Looking for Mr. Gilbert

“The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly, the photographer takes infinite care with, and so makes its illusion perfect.”

Given the fact that the trees are bare and the river is low, it was probably November.

A clear day, brisk, with harsh light, but warm enough to allow one of the women that day to strip off her jacket and sit in the sun in her shirtwaist. She is wearing a white blouse of taffeta silk with full flouncy upper arms and a black silk neck scarf, a long black crepon skirt, and a wide white beret that she has cocked down over her left eye. One hand is resting on the gunnel of the Old Town canoe, the other touching the bow with her fingertips, as if to balance herself. The other three women stand and sit in various positions ranged between the other two boats. One, dressed all in dark, holds a rough walking stick, and one is seated on the gunnel and has a rising bird feather in her cap. The third is dressed in a double-breasted cheviot jacket, a white shirtwaist, and a black neck scarf, and has one hand resting jauntily on her hip. The face is familiar; I have seen her before in other plates, sometimes in the forest, sometimes out on lakes, once on the porch of an unnamed house in an unnamed location. Although hard to distinguish at a distance of a hundred years or so, I believe this is the woman referred to in the Brewster diaries as ERS.

There are two men there that day as well: a younger one in shirtsleeves and a tie and a natty jockey’s cap, seated on a picnic hamper on the bank beside the canoe, and then someone who looks a little like an older Mr. Brewster, leaning forward, his hand on the gunnel.

Gilbert is there too, the invisible man, as usual. He stands somewhere off stage, behind the lens and the tripod, and it appears that he has climbed up on a rock or small promontory to shoot this picture. The angle is downward, the river beyond, ruffled by a light wind, a woodland beyond the river, and on the dry banks in front of the group, you can see the spaniel, Larry, a constant companion on the Brewster outings. He is curled up, asleep on the dank shores—which serves to tell us something about this particular moment. This happy throng has just come back from the woods along the western bank of the Concord River, downstream from Ball’s Hill, about a mile above the Carlisle bridge, I would say, judging from the lay of the land beyond the riverbanks. They had pulled the boats on the shore and then proceeded into the forest on the west bank, perhaps searching for a good picnic site. We know this because the shadows are still shortened, the light is morning light, the century is young, the walking stick is still in hand, and the dog is curled up on the bank, asleep in the sun. If they had just landed, in the manner of dogs he would have bounded off along the shore.

I know this place. I’ve poked up this section of the stream in my own boat, an antique craft from the same period in fact, a 1910 Old Town rowing canoe and a type—judging from other photos—favored by Mr. Brewster and company.

One early autumn day I rowed up the river in this section and when I was a few hundred yards upstream from Ball’s Hill, I turned the boat and let the river carry me downstream, lounging in the stern, eyeing the passing hills and low swamps through my camera lens—the banks of black willow and buttonbush, the small streams that feed into the river, and, higher up, away from the shores, a few of the newly constructed mansions of the arrivistes of Concord, Massachusetts. These are huge neo-Georgian megastructures, of three, sometimes four storeys, containing room after room, and all of them, I would judge—given the fact that these people must work to maintain their manor houses—empty for most of the day.

From the bend in the Concord River at Ball’s Hill, not far from the site where Gilbert took the photograph on the morning of April 6th, 1911, the land rises gently in a series of fields and patches of woodlands and flows into a large, somewhat ill-defined tract of land known ever since the early eighteenth century as Estabrook Woods. This section of the town of Concord contains some important historical sites, including, among other places, Punkatasset Hill, where the American colonials gathered on the morning of April 18th in 1775. just before they descended to the nearby bridge over the river to fire the first shots of the American war of rebellion.

The woodland was named for one of the early settlers in this section of the town, a certain Thomas Estabrook who built a homestead in the forest there in the late 1600s, after the so-called second division of Concord, when the children of the earliest settlers began occupying land holdings outside of the town center. The stone walls, the foundation, and some of the remains of the home lot of Thomas Estabrook can still be found along the so-called Carlisle road, an abandoned track that is now used by hikers, dog walkers, and crosscountry skiers. Some of the original trees are still growing there too, and an old limestone quarry and the remains of a kiln can be found near the road. The few people who settled there in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mr. Bensen included, I suppose, tended toward eccentricity. One old outlander, having heard that China lay directly below Concord on the other side of the globe, decided to dig a tunnel through the earth to get there. In Henry Thoreau’s time, an old gentleman named Brooks Clark lived here. He rarely wore shoes and used to collect wild apples and dead birds in the forest for his dinner. Even into the late twentieth century bands of citizens of the community who were down on their luck maintained hobo camps in the northern end of the woods, near the town of Carlisle.

