Finding Lost Voices: The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais and the Botanist Alice Eastwood (1859 - 1953)
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered
Last weekend, I went on an extraordinary hike called The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais. I’d heard about it a few years ago through the poet Forrest Gander and had wanted to go but had never made it work. Forrest, inspired by the hike wrote a video poem about it) that would later appear in his collection, Twice Alive). Then, I heard my friend, the poet Judy Halebsky, would do the winter solstice hike again this year, and I jumped at the chance. For ten hours, we hiked through intermittent rain up and around cloud-wooled Mt. Tam, taking breaks to chant and read poetry.
The word circumambulate, from the Latin roots circum (around) and ambulare (to walk or go about), means an intentional walking around an object (in this case, a mountain) in order to connect spiritually with that object. The first circumambulation of Mt. Tam occurred on Friday, October 22, 1965, when the Beat poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen drew on a fusion of spiritual traditions to walk clockwise around the mountain.
Our group hiked around 15 miles, finishing in the pitch dark at Muir Woods and navigating down the last few miles of trail by headlamp. But what was an epic day of hiking for me was a light day for an extraordinary woman named Alice Eastwood, who typically hiked around twenty miles a day. Eastwood was a self-taught botanist who later became the Curator of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences from 1892 to 1949. During her tenure, she botanized Mt. Tam actively from 1912 to 1929, and her name appears three times on the mountain: Eastwood Trail, Camp Eastwood, and Camp Eastwood Road.
Eastwood was born on January 19, 1859, in Toronto, Canada. She lost her mother when she was just six years old, and her father left her and her two siblings with relatives as he traveled to America to find work. They stayed with her Uncle Helliwell, A doctor who was also an experimental horticulturalist in Ontario, Canada. She first developed her early love for plants in his home. Then, she and her sister were placed in a boarding school in Oshawa, Ontario, where she met another early mentor: an elderly French priest-gardener, Father Pugh. These early experiences left an impression on young Eastwood. Though her childhood was fraught with turmoil, she always found wonder and peace in the natural world.
Then, at age fourteen, Eastwood’s father sent for her and her sister, and they moved to Denver, Colorado. Eastwood thrived in the new alpine climate and was fascinated by the new flora surrounding her. She became class valedictorian of her high school, Shawa Convent Catholic High School, and was given two books as graduation gifts: Porter and Coulter’s Synopsis of the Flora of Colorado (1874) and Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States (1878). Eastwood would use these books to teach herself botany.
She'd teach high school for the next ten years at her Alma Mater and save her money to spend her summers researching in the Rocky Mountains. Like other active women of her era, she felt limited by the clothes she was forced by society to wear and instead invented the clothing she needed to do the work she wanted to do. She used heavy denim nightgowns to create buttoned-down skirts that split like culottes. She also learned to ride horses to more easily travel to the remote areas where specimens could be found.
In May of 1887, Eastwood guided the famous British Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace up Gray’s Peak on a three-day botanical collecting trip (in her homemade britches). Later, he wrote about her skills as a guide and a botanist in his autobiography, My Life. She’d also begun to collect specimens for Colorado University’s herbarium at Boulder. Then, in 1890, was able to leave her position as a teacher and dedicate her life to botany thanks to a return on a real estate investment. By this time, Eastwood was in her early thirties. With her new financial freedom, she traveled to California to connect with other women in her field. She met horticulturist Kate Sessions (1857-1940) in San Diego and Katherine Brandegee (1844-1920) in San Francisco.
Brandegee was the first female curator of the California Academy of Science and the first woman to be a botany department curator in a scientific museum in the United States. While she visited, Brandegee took Eastwood on a hike on Mount Tamalpais and Eastwood fell in love with the area. Brandegee recognized Eastwood’s talent as a botanist and invited her to become joint curator of the botanical collection at the Academy. Eastwood was hesitant to leave the Rocky Mountains. But she was soon wooed by the variety of flora and fauna in the Bay Area and accepted the position.
When Brandegee retired in 1894, Eastwood became the second female curator of the California Academy of Science, where she immediately began to amass an extensive collection of specimens. During her time in the Bay Area, Eastwood fought to preserve Muir Woods National Monument and Mt. Tamalpais State Park as well as many other redwood groves in California. On November 20th, 1904, The San Francisco Call reported on a women’s club meeting that had been called together to save what was then called the Redwood Creek Canyon (what is now Muir Woods National Monument and Mt. Tamalpais State Park). Eastwood spoke passionately about protecting the rare and beautiful landscape at this meeting and specified its ecological importance. In her impassioned speech:
"There is only one reason why I wish I had $1,000,000. The only thing I want that amount of money for is to buy Redwood Park and Mount Tamalpais and present them to the State of California for a public reserve."
