Annual JBA Literary Awards Are the Highlight of the April...

Wake-Robin Volume 44, Number 1, Summer 2011

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Volume 44Number 1Summer 2011

Annual JBA Literary Awards Are the Highlight of the April Luncheon Held at the American Museum of Natural History Elisabeth Tova Bailey Receives the 2010 John Burroughs MedalColor photographs from the luncheon will be posted on the

JBA website by September 1

Awards Luncheon continued on page 4

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eatingby Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Algonquin Books of Chapel HillReview

By Robert Michael Pyle

“What About This Snail?” As we meet today to honor John Burroughs and a fresh new medal recipient, it is important that we also note the passing of a great friend of the As-sociation. John Hay was considered by many the dean of American nature writers. He won the medal in 1964 for his magnificent book, The Great Beach. He served as medal juror, board member, and cheerleader for the Association. John’s books were cerebral, taut, and dense, never a light read, but highly approachable, of-ten witty as well as wistful, and deeply enriching. I first met him on a butterfly-watching trip in Britain in 1985. I was intimidated at first to meet the author of In Defense of Nature, but soon found him to be a great guy in the field as well as in a pub. In 1987, when I received the medal for Wintergreen, it was John who took me both under his wing and to dinner that night. And in 1992, I was happy to help bestow upon him at Cape Cod the honor that began the Orion Society’s John Hay Award: one recipient of which would be our own longtime board member and medalist, Ann Zwinger. In his own remarks upon receiving the med-

al, John said that “learning to see, to look at things, may help take the man-centered world away from its own image.” There could be no better introduction to the writer and book we are about to honor as the new-est recipient of the John Burroughs Medal. The extraordinary little book that we honor with this year’s John Burroughs Medal tells an equally extraordinary tale: how one woman, confined to her bed by a pernicious illness, managed to journey out-ward in her mind, even unto the depths of the forest floor and the heights of her imagination, on the slick foot of a small brown snail—a snail that she didn’t even want when it entered her life. Well, I would have taken it. Let me admit from the outset that I was pre-adapted to like this book. As a boy naturalist, long before butterflies, I was first infat-uated with mollusks. By infatuated, I mean that shells and their animals almost completely captured my at-tention. Had I lived at the coast, any coast, this would have been well enough. But I grew up in Colorado, a genuinely dismal place to be a young conchologist. I spent all of my allowance on seashells from the Den-ver Museum of Natural History’s shop and mail-order dealers, and I belonged to a Shell of the Month Club: each month brought a fancy murex, volute, or tellin to my doorstep. But my passion ran especially toward land snails, and of these I possessed exactly none. My books told me to seek them in moist, muddy places;

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Trail Work Takes a BreakAfter Completion of

a Fifty-Five-Step Stairway

Supported by a company of volunteers, Eddie Walsh and his team from Tahawus Trails completed the first phase of trail construction on June 26. Work had begun on Earth Day in April. Over the next ten weeks more than sixty volunteers contributed more than 550 hours to the project. In a daylong downpour, the volunteer corps cleared sticks and branches from the trail. Work then hit a snag when unanticipated, immovable bedrock required more stonework to get us over and around it. Moving rocks tested the lim-its of our strength, and “sidehilling” (soft squaring of the edges) became a new skill for many as we learned the advantages of “pick mattocks” and “hazel hoes,” cousins to the hand hoe. (The work activities are de-scribed in the last issue of Wake-Robin, Spring 2011, and online at the JBA website under Wake-Robin ar-chives.) On Slabsides Day in May, new recruits from the Catskills and New York City painted trail blazes and helped carry rough lumber into position at the head of the trail. This rough-cut black locust became a seventy-foot boardwalk across a section of John Bur-roughs’s former celery swamp—through an arduous process of messy work in black muck. Capping off the effort, the crew built a striking fifty-five-step stone stairway leading down to the fern valley toward the end of the Highlands Trail.

Trail Work Resumes September 10

In the fall we will start on Southern Trail, where volunteers will restore the natural appearance of this wide, trail corridor. Next, we will build the sig-nature ladder for the trail spur where it crosses a steep cliff before it meets the 18th Century trail to Chodikee Lake. To cross another cliff, the new trail will have a series of switchbacks up narrow ridges on a cliff face, adding variety to the trail network. We will finish by restoring the two trails to the north and south of the Pond and will relocate a trail-head away from the privy. Another section will be re-routed to provide a full view of a series of waterfalls.

Trail Names Updated

Several trail names will change to make them more descriptive, referring to each trail’s primary fea-ture: the Spring Trail, the South and North Pond Trails, the Peninsula Trail, and the Overlook Trail. Two with historic references will remain unchanged. The trail to Julian’s Rock, up the sheer east cliff in front of Slab-sides, is named for Burroughs’s son, who as a teenager discovered the grotto below. And the Amasa Martin Trail loops around Martin’s former homestead, built while he was helping Burroughs clear the wetland that would become the three-acre swamp where Burroughs would grow celery for the New York City market.

