several poems of great merit - Isabella Bird gives a glimpse of a strange time and place

A side issue from A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains in the category “the past is an alien place.”  Even 19th century Victorians are alien.  Isabella Bird becomes close to a genuine mountain man, Mountain Jim Nugent, a violent, dangerous drunk who is murdered a year after Bird leaves Colorado.  He lost an eye to a grizzly bear – “the loss made one side of the face repulsive, while the other might have been modeled in marble.”  He is an Englishman, and when he cleans himself up has beautiful golden curly locks.  He is also – this is the alien part – a poet:

"Jim" shortened the way by repeating a great deal of poetry, and by earnest, reasonable conversation, so that I was quite surprised when it grew dark…  I wrote to you for some time, while Mr. Nugent copied for himself the poems “In the Glen” and the latter half of “The River without a Bridge,” which he recited with deep feeling.  It was altogether very quiet and peaceful.  He repeated to me several poems of great merit which he had composed, and told me much more about his life.  (Letter XVII)

In the 1870s this was all entirely normal.  No idea what poems those are that Mountain Jim copied.

The book’s great comic interlude features a second poet.  Bird and a couple of silver miners fear they will be trapped in their Estes Park cabin for the winter, to the extent that they are rationing their provisions.  To their surprise, a young man, a “theological student,” appears, an additional mouth to feed.

This “mouth” has come up to try the panacea of manual labor, but he is town bred, and I see that he will do nothing.  He is writing poetry, and while I was busy to-day began to read it aloud to me, asking for my criticism.  He is just at the age when everything literary has a fascination, and every literary person is a hero…  (Letter XV)

The poet is lazy, worse than useless, doing no work and losing the milk cow when he tries, and a parasite, sneaking food at night.

He has eaten two pounds of dried cherries from the shelf, half of my second four-pound spice loaf before it was cold, licked up my custard sauce in the night, and privately devoured the pudding which was to be for supper.

Worst of all, he shows Isabella Bird his published poetry:

In one there are twenty lines copied (as Mr. Kavan has shown me) without alteration from Paradise Lost; in another there are two stanzas from Resignation, with only the alteration of “stray” for “dead”; and he has passed the whole of Bonar's Meeting-place off as his own.  Again, he lent me an essay by himself, called The Function of the Novelist, which is nothing but a mosaic of unacknowledged quotations.

A post-modernist ahead of his time.  This epsiode would not be so amusing if the plagiarist caused everyone to starve to death, but everything worked out all right.  Mr. Kavan is not a hard case like Mountain Jim (he “makes the best bread I ever ate”), but still.  In those days Rocky Mountain silver miners could identify passages from Paradise Lost.  I’m not sure I can do that.  A strange, alien time.

If it's the English lady traveling in the mountains - A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird

Since I was just in the Rocky Mountains, I will linger there for a day by writing about A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) by Isabella Bird, the greatest tourist of the 19th century.  In this book she is mostly in Colorado, exploring the mountain trails on horseback, often alone, sometimes assisted by the desperados, settlers, and other tough characters she encounters.

…  I at once inquired if I could get to Green Lake.  The landlord said he thought not; the snow was very deep, and no one had been up for five weeks, but for my satisfaction he would send to a stable and inquire.  The amusing answer came back, “If it’s the English lady traveling in the mountains, she can have a horse, but not any one else.”  (Letter XII)

Her adventures – her unlikely existence – featured in the Colorado newspapers, Bird becomes a celebrity while she is there.  She is not the only celebrity in Colorado, but perhaps the only one who is not an outlaw, like the terrifying Comanche Bill (“my intelligent, courteous companion was one of the most notorious desperadoes of the Rocky Mountains, and the greatest Indian exterminator on the frontier,” Letter XI) and a man who becomes Bird’s close friend and companion, Rocky Mountain Jim Nugent (“She was as proud of having him in her house as if he had been the President, and I gained a reflected importance!,” Letter XVII).

