Childhood Landscape--Growing Up Inside The Minds of Visionaries

While reading a eulogy from 1935 found online, I realized that I had spent much of my childhood living inside the minds of some pretty famous visionaries. There were three I know of thus far, whose realized visions framed my world.

One was George Ellery Hale, founder of Yerkes Observatory, the iconic 1895 building where my father worked. Another was John Charles Olmsted--nephew and adopted son of famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted--and designer of the grounds of the observatory. Those grounds served as my very expansive and semi-public front yard.

But the person being eulogized, and the subject of this post, was a prominent astronomer of the early 20th century named Edwin Brant Frost. He was director of the observatory from 1905 to 1932, and editor of the Astrophysical Journal. He was also the man whose love of nature brought into being my childhood landscape, and after a youth spent roaming that broad expanse of lawns, trees, and sidewalks surrounding Yerkes Observatory, my mind seems to have continued down pathways of thought similar to his. As an astronomer first and foremost, his head was up in the stars, but he was also a renaissance man who tracked the arrivals and departures of birds, loved music and singing, played sports. He was, for my childhood world, a hidden figure parallel in many ways to my "adopted ancestor" of sorts, Oswald Veblen, who in Princeton had long ago formed a link between the high intellectual pursuits of mathematics and physics, and the beloved natural world we experience during a walk in the woods.

Though it was Hale who in the 1890s conceived of and found funding for Yerkes Observatory, he soon moved on to other projects, leaving Frost to lead the institution for the next 30 years.

At that point, the observatory was "out standing in its field," as they say, surrounded by what in this photo appears to be Wisconsin prairie. Frost loved trees, however, and so hired the Olmsted firm to create a design for the grounds.

Strange, to learn as an adult that my childhood landscape was designed by Olmsteds, but there it is, seen from above, looking like a giant horseshoe crab with the domes of telescopes for eyes. These are the roads and paths I walked to school, and where my father taught me to drive. Along them lived astronomers like Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel prize, Bill Morgan, Nelson Limber, and my father, Al Hiltner.

With a long list of trees from many continents, my childhood landscape, unbeknownst to me at the time, was an arboretum of sorts, with some trees having grown to be "state records" for their species.

To a kid who, like Frost, took to sports, the grounds were primarily a place to play pickup games of volleyball, football, or baseball, or launch Estes rockets. As I tested my skill as a golfer, seeing how many shots it took to hit a ball all the way around the building, the trees were challenging obstructions to hit the ball over or around. The working class golf course next to Yerkes, where I spent summers seeking and only once achieving an under par round, turns out to have been Frost's idea as well.

Our astronomical enclave was perched on the outskirts of little Williams Bay, Wisconsin, chosen by the University of Chicago because of its littleness, as a place where telescopes would not be hindered by city lights and pollution. Despite the town's small size, there was also a handy railroad that came into town and could carry students and faculty back and forth to Chicago. It was in some ways reminiscent of the Institute for Advanced Study's location on the edge of Princeton, thirty years later.

My path into town for school each day included a wooded path called "Frost's Trail." In his 50s, Frost lost the use of one eye, then the other, which normally would be catastrophic for an astronomer. Yet with the help of his wife and observatory staff he continued on as Yerkes director and editor of the Astrophysical Journal. A wire was strung from tree to tree along the wooded trail so that, with the help of a cane to wrap around the wire, he could find his way to work. Walking that path thirty years later, I would see bits of the long-since rusted wire, and imagine Frost having walked there, experiencing nature by its smell and touch.

In my child's mind, I somehow conflated Edwin Frost the astronomer with Robert Frost the poet. They both liked to botanize. Both were beloved figures. Both had the northeast in their bones. Edwin Frost's wife wrote poetry. So I wasn't too far off.

The eulogy for Edwin Brant Frost encountered online was written by the astronomer and artist Philip Fox, in the elegant, gallant style of the time. Here are some passages:

Most of the extraordinary people we know who are blind are musicians--Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles--certainly no one in as sight-dependent a field as astronomy. And yet in our era, so saturated with rich digital imagery, it is uncanny to learn that Frost not only coped but thrived without sight. In part due to having learned to do math in his head, he was able to visualize the world he could no longer see.

The dominance of sight causes so much to go unnoticed.

Frost kept records of the arrivals and departures of migratory birds, and even came up with a formula to predict the rate of a cricket's chirp related to temperature.

