A Humbling, Amazing Response

I’ve been putting off writing about this subject, because I haven’t been able to think of words to describe my reaction—but there aren’t any. Also, this post has two audiences: First, to “everyone,” a.k.a. tout le monde, a.k.a. “all you kids in Internet-land”; and second, to John G______ (last name withheld, because I’m not sure he’d want to be identified publicly), in Massachusetts.

Back in May, John wrote me a letter and sent it in the mail to my house. Okay, first of all, who writes actual letters anymore? That itself is remarkable. Plus, it was two pages, single-spaced, typewritten (with an actual typewriter, in good ol’ Courier), and it was a thoughtful, and warm, response to my entire blog.

No joke—John had read all 544 posts, dating back to early 2009, and instead of leaving comments here and there on miscellaneous older posts, he wrote me the letter, commenting on several at once.

Seriously: He mentioned reading about lebkuchen, venison jelly, woodchucks, stinkhorns, and spiders.



He mentioned reading about our temperamental historic storm windows, my fibula fracture, and our Christmas tree.



By golly, I think he really did read through every post. Wow!



There’s something a little disconcerting about that—my blog is, basically, an online journal, and although I refrain from posting things that are quite personal, still, if you were to read it straight through, I suppose you would get a pretty personal glimpse into “who I am.”



Despite the slightly disconcerting realization that someone had actually read my blog, the flip side is that it is deeply gratifying, and humbling, and exhilarating, to think someone enjoyed reading it so much that he waded through the whole shebang, starting all the way back at my insignificant little first post.



Again, I’m an editor. And I’ve heard it said that authors, during the editorial process, oftentimes feel this sense of being deeply flattered, because the editor has read and considered every single word of the manuscript. Such a close reading, by someone “on your side,” is supposed to be a big ego boost. At least for some authors. I suppose this is kind of how it feels to be on the receiving end.



But here’s something else. John found my blog (much to my personal satisfaction) when he was doing web searches about Edwin Way Teale’s four American Seasons books. (You might recall that I’ve written at length about Teale, and particularly about his four American Seasons books.)



I admit it: Most of my posts are not well planned. They lack structure. The blog itself doesn’t stick to a single topic the way a “good” blog should (crafts; cooking; grandchildren; hotrods; etc). I’m chatty and rambly. And the posts are way too long. I know better than this.

I worry that potential clients for editing projects will find my blog and think that my haphazard free-writings must mean I’m an awful editor. (Trust me, casual journal writing and editing are two completely different things! Make no mistake: I’m much better at editing! I do this blogging stuff just for fun! ~Honest!)



However, I took extra care with my Teale American Seasons posts. So much “care” that I haven’t even yet finished my post for the last book of the quartet, Wandering Through Winter! It’s still in my file titled “Drafts Op Op.” And someday I will post it. (Meanwhile, John, this next picture is for you!)



My Teale posts are especially long and full of words. They are the antithesis of “successful” blogging and Internet writing; they are not breezy, choppy, simple, hyped-up, dumbed-down.

But here’s the thing: I liked them. I was satisfied with them. Of all my 500+ posts, those are easily in my top ten personal favorites. And if the Internet is good for something, it can be a powerful tool for connecting people who have similar interests, no matter where we are in the world. When I posted them, I’m sure I muttered to myself, “There you go. I spent a week writing that post, and maybe three people will eventually read the entire thing.”



But it didn’t bother me too much, because whoever those three people were, I knew they’d be Teale fans. I knew they’d have just finished reading the American Seasons books, and I knew they’d relish the connection with another person who enjoyed reading them.

So my emotions upon reading John’s letter last May were all over the place. Sure, I was momentarily freaked out: How’d he find my address? —Oh yeah, it’s a matter of public record. (Though I don’t engrave it on my posts, it’s also not a secret.) But most of all, I was elated.

Well more than 500 times, I’ve clicked “post” and had the sense that my little voice has just swirled away . . . into nothingness. Or who knows.



Yes, I was thrilled back when I started blogging, when people started leaving comments. And (spammers excluded) it still thrills me each time someone leaves a comment. (And yes, John, I do get an e-mail notification from Blogger each time someone posts a comment, even on the oldest posts.)

But John’s response has felt much, much different. I’ve been trying to decide how to reply to his letter, but I realize I can’t do better than to simply describe what happened, and how it made me feel.

For weeks after I received it, I showed it to friends and family: “Look at this incredible letter I got in the mail!” I read portions of it to just about anyone who would listen. I carried that letter with me everywhere I went.



I took it with me on two recent vacations. I kept it in my possession the way a dog carries around a treasured bone. Swear to God, I want to frame it and put it on my wall, the way a business owner frames his first dollar of profit. What else can I say?

And so, John, I heartily return your final comment to me:

Thank you! I really enjoyed reading that!

My best regards,

Julie

Journeys Around the Sun: Edwin Way Teale

It’s still early enough in the year to be thinking of the passage of time, as I do at every new year—jeez, it’s hard to believe it’s the year 2014! I suppose part of my pondering might also have something to do with this year’s lengthy onslaught of snow and bitter cold—I can’t help looking for signs the spring is coming.

And it is. Even if we’re getting yet another dump of ice and snow this weekend!

My evidence? Well, haven’t you been hearing cardinals singing outside your windows in the mornings? I have. And it’s a damn good song they’re singing!