Then, at 5:12 AM on April 18, 1906, Eastwood woke at her residence on Nob Hill to the shock of a lifetime. For sixty-five seconds, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake decimated San Francisco. Instead of fearing for her own life and home, Eastwood ran instead toward the California Academy of Science (then located in Market Street). When she arrived, she saw the marble staircase leading to the Herbarium on the sixth floor crumbled into rubble. But that didn’t stop her. Eastwood used her mountain climbing experience to reach the sixth floor. Once there, she started saving specimens by wrapping them in her apron and hoisting them to a friend who was waiting six floors below with a cart. Because of her efforts, over 1500 collection items were saved before the fires that followed the earthquake destroyed the building and everything else in the collection. Eastwood made a promise to herself that day, that she’d spend her life building back the collection.
After the earthquake, the new Academy was under construction in Golden Gate Park until 1912, so during that time, Eastwood took to traveling again. She visited England, studying at Kew Gardens and the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. She also observed Linnaeus’ herbarium at the Linnaean Society in London and Lindley Herbarium. In Paris she studied Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s Herbarium, specifically the different varieties of the evening primrose. She finished her studies in the United States visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the New York Botanical Gardens in New York City.
“So distinct, so individual are those blossoms that they seem to have souls. They speak a wonderfully enticing language to draw the wandering insects to their honeyed depths…The bands of color on both divisions of the perianth are bewildering, impossible to describe; but more than aught else, they cause each flower to say proudly, with uplifted head, ‘I am myself; there is no other like me.”
Eastwood returned to be the curator of the Herbarium. By the time she retired in 1949 at 90, it contained over 350,000 specimens (three times as many as were there in 1906).
Throughout the rest of her life, she went on numerous collecting trips to places such as Alaska, Arizona, Utah and Idaho. Beginning in 1928, Eastwood accompanied her friend, the fellow botanist Susan Delano McKelvey on several collecting expeditions in the Southwest. Throughout her long life, Eastwood fought to understand and protect the diverse botany and ecology of California, Colorado and the world at large. She dedicated her own life to this work, and inspired others to do the same. Eastwood would die in 1953. Her papers are kept at the California Academy of Sciences. During her lifetime she published over 310 scientific articles and authored 395 land plant species names. There are seventeen currently recognized species named for her, as well as the genera Eastwoodia and Aliciella.
After threading my body up the steep climbs, meandering past swollen creeks, and looking out on a landscape where the sea (erased by fog) crashed against the shore hundreds of feet below, I can understand why one might feel an incredible connection with a place like this. Years ago, when my young, hippie parents were hiking Mt. Tam, they saw the wild irises pocking a meadow and decided that they would name their daughter after that flower. A flower whose habitat wouldn’t exist had Eastwood not fought to preserve it.
Upcoming Events
My book tour for Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb continues in the new year. Please see below for a list of upcoming events.
January 11 - Presentation at Daughters of the Revolution, Santa Rosa Chapter
January 12, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM - California Writers' Club Marin chapter talk on "Building a Readership with Biographer and Poet Iris Jamahl Dunkle" at Dominican University
January 15, 10:30 AM Iris Jamahl Dunkle Reading from Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb at The Century Club, SF, CA
January 24, 3:15 - 5:00 PM - A Reading with Iris Jamahl Dunkle from Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
January 25 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle Reading with Jan Beatty at White Whale Books in Pittsburgh, PA
January 27, 6:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Donovan Hohn at Literati in Ann Arbor, MI
January 28, 6:00 PM - Author Event: Iris Jamahl Dunkle at Morgenstern Books, Bloomington, Indiana
January 30, 6:00 PM - Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb with Iris Jamahl Dunkle, The Mechanics Institute, SF, 57 Post Street San Francisco, CA 94104
February
February 21, Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s talk at New York University, New York, NY
February 22, Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at North Bay Letter Press, Sebastopol, CA
February 23, Workshop on Erasure at North Bay Letter Press, Sebastopol, CA
February 26, 6:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at King's English, Salt Lake City, UT
February 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at American West Center, Salt Lake City, UT
March
March 5 - The Bill Lane Center for the American West: Stanford, CA
March 6 - UC Boulder/Center for the West, online lecture. Details coming soon!
March 13- 5:00 PM Garden City Community College, Kansas
March 14 - Books and Books in Key West, FL
March 21 - 2:00 PM New York Public Library, New York City
March 30, 4:00-5:30 PM, Occidental Center for the Arts, Occidental, CA
May
May 17 - 5:30 - 7:30 PM - National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA
Great post - I hadn't read anything about Alice before. Also loved your poem - and the story about your parents naming you!