Some Winter Days in Iowa Part 1

Some Winter Days in Iowa.

by Frederick John Lazell.

FOREWORD

I am glad to have the privilege, thus in advance, of looking over Mr.

Lazell's delightful essays. He has surely a gift in this sort of thing. We are grateful to the man who shows us what he sees in Nature, but more to the man who like our present author shows us how easy and blessed it is to see for ourselves.

Mr. Lazell reminds me of Th.o.r.eau and Emerson, and I can suggest no better foreword than the pa.s.sage from the last named author, from the _Method of Nature_, as follows:

"Every earnest glance we give to the realities around us with intent to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse and is really songs of praise.

What difference can it make whether it take the shape of exhortation, or of pa.s.sionate exclamation, or of scientific statement? These are forms merely. Through them we express, at last, the fact that G.o.d has done thus or thus."

THOMAS H. MACBRIDE

IOWA CITY, IOWA OCTOBER 17, 1907

I. THE WOODLANDS IN JANUARY

Humanity has always turned to nature for relief from toil and strife.

This was true of the old world; it is much more true of the new, especially in recent years. There is a growing interest in wild things and wild places. The benedicite of the Druid woods, always appreciated by the few, like Lowell, is coming to be understood by the many. There is an increasing desire to get away from the roar and rattle of the streets, away from even the prim formality of suburban avenues and artificial bits of landscape gardening into the panorama of woodland, field, and stream. Men with means are disposing of their palatial residences in the cities and moving to real homes in the country, where they can see the sunrise and the death of day, hear the rhythm of the rain and the murmur of the wind, and watch the unfolding of the first flowers of spring. Cities are purchasing large parks where the beauties of nature are merely accentuated, not marred. States and the nation are setting aside big tracts of wilderness where rock and rill, waterfall and canon, mountain and marsh, sh.e.l.l-strewn beach and starry-blossomed brae, flowerful islets and wondrous wooded hills welcome the populace, soothe tired nerves and mend the mind and the morals. These are encouraging signs of the times. At last we are beginning to understand, with Emerson, that he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. It is as if some new prophet had arisen in the land, crying, "Ho, every one that is worn and weary, come ye to the woodlands; and he that hath no money let him feast upon those things which are really rich and abiding." While we are making New Year resolves let us resolve to spend less time with shams, more with realities; less with dogma, more with sermons in stones; less with erotic novels and baneful journals, more with the books in the running brooks; listening less readily to gossip and malice, more willingly to the tongues in trees; spending more pleasureful hours with the music of bird and breeze, rippling rivers, and laughing leaves; less time with cues and cards and colored comics, more with cloud and star, fish and field, and forest. "The cares that infest the day" shall fall like the burden from Christian's back as we watch the fleecy clouds or the silver stars mirrored in the waveless waters. We shall call the constellations by their names and become on speaking terms with the luring voices of the forest fairyland. We shall "thrill with the resurrection called spring," and steep our senses in the fragrance of its flowers; glory in the gushing life of summer, sigh at the sweet sorrows of autumn, and wax virile in winter's strength of storm and snow.

We shall begin our pilgrimages lacking in Nature's lore, many of us, as were four men who recently walked down a city street and looked at the trees which lined the way. One confessed ignorance as to their ident.i.ty; another thought he knew but couldn't remember; a third said they looked like maples; and a fourth thought that silence, like honesty, as the copybooks used to tell us, was the best policy. And yet the name linden was writ large on those trees,--on the beautiful gray bark, the alternate method of twig arrangement, the fat red winter buds, which shone in the sunshine like rubies, and especially on the little cymes of pendulous, pea-like fruit, each cyme attached to its membranaceous bract or wing. Of course, if the pedestrians had been in the midst of rich woods and there found a trunk of great girth and rough bark, surrounded by several handsome young stems with close-fitting coats, the group looking for all the world like a comfortable old mother with a family of fresh-faced, willowy, marriageable daughters, every member of the quartet would have chorused, ba.s.s-wood.

But no one need be ashamed to confess an ignorance of botany.

Botanical ignorance is more common than poverty. It has always been prevalent. And the cause of it may be traced back to the author of all our short-comings, old Adam. We read that every beast of the field and every fowl of the air were brought to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. But why, oh why, didn't he name the trees? If he had known enough of the science to partake of the fruit of the tree of life he might have lived long enough to write a systematic botany, satisfactory alike to the Harvard school of standpat systematists and their manual-ripping rivals in nomenclature. But he didn't; and no one else may ever hope to do it.

Eve had never read a book on how to know the wild fruits, and her first field work in botany had a disastrous termination; it complicated the subject by the punishment of thorns and thistles.

Cain's conduct brought both botany and agriculture into disrepute.