Mountain Jim guides Isabella Bird on her ascent of Longs Peak, a highlight of the book.  Nowadays I believe you can drive most of the way to the top, and Bird herself writes that “[t]ruly terrible it was for me, to a member of the Alpine Club it would not be a feat worth performing” (Letter VII).  Nevertheless Bird’s book is part of the 1870s mountain-climbing craze, in the less crazed division.  Photo from the National Park Service.  They also have a little tribute to Bird as one of the founders of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Once Bird started traveling, and writing, she never stopped.  Trips to and books about Australia and Hawaii preceded A Lady’s Life, and the next stop would be Japan.  She is the woman that rode the mule ‘round the world, so to speak (warning: music).  I have read Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880).  As interesting as that book is, it does not have as good a story as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, which in places has the narrative drive of an exciting novel and is curiously made more interesting by being less exotic.  Bird observes her own culture but in an unfinished form, as if civilization has collapsed but is being rebuilt amidst the rattlesnakes, blizzards, and black flies.  “Here the life was rough, rougher than any I had ever seen” she writes early in the book (Letter IV).  She not only develops a taste for certain parts of that roughness – not for the filth and flies – but helped develop that taste in who knows how many readers.

Isabella Bird visits my neighborhood - the people of the neighborhood never experience the least annoyance

Isabella Bird's trip to Japan was a consequence, indirectly, of the outcome of a Japanese civil war. Although Bird was in Japan just ten years after the war of the Meiji Restoration, she almost never mentions, or presumably witnesses, any evidence of the war. The modernizers had won the war, Western scientists, traders, and tourists were allowed to troop around the country, and that was that.

I put an ellipsis in a quotation yesterday that excised one of the few times she did mention the war. Why was the town of Shinjo so horrible, full of boot-gnawing rats and the like? Because it had been a daimyo town, the home of a local warlord. The Meiji administration had crushed the daimyos, pulled down their castles, and dispersed their samurai. So the castle towns had fallen into decay.

In the last letter in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Bird has returned to Edo/ Tokyo, where she visits the suburb of Meguro, the very neighborhood where I lived for a month. The attraction, oddly, is a crematorium. It is hygienic and efficient, with high chimneys, so that "the people of the neighborhood never experience the least annoyance." The Governor of Tokyo insists on presenting Bird with a translated history of cremation in Japan.

Reading this letter, I can hardly avoid imagining the entire neighborhood of Meguro as a crematorium. It was incinerated, every scrap of it, by American firebombing. Perhaps there was a monument somewhere, although I never found it. I worked and ate and shopped in Meguro, just like everyone else who works and lives there, without this sort of thing ever crossing my mind. Why would it?

I'm making Unbeaten Tracks in Japan sound like a W. G. Sebald novel, which it is not. One of Sebald's gifts, though, was to transform material like Bird's book, to fit them into his own creative world. If you are actually writing a Japan-centered, Rings of Saturn-inspired novel, take a look at Bird and steal this idea from me. No one will ever know. I won't tell.

Lady Isabella Bird in Japan - rats gnawed my boots and ran away with my cucumbers

I barely left Tokyo while in Japan, but I had Lady Isabella Bird's Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) to show me some of the rest of the country. At least as it was in 1878, when Bird trooped around northern Japan, making her the first European woman to visit any number of spots. She was accompanied by a young interpreter, and otherwise hired horses and guides along the way, so she was never alone, but she was not relying on any other Europeans.

Isabella Bird's story is typically Victorian only in its comedy. Sufferering from various health problems, especially back pain, her doctor recommended horseback riding. She complied by riding horses all over Colorado, Hawaii, Japan, and a substantial part of the continent of Asia. She had some money of her own, but her trips were mostly financed by her popular travel books.

Bird's most famous book, by far, is A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), ironically about one of the least exotic places she ever went. I haven't read this one, yet, but I think it is not as much of a pure travelogue.* Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is limited by the format, letters to her sister Henrietta. It's a journal, basically. There's no real point to the Japan trip, except that she's doing it. There's some anthropology at the end, and some geologizing, but the journey is at least as interesting as the destination.

Isabella Bird is a great travel companion. She's intrepid, stubborn, and has a fine sense of humor. A very impressive woman. She's also a fine complainer, by which I mean that she complains a lot, but with justice, ususally, and with a dry tone that's pretty funny:

"Again I write that Shinjo is a wretched place... The mosquitoes were in the thousands, and I had to go to bed, so as to be out of their reach, before I had finished my wretched meal of sago and condensed milk. There was a hot rain all night, my wretched room was dirty and stifling, and rats gnawed my boots and ran away with my cucumbers." (Letter 19)

Maybe this doesn't sound so funny on its own. I don't know, although I think ending with the cucumbers is the giveaway. Having spent some time with her, I sure that she's well aware that her misery is not really serious, is funny in retrospect. And it certainly does not keep her from mounting the next horse and moving forward, on and on and on, for the rest of her life.

* It also includes her friendship or romance or whatever it was with an actual mountain man.