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I am honored to be
invited to speak here, and I am so glad that the
Sphinx Club has reinstated this grand old tradition.
The older I get the more I appreciate the loveliness
of ritual and tradition. I must say, though, that
on the few occasions that I have spoken from this
height during Awards Night, I have felt rather like
a captain of the prow of his ship or maybe it’s
more like Father Mapple in Moby Dick mounting the
pulpit of the Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford.
There’s a rush of power that comes from standing
here. I’ll try not to let that power go to
my head. But don’t be surprised if I start
sermonizing issuing salty oaths.
Before I get underway,
I would like to thank several people who have helped
me research this talk; first Beth Swift of the Wabash
Archives, then Dr. Vern Easterling, Dr. David Polley,
Dr. Marion Jackson, an emeritus professor of ecology
at Indiana State University, and one other I will
name shortly.
Once upon a time
a young man traveled from Indiana to the West, to
Utah and the Yellowstone. He’d recently taken
a degree in Classics and Geology from a small liberal
arts college in southern Indiana and he’d
been invited on a scientific expedition to help
reconnoiter the geology of the region. But something
happened as he cooled his heels in the Wasatch Mountains;
instead of cataloguing the geological features,
he became entranced by the local flora, so unlike
that of his native Ohio River Valley. That was the
beginning. Over the next several months as the expedition
wended its way north into the Snake River Country,
through the Teton Basin, into the Madison River
Valley and into Yellowstone, he collected and catalogued
hundreds of plants. The next summer, after a winter
and spring spent systematizing his collections at
the National Herbarium in Washington, he came back
again in the second phrase of the expedition to
range about the high country of Colorado, collecting.
Fair to say, he was taken by the wilderness, especially
the alpine meadows and those hardy species that
manage such beauty in difficult conditions. They
brought out the poet in him. On the very summit
of Mount Lincoln, he found, “A beautiful Polemonium
or Greek Valerian with its rich bunches of blue
bells.” Conspicuous were also “Claytonias,
or Spring Beauties:” the exquisite deep blue
of the forget-me-not; and “phloxes of every
shade of white and purple and blue…”
He came back from
the expeditions—the Hayden Expeditions of
1872 and ’73—a botanist. But he returned
to Hanover College as a professor of Latin, his
first love. This young man, John Merle Coulter,
took a little while to find that his life work lay
not in declining ancient verbs but in classifying
and cataloguing the flora of the Midwest and the
West and in teaching the quickly evolving field
of botany to undergraduates. In 1876, he was transferred
to the Chair of the Natural Sciences, and a few
years later, in 1879, he accepted a Chair in the
Natural Sciences at Wabash College. (In fact, Coulter
had lived in Crawfordsville before, as a teenager,
where his mother ran a day school in the basement
of the First Presbyterian Church and he helped out
as a sexton and his brother, Stanley, as a part-time
janitor). Those were good years for Coulter and
the College. While Wabash lacked the natural beauty
of Hanover College in the hill country just north
of the Ohio, its campus, according to Coulter, boasted
an unsurpassed array of native plants. And being
more financially secure, it was a more progressive
college.
Here Coulter came
into his own as a teacher and a botanist. During
the next ten years, he started the Indiana Botanical
Gazette, made a compilation of the flora of Indiana,
curated the Hovey Museum and its herbarium of 50,000
botanical specimens, and developed an advanced curriculum
in science. Religiously conservative, a believer
in the harmonious design of nature, he was a best
tentative in embracing the new evolutionary biology
of Darwin. He saw evolutionary theory, as we wrote
in an 1877 address, reared upon “a foundation
whose cornerstone is an if.” His early work,
then, was very much a part of the great Linnaean
project, which began, in the mid-eighteenth century
of collecting and classifying the flora of the New
World. The premise of this project was that nature,
though infinitely diverse, was stable and the taxonomist
need only observe, describe, and, using his reason
to see the great design, classify the particular
manifestations of God’s magisterial art. It
was a beautiful idea, which he himself, as an older
man, would help dismantle.
Coulter also embodied
another transition in his life and work. As a member
of the Hayden expeditions, he was one of the last
“adventurer-naturalists.” Thomas Nuttall,
perhaps the greatest of such naturalists, wrote
in exasperation to his younger stay-at-home botanist
friend, Asa Gray, proclaiming that he [Nuttall]
had done his work “not in the closet but in
the field.” He no doubt saw in Gray the end
of his era. As Joseph Kastner, writes, “The
adventure naturalist was now being eclipsed by the
academic specialist.”
Coulter would never
again roam so far a field botanizing. While his
students at Wabash would often get him out of his
scientific closet and into the woods, he spent much
of his time analyzing and poring over the specimens
in the ever-growing herbarium. I can’t help
but imagine that Coulter looked back on those summers
in the Yellowstone Valley and in the high country
of Colorado as paradisial.
Indeed we get glimpses
of a very young Coulter from some of the diary entries
he made that spring and summer of ’72. On
May 24th, he describes an impromptu journey he and
several other members of the expedition made to
climb a peak that rose behind Ogden, Utah. The peak
was higher than they thought and two companions
turned back before Coulter and another reached the
summit-some five thousand feet above the valley—at
six o’clock in the evening. Rather than get
caught on the mountain at nightfall, they sought
a short cut and found one in a snow-covered col
between two peaks. Coulter’s friend surveyed
it for a moment, then sat down, and shoved off,
checking his “break-neck speed with his geological
hammer. Coulter hesitated but rather than be thought
a piker, sat down on his pockets and shoved off
himself. He writes, “If I had only possessed
a board I might have coasted with considerable ease,
but this thing of sitting down flat on the snow
with nothing but buckskin between me and any sharp-pointed
crag that might be lurking just beneath the surface
was anything but a pleasant prospect. But down I
sat and started and traveled towards my destination
with as much ease and rapidity as I had before in
the [railway] cars.” (I think young Coulter
unintentionally speaks volumes here about the “ease”
of travel by rail in the 1870s.) In any event, Coulter
and his companion made it back to their hotel late
that night, “sore and almost in rags but [they]
were proud.”
So the adventurer-naturalist
married and settled down in Crawfordsville, with
occasional outings to botanize around Indiana with
his students or stay in Kingfisher Cabin in the
Pine Hills with the likes of General Lou Wallace
and his son Henry or relax at home with his young
family. He did much of his botany in the lab—his
closet. For all his gifts, you would have to say
he became, like his mentor the great Asa Gray, an
academic specialist.
Founder and editor
of the Indiana Botanical Gazette, President for
many of those years of the Indiana Academy of Science,
he was part of a nexus of many gifted naturalists
who were his collaborators, rivals, and friendly
enemies that together fashioned the new botany.
From being a strictly descriptive taxonomist, he
evolved a more complex vision that incorporated
the study of a plant’s physiology, embryology
and genetics. He stressed the importance of knowing
a plant’s life history. In an 1891 address
to the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, he defines just how large an idea his
notion of a plant’s life history was:
By “life history”
I do not mean simply that gross observation that
watches a plant from germination to maturity…but
even more that minute tracing, cell by cell, from
the primitive cell to the mature plant, a work that
is now conceded to reveal more of the deep secrets
of affinity than any other.
He’d come
a far piece from the young scientist who was doubtful
of Darwin’s theory and confident in the static,
enduring design of Nature. His botany, and his concept
of the universe, was now dynamic, restless, and
modern. God had not withdrawn Himself from Coulter,
but His cosmos and His kingdom of plants had grown
more mysterious in the meantime.
I leave off speaking
of Coulter now, because, brilliant though he was,
he had the misfortune and the questionable judgment
of resigning the Rose Professorship of Geology and
Natural History at Wabash to assume, in 1891, the
Presidency of Indiana University.
Now I would speak
of another Wabash naturalist, one of whom it was
said that he had Native American—Wyandotte
blood—and that, in Bert Stern’s memorable
phrase, “he moved through the forest like
a shadow.” This man, a sort of gentle wolf,
prowled the margins of the humanities and the sciences,
and saw them as one. A modern ecologist, trained
at Purdue in the fifties and sixties, he was in
some ways, pre-Socratic. He despised the dichotomizing
mind, Aristotle’s obsession to divide and
subdivide living nature. He could not be called,
by any stretch, an academic specialist. Though frail
health, he was hardly in mind and spirit; more like
Nuttall than Asa Gray, more like Parmenides than
Aristotle. He was a naturalist adventurer, an ecologist
poet, who possessed a unitary consciousness: who
“saw life steadily and saw it whole.”
I dropped quite
a few clues, the elders among you know of whom I
speak, a man who is already turning to myth in our
remembrances of him, Robert Owen Petty. Regretfully,
I didn’t know him. When I came to Wabash in
1987, he was retired because of illness—a
lifelong struggle with Crohn’s Disease—and
though Bert Stern spoke of our getting together,
it never happened. I knew him glancingly through
Bert’s admiring words and through his gracious
brilliant wife, Anne. Thus, I know Robert Petty
principally through his prose, his beautiful prose.
Here he is writing with an insight Coulter would
admire of the “life-histories” of flowers:
“Each flower
is a story of adaptation, of meticulous fashioning
for the barter of pollen—old freight of insects
or wind—carried among the kindred of a species.
Whatever the flower’s shape, we see it poised
in a given moment of life’s happening. We
are there in our own moment of knowing that life
is a cycle of such happenings, a passing of days.”A
few days ago, I talked with Marion Jackson, a professor
emeritus at ISU, who is presently teaching at St.
Mary of the Woods College. Though they are the same
age, Dr. Petty was Jackson’s first professor
of botany. Later, they would do research together
at Allee Woods. They became fast friends.
I’d read that
Dr. Petty used radioactive isotopes in his work
and I was curious to learn more about that. Dr.
Jackson told me that Petty used the isotopes to
study the energy pathways within the forest ecosystems
of Alle Woods. You must remember these were the
late 50s, during the height of the Cold War, and
the Atomic Energy Commission was interested in how
radioactivity moved through living systems, so for
purposes different tan his own, it funded his research
and gave him access to these isotopes. But Petty
for a while was at a loss about how to deliver these
isotopes to the trees.
Then a solution
presented itself almost out of the blue. Petty had
suffered a serious bout with his disease and found
himself waking up, groggy, on an IV drip. Still
half-asleep, he whispered, “Aha!,” to
himself and dozed off again. When he was better,
he went out to the woods with an IV bottle and plastic
tubing. He bored a hole through the bark and into
the vascular tissue of a tree, slapped some aquarium
cement at the juncture of the tree and tubing, filled
the bottle with a solution of his isotope, and hung
it from a nearby branch, putting the tree on an
IV drip.
As I think about
it, the story is a parable of Petty’s mind.
He saw himself as a tree, he thought like a tree.
Indeed, he had the poet’s metaphorical cast
of mind. But, you know, I don’t think he would
have approved of that last sentence. Scientists
coin metaphors too. Our species is simply the semblance-seeing
creature; with our minds, we place disparate things
side by side and watch what happens. Sometimes nothing,
sometimes a fizz, sometimes an explosion. Good scientists
and good poets both know this.
But while most of
us visit the “tension zone” where metaphor
happens from time to time, Petty built his cabin
there and loitered and watched and “invited
his soul.” And he invited others—that
was one of his gifts as a teacher. His courses were
the ecotones between our Aristotelian Divisions—between
Divisions I and III, he constructed “Biopolitics”
and “Environmental Economics”; between
I and II, “Bio-Religion.”
For Petty, such
courses were a natural application of his pre-Socratic
method. Such courses might sound to some a little
light, but I doubt they were if a more conventional
Petty course—Plant Taxonomy—is any indication.
An alumnus, Dr. Gerald Hoeltke, noted that by mid-term
he had to be able to identify over 120 trees, family,
genus, and species. The final exam was a walk through
Turkey Run State Park: each tree was to be identified.
Petty thought like
a tree, and he felt for the trees. He knew how important
they were for human thought, and how important they
were for the continuance of life on this planet.
Professor Jackson also told me how, on arriving
on campus one day, Petty saw that the grounds folk
were preparing to cut down an old tree that was
starting to die at the top. That tree was the Ohio
Buckeye State Tree: the largest such tree in the
entire state. Bob Petty rushed over to the tree
and hugged it, telling the men that they would cut
that tree down over his dead body. The President
of the College was called and the decision made
to preserve the tree.
Petty was instrumental
in establishing the Fuller Arboretum and in planting
the islands of beech-maple and oak-hickory associations
that characterize the native forests of Indiana.
Vern Easterling tells me that Petty must have planted
hundreds of beech trees in the northeastern part
of the arboretum. Petty would later write that “the
forest nature of our campus is an especially significant
legacy, which is part of the college’s wilderness
heritage.”
