John Burroughs. In the Catskills. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910. Gutenberg.org. 21 Nov. 2004. Ebook.

Some people like the mountains. Some people like the sea. I have found myself in an ongoing discussion on the merits of each. John Burroughs makes a case for the mountains in his In the Catskills, actually a collection of essays that he wrote at various times. To him, the Catskill Mountains are rugged, pristine, and extravagant. At times the climbing is difficult. At times the mosquitoes and no-see-ums are so bad his face bleeds from their bites. But he loves his native mountains.

Burroughs’ Catskill Mountains are things of the past. One day he and his friends catch 300 trout from one brook. They find shelter in abandoned sheds of tanbark rippers. They make their beds out of hemlock or balsam boughs. Hemlock boughs are more comfortable; balsam boughs, more fragrant. No ski resorts, just a few families in remote areas trying to eke out a living.

Burroughs’ descriptions of the mammals and birds he sees show us why he got the nickname John O’Birds. In spite of not even having field glasses, he is able to get close enough to birds to observe them and even find their nests. He notes subtleties that even later ornithologists would mark.

The section on the Bicknell’s Thrush was particularly striking. Most authorities considered the Bicknell’s Thrush a subspecies of the more widespread Gray-Cheeked Thrush. They look alike, or nearly so, but their habitats, songs, and habits are different. Burroughs makes a convincing case that the Bicknell’s Thrush is a separate species. The American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), with help from DNA analysis, confirmed this in 1998 and split the Bicknell’s Thrush into a separate species. (Burroughs tells us that the species was first described by Eugene Bicknell in 1880 on Slide Mountain, the same mountain he climbs and describes in this book.)

Burroughs’ style is reminiscent of the earlier transcendentalist writers, men who were also known for their intimate knowledge of nature. His very first published essay was thought by many to have been plagiarized from Emerson. But because of the careful descriptions of nature, In the Catskills sounds more like Thoreau.

Here is one passage whose sentiment could have come from Walden Pond:

Not only is the angler, like the poet, born and not made, as Walton says, but there is a deal of the poet in him, and he is to be judged no more harshly; he is the victim of his genius: those wild streams, how they haunt him! he will play truant to dull care, and flee to them; their waters impart somewhat of their own perpetual youth to him. My grandfather when he was eighty years old would take down his pole as eagerly as any boy, and step off with wonderful elasticity toward the beloved streams; it used to try my young legs a good deal to follow him, specially on the return trip. And no poet was ever more innocent of worldly success or ambition. For, to paraphrase Tennyson

“Lusty trout to him were scrip and share,
And babbling waters more than cent for cent.”

He laid up treasures, but they were not in this world.

Outdoors people, whether you like the sea or the mountains, treasure this collection of essays, and a perhaps we can at least imagine what natural North America was a century ago.