Posted by Adrian Ayres Fisher on February 03, 2011
A Place in the Woods and The Inland Island
One recent evening my husband dropped a book next to me on the couch and said, “here’s something for you to read.” One way he shows his love is by bringing me things to read. He, himself, tends to read big, weighty biographies of outsize men—Churchill, Lyndon Johnson, Teddy Roosevelt—as well as other history and analysis that seeks to explain our politics and wars and how we got in the mess we’re in.

The book was A Place in the Woods, which he’d seen posted about at UpNorthica, a site devoted to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. He and I share a love of northern Minnesota’s rocks and trees and water. We also share that common urban fantasy of somehow going to live in a place where you don’t have to drive to get to the woods, where the living earth is not constrained by the urban grid, and taking a walk doesn’t involve crossing streets.

A Place in the Woods A Place in the Woods tells this story for real. In 1954, Helen and Ade Hoover left Chicago for Minnesota’s North Woods where they bought a primitive lakeside cabin for vacation use, but where, seduced by beauty, they decided to live full time, almost on impulse. In 1968, Helen published this memoir, with Ade’s illustrations, that recounts their first year there, organized, like so many nature books, around the seasons and the changes in landscape and the wildlife they loved. Hoover’s account (reissued in 1999 by University of Minnesota Press) speaks of beauty and hardship, displaying something of the immigrants’ courage in going to a foreign country, living a new life, starting out poor, learning new skills, figuring out how to support themselves.

And they need all the courage and persistence they possess to cope, not only with the expected hardships of weather and isolation, but also with near disasters, some partly incurred by their own lack of knowledge, some not. Storms, floods, a car wreck, injuries, malfunctioning stoves, hunger—these are dealt with matter-of-factly. Sometimes they avoid potential catastrophe due to luck, sometimes due to the helpfulness of more experienced members of the small human community. The narrative is restrained, with no extra elaboration on enormities and a lack of histrionics that reminds one a little of explorers’ logs, such as those by Louis and Clark.

Living in the north requires a degree of self-reliance that both frightens and exhilarates. While working to gain a foothold in such a challenging landscape, the Hoovers find time to appreciate the landscape and wildlife that surround them. They put out food for the animals, learn more about their wild neighbors and develop relationships with some of them. Mrs. Mouse the deer mouse, Walter the ermine, the two fishers (those mysterious predators of the deep woods), and others are described with sympathy, but not anthropomorphized or sentimentalized. Hoover’s interaction with the animals gives the narrative the feeling of a folktale, in which the animal characters are as clearly realized as the humans.

The writing is outward looking, not self-consciously literary, yet movingly describes the beauties and dangers of living in a place where winter is the dominant fact of life, and summer a brief interlude. One winter night, feeling cold, Hoover goes toward the kitchen and stops short in the doorway. She continues,

The outside door was wide open. In the kitchen a fisher, nearly four feet long, rose on his haunches, then stood straight up on his hind legs. He was almost pure black, with the smallest of white throat patches and very little frosting. As he arched his sinuous body to one side, his eyes, catching the beam of light from the reflector behind my lamp, exploded into green stars. He thrust his head forward and hissed—and, involuntarily, I hissed back.

The Inland Island While rummaging around the web looking for information about Hoover, I came across another nature writer and book I’d never heard of. Josephine W. Johnson and her husband Grant Cannon moved to 37 acres outside of Cincinnati, Ohio in 1956 and, as she puts it, “let the ecology take over.” What had been a farm became a natural area, and in 1969 she published The Inland Island, not a memoir of years past, but a current account divided by the months of the year, with essays that read a little like journal entries full of observations of weather, plants and wildlife, and musings on age, war and the environment.

Johnson was well known. She had won a Pulitzer for her first novel and several O. Henry awards for her short stories, and had taught at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. This book was reviewed admiringly by Edward Abbey in The New York Times and was reissued in 1996 by Story Press with illustrations by her daughter Annie Cannon.

The Inland Island also tells the story of living with nature, but demonstrates a different kind of courage. Johnson’s life on her farm-turned-nature reserve includes central heat and enough money. Yet her courage shows: she and her husband let the property go wild (“run-down” or “neglected”) in a heavily farmed region, and she needs persistence for the kind of writing she does and to hold to her convictions, those of a Quaker pacifist during the Viet Nam war, with a conscientious objector son.

Each section’s organization mirrors the way one might think as one take a walk, and so, like our thoughts, has a non-linear progression, veering from observation, to poetic description, to science, to rumination. Johnson doesn’t make friends with the animals. They are observed and described, along with plants, rocks, insects, and the two creeks that flow through the property, as parts of a living whole, an ecosystem—sometimes seen artistically, sometimes scientifically, but always as “other.”

