Last Sunday, I shared with
you a personal narrative of a forty-year friendship and a hike to the windy
summit of Doubletop Mountain in Baxter State Park. That friend was Nat
Bowditch, who passed away in 2008.
While I was editing my story,
I was in touch with Stan Tag, a professor at Western Washington University in
Bellingham, Washington. Stan wrote his Ph.D thesis on Henry David Throeau and
the 19th century Maine woods narrative tradition. Thinking that he
might enjoy my narrative, I emailed him a copy.
When Stan saw the name that
was the subject of my memorial tribute, he was startled. He thought that I had
written about another Nathaniel Bowditch who, with his father, and three of his
cousins, had climbed Katahdin as a
sixteen year old in 1856. That Nat Bowditch later died of battle wounds at
Kelly’s Ford, Virginia in 1863, having served as a Lieutenant with the First
Massachusetts Cavalry.
Nathaniel’s father was Henry
Ingersoll Bowditch, a prominent Boston physician, abolitionist, and an avid
outdoorsman. As a physician, he pioneered the use of the stethoscope in the US,
promoted a public health system in Massachusetts, wrote a pamphlet advocating
an ambulance system to care for the wounded in the Civil War, and with Julia
Ward Howe and others, came before the state legislature year after year to urge
suffrage for women, refuting the idea that they were physiologically unfit to
vote.
He wrote a narrative of his
1856 ascent of Katahdin, published in 1958 and 1959 in two issues of Appalachia, the journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club.
Henry Bowditch was my friend
Nat’s great-great grandfather. In all the years that Nat and I hiked in Baxter
State Park, and the three occasions that we climbed to the summit of the great
mountain, we were unaware that his ancestor had been one of the first to climb
Katahdin and write about it. Some years before, Henry David Thoreau had
famously written about his September, 1846 ascent of the mountain, an account
of which was later published in his book The Maine Woods.
Henry Bowditch was a Christian, though his theological views were progressive and ecumenically broad. While studying
medicine in France and England in the 1830’s, he was profoundly influenced by
the writings of the Anglican William Wiberforce—whose feast day is commemorated
in the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church—a single-minded crusader for
the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Bowditch came home a militant
abolitionist. He was proud to count among his friends, the escaped slave,
memoirist, and great orator, Frederic Douglass.
Years before, when Henry was
ten, his mother Mary gave him her Bible on her deathbed, which he carried on
all his many journeys abroad and at home, even during his fourteen day
expedition through the wilds of Maine, an enduring emblem of his piety and
faith in God.
Stan Tag writes that, at a
time in the 19th century when many adhered to the strict observance
of the Sabbath—even, if not especially, the several clergy and their companions
who climbed Katahdin—for Bowditch, the religious experience of being in the
natural world, in the wild realm of God’s creation, was more important than
keeping any particular day holy...Bowditch believed in making each day as much
a sacrament as any other day.[i]
On Monday, August 11, his
camping party saw Katahdin from afar, and Bowditch exclaimed, foretelling the
praise of present day travelers who approach the mountain in awe: To the
East arose in solemn silence, with his head veiled in clouds, the glorious
Katahdin! I would that I could express in words one tithe of the emotions that
arose within me, or give even a faint idea of the combined loveliness and
grandeur of the scene.
Suffice it to say that
here I enjoyed one of those rich communings with Nature & with men. Such as
are not often felt... In silence I worshipped the Great Spirit, the Father of
all, who watches over the Red and White Men and blesses all alike who seek
[God] in reverential step amid the magnificence of his works.[ii]
Tag writes: Bowditch
traveled through the Maine woods “with [a] reverential step”of his own,
believing that the rivers, mountains, and trees expressed the glories of the
Great Spirit. [His]narrative combines a wealth of details and observations
about the expedition...as well as a deeply felt religious awareness of his
place in nature and his relationship to God.[iii]
Bowditch realizes that his
deepest experiences in the Maine woods come not in keeping the Sabbath holy,
but in recognizing that it is God who keeps us, and the world we live in, holy.
For [him] traveling into the Maine woods is as much a journey of the spirit as
of the body. Katahdin and the Penobscot River become sacred ground and holy
water, places to commune with, and be baptized in, by the spirit of God.[iv]
I wonder: are we fast losing
that felt sense of nature as being sacred ground and holy water, places to
commune with, and be baptized in, by the spirit of God?
The Maine author, Henry
Beston, thought so, though he might have phrased it differently. Do we really
see as Beston saw, with a keen awareness and focused attention? Or what
Bowditch so reverently observed in his many trips to Maine and the Adirondack
Mountains? Have we lost the art of insight into the mystery of God’s creation?
Has God’s creation become merely a backdrop to our mental machinations and
increasingly fragmented lives?
Listen
again to Beston’s exquisite paean of praise to a winter night sky at his farm
in Nobleboro: The
sky was less a sky of earth than interstellar space itself revealed in its pure
and overarching height, an abyss timeless and remote and sown with an immense
glittering of stars in their luminous rivers and pale mists, in their solitary
and unneighbored splendors, in their ordered figures, and dark, half-empty
fields.
It was the middle of the evening and in the
north over a lonely farm, a great darkness of the forest, and one distant
light, the Dipper, stood on its handle, each star radiant in the blue and empty
space about the pole.
On
Friday, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its
fifth report. The report serves as yet another
warning that without dramatic and rapid cuts in emissions of global greenhouse
gas emissions, primarily emissions of carbon dioxide, the consequences of
climate change could be disastrous in many parts of the world.
The report states that it is now extremely
likely (extremely
being a
very precise word, meaning a 95% certainty) that the rise in global
temperatures over the last sixty years is due to human activity. It further
notes that projected sea level rise is 50% higher then last reported by the
panel in 2007. Finally, it states unequivocally that the window of opportunity
to do something about it—to overt potentially catastrophic results—is closing
rapidly.
All this, yet we do little, as the “greatest”
nation on earth, to avert what is perhaps the moral issue facing us
today. Instead, we fritter away our days squabbling in Congress.
I wonder what Henry Bowditch would have us do? A
spirited, resolute, and intelligent activist, a devout man of faith with a keen
awareness of the sacredness of human life and of creation that translated daily
into practical acts of healing, compassion, and justice, I think he would have
been appalled at our indifference and inertia.
Learn to listen to the still voice of Nature as
it speaks to our hearts, he would say. Pay attention. Give thanks. Act.
Under no circumstances have I heard that voice
sound so solemnly or so sweetly as during this voyage down the Penobscot, he wrote in his diary,
as his 1856 trip to Katahdin came to a close. It comes up before me now like
the cadences of a great choral hymn.[v]
AMEN
* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church; The Third Sunday of Creation Season; September 29, 2013
[i] Tag, Stan
“Growing Outward into the World: Henry David Thoreau and the Maine Woods
Narrative Tradition, 1804-1886”; 1994 Dissertation (University of Iowa); pg. 45
[ii] Bowditch,
Henry Ingersoll, “A Trip to Katahdin in 1856,” Appalachia, 1958, 1959, pg. 337
[iii] Tag, Stan;
pg. 46
[iv] Ibid.; pg.
49
[v] Bowditch, “A
Trip to Katahdin,” pg. 348
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment