The View from Here: Reflections on the Deep North, the Wild East
By Franklin Burroughs (Down East Books)
In his 50-plus years in Maine, the South Carolina-born writer Franklin Burroughs has attained the stature of one of the state’s most beloved and brilliant nature writers. His Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay won the prestigious John Burroughs Award for natural history writing in 2007.
This collection of essays includes the “Room with a View” columns Burroughs wrote for Down East magazine from August 2016 to December 2018. Limited to a “miserly word count”—650—these occasional pieces nonetheless manage to overcome that limitation to offer engaging perspectives on living in Maine.
Burroughs riffs on a variety of topics, including our “abject” moniker, “Vacationland.” It’s as though, he writes, “the state had no substance—no history, no distinct character, complexity, sophistication, cussedness, no claims of its own, as if it existed only as a sort of high-class amusement park.” And then he quotes T. S. Eliot from Four Quartets: “The vacant into the vacant.”
By its clarity and craft, the writing brings to mind John McPhee and E. B. White. Burroughs cites the latter at the beginning of a column on chickens where he broods on the broodiness of hens and writers. “Reach your hand under a brooding hen. You’ll get a sharp peck, and may find no eggs at all. Ask a broody writer how it’s going at your own risk.”
A devoted fly fisherman, Burroughs describes this pastime with grace—until he tumbles down a cliff at Harris Station on the Kennebec, loses consciousness and winds up in a hospital. “Catch and Release” tells the near-tragic tale of the misstep and the subsequent rescue by professional rafters who happened to be on the river that day. It’s a narrative that has stuck with me since finding it in Down East a few years ago. A re-read redoubled the wonder of this fisherman’s near-miraculous recovery.
In “The Deep North,” Burroughs returns to a summer spent on Cooper Lake in Quebec in 1963, an experience that “informed the whole” of his adult life. In this memoir he describes life as a compass man, “a timber cruiser’s assistant,” for the Canadian International Paper Co. 200 miles north of La Tuque. All of 21, he learns the ways of camp life, from trapping bear cubs and drawing water from sphagnum moss to maintaining planes and chainsaws. At one point, describing the feeling of home found in a pitched tent, he cites Hemingway’s Nick Adams, a fitting reference: this chronicle of northern living similarly captures the wonders of the great outdoors.
Other featured writings include the author’s convocation address at Bowdoin in 2001 (he taught medieval English there from 1968 to 2000); “Up to Camp,” a reminiscence of a fishing retreat on Hungry Mountain; a National Geographic piece on the ACE (Ashepoo, Cornbahee, Edisto) Basin in South Carolina; and a tribute to wolves. This last piece, based on Burroughs’ Quebec adventures, highlights his spiritual connection to nature. Hearing those creatures, he recalls, “was a variety of religious experience, in the same way that falling in love is: it does not commit you to a creed; it does commit you to trying to be worthy of something you in no way deserved or ever truly expected.” Some beautiful writing, that.
Carl Little’s recent publications include a profile of poet Gary Lawless in the Island Journal and a feature on Ellen Windemuth’s jewelry in Ornament Magazine.
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