I’ve been dipping into some of my favorite books that celebrate the annual cycle. A recent comment on my blog suggested to me a book by the great natural history writer Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns. (Thanks, Tina, I’m going to check it out!) Peattie’s books describing America’s trees are exquisite blends of science, poetics, and philosophy. Peattie educated his reader while ensouling his subjects.

Of course, the famous quartet of books by Edwin Way Teale is a monument to the changing American seasons, and I’ve written about them before.

But Teale’s more compact, and personal celebration of the changing seasons is A Walk Through the Year (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978). In it, he writes a brief essay for each day of the year, describing some natural event that happened on his farm in Connecticut. He intended it as a companion to A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, which tells about the property he purchased later in life, Trail Wood, which he treasured as a natural area.



A Walk Through the Year is pure Teale. In it, one of his later books, he shares his reflections on his and his wife, Nelly’s observations of nature at Trail Wood. It’s a gentle and pleasant conversation, as if you and the aging Teales were chatting in their living room, sitting around their cozy fireplace on some evening after a blizzard. “Guess what we saw at one of our bird feeders yesterday!” And “I was walking on the lane to the road and saw a red fox—guess what it was doing!”

To show you why I’ve been dipping into this book, and to celebrate the springtime we’re all hungry for, here’s an excerpt from A Walk Through the Year. Because the Teales were nuts about birds, I’ve chosen one about birds—specifically, red-winged blackbirds:

“February 28. This is the sound we longed for, dreamed about, looked forward to in the darkest days of winter. Rising and subsiding, becoming a storm of mingled voices, then ebbing away, it comes from the treetops along the brook. It is an excited sound, a festive, holiday sound. Like the torrents of spring, it is a rushing, liquid sound that here antedates the spring. It is the great chorus of the first of the homecoming flocks of the redwings.

“Bare only yesterday, the treetops along the brook today are clothed with blackbirds. A hundred and fifty or more swirled down to alight among the leafless branches before dawn today. All are males. The females will arrive later. We watch the birds, in the richness of their breeding plumage, flying from tree to tree, each alighting with its scarlet epaulets exposed. Their surging energy is contagious. We feel a sense of elation, a wave of optimism. The stolid endurance of the deepest winter drops away.

“We listen to the overlapping chorus of ‘okaleees’ or ‘bob-y-leees’ swell and fade and begin again. The interplay of sounds merges into a rolling, trilling clamor. Standing listening, we catch little dropped notes spilling through the chorus. The ‘okaleeeing’ is replaced by sharp metallic calls as all the birds take off in a cloud of black to sweep in curves, to turn and turn again, and then swirl down once more to the tops of the brookside trees.

“It is usually near the end of this shortest month of the year or in the earliest days of March that the redwings come back to Trail Wood. The intermingled tumult that comes down from the treetops seems compounded of relief at the end of a long journey, of ecstasy in reaching an age-old breeding ground, of health at a peak, and life lived intensely. We are swept along by the excitement pulsing through these hundred and more bodies. This wild musical clamor of the first of the returning redwings reechoes in our minds long after it is left behind. For the birds, the farflung journeys of migration now are a thing of the past. For us, the winter—all but a few short weeks—has run its course.”

------------------------------------

And yes: While visiting my parents two weeks ago in Columbia, Sue and I heard our first raucous, cacophonous red-winged blackbird chorus of the spring, and we almost jumped for joy!

Is winter over? Of course not. Look at all this frickin’ ice!

But hey—keep your hopes up! The cardinals are singing, and the redwings have appeared.

Today, There Are Only Hungry Birds

Boy, we’re having a genuine winter this year, aren’t we. Sue and I just got in from shoveling our six or so inches of snow, which, thankfully, was fluffy stuff and easy to toss away from our sidewalks with my trusty lightweight aluminum coal shovel (which came with the house).

While the sun was out, and while we were getting our workout, it actually didn’t feel that cold. But now that we’re inside with damp hair, and not moving anymore, now that the sun has gone behind a cloud, it’s starting to feel like that zero-degree weather we’re supposed to be having.

A look out our bathroom window, and I noticed more and more starlings perching on the small length of horizontal drain pipe connecting one section of gutter to another, in a place that’s sheltered by the eaves and out of the wind.

At one point, I counted fifteen of them, huddling together.

Now: I’m far from being in love with European starlings—they are exotic, invasive, noxious weeds of the bird world—but when it’s this cold, this bitter, this deadly, things are different. I’m on the side of life.



It reminded me of something my hero Edwin Way Teale wrote in his book A Walk Through the Year (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978), for his entry for “January 4” (p. 326):

When we put out bird food these winter days we are as impartial as nature. The varied species compete, as they compete in the wild, for seeds scattered on the stone wall under the hickories and along the lane, for suet hanging in mesh bags from the apple tree, for food filling our different feeders. Bluejays share the sunflower seeds with chickadees and evening grosbeaks. Cowbirds feed among the tree sparrows. In these bitter winds of January, there are no “good” or “bad,” “beneficial” or “harmful” birds for us. There are only hungry birds.

Aside from the gray squirrels that we see coming in from the woods, bounding across the glitter of the ice crust, the birds, in their varied shapes and colors, are the most evident form of warm-blooded life today. And they will remain so all during the rest of the weeks of cold. The “dead of winter”—how much more dead it would be each year without the birds!

Birds can survive winter, provided they have enough food to stoke the fires of their metabolism. When there’s snow on the ground, birds can’t find food very easily. If you haven’t done so yet, go get yourself a bird feeder and some seed.

