Under a Wild Sky, page 7
After a few months, Wilson and Duncan found work at a loom just outside the city and spent the winter weaving. The following spring Wilson headed for New Jersey, where he found eager buyers for the cloth he peddled. When he got back he decided to try something new—teaching school. Having little education himself, Wilson managed as best he could by becoming both an instructor and a student at once, furiously going through his next day’s lessons until late in the evening, learning just fast enough to stay ahead of his pupils. He practiced his grammar and read history. Finding he had a special affinity for mathematics, Wilson was soon reading Newton’s calculus. He taught himself surveying and earned a little extra income from it. He even managed to make a few of his own instruments.
Wilson settled in at a school in Milestown, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles northeast of Philadelphia, where most of his pupils were Pennsylvania Dutch. They spoke German, as did the family with whom Wilson boarded, and so he learned German even as he drilled the students every day in English. He found his neighbors pleasant and honest, and filled with aspirations for their children. But they were also strange—governed by superstition and odd religious dogma. They followed phases of the moon in timing activities such as the slaughter of livestock or cutting their hair. They treated physical ailments with charms and spells, and believed the countryside was haunted. But Wilson was gratified by their commitment to his school. He was well thought of in the community and could count on his salary in full as it came due.
America suited Wilson’s taste for exploring the countryside, and also his deepening passion for wingshooting. Hunting in America, where wild places were never far away, was a thrilling elevation of the senses. The abundance of game and birds, especially waterfowl, was amazing. The latter passed along the East Coast for months every autumn in massive, noisy migrations. Ducks and geese of every kind funneled down the Delaware watershed en route to the marshes of the Chesapeake Bay and eventually on to their tropical overwintering destinations far beyond. From the end of summer through Christmas, the markets were hung with a seemingly limitless bounty: swans, geese, pigeons, woodcock, grouse, quail, and a kaleidoscopic assortment of ducks. Mallards, redheads, teal, and widgeon could be had for pennies, although a brace of prized canvasbacks sometimes commanded several dollars. For someone like Wilson, happy to do his own shooting, the arrival of September commenced an annual rite as these birds of passage poured through, each species arriving and departing on its own schedule.
It began with blue-winged teal, which Wilson learned was the first of the duck “tribe” to head south out of its breeding grounds. By early September, teal congregated in such numbers along the mudflats of the Delaware River that a hunter could often kill a large number of them with a single discharge of his shotgun. Although the birds were wary and fast-flying, a hunter could sneak up on them merely by hunkering down and pushing a small boat ahead of him though the shallows, taking care to remain concealed until the last minute. Teal were delicious, and they grew fat in their days along the Delaware until they fled south with the first frost.
Canada geese—which were shot in the spring as well as the fall—were more difficult to hunt, as their sharp eyesight and skittishness made them impossible to pursue in the open. Hunters had to conceal themselves near places regularly overflown by flocks of geese, and it was possible to decoy the birds within range by various means, some as crude as shooting a goose or two and impaling them on stakes that were then set out near the gunner. Many hunters tamed geese they had wounded and used them as live decoys, tethered and eager to call to other geese flying overhead.
But it was canvasback hunting that seemed to inspire the most imaginative and relentless techniques. Their ranks now immensely reduced, these large, tasty waterfowl, which got their name from the white plumage that wraps their midsections, once migrated across America in great numbers. The duck waters around Philadelphia produced crops of an aquatic plant known as “wild celery,” which grew so thick in places that it was impossible to row a boat through a stand of its submerged stalks. Canvasbacks love the root of this plant, and when it comprises the bulk of their diet, the taste of canvasback flesh is unequaled. It was not uncommon for rafts of canvasbacks to form in open water near stands of wild celery, and to remain there in safety through the daytime before coming closer in at night to feed.
