Under a Wild Sky (9 page)

With the dawn of the succeeding morning, mounting to the top of some tall tree that rises from a low thick shaded part of the woods, he pipes his few, but clear musical notes, in a kind of ecstasy; the prelude, or symphony to which, strongly resembles the double-tonguing of a German flute, and sometimes the tinkling of a small bell; the whole song consists of five or six parts, the last note of each of which is in such a tone as to leave the conclusion evidently suspended; the finale is finely managed, and with such charming effect as to soothe and tranquilize the mind, and to seem sweeter and mellower at each successive repetition.

This lyrical, overwrought style, characteristic of the times and also of Wilson's poetic sensibility, contrasted with his drawing of the wood thrush—a frozen profile in which Wilson showed the bird's beak open, as if it were caught singing. Like all of his images, this one bore the caption “Drawn from Nature.” But it was nature flattened, as though the bird had been pressed onto the paper like a flower preserved between the
pages of a book. Nature was less vivid in Wilson's drawings than it was in his prose, and in this Wilson was a reflection of the moment in which he lived. America was then the epicenter of several worlds in collision—a country of revolution and radicalism premised on the triumph of reason, a civil nation thinly established on the shore of an immense land where the raw power of nature flooded the senses. Jefferson's
Notes on the State of Virginia
had in effect been a second declaration of American independence, this time from the tyranny of European science. In answering Jefferson's call to arms, Wilson was awed by what he saw in nature and by the responsibility of rendering it properly. But he wasn't ready, or talented enough, to throw away tradition. This limitation added a sorrowful tinge to the graceful but immovable images in
American Ornithology
, which was so much like its creator—ambitious yet bound by convention. Wilson allowed his writing to soar, but not his birds.

Wilson's interest in ornithology arrived late in his short life, after years of struggle and restlessness.
In the summer of 1803 he wrote to a friend back in Scotland that he was determined to “make a collection of all our finest birds.” He was just shy of his thirty-seventh birthday. He would be dead in ten years.

In the summer of 1794, Philadelphia, which had so impressed Wilson and his nephew when they first saw it sprawled on the opposite shore of the Delaware River, was in reality a devastated city just coming back to life. Still the provisional seat of government—Philadelphia was the federal capital under the Articles of Confederation—the city had been decimated by yellow fever the previous summer and fall.
The fever was a terrifying, frequently fatal disease that produced rashes, lethargy, breathing difficulties, black vomit, and a ghastly yellowing of the skin. It turned up initially along the riverfront but spread quickly, sending panicked citizens fleeing to the countryside.
Many who left did so on the advice of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the city's most prominent physician. Rush, who was also a political leader and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was among the handful of doctors who first realized an epidemic was under way. He believed that the fever was caused by airborne poisons given off by putrefying garbage—especially the spoiled cargoes that were sometimes dumped on the wharves along the Delaware and left to rot.
Rush thought that a great load of ruined coffee, lying out under the August sun and fouling the air over the city immediately before the outbreak of fever, was particularly suspect.

As the city emptied, those who stayed behind saw the hellish effects of the fever. City officials commandeered deserted homes and stables to house the sick.
In reeking hospitals the dying and the dead were confined together and then abandoned by their physicians, left to be tended only by ill-trained nurses, some of whom stole their patients' food and took no notice of the filth accumulating around them.
The sky itself turned black, as buckets of tar were burned in the streets in hopes of sanitizing the air.

Rush no doubt saved many lives with his advice to get out of town—mainly because people who left were more likely to escape his own widely practiced treatment for the fever.
Rush adhered to an old-fashioned, two-stage remedy that began with a massive dose of purgatives, which doubtless exhausted and dehydrated an already desperately ill patient. This was followed with a heavy bleeding of the victim. Rush, who greatly overestimated the amount of blood in a typical human body, advised the removal of several
quarts
from fever sufferers. In both phases of the treatment, Rush emphasized that it was important not to err on the side of caution, but to take the most aggressive measures possible. This approach, which by itself could be enough to kill a healthy person, contributed to the deaths of many fever patients.

