Days Without Time: Adventures of a Naturalist

by Edwin Way Teale

Hardcover - 1948 - First Edition - Dodd, Mead & Company, New York. Rare book, can not locate it anywhere. Mint green boards with black lettering are square, sharp tips, top/bottom edge have slight fading. Book is protected by mylar over original dust jacket uncliped. Interior pages are clean, crisp, unmarked and of a warm ivory color. This book comes from a private collection in a year round home. Immediate shipping.

Genres: Nature

283 pages

Published January 1, 1948

About the author

Edwin Way Teale was an American naturalist, photographer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Teale's works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930 - 1980. He is perhaps best known for his series The American Seasons, four books documenting over 75,000 miles (121,000 km) of automobile travel across North America following the changing seasons.

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

But there have been other days, days without time, days when I left watches and calendars behind and, in a small way, seceded from the World of the Clock. These were days of sun time and wind time. I spent them out-of-doors. Here, creatures hurried, labored, were pursuing and pursued. But they had no set, inflexible schedules-no fixed, appointed rounds. There was never so-many-pounds-of-flies to deliver next Thursday for the spider. It could sit in the sun and wait for its own to come to it. Here I could slip the leash, escape from the fences and hedges of time. Like the galled horse turned out to roll, I knew the feel of the earth. Only the swing of the shadows reminded me there of the passing of time.

Trying to read as much Teale as I can, finding some online sources, and I am surprised how some essays are glorious and others are humdrum. Many of them are repeats from the Adventures book, but his abiding love for the earth and all the life on it continues to inspire.

The centrifugal force of civilized life draws us out thin, stretches us to the ultimate of our resiliency. Days out-of-doors give us release. They permit us to contract back to the center of life. In the natural world, the circle of each succeeding year brings with it variations of eternal themes. Events occur in endless, but varied, repetition. The fall of the tree, the swoop of the hawk, the tilt of the buzzard in a windy sky, the song of the hermit thrush at evening, the opening of a windflower, the eddy of a woodland brook-all these are events for days without time. They might have occurred during any one of a thousand or ten thousand years. Ticking clocks and factory whistles have little to do with the eternal recurrence of these eternal themes.

So, in two senses, the chapters of this book represent adventures in a timeless world. The events that they record are part of the timelessness of nature. They are also part of days spent with little regard for the hour or the minute-days without time. There was, to be sure, a day indicated by the calendar, an hour shown by the clock, when each of the events related in this book took place.

In the out-of-doors, in "the glories of the circling year," there are such a variety of events, such a diversity of interests, that all tastes can be satisfied. This variety is reflected in the subject matter of the following chapters; it ranges from floral traps that are a feature of almost every roadside to white owls from the Arctic tundras. Memories of such things form little landmarks of the past. The true calendar of our lives is dated with memories. For time slips through our fingers; it dissolves while memories remain. Memory is the soul of time. It imparts a kind of immortality to moments of the past, re-creating them in our minds. Such recollections, memories of days when clocks were forgotten and I was absorbed in the natural world, are recollections of special pleasure.

In the variety and splendor of its trees, North America is particularly fortunate. More than six hundred species grow north of the Rio Grande. From the mitten-leaved sassafras found on Cape Cod to the Douglas firs that rise in towering monuments at the edge of the Pacific, American trees are striking, beautiful, familiar features of the landscape. They are beloved by people from coast to coast. The frugal pine that asks so little of life, the birch as beautiful as the column of a Greek temple, the gnarled and enduring oak, the ball-bottomed cypress of Southern swamps, the live oak with pendant flags of Spanish moss, the giant spruces of the Northwest-all these become linked with the lives of people.

One September, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I was returning by train from my grandfather's farm in Indiana to my home at Joliet, Illinois. A few miles short of my destination, the train swung in a wide curve, skirting a field at the far side of which a magnificent elm towered upward, etched against an ebbing sunset. The time, the scene, the conditions, my mood at the moment, one or all of these impressed the picture of that lone tree indelibly on my memory. The recollection was like haunting music. Several times a year, as long as I lived in the region, I used to walk eastward miles along the railroad ties to see this tree again. Such a feeling of the personality, the closeness, the kinship of trees is one that probably few people know. But those who experience it, feel it deeply. John Muir, clinging to a swaying tree in a great storm in the Sierras; W. H. Hudson in the moonlight on the pampas, standing silent before the mystery of the acacia trees-these were men who knew this feeling in all its intensity.

Dusty goldenrod runs along that roadside today as it did then. Red-headed woodpeckers lope through the air, barn-swallows skim over the pastures above the homecoming cattle at evening, the wild rose blooms, the sycamores bend over meandering brooks-all these have continued unchanged through the years. And they will, in the words of the poet, go onward the same though dynasties pass. The out-of-doors is-as it always has been-everybody's art gallery, everybody's concert hall, everybody's library of poetry written in a universal language. The beauty of nature is every generation's gift. It is free for the taking, around us always. And each man, according to his character, realizes its possibilities.

To dwell with this beauty of the out-of-doors, as much as we can, is the better part of wisdom. Here we feel ourselves losing nervous tension, relaxing like a drought-dried plant in a summer shower. Here the hunger of our eyes for the green of trees and the color of flowers is satisfied. Here the longing of our ears for the sound of wind in the grasses and the lap of waves on sand is gratified. Here there is beauty to lift the heart and calm endurance to speak of courage. And here there is something more, something magical, something that fills a deep need of the human heart, a need as old as the race symbolized in my mind by those mountain swallows of the Great Divide.