Because today, there are only hungry birds.

Edwin Way Teale’s Autumn across America

Today we’re celebrating another classic work by the famous midcentury natural history writer Edwin Way Teale: Autumn across America: A Naturalist’s Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey through the North American Autumn (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956).




This is my third “book report” on Edwin Way Teale this year: I decided that in 2011, I would reread all four of Teale’s “American Seasons” books, in their appropriate seasons! To catch up with me, click here for my post on Teale’s North with the Spring (and an introduction to this remarkable quartet of books), and click here for my post on Teale’s Journey into Summer (including a discussion of the timing of the trips and the publication of the books).

The American Seasons Series: Spring and Summer

Each of the four American Seasons volumes chronicles the automobile travels of Edwin Way Teale and his wife, Nellie, as they traverse the continent for months, following the progress of a season in as many places and aspects they can.

In the spring volume (published in 1951 based on travels made in 1947), they rode the wave of the season from the southern tip of Florida all the way up to Maine: one big, long extended springtime of migrating birds and opening wildflowers—and lots more that you never would have noticed—all the way up the coast, ending as spring does with the summer solstice.

The summer book was published in 1960, based on their travels during the summer of 1957. For that project, they started at the summer solstice in New Hampshire, traced the northern edge of the United States clear to Montana, then wandered south through the Great Plains and explored Colorado and its Rockies. Thus they experienced “the summer of the shore, the summer of the forest, the summer of the Great Plains, the summer of the mountains . . . in vacation spots—along lake shores, on the mountain heights, in the cool north woods . . . [as well as] on salt flats and in corn country, amid swamps and in areas where falling rain would be sucked up by the thirsty atmosphere before it reached the ground.”




The Autumn Project

The autumn travels, and publication of the autumn book, actually occurred between the spring and summer projects. Autumn across America was published in 1956, based on travels that occurred in 1952. Their trip began in late August, looking east across the waves of the Atlantic on Cape Cod. Why in August? Teale explains at the beginning of chapter 3:

The season of summer extends to about September 21 but the summer season ends with Labor Day. Then the newspapers begin referring to summer in the past tense. Vacations are over. Schools commence. To the popular mind, September belongs to autumn as December belongs to winter. (p. 19)

Their autumn trip starts out rather like the summer one, for they travel west from New England taking a somewhat northern route, through Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. But here they continue west all the way to the Pacific, visiting Wyoming, Montana (and Yellowstone), Idaho, Utah, Oregon, and Washington.




Then they proceed southward into California, seeing the sequoias, Monterey, the migrating monarchs at Pacific Grove, and Yosemite. They end up on a very windy Point Reyes, north of San Francisco, facing westward across the Pacific, at sunset on the shortest day of the year.

Some Major Themes

Teale was an incredibly organized writer. Each book of the quartet offers about the same blend of topics. In each, there’s a chapter or two spotlighting individuals who make their living from the land, and he marvels at expansive agricultural endeavors, and their picturesque qualities.

And although he’s mostly interested in animals and plants, with chapters spotlighting particular species, he always includes a few chapters focusing on geological matters, on landscapes, on astronomy, and on notable environmental tragedies, or on disasters averted.

But in this volume, more than the others, there are certain subjects Teale weaves through the whole book:

Bird Migration. The Teales were avid birders! It’s no accident that their autumn trip took them across all four major flyways for migration, and Teale writes enthusiastically about the flocks they see. The map in the front endpapers has the four major North American flyways marked on it. Along the Atlantic Coast Flyway, there are “swallow clouds” at Cape May, where bazillions of migrating birds concentrate before crossing the Delaware Bay. The Teales trace the Mississippi Flyway in five states, and see the Central Flyway as they travel through the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana.




At some point, if you’re not really into birding, you either get weary of reading about the birds, or you begin to chuckle affectionately at Teale’s enthusiasm. At the Bear River delta on the Great Salt Lake, they experience their “Million-Duck Day,” where Teale, well, positively gushes at the thousands and thousands and thousands of birds they saw.

He keeps returning to his writerly style but always ends up helplessly gushing once again about the huge flocks: “For us who, among the depleted, overgunned ponds of the populous east, were accustomed to counting our flocks of migrant ducks in dozens and scores, the wonder never diminished in these thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of waterfowl” (p. 194). (Remember, Teale was writing at a time when conservation laws were still rather new.)

And then later, they visit the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge (on the Pacific Flyway) and see more zillions of birds: “Wherever we went the roar of waterfowl wings preceded us as mallard and pintail and baldpate and green-winged teal—perhaps some of the very birds we saw at Bear River—shot into the air from behind the curtain of the tule rushes” (p. 316). But the big deal there, that day, for the Teales, was the swarms of blackbirds! (But I’ll let you read about that yourself.)




Tracing the Paths of Explorers. Their route took them west, but they do more than just intersect with the paths of some famous explorers: They trace them. They first join the trail of Lewis and Clark at the juncture of the Knife and Missouri rivers, where, at Fort Mandan, the explorers had met Charbonneau and “his amazing squaw, Sacajawea” (p. 127).