John Burroughs AssociationThe John Burroughs Association was formed

in 1921 shortly after the naturalist-writer died. Among the Association’s aims are fostering a love of nature as exemplified by Burroughs’s life and work and preserving the places associated with his life. The Association publicly recognizes well written and illustrated nature essay publications with literary awards that are given after the annual meeting on the first Monday of April.

The Association owns and maintains Slab-sides and the adjoining John Burroughs Sanctuary in West Park, New York. Open house at Slabsides is held the third Saturday in May and the first Sat-urday in October. A permanent exhibit about John Burroughs is in the American Museum of Natural History.

The membership year begins in April. Con-tact Secretary, John Burroughs Association, Inc., 15 West 77 Street, New York, NY 10024-5192, or e-mail: [email protected]. Telephone 212-769-5169. Website: www.research.amnh.org/burroughs Wake-Robin is published in March, July, and November. Vittorio Maestro, Richard Milner, and Steve Thurston, editors. Send submissions and editorial inquiries to Secretary, John Burroughs Association, Inc., 15 West 77th Street, New York, NY 10024-5192 or e-mail [email protected] drawing © 1996 Jim Arnosky. Wake-Robin © 2011 John Burroughs Association, Inc.

Directors: Jackie Beckett, Lisa Breslof, Joan Burroughs, Marcia Dworak, Jay Holmes, Regina Kelly, David Liddell, Evelyn Rifenburg, Selden Spencer, Jeff Walker, Keith Wheeler.

pick mattock

hazel hoe


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The JBA Welcomes New Members

Senior James P. Capossela Annette Sambolin (Gift from Regina Kelly) Priscilla Vanvalkenburgh

Student Joshua Beckman James Walsh (Gift from Joshua Beckman)

Annual Robert D. Johnson Joshua Knudtson

YOU CAN HELP:Make a Donation and/or Volunteer

We need to raise a total of $12,500 as the match for our grant from New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. The value of the time donated by the trail volunteers so far totals nearly $4,000. Please consider making a gift to help meet the match. This important work will enable more people to appreciate the environs that inspired Burroughs. Send your check to The John Burroughs Association, 15 West 77 Street, New York, NY 10024-5192. Tax deductable contributions may also be made online at NYCharities.org. Look for the link on the JBA web-site, www.research.amnh.org/burroughs. And please volunteer to help finish the trails. We will be back at work September 10, and should be able to complete the trail work this fall. To sign up e-mail [email protected].

Watch a slideshow of the trail volunteers at work and see the trails come to life: visit www.research.amnh.org/burroughs

Sidehill construction Photo by Joan Burroughs

Lisa Breslof (left) and Joan Burroughs (center) congratulate Jack Padalino on his retirement from the JBA Board after many years of devoted service. Roderick Mickens, Sr. Photographer, Photo Studio, AMNH

April 2011 JBA Board Meeting (left to right): Lisa Breslof, Jeff Walker, Joan Burroughs, and Regina Kelly Roderick Mickens, Sr. Photographer, Photo Studio, AMNH

From Pondside, Spring 2011, By Jason DempseyResident Naturalist, John Burroughs Sanctuary, West Park, New York, can be found on the web at www.research.amnh.org/burroughs

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to the reader, to the world. Snail is an expression of nature and human nature, and fate, intertwined and intimately experienced, observed.” I would add that Burroughs himself would readily recognize this twin-ing, for as he wrote in New Gleanings in Old Fields, “The facts of natural history become interesting the moment they become facts of human history.”The juror went on:

A compelling example for me is how she re-lated the mini-ecology of the snail and the nec-essarily limited and human-arranged habitat of the terrarium—her “bit of native forest floor with all its natural disarray”—to the brookside granite boulder in the forest, with its colony of polypody ferns, which “survive on a margin of rock where the air is humid and alive with the brook’s energy.” Her relationship with time and her setting its variance in human and natural-world contexts, a theme woven throughout her text, seems something signal to the naturalist tradition.

My colleague’s comments are astute. For my part, I was especially impressed by how Ms. Bailey set out, through extensive research and reading from home, to learn the salient features of snails; then, through personal observation, closest attention, and even experimentation, to learn still more; and finally, by dint of the heroic labor that exquisite prose requires even from the hale, to bring it all to her lucky readers. Unwanted though it was to begin with, she has ren-dered from the gift of her snail a profound gift for us all. So we can see that our laureate has been rec-ognized on her merit, and her book’s merit, fully in the Burroughs Medal tradition—not just because one of the jurors once had a mighty jones for snails. Yet, apart from the animal and its depiction, there is that entirely other aspect of Wild Snail that rivets our atten-tion. It renders this winner different from all who have gone before, and it stretches the award itself, and its precepts. I think of Ken Lamberton’s Wilderness and Razor Wire as another recent winner that caused the jury to think, to take a risk, and to allow their remit to grow—as the medal competition surely must do if it is to remain relevant. In fact, Ken Lamberton is doubly connected with our present book. I first learned of him in a com-

