The Bird Story, Part 4
Plus some links because I can't stop linking
If you have no idea who Isabella Bird is and/or why I’m writing about her, read this first.
In the U.S., Bird might be best known for her 1873 memoir A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. Her story of riding on horseback through the Colorado Territory is told through a series of letters written to her sister in their native England. Bird was 42, had just finished a trip through Australian, New Zealand, and what would be Hawaii. But this trip tested her in new ways—not the least of which was falling for a handsome trapper—and describes a gorgeous, pitiless place that no longer exists. In her native England, her books about backcountry trips in China, Japan, Malaysia, and Korea might be better known.
At its most basic, Bird’s purpose was to take readers with her to places they could not go because of financial, social, or physical reasons. She travels because it makes her feel less terrible (more on that in a minute) and to share the adventure with her sister Hennie, whose poor health keeps her in England. Even when Bird is nearly killed fording a flooded river on horseback, for example, she shakes it off with a middle-aged sturdiness and a stiff-upper lip, which are qualities often admired but rarely ever celebrated. It’s that quiet competence might have led to the wider world of books to forget her. If she were more inclined to drama, she might still be a household name.
Regardless, it’s likely she’d remain unknown in my personal world had there not been a pandemic. And, no, I’m not saying that a pandemic happened simply to introduce me to a travel writer I hadn’t before known. In this time when there are so many tragedies of all shapes and sizes, it’s become important to pay attention to any available silver linings. For me, falling into Bird’s world has been one of the silvery-est.
Because of the pandemic, I’ve met a woman who didn’t confirm to what I’d been taught women of that period were, which is the Angel of the House who struggled under the patriarchy while having a dozen children and dying young. Bird married in middle age, was widowed a few years later, and never had children. Her first successful book wasn’t published until she was in her mid-40s. After her husband’s death, she trained as a nurse, then founded a medical mission in her husband’s honor in India. Because of an ill-timed invasion, she found herself a war reporter during the Japanese invasion of Korea, after she’d been on a mapping mission to Kurdistan and Persia.
She did this more than 175 years ago. I have all of the advantages of a modern woman and can’t leave my house.1
Physically, I cannot go anywhere I haven’t already been a million times. But because of my ever-growing obsession with discovering as much as I can about Bird, I’ve traveled in time and space. Even now, assuming that we are able to travel again in the near future, I want to know more and plan to visit her archives in Edinburgh and Denver.2 I intend to revisit as many of the places she saw in order to know how the world she experienced has changed—and how it hasn’t.
Some of the places she went are already familiar to me. In 1852, during her first trip to the United State when she was in her early 20s, she traveled all over the Eastern U.S. and into Canada’s Maritimes. One of her stops was Albany, New York, which happens to be a city I know well, if only because it’s the largest city near Oneonta, N.Y., where I’ve lived for 20+ years.
“Albany is one of the prettiest towns in the Union,” she wrote from her hotel room near what is now the state capital complex. From there, she could see the traffic on the Hudson River, which is where the Erie and Champlain canals met. The river is full of sloops and steamers, “painted white, and the sails are perfectly dazzling in their purity, and twenty, thirty, and forty of these flotillas may be seen in the course of a morning.”
One hundred and fifty years into the future, it’s hard to imagine anyone associating the words “pretty” or “pure” to Albany. It is lovely enough, mind, but hardly something to write home about, mostly because all of its more charming districts have been carved up by interstates. The canals and the river no longer dictate how the city operates. Now it’s more about political currents more than actual ones.
Because I am the right kind of nerd, I found out what happened to the Delavan (which she misspells “Delaval”), the hotel Bird stayed in. She described it as “peculiar” and “comfortable,” which is bland enough. What stuck out to her was that the waiters were Irish girls who worked under a “coloured” manager, “and their civility and alacrity made me wonder that the highly-paid services of male waiters were more more frequently dispensed with.”
Theophilus Roessle, the self-described “Celery King,” owned the Delavan Hotel at that time, having recently purchased it from Edward Delavan, a wealthy abolitionist.3 The hotel itself employed Stephan Myers, who was one of the leaders of the Underground Railroad in the area. Many of the Black men who worked at the hotel were also workers in the area’s anti-slavery movement. An anti-slavery activist herself, Bird may have known this before she checked in.
Roessle, said Celery King, was a German immigrant made his fortune growing exactly what you’d expect. He invested his celery money in real estate, which was a wise choice since the Victorian celery bubble (and, yes, there was a Victorian celery bubble) would burst a few years later. He sold the hotel in 1890. You can’t visit it because it burned down in 1892. The Egg, which is one of the more iconic buildings on the Albany skyline, stands there now, if the old maps are to be trusted.
Bird’s room looked directly onto the train tracks. “All night long,” she writes, “[I] was serenaded with screams, ringing of bells, and cries of ‘All aboard!’ and ‘go ahead!’” After her brief stay, she’d take that train to New York City. I’ve taken that same train — well, I imagine the physical train is different after all these years — to New York City myself.
Her description of that ride remains true. “A very undignified scramble takes place for the seats on the right side of the cars, as the scenery for 130 miles is perfectly magnificent. [The tracks] run along the very verge of the river, below a steep cliff, but often are supported just above the surface of the water upon a wooden platform,” she writes. A couple of sentences later she mentions how magnificent the view is, with the November sun beaming “upon swelling hills, green savannahs, and waving woods.”
The only difference between how I’d write about the same trip compared to her writing might be word choice. Rest assured, the scramble for seats on the river side of the train (as well as the hills, plains, and woods) remains the same.
Some links (not Bird related):
It is very possible to have too much money: the Enhanced Games
Reader: I cried a little.
I’m a member of the We Do Not Care Club4.
We talk about this a lot when we talk about weaving at the Fenimore Farm.
It’s almost like this country wants us to be exhausted and broke just because we care about other people.
The Declaration of Sentiments hits harder this year.
Why feeling good feels like a full-time job.5
Perhaps the most amusing story I’ve written about lately. Humans can be great.
I wrote this is 2020, FYI. And while I don’t have to worry about COVID restrictions (mostly), I do worry that the federal government may one day decide I can’t leave the country anymore because I won’t conform to whatever they come up with next. The more things change, I guess.
I still have not done this, mostly because I seem to be the only person obsessed with Bird.
There’s a whole sidebar waiting to happen about these guys. If anyone knows of any existing research…
You are welcome to make your own membership card, if you care to. I do not.
Related: foot/ankle update soon. Short version: I’ve been in a big ol’ boot for four weeks and the future is murky.