When I fly out of JFK airport and can look out from a window seat I gaze at the empty marsh below instead of the Manhattan skyline after our wheels lift off runway 4L. I’m thinking about Bob Morris, the New York surgeon I wrote about last time, and imagine him stalking a raft of ducks. The T.S.A. would not be happy if our pilot reported him leveling a twelve gauge between the reeds. But Bob left the marsh long ago.
The Jo Co Marsh was his favorite hunting ground after arriving as a medical student in New York City in the 1880s. At the end of the day’s work at Bellevue Hospital or the Cornell Clinic or assisting with surgery on patients in their own homes (it was more risky in hospital early in his career) he would often catch a train from Penn Station in Midtown to Rockaway, the closest drop-off point for Jamaica Bay. He’d collect his firearm from a friend at the Atlantic Hotel before heading to the marsh. When ducks and geese were not in season, he’d pick up fishing gear instead. There were plenty of striped bass, bluefish, porgies, flounders, and sheepsheads in the Broad Channel. Sometimes a friend helped to set lobster pots, catch soft shell crabs, or collect all the oysters they could cart back to the hotel for a roast. They had sea appetites and marine treasure to satisfy them.
The Bay was still quite productive by the 1930s, even as the metropolis was encroaching on his paradise. He now visited the marsh with a camera instead of a gun, and was a patron of the Audubon Society. He wanted the Jo Co to become a bird sanctuary, and its channels and little islands “forbidden to visitors.” Now that ninety airlines operate from the airport and the marsh is closed to the public he seems to have gotten his wish, if not all his hopes. The din of Rolls Royce engines a few hundred feet overhead is a better bird scarer than anything heard on a farm.
Reaching a more reflective age, he wrote, “When a man retires from the swift rapids of an active professional life he arrives at a long stillwater, but the banks of that stillwater are so alive that his days continue to be brimful.” He had heard “the Red Gods calling him to go” to borrow an expression from his soul-mate, Rudyard Kipling. There was still time to pursue his love of nature after the years of work, but they would be spent elsewhere.
He retired to his own sanctuary which he had purchased serendipitously on a whim many years earlier. It was a 440 acre estate near Stamford, Connecticut, and was rich in wildlife and virtually unspoiled. He was sanguine about leaving behind his career as a renowned surgeon, knowing how quickly fame fades. He was one of the first to bring aseptic surgery to America and had made many innovations in wound healing and in what today is called minimal access operations. He was comfortable, even anxious, to move on to the next phase of life, and would have cared little that along with a few others I had started to focus a light on his legacy. He wrote, “I felt that I had been born for the woods, the rivers, the mountains, and the sea. Anyone who wanted New York might have it and all that was in it. My light heart was out of doors. Only my heavy feet remained in town.” He couldn’t resist the call of the Red Gods: it was as if the poetic right side of his brain had gotten the better of his professional left.
The estate, called Merribrooke, lay barely 18 miles from New York City limits. While he couldn’t protect Jamaica Bay, at least he had more control over his own property and could dedicate his time there to conservation, writing, and horticulture. He even honed his grafting skills to try to bring back the American chestnut which had become almost extinct from an imported blight.
There can be little doubt from his memoirs that this was one of the happiest times of his life, blessed by the arrival of a daughter, Mary, in his graying years. There was a dark side. It wasn’t the burden of owning such a large estate, but the responsibility he felt for preserving a beautiful place for future enjoyment. He had plenty of run-ins with corporations and lawyers who wanted to develop the land or divert the Mianus River running through his property down to the sparkling Long Island Sound. “If succeeding owners can keep Merribrooke as a wild park for centuries to come with residences only on road frontage I shall ask these other people to be grateful to me for preserving a beauty spot intact near New York City at great personal effort and financial loss while “improvement” ogres stood about with snuffers all ready for putting out Nature’s light.” Those words, which we rediscovered among his papers, were scrubbed out of the original manuscript for his Fifty Years a Surgeon (1936).
Merribrooke largely survives today as the Mianus River Park, a fine woodland with public access. A Park website gives no clue whether anyone knows how such a place avoided being swallowed up by developers, or at what personal cost. Bob would have shrugged his shoulders – we are all forgotten sooner or later.
I was musing about his life on a flight from JFK to Virginia. As we flew parallel to the East River I saw on its banks the gray stone edifice of the New York Presbyterian Hospital which houses Weill Cornell Medical College. My wife and I worked at the College until we took early retirement, so many decades after Morris.
I used to regularly attend Grand Rounds in the hospital to keep pace with advances in other specialties. The Rounds were generally full, but quite a number of seats were taken by doctors of advanced years, some so advanced they leaned on their canes or struggled on the stairs. They all wore freshly-laundered white coats. These were distinguished men whom, a generation earlier, you might have asked to care for a sick relative or for yourself, but now…? One of them, a former departmental chairman, confessed to me, “It’s pathetic that we can’t keep away … can’t give it up.”
Many people never hear the Red Gods calling, and some unfortunately can’t afford to go, but for the rest I urge them to go – go – go. Abandoning the vocation you love is painful, but there is a time for grasping something you feel passionate about, that has been held in suspension for years, before the chance slips away forever – if not nature study, then golf or painting or DIY or growing bonsai trees, or anything else for the sake of heart’s ease. Women seem to be more successful in this than men. The call came urgently to me because my father never had the chance to go, and Bob’s died a few months after finishing his heavy duties as the Governor of Connecticut.
He must go — go — go away from here!
On the other side the world he’s overdue.
‘Send your road is clear before you where the old Spring-fret comes o’er you,
And the Red Gods call for you!
From The Red Gods by Rudyard Kipling
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