• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 654 0

I found myself hiking through a pasture with a fishing pole and a hunk of Spam in hand. The Spam was for bait, a gift from my host, Rich, who was a rather expert angler. He’d lived all his life in Shrewsbury and knew all the fishing holes on the Severn River. (And probably, for that matter, most of the fish.) Rich had driven me out to the middle of a large pasture, parked his car in the shadow of a hayloft, and set off across the country, following a cow path toward the Severn. The way he picked his own route reminded me of hiking somewhere like the Monte Wood in Port San Julian, except the environment around us was radically different. In England, everything about the scenery, down to the almost stifling peacefulness, demonstrates man’s ability to manipulate the environment. In South America, there was absolutely no question who wore the pants in the man-vs.environment relationship. (Not that destructive humans weren’t doing their best to catch up.) The human settlements I passed through felt fragile and slapdash. Even places like Rio de Janeiro, concrete-straitjacketed as they were, seemed overwhelmed by the absolute vastness of Brazil when I saw them from the airplane window. In Darwin’s time, the contrast between North and South, stately countryside and untamed wilderness, must have seemed even greater.

We left off fishing late in the afternoon and drove back to town for fish and chips, beer in the pub, and a fervent discussion of the Liverpool soccer team. (Sample dialogue, between a soon-to-be-bride and her close male friend: “You told me in December that you’d be at my wedding no matter who was playing!” “Well, I didn’t know they’d be at home.”)

The next morning Rich had to work, so I wandered around the Shrewsbury town, touring the thirteenth-c e ntury castle, admiring the signs outside the pubs that granted the owners a license “to sell by retail all intoxicating liquor for consumption on or off the premises,” contemplating the modern “Darwin Shopping Centre,” and strolling through blackberry bushes along the Severn, which wound in slow, stately curves from our countryside fishing spot back through town and right up to Darwin’s childhood home.

The Mount, as it was known, stood apart from the rest of the houses in town and was snugly walled off in a suburban neighborhood. (Darwin’s father was a wealthy, popular country doctor, and he could afford to splash out on his estate.) A small plaque on the façade commemorated Charles Darwin’s birth and noted his “detailed observations of the Galapagos.” The house itself had long since passed from the Darwin family, and now served as the local land valuation office, full of white-collar land valuers buzzing about attaching numbers to parcel maps. This was a curious thing to me: the country house that Darwin had purchased in his thirtiess, where he had lived and worked until his death, was now an English heritage site, perfectly preserved down to the furniture, paintings on the walls, and plants in the garden. I’d been to Down House, as it’s called, a few days earlier, before coming out to Shrewsbury, and found there a steady stream of tourists, myself among them, wandering through, gawking at Darwin’s rocking chair, and taking pictures of Venus flytraps in his greenhouse. While each house was significant to Darwin’s life and personality, the relative importance attached to them—the touristy, well-preserved landmark house on the one hand, and the land valuation office on the other—seemed yet another reminder that Darwin the evolutionist superseded most other aspects of him.

I rang the bell at the front door of the Mount, and after a few moments, a pleasant, middle-aged red-haired woman let me in. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said.

I asked if there was anything Darwin-related to see.

“There’s really nothing left,” she said, but then she added, “You can see the room where he was born.”

I said I’d be delighted, and we walked upstairs. She led me toward a door, and as she was about to open it, a man in suit and tie walked out. “Is the Darwin room free?” she asked him.