From American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
A Day with John Burroughs, a mesmerizing nine-minute film shot in 1919 using a new motion-picture technique called Prizma Color, contains footage of the great nature writer at Woodchuck Lodge, the farm Henry Ford bought for him in 1913. Eighty-two years old—he would die two years later—Burroughs was at “the summit of my years,” to quote one of the film’s title cards. He leads three children through the area surrounding his cabin and shows them how to uncover the joys of nature: living creatures under a rock, the camouflage of a frog, the evidence of glacial striation, and the habits of nature’s “clown” (a grasshopper).
Burroughs’s day with the children is a fitting summation of the fifty years he had spent convincing the reading public to become close observers of nature. “The place to observe nature is where you are; the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday,” he wrote in 1886. “You will not find just the same things: both the observed and the observer have changed.”
During the last two decades of his life, he redirected his energies to the study of geology. “The youth of the earth is in the soil and in the trees and verdure that springs from it; its age is in the rocks; in the great stone book of the geologic strata its history is written,” he wrote in his 1916 essay collection Under the Apple-Trees. “Even if we do not know our geology, there is something in the face of a cliff and in the look of a granite boulder that gives us pause and draws us thitherward in our walk.” In dirt and in rocks he saw humanity’s future and our past: “The rocks are not so close akin to us as the soil; they are one more remove from us; but they lie back of all.”
“The Grist of the Gods” is one of the earliest essays in which Burroughs examines the cyclical nature of geology and life (rocks to dirt to plant to animal and back again). We present the piece in full, along with a brief introduction by Bill McKibben, at our Story of the Week website.
