The Inland Island: A Year in Nature

"A beautiful book… about nature the way Walden was a book about nature." —The New York Times

The Inland Island

A Year in Nature

Josephine W. Johnson

Author of Now in November, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Introduction by Camille T. Dungy

Full of marvels. —The New York Times Book Review

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THE PATH HER PEN DESCRIBES

I would have liked to take a walk alongside Josephine Johnson. To tromp, as she often did, across the thirty-seven Ohio acres she called home during the final decades of a life that spanned the twentieth century. To walk the land she let transform from mown pasture back to woods, and which she describes in The Inland Island with precise and clear-eyed care. I’m a walker, too, and I can feel in Johnson’s lines the breath and tread of a person who measures time by the pace of her stride and the color of leaves on the limbs of trees. I would have liked to walk with Johnson, observing a huddle of ladybugs or the twisted trunk of an Osage orange, but she died in February 1990, at the age of seventy-nine, and I never had the chance. Reading The Inland Island, though, I feel as if she’s right beside me, walking, walking, witnessing the world.

If I’d had a chance to take that walk with Johnson, I have a feeling she would not have talked much. She’d have been too busy watching and recording everything she saw. But I imagine she might have turned to me with the occasional question. Do you want to go over and see what’s growing near the clear stream, or the polluted one? perhaps, or What will you do today to protest the war? or Did you hear that robin singing from the wild cherry tree? If The Inland Island is any indication, she wouldn’t wait for an answer. Johnson writes in the present tense, as if she understands that what is required of us, always, is to be present, fully, in the place and time we are. As if she understood what had always been important and would remain ever so. She writes of the ugly and gorgeous in equal turns. This is a work of radical witness. Reading The Inland Island feels like being with Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, if the Angel of History were a midwestern amateur naturalist. Johnson does not judge, nor does she demand particular action from anyone or anything. She walks and she watches and she patiently describes.

The Inland Island was published in 1969, thirty-five years after Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel, Now in November. In 1935, at just twenty-five years old, Johnson became the youngest person ever to win the prize for fiction, and she remains the youngest person with that honor to this day. But The Inland Island is the work of a woman in her late middle age. This memoir, recording twelve months of her life on the land, is filled with the loving attention of someone who has learned how to live on through grave disappointment. The Vietnam War was much on her mind as she walked through the woods she’d let go back to the wild. Her son was facing jail time for activities related to antiwar protest, and she wonders about withholding her own tax dollars so as not to be party to violence she didn’t condone. She thinks about Black people’s struggles for equal rights. She wonders about what readers might think of her book, having faced dispiriting reception for some of the political stances she’d included in books she wrote after Now in November. She worries about the fox who roams nearby, a fox she knows local hunters want to kill. She considers what it must be like to be a caterpillar and, also, what it must be like to be a mink. She thinks about what it means to be American and white. There are all manner of snow, both cruel and kind. There is the snow that falls like needles and drifts in hard ridges on the dead cornfields, is bitterly cold, coming down from the northwest and driving into the earth like knives, she observes, and I find myself nodding in chilled recognition. She writes about flowers and boorish neighbors with equal grace and precision and something that, even when what she witnesses hurts, I can best identify as love.

I would have liked to walk with Josephine Johnson across her thirty-seven acres. Thanks to this rerelease of The Inland Island, it seems as if I can.

Camille T. Dungy

Fort Collins, Colorado

December 2021

The new year lies before us. One stands on a high firm place. All’s clean and clear. The air is fresh, not freezing. Hoarfrost is on the valley trees, grey ice on the pond and glitter on the grass clumps. The delicate dead grasses are frosted, the plowed earth cold and bitter-chocolate brown.

This beautiful slice of land is all that’s left. It’s my lifeblood. The old house is abandoned down in the valley where the mammoth bones were found in the quarry. We are on this side the ridge from that valley now. The children are gone. The horses gone. The old house gone. What’s left? A world of trees, wild birds, wild weeds—a world of singular briary beauty that will last my life. The land—my alderliefest—the most beloved, that which has held the longest possession of the heart.

I was born of Franklins on my mother’s side, and the Franklin was a landowner, a freeman, in the Anglo-Saxon days. I have had a love for the land all my life, and today when all life is a life against nature, against man’s whole being, there is a sense of urgency, a need to record and cherish, and to share this love before it is too late. Time passes—mine and the land’s.

This place, just short of the timber forty, has steep hills, two creeks, thousands of trees, and a network of small ravines or draws. There is one-half acre of flatland, and the house sits on it. The windows, wide as the walls, look out and down into a narrow valley made by a widening creek with steep clay banks. This creek bed grows in every storm, sometimes east, sometimes west. When it moves east it eats under the hill on which the house stands. In the storm nights one can hear the great rocks grinding in the rush of the water—rocks born in the beginning of the world, once the bottom of vast oceans—now upended, rolled and shoaled downstream, by a small midwestern storm.