Awards Luncheon continued from page 1

after every Denver rain I came in soaked like a muddy marsh animal, but I never found a one. As I wrote in Wintergreen, the book that first brought me to one of these affairs: “When my grand-father took my brother, Tom, and me back East in the Packard and we called in at the Big Spring in Mis-souri’s Ozarks, I had no eyes for the usual souvenirs: for there I found my first land snail, laying its silver streak on the wall of a cave beside the blue pool of the spring. I was transported with excitement, and the creature occupied me for the rest of the long, hot trip, then died.” Eventually I tired, as one will, of unrequited desire. Having noticed rather more butterflies around than snails, like, some vs. none, I metamorphosed into a young lepidopterist, and the world became my oyster. Yet even now, when I live among green, and chocolate, and fuzzy wild snails and am liable to come upon them daily, I recall the tang of that boyish pas-sion. Had I owned The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating at ten or eleven, it would have been right up there with A. Hyatt Verrill’s Shell Collector’s Handbook, An Ot-ter’s Story by Emil E. Liers, and F. M. Brown’s Colo-rado Butterflies in the libretto of my life. But I wouldn’t want anyone to think that my love of the book we honor today is based solely on past associations, or that I fell for it thanks to a pow-erful penchant for snails. No, when a book is called “beautiful” by Ed Wilson and “irresistible” by Maxine Kumin, one would be wise to give it a look, even a read. And one would be right, when the book is The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. Of course, those are just blurbs, and don’t blurbists trade in superlatives the way bankers swap mortgages? Not really. I don’t know any who want their names associated with a bum book. These authors were, if anything, understated in their praise. One would be hard pressed to overblurb this book. One of my fellow jurors wrote that Snail is “truly a natural history, arrived at via a naturalists’ sensibility, awareness of the extensions that come from the classical nineteenth-century naturalists’ qual-ity of direct observation and personal connection with place in nature and in the human world. Bailey makes clear her esteem for the legacy of the likes of John Burroughs; I see her as a modern exemplar of that tra-dition and what its perceptions and writings can bring


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petition for the literary journal Alligator Juniper. Mr. Lamberton had submitted an essay entitled “Weeds,” with which I was very taken. In the end, “Weeds” won second place; and the book in which it eventually ap-peared, Wilderness and Razor Wire, went on to win this medal in 2002. That book’s genre-stretching at-tribute was this: it concerns the author’s incarceration in penitentiary, and how the weeds and other organ-isms of the prison yard saved his sanity. It strikes me that the parallel between these two winners is not a subtle one: after all, imprisonment is where you find it, whether in the Big House or your own house. And the way out may lie in a patch of jailhouse weeds, a desert toad . . . or a snail in a bedside flowerpot. Their second link, a little more oblique, lies with another of the winners of the Alligator Juniper contest. That essay described how a person dying of AIDS found redemption, solace, meaning, and worth, all in a goldfish in a bowl beside his hospital bed. It is the only other piece I’ve read that explores the special territory of Wild Snail: how an indoor experience of natural history can redeem the world, especially when that’s all you’ve got. As John Burroughs wrote in The Animal and the Puzzle-Box, “There is so much in animal behavior that is interesting, and that throws light on our own psychology and its origins.” Just so. Or, as another of the jurors put it, “The implicit or explicit conviction that there is something of benefaction, inspiration, and/or consolation in the natural world underlies the tradition of nature writing, and this book seems to me to bear an impressive and original witness to that con-viction.” I would add that this book’s very existence (and the author’s very survival) attest beyond argu-ment to such a benefaction and consolation; and, the gods know, she was inspired! “When the body is rendered useless,” wrote Ms. Bailey of her disabling disease,

the mind still runs like a bloodhound along well-worn trails of neurons, tracking the echo-ing questions: the confused family of whys, whats, and whens, and their impossibly dis-tant kin how. The search is exhaustive; the an-swers, elusive. Sometimes my mind went blank and listless; at other times it was flooded with storms of thought, unspeakable sadness, and in-tolerable loss. Given the ease with which health infuses

life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certain-ties. It was all I could do to get through each moment, and each moment felt like an endless hour, yet days slipped silently past. Time un-used and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.

Reading this, you could be forgiven for think-ing it a miracle that this book was ever written. And a kind of a miracle it really was, a miracle in a small brown shell. But like most such marvels, it was a close call that it happened at all. Ms. Bailey wrote of the time before she was ill, when her dog, Brandy, and she wandered beside a nearby brook. “On the trail home, in the boggiest of spots, perched on tiny islands of root and moss, I found diminutive wild white violets, their throats faintly striped with purple.” So when she could no longer take those walks, it was a solace when a friend brought her a pot of field violets to keep beside her bed. But then the friend brought the snail to go with them.

