Naturalist proves a graceful essayist Montgomery makes nature accessible

THE WILD OUT YOUR WINDOW: EXPLORING NATURE NEAR AT HAND, by Sy Montgomery, Down East Books, Camden, 2002, 250 pages, $15.95.

Sy Montgomery is the most natural of naturalists. Whether the realm is plant or animal, the territory the Amazon River or the Appalachian Trail, she is not only comfortable with her facts, she is downright expansive. Montgomery easily weaves references to Walt Whitman, Zen gardens and children’s literature into her graceful stories about the world around us.

More important, in her book, “The Wild Out Your Window,” a collection of essays which originally appeared in her column in the Boston Globe, she speaks about a nature that is fascinating and easily accessible, even to folks who, like me, are still at the primer stage of natural knowledge.

“The Wild Out Your Window” is about the Northeast, concentrating on New Hampshire, but totally apt for Maine. She writes about the ladybugs, which swarm inside our homes and the squirrels who clamber over them and sometimes right out into the road (though usually, we discover, during years of sparse acorn production). It’s nature that even the most unnatural of us can’t help but see. Most important, Montgomery tells us why we’re seeing it, what’s going on.

Montgomery also writes about what we don’t see, not unless we try. Divided into four seasonal sections, the spring portion is filled with hidden activities happening right under our eyes. Sometimes, these springtime events are underwater, or underground, as in the essay about moles, titled, “The Little Gentleman in Black Velvet.”

But whether we’re reading Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau or Montgomery, we ask much more of our naturalists than simply nature. We seek a dose of philosophy in our reading, a perspective that includes us. Montgomery does not disappoint.

“Vernal pools teach us to look deeply, to appreciate how crucial subtle places can be,” she writes in her essay, “Vernal Pools”. “Such pools are dry beds that fill with water only in spring. Because they have no inlet or outlet, and so don’t get major predators, they are a favorite mating habitat of amphibians. Here, a careful watcher might find salamanders as long as your foot, mating in great squirming congresses, who appear above ground only a few nights a year and then vanish into the burrows of shrews and moles.”

One such creature is the tiny four-toed salamander, an amphibian, “so aquatic it can swim like an eel.” This salamander usually lives in the woods, near bogs, but spends six weeks of its life hiding under the wet moss of a vernal pool or stream, waiting for its eggs to hatch.

Maybe it’s my own mothering instinct, but this story was enough to make me want to pull on my mud boots and head into the bogs in hopes that I’m not too late to catch a glimpse of this brave, if miniature, mom.

What Montgomery is pursuing is not amazement, though there is much to wonder at in each of her 49 essays. Nor is it only information, either, though she gracefully slips in plenty of knowledge. Montgomery is seeking to convey the vision that will get people looking deeper at what they see, whether its birds out their window or flowers on top of Mt. Katahdin. For with the seeing comes caring, the knowledge that layers of life, deeper than we can imagine, inhabit our woods, gardens, lawns, pools, sometimes even our homes.

With simple, lighthearted essays, Montgomery guides us to this depth right out our window, and by understanding them, expands the range not just of our vision, but of our lives.