NH Authors
David Carroll
Season 2 Episode 1 | 27m 17sVideo has Closed Captions
David Carroll is an award-winning writer and illustrator of natural histories.
David Carroll is an award-winning writer and illustrator of natural histories, most notably The Year of the Turtle, Trout Reflections and Swampwalker's Journal. Carroll is the 2006 recipient of a $500,000 McArthur Foundation genius grant. In this program, Carroll talks to program host Rebecca Rule about his life, art, writing and passion for turtles and wetlands.
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NH Authors is a local public television program presented by NHPBS
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NH Authors
David Carroll
Season 2 Episode 1 | 27m 17sVideo has Closed Captions
David Carroll is an award-winning writer and illustrator of natural histories, most notably The Year of the Turtle, Trout Reflections and Swampwalker's Journal. Carroll is the 2006 recipient of a $500,000 McArthur Foundation genius grant. In this program, Carroll talks to program host Rebecca Rule about his life, art, writing and passion for turtles and wetlands.
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This is the New Hampshire Authors’ Series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.
♪♪ -David Carroll is an author, artist, lecturer, and a passionate advocate for wetlands preservation.
He lives in Warner and runs a home-based business, the Carroll Family Art Studio, which features not only his work but the watercolors of his wife Laurette, the feather paintings of his daughter Riana, and pen and inks by his son Sean, his daughter Rebecca is also an acclaimed author.
David's books include Trout Reflections, Swamp Walker’s Journal, The Year of the Turtle, Self-Portrait with Turtles, he really likes turtles.
His new book, which will be finished by April, has the working title Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook.
Among his many awards, the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing and a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the Genius Award, which bestows unasked a pot load of money, on pe-- on people who foster lasting improvement in the human condition.
Nature writer Annie Dillard called him a genius, a mad man, a national treasure.
Welcome, David Carroll.
[applause] -Thank you very much, Rebecca, what a, pleasure to be here with you.
-I'm so happy to have you here-- -I think Annie Dillard had two out of three right anyways-- -Well, I was going to ask you about that.
What's up with the mad man thing?
-That's probably the most accurate.
That’s probably the most accurate, yeah.
-So what's a hydromancer?
I looked it up, but I thought others might not know.
-Well, basically it is it is one-- the short version is it's one who divines things through observations of water.
But it means, it comes from a Greek root manteia, from manteia, which really means prophet, and I certainly don't put myself forth as a prophet.
That's not the part I'm in, but it, it also includes a definition of one who, through other than human means, gets insights into obscure knowledges and so forth.
And the word just fascinated me.
Quite a few years ago, really, this idea for this book and, I thought, you know, and that was the book, actually, I was going to do after Swamp Walker.
But my editor, Harry Foster at Houghton Mifflin, who unfortunately, I'm sorry to report, died actually in July at the age of 62.
It's a big loss I had a ten year history with him, and as you know, that editor-writer relationship is-- you know, that editor-writer relationship is-- -Is very important yeah.
-Quite something.
But at any rate, he really was persuading me to go to a more personal book, and I said, Harry, memory lane is not my favorite street I really don't want to do this.
I want to, stay with what you know and do another natural history but that's, so this book is now coming forth.
-So you did Self-Portrait With Turtles for him and for yourself?
-Well, yeah, I told him, and I don't I don't really do that much of my writing that's specifically aimed at being in a book when I'm, during the season, I'm out with the turtles.
I do make notes here and there that eventually I work on over the winter, when I do 90% of my artwork and my writing.
Because there's a couple of different venues going on there but I told Harry, a wonderful man, an editor, that I would take a notebook with me and have it specially for that, and if I came back in the fall, I'd send him stuff if I had it and when I came back in in the fall, I found that I had more material than I thought I would.
I found that I was comfortable with the approach I came up with, and that I liked it, and I sent it to him and he liked it, the editors were very high on it, and so we proceeded, and that's how Self-Portrait came into, came into being.
-Well, when I first when I saw your first book, The Year of the Turtle, I think it was before I knew you and we've known each other for a while, but I was so amazed that the same person had written the words and made the beautiful paintings in that book.