Little more is heard until Pharaoh's daughter went botanizing and found Moses in the bulrushes. Oshea and Jehoshua showed some advancement by bringing back grapes and figs and pomegranates from the brook Eschol as the proudest products of the promised land. But Solomon was the only man in the olden times who ever knew botany thoroughly. We are told that he was wiser than all men. "Prove it,"

says some doubting reader, moving for a more specific statement. So the biographer adds: "He spake of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall."

Four centuries later, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego antic.i.p.ated Emerson's advice about eating bread and pulse at rich men's tables. The historian tells us that they were men skilful in all wisdom, cunning in knowledge, and understanding science. Possessing such wisdom, Daniel knew it would be easy to mix up the wicked elders who plotted against the virtue of the fair Susanna by asking them a question of botany. One said he saw her under a mastick tree and the other under a holm tree. This gave Shakespeare that fine line in _The Merchant of Venice_, "A Daniel come to judgment; yea, a Daniel." But in these latter days we rarely read the story of Susanna, and Shakespeare's line is not understood by one play-goer in fifty.

When the diminutive Zaccheus climbed into a shade tree which graced a town lot in Jericho he gave the translators for "the Most High and Mighty Prince James" another puzzle, for they put him on record as going up into a sycamore tree. We had always supposed that this was because the sycamore's habit of shedding its bark made smooth climbing for Zaccheus. But scientific commentators tell us now that it was not a sycamore tree, but a hybridized fig-mulberry!

But all this is digression. The best time to begin keeping that New Year's nature resolution is now, when the oaks are seen in all their rugged majesty, when the elms display their lofty, graceful, vase-like forms, and when every other tree of the forest exhibits its peculiar beauty of trunk, and branch, and twig. Often January is a most propitious month for the tenderfoot nature-lover. Such was the year which has just pa.s.sed. During the first part of the month the weather was almost springlike; so bright and balmy that a robin was seen in an apple-tree, and the brilliant plumage of the cardinal was observed in this lat.i.tude. Green leaves, such as wild geranium, strawberry and speedwell, were to be found in abundance beneath their covering of fallen forest leaves. Scouring rushes vied with evergreen ferns in arresting the attention of the rambler. In one sheltered spot a clump of catnip was found, fresh, green, and aromatic, as if it were July instead of January.

Sunday, the sixth, was a day of rare beauty and enticement. Well might the recording angel forgive the nature lover who forgot the promises made for him by his sponsors that he should "hear sermons," and who fared forth into the woods instead, first reciting "The groves were G.o.d's first temples," and then softly singing, "When G.o.d invites, how blest the day!"

They err who think the winter woods void of life and color. Pause for a moment on the broad open flood-plain of the river, the winter fields and meadows stretching away in gentle slopes on either side. There are but few trees, but they have had room for full development and are n.o.ble specimens. All is gaiety. A blue-jay screams from a broad-topped white ash which is so full of winged seeds that it looks like a ma.s.s of foliage. The sable-robed king of the winter woods, the American crow, in the full vigor of his three-score years, maybe, (he lives to be a hundred) caws l.u.s.tily from the bare white branches of a big sycamore, that queer anomaly of the forest which disrobes itself for the winter. The merry chickadees divide their time between the rustling, ragged bark of the red birches and the withered heads of heath-aster and blue vervain below. In the one they get the meat portion of their midday meal, and in the other the cereal foods. No wonder they are sleek and joyous.

A few steps farther and we leave this broad alluvial bottom to enter the canon through which the river, ages ago, began to cut its course.

These ridges of limestone, loess and drift rise a hundred feet or more above the level of the plain from which the river suddenly turns aside. They are thickly covered with timber. There is no angel with a flaming sword to keep you from pa.s.sing into this winter paradise! The river bank is lined with p.u.s.s.y willows; they gleam in the sunshine like copper. Farther back there are different varieties of dogwood, some with delicate green twigs and some a cherry red. The wild rose and the raspberry vines add their glossy purplish and cherry red stems to the color combination, and a contrast is afforded by the silvery gray bark of stray aspens. A still softer and more beautiful shade of silver gray is seen in the big hornet's nest of last year which still hangs suspended from a low sugar maple. On all of these the sunlight plays and makes a wondrous color symphony. "Truly the light is sweet and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." To be sure, this colorful arrangement of the stems and twigs is not brilliant, like the flaming vermilion blossoms of the _Lobelia cardinalis_ in August, the orange yellow of the rudbeckias in September, or the wondrous blue of the fringed gentian in early October. It is more like the delicate tints and shadings of an arts and crafts exhibition, stained leather, hammered copper and bra.s.s, art canvas, and ancient illuminated initials in monks' missals. The tempered winter sunlight is further softened by the trees; as it illuminates the soft red rags of the happy old birch it seems sublimated, almost sanctified and spiritual, like that which filters through rich windows in cathedrals, and makes a real halo around the heads of sweet-faced saints.