I made a brief return to Williams Bay in the 1970s, and remember walking Frost's trail one spring day when the woods was alive with birdsong, easily enough to fill one's mind with beauty without the aid of sight. One of the songs reminded me of a riff Charlie Parker often used to end his phrases.

Here's something lost from our culture, as people's lives become more urban--the notion that character is rooted in the land.

A nice expression of love for open spaces. Standing on the shores of Lake Geneva this past September, just down a path from the observatory, the lake relieved of the burden of tourists and motorboats that crowd it in the summer, I felt that extraordinary calm, with silence extending out in all directions.

This passage depicts Frost the astronomer almost as a rock star, conceivable in the early 1930s, when science and technology offered promise of a way out of the Great Depression and into an exciting new world. To demonstrate the wonders of new technologies like the photo cell, Frost conceived of using the light of the star Arcturus to trigger the lighting of the Worlds Fair on opening night. Arcturus being about 40 light years away, the light reaching Earth from the star would have just been leaving it 40 years earlier when Chicago had a previous Worlds Fair. At the appointed moment, the lights came on and the crowd went wild. Frost was celebrated for this poetic application of technology, then returned to the comforting open spaces and dark nights of Williams Bay two hours north.

Since the closing of Yerkes Observatory on October 1 this fall, after 120 years of operation, my childhood landscape is in suspended animation. The grass is still mowed, the telescopes still exercised periodically but closed off from public view. The vision of Frost and others was a good one, but now awaits another.

Writings from Durham Days--Rain ponds, live stakes, and falling leaves

Googling myself, I found some published writings from my days in Durham, NC, where I founded a nonprofit called the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association. Published in the "Front Porch" section of a news magazine called Indyweek, they make a good entry for this website's 1250th post.

August 07, 2002Columns » Front Porch

Rhapsody to a rain pond 

By Stephen K. Hiltner

Though the reservoirs that feed Durham's faucets--Lake Mickie and the Little River Reservoir--are still low, I am happy to report that Lake Hiltner is now filled to the brim, thanks to recent heavy rains.

Located on an upland slope in an old city neighborhood, it receives its waters from a nearby mountain range, better known as my roof. Lake Hiltner is what my next door neighbor calls this new, homemade body of water, but at 8 feet across, terracing down to 2 feet deep, it's somewhere between a pond and a permanent puddle. A pondle, perhaps, or a pund.

It needs a good name, because it's such a satisfying thing to have in a backyard garden. In time, frogs will move in, and hummingbirds will find the hibiscus, cardinal flower and jewelweed that bloom along its shores. Most of all, the mini-pond is responsive to the weather and the seasons, slowly diminishing in drought, rising in the rain. Flowers come and go in succeeding waves; the school of mosquito fish--a native of local creeks related to guppies--swells with each new batch of fry. And then there are the distinguished visitors, which in other backyard mini-ponds have included great blue herons and hawks.

For those who seek larger meanings in backyard projects, a neighborhood dotted with Lake Smiths and Joneses will be better prepared for extremes of weather. Drought and flood teach the same lesson: Find a place for rainwater in the landscape. The current practice of shedding runoff quickly from roofs into streets into urban creeks not only creates destructive flooding, but also leaves the rainwater-deprived landscape more vulnerable to drought.

The most drought-resistant landscapes are those where water is allowed to linger, whether in mini-ponds or in absorbent swales where water will seep in over a few days. Water allowed to seep into the ground creates an underground reservoir of moisture for plants to draw on during drought. This has been clearly demonstrated this summer as larger-scale projects like the stormwater wetland at Hillandale Golf Course and the wetland gardens at Indian Trail Park continue to flourish without watering.

The same philosophy applies to the backyard. The way to reduce weather's extremes is to accept the gifts currently spurned. It involves harvesting the rain that falls on house and yard, in rainbarrels, raingardens, grassy swales, mini-ponds and soil made absorbent by mulch. Even the condensate from air conditioners, most abundant when it's most needed, can be directed to a pond or raingarden rather than left to soak into the foundation.

Though droughts and torrential downpours teach harsh lessons, the response can be a rewarding adventure.

March 27, 2002Columns » Front Porch

Dogwood candles 

By Stephen K. Hiltner

It's fun to watch 6-year-olds deal with the concept of spring starting on a particular day. They think something magical is going to happen--all the flowers will burst forth, the temperature will suddenly jump. But the heavens and the trees don't give a hoot about March 20th, the official start date for spring, and kids everywhere are left to wonder what it's all about.

