Music Welcome to Snuescast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snuescast.com and if you enjoy our show, please share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by the Songs of Nightingales. Tonight we'll read excerpts from the book Fresh Fields by John Burrows published in 1896. The main section we will read is titled At Sea. Snuescast first read this story back in 2020. In Fresh Fields, Burrows takes us on a journey through his travels and observations of the natural world, both in America and abroad. collection of essays showcases Burrow's keen eye for detail and his deep appreciation for the beauty and complexity of nature. John Burrow's was an American nature essayist, active in the U.S. conservation movement. Bur Burrows accompanied many personalities of the time

in his later years, including theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, who gave him an automobile, and Thomas Edison. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. At sea. One does not seem really to have got out of doors till he goes to sea. On the land he is shut in by the hills, or the forests, or more or less housed by the sharp lines of his horizon. But at sea he finds the roof taken off, the walls taken down. He is no longer in the hollow of the earth's hand,

but upon its naked back, with nothing between him and the amensities. He is in the great cosmic out of doors, as much so as if voyaging to the moon or to Mars.

An astronaut out of doors, as much so as if voyaging to the moon or to Mars. An astronomic solitude and vacuity surround him. His only guides and landmarks are stellar. The earth has disappeared. The horizon has gone. He has only the sky and its orbs left. This cold blue-black liquid through which the ship plows is not water, but some denser form of the cosmic either. He can now see the curve of the sphere which the hills hid from him. He can study astronomy under improved conditions. If he was being born through the interplanetary spaces on an immense shield, his impressions would not perhaps be much different. He would find the same vacuity, the same blank or negative space, the same empty, indefinite, oppressive, out of doors. it must be admitted that a voyage at sea is more impressive to the imagination than to the actual sense. The world is left behind. All standards of size, of magnitude, of distance are vanished.

There is no size, no form, no perspective. The universe has dwindled to a little circle of crumpled water that journeys with you day after day and to which you seem bound by some enchantment. The sky becomes a shallow, close-fitting dome or else a pall of cloud that seems ready to descend upon you. You cannot see or realize the vast and vacant surrounding. There is nothing to define it or set it off. 3,000 miles of ocean space are less impressive than 3 miles bounded by rugged mountain walls. Indeed, the grandeur of form, of magnitude, of distance, of proportion, are only upon shore. A voyage across the Atlantic is an eight or nine-day sale through vacancy. There is no sensible progress. You pass no fixed points. Is it the steamer that is moving? Or is it the sea? Or is it all a dance and illusion of the troubled brain? Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, you are in the same parenthesis of nowhere. The three hundred or more miles the ship daily makes is ideal, not real. Every night the stars dance and reel there in the same place amid the rigging. Every morning the sun comes up from behind the

same wave, and staggers slowly across the sinister sky. The eye becomes a hunger for form for permanent lines, for a horizon wall to lift up and keep off the sky and give it a sense of room. One understands why sailors become an imaginative and superstitious people. It is the reaction from this narrow horizon in which they are penned. This ring of fates surrounds them. They escape by invoking the aid of the supernatural. In the sea itself, there is far less to stimulate the imagination than in the varied forms and colors of the land. How cold, how elemental it looks. The only thing that look familiar at sea are the clouds. These are messengers from home, and how weary and disconsolate they appear, stretching out along the horizon as if looking for a hill or mountain top to rest upon. Nothing to hold them up. A roof without walls, a span without peers. One gets the impression that they are grown faint and must presently if they reach much further fall into the sea. But when the rain came, it seemed like mockery or irony on the part of the clouds. Did one vaguely believe then that the clouds would respect the sea, and withhold their needless rain.

No, they treated it as if it were a mill pond, or a spring run, too insignificant to make any exceptions to. One bright Sunday.

When the surface of the sea was like glass,

a long chain of cloud mountains lay to the south of us all day, while the rest of the sky was clear. How they glowed in the strong sunlight, their summit shining like a bouquet of full moons, and making a broad, white or golden path upon the water, they came out of the southwest, endless procession of them, and tapered away in the east. They were the piled, convoluted, indolent clouds of mid-summer, thunder clouds that had retired from business, the captains of the storm in easy undress.