A little farther upstream on the east bank of the Concord River there is a federal wildlife sanctuary known since Thoreau’s time as the Great Meadows. This wide floodplain of freshwater marsh, streams, and ponds was Brewster and Gilbert’s hunting grounds. On spring and autumn days, they would often cross the river from Ball’s Hill and go boating along the banks counting birds and eyeing the skies for incoming flights of ducks, geese, and swans. In their time, this was also a favored hunting spot; gunners from the region would descend in autumn, including William Brewster, who, perhaps ironically, was a great waterfowl hunter himself. One of Gilbert’s best portraits of him shows Brewster in front of one of his lodges, his rudder-straight nose below his old slouch hat, shotgun crooked in his right arm, and a brace of unidentifiable ducks dangling from his left hand.

Brewster and company did not limit themselves to shooting birds for the pot. At the time, the common practice in establishing a bird’s presence in a given location was to shoot them. John James Audubon himself killed virtually everything he painted so lovingly. Brewster, to his credit, was the one who altered this somewhat violent bird-watching technique. One of the things he is known for in the birding community is his use of field observation techniques as a means of establishing a record. He had a “glass” that he used to spot birds, and he was a great chronicler of bird behaviors, an early ethologist of sorts. For these collection trips, Gilbert, who was also handy with a gun, may have been his shooter, certainly his spotter, and I believe that it was out of this custom of going out together in the forests and fields of the northeast that the two of them came to field photography. They simply substituted the camera for the gun and began collecting landscapes as well as birds. (Interestingly enough, the mounted specimens of Gilbert and Brewster’s birds, most of which are still in the collection of the Harvard museum, have sadly deteriorated. The photographic plates remain as sharp as the day they were made.)

On their expeditions along the Great Meadows, Brewster and Gilbert tended to go upriver, thence southwestward, under the North Bridge, and on to the spot known as Fairhaven Bay, where the river widens into a lakelike expanse that was thick with waterbirds. From here they would sail or row onward to the wide marshes below the section of the river known as Nine Acre Corner, also a great bird site and now protected under the federal wildlife refuge system.

This whole reach of the Concord, Sudbury, and Assabet Rivers ranks as one of the most significant natural history sites in the United States, not so much for its scenic qualities, or for the concentrations of wildlife, but mainly because it must be one of the most intensely studied parts of the American continent. Ever since the founding of Harvard College and the creation of a department of science, field researchers would come out to the river and the woodlands to the west of Cambridge to study wildlife. Extensive woodland tracts such as the Estabrook were rare, even as early as the time of the Revolution. Most of the forestlands had been cleared by the 1770s in eastern New England, and the biologists must have welcomed the opportunity to study the trees of the forest and such denizens of the woodlots as remained in the region.

Of all the naturalists who have spent time on the riverbanks and woodlands of the Estabrook, no doubt the best known, and probably the most thorough documenter of the natural history of the area, was Henry Thoreau. His father maintained a sawmill in the Estabrook tract in the 1820s where he used to mill cedars for his pencil factory, and Henry himself haunted this untrammeled section of the town, looking for adventure and new plants and animals. William Brewster settled at October Farm in 1883 and began scouring the region for birdlife, which he recorded religiously in his journals. He and Gilbert would make daily forays into the fields and woods when they weren’t rowing and sailing the river looking for birds. Of the two thousand or so photographs they made, many glass plates, as yet unnumbered and unprinted, depict river scenes and tributaries, as well as fields, swamps, and extant woods in the Concord region.

Not long after I met old man Bensen, I too began haunting the Estabrook Woods. Along with their river expeditions, Brewster and Gilbert used to make regular excursions there, especially along the unpaved carriage track that stills runs north to Carlisle.

