The Iron Bridge: An Essay on Necessity
The Iron Bridge over Stony Brook, Princeton Township, NJ, is painted green, but the surroundings have a distinctly iron tinge to them.
The essay originally published in New Jersey Federated Sportsmen’s News of the New Jersey State Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, it’s one of the “thought pieces” I’ve done for the publication, rather than how-to or where-to pertaining to fishing. The editor at the time, Oliver Shapiro, invited us to write such pieces, and although “The Iron Bridge” has to do with fishing and sportsmen, the theme is overarching and includes Western history. I’ve lengthened it somewhat, having decided it’s a good one for my “Literature and Philosophy” blog category, rather than wait until I commit to new material, as busy as I am at present.
So welcome to my blog, and I hope you’ll like what I have for you.
An Example of Starting Out
A lifetime ago, we fished under a green-painted iron bridge over Stony Brook in Princeton Township.
I used to ride over it on my 10-speed Schwinn when I was 13, having pedaled seven miles from home in Lawrence. A steep grade with a sharp bend preceded that crossing, and I would streak downhill at breakneck speed, passing swiftly over Stony Brook. Upon return, it was a hard pedal. I sometimes walked the bike.
Stony Brook’s smallmouth bass were mostly unknown to me. I fished largemouths in ponds nearby owned by Princeton Day School, knowing the Headmaster, and some of those fish measured as many as 17 inches long. Soon I caught a few seven-inch Stony Brook smallmouths on popping bugs fly cast. I believed none larger existed, but the next summer, I discovered the brook’s population of legal-sized bronzebacks. Scores of bass as big as 14 inches. I released them all, which eventually included 16-inchers. Legal size was just my benchmark.
Mostly, I fished stretches and runs near Prettybrook Road. When I was 10 or 11, a boy I knew from Trinity Episcopal Church in Princeton invited me fishing. He said we might fish for trout along Prettybrook Road, and I experienced visions of rainbow trout two feet long. Just a few years later I had moved on greatly. Sometimes I began fishing at the Iron Bridge and hiked far upstream towards Carter Road. The state stocked trout at the bridge, and during the spring, my younger brothers Rick and David would sometimes fish with me for rainbows and browns. I had begun fishing with a man 11 years my senior, a mentor who taught me priceless knowledge about fishing. Most of the time I fished alone, but I fished with Joe very persistently. He fished at least as often as I did. Almost every day.
Education
What had I got myself into? One might think that especially for someone intelligent, making high grades would be more important than getting home from fishing at 10 p.m. and maybe dabbling at homework. My conscience did nag me, but I often spent time with gear or read outdoor magazines instead. Sticking to school is a hard thing to argue against in a society that places supreme value on money, but I spent so much time alone in wilds that I grew temperamentally different from my peers. I surprised everyone when I came out of the woods our senior year to join the party. And when my Advanced Biology teacher announced to the class the highest score for the course’s final project, owing to my observations of spawning largemouths—a 103 including extra credit—one of my friends cheered out loud. I was the underdog who had gone astray but had the brilliance to do something.
I left for Lynchburg College in Virginia, now University of Lynchburg. When I enrolled, I was aware of it being known as a good one for writers, though it was easy to get into. I felt deeply impressed that poet Stephen Spender associated with the college as a resident and that playwright Tennessee Williams came and spoke there, both men present during the semester I enrolled at the college. Earning there a 3.8 grade average for 21 semester credits, I transferred to St. John’s College two years later, a school for the classics that ranked third academically in the nation, according to, I believe, either Time magazine or The New York Times.
My history professor at Lynchburg, Sheldon Vanuaken, had written A Severe Mercy, which won a National Book Award. I loved the book. About sailing the Grey Goose, a schooner, with his wife, Davy, and the time they spent at Oxford University, having befriended C.S. Lewis, best known for writing The Chronicles of Narnia. The exchanges with Lewis interested me most. But Sheldon had lost Davy, only 40, to liver failure. Of course, I couldn’t have missed the book’s being about the depth of tragedy, and I marveled at the joy I always saw in Vanauken’s eyes, after such a loss.
I managed to make a highest test score in his class. If I remember correctly, it was a perfect score plus extra credit. We happened upon each other while walking the campus dell, and during the conversation that ensued, I spoke about the problem of my mind moving too fast in class. The pace of the lecture and the pace of my mind two different things, I felt compromised, even though I made great efforts to pay clear attention, something I had never done in high school. Vanauken offered me a cigarette, as if to say, “Here, this will help,” lit it for me, and said, “Have you considered Oxford?” That bowled me over.
“Not with my grades from high school,” I said, coughing. “I didn’t even score 1100 on the SAT!”
Unphased by my admissions, he smiled as if my protestations amounted to so much chaff. I hadn’t thought to tell him I did score a five on the Advanced Placement English exam. Test scores ranged from one to five, five being the best. I hadn’t taken the APE course—although, interestingly, I did take that Advanced Biology course. I wanted time to party, but biology remained compelling to me from my boyhood when I read a fair amount of zoology. Did I refuse APE because I wanted my time open, or was it because I decided in the first place that I would take the APE exam without the class? Besides, literature was a personal value and taking a course on it impressed me as stuffy. With my usual assurance, I would have assumed I’d ace exam. When I did show up for that exam, I was laughed at, but I just smiled and waved. Likely some who laughed didn’t score as high as I did, but my presence there was all in good fun, anyway.