Wait a minute—a note on that loaded term: The word squaw was not a loaded term in standard American English in midcentury. Americans didn’t know it was a deeply offensive term in the Native American language from which it was adopted. As far as any of us knew, it was a Native word for “wife” or for “woman”—same as you might refer to a young French woman as a “mademoiselle,” or a Spanish man as a “señor.” The Russian king was a “czar” and a Muslim sovereign was a “sultan.” I’m pretty sure that nearly all Americans who were not First Nation peoples had no idea that squaw was an offensive term, and Teale was simply using the pleasantly widened vocabulary of an educated man.

So let’s cut him a break, and acknowledge that the word came to have a different meaning in American English than it had in its original language. And, yes, now that we know how offensive it is, let’s please quit using it.

At any rate, it is clear that Teale admired Sacajawea, for he speaks directly about the importance of her contribution to the expedition. He mentions her often and notes places where she has been memorialized in place-names.

And so their path leads them along the Missouri, through the Rockies, all the way to where the Columbia joins the Pacific. Teale quotes from the Lewis and Clark journals, and he notes several plants and animals named for the explorers. He keeps the famous expedition in the reader’s mind as well as his own.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(By the way, this is not the "Lewis and Clark" we've been talking about! --Just a bit of humor to see if you're still paying attention!)

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Another explorer whose path the Teales keep intersecting is less well-known, except among biologists: Thomas Nuttall, and his assistant John K. Townsend, traveled the interior of America in the early 1800s not long after Lewis and Clark, botanizing and collecting biological specimens. Nuttall was the curator of the Harvard Botanic Garden, and as a result of his travels, he added “more new species to the lists of science than any other man in America” (p. 28). The Teales follow Nuttall’s path, off and on, from Cape May on the East Coast all the way to Vancouver and to Monterey. And yes, the parts about Nuttall are more fascinating than those about Lewis and Clark.




Autumn Color. Well, of course, Teale had to write about this subject. But perhaps the most surprising thing about Autumn across America is that the Teales, who lived in New York at the time, began their fall trip by promptly leaving New England! Remarkable, since New England is the official place to see a glorious riot of autumn foliage, picturesque white-painted churches, and so on. But the Teales have big plans—they’ve got to get across the continent, and through Rocky Mountain passes, while it’s still “fall.”

Teale gets around this problem by relating the splendor of New England’s fall color from memory! Then, he proceeds to witness and describe all the different colors of autumn, all across America. Autumn looks different in the Dakotas, in the treeless plains, in the Rockies, in the Pacific Northwest, in Northern California, than it does in the entire eastern half of the country.




One chapter focuses on “dusty autumn”—this is the dustiest time of year. (The early fifties, I understand, were drought years throughout much of America.) Though it is the bane of anyone trying to keep a place tidy, atmospheric dust, Teale points out, is what gives us our brilliant sunrises and sunsets, and it is what forms the nuclei of every single raindrop and snowflake: No dust, no clouds, no rain.




In his ruminations about fall color, Teale provides an especially insightful paragraph about the way we “feel” about autumn—how the lower humidity, the crisp air, the generally clear skies, and, especially, the riots of color in the landscape serve to exhilarate and uplift us:

In the forest, fall is the season of light. The aureate leaves, the golden carpet of fallen foliage reflecting rays upward from the ground, these fill the deciduous woodlands with a luminous radiance unknown at other seasons of the year. Henri Amiel noted in his Journal Intime: “The scarlet autumn stands for vigorous activity; the gray autumn for meditative feeling.” Later in the season there would come slaty skies, brown leaves, gray autumn. But now we wandered in the multicolored early days of fall, the time of vigor and elation. (109–10)

I truly appreciate that distinction between “red autumn” and “gray autumn,” for it helps me to conceptualize this Janus-faced season, so intensely colorful at one end and depressingly drab at the other. It’s almost hard to “picture” autumn for this reason. Thanksgiving usually looks very little like Columbus Day! (The dividing line, of course, is usually the Abscission Wind!)





The Pacific Coast. Of the quartet of books, this is the only one that explores Northern California, Oregon, and Washington, and it’s clear the Teales glory in these travels. About a third of the book focuses on this leg of the trip. (Here's a photo from the book--the Teales are seeing a group of sea otters, which were then just beginning to come back along the Pacific Coast.)




They’re easterners, writing for an audience that viewed the West Coast as a spectacular vacation destination. So if you like places like Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, Monterey Bay, the Redwoods, Mount Ranier, the Olympic Peninsula, tidepooling and skirting the coast all down the length of Oregon . . . you will love where this book goes.

End of the Trip

Teale really wraps it up nicely; their autumn travels began in late August, with them standing on Cape Cod, staring eastward across the Atlantic, watching the tide rise to its fullest point and then start to go out—and they complete their journey facing west across the Pacific, on a windy crag at Point Reyes, watching the tide ebb on Winter’s Eve, the shortest day of the year. (Here is a photo from the book, of the lighthouse at Point Reyes, taken that day.)




They return the next day to watch the hands move on Teale’s wristwatch as the minutes slip away from autumn: “The sun, shining from farthest south in the heavens, ‘stood still’ before beginning its long, slow climb to the zenith of June. One instant it was autumn, the next it was winter. In this moment in the sunshine, between breaths, fall had slipped away” (p. 363).

I have to admit, I got a little choked up as I read aloud the final passages of the book. At some point, you just feel like you’re traveling along with Edwin and Nellie, and when their epic adventure—their incredible, once-in-a-lifetime autumn trip across America—draws to a close, you can’t help but feel a pang.

