Teale, Edwin Way

Edwin Way Teale was a nature writer best known for books on the American seasons. He was a recipient of the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished nature writing. Among his other books are Grassroot Jungles (1937, rev. 1944), Boy's Book of Insects (1939), Byways to Adventure (1942), Dune Boy, The Early Years of a Naturalist (1943), Insect Life (1944), and The Wilderness World of John Muir 1954). He died in 1980.

A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives. The Lost Woods, 19

 

Our world, it is obvious, is shaped by our senses. Ibid.

 

Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. North with the Spring, 1951.

 

The world is never finished. Ibid.

 

Anyone, it seems to me, who loves anything in nature simply and sincerely will find a measure of joy in life. Ibid.

 

Not only seeing what we look at - accuracy of observation - but truth in conclusion is a first obligation of a naturalist. Ibid.

 

John Burroughs referred to the fox variously as a 'rogue' and a 'villain' - reflecting the general outlook of his day. But Thoreau, at an even earlier time, saw the fox in the modern concept - as an individual endowment of abilities, a unit in nature's interlocking whole. . Ibid.

 

From the edge of the pond, as the dusk begins to deepen, rises the round, clear, musical call of the tiny frog, the spring peeper, Hyla crucifer. First one, then another, then another. Ibid.

 

As Nellie and I drove on we talked of how few are the men, in all the written history of the world, who have known a fellow feeling for creatures called wild. The story of St. Francis of Assissi needs no miracles to make it superlative. It is miracle enough to find a man well disposed toward all the living things around him. Ibid.

 

That specialist in American bird songs, Aretas A. Saunders, studied records of 884 song sparrows and found that no two sang exactly alike. There were variations in duration, in accent, in pitch, and in quality. Moreover, the same bird does not always sing in the same way. Ibid.

 

Out-of-doors, adventures are everywhere. Wonders are all around us. If the world is stale, its fascination gone, the fault is in ourselves. As G. K. Chesterton put it: "The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder." Circle of the Seasons, 1953.

 

For observing nature, the best pace is a snail's pace. Ibid.

 

The universal solvent is memory. It dissolves the past. It eliminates time. Ibid.

 

How smoothly nature's vast machine whirs on with all the big and little cogs revolving in their places! Ibid.

 

There is, in nature, a timelessness, a sturdy, undeviating endurance, that induces the conviction that here we have a place to stand. Ibid.

 

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation. Ibid.

 

Nothing - not mountains nor sea nor shore nor rocks - is exactly the same on two successive days. Ibid.

 

Today I had lunch in the city with two scientists, a botanist and an ichthyologist. The botanist said he never kept a garden and the ichthyologist said he never went fishing. Ibid.

 

I sometimes wonder what difference it would have made in the reception of Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man if it had been called The Ascent of Man. Any advertising copy-writer would have told him to change the title. But the rugged honesty, the undeviating devotion to scientific method and thought that were cornerstones of his greatness are reflected in the title he chose. Ibid.

 

The seasons, like the rivers of Ecclesiastes. endlessly return to their beginnings again. Journey into Summer, 1960.

 

At times a remembrance will be hard and solid like an artifact, a piece of pottery or an arrowhead found in the sand. At other times a memory will be quicksilver. Ibid.

 

Rhythms infinitely varied run through nature. Ibid.

 

Government maps of national forests now carry a list of suggestions on what to do if lost, such as: Stop. Try to figure out where you are. Do not yell. Do not wander about. Do not run. Travel only downhill. On several occasions . . . the far-carrying racket of a chain saw has been used to guide lost persons out of the forest. Ibid.

 

Along this . . . California coast, in the 1840's, there had moved an armada of migrating whales estimated to have been between 25,000 and 50,000 strong. Ibid.

 

This insatiable desire to be inside other forms of life, to see the things that I see with their eyes and their minds&endash;this is a thread that has run through all our seasonable wanderings. A thousand reincarnations, each as a different form of life, would be too few to satisfy this curiosity. Thoreau understood it when he wrote of the calling of the Concord frogs: "So the frogs dream, would that I knew what!" Ibid.

 

Picking flowers, collecting butterflies, stuffing birds&endash;all these indicate a love, or at least an interest in nature. But on a plane far higher lives the one who leaves the flower blooming and the butterfly and bird flying. Ibid.

 

The most durable harvest of our lives, in all probability, is our harvest of memories. Ibid.