“Charlotte’s Web” inspired by animals–and what they produce

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Wilbur loves Charlotte.

I’m writing this blog post on the birthday of E.B. White (July 11, 1899- October 1, 1985) and remembering the pure pleasure of reading his 1952 children’s book, Charlotte’s Web.  It turns out that both Elwyn Brooks White and his character, Wilbur, were fond of warm manure, that inextricable aroma and texture of farm life.

A new book by Michael Sims, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, provides a hundred ways in which White connected with nature.  Of course, a book about a spider named Charlotte and a pig named Wilbur began in nature; what is fascinating is how addicted White was to domesticated nature.

He was a shy, quiet, and sometimes depressed person and, though he tried therapy, he found his greatest solace and healing in the barn.  Growing up, his family in Mt. Vernon, New York had stables with horses, pigs, geese, hay, and manure.  Little Elwyn loved watching and listening to the goings-on there and later wrote about himself, “This boy felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people”  (Sims, p. 4).  As an adult, he and his wife, Katharine, bought a farm in Maine where they worked on their writing and editing.  White wrote, “Animals are a weakness with me, and when I got a place in the country I was quite sure animals would appear, and they did” (p. 132).  The Whites raised pigs and chickens and enjoyed watching spiders spin their webs in the doorways of their big, white barn.

In the book, the manure pile was a big part of Wilbur’s world, as it was a big part of White’s experience of country living.  “There is no doubt about it,” he wrote (p. 195), “the basic satisfaction in farming is manure, which always suggests that life can be cyclic and chemically perfect and aromatic and continuous.”

I notice in my own posts on this blog that various forms of manure have come up, including that of turtles and birds.  The truth is that encountering scat is part of being outdoors and gives us clues as to who is doing what and where.  My first chore when I arrive at our cabin is to sweep the guano off the stoop.  Bats sleep in the peak of the covered entry and poop like mad.  Someday I’ll also clean off the robin and phoebe droppings that whitewash the log walls where they build their nests.  Lately, I’ve had to clean off the dock some mounds packed with crunched-up bits of crayfish shell, probably from a raccoon.

As David Gessner wrote in his book, Sick of Nature, nature writers talk a lot about scat, but are supposed to be refined about it.  White put it front and center in his book, starting a draft, before there were any human characters involved, with: “Wilbur was a small, nicely-behaved pig living in a manure pile in the cellar of a barn” (p. 195).  We write what we are called to write, as Charlotte did in her web in order to save Wilbur’s life.

Birth and death, intake and output, animals and manure–you cannot have one without the other.  For White, it was part of “a paean to life, a hymn to the barn, an acceptance of dung” (p. 188).

“A Wrinkle in Time” began in nature

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A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books as a child, and I liked it even more when I reread it as an adult.  Central to the tale are three mysterious women

a classic

called Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which.  These visitors from beyond time and space disguise themselves, rather poorly, as frumpy old ladies, materializing at crucial moments in the plot.  How did Madeleine L’Engle (1918- 2007), a mother, choir director, and general store clerk, come up with these outlandish ladies?  By letting her mind rest and her imagination spin in the quiet of nature.

Before she made her name as a writer, L’Engle lived in a 200-year-old farmhouse called Crosswicks in Connecticut.  In the midst of her busy life raising children and running a general store, she found a secluded spot in the countryside, a ten-minute walk from her house, and made it her own.  “My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings,” she wrote (1972).   “The brook wanders through a tunnel of foliage, and the birds sing more sweetly there than anywhere else; or perhaps it is just that when I am at the brook I have time to be aware of them, and I move slowly into a kind of peace that is marvelous.”

In a noisy world, visiting a soothing, quiet place means that “things slowly come back into perspective … and my sense of humor returns,” as L’Engle found.  The quiet of green spaces is restorative to both mind and body.

MRI scans show that the areas of the brain most active when our minds are relaxed and free to wander are the same areas that “light up” when we are engaged in creative work.  Michael Rich of Children’s Hospital in Boston, says, “If our minds are always busy, we may be missing out on creative thinking,” noting that Albert Einstein didn’t devise his theory of relativity in a lab, but on his walks home from work.

Madeleine L’Engle was nurtured by her Circle of Quiet but actually found the inspiration for her wildly creative novel, A Wrinkle in Time, on a camping trip out west.  She reported that she was among “deserts and buttes and leafless mountains, wholly new and alien to me.  And suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which,” the sages who help the main character Meg travel by way of a wrinkle in time to try to rescue her father.