Perhaps you have
heard, as I have, of a chill winter night an owl
hooting in treetops of our arboretum and shivered
at that wild sound. Whatever’s on my mind,
it never fails to bring me back to my own earthliness,
my being as a creature among other wild things that
inhabit this planet. That forest fringe, that was
another ecotone that Petty sought to keep for our
College, part of his legacy.
Petty also worked
assiduously to preserve the Pine Hills and Big Walnut
Creek area near Greencastle from the depredations
of development. A story connected with Pine Hills:
One fine afternoon in the early 1960s, shortly after
Pine Hills had been made a state natural area preserve,
Bob Petty and a student were strolling about botanizing
when they heard a rifle shot over the neighboring
ridge. While the student sought cover, Petty took
off running in the direction of the shot, hurling
over his shoulder an explanation: the ____ was hunting
illegally in the preserve.
A few minutes later,
the student marveled to see Petty strolling arm-in-arm
with another man, who was toting some light artillery,
both men laughing and chatting amiably. Petty introduced
the bewildered student to the hunter: Dick Ristine,
aka Wabash Trustee and soon to be Lieutenant Governor
of Indiana. Mr. Ristine pleaded that he had not
heard of Pine Hills’s status as a preserve
and so he was spared a citizen’s arrest by
Dr. Petty. Or perhaps he was given a short sentence
by the arresting officer, a lecture in natural history,
and released.
So what is it that
makes a man or a woman a poet, at least the sort
of poet that Bob Petty was? I do think it has something
to do with that Wyandotte blood, a sort of wild
or atavistic strain in the human genome. I also
think that this strain combined with Bob’s
prescience of death, from his long mortal combat
with Chron’s Disease, set him on his path
toward poet hood. He lived quite naturally, and
with more than a little courage, at the metaphysical
edge, that tideland of the final dark water. That
surely must have pierced him to the marrow and given
him his uncommon sympathy for all mortal things.
You feel that sympathy in much of his work. For
instance, in this late poem called “Path to
Garden World” from his posthumous collection,
Splitting the Witness Tree:
For years we only
watched what
we could not walk through
without a mower
A cycle or a scythe.
The wild briar was too thick,
New goldenrods, rose and poison ivy.
Then all the shades grew tall.
Shadows came at
night
And left their tracks in paths
Like tiny traces in the weeds
Which larger shadows followed.
Then one year not long after fallow
The largest shadows left clear paths
That even we could follow
At first hunkered over—a path
like a tunnel in the cover.
“Was it for this the clay grew tall?”
Everywhere we looked
were miracles—
A myriad; flowers, fruits and nesting birds,
Butterflies never seen before
In that region, wild ferns and honey bees.
Yellow jackets drilled the earth;
Hornet’s nests and paper wasps,
Spiders of all sorts and many snakes—
This web of life like something seen before!
One tree had thorns heart-deep
To fall against, tricorn and long—
Sweet bloom of Honey Locust.
Move about with
care in such a garden.
This new world could be your own backyard.
To cut a tree is all that is forbidden;
The secret is the act that is not done—
A garden world before the fall
After the forgiveness.
In these difficult
times, we feel further from that garden than ever;
but remember “This new world could be your
own backyard.” Or the waters of Babylon for
that matter. The legacy of such Wabash men as John
Merle Coulter and Robert Owen Petty bring that garden
nearer to us. It takes human action, a man’s
or a woman’s arête, your arête:
a whole mind linked to a whole heart, to find and
cultivate that garden. That is the work of the liberal
arts, of the informed and engaged citizen, and of,
I would say, the human soul in its long journey
toward caritas, toward love. I’ll close with
a final poem from our poet-naturalist-adventurer.
Bob Petty’s family found it among his things
some time after his death. It was “written
in pencil on ruled yellow paper.” It’s
entitled, “We Who Come”:
We who come from
the earth
Must speak of the earth
Softly, gently, a quiet fierceness.
Far away in the mind
A homeland yet lives.
Silent before us
And beautiful
Into our eyes and ears
The earth does happen,
Speaks through our tongues
To wind and sky,
The great trees and after them
All flesh alive,
Familiar forms
And ancient souls
Of bone and flint.
Know my people
From where you came
And of that long far coming.
It is an awesome epic
Up from that wet dark
Into the light
Burning
With life.
Hudson is Professor of English at Wabash.
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