There are strange sounds for January. All the winter birds are doing their share in the chorus and orchestra; crows, jays, woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, nut-hatches, juncos, tree-sparrows. But suddenly a woodp.e.c.k.e.r begins a new sound,--his vernal drumming! Not the mere tap, tap, tap, in quest of insects, but the love-call drumming of the nidification season, nearly three months ahead of time.

Swollen by recent rains, the river is two feet higher than usual.

There is a sheet of ice on either sh.o.r.e, but the water swiftly flows down the narrow channel in the middle with a sound halfway between a gurgle and a roar, mingled anon with the sound of grinding cakes of ice. Suddenly away up at the bend of the river there is a sharp crack, like the discharge of a volley of musketry. Swiftly it comes down the ice, pa.s.ses your feet with a distinct tremor, and your eyes follow the sound down the river until the two walls of the canon meet in the perspective. In a small way you know how it would feel to hear the rumble of an approaching seismic shock. Only there was no terror in this. It was the laughter of the sunbeam fairies as they loosened the architecture of "the elfin builders of the frost."

The recent rains have vivified the mosses clinging to the gray rocks which jut out, halfway up the slope. Very tender and beautiful is their vivid shade of green. Winter and summer, the mosses are always with us. When the last late aster has faded, the last blue blossom of the gentian changed to brown, the green mosses still remain. And the more they are studied, the more fascinating they become. Take some home and examine them with a hand lens, then with a microscope. You will be charmed with the exquisite finish of their most minute parts.

Nature glories in the artistic excellence of infinitesimal workmanship. The most beautiful part of her handiwork is that which is seen through a microscope. There is beauty, beauty everywhere; the crystals of the snow, the cell structure of the leaf, the scales of the b.u.t.terfly's wing, the pedicels, capsules and cilia of these mosses. No wonder that many distinguished men have been led to give their whole lives to the study of mosses and have felt well repaid.

Here are Nature's only two elementary forms of growth, the cell and the crystal, wrestling for the mastery over each other in a life and death struggle. The moss is built up of cell, the rock of crystal forms. Below this Devonian limestone, its crystals sparkling in the sunshine, with its coral fossils, its fragments of crinoids, and its broken sh.e.l.ls of brachiopods, down through the Devonian, the Silurian, the Ordovician, and the Cambrian rocks, down to the original crust formed when first the earth began to cool, if any there be remaining; all these miles of rocks are inorganic, built up of crystals. But here on the surface, the tender green mosses and the bright lichens have begun the struggle of the cellular system for supremacy. These humble little rock-breakers will not rest until they have pulverized the rocks into soil sufficient to sustain higher forms of vegetable life.

Once before, many millions of years ago, the cell life had won a partial victory over the crystal. In the great sub-tropical sea which once covered this spot, corals lived and flourished as they do now in similar seas. Myriads of brachiopods lived, moved, and had their being. Gigantic fish sported in the waters. Meanwhile older rocks were being denuded and disintegrated. Millions of tons of sediment were brought by the rivers and streams to the sh.o.r.es of the Devonian sea.

Upheaval, change, transformation followed, and the tide of battle turned. Cell life was powerless before the vanquishing crystals of the infiltrating calcite. Only the inorganic part of that vast world of organic life here remains in these fossils to tell the story--the walls of the corals, the sh.e.l.ls of the brachiopods, the teeth of the monster fishes. Then came succeeding ages, and finally the great glaciers which brought down the drift, rounded the sharp ridges, filled up the deep valleys and gorges, and gave to Iowa her fertile and inexhaustible soil. The earth was prepared to receive her king.

The glaciers receded. Man came.

Now here, on this bit of limestone rock, the struggle is on again. The mosses and the lichens have proceeded far enough in their work of disintegration to provide substance for the slender red stem of dogwood, which is growing out of the soil they have made. The fallen leaves of the surrounding trees follow the pioneer work of the mosses.

The rain and the cracking frosts are other agencies. By and by the organic will triumph over the inorganic, the cell over the crystal, the plant over the rock, and where now the fossils lie beautiful flowers will bloom.

