Dune Boy Edwin Way Teale, best-selling author of
nature books,
had roots in the sandy soil of northwest Indiana
By
Joan Gibb Engel
"If
the world is dull, it is because we are blind and deaf and
dumb," wrote the renowned American naturalist Edwin Way
Teale.
The
world was never dull for Teale, nor was it dull for his
readers. Winner of numerous awards for his nature writing,
including the Pulitzer Prize, Teale had a gift of putting
himself in the place of whatever creature he was writing
about (sparrows in treetops, whales in oceans, bugs in flowers).
Dune
Boy was Edwin Way Teale's eighth book, a reminiscence
of growing up around the dunes of northwest Indiana,
near what is now the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
Edwin
Way Teale examines a sunflower, or perhaps a tiny
insect among its petals.Photo courtesy of
Edwin Way Teale Papers, Archives & Special Collections
at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University
of Connecticut Libraries.
Sun
rises over the dune. Teale actively supported the establishment
of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.Photo by Walt
Anderson/Root Resources.
He
particularly liked to put himself in the three-paired shoes
of insects because, he said, "the way of an insect is so
foreign to our mode of life that trying to picture ourselves
in its place is always an adventure in imagination."
Teale
describes the world of a daddy longlegs: "Imagine walking
on legs so long you could cover a mile in fifty strides!
Imagine looking to either side through eyes set not in your
head but in a turret-like hump on your back! Imagine your
knees, when you walked, working a dozen feet or more above
your head!"
Teale
also confesses to an Alice-in-Wonderland sensation as he
watches a red-and-black ladybird beetle settle down on a
hollyhock leaf. He feels himself "shutting up like a telescope"
to be as small as it is, then imagines the quarter-inch
insect and everything around it expanding to his size so
that grass blades are as wide as a highway and crickets
are 24 feet long. Teale was forever putting insect facts
into human terms to emphasize their exotic lifestyles.
Of
the 17-year "locust" he wrote: "While the earth spins on
its axis six thousand times, while first-grade students
are becoming men and women of voting age, while wars are
fought and presidents come and go, these slowly maturing
cicadas dwell in tunnels and tiny caves of their own making."
Teale
viewed nature with the amazement of an explorer to a distant
shore, fascinated by the strange lives of the natives. Yet
his distant shore is his own backyard, and the natives are
the ordinary creatures most of us don’t even notice.
The
Source of His Gift Teale
credits something that happened when he was a child playing
on his grandparents’ farm in the Indiana dune country
as the source of this "peculiar Odyssey of the mind:" "Between
the yellow flanks of the Indiana sand dunes and my grandfather’s
farm, a field of rye used to rise like a mane of hair above
the brow of a low hill . . . There, one hot and somnolent
afternoon, when I was six or seven, I crawled deep into
the gray-green luminous light that filtered down between
the stalks in this sea of waving grain."
As
he played in the sandy cave, he imagined himself in the
place of the ants, beetles and flies that shared his secret
spot.
"I
even tried to picture the field as it must appear to little
dust-colored toads that hopped, with incorruptibly solemn
expressions, down the sandy aisles, and to the harmless,
striped garter snake that slid leisurely along the floor
of this forest of rye.
"Returning
home that evening was like landing from a distant voyage
of discovery."
Freedom
to Explore Teale
was born June 2, 1899 in Joliet, Illinois, the son of a
railroad mechanic and a teacher. He grew up near railroad
tracks "in the kind of neighborhood where boys put rocks
in their snowballs," and lived in fear of going through
life with a flattened nose on his face. With great joy he
escaped over holidays and during the summer months to the
farm of his grandparents, Edwin and Jemima Way, located
on the Furnessville Road in northwest Indiana not far west
of Michigan City and immediately south of what is now the
campground of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
The
Way farm, called Lone Oak after a 200-year-old tree near
the house, was not notable for its ecological integrity.
Teale
and watermelon at Lone Oak Farm. All kids need access
to nature. Photo
courtesy of Edwin Way Teale Papers, Archives &
Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research
Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.
"Compared
with the black loam of the river bottom or the productive
acres of the prairie," he later wrote, "Lone Oak Farm probably
was an unpromising tract. But to a boy, alive to the natural
harvest of birds and animals and insects, it offered boundless
returns." Teale helped his "Gram" and "Gramp" with chores
while savoring the long stretches of time he was left to
his own devices.
The
beneficent influence of his grandparents on his future careers
as writer and naturalist is recorded in Dune Boy,
Teale’s 1943 reminiscence of his boyhood. He credits
Jemima Way with stimulating his imagination through the
nightly stories she read to him and Gramp. These included
the novels of Cooper, Dickens, and Mark Twain. His grandfather,
who settled in the Indiana dune country in 1854 and then
fought in the Civil War, was a fund of stories and "flavorsome"
remarks, such as when he said of Teale’s wash-shrunk
pants that they "look like they’d been picked too soon."
Teale praised his grandparents most of all for allowing
him to explore the out-of-doors.
He
explored it in many ways. He knew the farm "inch by inch"
through walking it, gathering kindling and stove wood, and
plucking spearmint and winterberries. He knew the animals
and insects by patient observation of their curious ways.
At night he listened to the crickets and katydids and he
learned the birds’ songs. He also learned from farm
catalogs and from books that he took out from the Michigan
City library. Photography was another way of learning nature’s
ways. One summer he picked 20,000 strawberries – enough
so that he could afford to purchase a box camera. One of
his first successful photos was of a wild rabbit that he
had accustomed to his presence.
