In 1819, the renowned Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray walked from Aberdeen, Scotland to London, England in order to visit the natural history collection at the British Museum. If the modern M6 had been available to him, this would be a distance of 548 miles – one way. However because Mr. MacGillivray took a more scenic route that included Ben Nevis, the distance he walked totaled 837 miles; a distance he covered in approximately eight weeks.
When the CoVid-19 outbreak began, I had a hunch that the sitting administration of the United States was ill-prepared to take the necessary steps to address it and keep the population as safe as could be from it. Yet even given my long-established and finely-honed cynicism did I imagine just how ill-prepared they were, and how badly they would bollocks it up, leaving us in the emotionally and economically hamstrung state we find ourselves today. And while I spent much of my free time in the spring of 2020 reading more books than I perhaps normally would have read, I ceased writing in my journal. Looking back, it seems now that it was an unconscious decision, as if I wanted to one day be able to forget it all happened.
As one accustomed to traveling with some frequency, sitting at home these past two months has certainly instilled in me a certain desire to go forth into the world once again – even an otherwise unexciting business trip would do at this point. So when I looked over my shelf of books awaiting a reading (“shelf”… singular? Oh who am I kidding?) John van Wyhe’s new “Wanderlust, The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer, the First Female Tourist” quickly caught my attention.
As I, like so many other naturalists, have long kept a dated record of the natural events I witness occurring around me throughout the year, I was recently delighted to discover when and how the practice is able to be documented as beginning.