This past February, I relocated to Revelstoke, British Columbia, from Whitefish, Montana, with the hope that my new home would provide plenty of opportunities to explore the Canadian backcountry. Then the pandemic hit and, like people all over the world, I was compelled to shelter in place. Suddenly, the landscape of adventure shrunk to my immediate surroundings. Backpacking was out; walks around town were in. At first, this was a disappointment. But as I was forced to slow down and reflect, I felt a new appreciation for the nature right outside my door. The mere act of walking caused my focus to sharpen, as the natural rhythms of strolling joggled my thoughts loose and delighted my mind. These new practices of observation did jujitsu to my senses, pausing my thoughts long enough to feel with my heart.

As I deepened my appreciation of next-door nature during the season of self-isolation, I found myself returning to the writings of the old white-bearded, John Burroughs, one of the most successful nature essayists in American literature. Today, Burroughs is mostly forgotten. But during his lifetime, Burroughs, the author of 27 books about nature, was a celebrity as famous as Mark Twain. From the 1870s to 1920s, he wrote philosophical essays for Harper’s, Scribner’s, and The Atlantic Monthly and in the process created the modern nature essay. His essays were gathered in books that sold over 1.5 million copies and were required reading for schoolchildren across the United States. 

Although Burroughs’s name is obscure today, his literary lineage continues. There is a writing award in his name—the John Burroughs Medal for excellence—and his prose style of combining an observant eye for nature with grand themes has influenced writers such as Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rick Bass, and Terry Tempest Williams. Especially during this time in which we are being asked to stay close to home, Burroughs can serve as a literary guide to exploring the nearby nature.  

In his writings, Burroughs stressed the importance of falling in love with home. He celebrated being under the spell of the near and familiar and the rewards of walking outside your doorstep to be intoxicated by the beauty found there and, in the process, to discover the divine in the common. “Why should I go gadding about to see the strange and the extraordinary?” Burroughs wrote to his friend Clara Barrus after abandoning a camping trip on the West Coast with John Muir. For Burroughs, “home” was the Catskills Mountains of New York, where he spent almost the entirety of his life and where his heart always remained even though he traveled extensively. “The whole gospel of my books (if they have any gospel) is ‘Stay at home; see the wonderful and the beautiful in the simple things all about you; make the most of the common and the near at hand.’” 

This spring, I took those words to heart as I practiced new ways of noticing the natural world around me. A first step involved listening with my eyes and seeing with my ears. In early March, one of the first seasonal migrants along the Pacific Northwest is the varied thrush. Long before I saw the skittish birds, their song spilled out from the shadows of western red cedar and western hemlock groves, like referee whistles warning winter that spring was around the corner. The large mixed flocks of dark-eyed juncos, white-crowned sparrows, and yellow-rumped warbler murmurations dispersed as individual pairs linked up with mates. Strolling along the Illecillewaet River, I searched for the rattling sound resembling a rainstick being turned over and over before my eyes landed on the belted kingfisher, a large-headed, bluish-gray bird with a shaggy crest and a dagger-like bill perched on a red-osier dogwood. 

Next, I tried smelling with my mouth and tasting with my nose. The warmer and longer days began to thaw the soft tissue of the poplar trees, and as the sap slowly rose up the xylem into the trees’ extremities, the spring reawakening announced itself via scent. The ecosphere filled with the sticky and resinous, cinnamon-scented smell of cottonwood buds. Winter’s white skirt was exchanged for the lush, lime-green dresses attired on quaking aspen, paper birch, and Rocky Mountain maple trees. The snow retreated up the mountains and exposed glacier lilies in full bloom popping from the earth like dainty, little yellow suns. My ears pricked up again as I heard the sounds of insects beginning to stir.  

As I continued my springtime explorations of my new neighborhood, I kept coming back to the wisdom in Burroughs’s writings. “The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is, ‘Look under foot,’” Burroughs wrote in “The Divine Soil,” an essay published in The Atlantic Monthly. “You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. . . . The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.” 

Look under foot. Rocky Mountain dotted-blue butterflies were congregating on the sides of mud puddles. In other places, the golden-fringed, black wings of the mourning cloak butterflies were opening and closing, pursing the air like a lover’s lips. Beneath the canopy of this temperate interior rainforest, Oregon forest snails inched along with primordial spirals on their backs—an armor of sorts to retreat to for protection against predatory birds and rodents.

Every place is the center of the world. As I learned about the flora and fauna of a new place, I set down roots into a forest home that did start to feel like the center of the world. By May, this year’s fresh green shoots of green grass pushed aside last year's dry and matted winter-brown-colored thatch. The vodka-clear rivers swelled with snowmelt, and ospreys followed the invitation north to nest and enjoy life’s abundance during summer’s feast. Here, where the 49th parallel intersects with 118 degrees west longitude, the monsoon-like rains of June came next, damping the woods to keep forest fires at bay. Beyond the forest edges, painted western turtles basked on logs floating in the backwater sloughs, while prehistoric-looking great blue herons stalked the shallows for bull trout minnows. A tsunami of yellow pollen clouds filled the air after a breeze passed through the lodgepole pine grove and the paper-birch stands. 

Burroughs’s argument that we need to fall in love with our backyards—or else risk ignoring the wonders of the nearby in favor of the exotic faraway—is like a direct challenge to the way many of us fetishize national parks and wilderness areas. “One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life, and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand,” Burroughs wrote. “We found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.” I could imagine Burroughs and Muir butting heads over the national park concept. Burroughs warned that national parks would become testaments of natural beauty placed on pedestals, while we would allow the nature we live with every day to be developed and polluted. He was right. The nature we live with every day has been ignored in favor of the grandiose, while the national parks have become biological islands cut off from each. Biodiversity has suffered from our biases about which natural areas are most deserving of protection.  

I understand that we need places that are safe from the greedy hands of industry, especially now that we have spoiled our own backyards. But what if, in the pantheon of environmental writers, Burroughs came to eclipse Muir and we came to believe that all of nature was sacred? Perhaps then—if we fought to preserve the nearby as it was a place of beauty too—we wouldn’t be approaching the sixth mass extinction. If traveling less becomes the new norm, then protecting more green space in our backyards and towns will be just as crucial for our sanity as getting lost in the grandest landscapes. Sure, I need adventure and large areas of public land to get lost in as much as the next person. But the Grand Show isn’t about me. 

Burroughs was a passionate homebody, but he spent the last two years of his life wintering in the maritime climate of California for his waning health. Each spring, he traveled home by train to the Catskills of New York. “The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense—the home sense —which operates unerringly.”  

On Burroughs’s second trip home, he died on March 29, 1921, as the train passed through Ohio. His obituary was featured on the front page of The New York Times. His dying words were, “How far are we from home?”