New Bedford's Pacific connection, Willa Cather and Midwestern landscapes, and plant of the week
Also: Vijay Iyer on listening and composing with the spine
Southeastern Massachusetts’ connection to the North Pacific
This newsletter is about local ecology and getting to know nearby landscapes, but I find it’s useful to have a flexible idea of what local means. The history of New Bedford, a short drive south of us on Route 24, is a reminder of the bonds between apparently disparate places.
In the book Floating Coast, environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth charts how U.S. capitalism and Soviet communism both tried and failed to overcome the ecology of Beringia—the lands and seas of the North Pacific. She begins with the history of whaling, which Yupik, Iñupiat, and Chukchi peoples have practiced sustainably for millennia. Indigenous hunters pursued bowhead whales near the coast in small vessels called umiaks made of walrus skins. Bowhead whales are adapted to life among Arctic ice packs. They only gave themselves up near the shore, the hunters believed, if their people had sufficient “moral worth and ceremonial care”—otherwise, the whales “would keep to their own country.” The community made sure to consume or use nearly all parts of the harvested whale except for the skull, offered back to the water “where its soul could journey home and transform, again, into a whale.”
In the 19th century, commercial whalers centered in New Bedford, Massachusetts, tried to establish a different relationship with bowhead whales. In the process, they paved the way for colonial claims to the North Pacific. The New England whaling fleet, launching from New Bedford, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and a few other ports, harvested Beringia’s whales as raw material for industry. Before plastics, tough and springy baleen became umbrellas, hats and fishing rods. Before fossil fuels, whale oil “lit homes and factory floors, streetlamps and the headlights of trains. … Energy gathered from distant oceans became an intimate part of domestic and civic life for people who had never seen, touched, or tasted a whale,” writes Demuth.
In the late 1840s, many whaling captains turned away from the South Pacific’s fearsome sperm whales and headed for the North Pacific’s slow-moving bowheads. For a couple seasons, things went as planned, with dozens of ships killing thousands of whales. But as early as 1851, bowhead whales became harder to catch. They began hiding under the ice and swimming away from ships. This wasn’t an evolutionary response exactly—whales are long-lived and genetic change takes generations. Instead, it was a cultural response: behaviors that can be learned and passed down. The whalers, knowing their prey as intelligent, social creatures, soon accepted that the whales had outmaneuvered them and returned to other waters. The bowhead whales’ actions changed the course of history.
While New Bedford’s bowhead whale hunt didn’t last, the signs of hoarded wealth remain in New England to this day. As Forbes notes, the “corporate descendants” of New Bedford whaling fortunes “include American titans like Standard Oil, General Motors, R.H. Macy and Berkshire Hathaway.” Many of the fine houses built by captains and financiers in whaling and shipbuilding towns still stand. Maritime money has become other kinds of money. Quaint seaside whaling towns enabled modern real estate fortunes and tourism revenue.
It’s worth reflecting on what it means that the resources to build New England’s coastal towns, now renowned for their charm, came in part from killing thousands of whales in the South Pacific and Beringia. What might that mean for New England’s modern-day relationships to these places and their communities?
This week, Demuth moderated a fascinating roundtable discussion with historians Boyd Cothran, Joshua L. Reid, Helen M. Rozwadowski, and Coll Thrush on how to approach stories of place and time when writing about the ocean, which on first appearance seems to transcend our land-borne concepts of place and time. The panel had a particular focus on how Indigenous histories of long-enduring relationships with the ocean and its other-than-human inhabitants can shift the focus from short-term cycles of exploitation and collapse that often foreground Western stories about the sea. The recording will be posted here in the next week or so.
Willa Cather and Midwestern landscapes
For Literary Landscapes, The New Territory’s essay series on the places that shaped the lives and writings of Midwestern authors, I wrote about Willa Cather and the view of grasslands from Midwestern cities:
“The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.” One of Willa Cather’s most famous lines, from the 1918 novel My Ántonia, mainly refers to the color of little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), one of the key grasses of the mixed grass prairie where she grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The species has a bluish color in spring but matures to a copper-red in autumn that reflects the fire of a Great Plains sunset.
The first place I connected Cather’s words to little bluestem wasn’t in farm country but instead at Glacier Creek Preserve on the outskirts of Omaha. … In the Midwest, we’ve lost nearly all of our native grasslands to agriculture, meaning that if you grew up in a city like Omaha or St. Louis—my hometown—your first look at a grassland was probably a restored site down the road like Glacier Creek.
Cather left behind a complex, thorny legacy that continues to give scholars plenty to write about. The thread I focus on here is how her work provided a way for Midwestern readers to see nearby landscapes as vital and unique, in contrast to the long-lived caricature of the Great Plains as one flat field of grass, corn, and soy. I see the ability to recognize the uniqueness of Midwestern places as key to building a greater consensus for conserving at-risk ecosystems like grasslands and savannahs.
Read the rest of The New Territory’s special volume on places in Cather’s life here!
Vijay Iyer on listening to the spine
Composer and pianist Vijay Iyer had some memorable things to say about making art and collaborating with others in a meaty interview with The Believer. Here’s how he describes communicating as a musician:
… when I listen to you, I’m not listening to your extremities. Those are meaningless to me in the sense of body-to-body communication. What I need to feel is your spine, your torso. I need to feel the centrality of that, that pulse that’s governing your actions because it’s also going to instantiate itself in me. It needs to come from your spine to my spine, not from your hands to my ears. That’s not the pathway. Those are conduits, you know, the hands and ears. So it isn’t just me playing, trying to get it correct. It’s about me as a responsible fellow being trying to give something to somebody.
I think Iyer’s terminology translates to creative writing pretty well. For a writer, being led by the spine could mean following the harmony between one image and the next rather than the 2D blueprint you have for a composition. I often struggle with topic choice in writing. I’m sometimes drawn to ideas that seem clever in the mind but don’t hold up on paper, where rhythm and fundamental harmonies turn out to matter. Iyer suggests that if you listen to where your spine leads you rather than what your hands consider feasible, you’re more likely to create something you like.
Henry Threadgill said it best: when you’re drawn to something, whatever that is, that’s sacred and you have to honor that. You have to go toward it. You have to take that call seriously. Go close to it and try to find out what it is. What is it? Try to incorporate it into your being and harmonize with it.
Hey, let’s all try to incorporate some things into our beings this weekend.
Plant of the week: Early Whitlow Grass
Before the big show of crabapple trees blooming, there are a few smaller performances to watch for first. I noticed tiny whitish flowers opening a centimeter above some over-trampled soil in a popular park. Early Whitlow grass (Draba verna), also known as spring draba, specializes in full sun and poor-quality soils. The flowers open when it’s bright out and close when March rainclouds return. This species is introduced from Eurasia, but native Carolina Whitlow grass (Draba reptans) appears in grasslands and savannahs scattered throughout the continent.
Berkeley’s Jepsen Herbarium observes that Draba verna is “A highly variable, complex sp. occasionally split into many poorly defined taxa.” There are a mind-boggling number of species in the world, and many of those species have locally-adapted populations with their own evolutionary trajectories. Scientists haven’t been able to study many of these “highly variable” species in detail, especially little ones that might escape notice in botanical surveys. There are millions of stories of adaptation still waiting to be read in the genetics and life histories of plants.
Questions or comments? Send it to the mailbag: possum.notes.substack@gmail.com
Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.