"I
was out-of-doors from morning until night, running barefoot
and in overalls, a straw hat protecting me from the midday
sun," he wrote in Dune Boy. "The debt I owe my grandparents
most of all is the freedom they gave me, freedom to roam
the acres of corn and wheat and potatoes, the woods and
swamps, and to make this world my own."
First
Book at Age Nine Having
made the world of nature his own, Teale set out to make
it everyone else’s. Dune Boy was Teale’s
eighth book (ninth, if you count Tails of Lone Oak, composed
at the age of nine). By the time he wrote Dune Boy
he had established himself as a nature writer and was being
compared to the great French entomologist J. Henri Fabré.
Like
Fabré, his science was self-taught; like him also,
Teale never "prettified" nature. He portrayed it as he saw
it – warts, cannibalism, parasitism and all. Nor did
he have much truck for naturalists who worked solely with
preserved specimens, nor for persons whose idea of nature
was based on wishful thinking. On the other hand, Teale
refused to close off the possibility that other creatures
might share our "higher" appreciations. "Do animals ever
appreciate natural beauty?" he asked, and answered, "We
see little evidence of it. But who can say?"
Such
steadfast refusal to ignore facts, combined with his enthusiasm
and philosophic bent, made Teale a favorite writer of his
generation. Henry Beston said of him, "It is no easy task
to combine the spirit of modern science and the spirit of
beauty, but Teale is one of the very, very few who succeeds
in so doing."
Teale
very much wanted to introduce others to the exciting world
of nature, but before he was able to branch out on his own
as a freelance writer, there were college, marriage to Nellie
Donovan, his lifelong companion, the birth of a son, David,
and 13 years as a feature writer for Popular Science Monthly.
Teale’s
"hobby" of photography gave him his first big break in the
publishing world. Grassroot Jungles was illustrated with
130 photographs of insects: incredible close-ups of the
heads of hornets, of moths emerging from their cocoons,
of ants guarding colonies of aphids. To get them, Teale
had patiently perfected ways of capturing living insects
on film. One of his techniques was to refrigerate insects
first so that he could delay their flight while he focused.
Drama
in the Backyard The
photographs in Grassroot Jungles proved Teale’s contention
that there was a most dramatic world awaiting each of us
right in our own backyards. He wrote in the book’s
foreword, "Few of us can explore the jungles or embark in
a bathysphere to view the wonders of the deep sea. But we
can find adventure at home exploring the forests of the
insects peopled with their small but amazingly strange inhabitants."
He said pretty much the same thing in another of his books,
Near Horizons. "To stop and wonder, to put ourselves for
a passing moment in the place of the creatures around us
(to visualize life from their standpoint) here, truly, is
an adventure in exploring. Such journeys require neither
ships nor trains nor rubber tires nor gasoline."
Respect
for Grubs and Toads "Edwin
Teale has to keep reminding himself that other people want
to get rid of insects," his biographer, Edward H. Dodd,
Jr., wrote. "Read Teale and you will nevermore dare disrespect
buzzards, ticks, grubs, starlings, toads, crows, carrion
beetles, turtles, moles, poison ivy, cockroaches, hawks,
sowbugs and bats."
Because
of his beliefs, Teale was constantly asked to write letters
and testify in conservation causes, and he did so freely.
He supported the establishment of the Indiana Dunes State
Park and, at the request of Senator Paul Douglas, wrote
letters to support the establishment of Indiana Dunes National
Lakeshore. "The long fight to save wild beauty represents
democracy at its best," he believed.
But
he helped the cause of conservation best with his nature
writing and he knew it. On his return home after testifying
on a conservation measure, he could feel himself "expanding"
with the freedom to once again "strike out across open land."
In Teale’s later works one even senses a tone of questioning
melancholy about the future of nature. In A Walk Through
the Year, his last work, he wrote:
"As
I come to these final sentences, I sit here wondering if
the time will ever come when such a book as this will seem
like a letter from another world. Will the richness of the
natural world be overrun and more and more replaced with
a plastic artificial substitute?"
A
Return to Boyhood Wonder After
the Lone Oak farmhouse burned to the ground when Teale was
15, his summer idylls became memories. In The Lost Woods,
written the year that David, his only son, died in the war,
Teale writes of returning to a blowout in the dunes and
sitting in the dark on the beach in silence:
"Memories
of beauty, memories of moonlight and starlight, of wildflowers
and birds in a cloud-filled sky are things of fundamental
virtue. Remembering such things in times of stress brings
us consolation."
In
the 1950s, Teale and his wife embarked on four journeys
across America, covering some 100,000 miles and culminating
in his books North with the Spring, Autumn Across America,
Journey Into Summer, and Wandering Through Winter.
In the town of Michigan City, Teale observed a small boy
pick up a dead monarch butterfly and stand entranced. He
saw himself, the youthful duneland explorer. "A door was
opening for him," he wrote, "a door beyond which lay all
the beauty and mystery of nature."
Joan
Gibb Engel lives in the Indiana Dunes near the site of Lone
Oak and is active in the land preservation work of the Shirley
Heinze Environmental Fund.
Dune
Boy was Edwin Way Teale's eighth book, a reminiscence
of growing up around the dunes of northwest Indiana,
near what is now the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
Sun
rises over the dune. Teale actively supported the establishment
of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Photo by Walt
Anderson/Root Resources.