The short winter day draws rapidly to a close and there is time for only a brief survey of the beauty of the upland trees. The fairy-like delicacy of the hop hornbeam, with its hop cl.u.s.ters and pointing catkins; the slender gracefulness of the chestnut oak; the Etruscan vase-like form of the white elm; the flaky bark and pungent, aromatic twigs of the black cherry; the ma.s.sive, n.o.ble, silver-gray trunk of the white-oak; the lofty stateliness, filagree bark, and berry-like fruit of the hackberry; the black twigs of the black oaks, ashes, hickories and walnuts etched against the sky,--all these arrest your attention and r.e.t.a.r.d your steps until the sun is near the horizon and you look over the tangled undergrowth of hazel, sumac, and briers, far through the trunks of the trees to the western sky which is bathed in flame color, as if from a forest fire.

You are alone and yet not alone. A rabbit scurries across your pathway. A faint little squeak voices the fright of a mouse. There is a swoop of wings which you neither distinctly hear nor clearly see, yet you are aware, in a less marked degree than was the mouse, that an owl was near. You feel certain that the downy woodp.e.c.k.e.r is asleep in that neat little round hole on the southwest side of a tree trunk, just a little higher than you can reach. In the early afternoon you saw a red squirrel go gaily up a tall red oak and climb into his nest of leaves. You fancy he is snugly coiled there now. This recent hill of fresh dirt--strange sight in January--was surely made by a mole, and you know that they are all somewhere beneath your feet: moles, pocket gophers, and the pretty striped gopher which used to sit up on his hind legs, fold his front paws, and look at you in the summer time, then give a low whistle and duck; meadow mice in their cozy tunnels through which the water will be pouring when the spring freshets come; the woodchuck in his long, long sleep, and the chipmunk with his winter store of food. And so watching, listening, and musing you come at length to the western edge of the woodland and look across the prairie, far as the eye can reach, to where the red ball of the sun hangs scarce a yard above the horizon. You look upon a scene which is peculiar to this part of Iowa alone. It is not found in any other state or nation on earth. "These are the gardens of the desert, for which the speech of England has no name--the Prairies."

_"Lo they stretch In airy undulations, far away, As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, And motionless, forever."_

The "rounded billows fixed" are the paha ridges which the glaciers made. They are not high enough to obstruct the view, nor to mar its ocean-like effect. In the middle distance you may see a farm windmill from sail to platform, but away across the snow-plain sea you catch only the uppermost part of the white sails. The rest is concealed from view by the illusory rise of the foreground toward the horizon--for this twenty-mile stretch of prairie has an illusory curve similar to that seen from all ocean sh.o.r.es. But now the sun has disappeared and the windmills, houses, groves, and fences which looked like black etchings against the flame-colored sky slowly vanish, first far away toward the bluffs on the yon sh.o.r.e of the prairie sea, then nearer, nearer, comes the gloom until the fence across the first field is scarcely discernible. The bright vermilion fades at length to misty gray and lights appear in the windows of the farm homes.

This sunset and twilight scene, peculiar to Iowa, is succeeded by the pageant of the stars. These are not peculiar, in neighboring lat.i.tudes, to any clime or time. They are the same stars which sang together when the foundations of the earth were fastened; the same calm stars upon which Adam gazed in remorse, the night he was driven from the garden of Eden. The Chinese, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans counted the hours of the night by the revolutions of the Greater and the Lesser Bear around Polaris, and guided their crafts and caravans by that sure star's light:

_"And therefore bards of old, Sages and hermits of the solemn wood, Did in thy beams behold That bright eternal beacon, by whose ray The voyager of time should shape his needful way."_

These

_"Constellations of the early night That sparkled brighter as the twilight died And made the darkness glorious"_

were mysteries to Ptolemy and to Plato, as well as to Job. All ages of mankind must have watched and wondered, pondering over the unsolved problems. When the First Great Cause projected all these whirling fire-mists into illimitable s.p.a.ce with all the laws of physics, chemistry, evolution in perfect working order, did he choose this earth as humanity's only home? Is this the only planet with a plan of salvation? Is this mere speck among all the myriads of worlds in the solar system, and the other systems, the only creation of His hand which has known a Garden of Eden, a Bethlehem, and a Calvary? When the sun has lost his heat and the cold crystals of the earth have fought their last fight with cellular structures, and won; when all the fairy forms of field and forest are only fossils in the grim, gray rocks; when the music of bee and bird and breeze shall have waned into everlasting silence; when "all the pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre;" when man with all his achievements and triumphs, his love and laughter, his songs and sighs, is forgotten even more completely than his Paleolithic ancestors; then, shall some portion of the nebula which now bejewels Andromeda's girdle become evolutionized into a flora and a fauna, a civilization and a spirituality unto which the visions of the wisest seers have never attained? Shall this subtle, evanescent mystery which we call life, which glorifies so many varied forms, be wholly lost, or shall it pa.s.s joyfully through the ether to some brighter and better world? Is it true

_"That nothing walks with aimless feet; That no one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When G.o.d hath made the pile complete?"_