I mean, that to me is-- and then and then you have this third thing of just being a highly knowledgeable naturalist so you're out in the field a lot of the year.
Then you come in, you turn inward, you do the paintings and you write the stories.
It's a passion.
-It's a passion and it's, you know, it's a it's just a combination that is so mutually enhancing and just wonderful.
It's a gift.
I mean, you know, these are we all have various talents and to be able to use them and to have been able to live long enough and have enough good health and good luck and last long enough.
This was an idea very, very clear in my mind when I was, 18, 17 or 18 years old, and I was a mere lad of 45 when I got my first book contract.
But I always wanted to combine those things.
I wanted to combine that, that naturalist bent that I had.
I wanted to use my art, and I wanted to use my, my scientific reportage writing, but also my creative writing and this provided that opportunity and then and it took a long time to get that first contract, after that, the books pretty much have come and, not overnight, but in sequence.
-I there's a story I think it's in, I'm not sure which of your books it's in, but it talks about you as a young boy finding your first wetland.
Would you just tell that story briefly?
-What happened was, at age eight, my father more or less ran away and joined the Navy, from Pennsylvania, a long way to water but he ended up in the submarine service so, and then he asked my mother to join him, and my brother and I, we I was eight, he was seven.
So I ended up in southeastern Connecticut, which at the time had, you know, a lot of wetlands and things and third day in town, I didn't know any kids or anybody around I, in June I drifted- [clears throat] drifted out alone, and that's not easy to do my mother always had a very watchful eye.
-You slipped away.
-I slipped away and I entered this world.
I slipped into a world that was just incredible, and I was already spellbound just seeing the stream and dragonflies, frogs in this backwater marsh with reeds and it was just so entrancing and then I saw something moving in the reeds and I watched to see what am I going to see next, you know, and this is, this is a pattern for life now, what is next out here?
And this tremendously beautiful, I didn't know what species or kind it was of course, but this black shelled yellow spotted turtle appeared and that was it I mean, honestly, from that moment on, I dedicated my life to slipping away from my mother, slipping away from any employment opportunity or anything that would keep me from being in the swamp and somehow making that work.
And then eventually, the other things, the art and the writing and, and I'm still trying to slip away.
[laughter] -Traditionally on this program we, we have people read from their work, and I would ask you to read from your work in progress, because I know that's where your head is now.
-Yeah.
-And, we've picked out a few little pieces that, just to give you a sense of the kind of writing that David does, which is as close to poetry as you ever get in sentences, if you ask me.
And so we'll do a few of those, you want to start with Wading Alder Brook?
-I would like to do that and, this writing is, as you know, because you're familiar with my work is, well it’s there are there are parts of this flavor in all of my books, but in this book, it's it's much more my own personal musings and, descriptive writing and somewhat philosophical here and there it's, with this book, I am not trying to build in as much of the natural history background information, slipping that in with, you know, the creative writing aspect.
So this is more, thank you, poetic it's wonderful I love that this is, Wading Alder Brook and I may actually open my book with this, Wading Alder Brook, I search a steep west facing bank just upstream from the Willow Dam.
The high, nearly perpendicular slope rises 20ft or so above the brook.
At its downstream base Beavers built a dam but abandoned it long ago.
A tenacious line of black willows and silky dogwood colonized it and over time created a turfy embankment that is breached by spring's unruly spades whose silver cascades bring life to a cutoff stream section.
But in low, autumn-- In low water autumn, this natural levy deflects a steady slide of water through the alder lowlands.
In scanning the mesmerizing play of lights and shadows upon the brook and all along its banks, I feel as though I have a glimpse into the soul of the season.
Set against the bank slope, my own silhouette is alive with wavering lights golden shimmerings in a slow moving black shadow shape.
These rippling threads are sunlight tossed off from a wind ruffled, quiet backwater where just off the channels, more enlivened run water striders serenely glide.
I see that the flickering reflections can only come to light in shadows.
They become lights dissolved in lights invisible on the radiant slope of the sun-struck, stream bank.
Strewn with fallen leaves, bleached of their autumn brilliance, the high banking has become a glowing ochre wall.
It is a tabula rasa for this watery writing.