By coincidence, March 20 was the day I went to my daughter's first grade class to do a little planting project. The bushes we were going to plant had no leaves and no roots, but I assured the students that they would grow. That would have to be magic enough to fill the gap between this most ordinary day and the far grander work of their imaginations.

The activity is by now pretty standard. A couple of big plastic tubs--the cut off ends of a donated 55 gallon drum--stand ready outside the classroom. After some discussion about the things plants need to grow, the kids do their best to shovel schoolyard dirt into the tubs. When they're filled to the brim, we add water to turn the dirt into glorious mud. Finally, each kid takes a freshly cut section of stem from one or another native shrub that grows along Ellerbe Creek in Durham--silky dogwood, buttonbush, elderberry--and sticks it deep into the ooze.

This time, though, about when we had 20 stems in each tub, the kids began singing "Happy Birthday." Now the grown-ups were left wondering. In the eyes of the first graders, the tubs of brown mud with sticks pointing up had taken on the look of birthday cakes with chocolate frosting and candles. "Happy birthday, silky dogwood. Happy birthday to you."

In a week or two, the buds on the sticks will open, and the buried portions will sprout roots in the mud. By fall, Forest View Elementary will have 40 shrubs to plant on the school grounds. But more importantly, the kids got to dig the good earth, to learn which way's up on a buttonbush sprig and, best of all, they found meaning in the day. A birthday for spring--maybe that's what March 20 is really all about.

November 08, 2000

Front Porch 

Rhapsody in leaves

By Stephen K. Hiltner

The narrow leaves of willow oak spin earthwards, catching flashes of morning light. In walks along the tree-lined canyons of city streets, we are all victors in a ticket-tape parade. The sun's rays, having lost their summer harshness, now angle into the sheltered air beneath trees, illuminating the languid descent of leaves from the vaulted canopy.

Not all leaves are so elegant. Pine needles plunge earthward like clouds of arrows. The broader leaves of maples fall in rocking zigzags. But willow oak leaves are designed to celebrate their momentary freedom in one long graceful pirouette. They spend summer clustered overhead, anonymous in dense masses of green. Then they become a million individualists in their first and last dance back to earth. In loose embrace with gravity, they fall--each spinning in its own manner, at its own tempo, each captured for a moment by the sun's beaming light. Having reached the ground, again anonymously massed, they mingle and merge and return by degrees to the soil from which they came.

At such times, it's hard to think of leaves as anything but a gift. In the competition for my heart between lawn and leaf, lawn has had to yield. I used to rake the leaves and mow the threadbare grass. But now I channel my yard's sylvan tendencies rather than struggle against them. The leaves fall where they do for a reason: to soften the soil, to catch the rain, to help dogwoods through the droughts and to give kids one more reason for delight. What pleasure to trace a leaf's whimsical flight and find, at bottom, a sense of rightness and rest, rather than impending chore. The Triangle is a forest masquerading as metropolis, and we are the beneficiaries of its golden rain
.

Memories of a Naturalist--Tonantzintla, Mexico

Google''s celebration of Mexican astronomer Guillermo Haro's birthday today brings back memories of traveling to Tonantzintla, Mexico, where Haro did much of his observing. He was the first Mexican astronomer to be elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. My father, a contemporary of Haro's, took the family along on one of his observing runs, probably to use the same Schmidt telescope. There was some overlap in their work, and some correspondence between them in the late '50s, early '60s.

One perk of being the son of an astronomer is occasional trips to dry, mountainous parts of the world. Whether the destination was McDonald Observatory in Texas, Kitt Peak in Arizona, or Tololo in the desert of northern Chile, I was free to explore the mountainsides all day.

Five years ago, when my family traveled to Mexico City, we made the two hour drive over to Tonantzintla to have a look. I tried to overlay the pale fragments of boyhood memories onto the landscape as it is today, with mixed success.

This might be the yard where my brother and I had two burros to ride around on for the week. My brother's was white, and stubbornly held its ground as my brother pulled on the rope, wanting to take a ride. Mine was smaller, brown, and much more cooperative. Rising in the distance was an impressive mountain with the fun, rhythmic name Popocatepetl. Po-po-ka-TEP-e-tl may have been one of those words that my dad liked but which often got caught in his mouth, struggling to get out.

