Real winter. Winter out of memory. For spring creepeth, though not quite yet.
A favorite book of years ago which I read several times is North with the Spring by Edwin Way Teale. It is the first of what became his American Seasons series. I enjoyed his writerly way of setting forth observations of the ways of nature among observations of human life and insightful comments from the wide assortment of his library.
Like my "first bird" calendars in high school, rereading chapters of North with the Spring in February or early March fed my longing for the calls of redwings, robins, song sparrows, and thrushes, and the blow of shadbush blossoms.
Subtitled "A Naturalist's Record of a 17,000 Mile Journey with the North American Spring," it was first published in November 1951. The copy I have lists eight printings by February 1952. You can still get recently published copies, with its sister books: Journey into Summer, Autumn Across America, and Wandering Through Winter, all records of distinct journeys across the North American continent by the Teales.
Considering that their journey took 17,000 miles to cover the distance from the Florida keys to northern New Hampshire —about 1500 miles as the crow might fly —you know that the word "perambulate" is most descriptive of this journey.
Why take such journeys?
When you look with dread upon the winter weeks that lie before you, have you ever dreamed—in office or kitchen or school—of leaving winter behind, of meeting spring under far-southern skies, of following its triumphal pilgrimage up the map with flowers all the way, with singing birds and soft air, green grass and trees new-clothed, of coming north with the spring?Maybe you have to experience foot-dragging winter to know that longing. This will be my first real spring in seven years, back in Vermont after living in the plains of Colorado where many red-wings and robins and meadowlarks hunker down and stay for the winter and Swainson's hawks return as harbingers.
I think I will again leaf through the Teales' journey of more than fifty years ago, with the thought in mind of what it would be like to retrace their steps. Would it be too devastating a process to come face to face with the myriad of degradations? Or would one also find hope in protection of habitats?
One of the places described is the Ducktown Desert in Tennessee.
Bushes shrank and vanished. Grasses died away. Blighted land replaced the forest. All around us dead hills, red, raw, ribbed by erosion, stood stark in the sunshine. Hardly two miles from dense woodland we were in the midst of a moonscape on earth. Ahead of us the road led through a land of desolation, through a man-made desert, through a hundred square miles of poisoned earth. We were in the southeast corner of Tennessee, in the Ducktown Desert of the Copper Basin….It is a classic tale of land abuse. It is also, in its way, a murder story. For it deals, literally, with the murder of a countryside.Copper smelting in the last half of the 19th century involved roasting the ore over open fires, fueled from the surrounding forest. Between logging trees for fuel, frequent fires, and the resulting clouds of sulphur-dioxide gas from the smelting ore, the vegetation and the soil were poisoned. Eventually the hills eroded down to subsoil in the frequent rains of the southeastern U.S.. This is what the Teales saw in the middle of the 20th century. Teale states that nearly two and a half million trees had been set out before World War II in efforts to rehabilitate region. They saw negligible numbers remaining.
The Teales didn't travel into West Virginia. But if I were to do so today, it would not be difficult to locate equal areas of devastation. Copper is not the culprit; coal is. The removal of whole mountain tops to dig out veins of coal is resulting in the dumping of the thousands of tons of overburden (the non-coal dirt) into the hollows and valleys creasing the sides of these mountains, all under the grateful eyes of the recipients of campaign contributions by the corporate owners of the mining companies. Landowners in the hollows and hillsides live in imminent danger of coal slurry lagoons breaking and spilling millions of gallons of poison, as has happened already.
Streams buried, with no recourse to the U.S. Clean Water Act. The mining companies have bought that off, also. People who live there and fight back are threatened with physical danger by their neighbors and not-so-neighbors who work for the companies.
The alternative to this form of mining is the old way: shafts and miners digging. Another alternative is energy efficiency, learning to make do with less, and implementing alternative, less-environmentally abusive forms of energy.
The Teales would find their trip changed in some ways, and not in others. We've invented great new ways to rape the land and the non-human species that live on it. And we still have some beautiful places.
Songbirds do still sing in the spring. They are, perhaps, fewer in number, though. Habitat is chopped up, ruined, both north and south. It makes a difference.
At the end of their long trip, near the wilderness (before it was declared so) of the Pemigewasset, the Teales spend the last night of their spring.
Never in our lives would there be another spring like this. It was late when we stepped out to look at the sky. From horizon to horizon the heavens were clear, filled with the glinting of the stars. And almost as we looked, in the night, under the stars, spring was gone….The season had swept far to the north; it had climbed mountains; it had passed into the sky…. We longed for a thousand springs on the road instead of this one. For spring is like life. You never grasp it entire; you touch it here, there; you know it only in parts and fragments….In reality its end is a gradual change. Season merges with season in a slow transition into another life.Thank you, Edwin Way Teale.