Within every cast shadow, from that of the slenderest wisp of dried sedge to those of the infinitely branched debris of former floods and the broader stems of standing alder, and the one I cast myself, the largest among these, there is a ceaseless wavering of amber gold webbings of light cast by flowing and windblown water.
I move, and the lights move with me, to glimmer wherever my shadow goes.
I cannot catch them in my hand, but I can shift them about by playing the shadow of my hand over the stream bank, and place them where I will.
It is as though the brook’s reflections pass through me, passed through fallen trees and tumbled ferns, sunlight and shadows, wind and water.
At this late afternoon hour, in deepening autumn, the world becomes translucent, immaterial.
-Thank you.
[papers waving] -That, to me, is a lot about seeing, which is what-- So many of us go through our lives and we see, but we don't really see somehow, -I've trained myself or been trained by looking so long because from that first moment, literally that seeing and the patterns of the plants and the I mean, I can be moving along and, you know, out of the corner of my eye, I'll just see a, a leaf shape will suddenly catch my attention and I'll think, wait a minute, that's not in my bank of botanical search images.
You know, sometimes it's a very specific item that I see.
But then it's just this, this, the, the act of seeing is extra-- I guess seeing and being there and seeing there, those are very, very important.
And that's how it all started out, I mean, as this eight year old kid, I had no background in art, science or anything, really.
And to me, it was just to be there to be witness to that.
It was extraordinary, and I guess that's true and that that probably enhanced my artistic sensibility that I was born with in the artistic and sense-- sensibility enhanced that seeing and what I, what-- one of the things I love and I'm very fascinated with the, the camouflage and the patterns out there, I just don't get tired of of seeing that.
And although it's so familiar and I've seen it so often, it's I can't embrace it enough, I can't see it enough.
And then there's always something, almost always something.
It doesn't have to be shockingly new.
There's some new slant of light or something.
I guess-- yeah If you keep me amused.
-You see it and then you name it, which-- -Yeah.
-Names are so important.
-That's another interesting point, because to me, for some reason, the, the names of things which I didn't know at first at all, I couldn't, you know, I knew bird, frog, turtle, grass leaf tree.
[laughter] I had a nice Tarzan vocabulary, you know?
But then I started to learn the names of the different species.
And I thought, that's not just a tree, there's a big, huge giant difference between a red maple tree and a red oak tree and a white pine tree.
And that's not just a grass.
There are grasses, there are sedges, there are rushes.
And that's not just a sedge, that's, Carex lonchocarpa, that's long stem sedge.
You know, and I just began to build this kind of litany of names and that's, I was talking to you when we were talking on the phone this week about my, my other, some of my other obsessions, the language thing.
I just love to learn names and languages.
-How many languages are you studying right now?
-Four, four languages, I speak three pretty well and I'm, I’m, I may be over my head here, I'm trying to add French to the German and Spanish and Italian.
-German, Spanish, Italian?
-Yeah, those, those I've got a pretty good grip on.
[softly] -English.
-Oh English too!
[faint laughter] -Japanese?
[speaking in Japanese] Sugimashita (That was too much) [laughter] Konnichiwa (Hello) [laughter continues] -That's amazing.
That’s amazing.
-I think, anything we're fascinated with or fascinated by, we have a good chance of being amazing at.
And maybe people could be more amazing if they let themselves get fascinated more.
-Well could I ask you to read again-- -Surely.
-I just love when you read, and this is just a very short piece called In Memory Only.
-In Memory Only.
That breath of air just now breathed back to me from the heated stream bank.
The scent of the sun on earth rising on the slightest stirring of the air.
The mingled sense of moss and leaves.
The brook.
I remember, and I'm there again.
In that place that no longer exists.
As a young boy who no longer exists.
April's alchemy creates a memory out of mud and water, sunlight and fallen leaves.
Spring breathes on these and brings something not just, to light, but to life.
At such unbidden moments, and they are fleeting, fragments of memory become so vivid that they live.
I cannot see them.
I can only feel them.
These unconscious rememberings not just of what I was then, but of what was all around me.
That light of some deep yesterday, the sunlight on the water, the stream that sparkled by, that frog that looked back at me and at the same time, all the world around.