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but Sue and I have been reading these books together, aloud, in the evenings, or when we have some driving to do. We react to it, comment on it, discuss it. It’s very pleasant to share a book this way, and I heartily recommend it.




So now there’s just one more of Teale’s American Seasons books: Wandering through Winter, based on travels that took place during the winter of 1961–1962, and published in 1965. (That’s the year I was born—how about that! This is also the book where Teale visits Jefferson City!) Wandering through Winter was the book that earned Teale the Pulitzer Prize, when Teale was sixty-six and had some thirty books to his credit.

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve read Wandering through Winter, so stay tuned for the final installment—I’ll probably be blogging about it about three months from now!

What Does Queen Anne’s Lace Look Like in the Fall?

This fall, I’ve been especially enjoying the dried, curling umbels of Queen Anne’s lace, and literature has helped.

You know Queen Anne’s lace—it’s a long-ago invader from Europe that’s now a common wildflower. Also called “wild carrot,” it is indeed in the carrot-parsnip-parsley-fennel-dill-anise-celery-caraway-coriander-cumin family, the Apiaceae, which used to be called the Umbelliferae (for its type of flower cluster, called an umbel, which has the same root as our word umbrella). I’ve written about the Apiaceae before—remember pretty little harbinger of spring?

Anyway, it should come as no surprise to you that I’ve already begun reading the third of Edwin Way Teale’s “American Seasons” volumes, Autumn across America. (Click here for my posts on Teale, including the spring and summer volumes.)




At the beginning of the third chapter, he quite poetically describes the look of Queen Anne’s lace in the fall: “Now along that road Queen Anne’s lace was going to seed, balling up like fingers closing into a fist.” Here, and in so many places in his writings, you can tell he had studied the great poets of our language—indeed, his bachelor’s degree was in English, and he had apparently taught that subject at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas.

“Balling up like fingers closing into a fist.” What a great metaphor! I think I would have characterized them as delicate little baskets full of sticktights!

At the end of chapter 8, Teale reveals a moment of “autumn sadness”; he has been quietly watching migrating plovers over a pond that he recalled from his youth:

Perhaps it was a plaintive recurring note in the killdeer’s call. . . . Perhaps it was the faraway, lonely, nostalgic sound of the train whistle. Perhaps it was the singing of the September insects, that dry orchestral music that carries like an overtone the thought of swiftly passing life. Perhaps it was compounded of all of them—this wave of autumn sadness that enveloped me.

In a day, a week, a month at most, the plovers would move on. . . . And nature—absorbed with species and averages, not with individuals—cares but little whether these birds return again. All the insects singing in the grass, all the leaves still spread to the sunshine, all the dusty annuals and the waning flowers—they were all living their last days and the end was moving swiftly toward them. Life would come again in the spring—but not this life, not to these flowers, not to these leaves, not to these crickets and grasshoppers.

(Fortunately, Teale soon witnesses something that, upon reflection, offered an antidote to his melancholy.)




. . . And then, ohh, I was recently feeling all artsy-fartsy while sitting at a fashionable Columbia coffee shop reading poetry from a book that I got for free. It was free because of a shipping accident. (When poetry comes to you like that, out of the blue, you’d better read it, because you were probably meant to have it.)

And so, because I got it for free, I’m going to share a poem out of it for free (at least, until someone tells me to get it the hell off my website, since I haven’t sought permission). (But maybe this counts as a review of sorts, and a glowing one at that, so perhaps my treachery will be forgiven.)

The book is called Inverted Fire, and the poet is Alice Friman. She was born in New York but is lucky enough to have lived in the Midwest! The volume was published in 1997 by BkMk Press of the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and I strongly recommend finding a copy for yourself. Alice Friman’s website is here. She is quite accomplished; her ninth poetry collection is being published this year. I love her poems.

More than a few poems in Inverted Fire are about autumn, and naturally that reminds me of a friend of mine who died last year, who was herself a gifted, accomplished poet, and she loved autumn the best.

This poem is on page 13 of Inverted Fire. It’s delicately unified in a circular pattern reminiscent of the flowering, seeding umbel itself, and the images are carefully interwoven, like the lacy patterns of the flower. When you read it, you’ll quickly understand why I’ve been thinking so much about Queen Anne’s lace this fall, for you see I, too, was born in the autumn, and I share the poet’s view that one’s season of birth influences one’s perspective . . .

Letter to the Children

In the new cold of late September
the prongs of Queen Anne’s lace that held
their doilies up like jewels
rise then stiffen, crushing toward center,
making wooden enclosures to die in
like the ones the Celts built to hold their enemies
then set aflame. The goldenrod leans,
licks at their cages. And all that’s left of daisies
are burnt-out eyes.

I walk these back fields
past the swish of cattails in their silver
grasses, the old ones
showing the woolly lining of their suede jackets
while the thistle, dried to gray,
bends her trembling head
and spills her seed.

It is the time—the great lying-in of Autumn—
and I am walking its wards.
And I remember it was now, late September
then on into the deep gully of fall—when the hackberry
groans and the black oak strains in its sockets, the winds
pushing in the long forest corridors—
that I too was born and gave birth.

And you are all Autumn’s children, all
given to sadness amid great stirrings
for you were rocked to sleep in the knowledge
of loss and saw in the reflection outside your window,
beyond the bars of your reach, your own face
beckoning from the burning promise
that little by little disappeared. What can I give you
for your birthdays this year, you who are the match
and the flaming jewel, whose birthright consumes itself
in the face of your desire?