UPDATE: The movie “A Wrinkle in Time” opens March 9, 2018. The roles of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which will be played by Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, and Oprah Winfrey. What amazing women to play these characters inspired by the forces of nature! @WrinkleInTime

the author

Written on Stone

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511 million-year-old stones in central Wisconsin

Every time I drive between Wautoma and Tomah, Wisconsin, I admire three things: Necedah Wildlife Refuge, the cranberry bogs, and the Shiprock stone formation that has its own little rest area.  I used to like to stop there and clamber around the rocks, but every year there is more spray painting and litter there, making it more painful than pleasant to observe.

Is graffiti an art form or an act of vandalism?  Artist Terrance Lindall is quoted on Wikipedia as saying that graffiti can be a subversive form of expression that is revolutionary, adding, “People who are oppressed or suppressed need an outlet, so they write on walls–it’s free.”  Having grown up in a small town myself, not unlike this area, I suspect that the spray-painters who leave their names and initials are simply bored or want to somehow leave their mark on the world.

Shiprock Graffiti

My friend, Bill Buchholtz, comments on the practice of defacing areas of natural beauty, saying, “How sad.  Instead of protecting stuff like this, my people are losing more of their history.”  This Cambrian Shiprock formation happens to be just a bit north of the well-known vacation area of the Wisconsins Dells, which is full of even bigger sandstone bluffs, left over from the last ice age.  The ones in the Dells area are mostly protected, including some that have ancient pictographs (rock painting).

Tens of millions of rock art images appear around the world, with the ones in Australia dating back 60,000 years.  “Rock art,” says James Q. Jacobs, an expert on pictographs and petroglyphs, “constitutes the greatest body of evidence of the intellectual life of our ancestors.”  He feels it is important to preserve these graphic records of prehistory.

What are we recording in our current history, and how much of it will survive to tell our tales?  The first image I posted on this blog is an example of the rock art in Boynton Canyon, Arizona.  I was moved when I saw it, so I took a picture of it and shared it with you all.  The spray painting along Highway 21 in Wisconsin?  I just shake my head and keep moving.

Nature as Mentor

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What is biomimicry?  The term is made up of the Greek words bios for life and mimesis for imitation.  It is an approach to science and product development that relies on learning from and imitating nature.  This is in stark contrast to our usual practice of forcing nature to do our bidding, usually by way of harsh chemicals, high temperatures and/or intense pressure.  (This is how we synthesize plastics, alloys, and many other products in this industrial age.)

The environmental costs of such brute force technologies are so devastating that scientists, engineers, and manufacturers are looking for alternatives.  Many are asking the question, “How does nature do it?”  For instance, certain plants filter water to purify it; no chlorine needed.  How can we mimic that?

Science writer Janine Benyus described biomimicry in her book by that title as “a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inpired by a leaf.”  Nature provides myriad models and possibilities for us to consider.

Biomimicry also uses nature as a measure, a standard to meet in finding what works and what is most sustainable.  An animal or a plant cannot afford to pollute or otherwise ruin its own environment, its home, so it finds low impact methods to survive and thrive.  Why not learn from billions of years of innovation and development (aka evolution)?

Benyus goes a step further and says that nature can be a mentor, which is what I have been thinking about for a few years now.  “Biomimicry,” she writes, “is a new way of viewing and valuing nature.  It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.”

What can we learn from prairies and clouds?

What a concept–working with nature!  This is what Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” requires.  This is the way many indigenous people live, or were living, not because they were more virtuous but because cooperating with nature is what works in the long run.

My previous post told the story of learning from burrs in order to invent hook-and-loop fasteners, currently used in virtually every household in America.  Now products are being invented based on the self-cleaning properties of lotus leaves and the amazing “stickiness” of gecko feet.  (Those little lizards can run straight up a plate glass window!)  This is in part due to high-powered microscopes that allow us to see such things as the tiny bumps on the leaves of the lotus plant, and in part due to our willingness to pay attention to the intelligence of nature displayed all around us.

What can we learn from trees and insects, water and stone? We’ve just begun to find out.

Have You Thanked a Burr Today?

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Dog and burrs

In 1941, a man named George de Mestral went hunting for two weeks in the Swiss mountains.  Switzerland, like many places in the world, has plants with burrs and those burrs stick to anything fuzzy.  By the time George got home, there were so many burrs on his trousers and tangled in the fur of his dog (an Irish Pointer), it took a long time to remove them all.

