An Intricate Design

The Frog Run is John Elder's contribution to Credo, a series of books published by Milkweed Editions that offer “contemporary American writers whose work emphasizes the natural world and the human community the opportunity to discuss their essential goals, concerns, and practices.” Credo currently lists as contributors ten such writers, each of whom presents his or her “investigation of what it means to write about human experience and society in the context of the more-than-human world.” Each volume also contains “a biographical profile and complete bibliography of the author's published work.”

The “frog run,” as Elder explains in his Prologue, refers to the final week of maple sugaring season. The key combination of warm days and cold nights will soon give way to more and stronger light and less variation in temperature, and, as the maple buds swell, the sap will begin to evince a “funky taste.” At the same time the vernal pools produced by the melting snow grow lively with frogs, their singing signaling thereby the imminent end of the season. So the phrase “frog run” celebrates the sap that is still untainted even as it eulogizes a season coming to an end; for Elder, it “captures… the ludicrous urgency of the peepers' moment-and the human moment, too.”

Elder chose the title because the three essays contained in the volume “are my own frog run, like a year's lost jugs of syrup, carrying the harvest of one season into the untapped morning of whatever comes next.” For a 54-year-old professor who is heading into the final stage of his teaching career and whose his youngest child is about to begin college, “whatever comes next” is a question both daunting and rich with possibility, a perfect question to occasion reflection. And reflect Elder does: the first essay offers “a vision of wilderness and sustainability” for his adopted state of Vermont; the second contains a chronicle of his “evolution as a reader”; and the third reflects on his family's “adventure in sugaring.” One senses that these are important essays for him. “The sap's flowing strongly,” he says at the end of the Prologue, “but we won't keep boiling for too much longer this season. Open the louvers and fire up the evaporator. Sleeping can wait until next week.”

The first essay carries as title “Aji,” a word in Japanese that means “a lingering taste” and that has key significance for the game of Go. In that board game, players place black stones and white stones in arrangements designed to control territory. But control shifts, sometimes suddenly, often subtly, and stones that seem dead can spring back to life and add both to the shifting of control and to the overall design that the competition produces, “a design more intricate than either player's single intention.” Black and white, ironically, work together even as they appear to oppose each other. For Elder this aspect of Go has metaphorical significance for his vision of wilderness and sustainability. “Aji is an important factor in biological succession and in Go alike,” he says. “Dominance shifts back and forth. Such ebbs and flows within wholeness define, among other things, the surprising reemergence of wilderness from the cutover landscape of Vermont.” At the heart of “Aji,” then, as well as at the heart of Elder's masterful and moving book Reading the Mountains of Home, lies his contention that, both in the land itself and in the cultural awareness of the land, one can witness succession, a shifting of conflicting forces, a struggle that can produce design rather than destruction. It is a contention that grants hope.

In “Starting with the Psalms,” the second essay of the trio, Elder elaborates on his evolution as a reader, and in particular how it led him to his growing interest in nature writing. He starts at his beginning, his love of the Psalms, building a case that, far from contributing to environmental problems (the thinking of Lynn White, Jr. and others), “the Bible represents a resource for greater environmental mindfulness.” He then fleshes out in turn his great regard for Milton, and for Wordsworth, for John Muir and Annie Dillard, for Basho, a master of the haiku, for Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver, and ultimately for Robert Frost, whose “Directive” is the skeletal support for the flesh of Reading the Mountains of Home. He concludes this loving recitation with the following: “…literature has offered me a connection both with a grounded lineage of human feelings and with the landscape that stimulated and still fosters such response. This continuity is a form of grace….”

Elder's third essay focuses on his family's decision to buy nearby wooded land and to learn and practice the skill of sugaring. Their intent, in part, was “to participate in a living rural tradition, which we had not inherited in the usual sense.” In one way or another each member of the family became involved in the project, the two sons assuming “ownership of the process” in part because they were able to teach their parents as much as their parents were able to teach them. At one moment a parent seems in control, a child cut off; at another, a parent seems cut off, a child in control. “Maybe there's a dynamic of this sort in the transmission of any rooted culture,” Elder says. “The older generation relies on the younger, as well as the other way around.” This thought brings Elder back to the “aji” of Go: “[a] 'lingering taste' is one elegant way to generalize the process of inheritance,” he says. And he ends the essay with his family convened at the sugarhouse that they have together constructed; while boiling the sap, they engage in a “never-ending sequence of five-minute conversations,” conversations that create a design more intricate than any speaker's single intention, conversations that are “the real sugaring off from the seasons that have brought us here.”

Will I add The Frog Run to the reading list for my senior elective English course entitled Literature and the Land? “Aji,” I know, would, among other things, deepen our discussion of the distinction between “conservationist” and “preservationist” that invariably comes up in our study of McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid. “Starting with the Psalms” would, among other things, enrich our understanding of Aldo Leopold's phrase “the Abrahamic concept of land” in our study of A Sand County Almanac. And “Sugaring Off” would, among other things, illuminate the positive influence that a land-based culture can have on individual and family alike. Maybe most important of all, my students would be hearing the voice of a major figure in naturalist literature. But I fear, finally, that the book would not hold their attention as much as I would want it to. The many allusions to texts that they would likely be only lightly familiar with might distance them; the mixing of personal moments and philosophical musings might feel to them more discursive than directed; the concept of “aji” might leave them more puzzled by its intricacy than reassured by its centrality to the structure of the essays. To put it another way, when Elder says “I also need to tell you, here at the outset, that I have never experienced dissonance between the Bible and my environmental ethic,” the “you” whom he addresses there and elsewhere feels to me like a reader (or listener) older and more experienced than my students tend to be. I am blessed with many good students, and I may be underestimating them, but I think that I would recommend The Frog Run to a particular student here or there rather than assign it to the full class.

Finally, I would like to point out that in the brief biography of Elder included in this volume; Scott Slovic emphasizes his subject's work as a teacher. Testimonials from former students make clear that John Elder is masterful, comprehensive in his knowledge of the material and remarkable in his ability to direct a discussion without dominating it. I suspect that “aji” is at work in those discussions and that they produce designs more intricate than either any student or the teacher himself intended. In this light, I find it fitting to conclude this review with words that Slovic uses as an epigraph to his essay, words that are Elder's own: “Teaching is our work!”


©2004 by Peter C. Greer and RSiSS
Phillips Exeter Academy

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