Under a Wild Sky, page 9
For a young man already in love with the outdoors and fascinated by wildlife, Mill Grove was a dream come true. It was near the confluence of Perkiomen Creek and the Schuylkill River, twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. Audubon would recall the place later in his life as his “beautiful American plantation.” The house, already forty years old, was impressive—a sprawling, three-story stone structure topped by a dormered shake roof and several tall brick chimneys. Inside, it was a warren of small rooms and low ceilings. The floors were wide-planked southern yellow pine worn to a warm patina. The house and a compound of out-buildings stood on a hillside, at the end of a long drive. A wide veranda ran the length of the house in the rear, overlooking an expanse of lawn and pastureland falling away to the south on a long slope above Perkiomen Creek. The Perkiomen, more truly a river than a creek, was eighty yards wide at the foot of the hill, where it ran over a low dam built to power the mill. Being close to the main crossing point of the creek, the house featured a small addition on its west end, with a tavern in the basement and rooms for travelers above. The famous lead mine was in the front yard, only twenty paces from the entrance to the house. Its shaft was twelve feet across and went straight down for some distance before angling off beneath the hillside.
Audubon spent little time in the house. Every day he was up at dawn and into the woods with his gun. The countryside, just then beginning to color with the onset of fall, was spectacular. High bluffs flanked the grounds, and the ravines were cathedrals of old-growth beech and oak and chestnut. Hemlocks stood on the ridgetops. The bottoms, especially along the creek, were shaded by immense, thick-bodied sycamores. Recent surveys at Mill Grove have found 176 species of birds in the forest. In Audubon’s day there were more, including flocks of passenger pigeons that appeared from time to time.
The intensity of Audubon’s curiosity about the birds and animals in the forest was unflagging. In the evenings he practiced his violin and flute, but he also retreated to an upstairs room where he assembled a growing collection of specimens—nests, eggs, shed snakeskins, and now and then a freshly dispatched bird or small mammal that he practiced drawing. He was always reluctant to come home at the end of the day, and usually only returned after the dew had begun to settle and he had a full game bag hanging against his damp trousers. In a crevice in the rocks on one of the cliffs above Perkiomen Creek, Audubon discovered a grotto that became a favorite retreat. Phoebes nested there, and under his constant attentions the birds became so tame that Audubon could hold them in his hands. Curious as to whether they returned to the same nesting place every year, Audubon tied threads around their feet in hopes of identifying them in subsequent seasons. Audubon would later recall this as a time when he had not a care in the world, passing each day afoot in the woods, dressed in fancy coats and shirts with lace cuffs, or riding over the fields on one of his fine horses. The reality may have been more modest—it took him some months to save up for a new gun and a hunting dog—but Audubon’s claim of having spent these days in a kind of nature-induced trance was true.
Shortly after he got to Mill Grove, Audubon learned that a new family was moving in at a big house only a half-mile down the road. Their name was Bakewell. They were originally from Derbyshire, in England, and more recently by way of New Haven, Connecticut. Evidently they were well off. Expensive stocks of fancy-bred sheep and cattle arrived shortly, and the Bakewells renamed their estate Fatland Ford after a local legend about the richness of its soil. Like Mill Grove, the house at Fatland Ford—far bigger and grander than Audubon’s—commanded stunning vistas of the rolling countryside to the south and west. On a clear day, you could see from Fatland Ford all the way to Valley Forge.
Audubon was curious about the Bakewells. It was said that they had several handsome daughters, though he was more intrigued by the rumor that William Bakewell, the father, raised pointing dogs. But Audubon kept his distance. These people were, after all, English—countrymen of the enemies of his father. And although Audubon had slipped effortlessly into the role of young prince on his American plantation, he was painfully aware of his limited education and social experience, and that there were only a handful of English words that made sense to him. The Bakewells were sure to be much too sophisticated for his company.
But one day right after New Year’s, Audubon came upon William Bakewell when they were both out grouse hunting along Perkiomen Creek. Bakewell was friendly and reassuring, and insisted the young man come to Fatland Ford for a visit and a formal introduction to the Bakewell family. Audubon said he would, and after some delay, he nervously went.
Audubon never forgot that day. He went down the lane to Fatland Ford in the morning. A servant answered the door and quietly led him into the parlor, where he found himself alone with a girl who was sewing by the fire. She seemed momentarily surprised by her visitor, but stood politely and offered Audubon a seat. Her father, she said, was out but would return shortly. They sat. Audubon could not take his eyes off the girl, who continued to sew and now chatted amiably with her guest. Her name was Lucy. She was the Bakewells’ eldest daughter. In two days she would be eighteen.