Temporary measures were sometimes adopted to regulate duck hunting, usually in times when waterfowl numbers appeared low. As early as 1727, the colony of Massachusetts had briefly outlawed nighttime hunting. But, for the most part, anything went. On moonlit nights, when the canvasbacks were thick on the Delaware, it was common practice to guide a boat silently under the shadow of the shoreline and then drift into a flock of feeding ducks—whereupon the stillness was broken by a blue flash and a booming report that echoed over the water as the hunter raked the ducks where they sat, killing many at a time. Another method, used late in the season, involved painting a boat white and setting chunks of ice or snow along the gunwales. The hunter—also dressed in white—approached a flock from upstream and reclined hidden in the boat, allowing it to float in among the ducks as it if were a chunk of drifting ice before he rose up and fired. The method that most intrigued Wilson was “tolling,” in which a well-hidden hunter ordered his highly trained dog to scamper along the shoreline, usually with a brightly colored handkerchief tied about its midsection. The canvasbacks mistook the dog’s actions for the movement of other ducks paddling close to shore and, curious, would swim in to investigate.
Wilson eagerly took up these sports, so different from his casual walking hunts over the moors near Paisley. It would have been hard to envision a more dramatic demonstration of nature’s bounty than the annual flights of ducks and geese that passed over his head each autumn and again every spring. Their numbers, like the vision itself, are now so much diminished that it is all but impossible to conceive what it was like. The throngs of geese and ducks that Wilson saw were but a fraction of the waterfowl migrating along the Eastern Flyway, a number that was itself a fraction of the unimaginable masses overflying the continent.
Although there were other Scottish immigrants in the area, Wilson avoided people he thought might know about the circumstances under which he’d left his homeland. One exception was a man named Charles Orr, who lived in Philadelphia and occasionally visited Wilson out at Milestown. They wrote each other often, with Wilson sometimes corresponding in verse. Evidently, he enjoyed Orr as a compatriot and captive audience. The great thing about letter-writing, he once told Orr, was that it afforded you an opportunity to speak your mind without fear of interruption.
Time slipped away. William Duncan moved to upstate New York, to establish a farm. In 1798 Philadelphia was again gripped by a yellow fever outbreak that emptied the city. Through the summer and into the fall, people died by the thousands. Wilson could scarcely believe the deserted streets—no more than 8,000 of the city’s 65,000 residents remained in town. It was possible, Wilson wrote to his family, to stand in any public square and hear no other human being “except for the drivers of the death carts.” But the plague passed with the onset of winter and Philadelphia again recovered. Before he knew it, Wilson found that he’d been teaching for five years—and that he was on the verge of something, either an epiphany or a nervous breakdown. Or maybe both. He began to feel imprisoned by his responsibilities. He periodically complained of being ill. At one point he even resigned his post, only to be coaxed back to work with a promise of additional sick leave from the school’s trustees. In the summer of 1800, Wilson’s letters to Orr began to confide his innermost feelings—which were suddenly jumbled and anxious. In one letter, Wilson suggested they had much to reveal to each other as “lovers of truth,” adding, oddly, that they were both “subject to the failings of Human Nature.” Wilson couldn’t quite seem to stay on one subject. He said he planned to begin an earnest campaign of frugality. Did Orr think that was a good idea? Could he speculate on the benefits of such a program? Wilson admitted he was writing in haste and urged Orr to write him back the same way. In a long, nearly inscrutable passage, Wilson hinted at something he wished to discuss that was so mysterious that even he couldn’t tell for sure what it was:
I, for my part, have many things to enquire of you, of which at different times I form very different opinions, and at other times can form no distinct decided opinion at all. Sometimes they appear dark and impenetrable; sometimes I think I see a little better into them. Now I see them as plain as broad day, and again they are as dark to me as midnight. In short, the moon puts on not more variety of appearance to the eye than many subjects do to my apprehension & yet in themselves they still remain the same.
Alarmingly, Wilson added that he had “many things of a more interesting and secret nature” to talk over with Orr. Perhaps Orr would find these “things” funny. A few days later, Wilson again wrote to Orr—who, not surprisingly, showed a growing reluctance to write back—and this time solicited Orr’s opinion on marriage and family, a topic that Wilson said had been on his mind since a fateful walk in the woods the previous spring.