Yellow fever was actually transmitted by mosquitoes. It probably arrived in Philadelphia with infected refugees who'd fled the recent uprising in Saint-Domingue—and who also seemed somewhat resistant to the disease. All of this was the subject of keen speculation, but nobody at the time really understood how the fever spread or what to do about it.
A few doctors who were more familiar with tropical diseases prescribed fluids and cool baths, and their fortunate patients survived at higher rates.
But the disease ran rampant. Racing through the city in a matter of months, it left five thousand dead—about one out of every ten Philadelphians. The following spring the city still appeared deserted. Weeds grew in the streets. Many businesses were boarded up; some had been looted or burned out.

But by midsummer, as Wilson and his nephew hiked along the Delaware toward the city, things were returning to normal and a general cleanup had restored a sense of well-being. Wilson, shocked as he was at
the prices of almost everything and by the number of Caribbean refugees wandering the streets, still perceived the wealth and opportunity pulsing in the city.
When he couldn't find work as a weaver right away, he accepted a position at an engraving shop—where he got a taste of the printmaking business in which he would one day make a name. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Wilson felt happy. In letter after letter home, he wrote about the wonder of America, and how grand a city Philadelphia was.

Philadelphia was then America's most successful seaport, prospering on a brisk export trade in agricultural produce—principally flour—and on the import of manufactured goods.
Built on an orderly grid of tree-lined avenues fronted by sturdy, somewhat unimaginative brick buildings, the city was dominated by a burgeoning class of merchants and seamen. Market Street, which ran east–west from the Delaware waterfront, bisected the downtown area.
It was twice as wide as the other streets, and the roofed stalls of meat and produce sellers occupied the center of the boulevard. Newcomers gaped at the abundance on display in the marketplace and at its tidiness. The butchers, especially, were immaculate. They dressed in sparkling white smocks and sawed the bones as they cut meat—an appetizing improvement over the European practice of breaking the bones.
Every inn and hotel in the city served feastlike meals daily, though the rough table manners of the Americans offered a challenge to anyone too dainty to grab a portion.

By day the streets were clean and quiet, and it was generally agreed that no city in the world was better lit at night. Philadelphia looked rich, and it was—a city triumphant in the wake of a revolution launched from where it stood.
Wilson said that coming to America was like being a tree that had been transplanted. After a period of adjustment to his new environment, he could feel himself blooming anew amid the bounty of the New World. Any of his old friends who dreamed of coming here should do so at once, he thought.
No matter what a man's occupation was, there were “a thousand other offers” of employment to contemplate in America, and it was all but assured that you could “live ten times better” here than in Scotland. For Wilson, one recurring measure of the young country's greatness was how well Americans ate.
“When I look round me here on the abundance which every one enjoys,” Wilson wrote to a friend back in Paisley, “when I see them sit down to a table loaded with roasted,
boiled, fruits of different kinds, and plenty of good cyder, and this only the common fare of the common people, I think on my poor countrymen, and cannot refrain feeling sorrowful at the contrast.”

After a few months, Wilson and Duncan found work at a loom just outside the city and spent the winter weaving. The following spring Wilson headed for New Jersey, where he found eager buyers for the cloth he peddled. When he got back he decided to try something new—teaching school.
Having little education himself, Wilson managed as best he could by becoming both an instructor and a student at once, furiously going through his next day's lessons until late in the evening, learning just fast enough to stay ahead of his pupils. He practiced his grammar and read history. Finding he had a special affinity for mathematics, Wilson was soon reading Newton's calculus. He taught himself surveying and earned a little extra income from it. He even managed to make a few of his own instruments.