Are these some last earthly existences destined to die with me?
How is it they return to me to take me back?
Is there ever a going back to stay?
Does all of this lie in memory only?
-Wow.
-Yeah, that's what a stream bank can do to you.
-Well, when I hear this piece, I think about mortality.
I think about spirituality.
And there's an there's magic in it, too.
I mean it's all, hydromancer implies a certain amount of magic.
-Right.
-It's there's so much underlying this.
It's like you observe, as closely as you can, but by doing that, you get in touch with some, I don't want to get mystical, but it-- -That’s, that’s, yeah and that's, you know, and I'm as I, as I gear up now to push forth on this and I do have quite a few drafts and notes to work from.
That's, that's another great point because I don't want to get, you know, mystically new-agey off the mark because-- -You don’t want to be on the new age shelf?
-Well, I, I love the new age music, and so forth.
But, I think one of the things that's also important in my work is that I do have a very, very strong biologist component.
And yeah, I don't mind, you know, having this intuitive, I'm all for that.
But I feel it's it's good for me that I am also very, very well grounded in science.
And when I use the word magic, it's more I don't believe in magic.
I don't believe in superstition.
Mumbo is jumbo is what I always say.
-Mumbo is jumbo?
-Mumbo is jumbo.
-But you ask questions like, is there ever a going back to stay?
Does all this lie in memory only?
-Yeah, maybe-- -So your answer is no?
-I hope not.
[laughter] -I won't answer that, maybe that's mumbo jumbo.
[laughter] -But it's wonderful to ask the questions.
-I let myself go and you know but then, as I say, I have that other grounding as well and we'll see how it turns out.
-Well, there's this other little piece that goes with that, Girl Dancing Tree.
Would you read that?
-Surely.
-I think that will deepen our discussion a little bit.
-And then we’ll then we’ll get politcal.
-This will really get us out there.
-I love this piece, I love this.
Mister no mumbo jumbo.
[laughter] -I think we've got to skip this one here.
-Oh, no.
Oh, no.
[laughter] -Now here’s pure science.
[laughter] -Alright, mister scientist, I’m empirical.
-Mister science, Leonardo da Vinci.
[Rebecca laughs] You really set this up beautifully.
-Thank you.
[laughter] Girl Dancing Tree.
I walk along shadows again today and again today.
The light breezes are at play in them.
I feel the heated sun in open field spaces and sun slants among the shadows I see a young girl, dancing.
Is the wind, in a sapling big-toothed aspen turning golden leaves over to shimmer with sun reflected from their pale undersides.
She dances a moment in an open space with little bluestem grass bronzing all around and gray goldenrod fading to seed on the sand flats where the hatchling wood turtles have departed from their nests.
She stands still as a sapling again, just for a moment, and then as dancing leaves once more a young girl dancing on the restless wind, so supple, swaying and bowing in her circumscribed place.
In this clear field with its crickets singing.
As I read these signs of another season, I am old enough now that they seem ancient.
The sun and the sand and the wind and the leaves and the dancing girl who cannot stay.
[David chuckles] A silent voice within me asks, as it has every autumn since I was a small boy, where does the season go?
and then asks the season, can I go with you?
[laughter] I rest your case.
[laughter increases] -Well, that's the tension, isn't it, between the scientist and the person who is so engaged well, by nature that-- -you will not find a career PhD herpetologist writing this.
-Well, well, now we can get political if you’d like-- -Surely.
-Because the wetlands are in danger, your beloved turtles are in danger, and you've been trying for decades to do something about it through your writing, through your speaking, you've written a piece that you might want to read from or just talk about.
I won't read all of this, but, Boundary Marker.
As I turn toward the brook, I am stunned by a sign.
This is not the kind of sign for which I am ever on the lookout, ever trying to read on the earth in the water, among the plants, but a human designation, a small rectangular boundary marker nailed to a tree It bears the initials of a land trust.
I knew this was coming, but there was no way for me to prepare myself for it, and I knew it would go hard for me.
But I am surprised by the depth of my reaction physically and mentally to this symbol.
It is almost enough to turn me back.
Send me home.
