Rustlers

 I met the only cattle rustlers I’ve known in a professional capacity. I was young reporter, and the rustlers were in a county jail in East Texas. Cherokee County, I think.

Rustlers are daring, cunning, dangerous criminals — at least in Hollywood. The two I met were “good ol’ boys,” meaning that everyone knew them well enough to hope someone else would give them a job. Both rustlers were broke and unemployable but knew where to borrow a gooseneck trailer. They consumed beer while working on an elaborate plan. The planning and drinking went on for hours. They awoke the next morning, hungover in jail, baffled that the plan had failed.

One of the rustlers had been hooked, kicked and stomped — mama cows defend their calves with the daring, cunning and ruthlessness that impresses Hollywood.

The motive was money. Even then, 10 pairs — a pair being a cow and a calf — might get you $10,000. That was close to a year’s wage in town. You could buy a small frame house on a country road for that.

But money aside, rustling was a serious legal business in Texas, where money is never an aside. The only thing the rustlers said in their own defense involved class. The man who owned the cattle was wealthy, and the rustlers were just scraping by. They saw themselves as Robin Hoods, though they didn’t plan to share the wealth. It just seemed right that they should have some of it.

If you ask me, any political party that represents the wealthy classes and espouses populism is playing with fire. But that’s another story.

As you can see, the rustlers didn’t make for much of a story. It would have been funny except they were looking at decades in prison.

The Old Editor was exasperated by the quality of the local criminal class and was prone to speaking in dialect when he was exasperated. He declared that all accounts of all crimes could begin with the same statement:

 

Earl and Joe Bob was drinking at the Hard Times and Misery Saloon when they was overcome by an idea.

 

I got to thinking about the rustlers because I’ve known another kind of rustler far better. He was a flower rustler.

It’s illegal in Texas, and probably in most other states, to remove wildflowers from public lands. The flower rustler knew that but was unrepentant. He was also daring and cunning.

He transplanted wildflowers in his yard until he didn’t have grass to mow. The wildflowers seeded the whole neighborhood.

He was the rustler that captured my attention. But I doubt Hollywood would be interested.

The first chilly day

 It was the first chilly day, 63 degrees when we started, heading from Alexander Lake to South River. We’ll have warmer days next week and in October. It’s like that in the Piedmont, as if the weather can’t decide whether it’s summer or fall. 

The woods are full of yellows (goldenrods and crownbeards), purples (beautyberries and mistflowers) and whites (mostly late boneset).

Dogfennel, Eupatorium capillifolium, is blooming. The white flowers are tiny.

The stands we saw were taller than I am. The plants looked like 6- to 7-foot feathers swaying in a light wind.

I think dogfennel plants are beautiful. People in the United Kingdom put them in borders. One variety won an award from the Royal Horticultural Society.

But dogfennel is a weed in Georgia. If you ask about it, people are apt to tell you how to kill it.

The other book

 Canby talks of Thoreau’s famous books but also repeatedly mentions the other book, the one in the Journal but never written. 

Formless the Journal is, but not futile, since good books have been drawn from it. And it is probable that there is one book more, and the best of its kind, to be put together by some laborious and self-sacrificing student, from the confusion of its lengthy narrative.

 

It’s a book about place. Canby had in mind the Rev. Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne and William Howitt’s The Book of the Seasons; or, The Calendar of Nature. Somewhere in “the thickets of iterative detail” in Thoreau’s Journal is a first-rate book about a place.

 

The result awaits the labors of an editor of genius.

 

Canby is a peculiar biographer on many counts. I read him because I trust his instincts on Thoreau, not the easiest personality to read. And I think Canby’s right about this.

I think of Wittgenstein’s enormous Nachlass and the books that scholars have mined from it since his death. Canby published his biography in 1939, and since then some wonderful books have been written about places and the idea of place. You’ll find entries in this online collection of notes on writers like Nan Shepherd, Robert Macfarlane, Scott Russell Sanders, Aldo Leopold, Ronald Blythe and Roger Deakin, all of whom tried to get at a sense of place.

I think such books are built by accretion — by the accumulation of layers and layers of detail. That is what Canby saw in Thoreau’s Journal.

The art of such a book is the art of the mosaic. The hundred or thousand details chosen must be good in themselves. But they also must make a larger picture.