One day coming out of the forest onto this road, I saw a tall older man with close-cropped hair, carrying what looked like some sort of military radio device. He was accompanied by a younger woman, who also carried in a pack a variety of electronic devices. We fell into conversation about the equipment and this led to a discussion of animal communication, which turned out to be the field of study these two were engaged in. They were embarked on a project to learn more about the vocalizations of young beavers. They eavesdropped by lowering the microphones into active beaver lodges and then recording the mews and squeaks and snarls of the beaver family.

It was only after we said our good-byes that I learned that the man I was talking to was Donald Griffin, the scientist who had discovered echolocation in bats, and had gone on to a lifetime of study of animal communication at Cornell University. Now at age 80-plus, having associated himself with Harvard, he had started a study on beaver communication.

On another occasion, near this spot I met another old man with big ears and a German accent. We began talking about the forest and he became passionate about the advances of developers to the north and east and especially about the inroads of the Middlesex School, which was intending to build playing fields on the west side. “They have the perfect outdoor laboratory here,” he said, chopping the air with his hand, “and what do they do but make sport fields.”

This brought on a diatribe on the decline of field studies at Harvard and the fact that modern biologists were spending all their time in sterile brightly lit labs, looking through electronic microscopes.

I later learned that the man was the renowned Ernst Mayr himself, author of Systematics and the Origin of Species and the guru of modern evolutionary theory.

But what of Mr. Gilbert? I knew he was in here often, sometimes alone, sometimes with Brewster and his friends. The Brewster journals periodically refer to the fact that Gilbert returned from the Estabrook having seen some interesting species of bird or having collected for Brewster’s Ball’s Hill plantings a number of native azaleas.

Late in my quest, when I knew a little more about Gilbert’s comings and goings, I began purposefully going into the Estabrook at odd times when I knew no one else would be there. I went in once during a snowstorm. I went in on March days when sleet was sweeping across the ponds and the trees were howling ominously in the wind. I went once in heavy summer rain and I also went in once or twice on moonlit nights. On these occasions I would select some likely site along the old Carlisle road and sit there waiting for the ghosts of the place, hoping some spirit would appear to guide me. All I managed to do was scare myself.

On one of these excursions, late on a summer evening, I was sitting on the wall at the ruins of the old Estabrook homestead when a man dressed all in white slowly materialized from the woods on the east side of the road. He wore cotton trousers cut off in mid-calf, sandals, and a loose kahdi-cotton shirt and had long black hair that fell freely around his shoulders. On a colorful woven cloth strap, he carried, slung over his right shoulder, a long wooden flute.

Seeing this figure emerge in the gloaming I thought to myself that he was perhaps some manner of spirit traveler, so I purposefully put myself in harm’s way and greeted him as he drew near.

I would like to say he bowed deeply upon my greeting, and asked how he could be of service to me, but in fact he merely pressed his fingertips together quickly, nodded coolly, and carried on without a word.

“Is that a Cherokee flute?” I asked as he moved off.

This served to stop him.

“Yes,” he said. “But how did you know? Are you Cherokee?”

It was actually only a guess but the dark polished wood looked like Native American flutes I had seen.

Having broken the ice, the traveler, although deeply serious, became chatty, indeed, voluble, and happy to talk about his religion, although his responses to my questions tended to take on the form of sermons. He was, he explained, a student of Thoreau and Ashokan Buddhism, mixed in—as far as I could make out—with Emersonian transcendentalism. He was well-versed in the somewhat off-center religio-philosophic theories of nineteenth-century Concord and, like Bronson Alcott and Alexander Graham, the inventor of Graham crackers, he said he followed a prescribed diet and would feed only upon “aspiring” vegetables, that is to say plants such as beans, corn, and squash, which in their growing habits strive upward toward the heavens.

“I do not consume the lowly potato, or onions, or turnips, beets, or carrots,” he explained.

“How about a bird?” I asked. “Would you eat, say, a wild goose? They fly very high during migration.”

He looked at me in horror.