Johnson’s writing is dense, chancy, and deals with nature in complex emotional and descriptive terms. She doesn’t prettify, accepting the pain and death she sees as well as the beauty; not afraid to express revulsion (for the tent caterpillars, those “loathsome, hairy, spined, nasty brown things” defoliating the trees) as well as love for what she encounters. In late summer she writes,

The high mark of this month came late in August. At two in the afternoon of a hot, green day. Where the two creeks join, pure and polluted becoming one, I saw a black shape run across the stones. A shape like a drowned black cat. A mink. I sat down on a stone and waited. My eyes like big, burning headlights fixed on the spot where it had been. Two minutes passed, and then another little dark shape came from the wet weeds. Dove into the water, rose and climbed onto a rock. A small brown mink, shaking off the water. Every hair with silver water seemed visible to me. And then it was gone. Under the yellow jewelweed the grass was flattened.

In Accordance with Wendell Berry
Neither writer is very charitable towards modern civilization, or its effects. You don’t go live among the animals if you approve of human development’s impact on the land. Both, children of the early twentieth century, had semi-rural childhoods during what I think of as the “time before”— before development and industrial farming overwhelmed so much of the countryside. Both were in their forties, old enough to know what they were doing, when they moved back to the land; both lived somewhat aslant to the surrounding cultural byways.

Those of us who garden could learn from the ones, like Hoover and Johnson, who consciously choose not to garden, but to accept nature’s patterns as a given. If you lived like that for a while, and then were to design a garden, it might be very different from the one you would have designed before, with a different fulcrum of balance and sense of proportion, a different feeling for our place in the world and what it is permissible or desirable to do.

We still, in this still-new century, haven’t figured out how to live with the restraint, as Wendell Berry has put it, that living in harmony with the patterns of our ecosystem requires. Every generation seems to have to discover this elusive lesson all over again, as though there’s no chthonic American memory or deep cultural tradition of valuing wild nature and living mindfully within the ecosystem. One keeps hoping the necessary realizations, insights, and habits of thought and action will stick, will form enough critical mass to help us avoid catastrophe.

Some days, thinking about this, I feel as though I'm carrying heavy stones in my pockets. Other days I remember with gratitude that so many of us seem to be getting the idea. In many ways, since the sixties, we’ve done better for wildlife than Hoover or Johnson could expect. Hoover is thrilled to observe the deer up north—they sure didn’t live around Chicago; Johnson longs to see a deer, just one, lurking around her property. I, myself, can see them any day I choose to take a walk in the local forest preserve—and in fact there might be a few too many there for that biotic community’s complete health.

Hoover’s book describes a landscape I love to visit, steep, rocky, full of pine trees, lakes, animals, and the force of nature as expressed in extreme weather. Johnson describes a Midwestern landscape I know and understand. Birds, insects, trees, grasses and forbs—all remind me of my own home in Illinois. Either book is inspiring to read on a long winter night while waiting for earth’s orbit to come round again, while waiting for the season to turn.

Note: Written during the great blizzard of February 1-2, 2011: third worst in Chicago records.

Hummingbird Facts and Nature Rants
An Excellent, Timeless Book It's interesting to read your account about two people who, in a sense, retreated from civilization. I, too, sometimes fantasize about living a Thoreau-like existence. But I am a landscape architect and gardener, and as such, I am dedicated to the idea of civilized nature. Or cultivated nature.

If the natural world is to survive the next century, it will not be because people fled the city (in fact, I would argue that the impulse to flee cities and civilization has done more damage to the natural world than almost anything else--surburban sprawl), but because civilization created innovative ways of bringing nature in.

I hope conservationists fight to preserve the last remaining wild places. But my real hope is that we focus less on nature "out there" in some natural park, and more on making parking lots, office parks, strip malls more ecologically fecund.

Thanks for the thoughtful post!
February 3, 2011 at 3:40 PM Hi Thomas,

Thanks for your comment, thoughtful, as ever.

I agree wholeheartedly that designing for nature in our urban environments is the way of the future. That has even become a major focus for some conservation organizations such as Chicago Wilderness.

The desire to flee city life for the country and then to write about it has been going on at least since the Roman empire.
February 3, 2011 at 4:08 PM Dear Adrian, I have been most interested to read your reviews of these great pioneers of the past. I can well see the thrill of pitting oneself against nature and living as close to the environment as possible, but, as you also point out, this way of life is also quite frightening. The fraility of human beings against the great elemental forces of the wild would be something to be faced every day of one's life. One cannot help but wonder whether one would be able to cope....perhaps only very special individuals are up to the challenge.
February 4, 2011 at 7:25 AM Hello Edith,

Thanks for stopping by. Yes, to truly live close to nature as the Hoovers did would be difficult. Johnson was living in settled country and didn't require the same survival skills. As a city person, I know I sure don't have the skill set or the bravery to do what the Hoovers did.
February 4, 2011 at 2:14 PM I wonder if you have seen this post. About a magical garden on the roof of a shopping mall in Osaka. There were people on benches outside, chatting and reading, at 6-9 C.

