The Grapes Of John Burroughs

For various reasons he preferred to he alone when working up his material so he went off by himself to write in his retreats and cabin. He seemed not to have been averse to joshing callers, either, as his son tells of a piece of hemlock which he kept over his fireplace which was so grooved by the twining branch of a bitter-sweet which had encircled it when it was small that it had the appearance of having been actually twisted. He loved to tell gullible callers that he had twisted the stick by hand and then fastened it and dried it. Many were the chuckles that he enjoyed.

John Burroughs never was a wide traveller. He was a member of the Harriman Expedition to Alaska in 1899 going as far as Siberia, and was the companion of President Roosevelt on a trip to Yellowstone Park in 1903. He also had gone to California several times, but he did not seem to enjoy adventuring in new places as much as staying at home on his farm and spending his days quietly in his cabin in the woods. Critics may find fault with some of Mr. Burroughs essays from a purely scientific standpoint. He is not to be rated with men of science, but he stands high as a literary naturalist. Walk with him if you want to hunt wake-robins or look for spring warblers. His vegetables are always fresh and his fruit ripened in the sun.

In addition to Slab-sides is John Burroughs’ vineyard, and his son Julian Burroughs lived nearby. He shipped his grapes to the New York market, but along with the grapes he was producing essays just as honest in weight and wholesome in flavour. All of these thoughts ran through my mind as we sat there before the crackling fire talking quietly and growing drowsy in the cosy warmth. That night I slept in a rustic bed under the covers that Mr. Burroughs' mother made some eighty years ago. He was very proud of them, as he well might be.

After breakfast the next morning he had a letter to write, so I picked up his volume on Whitman and sat by the fire reading the part of his preliminary chapter where, he told of buying this place. "I call this place Whitman Land, because in many ways it is typical of my poet—-an amphitheatre of precipitous rock, slightly veiled with a delicate growth of verdure, enclosing a few acres of prairie-like land, once the site of an ancient lake, now a garden of unknown depth and fertility." His friend, Walt Whitman, had walked here through the woods with, him and up Black Creek before Slabsides was built.