I regretted my little dig, and to cover myself began to explain my mission here in the woods and my attempts to locate the spirit of Mr. Gilbert. Since we were fairly deep into the territory of philosophies I tried to explain my perhaps bizarre theories of light: how any moment in history is illuminated by light and how, after the invention of the camera, it became possible to use existing light to halt the linear flow of time and pluck a discontinuity from an otherwise continuous flow of events.

“Only the image, of course,” I explained. “The dimensions, the wholeness of the moment flies past.”

None of this seemed at all odd to him.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” he said. “But there are also those who can freely move within the flux of things.”

“Time travelers, you mean?”

“Yes, you might, in the common parlance, use that discredited term as a manner of speaking. Certain famous sanyatsi in India were said to be able to travel freely on the wheel of time.”

“Not the river of time?” I asked (already knowing what his answer would be).

“No, the wheel. The great cycle of life and death. The sanyatsi were able to voyage along the course of the wheel, living in other life times, those to come, and those gone by.”

“But given their theories of metempsychosis,” I said, “would this not mean that they would be living for a while, perhaps, as a snake?”

“Yes, in some cases. They could know snakeness. They would never kill a cobra, for example.”

“But would the cobra kill them?” I asked.

He was silent for a minute.

“This is a very good question,” he said. “I have considered this question myself, when it comes to my own passage across the divide, and I believe, given the circumstances of the holy man and the snake, that there are in fact two responses to this proposition.”

He folded his hands together, nodded gravely, and carried on.

“If the cobra struck, the sanyatsi would say it is a good thing that this cobra has bitten me at this time and this place. The lesson on this plane of existence, he would say, has been completed, and the wheel will now carry me onward. But it is also possible that the cobra would not strike, because the cobra would know that the sanyatsi knows that he, the snake, is only a cobra trapped, like any other soul, on the same wheel as the sanyatsi and that these two are fellow travelers in the realm of the great cycles. The cobra has no desire to eat the man, so he will not strike.”

“You are a student of these things,” I asked. “Could you possibly travel backward a few decades to, say, the year 1905?”

“No,” he said quickly. “At least not yet. And probably never. I started too late. I was twenty-five when I became a seeker. And anyway I know what you’re thinking. You are thinking that I could carry you back and you could talk to this man you seek and get to know him.”

“Yes, that’s the idea.”

Suddenly he fell out of character.

“No way, man,” he said with far less sanctimony. “You don’t do that kind of thing, all right? This stuff is beyond that, you know what I’m saying? This is serious. It’s the way to heaven.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Right.”

“I didn’t understand,” I said.

“Right. I know you don’t.”

“I’ve read Henry Thoreau too, the journals,” I said. Given the context this was not a non sequitur and he took my drift.

“The man’s been there,” he said.

“He was a great traveler,” I said.

“That he was,” said my new ally, softening.

We ended amicably and he pushed on, while I resumed my daydreams on the rock wall by the ruins of linear time.

It occurred to me thinking about our encounter that somewhere, someday, I could perhaps contact a more willing seer who could go back to 1905 and tell me more. Such things were, after all, very much in vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Gilbert and Brewster haunted these woods. In fact a gentleman of this vocation passed through the town of Medford not far from where Brewster lived, in the 1890s, offering séances and sessions with the dead. But then I remembered that in some ways I already had a blind seer in the form of Sanfred Bensen. So a few days after this encounter I went down Ball’s Hill Road to pay a visit.

As usual I found him out puttering in his yard, dressed in his stained coveralls and a peaked cap.

“Any more thoughts about going in to see the grave of Mr. Brewster?” I asked. This was a perennial opener for me by this time, an excuse really to visit. His answer was always the same.

“Well, yes,” he said. “Someday I should like to visit the gravesite but there’s so much to do around here, and I’m worried about leaving Muffin. I will have to wait until Colburn comes down.”

This was his perennial excuse to my perennial question. He was always waiting for his nephew Colburn, who was at the time living somewhere north of Concord and would periodically make visits to the farm to work on his Stanley Steamers. Colburn even had a pallet somewhere inside the cavernous dilapidated house and would sometimes spend the night there. He seemed a most loyal and attentive nephew. I had encountered him at the farm on several occasions before and he was very protective of his uncle and would say that I couldn’t visit him that day because he was sleeping, or ill, whereupon old Sanfred would appear at the door and spend the next hour or two standing in the sun, telling me stories, while Colburn puttered around the yard, glancing over periodically to see if I had left yet.