What stays in my mind as a gem of landscaping, is a glimpse of the roadside verge on the national road from Clanwilliam to Cape Town. Unmanipulated nature. Shrubs and smaller plants. Texture and flowers. Utter perfection, and nothing 'garden' about it!
February 6, 2011 at 5:20 AM Adrian, where in the Cincinnati area did the Josephine Johnson and her husband have their "Inland Island"? Just curious.
February 7, 2011 at 9:24 AM Hi Diana,

Thanks for the link, which I visited. That mall garden seems like good urban design to me. There's something like it planned for Boston.
February 7, 2011 at 10:10 AM I was hoping you'd read this post.

Johnson "moved to the Summerside area of Clermont County in 1956," according to The Dictionary of Missouri Biography (she was born in Missouri). Do you know that area?
February 7, 2011 at 10:16 AM Clermont County is just east of Cincinnati. The western section of the county, including the Summerside area, unfortunately, is now part of the urban sprawl--something that certainly would not have been true in 1956. (If you have an Ohio map, Summerside is near the intersection of Interstate 275 and SR 32.

I don't know the area well because I grew up at the other end of the state--in Northeast instead of Southwest Ohio, but my pioneer ancestors lived in the far southeastern part of Clermont County, near Felicity, for about a generation, from c. 1812 to c. 1830. My 4X-great grandparents are buried somewhere in that area. We spent several hours one day grave hunting, but any grave markers are long since gone.
February 7, 2011 at 3:26 PM Thanks, Don. I thought it might be sprawled into oblivion. Good to know about your ancestors.
February 7, 2011 at 10:11 PM Adrian, Thanks for both the book reviews and the very thoughtful discussion that followed.Both books sound like ones I would enjoy. Actually, the Hoover book sounds eerily familiar; I think I may have read it excerpted in Reader's Digest Condensed Books when I was a teenager! -Jean
February 8, 2011 at 8:31 PM Hi Jean,

You may indeed have read parts of the Hoover book--it was a Reader's Digest condensed book for 1969. How many people did she influence through that outlet, I wonder.

Blogging does give one the opportunity to interact with good, thoughtful people one would never have met otherwise. :)
February 9, 2011 at 10:39 AM During a recent conservation/climate change seminar, I happened to comment about the relationship of home gardens to natural areas; how we need to cease thinking of nature as being something over there, while our private yards and gardens are treated as separate; and how our gardens can help sequester carbon. Afterward, a woman came up to me, someone who had spoken knowledgeably about habitats, biodiversity of prairies, and the difference between C4 and C3 plant species. “Without using herbicides,” she said, “What am I to do about the creeping Charlie in my lawn? I just hate it.”

A fellow gardener and I tried to explain: a polyculture lawn is ok—herbiciding creeping Charlie not worth the environmental cost (besides which it’s nearly indestructible)—it’s easy to pull up—it mostly grows in shady areas where grass has difficulty—bees like the flowers—looks nice in spring—don’t fight it…Well, she wasn’t going to hand weed it, thought she was allergic to it and lawns shouldn’t have flower… I turned over my pillow and
went off to sleep again; finally I
turned over and stretched out;
the papered windows are bright,
so I know morning is here, yet
I stay in bed because my quilt
is as warm as spring;
do not stop me from being lazy!
Better to comfort me with
pleasant words; outside the cock crows
but I continue to sleep, no longer
emulating those who
attend early court.

(Imperial audiences were held before sunrise. Translation, Rewi Alley)

So wrote Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi sometime in the early 800s. I woke thinking of that poem yesterday, the first day of meteorological winter. Cold weather has finally arrived for real, and we keep our house cool, especially at night: how I love the warmth under my quilt, how loath to emerge in the chilly gray morning!

I can lie there feeling satisfied about the completion of fall garden tasks. Herbs harvested and frozen, and pesto made; a few jars of homemade jam placed on the shelf; seeds collected and saved; compost spread o… "Deadly nightshade:" a name that makes me glad for Latin nomenclature

Easy post, I thought. Just write about the deadly nightshade. I happened to be thinking about the perennial, semi-woody, weedy vine that lurks along my property boundaries, and climbs up through the links of the fence. It can grow to six feet and the leaves have distinctive “ears” at the base. Its purple flowers bloom in summer, and the berries ripen to an alluring red. Warned as a child not to eat the berries or leaves, I've been pulling it my entire gardening life. A little research informed me that this plant is also called bittersweet nightshade, or Solanum dulcamara. Our bee problem is quite the topic of conversation these days--at social gatherings, in meetings, over coffee. Everyone agrees we should save the bees, though many of us think of them in the abstract as little buzzing yellow flying things, maybe as cartoon characters, or as creatures that exist to help us.

