A keen look at Boston's nature
'Paradise' covers landscape, flora, fauna, folklore
The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston
By John Hanson Mitchell
Beacon, 254 pp., $24.95
When Walter Muir Whitehill wrote the preface to the first edition of his classic "Boston: A Topographical History" back in 1959, he described his daily ramble from North Station to the
Close to a half-century later, John Hanson Mitchell recounts an extended series of strolls through the city's natural spaces in "The Paradise of All These Parts" with an eye as admiring, and as occasionally disapproving, as Whitehill's.
And, with the possible exception of Whitehill's, this may well be the finest book about the town as a place, highly personal and at the same time keenly descriptive.
The competition should be steep, Mitchell notes, for Boston "was settled by a highly literate people and for this reason happens to be one of the best-documented places in the United States" in everything from politics to philosophy.
But not in terms of "the actual nature of the place." And that, he writes, is odd, for "the city would not exist were it not for its deep-water harbor and navigable rivers, its sharp hills underlain by water-bearing gravel beds, its abundance of fish and waterfowl and its nearby wooded hills."
It is an oversight Mitchell, who lives in Littleton and is one of the region's leading naturalists as editor of Sanctuary, the Massachusetts Audubon Society's magazine, sets out to redress and does so largely with great success.
Marring what is otherwise a close-to-perfect book is its lack of maps. It would have been good to be able to follow the paths of Mitchell's meanderings. (To remedy that omission, try Nancy S. Seasholes's "Walking Tours of Boston's Made Land," with maps both historical and contemporary, as a companion read.) Still, this book delivers a strong sense of the city and its residents.
One afternoon, Mitchell is "watching the action" from a sea wall near Columbus Park when he strikes up a conversation with a man in khakis, flannel shirt, and L. L. Bean hunting boots who he takes to be "an outlander eccentric" from an old proper Boston family.
"What the hell is that?" the man interrupts. "A little gull? They shouldn't be here now, should they?"
The conversation turns generally to birds, but for Mitchell it's getting tedious because he is more interested in identifying the gull.
Perhaps, Mitchell thinks, as the man "tilted away back toward the town," it is a rare California gull, or more likely a Bonaparte's, but it "flapped off, skimming over the gray waters to settle farther offshore, where I could get no field marks whatsoever."
The waterfront has a particular attraction for Mitchell, whose first view of the city was from offshore, in a long-ago summer when he was working as a deck hand on a schooner.
"Early one July morning," he recalls, "I came out on deck and saw a brownish fog on the shoreline. Rising through the mists were the towers of the coastal city." And as the fog lifted to reveal "the hilled skyline and the gray-brown granite of the buildings," the city was "looking for all the world like John Winthrop's divine city, save that the signature hills had been leveled."
Beyond all the discussions of the city's natural history and his warmhearted recounting of encounters with a range of characters, Mitchell is at his best in making the reader think anew about the city and its history.
He is walking one evening through the Charlesgate when he sees the Citgo sign, "that modernist landmark of the city [casting] an otherworldly glow above the town."
Noting the protests back in the early 1980s when Citgo said it was going to dismantle the sign - and earlier protests when the sign was erected - Mitchell sketches out a neatly reasoned discussion of Bostonians as "given to revolt, no matter what."
There were the original Puritan founders, then the Sons of Liberty, and then, "in what may have been [the city's] finest hour," the abolitionists' campaign against slavery.
But just as the reader might think Mitchell is heading off in praise of spectacular pop art, with maybe a riff on Sister Corita's Dorchester gas tanks, he asks why Bostonians, "generally an environmentally sensitive group," would champion "the emblem of a petroleum company."
Perhaps, he supposes, it was fitting to preserve the sign because this piece of "electronic blight" over the Back Bay skyline "is a perfect symbol of all that went wrong in Boston in the 1950s" - with the slicing of Storrow Drive through the Esplanade as a prime example.
Such language might suggest that in the end Mitchell has decided that the Boston of today exists in a kind of fallen state, a judgment he mutters at one point in the book. But it's more telling that he chose to take his title from Captain John Smith's marveling view from 1614 of a place that was "the paradise of all these parts."
Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge. 