Matthiessen, Peter. Wildlife in America. New York: Viking, 1959.
Regular readers of this column (is there anybody out there?) will perhaps have noticed the high regard with which the present author holds the late novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, an artist whose personal dedication to the redemption of a free and living earth is unparalleled in the current literary field. Here on the eve of another Independence Day, it seems appropriate to reflect on the uniquely American concurrence of wilderness and freedom as seen through the somber lens of Matthiessen’s seminal Wildlife in America.
We’ve been told that wilderness without wildlife is mere scenery. Wild creatures, particularly those whose continued existence in some way challenges the primacy of economic hegemony, recall our formative national experience on the frontier, while reining in the tendency toward total conquest of the natural world that much of our history has made manifest. The will to retain large carnivores, for instance, or seemingly inconsequential populations of fairy shrimp or louseworts in areas of great financial potential, casts a far brighter glow upon our essential character than could another overbearing recitation of the Gross National Product.
In 1958, Matthiessen loaded his convertible with food, books, clothing and weaponry and began a roaming tour of every national wildlife refuge in the country, intent upon experiencing and imparting to us his vision of a fading wild America. The concentration of purpose, the classical clarity of prose style—permeated as it is with an aching sense of what has already been lost—and the inherent nobility of his enterprise makes Wildlife in America an experience worthy of frequent rereading. The 1985 hardcover reprint from Viking Press includes a collection of glossy prints by Catesby, Audubon, Fuertes and other masters of natural history painting; current paperback editions reprint the excellent line drawings of wildlife artist Bob Hines. Matthiessen’s ringing lucidity and coolly reflective style makes his approach immediately discernable; better to let his magnum opus of America’s struggle with its natural inheritance, and the untenable link between extinction and extraction, be represented by a few of the more representative passages to be had here:
“The wildlife of America, pinned in or chivvied out of its last redoubts by the convulsions of blind progress, is finding its most potent defenders among individuals, or rather in those groups of individuals banded together in defense of the natural environment—wild flowers and trees, wild shorelines, swamps, savannas, deserts, wild rivers, mountains, forests—as a non-material need. That the need seems to be felt so commonly is only partly the achievement of those who, ever since the first warnings of [early American naturalist] Alexander Wilson, have worked painfully toward the illumination of their countrymen. It is also the reaction of a people entrapped by the apparatus of their own progress, and seeking a passage back to more permanent values, to the clean light of open air. The wild creatures of the open spaces, of clear water and green northern wilds, of gold prairie and huge sky, embody a human longing no less civilized for being primitive, no less real for being felt rather than thought.”
* * *
“One imagines with misgiving the last scene on desolate Eldey [a stony islet near Iceland, home of the last great auks in existence]. Offshore, the longboat wallows in a surge of seas, then slides forward in the lull, its stem grinding hard on the rock ledge. The hunters hurl the two dead birds aboard and, cursing, tumble after, as the boat falls away into the wash. Gaining the open water, it moves off to the eastward, the rough voices and the hollow thump of oars against wood tholepins unreal in the prevailing fogs of June. The dank mist, rank with marine smells, cloaks the dark mass, white-topped with guano, and the fierce-eyed gannets, which had not left the crest, settle once more on their crude nests, hissing peevishly and jabbing sharp blue bills at their near neighbors. The few gulls, mewing aimlessly, circle in, alighting. One banks, checks its flight, bends swiftly down upon the ledge, where the last, pathetic generation of great auks gleams raw and unborn on the rock. A second follows and, squalling, they yank at the loose embryo, scattering the black, brown, and green shell segments. After a time they return to the crest, and the ledge is still. The shell remnants lie at the edge of tideline, and the last sea of the flood, perhaps, or a rain days later, washes the last piece into the water. Slowly it drifts down among the sea-curled weeds, the anchored life of the marine world. A rock minnow, drawn to the strange scent, snaps at a minute shred of auk albumen; the shell fragment spins upward, descends once more. Further down, it settles briefly near a littorina, and surrounding molluscs stir dully toward the stimulus. The periwinkle scours it, spits the calcified bits away. The current takes the particles, so small as to be almost invisible, and they are borne outward, drifting down at last to the deeps of the sea out of which, across slow eons of the Cenozoic era, the species first evolved.”
“The finality of extinction is awesome, and not unrelated to the finality of eternity. Man, striving to imagine what might lie beyond the long light years of stars, beyond the universe, beyond the void, feels lost in space; confronted with the death of species, enacted on earth so many times before he came, and certain to continue when his own breed is gone, he is forced to face another void, and feels alone in time. Species appear, and, left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable. But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one. No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climatic change, has ever extinguished another, and certainly no species has ever devoured itself, an accomplishment of which man appears quite capable. There is some comfort in the notion that, however Homo sapiens contrives his own destruction, a few creatures will survive in that ultimate wilderness he will leave behind, going on about their ancient business in the mindless confidence that their own older and more tolerant species will prevail.”