“I thought you might enjoy it,” said the friend.“Is it alive?”“I think it is.”Why, I wondered, would I enjoy a snail? What on earth would I do with it? I couldn’t get out of bed to return it to the woods. It was not of much interest, and if it was alive, the responsibility—especially for a snail, something so uncalled for—was overwhelming.

After the friend left and Elizabeth had a chance to think about it, she felt she could manage to water the violets from her water glass. “But,” she asked her-self, “what about this snail?” The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is her an-swer. How Elisabeth Tova Bailey came not only to enjoy the snail, but to be enthralled by it, to virtual-ly monograph it, and eventually to be saved by it, is what makes this such a wonderful and utterly unex-pected book. It is a story, in her words, that “tracks the echoing questions”—a marvelous phrase that catches exactly what John Burroughs attempted to do, every time he put mind to matter and pen to paper. How a human being under extreme duress found redemption

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in a little snail is indeed a wonder, and how the author wrote about it, a quiet splendor. With this award, the John Burroughs Medal breaks fresh trail. Thank you, Ms. Bailey, for taking us into new territory, and please accept our warmest congratulations.

Robert Michael Pyle was the 1987 Medalist for Win-tergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land

Remarks on Acceptingthe John Burroughs Medal Award

By Elisabeth Tova Bailey

My heartfelt thanks to the John Burroughs As-sociation and its panel of judges. To Robert Michael Pyle, how lovely to have a commentary written with the light touch of a lepidop-terist. Thank you. For eighty-five years, the John Burroughs Medal Award has been bestowed on books with topics ranging from a minuscule grain of sand to the Earth’s bedrock, from rivers and wind to plants of the woods, swamps, and deserts. Animal topics have included avians, arthropods, and mammals. I am delighted that the jurors have added to this last lively list my small book on a humble mollusk. During my four-year writing process, I was of-ten asked what my book was about. “A snail,” I would reply. My answer always elicited a startled dubious look. The seemingly dull minuteness of my topic was a conversation stopper. In reading John Burroughs’s essays, it is inter-esting that I have yet to find a single mention of a snail. However, Burroughs was fascinated by the smaller creatures; “Mere size,” he wrote, “does not count for much with Nature; she is all there, in the least as in the greatest” (“Nature in Little,” Field & Study). He went further to say: “No creature is small in print, or in a book. Print is the great equalizer. . . . If I could give you [a small creature’s] life history . . . it would stand out on my page as distinctly as if it had been a thousand times larger: its travels, its adventures, its birth, its death, would fill the mind’s eye” (“Glean-ings in Old Fields,” Field & Study). My encounter with a Neohelix albolabris was intimate and lengthy. The snail entered my life unex-pectedly during a year of severe chronic illness. Watch-ing its adventures reawakened my curiosity. There was the mystery and fun of getting to know another being,

and the more I observed the snail, the more I wanted to know; and, as with any relationship, there was much to say. There was a question that haunted Charles Darwin for years: How did terrestrial gastropods colo-nize islands far out to sea? The question that haunted me was different: When your life is saved by a gastropod weighing less than half an ounce and smaller than a half inch in width, how do you explain this to the world? It’s the questions that haunt us that take us on the longest journeys. For years, my interspecies relationship felt too personal to share, but my desire to write a biographi-cal thank-you note to the snail would not fade. Darwin set up experiments to find his answers; I began to read the gastropod literature searching for mine. I interlibrary-loaned large dusty volumes on mollusks. When I found sentences in which a scien-tist’s love for, or obsession with, gastropods overcame scientific distance, I pounced. Slowly, I accumulated 10,000 words of natural history. “Facts,” Burroughs wrote, “are the flora upon which [the literary natu-ralist] lives” (Introduction to Wake-Robin, 1895 edi-tion). My research took me back through time to the dawn of life. As I learned how a small, slow-moving crea-ture colonized the world, I traveled intellectually and imaginatively with my snail’s ancestors, crossing con-tinents, riding currents of wind and water, and landing on oceanic islands. For an example of snail locomotion speed in relation to Earth time, consider a snail gliding from Maine to this luncheon at the American Museum of Natural History. Traveling a few inches per minute, only at night, as is typical to take advantage of damp condi-tions, and resting by day, with seasonal hibernation and estivation time included, a snail would arrive in sixty-four years, just in time for the 149th Medal Award ceremony in 2075. However, a Neohelix albo-labris’s lifespan is about seven years, so it would take more than nine generations to make such a trip. Yet snails managed to colonize the entire world millions of years before our species had even come into existence. This gives us some perspective on the depths of Earth time, the perseverance of the


