week of 5/29/02
 
 
 

Teale's travels among the 'wild and lonely mountains'
By George Ellison

The greatest literary naturalist in the English language is Gilbert White, author of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne, which was published in 1789. White is the Shakespeare of nature writing ... all else flows from him.

The British have, of course, produced a line of very fine literary naturalists since White. My favorite 19th century writer in the genre is W.H. Hudson, that low-key observer of the English countryside. But one also has to mention the wildly romantic Richard Jefferies.

In the late 20th century, England produced Richard Mabry, who is still going strong. Mabry’s biography of Gilbert White is a blessing. And his own observations of the natural world — recorded in books like Home Country (1990) — are keen and precise. Mabry also edited The Oxford Book of Nature Writing (1995), one of the best anthologies in the genre.

Nature writing in America flows from Henry David Thoreau, that sometimes cranky and always idiosyncratic observer of the commonplace. There is nature aplenty in that contrived masterpiece Walden, but the most memorable and heartfelt observations are to be found in Thoreau’s journals. John Burroughs, his late 19th-century follower, was the first professional nature writer in America, and he remains one of the most pleasurable to read.

In his shrewd literary survey titled The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), Harold Bloom rightfully places Walt Whitman’s work at the center of American literature. Whitman’s nature writings in both verse and prose are no doubt the high points of literary naturalism yet produced by an American. If you doubt me, take a look at Specimen Days (1882).

In the latter half of the 20th century, we had a spate of self-conscious literary posers appear on the scene ... and they are still going strong. Many among this grant-seeking, back-slapping tribe now known as the New Naturalists emerged from the dim recesses of academia. Less interested in describing the natural world than in lovingly examining their own feelings and posteriors, many in this category couldn’t tell a trillium from a skunk cabbage, a warbler from a crow, or a bull from a bat. I exaggerate, of course ... but not much.

I have tried time and again to read Annie Dillard, that master of self-absorption, but her cunningly “crafted” prose always gives me a bellyache. David Quammen, author of books with really cute titles like The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, apparently read too much O. Henry in his youth. With every essay he attempts a surprise ending (a la the late Stephen Jay Gould, an excellent writer) so as to establish his cleverness. I could continue in this vein almost ad infinitum ... but you get the picture. We’re living in an age of nature writing that — to too great an extent — borders on being an era of literary shysterism.

The finest American nature writer of the 20th century was, hands down, Edwin Way Teale. If you doubt me, read anything that he wrote. I suggest that you start with North With Spring (1957), one of the volumes in a four-part series (including Journey Into Summer, Autumn Across America and Wandering Through Winter) that won the Pulitzer Prize. To whet your appetite, here are some excerpts taken almost at random from North With Spring which record Teale’s observations made here in Western North Carolina during the long journey with his wife from Florida to Maine.

One of their stops was at Pearson’s Falls Glen, which is located in the Pacolet River valley in southwest Polk County: “The coolness of the grotto surrounded us ... Nowhere along the way did we find so glorious a wild flower garden as in this hidden nook among the North Carolina mountains ... Conservationists have grown increasingly conscious of the importance of these small, ‘type-specimen’ sanctuaries. There is no finer example in the country of the value of such a preserve than the glen at Pearson’s Falls ... Our lives touched it at this one point, at this one time in spring when its magical beauty was unrivaled ... At the head of the glen the path brought us to the white lace of Pearson’s Falls. It is lace formed of water by gravity on a loom of granite. In a thin, foaming layer the water slides down the face of successive shelves of rock. The sound of this falling water is murmurous, calming, companionable. Here is no mighty, roaring Niagara, no deep-tongued bellow. This was a sound for a glen to enclose ... Night and day the falling water of Pearson’s Falls generates a cool, moist breeze. It stirred the ferns and the lady-slippers and the pendant white flowers along the underside of branches of the silver-bell tree that leaned out over the pool.”

Another stop was in the mountains near Asheville: “A little later we pulled up to a huge tulip tree. Its billowing clouds of pale-green new leaves was a world of succulent plenty for larva and warbler alike. Magnolia warblers and black-throated blues and parulas and redstarts swarmed through this arboreal land of plenty. Nothing in the world is more alive than a warbler in the spring. Surely it must have been a warbler that James Stephens described in The Crock of Gold as being ‘so full of all-of-a-sudden.’ All of a sudden a warbler starts and stops. All of a sudden it flashes from branch to branch, peers under leaves, snaps up small caterpillars, darts on again.”

Along the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smokies, they came to Charlie’s Bunion: “Ridges, covered with red spruce and Fraser fir, extended away until they blurred into dark, smudgy lines in the distance. Seen from above, mountains become different mountains in different lighting ... The scene changes with every movement of the sun. On this morning, under a leaden sky, in the breathless silence before a rain, the dull gray lighting stressed the wild and lonely character of our surroundings. In all the sweep of mountains and sky around us we saw no single sign of life ... Then life appeared — a bird most fitting to that somber scene. Over the crags and blasted trees two dark birds, a pair of ravens, sailed past us. Their hoarse calls carried hollowly across the empty spaces ... At intervals one of the birds would dive and twist in a wild display of aerobatics. There were times when the stunting bird was completely inverted, flying upside down. In the ecstasy of spring a number of birds loop or stunt or sail in inverted flight ... but here, amid these crags that appeared as lonely as a moonscape and as devoid of active life, the aerobatics of the raven were superlatively impressive.”

Many a New Naturalist, alas, would proceed to tell us of his or her flying dreams and then equate them to his or her quixotic search for a personal nirvana. But Teale simply records what he actually observed in the real world and lets it go at that. And therein lies the difference. Gilbert White would nod his head in approval.

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com