."He thought amoment. "Seeing. The
intensity of that focus, that concentration of energy, would be the
heating up in which some signi?cant transformation could take place."
Last Monday night a friend of mine called to say that she had
heard a scream, a terrifying, almost human sound, and outside found
a newborn fawn, still wet fromits mother, and all around it black vultures
in the trees.
"Bob talked a lot of people out of trees,"Terry said, remembering
how I ?rst went to him, just wanting to be around that kind of man,
a hunter, the year my brother died, "but nobody was there for him."
When we were children, barely able to walk, my parents would take
us out into the middle of Seneca Lake and toss us off the side of their
boat into the deep green water. Although we could ?oat in our life
jackets, and there was the electric touch of the water itself, the lake
seemed dense and bottomless—heavy matter, like a skin not easily
shaken free. We had an instinctive dread of what could drift up
through that heavy medium from below—the immense primordial
sturgeon, like pale ghosts, plated in hard ridges of leathery gray.
The lake was something that we knew by heart, through our
bodily senses as they themselves were formed.
In those days there were only simple cottages in the bays, little
clapboard houses of one story, painted blue or white or gray. The narrow
water-worn docks of splintery wood stretched out into the water
on thin pipes rarely more than a hundred feet.
The ?elds behind them glittered with the multiplicity of summer
life, speckled red beetles on the milkweed leaves, the fragrance of
the milkweed unbearably sweet, its gummy milk bleeding into our
hands, the seed pods, their skin like pale knobby velvet, pulled back to
reveal a tight silver-white pattern of satin-rimmed scales. The seeds
formed the body of a tiny ?sh—a ?sh made of silk you could pull to
pieces and ?oat away.
When we ?rst came to the cottage it was full of old things: a
kind of old pine green and teal blue tinged with gray, lined plates of
pale blue glass, heavy stoneware, a ?eldstone ?replace, and, before it,
a bearskin rug smelling of bacon grease, and after we were there,
mounted ?sh on the walls—the walleye I had caught in Algonquin
Park that was patterned green and gold, with its tall reptilian dorsal
?n (how often we would get the spines of ?sh ?ns stuck in our ?ngers
in those days, and soak them out with Epsom salts).
My parents bought the place with all its contents, and there were
a lot of old books, Gene Stratton-Porter"s A Girl of the Limberlost—
the story of a girl who put herself through school collecting rare
moths in the swamps of Mackinaw—and The Keeper of the Bees,
about aWorldWar I veteran dying in a war hospital, who got up and
staggered away, and found a garden on the sea ?lled with ?owers in
every shade of blue, a garden ?lled with skeps and bees.
World War I and, after the terrible shock of that war, the solace
in the eternal presence of nature, were pervasive elements in the atmosphere
of the place. My mother was formed by the aftermath of
that war, and the books in the cottage were embedded with a sense of
the time, like the musty smell embedded in their pages.
There was one green book, The Bird Study Book, with a golden
moon pressed in relief on its cover, and ?ying across the golden
moon a dark ?ock of geese. Years later the cover remained like a seal
impression in my mind, although I had forgotten the book itself. One
day in New York I called the astronomy department at Columbia
University and said, "Can you see geese ?ying across the full moon?"
Their reply, after I was put on hold for a minute, was "Yes. When
there are geese ?ying across the full moon."
My brother David became a duck hunter in his early teens. We used
to go out in the boat so he could practice sighting the birds in ?ight at
a distance around the lake when the migrations came through in the
fall. We were used to seeing ?ocks of ducks settled on the icy water
near the crumbling old stone pier as our father drove us to school in
the morning down Hamilton Street. They had a mottled quality that
almost shone in the crisp clear air. Some were beautifully patched
with white—buf?eheads and goldeneyes among the canvasbacks
and redheads.
One Christmas Eve David appeared on the porch in the dark
in the moss green hunting jacket my mother had made for him by
hand, with a brace of canvasbacks over his shoulder. My mother
would later say, "How I remember his Adam"s apple bobbing in his
throat!" David, thin and blond as he was then, having recently come
back as an eagle scout from Philmont, which made him even more of
an outdoorsman—always up at 4:00. There he stood with the glovesoft
white breasts of the ducks, their burgundy, oddly shaped heads
spilling down the front of his jacket.How cold it was, the ?lm of shining
dark ice on the walk, the hard snow sparkling white beneath the
trees, and my mother saying, "Well, you can pluck them outside!"
But David and I went down to the basement and spread out
newspapers on the ?oor. I remember the sense of the gathered tension
of the feathers as they ripped out from the skin with a soft puckering
sound, the feathers coming loose in my hands, the soft inner
down full of mites. Redheads, buf?eheads, canvasbacks—the meat
gamy and tough, tasting of ?sh, full of shot, the shot falling loose on
the plate as you cut the dark-stained meat. The circular burn around
the shot burned into the ?esh remained, although we cooked the
birds in wine for a long time.
When we were children David and I used to catch things just
to look at them, and sometimes kill them to see what was inside.