I heard later, digging for rumors and stories in the dusty corners of the memories of old Concordians, that there had been some gossip that Colburn was not in fact Bensen’s nephew, but his son, the unidentified mother having departed for other parts.

“There is really so much to do around here on the farm, ever since Father died,” Mr. Bensen said.

I believe his father had died in 1928.

“Did Mr. Gilbert ever help out on the farm here?” I asked.

“No, but he would come down to visit with me and tell stories. He always had stories. He went to Washington sometimes to arrange his papers, as he used to say. One day there he saw the president of the United States out walking.”

“Which president was it?” I asked.

“Well, I think it was Abraham Lincoln.”

“Really?” I said. “I thought he died around the time that Gilbert was born.”

“Did he? Well then it must have been someone else. Gilbert said he was a very tall man. Lincoln, I have heard, was a very tall fellow. Father told me that.”

“Maybe it was Woodrow Wilson.”

“Yes, that sounds right. Woodrow Wilson.”

“1914.”

“Yes, I believe. That must have been the same year the chickens came down the river. I was walking one day, you see, and I heard chickens clucking out on the river. So I went to the banks and waited, and soon enough, around the bend came two canoes and they were filled to the gunnels with paddling Chinamen, stroking in rhythm. They were all talking in chicken, though, and I could not understand a word they said.”

Up until the 1920s there had been a boathouse down the river toward Carlisle that would rent out canoes and rowboats to weekend day-trippers who would take the train out to Bedford on the east side of the river. I had read that the traffic began to disturb Brewster and in his latter years he tended to stay around the farmhouse, away from the river.

“Did Mr. Gilbert see the Chinese paddlers?” I asked.

“No, he wasn’t there that day. He was too busy. You see he was the manager of the October Farm and there was always trouble up there. Mr. Brewster was such a kind man, the kindest man who ever walked the earth, he would never reprimand his people, and there were some low types who worked for him. One day, Mr. Gilbert told me, a man by the name of Charles was found to have stolen some tools from the barn. When Mr. Brewster confronted him about the theft, Charles became angry, and even raised his voice to Mr. Brewster and used strong language, I’m sorry to say. Mr. Brewster went home and did not sleep that night because, Gilbert said, he thought he would have to fire Charles the next day. So Gilbert came out to the farm and said to this Charles that he should quit first. Charles again became enraged, and made references to Mr. Gilbert’s race and used strong words again. Mr. Gilbert told me he was afraid that Charles would strike him in the face. But he was more afraid that this fellow would come back and burn down the barn if Mr. Brewster fired him. ‘It was better that he was angry with me,’ Gilbert said. You see he was that kind of man. He took care of things quietly. Well, Mr. Brewster, he learned of all this, but he was such a kindly man he decided to give Charles a second chance. After that Charles became humbled and reformed himself and became a loyal servant to Mr. Brewster.”

“He sounds like a forgiving man, Mr. Brewster,” I said.

“Oh yes, ever so gentle with people. Now there was another man there named Patrick, an Irishman. Patrick was fond of whiskey and would sometimes disappear for days at a time and then return all full of tears and apologies and Mr. Brewster would always forgive him. One day Gilbert found Patrick sleeping on the floor of the woodshed and tried to rouse him. Patrick attempted to strike Mr. Gilbert with his fist upon awakening and, like Charles, said things about Gilbert’s race. But then he began to cry and apologized. When Patrick was sober everyone loved him, he was a jolly, joking fellow who would do anything for you. He came down here once with Gilbert. He was a big ruddy-cheeked fellow with sandy hair who used to slap Mr. Gilbert on the back and call him his barber lad.”

“His what?” I asked.

“A barber chap, but a good one.”

“What did he mean, a barber?”

“A barber old chap, he would say, but a grand one at that.”

“Barbarous maybe?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean, a barber’s chap and a good one at that. But all this was part of Mr. Gilbert’s work, you see, keeping these Irish in line and, Mr. Brewster, he often knew nothing of it.”