Regular readers of this column (is there anybody out there?) will perhaps have noticed the high regard with which the present author holds the late novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, an artist whose personal dedication to the redemption of a free and living earth is unparalleled in the current literary field. Here on the eve of another Independence Day, it seems appropriate to reflect on the uniquely American concurrence of wilderness and freedom as seen through the somber lens of Matthiessen’s seminal Wildlife in America.
We’ve been told that wilderness without wildlife is mere scenery. Wild creatures, particularly those whose continued existence in some way challenges the primacy of economic hegemony, recall our formative national experience on the frontier, while reining in the tendency toward total conquest of the natural world that much of our history has made manifest. The will to retain large carnivores, for instance, or seemingly inconsequential populations of fairy shrimp or louseworts in areas of great financial potential, casts a far brighter glow upon our essential character than could another overbearing recitation of the Gross National Product.
In 1958, Matthiessen loaded his convertible with food, books, clothing and weaponry and began a roaming tour of every national wildlife refuge in the country, intent upon experiencing and imparting to us his vision of a fading wild America. The concentration of purpose, the classical clarity of prose style—permeated as it is with an aching sense of what has already been lost—and the inherent nobility of his enterprise makes Wildlife in America an experience worthy of frequent rereading. The 1985 hardcover reprint from Viking Press includes a collection of glossy prints by Catesby, Audubon, Fuertes and other masters of natural history painting; current paperback editions reprint the excellent line drawings of wildlife artist Bob Hines. Matthiessen’s ringing lucidity and coolly reflective style makes his approach immediately discernable; better to let his magnum opus of America’s struggle with its natural inheritance, and the untenable link between extinction and extraction, be represented by a few of the more representative passages to be had here:
“The wildlife of America, pinned in or chivvied out of its last redoubts by the convulsions of blind progress, is finding its most potent defenders among individuals, or rather in those groups of individuals banded together in defense of the natural environment—wild flowers and trees, wild shorelines, swamps, savannas, deserts, wild rivers, mountains, forests—as a non-material need. That the need seems to be felt so commonly is only partly the achievement of those who, ever since the first warnings of [early American naturalist] Alexander Wilson, have worked painfully toward the illumination of their countrymen. It is also the reaction of a people entrapped by the apparatus of their own progress, and seeking a passage back to more permanent values, to the clean light of open air. The wild creatures of the open spaces, of clear water and green northern wilds, of gold prairie and huge sky, embody a human longing no less civilized for being primitive, no less real for being felt rather than thought.”
* * *
“One imagines with misgiving the last scene on desolate Eldey [a stony islet near Iceland, home of the last great auks in existence]. Offshore, the longboat wallows in a surge of seas, then slides forward in the lull, its stem grinding hard on the rock ledge. The hunters hurl the two dead birds aboard and, cursing, tumble after, as the boat falls away into the wash. Gaining the open water, it moves off to the eastward, the rough voices and the hollow thump of oars against wood tholepins unreal in the prevailing fogs of June. The dank mist, rank with marine smells, cloaks the dark mass, white-topped with guano, and the fierce-eyed gannets, which had not left the crest, settle once more on their crude nests, hissing peevishly and jabbing sharp blue bills at their near neighbors. The few gulls, mewing aimlessly, circle in, alighting. One banks, checks its flight, bends swiftly down upon the ledge, where the last, pathetic generation of great auks gleams raw and unborn on the rock. A second follows and, squalling, they yank at the loose embryo, scattering the black, brown, and green shell segments. After a time they return to the crest, and the ledge is still. The shell remnants lie at the edge of tideline, and the last sea of the flood, perhaps, or a rain days later, washes the last piece into the water. Slowly it drifts down among the sea-curled weeds, the anchored life of the marine world. A rock minnow, drawn to the strange scent, snaps at a minute shred of auk albumen; the shell fragment spins upward, descends once more. Further down, it settles briefly near a littorina, and surrounding molluscs stir dully toward the stimulus. The periwinkle scours it, spits the calcified bits away. The current takes the particles, so small as to be almost invisible, and they are borne outward, drifting down at last to the deeps of the sea out of which, across slow eons of the Cenozoic era, the species first evolved.”
“The finality of extinction is awesome, and not unrelated to the finality of eternity. Man, striving to imagine what might lie beyond the long light years of stars, beyond the universe, beyond the void, feels lost in space; confronted with the death of species, enacted on earth so many times before he came, and certain to continue when his own breed is gone, he is forced to face another void, and feels alone in time. Species appear, and, left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable. But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one. No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climatic change, has ever extinguished another, and certainly no species has ever devoured itself, an accomplishment of which man appears quite capable. There is some comfort in the notion that, however Homo sapiens contrives his own destruction, a few creatures will survive in that ultimate wilderness he will leave behind, going on about their ancient business in the mindless confidence that their own older and more tolerant species will prevail.”