It was in the middle of May, Wilson wrote. The forest was in full bloom, and Wilson noticed many birds “in pairs” building nests in which to mate and raise their young. Continuing on his hike, Wilson saw a colt nuzzling its mother. Then he heard the bleating of lambs “from every farm,” and after that he became aware of insects “in the thousands” at his feet and in the air around him, all “preparing to usher their multitudes into being.” Suddenly, as if from a voice out of the heavens, the words “multiply and replenish the earth” formed in his mind. For a moment, Wilson said, he “stood like a blank in this interesting scene, like a note of discord in this universal harmony of love and self-propagation.” He perceived himself in this flash of clarity for what he was: a wretch, living outside of normal society, a man with “no endearing female” who saw in him “her other self” and no child to call him father.
“I was,” Wilson wrote, “like a dead tree in the midst of a green forest.” Hurrying home, Wilson found his landlords playing happily with their children. He was mortified. What good had he accomplished? What was the point of all his study and his books? Did it not strain the bounds of decency that a man such as he—learned now in science and in literature, and susceptible to “the finer feelings of the soul”—should not continue his line? There and then, Wilson vowed to fulfill the biological imperative. He would marry. He would raise a family. Bachelor to the core, he promised to do all this even though he could anticipate “ten thousand unseen distresses” that would befall him in the bargain. In any event, Wilson said, what he most wanted Orr’s advice on was this: Was it not a crime to “persist in a state of celibacy”?
Of course, Wilson quickly admitted, he’d forgotten about all of this as soon as he was back in his room and immersed in his mathematics. Almost as an afterthought, Wilson said he had lately considered a modified version of his plan. It would not be necessary, strictly speaking, to get married in order to contribute “towards this grand work of generation” and to become “the father of at least one of my own species.” Evidently there had been more than sap rising in the Pennsylvania woods that season. But Wilson said no more about it—certainly nothing about who might be his partner in such a furtherance of the species. He told Orr that, after thinking it over, he’d decided the whole idea seemed indecent and had abandoned any further thought of launching a little Wilson outside the bounds of holy matrimony. Exactly what additional thoughts he may have entertained he kept to himself.
And with that, he signed off.
Another year passed. In early 1801, Wilson was asked to speak at a patriots’ rally in Milestown to mark the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson as president. Although he still felt he was something of an outsider—Wilson would not become a citizen of the United States for three more years—his speech was a resounding success. He chose to speak principally of liberty, which he called “the great strength and happiness of nations, and the universal and best friend of man.” With a nod to the veterans of the Revolutionary War present in the crowd, Wilson exhorted his listeners to be protective of the freedoms gained by force of arms and to be mindful that the great American experiment was being closely watched around the world. Children should be taught to feel the highest regard for their country, and for the importance of preserving their rights, which were not granted to them by other men, but by God himself. Wilson so stirred his audience that the speech was transcribed and widely printed in pro-Jefferson newspapers. Wilson, carried away by the enthusiastic response to his rhetoric, basked in glory for weeks afterward.
But Wilson’s moods were like the rising and falling flight of a bird that beats its wings only intermittently, traveling forward on an undulating line that is always in part a free fall to earth. In May, only months after his speech, Wilson sent Orr a panicky note asking him to come see him so that they might discuss an urgent matter. Wilson said he was quite distracted by something that had happened, and was in fact making plans to leave Milestown as soon as possible. Staying on was out of the question, and he could confide his reasons to nobody but Orr. Orr, he said, was the only friend he had now—apart from “one whose friendship” had brought ruin to them both, or soon enough would. Wilson said he would await Orr at the schoolhouse and to please come out that same day.
Apparently, Wilson had fallen in love with someone, possibly a married woman, and his reputation as well as hers was now at risk. Wilson must have told Orr the whole story, but if he ever revealed the details of this affair to anyone else, he did so in private conversation or in letters that do not survive. Orr found Wilson in a miserable state when he visited him that evening, and the next night, after Orr had gone back to Philadelphia, Wilson led his horse out onto the road in the night and stole away, leaving behind everything he owned. He never went back.