Between stitches, Lucy studied the young man squirming in his chair and staring at her. She’d heard of her reclusive neighbor. The reality was unexpectedly pleasant. He was full of energy and most definitely handsome, although his hair, which hung to his shoulders, took some getting used to. But he was friendly, and his accent was cute. Lucy found his odd use of archaic expressions like “thee” and “thou” utterly charming. Despite the language problem, they managed to understand one another. Soon they were talking about England and France, and comparing impressions of their new homes in America. When Lucy spoke of the moors in Derbyshire, Audubon sensed that they shared certain feelings about wild places. He found himself hoping that her father would take his time getting back. She was pretty, he thought. Maybe not classically so, but she had lovely gray eyes and a sweetness that seemed to fill the room. Audubon was happy to see a pianoforte in the corner. When William Bakewell at last appeared, he saw that the two of them were getting on well and suggested that Lucy prepare lunch. Audubon would later recall that he and William Bakewell ate “over guns and dogs,” lost in talk of hunting. But his most vivid memory was of Lucy’s tiny waist as she went to the kitchen ahead of them.
“She now arose from her seat a second time,” he later wrote, “and her form, to which I had previously paid but partial attention, showed both grace and beauty; and my heart followed every one of her steps.”
Audubon’s feelings for Lucy advanced quickly in the days that followed. He got to know all the Bakewells, which in addition to Lucy, William, and Mrs. Bakewell, included five more children: Thomas, who was seventeen; his eager little brother William, who was five; plus Eliza, who was fourteen and exceedingly pretty; and the two little girls, Sarah and Ann. After Audubon’s visit to Fatland Ford, the Bakewells called at Mill Grove on several occasions. One cold evening, everyone went skating on Perkiomen Creek—where Audubon demonstrated impressive skill. He also had a fine time pushing Lucy around the ice on a sled. On another occasion, Audubon led the Bakewells up the cramped stairway to his specimen room, where they were impressed by his collection of stuffed birds and other animals. Shyly, he took out a few crayon drawings of some birds and a mink. He was an intense young man, though in his eagerness to impress he was prone to rash claims. He foolishly told the Bakewells that a portrait of George Washington hanging above the mantel had been presented to his father, “Admiral” Audubon, by Washington himself after the “Battle of Valley Forge.” Audubon was ignorant of the fact that Washington had only camped his troops at Valley Forge, and that the general had visited not Mill Grove, but Fatland Ford. No doubt he got by with these lies because the Bakewells by then wanted to believe that Audubon was the aristocrat he seemed. If they doubted his boast of having studied painting with Jacques-Louis David, they apparently let that one pass as well.
There was no denying that Audubon had many talents. He danced well, played music, and was an accomplished horseman. He could fence and swim, and he was a superb shot. He seemed to know everything about birds and animals. His curiosity about nature never rested. Audubon was always in a good mood, always full of ideas about what to do or where to go to see something interesting. It gave William Bakewell pause to hear that young Audubon had led his daughter to some hidden place in the bluff above Perkiomen Creek—but he relaxed when he was reassured that they were only up there to look at phoebes. He was less forgiving when Audubon, on skates and armed with a shotgun, talked Tom Bakewell into tossing his cap in the air for a target.
One afternoon in late winter, Audubon led a hunting party after ducks. The season was not yet far enough advanced for a spring flight of waterfowl, but there must have been a few early arrivals and some ducks always stayed through the winter. The hunters moved up frozen Perkiomen Creek on skates, being careful to avoid the patches of open water they called “air holes.” The group was still a long way from Mill Grove when darkness fell, leaving a fair distance of treacherous river ice between them and home. Undaunted, Audubon volunteered to lead the way. Tying a white handkerchief to a stick, Audubon held it aloft and told everyone to follow him. The others adjusted the still-warm ducks hanging from their belts, looking around doubtfully at the gloom. Then they were off, gliding down the creek beneath the bare branches of the overhanging trees, now and then passing by a gurgling air hole. The frigid night air stung their faces. At the head of the line, Audubon’s white signal bobbed along like a beacon in the dark sky. Suddenly, it disappeared.
Audubon had fallen into an air hole. Instantly, the current swept him under, pushing him along beneath the ice and away from all sight and sound. His friends rushed to the place where he’d gone through. An eternity seemed to pass as they stared, horrified, into the swirling blackness. There was nothing to say, nothing they could do. The night was a clear, frozen envelope of silence surrounding them. They shifted on their skates. The ice groaned. Then they heard a cry many yards downstream. Audubon had somehow found his way up through another air hole. He was dragged coughing and shaking onto the ice, where someone stripped off a coat and wrapped it around him. As they got him to his feet, Audubon told his companions that in the shock of going under he’d lost consciousness. It was by pure chance that he’d popped up through another opening and regained his senses before being pulled down again.
Audubon worked hard at his drawing. His favorite subjects were birds, but they frustrated his efforts to translate nature onto paper. In France, as a boy, he’d collected birds with his father along the Loire River, but when he drew them in pencil and crayon the results were “miserable.” The objects of these early sketches looked like what they were—dead birds. Audubon depicted them in “stiff, unnatural profiles,” a manner he would later find all too common in conventional ornithology. The elder Audubon was unstinting in his encouragement, but warned his son that “nothing in the world possessing life and animation” is easy to imitate. At Mill Grove, Audubon tried to solve the problem by taking his crayons and pencils to the grotto above Perkiomen Creek, where he made countless attempts at drawing his beloved phoebes as they flitted about. Sometimes he made rough outlines of birds in the field, then shot them and returned to his room, where he laid them out as best he could in the same positions. This didn’t work, as “they were dead to all intents and neither wing, leg, or tail could I place according to the intention of my wishes.” He even tried tying threads to the head and wings of his specimens to support them in lifelike attitudes. But when he compared these clumsy models to the real, live thing, he said, “I felt my blood rise in my temples.”