It seems to me that Canby sometimes imagines the extraction of the other book from the Journal as the work of some poor graduate student and sometimes the work of an editor of genius.

Like Moses, he could see the promised land but couldn’t quite get there.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 336.

Why Thoreau noticed

 Maybe the key test for biographers is whether they can list their subject’s failures. Here’s Henry Seidel Canby’s list for Thoreau:

 

Failure with his friends, failure to discover the great secret, failure to reach a satisfactory stopping place in his studies of detail, failure to make up his mind how to use his thousands of pages of mixed notebook, essay, and poetic philosophy, troubled him but never disturbed the essential joy in experience. It did not need fame, or even a certainty of achievement, to make him a very happy man in his relations with nature …. He observed, first of all I should say, because he liked to do so.

 

The “great secret” was the quest to find the Transcendental — some spiritual reality behind nature. That project made Thoreau’s observations less scientifically useful than they might have been, at least if your science is biology. But Thoreau, to the extent that he was interested in science, was more anthropologist than biologist. He was more interested in natural places as the home or habitat of people. He began by looking for forces in nature that shaped people.

Eventually, he was just looking, just paying attention to what was there, without worrying much about what might be behind it.

Thoreau recorded the details of the place he knew. He was aware that a lot of his neighbors hardly noticed it. There was no universal agreement about the place. There was no Transcendental reality behind it, at least as far as Thoreau could see. But he found that the place was worth his attention. He didn’t need a reason to go look.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 335-6.

Equinox

 We walked in the woods through bands of rain because we’d been cooped up for a week by the dog’s illness. And how can you stay inside on the equinox?

The forest canopy is still thick. During the heavy bands, the sound of rain in the trees was deafening. During the light bands, you could hear the frogs.

Before we think

 Julian Girdham’s “The Wolf You Feed: an essay on Attention” makes some points I wish I’d made in my notes about noticing. Here are two: 

We have to attend before we can think.

 

It’s essential. You can’t think about what you don’t notice, whether not noticing is a simple failure or an act of willful ignorance.

 

It is increasingly clear to me that in education the question of attention is also an ethical issue.

 

As Girdham puts it, the most disturbing problems we humans face are failures to pay attention. 

There are some lines in the essay I’d love to argue about. I’m not sure what memory is — but I wouldn’t describe it as the residue of thought. (He’s quoting Daniel Willingham, a psychologist.) But I love his description of how a teacher can open a work of art — a poem, for example — to a student who is paying attention. I am interested in how someone who has learned to notice can teach another how much there is to be gained by looking carefully and thinking carefully.

• Source: Juilan Girdham’s “The Wolf You Feed: an essay on Attention” is here:

https://www.juliangirdham.com/blog/the-wolf-you-feed-an-essay-on-attention

I’ve mentioned Girdham’s newsletter The Fortnightly repeatedly in these notes.

Noticing

 One of the recurring themes of this collection of notes is noticing. It’s possible for a person to go into a crowded room and be so self-absorbed that he notices no one else. The same thing is possible when a person goes into the woods.

Thoreau’s ability to observe — to notice, to attend, to pay attention — is the trait that still astonishes me. Here’s Canby, describing Thoreau in the 1850s:

 

No other man alive could have seen so much. And all this in a mounting excitement, stirred by his sheer love of wild nature, but also by the constant novelty of familiar places growing daily more complex as he penetrated their infinite variety. When he was able to identify the flowers, there were their habitats and times of opening to be studied. Then suddenly he discovered the lichens, and every weathered rock became a museum. Then the grasses, never really seen before, caught his attention, and proved rich and confusing beyond his guess. After that it was the mosses, the mushrooms, the hawks and the owls, the wild ducks, the flora of the swamps, then trees and their succession‚ and so on and on. One can take this Journal from the fifties on, and label each section as the moss year, the tree year, the muskrat year the bullfrog year. Of course they overlap. 

 

I like that outrageous claim. We tend to notice people who are the wealthiest, the most famous, the most powerful. But shouldn’t we wish for ourselves that we see a lot, rather than earn a lot or impress others a lot? Shouldn’t we want to  go through life noticing the world we live in?

And what should we want for our children: “No other person could have made so much money” or “No other person could have seen so much”?

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 312.

There are so many posts about noticing it’s hard to find a place to start, but this might do: “Davenport’s search for arrowheads,” March 15, 2022.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/03/davenports-search-for-arrowheads.html