Seeing the world in a grain of sand

The Path

A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe

Chet Raymo

Walker & Co.: 198 pp., $21

*

Chet Raymo’s “The Path” is a cannonball fired across the bow of the SS Reality TV, a wretched ship sailing on most of the major networks. Distilled from a lifetime’s experience, the book wrests back an appreciation for the ordinary from all those silly shows that capture the world, complete with soundtrack. While the situations on the tube are so wearily contrived, Raymo’s book uses the slightest of conceits: He takes readers on a walk.

To be more precise, he takes us down a path from his home to Stonehill College in North Easton, Mass., where he teaches astronomy and physics. For 37 years, Raymo has taken the same shortcut every day -- a one-mile route across an old estate once owned by a local family, the Ameses, and bequeathed to the town as a protected woodland.

The path is “a well-worn track, three or four feet wide,” leading through small woods of oak and white pine, then crossing a brook, open fields and a low-lying muddy meadow. Here Raymo seeks -- and finds -- the laws of nature and the existential problems of man hidden under every leaf and rock, or caught in the murmur of running water. “If it is possible to know a landscape well, I know this one,” he writes. “I can anticipate the exact day in late February when I will hear the first red-winged blackbirds.... After thirty-seven years, this knowledge is in my bones, put there by long experience, by close observation, by love.”

But “The Path” is not untethered poetic musing, and Raymo’s voice doesn’t get lost in gee-isn’t-nature-wonderful rhapsodizing but instead strikes a reverent tone. He employs the limpid language of science to startle us into seeing the familiar world with fresh eyes. “It is possible to find bits of glacial drift in Easton that had their origin anywhere,” he says, eyeing stones in the dirt. “Pieces of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Quebec litter the ground beneath my feet.”

Such is Raymo’s method throughout: As he ventures onward, the universe comes to nestle in his rustic petri dish. Spotting the Canada mayflower in the sun, he explains that “a fraction of a millionth of an ounce of fused hydrogen is all it takes to rocket [it] up out of the ground.” Crossing Queset Brook, he describes the pull of gravity that enabled these waters to power the mills owned by the Ameses, who built their wealth on shovel making in the 19th century.

It’s too bad we can’t be there, but Raymo consoles us with splendid imagery: Entering the meadow, he finds fiddlehead ferns “like crosiers shaking their tight little fists at winter past.” His mind then smoothly associates: from ferns to thoughts of spring, then to the rise of the first plants on Earth: “With the invention of photosynthesis,” he declares, “life plugged into a star.” When he “reads” the glacial scratches left on bedrock cliffs, Raymo is a woodsman like Sam Fathers in Faulkner’s “The Bear,” who taught a boy to navigate the woods without any compass or guide.

And yet there is something to be found in “The Path” beyond the simple delight of accompanying a nimble narrator: The hard work of businessmen like John and Oliver Ames gave their descendants enough financial freedom to study the region’s flora and fauna. This wasn’t some silly pursuit, Raymo explains, but an act of preservation.

Some wrote important treatises on the region’s plants and trees, while the Ameses hired Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted to accentuate their estates and “to create artificial landscapes that pay homage to the deep history of the land.” “Olmsted sought to create something that was not quite wilderness and not quite civilization,” he writes. “He had no qualms about moving tons of earth ... if the result was beautiful and ostensibly ‘natural.’ ”

Nature, refined through man’s imagination, then, is the affirmative note Raymo strikes. If rain forests are being mowed down, rather than lament their loss, we should reclaim what we can like those New Englanders, who believed in man’s ability to create his own Arcadia. Raymo’s vision strikes a balance between nature and development: “Like Olmsted’s parks, the Arcadia we should cultivate

And so, as Raymo arrives at the college, with our imperiled planet on his mind, “The Path” ends, and its final effect is contagious, even challenging: What history is hidden outside your front door? Shut off the TV and find out.