What the five letters I read, signify will be regarded by nearly everyone as a conservation victory, a cause for celebration.
I can only see loss and sorrow.
I had tried to steer this in another direction beyond conservation, to preservation.
The landscape here, with its lingering wildness and extraordinary biodiversity, possesses an ecological integrity that is rendered more rare by the hour in the face of a global loss and marginalization of habitats.
A relentless, planet wide conversion of natural ecosystems to serve human needs and desires.
I thought for a time it could go differently here.
That this place could be left alone.
But at the same time, I saw all those familiar signs that would point to the contrary.
And now I see that this has become a marked place.
It is all but universally believed that if development rights are bought up and motorized vehicles excluded, a parcel of land is saved and its wildlife habitat protected thereby.
But as will be the case here, funding sources in terms of easements in nearly every case, mandate a level of access and recreational use that lays the foundation not for true habitat protection, but for a playground for people.
A human theme park.
And that, that is my most difficult task and it's, it's gets more difficult all the time because I have a long history with places, disappearing and then some being set aside as conservation lands.
You know, we, we use that word protected, too loosely applied, protected for what?
Protected from, you know, a Walmart superstore maybe, protected from a four lane highway, but is it protected for the ecology somewhere, does the ecology come first?
And that's that's my difficult job is to-- And it is very difficult, you know, because our economics, our culture, our ethics, everything is driven towards, of course, using the land for human ends and where we don't absolutely pave it and use it in our hard core way, we expect it to be our working forest or our playground or just a nice backdrop for us to jog through.
And I'm thinking, okay, I’m all for trust for public lands.
I'm all for Central Park.
I'm all for the things that trusts do.
But where is the other thing being addressed?
And, and I don't see that, and I, a great part of my history is with, what I call in Swamp Walker’s Journal, a phrase that Harry Foster was really hoping he could get me to delete, but I thought was central.
I walk a landscape of loss.
And, you know, I have to report that when I began writing my books, one of the rules I saw for myself originally when I was 17 and 18, and I already was seeing these things and knew I couldn't go back to that place in Connecticut.
That was when I left at 18.
I would never go back.
But I wanted originally I was thinking, I want to celebrate these things I've seen.
I want to draw the pictures.
I want to write about what I see, and I want to give information.
But very quickly, I saw that there was this other thing and my job was to almost be like the little kid in Hans Christian Anderson's, The Emperor's Clothes, and say, you know, this this is stark naked here you know, this is not this is not a sanctuary, this is a human theme park.
So that's, and, you know, it's a difficult thing to do if I it's wonderful to have the MacArthur Grant and I'm hoping if I can make some moolah on top of the moolah, my, my, my, my, my big desire in life is to actually buy a swamp and just give it to the turtles.
And just, this is, you know, nobody need come in here.
There are some places like that.
But they're so few, and-- -how can people help you do that?
-Some of the things we could do is if we would just accept that that preservation is not a bad thing, that if some places where if we don't facilitate it, I mean, if we don't exclude access and I don't consider myself a misanthrope, I consider myself a humanist.
But if there are places that we can just leave alone, if we don't bar access, if we don't pave the way in.
The big problem is everybody goes trail crazy, bridge crazy cinder path crazy, bike path crazy, dog walk crazy.
-And that's not good for the turtles.
-It's not good for any of the ecology and that's, you know, that's a huge contributor to the lack of biodiversity that's going on.
So if we could just even begin to think that preservation, understand the difference between conservation, preservation, maybe supporting an initiative that is trying to raise funding that isn't necessarily for people to go and fish and hunt and chop trees and, you know, and that's all fine but we're running out of landscape.
And I know a lot of people have these bumper sticker-- stickers that say, save the humans or we need places, people will come back at me and say, we need places for people to go.
Well, yeah, we do but, you know, we're the ones that are filling up this landscape, and why is nature paying the price for that?
-David Carroll, thank you so much for joining me on the New Hampshire Authors’ Series.
-I have really been looking forward.
It’s wonderful.
-Well, it's great to see you here and to talk with you.
-So good, excellent.
-Okay.
-It's a wonderful forum.
[Rebecca chuckles] [applause] -Thank you very much.
[applause continues] ♪♪
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