I took pride in my grades at Lynchburg, because despite my having come to feel academics were not as important as my grounding in what undergirds them—nature itself—I never would lose, not only my respect for, but sense of identity with them. As I evaluated the polarity between education and nature, I understood that going into nature did not mean abandoning the other, but continuing to study and philosophize from the books themselves. Vanauken repeatedly emphasized in class just how important books are. Already committed to reading for life, I took great pleasure in his lauding the value, and I never rebelled against academia as such.
I not only scored an A- for the senior level English course I was allowed to take, thanks to APE; with no less than an A- achieved in all my other classes, the number of credits defining a heavy course load, plus an excellent entrance essay on the philosophical question of natural law, my getting into St. John’s proved to be successful. I studied at the Annapolis, Maryland campus, rather than at Santa Fe, New Mexico.
St. John’s is dubbed “the American Oxford.”
Wilderness
Most importantly while yet at Lynchburg, my profound desire to go into a wilderness and find my voice as a writer characterized the depths within me. The desire proved to be my signature experience that fall. I believe backpacking a couple of times in the Blue Ridge Mountains contributed to my desire. I came to believe no academic program sufficient, compared to the deepening of the center of consciousness in an environment where much of what’s encountered is the naturally given. Nature, being the origin of humankind’s creations, is the necessary starting point of our choices. The knowledge of climate change wasn’t available to me in 1979 and 1980 when my reorientation got underway, but as civilization is threatened by it, a change in the center of consciousness on a larger scale is inevitable. It’s important work to have gone out there and prepare the way forward and through.
During the spring after the 1979 fall semester at Lynchburg, I discovered commercial clamming in the bays behind Long Beach Island, New Jersey. The bays proved to be abundantly wild enough to serve my interest. In place of being a park ranger in a deep wilderness elsewhere, I had accepted the brine without further ado, and I spent much of 13 years in that water as a clam treader. Since I needed to work only about four or five hours a day, self-employed, I had abundant hours to read and write, though hours in the brine, unifying myself with nature, set my practice far apart from self-education alone. By repeatedly treading the bay in solitude, far from other boats, I came to believe I had become nature through and through, and it is no exaggeration that after years of treading year round, I did become something quite other to being a domicile.
I also quit St. John’s College after a semester, and I attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, three years later, spending only two semesters there. It was more and less 13 years of treading, including winters while wearing wetsuits. A far greater departure from normal than fishing during my teens. I would never stay behind the Walled Garden of academia, even though my Hampshire College academic advisor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandson John Boetigger, felt I would make a good philosophy professor.
I had been in the woods alone—almost daily for long periods—from age seven, when I began observing reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, insects, arachnids, mollusks, and crustaceans, taking notes about them, reading magazines and books at home about them, lookng ahead to becoming a zoologist. And even at age five I explored my own yard and that of friends while corelating observations of insects and other creatures to field guides, as well as discovering fossils and identifying various rocks. When I found an Iceland spar at Fall Creek near our home in Indianapolis, I knew what it was and felt thunderstruck. I like to think that if the planet means anything—and if humanity is to survive it does—someone must value the Earth on its own terms of necessity better than from an academic perspective.
Plato
Plato’s school was named the Academy, the first of a long line of universities and colleges to the present. Academia is, of course, named after the Academy. Plato can be said to have anchored the academic tradition by a pyramid scheme of sorts, because The Republic, the dialog that describes the scheme, is the most famous, the most influential, the most discussed of all his work. At the bottom of society, as he proposed the structure—men of iron and bronze. Men of the spirit would be men of silver. Reasoning men—men of gold. At the pinnacle, the Philosopher King. Pertaining to the metals describing rank, iron ore is the most evident on my outings—in rocks and gravel. The Iron Bridge over Stony Brook is the strength of that metal supporting a mysterious passage.
My mentor Joe and I fished there for trout, when the subject of college came up. I believe I was a junior in high school, though I could have been Sophomore. I said, even though I felt my own willingness to go, that I would “please my parents.”
Joe said, “That’s the worst reason to go.”
I didn’t know why I had said it, but I didn’t take it back. The cat was out of the hat. To backtrack would only weaken my position. I took a cast, heavy with confusion, but rather than having only belied my intention, I had hit my coming situation on the nose. In effect, I awkwardly expressed sympathy for my parents, who would take the future hard. I did go to college in my own self-interest…only to find, time and again, that the wild called me back. It had always called on me. I didn’t know that in words when I stood by the bridge with Joe, but that was the underlying reason of my confession. The Iron Bridge was the perfect place for imperfect word to get out on the course of my life ahead.
