{"id":60510,"date":"2013-09-25T12:10:50","date_gmt":"2013-09-25T16:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=60510"},"modified":"2013-09-25T13:03:05","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T17:03:05","slug":"a-lively-unfinished-manuscript","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/09\/25\/a-lively-unfinished-manuscript\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lively, Unfinished Manuscript"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<\/a>

Illustration from Reading the Landscape of America<\/em> (Nature Study Guild Publishers<\/em><\/small><\/a>) by May Theilgaard Watts. Many of the illustrations to this essay feature a variation on this blunted trapezoid, representing the boundaries of her passenger-side window.<\/p><\/div>\n

A number of years ago, on a plane returning to the United States from Mexico, I sat next to a garrulous doctor who was also the head of New York\u2019s cactus and succulent society. He told me about plant sales, about the traditional Bajan candy that was a great threat to one-hundred-year-old cacti, and about an earlier plane trip on which he smuggled an uprooted barrel cactus back to America wrapped in a ball of dirty T-shirts. But cacti were not the reason for this trip, he explained as he showed me a medal he had just won in a long-distance race up a Guatemalan volcano, running alongside other men in his age group, forty and older. He had been busy conquering a different harsh element of the Central American landscape. After landing, as we parted ways on the elevator up to ground transportation, to myself I thought, This is a character for a short story. But even though the stories that Ivan told me revolved around botany, geology, man\u2019s will to bend nature, it never once occurred to me until reading May Theilgaard Watts\u2019s essay \u201cLooking Down on Improved Property (or an Airplane View of Man and Land)\u201d that Ivan and his chatter might be just as suited to a short ecology study as to fiction.<\/p>\n

\"May<\/a>

May Theilgaard Watts. Courtesy of Bridget Watts.<\/p><\/div>\n

In this essay from Reading the Landscape of America<\/i>, Watts begins her narrative with a conversation overheard between businessmen about the evergreen plantings they had been collecting for their yards; she then reflects on the great landing strip on an orchid pinned on a fellow passenger\u2019s lapel. Once she has sensed the small presences of nature, even in the vacuum of the airport, we find her looking out the plane window at the passing city grids and farm grids and reporting that \u201cunder this net, Nature is squirming and resisting.\u201d At every margin, every mark on the human neatness of borders, she reels off the names \u201cdandelion, cottonwood, ailanthus,\u201d like a refrain announcing the little victories of hardy wilderness. In another essay from the same collection, \u201cPrairie Plowing Match,\u201d the concern with finding pockets of \u201cnative\u201d flora among the \u201cforeign\u201d plantings imported by humans is the same, but this study finds a different refrain. She refers back to seventy-five years of local literature for text suggesting the original Illinois landscape she seeks, and she uses fragments of these historical tractor-pull programs to punctuate her description of a walk around the prairie. When she finds her \u201cnatives,\u201d she finds them along a fence rail, on the grounds of a churchyard, and inside an abandoned school house. <\/p>\n

\"<\/a>

Illustration from \u201cReading the Headlines Only,\u201d Reading the Landscape of America<\/em> (Nature Study Guild Publishers) by May Theilgaard Watts.<\/p><\/div>\n

While Watts wrote and illustrated several botanical identification books and was a journalist, activist, and a poet to boot, it is her essays that best showcase her poetic style and her aptitude for combining rigor with reflection. \u201cThere is good reading on the land,\u201d she writes in the introduction to Reading the Landscape of America<\/i>, \u201cfirst hand reading, involving no symbols.\u201d If Watts rejects symbolism in a first breath, she doesn\u2019t do it to reject a literary style of writing. She chooses metaphor and simple juxtapositions as her paradigms for figurative thought.\u00a0Her gift for metaphor is evident in the titles of her pieces: one essay about a prehistoric strain of magnolias in the Smoky Mountains is called “In Search of Antiques”; another about the formation of a bog is called “History Book with a Flexible Cover.” A number of Watts\u2019s peculiarities of style and pet preoccupations call to mind some of my favorite writers of twentieth century. In her tendency to collect and collage the most wonderful fragments of nature study she is like Marianne Moore; in her interest in mapping and borders she is like Elizabeth Bishop; in her love of the plains and her Midwestern pithiness like Willa Cather. As an essayist, she makes a point, like E. B. White, of memorializing in a very human way the small battles that nature wages within itself.<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/a>