(Copyright 1997 by Alice Friman)

Edwin Way Teale’s Journey into Summer

Four months ago I wrote a post glowing about the prize-winning midcentury natural history writer Edwin Way Teale, who seems unfairly overlooked these days. True, much of Teale’s work seems “dated”; science has explained or reinterpreted some of the wonders Teale wrote about, photography has improved, the places he described have changed—sometimes—and environmental problems have shifted. But the cycles of nature repeat each year. And of the changes that have occurred over the past fifty years or so, I’m intrigued by Teale’s observations of people, places, and events—in part because they are so “dated.” It’s American history—Americana, nostalgia—and it’s natural history history. As I told you in that earlier post, I decided that this year I will reread all four of Edwin Way Teale’s “American Seasons” books, in the appropriate seasons. In April, I reread North with the Spring, the first of the quartet that Teale wrote. (Seriously, read that previous post, because here I’m gonna just sketch the background stuff for you.) The American Seasons Project Each of the four volumes describes a three-month-long, cross-country trip celebrating an entire season. At the beginning of each trip, Teale and his wife, Nellie, pack their car with binoculars, cameras and film, outdoor gear, notebooks, road and topo maps, “tramping shoes,” raincoats, and field guides. They lock up their house, get in the car, and begin a zigzagging route across America for an entire season, witnessing hundreds of seasonal natural events; hiking, birding, canoeing, riding in planes, and more; meeting naturalists, scientists, and others connected to the natural world; and taking oodles of notes. Why do I admire these books so much? There are many reasons—some of them quite personal. They represent America as it was about the time I entered the world, a world quite different from today’s; a world where travelers ate at local cafés, and they stayed at motor courts where air conditioning was a bonus but pretty little window boxes with flowers were routine. And these books celebrate the constancy of nature, which changes little, even though human fashions change. I take great comfort in that. The Teales are like gentle, reflective, knowledgeable grandparents (indeed, they remind me of the adults of my early childhood). Teale, like me, was an inveterate journaler and note-taker. He wrote a lot! (I do too—usually, too much!) Teale simply takes his time, and he finishes thoughts. He reflects on what he sees; he reflects on humanity. The Teales poke along America’s back roads, stopping often to take pictures and absorb what they see, which is something that Sue and I love to do. So, on the first day of summer, June 21, 2011, I began reading Journey into Summer, fifty-four years after Edwin and Nellie Teale stood on a bridge north of Franconia Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, watching the sun rise on the first day of their new adventures through a season. (Which is the exact same spot where they had watched the sun set ten years before, at the end of their journey north with the spring!) Why Did “Autumn” Come before “Summer”? Although it’s not apparent when you read the books, the Teales did their autumn project years before the summer one. I have often wondered why they didn’t take their four seasonal trips in the order of the seasons themselves. Here is when the books came out (note the lag time between the travel dates and the publishing dates—Teale had to collect tons of background information before he could compose satisfying essays about their adventures; and then the books had to go through the publishing process): North with the Spring: traveled 1947, published 1951 Autumn across America: traveled 1952, published 1956 Journey into Summer: traveled 1957, published 1960 Wandering through Winter: traveled 1961–1962, published 1965 I think I’ve figured out why the “autumn” project came between the spring and summer ones. Granted, I haven’t scrutinized the Teale Papers at the University of Connecticut, which might shed more light on the question, but here’s what I speculate. First, it’s not clear to me when the Teales decided this could or would be a four-volume series (it’s a massive undertaking). As far as I can tell, the first project was envisioned simply as a single, long spring: By traveling northward, surfing on the wave of springtime’s progress, the Teales—who were in need of a good, long springtime—could shake off some of the sadness of the 1940s war years. Even if Teale had early pondered the possibilities of doing all four seasons, he must have been too prudent to announce it right away. Experienced authors and publishers know not to trumpet about a “forthcoming multivolume series” without a guarantee that more than just the first volume will ever actually come out—which means, without the completed manuscripts in-hand. I think that the autumn volume came second in line because it follows the same kind of progression that spring does: a unidirectional movement from one point to another, from hot to cold, or cold to hot. But summer and winter aren’t like that; they peak in the middle, and a latitudinal voyage “with” those seasons couldn’t work the same way. Whenever he considered making it a four-volume series, I’ll bet Teale was scratching his head about how to “do” summer and winter; so meanwhile, I think he completed the volume about autumn (it, like spring, is more fun, colorful, and dynamic than summer and winter, anyway). But as he created the spring and autumn volumes, Teale must have been pondering how was he going to approach the summer and winter seasons, conceptually. At the beginning of Journey into Summer, Teale describes the situation as he (beautifully) characterizes the season:

Spring and autumn are constantly changing, active seasons. Summer is more stable, more predictable. We tend to consider it the high point of the year, with spring moving toward it and autumn retreating from it. In summer life is easier, food and warmth more abundant. Babies born then have a lower infant mortality rate than at any other season of the year. When, some years ago, Columbia University psychologists conducted a survey, they found that, other factors being equal, most persons have the highest level of good feeling, the greatest sense of well-being, in the summertime.

(Now, of course, scientists have identified the opposite, the bad-feeling of wintertime, as Seasonal Affective Disorder.)