George got curious.  What made the spiny seedpods grab onto the fur?  De Mestral was an engineer with a scientific mind.  And he had a microscope. (People started developing microscopes in 1590 to examine things too small to see with the naked eye.)  When he looked at a burr under the microscope, he saw that each spine was bent at the end, having what he called in French crochet, which means hook.  The hooks made the burr stick to anything soft that brushed against it—an  ingenious way to scatter the seeds of the burdock plant!

Not only did George admire the plant’s method of seed dispersal, he decided that people could use this same technology, if only he could find a way to manufacture it.  He imagined creating a zipperless zipper and even got a patent for it in 1951.  But it took him many years to invent his version of the burr’s hooks.  He got up at sunrise every morning in his small cabin in Switzerland and tried to figure out how to use nylon, a synthetic fabric, to grab onto velour, a velvety cloth.

De Mestral finally developed a manufacturing process and—voila! Velcro® (a combination of the words velour and crochet) was born.  First, astronauts used it in outer space (very useful in zero gravity), then skiers on their outfits, and pretty soon the new hook-and-loop technology appeared on wallets, clothes, book bags, and shoes.  George de Mestral became a millionaire, moving from his mountain hut to an elegant chateau, all because he learned the secrets of a burr.

One day, when he visited his manufacturing plant in the United States, George gave the bosses there some advice: “If any of your employees ask for a two-week holiday to go hunting, say yes.”  George de Mestral knew that if you go outside and pay attention, you might be surprised by what will stick with you.

This is the first in a series of MS. TREE’S NATURE MYSTERIES, an introduction to biomimicry by Barbara Wolf Terao.

Have You Thanked an Apple Today?

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Have a bite!

What item at the grocery store or farmers’ market is tempting and wholesome at the same time?  Well, the humble apple, for one.

What do apples do to keep the doctor away?  Nutritionist Victor Fulgoni found that eating apples improves our circulation and insulin levels.  For instance, there is a 27 percent reduction in risk factors for metabolic syndrome in those whose diets include whole-apple products, including applesauce (my favorite).

The Nobel Prize-winning poet from Chile, Pablo Neruda wrote in his “Oda la manzana” (translated by Ken Krabbenhoft):

You, apple,

are the object

of my praise.

I want to fill

my mouth

with your name.

I want to eat you whole.

Pablo Neruda has the right idea… by eating the flesh and skin of la manzana, we are getting a mix of antioxidants that work synergistically to prevent hardening of the arteries and even cancer.  Its pectin, a soluble fiber, helps lower cholesterol both in the blood and the liver.  An apple a day can also prevent glucose intolerance and insulin resistance.  Combine these health benefits with the many luscious ways to prepare apples and you can see why Johnny Appleseed preached that “fruit is next to religion.”

These fruits were first cultivated by Greeks and Romans in 300 BCE.  Johnny Appleseed, otherwise known as John Chapman, helped spread them around in the early 1800s by planting orchards in the Midwest.  Now we can find apples growing throughout the United States, with almost three million tons of them grown in Washington state alone.

Neruda, in his ode, called for even more abundance of this glorious orb:

I want

a city,

a republic,

a Mississippi River

of apples,

and I want to see

gathered on its banks

the world’s entire population

united and reunited

in the simplest act we know:

I want us to bite into an apple.

 

Apples for peace!  Thank you, orchards.  Thank you for your fruit–and our health.

Apples ready for eating

Snow in October

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I knew it was coming.

I just didn’t expect snow so early—

before the leaves all fell,

though I knew it was autumn

in Minnesota

where snow is inevitable,

where death, as everywhere,

is inevitable.

 

When it came for my mother,

she dropped one night like a leaf

into her sheaf of newspapers with half-finished

crossword puzzles,

a week past her Libra birthday.

 

My sisters and brother and I

buried her up north on a snowy slope

in October.

We dressed for dignity,

not the weather,

our thin shoes sliding toward the grave.

Mom, Zaccheus, and the Quakers

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Joy by her aunt's and grandparents' graves, with Earlham Library in background

The day after Thanksgiving, we had a service for my mom who died October 20, 2010, a week after she turned 85.  Daughter Emily and I were asked to speak about Mom’s Quaker heritage, followed by a minute of silence and a Quaker hymn.  Here is what I said and the gist of what Emily said.  For those who knew Joy, I hope it resonates with you.  For those who didn’t know my mom and Emily’s grandmom, here’s a glimpse of her and her ancestral roots.