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gastropod, and how recent we humans are. Gastropods were also ahead of us in making use of swifter transportation methods. Just as Darwin thought, they sometimes catch rides on faster-moving animals. The snail as a “whole creature” astounded me. What appears to be a simple animal is capable of a complex love life, an epicurean appetite, a desire for a comfortable bed, skilled locomotion methods, and multiple defense systems. Like any creature of evo-lution, the snail has enviable abilities, including out-standing strength, miraculous dormancy, and awesome hydraulics—which put human limits into perspective, and that is humbling. When it became clear there was enough mate-rial to write an entire chapter on slime and another on courtship, I thought of all the writers who would love to dip their pens into such topics, but my subject had clearly chosen me. “The truth of animal life,” John Burroughs wrote, “is more interesting than any fiction about it” (“Straight Seeing and Thinking,” Leaf & Tendril). The scientific literature often led me to more questions than answers, so Tim Pearce, a malacologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Ken Hotopp, a biologist at Appalachian Conservation Bi-ology, became my wonderful technical consultants. If you have not had the chance to listen to two scientists debate the color of gastropod eye granules and geni-tal location—both useful markers in species ID—then you’ve missed truly riveting discussions. When a malacologist with a firm grounding in science and a writer with a creative imagination come across the same fact, interpretations may vary. I read that some carnivorous snails fold their teeth out of the way, and I assumed this was to carry off their prey. I spent hours working up an amusing sentence on the slow-motion getaway. Tim pointed out, sensibly, that a snail usually dines on the spot, and it was more like-ly that folding its teeth down gave it more mouth room with which to swallow its victim. I would ask Tim or Ken what seemed to be a simple question only to learn that the answer was com-plicated, or there were many possible answers, or no answer at all. The richness of our scientific knowledge is astonishing; more astonishing is what we still don’t know and may never know. Facts, which we continue to accumulate exponentially, are useful, but more cru-

cial is how they lead us to the edge of the unknown, for that is where thinking is at its most creative and profound. Reading a good book is exhilarating, memo-rable, and can be life changing. As a child I escaped into the fields and woods of Robert Frost’s poems, the island adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and the salty, wind-blown pages of The Outermost House. Though I was 1,000 miles away from the sea when I finished Henry Beston’s book, I fell asleep with sand between my toes and the rhythm of ocean surf in my ears. I fell in love with sentences and the places they took me, particularly if those places were in the coun-try or the wilderness. Reading lets us enter the mind of another of our own species and thus expands our experience of the world, a truly amazing ability unique to Homo sa-piens. Unlike reading a book, writing one is as messy and challenging, as perplexing, and sometimes as fu-tile, but often as fertile, as the natural world itself. I could say that writing a book is like water finding its way downhill: there is meandering, the occasional boulder in the way, side channels that go dry, even hairpin turns. I could say that it’s like an oyster mak-ing a pearl—one starts with a microscopic bit of grit (a tiny idea) and then builds, ever so slowly, with con-stant polishing. Any nature metaphor works to describe the process of writing, for ultimately it is completely or-ganic; it is a natural selection of the thoughts that rise from the landscape of the mind. Reflecting on the universal experience of ill-ness and isolation took me inward, while exploring the similarities and differences between a snail and a human took me outward; both journeys led me to a deeper understanding of life itself. Will a Neohelix albolabris continue to evolve in subtle, but certain, new directions or will it go ex-tinct? Though the survival of any one species, includ-ing our own, seems more tenuous than ever, thanks to the extraordinary process of evolution life will con-tinue in some form, somewhere. Ultimately, writing the Wild Snail book has left me stunned by how human-centric we humans are. While there are many acclaimed national book awards, the John Burroughs Medal Award was the first to celebrate our relationship to other species and our

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planet, and it continues to document life as it evolves. I thank the Association and its judges for including The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating on this remarkable list. I end with Burroughs’s own words: “We share in the life of the universe; we are a part of it, and what keeps it going keeps us going” (“Horizon Lines,” Accepting the Universe). “The ground underfoot be-comes a history, the stars overhead a revelation” (“The Pleasures of Science,” Field & Study). Thank you.

SpringsRemarks on Accepting the JohnBurroughs Nature Essay Award

By Jill Sisson Quinn

In his essay “Springs,” John Burroughs writes, “Indeed, of all foot-paths, the spring-path is the most suggestive. This is a path with something at the end of it, and the best of good fortune awaits him who walks therein. It is a well-worn path, and, though generally up or down a hill, it is the easiest of all paths to travel: we forget our fatigue when going to the spring, and we have lost it when we turn to come away.” More than anything else, frequent walks to a spring—and to the creek that spring flowed into—instilled in me a fascination with nature. It was along a creek, also, where I saw my first ichneumon wasp—the subject of my essay, “Sign Here If You Exist.” The spring I grew up walking to was down a hill, and through a cornfield and forest. In chapter 10 of my recently published collection of nature essays, Deranged, I describe the spring: “A long time ago, someone had built a concave, hip-high wall of field-stone into the hill behind and above where the water began to seep, creating a place where the water could collect and stream from. We viewed this as a place to spot minnows, frogs, and salamanders, another path to the creek. . . .”At first, my sisters and I followed the spring to the creek with my father and played in the water by a large rock. Later, my sisters and I on our own followed the spring to the creek and the creek to the road, where we would circle home. Sometimes we went upstream and sometimes down, but always we went to the creek. I spent half my childhood in that water, shoes and socks on one bank or another. It was beside another creek that I saw my first