Wilson settled in at a school in Milestown, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles northeast of Philadelphia, where most of his pupils were Pennsylvania Dutch. They spoke German, as did the family with whom Wilson boarded, and so he learned German even as he drilled the students every day in English.
He found his neighbors pleasant and honest, and filled with aspirations for their children. But they were also strange—governed by superstition and odd religious dogma. They followed phases of the moon in timing activities such as the slaughter of livestock or cutting their hair. They treated physical ailments with charms and spells, and believed the countryside was haunted. But Wilson was gratified by their commitment to his school. He was well thought of in the community and could count on his salary in full as it came due.

America suited Wilson's taste for exploring the countryside, and also his deepening passion for wingshooting. Hunting in America, where wild places were never far away, was a thrilling elevation of the senses. The abundance of game and birds, especially waterfowl, was amazing. The latter passed along the East Coast for months every autumn in massive, noisy migrations. Ducks and geese of every kind funneled down the Delaware watershed en route to the marshes of the Chesapeake Bay and eventually on to their tropical overwintering destinations far beyond. From the end of summer through Christmas, the markets were hung with a seemingly limitless bounty: swans, geese, pigeons, woodcock, grouse, quail, and a kaleidoscopic assortment of ducks.
Mallards, redheads,
teal, and widgeon could be had for pennies, although a brace of prized canvasbacks sometimes commanded several dollars. For someone like Wilson, happy to do his own shooting, the arrival of September commenced an annual rite as these birds of passage poured through, each species arriving and departing on its own schedule.

It began with blue-winged teal, which Wilson learned was the first of the duck “tribe” to head south out of its breeding grounds. By early September, teal congregated in such numbers along the mudflats of the Delaware River that a hunter could often kill a large number of them with a single discharge of his shotgun.
Although the birds were wary and fast-flying, a hunter could sneak up on them merely by hunkering down and pushing a small boat ahead of him though the shallows, taking care to remain concealed until the last minute. Teal were delicious, and they grew fat in their days along the Delaware until they fled south with the first frost.

Canada geese—which were shot in the spring as well as the fall—were more difficult to hunt, as their sharp eyesight and skittishness made them impossible to pursue in the open.
Hunters had to conceal themselves near places regularly overflown by flocks of geese, and it was possible to decoy the birds within range by various means, some as crude as shooting a goose or two and impaling them on stakes that were then set out near the gunner. Many hunters tamed geese they had wounded and used them as live decoys, tethered and eager to call to other geese flying overhead.

But it was canvasback hunting that seemed to inspire the most imaginative and relentless techniques. Their ranks now immensely reduced, these large, tasty waterfowl, which got their name from the white plumage that wraps their midsections, once migrated across America in great numbers.
The duck waters around Philadelphia produced crops of an aquatic plant known as “wild celery,” which grew so thick in places that it was impossible to row a boat through a stand of its submerged stalks. Canvasbacks love the root of this plant, and when it comprises the bulk of their diet, the taste of canvasback flesh is unequaled. It was not uncommon for rafts of canvasbacks to form in open water near stands of wild celery, and to remain there in safety through the daytime before coming closer in at night to feed.

Temporary measures were sometimes adopted to regulate duck hunting, usually in times when waterfowl numbers appeared low.
As early as
1727, the colony of Massachusetts had briefly outlawed nighttime hunting. But, for the most part, anything went.
On moonlit nights, when the canvasbacks were thick on the Delaware, it was common practice to guide a boat silently under the shadow of the shoreline and then drift into a flock of feeding ducks—whereupon the stillness was broken by a blue flash and a booming report that echoed over the water as the hunter raked the ducks where they sat, killing many at a time. Another method, used late in the season, involved painting a boat white and setting chunks of ice or snow along the gunwales.
The hunter—also dressed in white—approached a flock from upstream and reclined hidden in the boat, allowing it to float in among the ducks as it if were a chunk of drifting ice before he rose up and fired.
The method that most intrigued Wilson was “tolling,” in which a well-hidden hunter ordered his highly trained dog to scamper along the shoreline, usually with a brightly colored handkerchief tied about its midsection. The canvasbacks mistook the dog's actions for the movement of other ducks paddling close to shore and, curious, would swim in to investigate.