These efforts so demoralized Audubon that at one point he stopped drawing for a month. Instead, he walked every day through the woods, looking at birds and waiting for inspiration. Audubon later claimed that during this time he began to dream about drawing birds, and long before daylight one morning he sat up in bed with a start. As Audubon told it, he ordered his horse saddled—probably he had to do it himself—and rode off at a gallop to Norristown, about five miles away. There he bought wire in various gauges and, leaping back on his “steed,” returned to Mill Grove. He passed up breakfast and instead grabbed his gun and bolted down the hill for Perkiomen Creek, where he shot a kingfisher. He gently carried the bird home by the bill and then went back down to the mill for a soft board. Filing points onto short lengths of wire, Audubon skewered the bird through the head, legs, and feet, and then, laying it on its side against the board, drove the wires into the wood to maintain the body in a fixed position. A final stiff wire was stuck under the tail to hold it up at a jaunty angle. Audubon was so excited he began to draw immediately, giving no further thought to time or hunger until he had finished. That kingfisher, he later said, marked the real beginning of his career. As he worked on his drawing, he reached over periodically and carefully opened the bird’s eyelid, and every time he did this it was as if the kingfisher had sprung back to life.
Audubon eventually added an important refinement to what he called “my method of drawing.” He marked off the surface of his mounting board with squares, and matched this grid with lightly penciled duplicate squares on his drafting papers. This allowed him to get the proportions and the foreshortenings of perspective just right. As for the scale, it was always a simple one-to-one. Audubon drew every bird as he saw it, exactly life-sized. It was a practice from which he never deviated.
Months streamed by in a delicious haze. Audubon was in love. Lucy was smart and bold, and she shared his enthusiasm for a day in the woods. He was thrilled at how well she kept up with him, and impressed by her riding skills. In England, Lucy had ridden with the hounds. She was at ease in the forest, and increasingly, she was attached to her companion at Mill Grove. They began to talk of marriage. When Audubon got sick just before the holidays in the fall of 1804, he went to Fatland Ford to be taken care of. His illness lasted weeks, and at one point it looked as if he might die. But once again he bounced back to life. Lucy read to him while he recovered. By early February he was well enough to go out for a ride.
Audubon did have one nagging concern—his father’s overseer, François Dacosta, who seemed intent on gaining control of Mill Grove. Evidently the two argued over who was giving orders to whom, and the elder Audubon got wind of it back in France. In truth, Audubon’s father had never completely explained to his son that Dacosta was an equal partner in Mill Grove. He wasn’t satisfied with Dacosta’s slow progress in opening the lead mine, but their arrangement had not changed. It meanwhile dawned on the younger Audubon that his say in the management of the estate didn’t amount to much, and that it was all but impossible to convey to his father on the other side of the world how unsatisfactory this was to him. The elder Audubon, having also heard of his son’s possible engagement, was already doing everything in his power to prevent a marriage between Audubon and Lucy. Audubon’s father suspected Lucy might only be after a wealthy husband. He wrote to Dacosta, urging him to find a way to delay his son’s plans, and, if need be, to let the Bakewells know that young Audubon, despite outward appearances, was not rich and could not expect anything in the way of support from his family in France if he were to marry “in his present condition.” In a follow-up letter, Audubon’s father warned Dacosta to stop complaining about his son, whose conduct must be the result of “bad advice and lack of experience.” Young Audubon was, after all, not yet twenty. The elder Audubon felt certain that the Bakewells had “goaded” his son into bragging that Mill Grove was his.
The old sea captain’s vision remained sharp. Even from across the ocean, his view of the situation was penetrating, and his response was a masterly demonstration of finesse and fatherly concern. He wrote to Dacosta, reassuring him that everyone in Philadelphia—except, apparently, young Audubon—understood perfectly that Dacosta’s rights and interests in Mill Grove were the same as his own. He said he had written to his son advising him as much and admonishing him to be a more respectful member of the household. He told Dacosta that sending young Audubon home to France, as Dacosta now proposed, was out of the question. All of the elder Audubon’s reasons for having his son in America were as before. Instead, he artfully suggested how Dacosta could act in his stead to bring the boy under control. Having repeated his command that his son not get married at such a young age, Audubon advised Dacosta to go easy:
Only an instant is needed to make him change from bad to good; his extreme youth and his petulance are his only faults, and if you have the goodness to give him the indispensable, he will soon feel the necessity of making friends with you, and he can be of great service if you use him for your own benefit.
If Dacosta followed this advice, Audubon said, his son could be “reclaimed” and would be fit to assume the duties at Mill Grove that he had thus far ignored. If this could be accomplished, the elder Audubon said, he would be “under every obligation” to Dacosta, adding, “This is my only son, my heir, and I am old.”