giant ichneumon wasp. I was hiking with my future husband along the Flatbrook River in Northwest New Jersey, returning from the old yellow birch where he and I had hung a swing on a branch that arched out over the water. On a dying tree, we noticed several large, winged insects all curled into the same curious posture—one that looked both tangled and deliberate at the same time. We assumed—wrongly—that the in-sects were performing some kind of courtship display. A quick consultation with our biology professor in-formed us that what we had seen was the intricate egg-laying process of the giant ichneumon wasp, which I examine closely in the essay. But I didn’t write about the ichneumon wasp until ten years later. By this time my life had under-gone many changes—I had married that boy who hiked with me along the Flatbrook River and with him had moved to Wisconsin, settling in the center of the state. I was in a new land, in need of feeling at home, and so I went out in search of springs. On one of these walks, that familiar looking insect with her long “tails” drifted across my path and there, to the left of the trail on a standing dead tree were perched a group of fe-male ichneumon wasps. They were engaged in their almost unbelievable egg-laying process, in which the female senses the vibrations of a specific larva inside a dead tree, and then bores a hole through the wood to deposit her eggs in the body of that larva. I can’t say exactly how I came to combine my interest and research on the ichneumon wasp with my struggles over what happens after we die—the other concern in “Sign Here If You Exist.” But I can say that when I am in search of a spring, which is on ev-ery walk, almost every day, my mind meanders like the water I desire, and that sort of meandering creates the type of essay—one that braids natural science with memoir—that I like to read and write myself. Burroughs writes, “What secret attraction draws one in his summer walk to touch at all the springs on his route, and to pause a moment at each, as if what he was in quest of would be likely to turn up there?” My quest for springs, like Burroughs’s own, is sure to continue all my life and feed my mind like the water from each spring, as it bubbles up, nourish-es and makes green almost year-round the land that houses it.


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Excerpt from the Award-WinningNature Essay, “Sign Here If You Exist”

by Jill Sisson Quinn

(Ecotone, Volume 6, Issue 1, Fall 2010)

The female giant ichneumon wasp flies, im-pressively for her near-eight-inch length, with the light buoyancy of cottonwood fluff, seemingly with-out direction, simply aloft. Despite her remarkable size, she is not bulky. Her three-part body makes up only about three inches of her total length, and is dis-proportionately slender; her thorax is connected to her abdomen by a Victorian-thin waist. Most of her maxi-mum, eight-inch span consists of an ovipositor half that length which extends from the tip of her abdomen and trails behind her like a thread loose from a pant hem. Fully extended, she can be nearly as long as your Peterson’s Field Guide to Insects. Her overall appearance of fragility—the corset-ed middle, the filamentous tail—portrays in flight a facade of drifting. But both of the times I have seen a giant ichneumon wasp she was on a mission, in search of something very specific: a single species among the 1,017,018 described species of insects in the world (91,000 in the United States, 18,000 in Wisconsin, where I observed my second giant ichneumon). To comprehend this statistic, there are many things one needs to know: the definition of an insect, Linnaean taxonomy, the function of zero, the imaginary borders of states and countries. The female ichneumon wasp knows none of this. Yet it can locate a larva of the pigeon horntail—a type of wood wasp whose living body will nourish her developing young—hidden two inches deep in the wood of a dead tree, in the middle of a forest. Charles Darwin himself, it turns out, studied the ichneumon wasp. He mentions it specifically in an 1860 letter to biologist Asa Gray, a proponent of the idea that nature reveals God’s benevolence. Darwin, on the other hand, swayed no doubt by the rather maca-bre details of this parasitic insect’s life, writes: “I can-not persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ichneumoni-dae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars”—and then, as if to reach the layman, he adds, “Or that a cat should play with mice.” The tabby that curls in your lap and licks

your temple, after all, has likely batted a live mouse between its paws until its brain swelled and burst. And the larvae of the giant ichneumon wasp eat, from the inside out and over the course of an entire season, the living bodies of the larvae of a fellow insect. Like Darwin, I think I have put to rest my belief in a beneficent and omnipotent God, in any God really. Contrary to what I once believed, it is easy to let go of God, whose essence has never been more than ethe-real anyway, expanding like an escaping gas into the corners of whatever church you happened to attend, into the breath of whatever frightened, gracious, or in-somnious prayer you found yourself emitting. But it is much more difficult to truly put to rest the belief in an afterlife, the kind where you might get to visit with all your dead friends and relatives. It will not be easy to let go of your deceased mother, who stands in her kitchen slicing potatoes and roast, who hacks ice from the sidewalk with shovels; she is marrow and bone, a kernel of morals, values, and lessons compacted like some astronomical amount of matter into tablespoons, one with sugar for your cereal, another, for your fever, with a crushed aspirin and orange juice. You love her. You mark time and space by her: she is someone you are always either near to or very far from.© 2010 by Jill Sisson Quinn; excerpted by permission.