I could say, and have—for example at Christmas dinner when apologizing for my not-quite-stellar pumpkin bread—that last summer the CSA grower from whom I get my produce planted five hundred pumpkin plants and only got three pumpkins (so I had to buy canned, rather than processing my own). No pollination, he thought. And just the other day an acquaintance mentioned that friends who live in a tony suburb north of Chicago had, also last summer, had their own pollination troubles in their vegetable garden. Why? she wondered.

For some years I volunteered with the Thatcher Woods Savanna Restoration Project and gardened at home. I also trained and volunteered as a University of Illinois Extension Master Gardener, and later worked at an independent garden center. As time passed, what I did in the garden seemed to conflict with what I was learning about conservation and restoration.

Without trying to make my small yard a conservation area, my gardening practices began to change. Without getting rid of the lilacs and peonies, I began to bring in native plants. I stopped using synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Many birds and insect pollinators showed up. I learned about the historic Chicago Wilderness landscape, our region's history, about soil and animals and compost and the virtues of the messy garden. More birds, bees and butterflies showed up. I began to propagate plants and grow native plants to harvest the seeds for use in forest preserve restoration work. I began to understand how my t…
[null, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TUr6ASZRm4I/AAAAAAAAAV4/vC45dfm4v80/s200/51KtuYtG36L._SL500_AA300_.jpg", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TUr6ASZRm4I/AAAAAAAAAV4/vC45dfm4v80/s200/51KtuYtG36L._SL500_AA300_.jpg", "formatted_filename": "KtuYtG L", "rendered_width": 200, "rendered_height": 200}, null, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Midwes", "rendered_width": 35, "rendered_height": 35}, null, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Midwes", "rendered_width": 35, "rendered_height": 35}, null, null, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Midwes", "rendered_width": 35, "rendered_height": 35}, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Midwes", "rendered_width": 35, "rendered_height": 35}, null, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Midwes", "rendered_width": 35, "rendered_height": 35}, null, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQlsbZrS73I/AAAAAAAAAUI/Ag2yQKURzgc/S45-s35/Midwes10.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Midwes", "rendered_width": 35, "rendered_height": 35}, null, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQZ1NQuRuUI/AAAAAAAAATI/EXIgTQyZfKE/s1600/bee.jpg", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TQZ1NQuRuUI/AAAAAAAAATI/EXIgTQyZfKE/s1600/bee.jpg", "formatted_filename": "bee", "alt_text": "Image"}, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//1.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TPgVj7NCe1I/AAAAAAAAATA/pRRV2qqYtFw/s320/hanmer-Prairie-L.jpg", "src": "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TPgVj7NCe1I/AAAAAAAAATA/pRRV2qqYtFw/s320/hanmer-Prairie-L.jpg", "formatted_filename": "hanmer Prairie L", "alt_text": "Image"}, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//3.bp.blogspot.com/-I5C6ifIYJ_Q/TinS-MQQBWI/AAAAAAAAAb0/Sf4OFBaicV4/s200/bittersweet1.jpg", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-I5C6ifIYJ_Q/TinS-MQQBWI/AAAAAAAAAb0/Sf4OFBaicV4/s200/bittersweet1.jpg", "formatted_filename": "bittersweet", "alt_text": "Image"}, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//2.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TTXnlnZP49I/AAAAAAAAAU0/t_CKk37Zccg/s400/2011-01-04-flowers-1.jpg", "src": "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_B5f6hnLhBtc/TTXnlnZP49I/AAAAAAAAAU0/t_CKk37Zccg/s400/2011-01-04-flowers-1.jpg", "formatted_filename": "flowers", "alt_text": "Image"}, null, {"document_url": "https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2011/02/two-classic-accounts-of-living-with.html", "unformatted_src": "//2.bp.blogspot.com/-JrQ6a2LV604/WuiMuh5pElI/AAAAAAAAEbI/fb-BkC0_FWw0DwTdprGlBQEVa2UNb3nMgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/KhrebielSummerTrees.jpg", "src": "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JrQ6a2LV604/WuiMuh5pElI/AAAAAAAAEbI/fb-BkC0_FWw0DwTdprGlBQEVa2UNb3nMgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/KhrebielSummerTrees.jpg", "formatted_filename": "KhrebielSummerTrees", "rendered_width": 600, "rendered_height": 426}]