This may be the cottage where we stayed. The most vivid memory is the smell that emanated from the kitchen when my mother first cranked up the dusty stove to heat water for tea.

Come to think of it, visits to such places in childhood, small enclaves of buildings devoted to scientific study surrounded by nature's splendor, and the feeling of walking into a cottage that may have stood empty for weeks or months prior, may have been the template that gives the Veblen House and Cottage in Herrontown Woods such power. I recently met a woman walking her two dogs in Herrontown Woods who likes it there so much in part because it brings back memories of walking through the woods to her grandmother's house when she was a kid.

Other memories from that childhood trip to Mexico include extended practice sessions with a wooden ball and cup game in a city apartment while my father and brother were recovering from a case of Montezuma's revenge, and an embarrassing I-cannot-tell-a-lie moment when my brother was trying to sneak some fireworks through customs. Not knowing there was anything illegal about it, and with a journalist's instinct for thoroughness, and always having been encouraged to speak up if I had the answer to a question, when the official asked us if we had anything else to declare, I proudly declared, "Fireworks!"

This Fall, Corral Those Leaves

I'll never understand why the human race throws certain things away, be it leaves or a hospitable climate. The two seem far different, but it's all one needless and tragic purging, a throwing away of nature's gifts while curiously courting danger, present and future. Some of my most vivid and happy memories from childhood involve leaves. One year I took the white oak leaves in our yard and raked them into rows to make a house, then rode my tricycle through the various rooms. Some leaves we burned, perfuming the autumn air. We'd throw acorns into the embers and wait for them to pop. And there's the memory of the whole family raking leaves down the hill, a row of leaves, dancing before us in bright sunlight, growing in size, to make a big pile at the edge of the woods. With my friends, I'd run down the hill, launch myself into the pile, to be enveloped in its crisp embrace. My walk to school was essentially a nature walk, through woods, down a mix of narrow paved and unpaved roads. One maple tree had particularly bright leaves with orange, yellow and red, to pick up and take to art class.

Now I live in a larger small town, a Little Big Town (like the Dustin Hoffman movie Little Big Man), on a busy street, and though I cannot stem the odd and hazardous tradition of piling leaves in the way of cars, bicyclists and pedestrians, or the stampede of traffic spilling gases into the air, I can toss leaves into a leaf corral, in what seems to me a more sustaining and spiritual approach to the physical world. The leaf corrals are an experiment in no-work, no carbon footprint composting. This fall, the corrals' contents, decomposing passively all summer, were inspected to see the results. This particular corral--called a Wishing the Earth Well because it's a well that works in reverse, giving nutrients back to the earth--includes a central cylinder made of critter-proof hardware cloth, where food scraps can be thrown and allowed to decompose, surrounded and disguised by a donut-shaped column of leaves. Yield of this 3 foot diameter corral was one and a half big tubs of compost, and a retrieved teaspoon from the kitchen that somehow got mixed in with the food scraps. There was also an effort to grow potatoes and nasturiums, which showed some promise. A botanist, by the way, will watch a movie like Young Frankenstein and come away wondering what Gene Wilder meant when he said "Never be nasty to nasturiums." Was he speaking metaphorically, or was it just something that needed to be said?

A larger corral, six feet wide and called the OK Leaf Corral, yielded five big tubs of compost ready for incorporation into the garden beds.

Here's a closeup of the compost, soft and spongy, dark and rich. Ah, the rewards of all that non-labor and non-burning of fossil fuels.

A neighbor who tried this leaf corral approach said his leaves didn't decompose, which probably meant they were dry. I, too, noticed in midsummer some pockets of undecomposed leaves in the piles, and came up with a novel approach to improving decomposition without having to turn the pile. This root feeder, normally used for fertilizing trees, can inject water into the leaf pile while also making channels for rainwater to penetrate. A few minutes of poking around was all it took to get the interior of the pile moist, and enable the decomposition of the red oak leaves by end of summer. Moisture, along with all the decomposing fungi, bacteria and insects, also enter from the ground beneath the pile.

Here's the prettiest leaf corral, which you'll have to take my word for because it's completely disguised by a dogwood tree. In other words, leaf corrals can blend into the yard, disguised by foliage while they quietly work their decomposing magic. A nice surprise last fall and winter was how the leaves would quickly settle in the corrals, after just a few days, allowing more leaves to be added as the trees slowly let them go. A leaf corral performs, then, as a bottomless receptacle for leaves.