Writer Jill Sisson Quinn is also an English teacher at the Stevens Point Area Senior High School in Wiscon-sin. Her first book, Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape and in the Lifespan, was published 2010 by Apprentice House of Loyola University, Mary-land. “Sign Here If You Exist” has been chosen for publication in Best American Science and Nature Writ-ing 2011 (Mariner Books, forthcoming in October).

Ecotone, founded in 2005 and published at University of North Carolina Wilming-ton, is a semiannual journal that seeks to reimagine place. Each issue brings together the literary and the scientific, the personal and the biologi-cal, the urban and the rural. For further information visit www.ecotonejournal.com

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The John Burroughs Association2010 Nature Booksfor Young Readers

Reviews by Marcia L. DworakChair of the JBA Young Readers Jury

(The reviews were read by educator Jenny Lando of the American Museum of Natural History.)

Each year, I begin the task of writing up the descriptions of the books that have been selected for the John Burroughs Association Young Readers List by thumbing through The Complete Nature Writings of John Burroughs as a starting point. I often find a passage in one of the essays that inspires me to begin writing. This year, I found myself led happily into a bit of procrastination by finding a number of essays that cried out to be read on the spot in their entirety. I especially encourage you to read his collection of es-says titled Accepting the Universe. There is much fuel for thought there! Hours later, I found a passage in Fresh Field about the sea that led me right back to the task at hand:

One does not seem really to have got-out-of-doors till he goes to sea. On the land he is shut in by the hills, or the forests, or more or less housed by the sharp lines of his horizon. But at sea he finds the roof taken off, the walls taken down; he is no longer in the hollow of the earth’s hand, but upon its naked back, with nothing between him and the immensities. He is in the great cosmic out-of-doors, as much so as if voyaging to the moon or to Mars.

Those lovely words fit beautifully as an intro-duction to two of the six books chosen this year that visit the sea and its immensities. Concern for time prevents me from reading equally lovely passages to introduce the rest of the books that deal intriguingly with mysteries in nature, strange partnerships, and na-ture’s most successful creatures. John Burroughs has a lot to say about those topics too! These books are worthy additions to the distin-guished books that make up the John Burroughs As-sociation List of Nature Books for Young Readers. On behalf of the Jury, it is my pleasure to present the 2010 award-winning books:

Adventure Beneath the Sea: Living in an Underwater Science Station, by Kenneth Mallory, with photographs by Brian Skerry (Boyds Mills Press); Grades 5-8. Imagine living underneath the sea for a whole week! The author and photographer of this intriguing book did just that in Aquarius, an underwater labo-ratory. The warm and personal tone of the narrative and the perfectly chosen photographs give the reader a clear view of the realities of living and working in a small, cramped steel habitat sixty feet below the surface of the sea. The important research that the Aquarius team does on a coral reef in the Florida Keys National Sanctuary is well described by highlighted materials interspersed throughout the book. Readers who want to know more can explore the excellent re-sources listed at the end of the book. Bugs and Bugsicles: Insects in the Winter, by Amy S. Hansen, with illustrations by Robert Clement Kray (Boyds Mills Press); Grades 3-5. Bugs and Bugsicles provides informative an-swers written in a charming manner to the age-old question, “Where do all the bugs go in the winter?” The wonderful illustrations are a perfect accompaniment and delightfully clarify details in the text. In case you wondered, one of the bugsicles in the title is an Arctic Woolly Bear Caterpillar. She gets ready for winter by spinning her winter cocoon: “But even as she finishes and goes to sleep, her body is hard at work. She’s get-ting ready to perform an amazing trick. She will freeze in the winter, thaw out in the spring, and start all over. Woolly Bear won’t need to breathe while she’s frozen. She isn’t dead. She isn’t really asleep. She’s a bugsicle.” This is a book that is perfect to read out loud! Captain Mac: The Life of Donald Baxter MacMillan, Arctic Explorer, by Mary Morton Cowan (Boyds Mills Press); Grades 5-9. This well written and researched book on the life of Donald MacMillan, an Arctic explorer, is an ex-cellent choice for readers in middle school and up who love adventure stories and real-life heroes. MacMillan had a long and distinguished career as an Arctic ex-plorer and researcher, naval officer, and chronicler of Northern native peoples. Cowan skillfully weaves to-gether the high and low points of MacMillan’s long life to tell a compelling story of a man who never lost his love of the sea and couldn’t “stay away from the snows and floes for long.” Numerous photographs of


