Sing Me Frumsceaft: The Artistry of Hope

Contemporary writing about the natural world is elegiac, a meditation on loss that troubles all thought since Eden. As a young man in Louisiana I hunted, fished, and worked summer jobs in marshes that no longer exist—wetlands not destroyed by storm but by levees, by navigation and pipeline canals, by saltwater intrusion into freshwater marsh. New Orleans and all of coastal Louisiana are more vulnerable to storm damage because the marsh that once was substantial enough to absorb the surges of Katrina and her kin no longer exists, and one of the world's great wetlands continues to disappear at an alarming rate. The loss, which in the next few years may become irreversible, affects everything and most poignantly dooms the traditional culture of rural south Louisiana, a culture that for generations has used and been sustained by the biological bounty of river swamps and brackish and freshwater marshes. A recent book entitled Bayou Farewell (2004) by Mike Tidwell chronicles the loss and issues an urgent call to action. For the most part it is a reasonable and sobering book, and, like all good writing in this vein, it mainly avoids the shrill Chicken Little gloom of a good bit of environmental prose. It is, nevertheless, elegiac, for it speaks of change and decline, of beauty that is no more. In the Heaven of Mars, Cacciaguida reminds Dante that

All things that you possess, possess their death, just as you do; but in some things that last long, death can hide from you whose lives are short.

In one sense, of course, we must always lose the world.

Tilbury House Publishers and the Environmental Studies Program at Bowdoin College deserve our thanks for publishing a beautiful book of essays by Franklin Burroughs and photographs by Heather Perry about and of Merrymeeting Bay in Maine. Perry's photographs are stunning—from underwater pictures of alewives, eels, and Atlantic sturgeon, to remarkable pictures of eagles in flight and at rest, to aerial photographs of the rivers flowing into Merrymeeting Bay and its surrounding landscapes in all seasons and tides. Perry's camera has also captured some of the sturdy and weathered faces of old bay men, the enduring heroes of the bay's recent history: Linwood Rideout, Ronnie Burrell, Buster Prout, and others. The pictures by themselves are worth owning and studying, but Franklin Burroughs's twenty short essays provide context and continuity for the photographs, and words and pictures together make a durable work of art worthy of the complex beauty of the place and the people bound to it through long habit and deep affection. In a famous preface Joseph Conrad wrote that "a work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect." Conrad would have loved Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay (2006).

Merrymeeting Bay, Burroughs tells us, is a rare place, there being only four places in the world where "two sizeable rivers, with entirely separate watersheds, converge at their mouths." The others are famous: the confluence of the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin east of San Francisco Bay, the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers in Bangladesh, and the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq. Merrymeeting Bay's two rivers are the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, and of the four it is the one "largely overlooked—important to only a small percentage . . . of even the people who live with it in their backyards." Burroughs and Perry have made a book about this overlooked place because they love the bay and its people and because they also recognize what Burroughs describes as "the longing to be claimed by a place—a neighborhood or a city, the vanished household of our childhood or scenes enriched by antiquities and historical associations. . . . Speaking for myself, this longing is generated by some places and not by others, and it involves some intimation that the place around me is something like...