In its simplest form, a leaf corral is made of green wire fencing, 3-4 feet high, with a couple stakes to hold it in place. Some folks in town have asked me to make leaf corrals for them, which I'm happy to do at cost, along with a donation to our Friends of Herrontown Woods.

Snow Forts and Memories

On a recent walk around the block, I encountered three boys building a complex of snow forts in the front yard. My first thought was, "You mean kids still build snow forts?" It brought back memories of all the dramas we superimposed on the landscape I ranged over as a kid.

Within those protective walls, we'd have stacks of snowballs ready to hurl at any who dared attack. My free-range childhood territory included windswept fields where the observatory's facilities crews would erect snowfences to keep snow from blowing over the sidewalks. Snow would gather in drifts five feet deep on the lee side of the fences, perfect for excavating and augmenting, following much the same impulse as the gophers that were hibernating in the ground below.

Like hunting, which I really enjoyed until I actually killed something, our building of the snowy equivalent of a Maginot Line was fun until war actually broke out. There was one traumatic day when our fort complex was attacked, by a couple college students who penetrated the flurry of snowballs and proceeded to destroy our carefully crafted fort. Those were some big bullies.

Here was the other scene during the walk around the block that brought back memories. Start with a small clump of snow, push it across the grass, gathering snow with each revolution. When the snowball was too big to budge any further, we knew where the snowman or the fort would stand. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, that we are snowballs, making tracks through time, experiences sticking to us as we go, gaining character, or at least characteristics, until we find ourselves outstanding, or at least out standing, in a field.

Ode To Willow Oak Leaves

Recently, walking through a pleasant blizzard of falling willow oak leaves on Franklin Avenue, I remembered an ode to willow oak leaves I had written in the fateful fall of 2000 while living in Durham, part of North Carolina's Research Triangle. It was this time of year, in a city whose streets were and still are lined with willow oaks, and the enormous specimen in our yard was laying down a fresh layer of soft, attractive mulch.

We had long since given up trying to grow lawn in deeply shaded piedmont clay, in favor of letting pine needles and willow oak leaves fall where they may. The pines down there are loblolly and shortleaf. Unlike the more northern white pine planted in Princeton, they are "self-pruning", meaning they drop their lower limbs to eventually become a vaulted canopy, creating an expansive, protected, cathedral-like space beneath, through which leaves and needles make their long, idiosyncratic descents to earth in the filtered light.

The piece below was published on the editorial page of the Raleigh News and Observer as one of their periodic pastoral pieces, almost certainly completely overlooked in the tumult following the Bush-Gore election that had taken place the day before.



The Work of an Autumn Breeze

The narrow leaves of willow oak spin earthwards, catching flashes of morning light. In walks along the treelined canyons of city streets, we are all victors in a ticker tape parade. The sun's rays, having lost their summer harshness, now angle into the sheltered air beneath trees, illuminating the languid descent of leaves from vaulted canopy.

Not all leaves are so elegant. Pine needles plunge earthward like clouds of arrows. The broader leaves of maples fall in rocking zig-zags. But willow oak leaves are so designed to celebrate their momentary freedom in one long graceful pirouette. They spend summer clustered overhead, anonymous in dense masses of green. Then, made expendible by autumn's chill, refined of all colors but gold, they become a million individualists in their first and last dance back to earth. In loose embrace with gravity they fall, each spinning in its own manner, at its own tempo, each captured by the sun's beaming light for all time and but for a moment.

The young girl next door tries to catch one, and quickly discovers how illusive they are--so tangible in their approach, yet like phantoms unwilling to have their only dance cut short. Having reached the ground, again anonymously massed, they mingle and merge and return by degrees to the soil from which they came.

At such times, it is hard to think of leaves as anything but a gift. In the competition between lawn and leaf for my heart, lawn has had to yield. I used to pick up the sticks, and rake the leaves, and mow threadworn grass. But now I channel my yard's sylvan tendencies rather than struggle against them. The leaves fall where they do for a reason: to soften the soil, to catch the rain, to help dogwoods through the droughts and give kids one more reason for delight. What pleasure to trace a leaf's whimsical flight, and find at bottom a sense of rightness and rest, rather than impending chore. The Triangle is a forest masquerading as metropolis, and we are the beneficiaries of its golden rain.

Durham, NC, Fall, 2000