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MacMillan throughout his life and from some of his ex-peditions help round out the story of an important con-tributor to an era of exploration still of interest today. The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe, by Loree Griffin Burns, with photographs by Ellen Harasimowicz (Houghton Mif-flin Harcourt Publishing Company); Grades 5-8. The news in recent years about the mysterious disappearance of honey bees has been frightening and has led to an interest in more information on the top-ic. The Hive Detectives is an excellent introduction to some of the dedicated beekeepers and scientists who are working to discover the cause of what is now know as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The book provides clear and interesting descriptions of two beekeepers and their beekeeping practices, and the way four scientists have developed various strategies and methodologies to study CCD. Colorful and well-chosen photographs support the text throughout. Burns has provided exten-sive, supporting materials for the reader who wants to continue to learn more about this important topic. This is an inspiring book for future budding scientists! How to Clean a Hippopotamus: A Look at Unusual Animal Partnerships, by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page, with illustrations by Steve Jenkins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company); K-Grade 3. Jenkins and Page have managed to turn a book about animal symbiosis into a visual and written de-light! The partnerships that form between two crea-tures for their mutual benefit are described in a factual yet never dry or boring manner. The vibrant collage

illustrations are stunning and give this book a unique and appealing look. The hippopotamus in the title looks quite content as the author writes: “As in many other cleaning relationships, the hippo holds still while the turtle does its work, nibbling away unwanted green-ery.” Additional information on symbiosis, in the back of the book, helps make this a valuable teaching tool. Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors, poetry by Joyce Sidman, with illustrations by Beckie Prange (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company); Grades 1-6. This visually stunning book succeeds on so many levels. The subject of species that have not only endured but have spread over the world is arranged chronologically and told with wonderful poems; brief, fact-filled essays; and gorgeous, hand-colored linocuts. The end papers of the book place each spe-cies in its place in a vivid timeline. The species start with bacteria and end with a human baby. The poem on the baby ends wonderfully with:

Drawn to others of its kind Loves fiercely Plays elaborate games

Asks questions, questions, questions and slowly learns to answer themThe glossary at the end of the book will help answer some of the questions the young readers will have.

Annual DuesPlease assist in supporting the mission of the John Burroughs Association by becoming a member. Becoming a Patron or Benefactor will reflect an even greater interest and help in the goals of the organization.Tax-deductible dues for the membership year April 1, 2011, through March 31, 2012:______ Student $15 ______ Family $35 ______ Life $500______ Annual $25 ______ Patron $50 ______ Bequest ______ Senior $15 ______ Benefactor $100 ______ Additional Gift______ Gift Membership of $_____for (name and address):

Name____________________________________________ E-mail_________________________Address________________________________________________________________________________Make checks payable to the John Burroughs Association and mail to: John Burroughs Association, Inc., Ameri can Museum of Natural History, 15 West 77 Street, New York, NY 10024-5192. Alternatively you can pay by credit card online through NYCharities.org. Start at our Web site http://research.amnh.org/burroughs. Scroll down to “Now You Can Contribute to the JBA online!” and click on the New York Charities link given there. Remember to add a 4 percent processing fee. We are a 501 (3)c tax exempt organization

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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Review by Robert Michael Pyle.................1Trail Work Takes a Break...........................2The JBA Welcomes New Members............3Acceptance Remarks by Medalist Elizabeth Tova Bailey..................................6Acceptance Remarks by Nature EssayWinner Jill Sisson Quinn............................8Excerpt from the Winning Nature Essay, “Sign Here If You Exist”.............................9The JBA 2010 Nature Books for Young Readers: Reviews by Marcia L Dworak....10

Wake-Robin John Burroughs Association, Inc. American Museum of Natural History 15 West 77 Street New York, NY 10024 Forwarding and return postage guaranteed Address correction requested

First Class Postage

CalendarSeptember 10 — 9:00 a.m.: Trail building resumes in the Slab-sides Trails Project. E-mail [email protected] to sign up.September 17 — 10:00 a.m.: John Burroughs Slabsides Ramble, a Hudson River Valley Ramble. Tour of Slabsides and interpre-tive nature walk, with readings from John Burroughs’s essays. Be among the first to hike the new Highlands Trail. To register contact Jason Dempsey at [email protected] or 845-384-6320 (RAIN DATE: September 24).October 1 — Slabsides Day Open House. “John Burroughs: Conservationist,” guest speaker Dr. Daniel Payne of the SUNY Oneonta English Department and Chairperson of the John Bur-roughs “Sharp-Eyes” Nature Writing Conference and Seminar.October 14 — Deadline for submissions to the Medal Award that recognizes an outstanding book of natural history writing. E-mail to [email protected] 30 — Deadline for submissions to the Young Reader’s Award recognizing writers, artists, and publishers who produce outstanding nature literature for children. E-mail to [email protected] 31 — Deadline for submissions to the Nature Essay Award recognizing the writer whose article on natural history has been published in an anthology or periodical. E-mail to [email protected].

In This Issue:John Burroughs

AssociationLiterary Awards

Luncheon

The John Burroughs Association informs members through Wake-Robin and the website www.research.amnh.org/burroughs. Occasionally, we reach out via e-mail with news alerts and timely news. Please send your e-mail address to the Secretary ([email protected]) so that we can better serve you. Members are encouraged to submit articles or news items for publication. Deadline for submissions to the next issue of Wake-Robin is No-vember 1. Direct inquiries to the editors.

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