One summer we found a mudpuppy under the dock, purple and
splotched, with gills that blossomed out like the purple buds of a Judas
tree, and perfectly ?ngered hands.We buried it on the shore and
later dug it up to see its beautifully articulated thin white bones.
My father was a lawyer, and we lived in town. But somehow for us as
children our great experiences had to do with being outside. I have a
photograph of David and me standing in the Canada woods—David
in a soft blue cloth jacket with a white blond crew cut, me in faded
corduroy lined with plaid.We are tiny beneath the tall trees amid the
masses of green ferns. I am holding a magnifying glass toward the
ground, and looking up. Thus is a life spun together through layers of
sense impressions, the light speckling through the trees, the smell of
dead leaves and damp earth. For me the elusive thing of value has
ever been the golden light of kerosene lamps, walls of thin blond
wood, tarpaper tacked over a table, some smell of damp, and just beyond
—the rich outlying darkness.
When David died in 1981 I was studying Greek in New York. I still
have taped above my desk a fragment from Ibycus:
Tou men petaloisin ep" akrotatois
Izanoisi poikilai aiolodeiroi
Panelopes lathiporphurides te kai
Alkuoves tanusipteroi
In these lines of early Greek poetry key words are mysteries, because
the author made them up. And they were never used again. All
one can do is break them down into their component parts, and then
guess what the composite might mean. It reminded me of oolitic
stone: in the words, as in the thing described, the beauty lay in the
?aws themselves, the irregularities—the speckling, the splotching,
the mixing up.
There was aiolodeiroi—throats that shone with their dappling
of color—with aiolos implying a moving brightness, a glittering, a
speckling, as in aiola nux, the starry sky.
The fragment went something like this:
Among the highest leaves they sat—
The mottled ducks, with throats
That almost shone;
And halcyons
that secretly grow red
with wings outstretched.
One could only think, reading this, of the American wood duck
with its shining splotches of color, its white speckled throat, its silverblue
wings like the panes in cathedral windows. I don"t know if there
is another duck that lives in trees. The wood duck was a rare bird
when I was growing up. Its populations had been decimated by the
nineteenth-century fashion industry. I had never seen one, only in
pictures in books.
The hardest word was lathiporphurides—with porphyry, a word
that means brightness itself, an emphatic doubling of the word for
living brightness—pur, ?re, the moving brightness of burning red,
or the heaving of the sea with its glittering changing light. Here attached
to lathi, meaning "in stealth." The Greek dictionary made a
leap into the violence implicit in the color red, and translated the
word "feeds in the dark."
I can"t remember the day I met Bob Kime, he came into my life so
quietly, and was so utterly familiar.
My father and I would sometimes stop by his house near the
lake on Sunday afternoons when some of his friends were over shooting
clay pigeons. The men would be standing in a line, with great seriousness
of purpose, aiming and shooting down the little clay discs as
they were ?ung into the air out of the machine with a rapid clicking
noise.
I was never much of a shot, but when I was growing up it was
considered important to know how to handle a gun. I had been target
shooting from the age of eight. As a teenager I had my own
Remington, and later even a pistol permit. There was a great deal of
pleasure in sighting the discs as they fell rapidly through the sky, pulling
the trigger, and seeing them shatter into pieces.
Bob would be standing in the line all the while, casually joking
as we all were. When one of us missed, he would stop midsentence,
raise his shotgun to his shoulder with a certain ease, and pick off the
disc before it hit the ground.
He was an ordinary man of medium build, with dark hair and
dark eyebrows. But he had a kind of antique face: soft features, eyes
set a little wide apart, the kind of face one might imagine an American
farmer having had a century or two ago—and indeed his family
had been farming the land on the east side of Seneca Lake for a
long time.
But most characteristic of him (so that one might not notice
other things—I can"t remember what he wore) was a kind of brightness.
He had, one might have said, a beautiful radiance: he was a man
who saw things, who saw things and understood them.
One October evening after we were friends he took me out to
the Junius swamps.We stood in waist-high waders in the cold murky
water amid the water-rotted trees, some still standing, with the faint
pink hands of remnant leaves ?oating on frail elongated stems up to
the surface, some gnawed down by beaver into ?aking points like palisades.
The sky was silver blue with a ?lm of cloud, but we could see
the stars come through in the early dark.
We watched the ducks ?y up in gathered bursts, and tried to see
what they were in the half-light, by the pattern of their wing beats,
their patches of white. For some reason we didn"t bother to shoot at
anything.
At Christmas that year Bob brought me a wood duck. I had
asked him that October night if he had ever seen one.
Continues...
Excerpted from Wolves and Honeyby Susan Brind Morrow Copyright © 2006 by Susan Brind Morrow. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Narrator Bernadette Dunne faces the challenge of providing coherence to a cornucopia of short essays. She produces something almost poetic from the simple prose about natural things in the author's life. The topics skip from animals to memories to men in rapid change, sometimes from sentence to sentence. Time flits around like a butterfly, so Dunne's relaxed approach and soft, motherly voice provide continuity. Honey bees receive the most scientific attention; we spend a good amount of time hearing about their social behavior and importance in producing crops. A few paragraphs in Latin sound stilted, but the pleasant remainder will delight many. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
