Stereoscope cards speak through past

The Brookings Arts Festival starts this weekend. I always try to spend some time with the antique dealers. Mary Lou says “You can’t have everything, where would you put it?” So, I limit my search to one item that I can add to my very “niche-y” collection — antique stereoscope cards depicting hunting and fish scenes.

Last year I found a good one. The card had a colorful depiction of three guys loading canoes, but the picture became much more meaningful when I read the description on the back of the card. The description began “With what irresistible force these mighty silver highways appeal in the true canoeist, angler and sportsmen….grandly shadowed pools teeming with hard-fighting fish, of unmeasured lands, the retreats of game and water fowl, where the beaver engineers his dam, of silent forests where lynx and marten hunt their prey and nose the trail of the trapper.”

After these moving words were a few lines from a Kipling poem titled “The Feet of the Young Men.” His poem ends with this line “For the Red Gods call us out and we must go.”

When I saw the words “Red Gods call” I immediately thought of a book about hunting and fishing in Brookings County – Paul Errington’s book about his boyhood experiences in hunting, fishing, trapping and observing wildlife along the Big Sioux River (and in Minnesota and Canada).

Errington received a wildlife degree from SDSU and went on to become a famous zoology professor at Iowa State University. He wrote a couple of good books. I recommend one titled “Of Men and Marshes” for interesting reading about Brookings County wildlife and wetland ecology. Visit the Paul Errington Memorial Marsh on 459th Avenue, west of Oakwood Lakes State Park. The Errington Marsh is managed by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The 650-acre marsh is comprised of shallow and deep wetlands surrounded by grasslands that provide opportunities to view wildlife. Errington wrote, “For me, as an individual, no other natural feature has ever had the enduring attraction of an unspoiled chain of marshes in an unspoiled setting of glacial hills.”

The Carolyn Errington Memorial land is 1.5 miles south of Paul’s Memorial. Carolyn Errington was born in Brookings in 1908. Musician, lawyer, naturalist, and writer, she is memorialized with a gift to the public of the family’s 300-acre homestead that bordered West Oakwood Lake.

The gift was controversial, and local opinions about “right” land-use were noted by anthropologists who published about Brookings County in a national scientific journal — but that’s a story for another time.

Who are the “Red Gods?” Nash Buckingham, in many of his hunting stories, mentions “Red Gods.” The Red Gods are not literal gods. The Red Gods are personifications (metaphors) of natural, enduring truths and timeless principles like personal responsibility, consequences of sin, struggle for survival, and cycles of nature. Kipling was saying that the Red Gods represent the basic truths (and consequences) that humans often ignore in favor of fleeting political or social fads. I think that Errington understood this meaning, but his book is all about huntin, fishin and trappin, with a good dose of ecology.

I like his description of pass shooting ducks between the lakes at Oakwood — “It was not entirely the shooting that made the day memorable, it was the day-long migration of mallards. They flew high, hundreds or thousands in each flock, flock after flock.”

However, it is his description of prairie chickens along the Big Sioux that is wonderous - “As we walked toward the car carrying our afternoon’s bag of pheasants, along came a characteristic flock of prairie chickens, flying low and fast and spread out over almost the whole width of the bottomlands.”

The “red” color of the gods is supposed to be from the Hebrew word meaning “red earth” from which Adam was made, so Buckingham, Errington, and other old-time outdoor writers say that red are the gods that call humans to nature. Modern philosophers call it “ecophilia,” (means affinity for the natural world).

Poets write that the red gods take the outdoorsperson to the pure bosom of nature, whose every phase is replete with beauty, of good fellowship, and of love for the natural world. One literary analyst of the Kipling poem wrote “ Mother Nature pours out her life-giving, soul-restoring magic upon us all.” Less poetic hunters might add “and she doses out some cold fingers and toes too!”

In nature’s vistas, some feel the magical experience envisioned by outdoor writers, others feel that nature is “animated by a Presence beyond ourselves” (quote from ecotheologian John Gatta). Thinking spiritually, another quote always comes to mind. It is attributed to physicist and prominent atheist Steven Weinberg. He said “sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.” I suppose Weinberg recognized that the universe’s beauty is not merely functional and a strict necessity for survival.

Gosh! All that history, philosophy, and religion from a one-dollar antique stereoscope card from the Brookings Arts Festival.