All day they filed along there, keeping the ship company. How the eye reveled in their definite, it, yet ever changing forms. Their under or baseline was as straight and continuous as the rim of the ocean. The substratum of air upon which they rested was like a uniform layer of granite rock, invisible but all resisting. Not one particle of these vast cloud mountains so broken and irregular in their summits sank below this aerial granite boundary. The equilibrium of the air is frequently such that the under surface of the clouds is like a ceiling. It is a fair weather sign, whether upon the sea or upon the land. One may frequently see it in a mountainous district, when the fog clouds settle down and blot out all the tops of the mountains, without one fleck of vapor going below a given line which runs above every valley, as uniform as the sea level. It is probable that in fair weather the atmosphere always lies in regular strata in this way. And that it is the displacement and mixing up of these by some unknown cause that produces storms. As the sun neared the horizon, these cloud masses through great blue shadows affore each each other, which afforded the eye a new pleasure. Late one afternoon, the clouds assumed a still more friendly and welcome shape. A long, purple, irregular range of them rose up from the horizon in the northwest, exactly stimulating distant mountains. The sun sank behind them, and throughout great spokes of light as from behind my native cat skills. Then, gradually, a low, wooded shore came into view along their base. It proved to be a fog bank lying low upon the water. But it copied exactly in its forms and outlines a flat coast. You could see distinctly where it ended and where the water began. I sat along that side of the ship and let my willing eyes deceive themselves. I could not divest myself of the comfortable feeling inspired by the prospect. It was to the outward sense what dreams and reveries are to the inward. That blind, instinctive love of the land. I do not know how masterful and involuntary the impulse was, till I found myself warming up toward the phantom coast. The empty void of the sea was partly filled, if only with a shadow. The inhuman desolation of the ocean was blotted out for a moment in that direction at least. What phantom huggers we are upon sea or upon land? It made no difference that I knew this to be a sham coast. I could feel its friendly influence all the same, even when my back was turned. In summer, fog seems to lie upon the Atlantic in great shallow fleeces, looking, I dare say, like spots of mold or mildew from an elevation of a few miles. These fog banks are produced by the deep cold currents rising to the surface and coming in contact with the warmer air. One may see them far in advance, looking so shallow that it seems as if the great steamer must carry her head above them, but she does not quite do it. When she enters this obscurity, there begins the horse-bellowing of her great whistle. As one dozes in the birth, or sits in the cabin reading, there comes a vague impression that we are entering some port or harbor. The sound is so welcome and is so suggestive of the proximity of other vessels. But only once did our loud and repeated, halu-ing awaken any response. Everybody heard the answering whistle out of the thick, obscurity ahead and was on the alert. Our steamer instantly slowed her engines and redoubled her two dings. The two vessels soon got the bearings of each and the stranger passed us on the starboard side, the horse voice of her whistle alone revealing her course to us. Late one afternoon, as we neared the banks, the word spread on the deck that the knobs and pinnacles of a thunder cloud sunk below the horizon, and that deeply and sharply notched the western rim of the sea were icebergs. The captain was quoted as authority. He probably encouraged the delusion. The jaded passengers wanted a new sensation. Everybody was willing, even anxious, to believe them icebergs, and some persons would have them so, and listened coldly and reluctantly to any proof to the contrary. What we want to believe, what its suits are convenience, or pleasure, or prejudice, to believe. One need not go to see to learn what slender logic will

incline us to believe. To affirm steady gaze, these icebergs were seemed to be momentally changing their forms. New chasms opening, new pinnacles rising, but these appearances were easily accounted for by the credulous. The ice mountains were rolling over, or splitting a sunder. One of the rarest things in the average cultivated man or woman is the capacity to receive and weigh evidence touching any natural phenomenon, especially at sea. If the captain had deliberately said that the shifting forms there on the horizon were only a school of whales playing at leapfrog, most of the passengers would have believed him. In going to England in early May, we encountered the fine weather, the warmth and the sunshine as of June that had been central over the British Islands for a week or more, five or 600 hundred miles from shore. We had come up from lower latitudes, and it was as if we had ascended a hill and found summer at the top, while a cold, backward spring yet lingered in the valley. But on our return in early August, the positions of spring and summer were reversed. Scotland was cold and rainy. And for several days at sea you could, in the distance, hardly tell the sea from the sky. All was so grey and misty. In mid-Atlantic we ran into the American climate.

The great continent, basking there in the western sun,

and glowing with mid-summer heat, made itself felt to the center of this briny void.

The sea detached itself sharply from the sky and became like a shield of burnished steel, which the sky surrounded like a dome of glass. 4. Successive nights, the sun sank clear in the wave, sometimes seeming to melt and mingle with the ocean. One night, a bank of mist seemed to impede his setting. He lingered along while partly buried in it, then slowly disappeared as though a slit in the vapor, which glowed red hot, a mere line of fire, for some moments afterward. As we neared home, the heat became severe. We were going down the hill into a fiery valley.

Fast stretches of the sea were like glass bending above the long, slow heaving of the primal ocean. fish lay basking here and there on the surface, too lazy to get out of the way of the ship. Occasionally, a whale would blow or show his glistening back, attracting a crowd to the railing. One morning a whale plunged spitefully through the track of the ship, but a few hundred yards away. But the prettiest sight in the way of animated nature was the shoulders of dolphins occasionally seen during these brilliant, torrid days, leaping and sporting, and apparently racing with the vessel. They would leap in pairs from the glassy surface of one swell of the steamer across the polished chasm into the next swell, frisking their tails and doing their best not to be beaten. They were like fawns sporting in the summer meadow. It was the only touch of mirth, where youth and jolly I saw in the sea.

The sea-fowls have weird and disconsolate cries, and appear doomed to perpetual solitude. that these dolphins know what companionship is and are in their own domain. When one sees them bursting out of the waves, the impression is that school is just out. air come the boys, skipping and laughing, and seeing us just passing, cry to one another. Now for race, hurrah boys, we can beat them. One notices any change in the course of the ship by the stars at night. For nearly a week Venus sank nightly into the sea far to the north of us. Our course coming home is south, south, west. Then, one night, as you promenade the deck you see with a keen pleasure, Venus through the rigging, dead ahead, the good ship has turned the corner. She has sent it to New York Harbor and is making straight for it, with New England far away there on her right. Now, sales and smoke funnels begin to

appear. All ocean paths converge here. Full rigged ships piled with canvas are passed, rocking I bleed upon the polished surface. Sales are seen just dropping below the horizon. Phantom ships without hulls.

While here and there, the black smoke of some steamer tarnishes the sky. Now we pass steamers that left New York, but yesterday the city of Rome looking with her three smoke stacks and her long hull like two steamers together, creeps along the southern horizon, just ready to vanish behind it. Now she stands in the reflected light of a great white cloud, which makes a bright track upon the water, like the full moon. Then she slides on into the dim and even dimmer distance. And we slide on over the tropic sea. And by a splendid run, Then just catch the tide at the moment of its full early the next morning, and pass the bar without a moment of time or an inch of water to spare.