My mother, Joy Wolf, was committed to spiritual exploration and also to the written word.  (She was a librarian.)  These two priorities are apparent in her ancestors as well and, at one point, led to profound conflict for her great-grandfather Zaccheus Test.  Before Emily explains about that, I want to share a couple anecdotes about Mom that are special to me and that, I think, help introduce the subject.

Mom spoke fondly of her Episcopalian upbringing and particularly Emmanual Episcopal Church in the St. Louis area where she and Dad were married.  Later, she and Dad became Unitarian-Universalists and were happy to be part of the UU Fellowship of Northfield.  Like many Unitarians, she and Dad were eclectic and open-minded to many different paths, reading omnivorously and always learning.  When I became Buddhist 34 years ago, I often found them reading my Buddhist publications before I got to them myself.  To them, it was all very interesting.

In 2001, a year after Dad died, Mom and I took a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for some Native American-related events and workshops.  During a presentation about the three clans of the Bear, Wolf, and Turtle, we learned that the Bear Clan tends to have the R & D folks, the ones with new ideas.  Like the curious, omnivorous bear, they explore widely—and from multiple perspectives, the way Bear can stand on 4 legs or 2.

Now, I know that Mom married into the Wolf family, and loved it, but on this day she felt connected to the ways of the bears.  When we broke into three groups, I went with the Wolves (the planners who put Bear’s ideas into action) and Mom went off with the boisterous Bears, feeling quite at home, and I didn’t see her for a while.

The only sticking point came the next day when it was time for a closing circle, a Talking Stick.  Before we sat down under the azure New Mexico sky, I told Mom that people take turns speaking and only the person holding the stick gets to talk; everyone else sits quietly.  Mom told me, “Oh!  I don’t know if I can do that.”  She so relished dialogue with people that she didn’t know if she could keep from commenting and making relevant points!  I’m here to tell you she did fine and was an excellent listener.

Because Mom enjoyed dialogue so much and was sometimes uncomfortable with silence, it might come as a surprise to hear how much she valued her Quaker heritage, since the Quakers traditionally sit in silence at their meetings until moved by spirit to speak.  Mom would sometimes point to a painted portrait she had of her great-grandfather, Zaccheus Test, saying that he was a patriarch of the family and that he had once been Quaker, but for some reason that she did not know, he left the Society of Friends.

When my daughter Emily went to Earlham, a Quaker college in Richmond, Indiana, we had an opportunity to solve this mystery.

Emily will continue the story from here.

EMILY:

Actually, I chose Earlham for its science program and the horse barn right on campus, not because of family history.  It wasn’t until I walked in the Earlham Cemetery with my parents and saw more than a dozen graves of Tests and Giffords, including my great-great-great grandfather Zaccheus Test, that I realized that Grandmom used to have a lot of family in Richmond, most of them Quaker.

After that, we found more links to our ancestors such as Test Road that goes by the stables and over to the remains of the Test family woolen mill.  When I studied birds in Peru one May Term, I noticed that my program was partly funded by the Test family, my relatives.  When Grandmom visited me in 2008, we were able to take her to many family history sites around town.  She especially enjoyed seeing a stained glass window dedicated to the daughter of Zaccheus Test and Sarah Anthony Test.  (Sarah was Susan B. Anthony’s cousin.)

The biggest surprise came when the library archivist told us that Zaccheus Test was not only a professor at my school, he was a founder of it and was the one to name it “Earlham” after a Quaker estate in England.

Zaccheus left Earlham in 1866 and started going to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which is how Grandmom’s family became Episcopal.  The archivist solved the mystery for us when he explained that Zaccheus got in trouble with the Friends by “writing his remarks” and reading from them at the Sunday meeting.  This was not the usual practice; even readings of the Bible were not permitted in meetings.  His fellow Quakers tolerated this only under protest and did not approve of his reliance on the written word.

Joy's children, grandchildren and great grandchildren on 11/26/10

That is why he left the Quakers.  Zaccheus, like Grandmom, had great affection for both the spoken and the written word, and was not willing to give up either.

I’ll be thinking of Grandmom when I graduate in May.  I have a feeling she’ll join all those ancestors in the Cemetery to keep an eye on me.

Have you thanked a tree today?