The place begins at the top of the hill, a narrow entrance between old lilac bushes. There isn’t any gate, only a space between the old barn and the lilac bush for cars to squeeze through, and every day one hears the crush and rattle of lilac twigs against glass. Which may annoy, and then may not—for no man or woman or child, coming down that drive for the first time, has failed to say, My, but it’s quiet back up here, I wish I had a place like this. I wish that they had, too. I wish there were great trees left and great trees planted. Who plants an acorn now for his son’s oak? There’s no room for oak trees in this world. And soon there’ll be no room for sons.

The elm by the gateway is not like the beautiful wine-glass elms of New England, but it healed itself of a weeping ulcer, and it throws up a sturdy fountain of branches against the sky. Under it is the well, a well of deep cold water, whose pump was cured by the plumber of coughing up red clay. And the pump, the little rascal, as he gravely spoke of it in its gasping, seems his property, so closely has he come to be its master, its translator, friend and father. He knows its valves and snifters intimately, and only once did it catch him by surprise. The blacksnake in the rotor box. You learn something new all the time, he said. Everything has a first.

On the narrow ridge where the land begins is the old barn, the small willow-bordered pond, and beyond, a crumbling cottage where the original owners lived when this was once a farm. But uncultivated as it is now, steep and rank with dock and wormwood, I love it with a human-animal’s love, and not a farmer’s love. This place, with all its layers of life, from the eggs of snails to the eyes of buzzards, is my home, as surely as it is the wild bird’s or the woodchuck’s home. I’ll defend it if I have to patrol it in the end with a bow and arrow—an old lady, like a big woodchuck in a brown coat, booting up and down these knife-cut hills, shouting at the dogs and hunters, making a path through the blackthorns and briars, a path through that encroaching ecology we were told would come inevitably as the tides, and faster.

This prophecy was from the state forester who tramped our thirty-seven acres, pointing out the wolf trees that spread up wild and branched, whose roots devour the wolf’s nourishment and return only a few feet of trunk to man. No good for lumber, but home of raccoons and woodpeckers, riddled with worms and insects, source of life for the big eating-circle. What can we do to make a nature preserve? we asked him cautiously, the title belonging to vaster things such as the Serengeti Plain.

Sit back, he said, and watch the ecology develop.

That was all, and the tide of that odd word has come. With the sheep and horses gone, nothing tramps or grazes, and the blackberry vines’ great red and purple hoops, their thorned whips, grow higher than a man’s head. Nothing stops the elderberry shoots and the waves of goldenrod. The young trees follow the briars, and a forest begins in the pastureland.

The new year lies before us. Janus, the porter of heaven, opens the year. In Rome he was god and guardian of gates. His two faces were the gates that swing both ways. In times of war the gates of his great temple were always open. In peace they were closed. Only once between the reign of Numa and the reign of Augusta were these gates closed. In this year of our lives the gates are open. They have been open for a long, long time. The armies flow in and out. The war goes on.

In the mind’s peculiar calendar, January is a high ridge, and the months go down, and now begins the slide toward spring. Winter is a time of clarity and simplicity. A time to begin, when there is less importuning, less distraction of the senses. The branches are bare and the far ridge visible. Through the bare branches the astonishing pileated woodpeckers flash and flatten against the scaly bark of the wild-cherry trees. From the back they look like huge cockroaches with red-crests. Black crows go laboring by, shouting, Hawk, Hawk! And under the angry convoy of their wings, a great grey hawk flies silently and lands on the white bones of a sycamore. He is blown up from cold to an owl’s size, but the hawk head sits small and firm, the eyes ice-gold. There is gold on his wings and breast and he sits as though wrapped in the great feathered cloak of an Aztec king. White on his wings, white on his head, white in the great gripping talons. The cruel curved beak is empty. Cruel and curved? Have you seen the beak of a brown creeper? There’s a scythe—a scimitar! Think how it looks to the small bark beetles. Hammered steel to them. A vicious thing and huge—the fishhook beak of this tiny bird like a speckled egg. His call is so thin and high it can’t be heard at all except by the most acute of human ears. Around the winter trees he goes in a spiral. Invisible eggs and beetles delicately devoured as by a needle. His round and spotted belly is like the smooth pelt of the leopard seal, his outsize beak the narwhale’s sword—that strange unicorn whale whose ivory tusk, superior to that of elephants, once made the thrones of Danish kings.

Our land is a paradise for woodpeckers. It is full of rotting