Edwin Way Teale was born in Joliet, Illinois,
in 1899. As a child, he lived in Illinois but spent summers
at his grandparents' farm, Lone Oak, located near the Indiana
Dunes and Valparaiso.
He authored one book that dealt with this experience later
in his lifetime, entitled Dune Boy.
Teale graduated from Columbia University and
began his writing career as a magazine assignment writer and
editor in New York. During that time, Teale and his wife,
Nellie, planned on breaking away from the city and becoming
nature writers, a dream both had held for many years. In 1941,
he left his job to pursue a life of nature photography and
writing. Two years later, Dune Boy was published.
While writing on insects, Teale discovered new
ways to closely photograph his subjects so that his readers
could see exactly what he was writing about. He and his wife
planned a series of four books about the seasons across the
states. After their only son, David, died in World War II,
Nellie and Edwin lived their dream, dedicating the series
to their son.
In 1959, the Teales bought and moved to Trail Wood,
an old farm in Connecticut. The Teales lived there for the rest
of their lives. Alhough Edwin died in 1980 and Nellie died in 1993,
Trail Wood is still open to the public, with wetlands,
meadow,
pond and woodland
habitats, as well as an Audubon Natural History museum.
During his lifetime, Teale won many awards,
most notably a Pulitzer Prize for his 1965 work, Wandering
Through Winter. He also received the John Burroughs Award
for nature writing and the Ecology Award of the Massachusetts
Horticultural Society.
In his memoir, Dune
Boy, Teale describes his youthful antics with
the wisdom of a man grown and comfortable with his own experience.
In the following quote, Teale describes the dunes
from his own perspective as a child, wondering how the dunes
would appear to another.
The boy lay still in the sunshine.... In his mind, he began
to picture how the...distant dunes must appear to the eagle
and the crane. His eyes again sought the far dunes. They
rose like a shining, mysterious land of gold beyond the
treetops. (2)
In the following pages, he explains
his awe at the mystery suggested by the wilderness. The young
Teale yearned to understand the natural world around him.
Because of the beauty of the dunes and the wilderness beyond,
he dreamed of adventure. Later in life, Teale not only experienced
the promised adventure, he also understood the history of
the dunes and how they came to be. While Teale as a boy could
not understand the significance of a dying tree, the man Teale
had become could.
For a great tree death comes as a gradual
transformation. Its vitality ebbs slowly. Even when life
has abandoned it entirely it remains a majestic thing. (235)
The book is about the value of experience throughout
life. Many things remained promising and wild to Teale, even
when he became an adult. Later in the book, in an essay entitled
"Lone Oak Return," Teale relates the dunes of his
childhood to the dunes of today:
I found the land of the dunes today is something of a paradox.
As many as 10,000 persons come to the lake shore of the
Indiana Dunes State Park on the fourth of July. Yet in the
region around foxes have come back and even deer are occasionally
seen. Great superhighways now carry their rivers of traffic
to the north and south of Lone Oak. Yet its immediate surroundings
lie in a kind of quiet backwater. There are changes, of
course. But curiously it is less the change than the lack
of change that is impressive. (274)
Dune Boy is memoir of life in Indiana,
including reflections of the ways in which nature has changed,
by human hands or not. During the course of the book, Teale
explains that he too has been transformed by the modern world,
and yet he still retains his youthful sense of adventure.
--SDJ
Sources:
Teale, Edwin Way. Dune Boy Lone Oak
Version. NY: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1957.
Image:
Edwin Way Teale, Teale Exhibit at University of
Connecticut Website. 15 Oct 2002
<http://www.lib.uconn.edu/Exhibits/carroll/ewteale/teale.html>.
Links:
Nature Writing.Com
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