Ever after, I have felt that my position must seem strange to others. For most, iron is already smelted, ready for use. Or already in place, like that of the bridge. It supports them, rather than confronts them with the awful implication—come and get it. For me, it’s in diabase or granite. Heavy stuff to carry, if I were to have any reason to, though Iron exists symbolically in relation to me, not only through my having worked worked wage jobs for decades, which has been tough, though not as tough as the job of men who mine ore. No, having stripped back the concretion within my mind to arrive upon the iron launch pad, if you will, is much more demanding of my talents—but a joy—than have been wage jobs. You might say any rocket would melt iron like it would melt ice, but perhaps an iron launch pad would serve a train of thought, instead. Iron is preceded only by copper and bronze in the history of metallurgy, iron smelting going back to the Hittites, 2000 BCE. Long before the birth of Western Philosophy in the sixth century BCE before Plato’s time some 200 years later. It’s deeper down in the foundation of civilization than philosophy’s development, on which philosophy stands, if you take Plato’s word for it. Whenever I visit Round Valley Reservoir, I become aware of the orange tinge of rock and gravel. And yet I’ve used the Iron Bridge to cross the brook and as a fishing spot like anyone else would, though many would say I had no reason to reinvent the wheels I rode on.
Necessity and the Future
I never thought of my taking leave of college, going deep into nature, and studying on my own as reinventing the wheel, not I myself, though I had been told I did, as I always believed the distant future is best apprehended through the abstraction of a contemplative mind. In my experience, such abstraction is best served by a clean start at the root of necessity. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it comprehends a society of a technological advancement far advanced beyond ours, and though I never have been educated in engineering or computer science, I’ve read a number of science fiction novels, and I keep up on AI and so on. How could I not with a physicist son?
That root of necessity you could call the plane of necessity, as if a blank template exists beyond which existence is an open possibility. A launch pad aimed at endlessness, though you must arrive upon something to create or you might suffer the “roaring into infinity” that novelist Hermann Hesse spoke of in describing madness. The spiritual heights developed by human volition reflect that volition’s origin at the interface between nature and society, where necessity not only yields to choice but supports it.
It happens through freedom from social convention. That’s how the depths are stirred and spiritual inspiration gives aim to original cause. Deep down within my work is an attempt to form the spirituality of the distant future, which might be felt to be a noble act, though it’s also practical, because if the distant future is at all assured as a positive value, it follows that everything between the present and that distant time is more assured of going well, too. Certainly of being overcome, if things do go awry. As they almost certainly will, given climate change.
Iron symbolizes what is weighty and hard, whether of rock, tools and structures—or human character. I believe in a solidarity among sportsmen like iron, intimidating to people who don’t identify with what they regard a crude metal. A solidarity that runs deeper than ordinary awareness and would collapse society under its weight, if complex structures built on its foundation of basic necessity were abandoned. Those structures do not stand without the knowledge of experts manning them. But we also know a world “underneath” development, where everything made by humans comes from—nature. Nothing can exist without it, and we serve our own interests by serving nature’s. Historically, iron did not originate as the first metal, but as Plato puts it on the bottom of his pyramid, it has a place at civilization’s foundation. It supports all else in the sense that the working class does the same. An infrastructure that has the potential for good or evil. Ethics must be concordant with the objectivity of natural necessity, or what’s to heal the sores of propaganda and point civilization towards a future that means something?
Functional Awareness
As if we sportsmen do more than indulge a useless pastime, perhaps awareness has more functionality than usually given credit. Perhaps we’re more than the passive receivers of experience—besides our hands, arms, legs and feet. Potentially our minds shape events in profoundly vast ways. Speaking for myself, I haven’t done badly, and it’s not just because I put some of my wage earnings in stocks. When you don’t graduate in America with at least a bachelor’s degree, you can find yourself hard-pressed to make much money, as is my situation, but as I say, it’s the mind that shapes experience, not just money that buys it.
And I like to think the quality of my life is high and has been high. I don’t believe I’m mistaken on that evaluation. It’s why my interest piques every time a friend, or my wife, my son, speaks of a book they’re read or are reading. Because I know the quality of life has a lot more to do with reading books than watching television. But beyond the personal, I wonder how much the contemplative power of the mind can involve the practical. Am I merely missing something obvious from Kant? Something that confirms that statement? Please comment if you see I am.
Inanimate things and processes move the world-at-large less than does the mind, but the mind gains its greatest power only upon the touchstone of natural necessity. Most people seem to think finance moves the world, as if market forces independent of the mind are most important. Besides, perhaps most sportsmen play their game lightly. Who wants to be as serious and hard as heavy metal? For that matter, the first and last heavy metal band, Led Zeppelin, despaired so greatly of Rosey that nothing else seems as central to the purpose, and no one wants to be reduced to that. (Though we feel the awe.)
Sportsmen are all in it together, however, and any of us deeply united with nature and committed to philosophy stand on the foundation and lift the weight. Could it be that we are the Iron Bridge to the future? We who preserve not only respect for nature and recognition of its necessity, but also active participation in nature. If climate change is going to overwhelm civilization, our civilization must be reconciled to nature if we will survive.
Different take on faith.