In the months following his disappearance, Wilson wrote Orr a string of increasingly pitiful letters—begging for information about rumors that might be circulating in Milestown and especially for any word of the “one” who’d broken his heart. He spent some time in New York City, a place he didn’t care for, and briefly contemplated going home to Scotland. Eventually he found a teaching post near Newark, New Jersey. It paid poorly and Wilson remained deeply depressed. At one point he asked Orr to consider something they had often talked about—opening their own school together. But Orr became slower in writing back, and then he stopped entirely, devastating Wilson. In a tortured letter, Wilson told Orr he still loved him, even if the reverse was not true anymore. He repeated that he no longer had any friends, and as for what was being said about him back in Milestown, he was indifferent to expressions of either love or hate from anyone he’d known there. He just didn’t care about anything now. A week later he wrote to Orr to apologize and take it all back. Orr should regard everything Wilson had told him as the rantings of a crazy person, but he should never doubt Wilson’s undying friendship. He said he had never experienced such unhappiness and that it would be a long time before his mind recovered. “Past hopes, present difficulties, and a gloomy futurity,” Wilson wrote, “have almost deranged my ideas and too deeply affected me.” Without even a hint that he saw better days ahead, Wilson also mentioned that he had secured a new teaching position, this one at a school in Gray’s Ferry, just across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. His predecessor there had been a boisterous and ineffective former sea captain, and the pupils appeared to be an unruly lot. He said he regarded the prospect of returning to yet another classroom with the same feeling as a condemned man walking to the gallows.
As it turned out, the move to the Union School of Kingsessing at Gray’s Ferry was the most fortuitous of Wilson’s life. The schoolhouse, a squat, one-room building with a steep roof and shuttered windows, stood in a glade near the main thoroughfare leading south out of the city. The road passed out of the city’s busy streets and into the countryside, running by nurseries and the U.S. Arsenal before arriving at the river crossing about four miles from downtown. On the opposite shore, the highway entered a woodsy neighborhood made up of a number of taverns and a few blocks of wooden houses thrown together during the yellow fever exodus ten years earlier. It was also where an elderly man named William Bartram lived quietly on an estate known for its elaborate botanical gardens, which were said to include most of the known flora of North America.
Bartram, Philadelphia’s most eminent naturalist, was a living legend. He was the son of John Bartram, formerly the “King’s Botanist” before the Revolution. The elder Bartram had been revered in America and all over Europe both for his expertise in New World plants—Linnaeus considered him the world’s most accomplished botanist—and for a series of expeditions he had made to collect plants and explore the continent. William, who from an early age showed an enthusiasm for drawing birds and trees, accompanied his father on several of these trips, most importantly in 1765 to northeastern Florida where he stayed on and established an indigo plantation near the banks of the St. John’s River. The enterprise failed. But in 1773 William returned to Florida and again explored its northeastern palmetto jungles and savannas over the course of a four-year sojourn among the area’s planters and the native Seminole Indians. In 1791, Bartram published a book, Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, based on the field journals he kept during his expedition. It offered a vivid account of a wild place that seemed to Bartram a kind of Garden of Eden, and included detailed lists and descriptions of the many plants and animals he had encountered. Bartram’s description of the Alachua savanna, an immense opening of sawgrass and wetlands just south of present-day Gainesville, evoked the intoxicating wildness of the place:
The extensive Alachua savanna is a level, green plain, above fifteen miles over, fifty miles in circumference, and scarcely a tree or bush of any kind to be seen on it. It is encircled with high, sloping hills, covered with waving forests and fragrant Orange groves, rising from an exuberantly fertile soil. The towering Magnolia grandilora and transcendent Palm, stand conspicuous amongst them. At the same time are seen innumerable droves of cattle; the lordly bull, lowing cow and sleek capricious heifer. The hills and groves re-echo their cheerful, social voices. Herds of sprightly deer, squadrons of the beautiful, fleet Siminole horse, flocks of turkeys, civilized communities of the sonorous, watchful crane, mix together, appearing happy and contented in the enjoyment of peace, ’till disturbed and affrighted by the warrior man. Behold yonder, coming upon them through the darkened groves, sneakingly and unawares, the naked red warrior, invading the Elysian fields and green plains of Alachua.
