Mount Auburn: The Other World by James H. Barton
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Up Fountain Avenue to the right we pass through Auburn Court to Auburn Lake, a suntrap divided by a bridge and known as Spectacle Pond for its appearance on a map. Palm fronds from Palm Sunday remain wedged in crevices in the polished, frozen pink surface of very cold stone. Easter flowers still are fresh. For a young girl, there are flowers from her parents throughout the year. I know her name well. I would like to leave her flowers, too, and also for her mother and father.
Eastern Phoebes nest under the bridge below us. Their percussive calls can be heard like rimshots--here, then there, then there. Just ahead, to our right and left, steep banks catch morning light coming in over the tops of the trees to our backs. The suntrap is rich with song. In a ping-pong panic, Ruby-crowned Kinglets bounce about.
Here the architectural exuberance of the trees surpasses the formal extravagance of the monuments. We go to our right, to a Dawn Redwood.
Until 1941, the Dawn Redwood was known only
from 5 million years old fossils.
That year it was discovered as a living species by
a Chinese forester, T. Kan, who came upon a mysterious conifer
in a remote valley in Szechwan Province.
The Dawn Redwoods here were planted
from seeds germinated at the Arnold Arboretum in 1948.
Next to the Dawn Redwood, a Plume Sawara. Then another Dawn Redwood with a Canada Goose nesting at its base. Behind us, Isabella Stewart Gardner...exuberant, too...she of the Gardner Museum whom John Singer Sargeant painted not as Botticelli, a nude Venus hiding, but clothed in black, open and arising. My father remembers his mother taking tea with her.
The azaleas have just begun to bloom at Spectacle. Looking
across the water to the east, you can seem them reflected on the
surface of the water. For several days you can collect your own
Monets here, in colors and in depths the painter could only have
dreamed of achieving in oil.
Palm Warblers frequent the western bank of the Spectacle Pond suntrap on our right and ahead of us beyond the bridge, as do White-throated Sparrows sometimes singing descants in chorus earlier in the year. From above, beyond the bridge to the south, the sound of twigs snapping along the shore of the pond. No one is here yet. A Yellow-crowned Night Heron is gathering nesting material 20 feet up in a Bald Cypress.
We leave Auburn Lake for Ivy Path, leading in to Consecration Dell at the base of the Tower. Set into the east side of the slope to your left is a crypt modeled on the entrance to an Egyptian tomb, the lintel bearing the name, Lowell. An original proprietor of Mount Auburn, Francis Cabot Lowell (1803-1874), was son of Francis Cabot Lowell (1775-1817), whose partners honored him in 1819 by naming a new city for him on the Merrimack River north of here, and for very good reason.
The British had kept plans for their textile mills secret. Foreigners could come to look and admire, but could neither bring paper and pencil with them nor leave the United Kingdom with any notes or drawings made later from memory. Lowell went to look. On his return, he drew plans from memory to start the Massachusetts textile industry.
Beyond the Lowell crypt, people are standing all along a narrow dirt path across a steep slope at the south side of the dell, hoping to see the Worm-eating Warbler singing high up above them. To our right, on the west side of the dell, other people on narrow dirt paths search for thrushes under yews. We're too many to get by them. We go right and back out to Walnut Avenue, then up a rise to our left and around past Mound Avenue.
The Mayflower Viburnum is in bloom along Walnut Avenue on the hillside to our left, above the entrance to Violet Path on the slope leading up to the Tower. "There's a Least Bittern in a dogwood by the west side of the Tower." "Thank you, I'll go look." A Least Bittern is looking out from among the leaves and the blossoms.
Pyrola Path leads west on our right. 9:00 a.m. May 1, 1989. People are describing a very brightly colored small bird. Now I see it. I've seen a picture of it before. I know what I'm looking for and where to look for it in the field guide, but I don't remember its name. I'm turning pages. A few seconds. We find it and agree on it, Tropical Parula. Four observers, three written descriptions, three drawings.
On our left further on, Sarah Margaret Fuller, Marchioness Ossoli; scholar, philosopher, friend and colleague of Ralph Waldo Emerson; teacher and advocate, believer that women should "build up the life of thought upon the life of action;" shipwrecked in 1850 at age 40 returning from Italy where her husband had fought and she had run a hospital for the cause of Italian freedom.
On our right, masks of tragedy and comedy, and a citation from Shakespeare facing us. Facing away from us on the same, monument, Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth. The flowers placed on his grave at Christmas have faded, but the ribbon around them is still bright blue, and the ribbon around the flowers at his wife's grave, bright white. A small plush teddy bear wearing a bright red vest and a bright white stocking cap trimmed in red is sitting beside a small gravestone to her left. A small plush dog crouches next to him, both having emerged from the snow.