To the average person, summer is the friend, winter the enemy. . . . Instinctively summer is accepted as the normal condition of the earth, winter as the abnormal. Summer is “the way it should be.” It is as though our minds subconsciously returned to some tropical beginning, some summer-filled Garden of Eden. . . . . . . Summer is vacation time, sweet clover time, swing and see-saw time, watermelon time, swimming and picnic and camping and Fourth-of-July time. This is the season of gardens and flowers, of haying and threshing. Summer is the period when birds have fewer feathers and furbearers have fewer hairs in their pelts. Through it runs the singing of insects, the sweetness of ripened fruit, the perfume of unnumbered blooms. It is a time of lambs and colts, kittens and puppies, a time to grow in. It is fishing time, canoeing time, baseball time. It is, for millions of Americans, “the good old summertime.” (2–4)

And here is where Teale explains the overall concept for his summer project (as well as the winter one):

But America has many summers. Its continental span embraces the summer of the shore, the summer of the forest, the summer of the Great Plains, the summer of the mountains. We had chosen our general route to carry us through the greatest variety. We would see the season in vacation spots—along lake shores, on mountain heights, in the cool north woods. But we would also see it on salt flats and in corn country, amid swamps and in areas where falling rain would be sucked up by the thirsty atmosphere before it reached the ground. (4)

The Route Thus, instead of tracking the “progress” of a season as it sweeps across the continent, the Teales opted to taste as many different flavors of the American summer as they could, in a 19,000-mile, three-month-long road trip. As with all the American Seasons volumes, there’s a map in the front endpapers that shows the Teales’ travel route. Their summertime trip in 1957 began in New England and led westward across the northern edge of the United States, tracing along the shores of all the Great Lakes, continuing westward near the Canadian border all the way into Montana. Then the Teales turned south and into the belly of the summertime beast, into the sweltering heat of the Great Plains (the dust bowl days would have been a vivid memory for many of Teale’s readers). The route extended as far south as Oklahoma and into Texas before the Teales finished their trip with a grand tour of Colorado. The volume ends, as summer ends, at the autumnal equinox, with the Teales watching the sunset from atop Pikes Peak, beside the tracks of the cog railway, east of the summit house. (How many people have taken pictures of their families at this place?) America’s Many Summers In addition to their “field glasses” and “tramping shoes,” the Teales brought with them their sense of wonder, their curiosity, their willingness to have adventures. You can tell they were best friends and excellent travel partners. Some of their conversation—even the silly stuff people talk about as the miles drift by—is recorded in the book:

Nellie started it with what seemed a perfectly logical observation that if there is a word “herbaceous” there ought to be a word “shrubaceous.” This was followed by deciding a good name for a combination swamp and bog would be “swog.” And it all ended in hastily changing the subject when I volunteered that if a small lion is called a cub and a small horse is called a colt a small swallow might be called a “sip.” (63)

The Teales’ journey included both the work and the play of summer. They pay special attention to the activities and challenges of timber harvesters, fishermen, ranchers, and farmers, whose livelihoods, and lives, revolve with the seasons. Many of the places the Teales visit would classify as high points of any Great American Summer Vacation of 1957. For instance, like thousands of other tourists, they see Niagara Falls. But watching it with naturalists’ eyes, they particularly enjoy watching the ducks and other fowl that drift so perilously close to the edge, then gracefully take flight just before the plunging abyss. The Teales visit all the Great Lakes (what is billed today as “America’s North Coast”). In northern Ohio, they visit Kelley’s Island and its ancient glacial grooves. Near Sandusky, they also visit the famous Cedar Point amusement park and comment on the thrill rides, “the salt-water-taffy stands, the booths where ‘Presto Pups’—small frankfurters on a stick—were toasting” (40). Teale, however, was much more interested in the miraculously abundant, annual swarms of mayflies that were coating the “green, glowing neon sign” of the Breakers Hotel! (And just about everything else!) They enjoy the North Woods country of Michigan and Minnesota, a landscape dominated by vacation cabins on lakes, of hunting and boating and fishing. Generations of Americans have traveled there to escape the heat of summer and the pressures of modern life. Pikes Peak, where they end the journey, is also, of course, one of the great American family-vacation spots. In Nebraska, they see Scott’s Bluff and Chimney Rock. In Michigan, they see Miner’s Castle. At Devil’s Tower, in Wyoming, they spend an entire day viewing a large prairie dog town protected by its proximity to the National Monument. This was before the park service started seriously nixing the feeding of cheez doodles, hot dogs, and Juicy Fruit gum to the wildlife, and back when everyone indulged in the pleasure of rewarding a critter’s begging behavior. Even the Teales shared some of their Fig Newtons with the rodents. (Remember when feeding the animals was okay?) Along the same lines, the Teales describe a visit to a garbage dump at Copper Harbor, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There, motorists could watch wildlife by simply parking at the town dump before the onset of twilight and waiting for the hungry bears to appear and start pawing through the trash. (I think Teale’s observations of his fellow bear-watchers are almost as interesting as his notes on the behavior of the bears!) The Nature of the Season Teale was a natural historian, so of course, that’s what this book is really about. If there was any doubt about it, then the second chapter clears it up: On the very second day of summer, Edwin and Nellie get off to a roaring start by donning their “rubber-soled sneakers that would cling to rocks” and spending the whole day leisurely walking down “the wild Sunday River” near the New Hampshire–Maine border. (It is now a huge ski and golf resort, apparently. Sigh.) As they follow the river, they watch the birds and the butterflies; they note the little river’s various gurgles and splooshes, the small plunging waterfalls, and the quiet pools: “Half a mile or so downstream, I remember, we sat for a long time beside a diminutive waterfall only a foot or two high, delighting in the low music that filled the air. The water gurgled and hissed, lisped and murmured. Never before had we appreciated quite so clearly how many rushing, bubbling, liquid sounds combine to form the music of falling water” (8). Doesn’t that sound lovely? Their vacation was off to a fantastic start! Later, they spend another entire day observing interactions between a pair of nesting woodpeckers and a pair of nesting starlings. On another day, they experience a bona fide dust storm in northwest Nebraska, which provides Teale the opportunity to teach the reader something about windblown loess and Great Plains agriculture. In Florissant, Colorado, the Teales visit “the valley of the fossil insects,” where more than a thousand different species of fossil insects had been discovered, preserved in perfect detail. (Teale loved insects as much as he loved birds!) In 1969, the area became the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. At Rocky Mountain National Park, the Teales drive the famous Trail Ridge Road and discover blooming specimens of Pedicularis groenlandica, a “fairyland flower”; “the Alpine bloom we wanted most to see” (307). The common name of this plant is “elephant’s head” because the arrangement of its pink petals looks amazingly like a tiny elephant head. (I read this part with special interest, as I had searched for this same crazy plant on my first visit to RMNP, and I had felt the same delight upon finding it!) And it’s not all biology—there’s a wonderful chapter about the annual, mid-August Perseid meteor shower. You can’t write a book about the wonders of summertime without talking about the Perseids! The Teales planned their trip so that they could be in Kiowa County, Kansas, at the Kimberley farm, which (at that time at least) was known as the “Kansas Meteorite Farm.” It was here, in the late 1800s, where a farmwife named Eliza Kimberley recognized that the strange, heavy rocks that were strewn all over her family’s property were meteorites from outer space. Once she could get someone to listen to what she was saying, her smarts, and sales of the space rocks, provided a comfortable income for her family! The place is still there, even though the Kimberleys/Kimberlys are not. Teale tells her story while also describing his meeting with the Kimberley descendants, and then describes his and Nellie’s memorable, magic time spent watching the shooting stars under the black midnight skies of Kansas. Green and Golden Waves Teale couldn’t write a book about summer without taking note of all the varieties of agriculture that our nation is blessed with. Here are some of his impressions upon entering Iowa in midsummer:

Poets generally have sung of wildflowers and landscapes arranged by nature. It is the beauty of the unplanted and the untamed, of mountains and streams and forests and shore, that stirs us most deeply. But everywhere we went these summer days, Nellie and I appreciated, too, another kind of beauty in the out-of-doors, the beauty of cultivated fields and agricultural crops. By now we could close our eyes and conjure up their forms and colors—the red and green of blooming clover spangled with fluttering butterflies; rows of potatoes, all in bloom, extending for miles across the black loam of upper Minnesota; the North Dakota flax stretching away in a sea of blue; vineyards running in parallel lines up and down the Michigan hills; the great wheat fields, rippling, golden, cloud-dappled, restless as water in the wind. But none of the scenes that returned before our inward eye brought more delight than the remembrance of green corn, row on row, with banner leaves all flowing in the wind. This greater grass, the corn or maize, has a fluid, graceful, impressive beauty of its own. All through Iowa . . . we were surrounded by corn, rarely out of sight of corn. Mile on mile, the rows went by, the great parade of corn, all drawn up in review. We saw the leaves shining as though waxed or varnished in morning sunshine. We saw them powdered with gray dust along the secondary roads. We saw the rows running up and over the hills, following the long straight lines laid down by the planters in spring. (230–31)

Oh, my friends, I could go on and on, because there’s so much more! I really hope you’ll consider finding yourself a copy of Journey into Summer, a true classic of American natural history writing. I mean, even if you can’t personally take a nice, three-month-long vacation traversing a majority of the United States this summer, you can easily share the fun and adventures the Teales had in 1957. A Few Notes about the Pictures in This Post First, I've copied the route map and some black and white photos from Teale's Journey into Summer. I don't have permission, but then Teale is dead, his publisher is defunct, and this is basically a review. There are some photos here that my Mom and Dad took back in the 1970s on some of our family vacations (the cog railway at Pikes Peak; the distance view of Pikes Peak; and my brother and myself at Miner's Castle on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan). Some other family photos are ones from my Grandma S's niece Marguerite and her husband Ralph (Aunt Minnie, Grandma, and Ralph at Niagara Falls; view of Niagara Falls; and a fishing boat at Gunn Lake in Minnesota). Marguerite and Ralph left behind a trove of nifty travel slides from the sixties and seventies. I could do a whole blog just about their slides. The rest of the photos are either mine or Sue's. From the top: A section of trail at Gans Creek, south of Columbia; sunbathers at Nickelplate Beach, Huron, Ohio; a little girl playing in the sand at Huron's Lake Park; a canoe on the Current River; peaches in our backyard; corn growing by the Katy Trail north of Jefferson City; view of Cedar Point amusement park, taken from a ride in a 1929 Ford Tri-Motor (which would have been retro even to Teale!); mayflies on a light pole on Kelleys Island, Ohio; a babbling spring along the Current River; a paragraph and pressed "elephant head" leaf from one of my journals; a vineyard on North Bass Island, Ohio; a cornfield near Berlin Heights, Ohio.