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October color in Evanston

All summer the leaves of the maples have taken in my breath (carbon dioxide) and given me theirs (oxygen).   Now their photosynthesis grinds to a halt, the chlorophyll unmasked, and the leaves turn sunset colors before they fall.  Turns out that those vivid colors are their true colors, revealed, like for so many of us, after the mass conformity of adolescence abates.  What do we owe these trees for their beauty?  It’s more than we can say, much less keeping account of all else they do.

Trees in New York City in 1994 removed about 1,821 metric tons of air pollution, absorbing and processing the gases with their leaves, at an estimated value to society of $9.5 million (according to the EPA).  Ecologist Yvonne Baskin wrote in The Work of Nature: How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us, “Most industrial societies tend to disregard and devalue ecosystem processes, opting instead for a technological fix whenever environmental services falter.  Lost services are replaced not with natural mimics but with engineering solutions: dams, reservoirs, waste treatment plants, air scrubbers, air conditioners, synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and water filtration systems.”  Economists have tried to put a value on species and natural processes as commodities.  Baskin states,  “None of these categories, however, gets directly at what it is worth to have species work together within ecosystems to generate the life-support services that make the earth habitable.”

Now the maples take my breath away, not to give me oxygen, but to open my senses to the many shades of orange, the smell of the earth, and the crunch of leaves underfoot.  As a canopy climber at http://www.treeclimbing.com said about being with trees: “All your senses come alive.”

I can thank the maples in person, in my own Evanston neighborhood, after a breakfast involving delicious maple syrup.  Other trees I have to go find.  For instance, I happen to love Paul Mitchell’s tea tree shampoo.  It smells minty and wonderful and is somehow refreshing and soothing at the same time.  Tea tree oil (Melaleuca) is a natural disinfectant and has been used for centuries by Aboriginal people of Australia to treat skin ailments.  Luckily I found some tea trees at the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum a few years ago.  I inhaled their mintiness and told them what they meant to me.

Another oil I use a lot is tamanu from Tahiti.  Pacific Islanders use its wood for the keels of their canoes and its nuts for oil.  In order to meet those trees in person I would have to travel to the Tropics.  Hmmm… that would be crazy, right?  Crazy or not, I am getting old enough to show my true colors as an incurable, tree-hugging nature-lover who talks to plants.  I tell them thank you.

Love Shack

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There is another shack in Baraboo besides Aldo Leopold’s (see the 9/18/10 “Land Ethic” post) that is well-known to environmentalists: the shack from which George Archibald, co-founder of International Crane Foundation, wooed Tex.  On September 25, my daughter and I heard George tell stories about those days as he opened the “George and Tex” exhibit at ICF.  It was a love story, at least on the part of Tex, a female Whooping Crane.

The Crane Foundation has a captive breeding program to help increase the numbers of Whooping Cranes.  The whoopers, along with Sandhill Cranes, are the only cranes native to North America and their numbers at mid-century were pitiful.  The beautiful, white birds were almost extinct.  Tex came to ICF already imprinted on humans, meaning that she failed to identify with cranes and only wanted to be with humans.  Particularly dark-haired, male humans.  Especially George.  She chased away any females who came near them.

In order to put Tex in the mood to “breed” (be artificially inseminated), George built a small hut inside her pen and stayed with her during the breeding season, acting, for all practical purposes, as her mate.  Sometimes he read and got work done inside the tiny wooden house but he was always available to dance with Tex, as all cranes like to do, to establish their bond.  In 1982, Tex laid an egg that hatched into a chick named Gee Whiz that, to this day,continues to contribute to a healthy Whooping Crane gene pool.

You may have heard of ultralight aircraft being used to teach birds migration.  That is where some of the ICF cranes go, to Necedah National Wildlife Refuge a bit north of ICF in Wisconsin, to live in the wetlands and learn a migration route to Florida.  Being as it’s Wisconsin, land of the Cheese Heads, the eleven Whooping Crane chicks raised at ICF this year were all named after cheeses, such as Ricotta, hatched on my birthday, June 10.  (There are also seven whoopers that hatched in the wild at Necedah and two survived, to be joined by those hatched at ICF.)

 

George Archibald's shack at International Crane Foundation

 

 

Female Whooping Crane at ICF

 

All the chicks at ICF are now raised by aviculturists, interns, and volunteers dressed in white outfits with a crane-head puppet on one hand, speaking not a word.  No more imprinting on humans!  With no more need for George’s shack, it is on display as part of the “George and Tex” exhibit–a testimony of Tex’s devotion to George and, even more so, of the Crane Foundation’s devotion to the protection and continuation of cranes.