Illustration from \u201cRedwood Valleys of the Pacific Slopes,\u201d Reading the Landscape of America<\/em> (Nature Study Guild Publishers) by May Theilgaard Watts. Pictured is a redwood burl sprouting in a living room.<\/p><\/div>\n

Though influential in the Rails-to-Trails program, Watts was not a strictly a preservationist. She was supremely interested in the interactions of the built environment with nature. She calls the landscape \u201ca lively, unfinished manuscript,\u201d and this state of flux was embodied as much by the antiques collectors, naturalists, and geologists with whom she traveled the country as by the modern transportation that carried them through it. Just as Watts narrates \u201cImproved Property\u201d from a plane, she also writes from the vantage of a train and from a car on the highway. The latter piece she titled \u201cReading the Headlines Only,\u201d because the speed of interstate traffic allowed her to pay careful attention only to the tree lines and median strips, but not more subtle details of the ecosystems through which she passed on her journey from Chicago to Atlantic City. Her whimsical solution to the vague and often monotonous \u201cheadlines\u201d of her road trip was to suggest \u201ca project for utilizing the vacant, characterless length of some interstate highway by allowing its whole length to become a \u2018Strip of Reality.\u2019 The procedure would be simply to do nothing: no mowing; no application of weed-killers; no shaping to channel the rain before it soaks in\u2014nothing. Then we could all watch as the potential vegetation returned, to this nationwide strip, changing from east to west as conditions changed.\u201d When she submitted this idea to a \u201cconservation-minded\u201d magazine, \u201cthey pondered, and then asked for more pondering time,\u201d before explaining that the \u201chighwaymen would be at our necks\u201d and the idea was not feasible. Watts was interested in nature broader than the inner workings of any given ecosystem\u2014she was interested in the poetics of each environment she saw, no matter at what speed she traveled though it.<\/p>\n

None of her essays goes without man\u2019s world as a counterpoint. When describing the migration of a small island, Watts takes the point of view of a great statue of Black Hawk that stands on the riverbank and watches as tree roots erode, logs fall, debris accumulates, and the landmass inches downstream. When outlining the formation of a sand dune, Watts and her friends have a picnic that becomes tragically sandy in the beach\u2019s breeze. But the grit is no problem to the hikers\u2014as they finish their sandwiches Watt\u2019s words shore up the dune beneath them as the narrative wends into the gradual appearance of hearty grass and deep-rooted trees. Even when she tells of her own hike and her own observations, she hands the job of narration over to the landscape itself to dictate the slow stages for which humans will never stay both alive and sitting still.<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/a>

Illustration from \u201cReading the Headlines Only,\u201d Reading the Landscape of America<\/em> (Nature Study Guild Publishers) by May Theilgaard Watts. Watts observes the placement of the landscape and paces her language accordingly.<\/p><\/div>\n

The rhythm of Watts\u2019s writing is a walking rhythm, even when she is on a plane or superhighway. Her structure too resembles any good contemplative walk as her narrative shifts in and out of the physical world. The plants she sees have their Linnaean place before they become local myths,\u00a0poetic reveries, natives and foreigners, and form roots at her feet once again. She pokes her toe in all the niches. The pace of Watt\u2019s work and the beauty of it is that she is not quite teaching about her landscapes so much as she is reading them aloud to herself, slow enough that we can keep up and sing-song enough that we want to.<\/p>\n

Abigail Walthausen is a writer and high-school teacher\u00a0in Brooklyn. Follow her blog at EdTech Pentameter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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