<\/p>\n
Chapter 1: Chasing the Erratic Spotlight of Memory<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thinking of memory, it occurs to me what an erratic spotlight memory is, playing across the landscape of our past, picking out small areas, illuminating fragments of our experience. Out of a shrouded, shapeless limbo of forgotten things one experience suddenly comes to life.[i]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Edwin Way Teale, The Hampton Journal<\/em>, November 15, 1961<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What did I know, what did I know<\/p>\n of love\u2019s austere and lonely offices? [ii]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Robert Hayden, from \u201cThose Winter Sundays\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n O sons of men,<\/p>\n You add the future to the future<\/p>\n But your sum is spoiled<\/p>\n By the grey cipher of death.<\/p>\n There is a Master<\/p>\n Who breathes upon armies,<\/p>\n Building a narrow and dark house for kings.[iii]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0From The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n On June 2, 1899, Clara Louise Way Teale gave birth to a son, her only child, Edwin Alfred Teale. The preceding winter had unleashed the Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899. The Mississippi river had frozen solid from St. Louis to New Orleans, and Arthur T. Wayne, writing for the American Ornithological Society, documented the deaths by starvation and exposure to blizzard conditions of tens of thousands of birds: fox sparrows and juncos, woodcock and killdeer, pine warblers and meadowlarks.[iv]<\/a> Across the globe, Danish schoolteacher Christian Mortensen introduced the first systematic method of bird-banding, offering a new window to life\u2019s beautiful, abundant complexity.[v]<\/a>\u00a0 Edwin himself would reflect upon these events seventy-five years later as he commenced reconstructing his earliest days to tell his life\u2019s story.[vi]<\/a> Endings juxtaposed with beginnings, death juxtaposed with life. Edwin Teale, too, entered a childhood defined by such seeming contradictions: confinement and freedom, loathing and admiration, hatred and love. The delivery, which took place in a modest Iowa Avenue frame house beside Hickory Creek in Joliet, Illinois, was \u201ca hard [one] that almost took\u201d Clara Teale\u2019s life.[vii]<\/a> Several days later, Clara contracted typhoid fever, from which she would not fully recover until September. While his mother recovered, and his father, Oliver Cromwell Teale, labored long hours as a skilled locomotive mechanic in the Michigan City Railroad roundhouse, Edwin was cared for by Oliver\u2019s sister Annie Brummitt and her husband George. The Brummitts had recently lost their only child at birth. Many years later, Clara Teale reflected, \u201cI don\u2019t think any of us quite realized what it meant to them to give up that baby,\u201d and how these earliest days of Edwin\u2019s life filled that void, if only briefly.[viii]<\/a><\/p>\n A studio portrait of Edwin Way Teale with his parents, Clara Louise Way Teale and Oliver Cromwell Teale, circa 1916-1918<\/p><\/div>\n Clara Teale recovered from typhoid in September of 1899, and she, Oliver, and four-month-old Edwin moved into a home that had been under construction on June 2. The East Washington Street home, just outside the Joliet city limits, \u201cfaced a wide expanse of wasteland,\u201d hundreds of acres of \u201cweed-covered hillocks and hollows\u201d that \u201cremained from the digging of gravel that had been deposited by the glaciers.\u201d[ix]<\/a>\u00a0This scarred and desolate landscape later afforded Edwin a site for his earliest peregrinations in nature, and these offered a reprieve from his mother\u2019s relentless dedication to her only child\u2019s \u201cimprovement,\u201d a dedication that left him, \u201cmuch of the time, desperately unhappy.\u201d[x]<\/a>\u00a0Amongst the overgrown hollows, he often unearthed \u201csmall cylinders of stone\u2026the fossil remains of prehistoric crinoids,\u201d which he at first mistook for \u201cIndian beads.\u201d[xi]<\/a>\u00a0Wandering in nature, even in a place that others saw as weed-choked and disfigured, Edwin felt \u201ca sense of coming home\u201d that eluded him elsewhere in Joliet.[xii]<\/a>Later he would praise with equal feeling the aerial prowess of invasive European starling flocks \u201cturning corners like soldiers on parade\u201d and the \u201csnow-white shimmer\u201d of wheeling seaside flocks of delicate sanderlings.[xiii]<\/a>\u00a0Where others saw ugliness in nature, Edwin saw beauty and purpose, undiluted by arbitrary human judgments.<\/p>\n The interior of the East Washington Street home contrasted sharply with the wasteland framed by its windows. Its contents painted a portrait of Clara Teale as a cultured, thoughtful, and deliberate woman. An oil on canvas of Niagara Falls, painted by Clara and mounted in a wide gilt frame, adorned the parlor wall. Below it, against a corner of the room, leaned an alpenstock, the antecedent to the modern ice axe, trailing a ribbon of \u201cnarrow horizontal bands of brilliant colors.\u201d Edwin would later recall that the alpenstock, among all other curiosities of the house, \u201cespecially fascinated me.\u201d[xiv]<\/a> Clara Teale\u2019s decor likewise reflected the heightened popularity of nature study at the advent of the twentieth century. A small stand housed an ostrich egg, a peacock feather, and other natural specimens.[xv]<\/a> Seashells \u201cbrought from Newport\u201d adorned the room, including a large conch shell that served as a door stop. Putting the conch to his ear, young Edwin \u201ccould hear the sea.\u201d[xvi]<\/a><\/p>\n There were also numerous pictures of sunsets scattered amongst the house\u2019s contents, clipped from popular magazines by Oliver Teale. In his few spare moments of leisure, Edwin\u2019s beleaguered father \u201cwrote descriptions\u201d of these scenes, his only foray into art in a draining, workaday life.[xvii]<\/a> Edwin later attributed his own \u201cpassionate love of beautiful scenes\u201d in part to his father\u2019s early influence.[xviii]<\/a> In 1942, fourteen years after Oliver\u2019s death, Edwin would dedicate his sixth book, Byways to Adventure: A Guide to Nature Hobbies<\/em>, to his father\u2014a tacit acknowledgment that his father earned but never got the luxury of such pursuits. At the other end of the parlor, an upright piano, \u201cthe first thing purchased after the house was built,\u201d occupied a wall of its own. What Edwin later remembered most of this piano was not his mother\u2019s playing but \u201cthe successive generations of baby mice its interior harbored,\u201d an apt preview of his future leanings.[xix]<\/a> Despite its rich d\u00e9cor and the intellectual sensitivities it represented, Edwin\u2019s childhood home was more a prison than a sanctuary, transmuting the barren wasteland of the gravel bank to a refuge, a place of retreat into nature and into himself.<\/p>\n Edwin\u2019s relationship with his mother was deeply complicated, and he struggled for the remainder of his life to reconcile its polar contradictions. In 1974, shortly after his 75th<\/sup> birthday, Edwin wrote a full chapter on the complexities of their relationship for The Long Way Home<\/em>, the autobiography he would not complete. He titled the chapter \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig,\u201d alluding to Alexander Pope\u2019s 1732 observation that \u201cTis education forms the common mind,\/Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclin\u2019d.\u201d[xx]<\/a> The choice of this allusion reflected the profound influence of Clara\u2019s unstinting efforts to render every experience of Edwin\u2019s boyhood \u201ca lesson, a training in character.\u201d In Clara\u2019s view, \u201cLife was a preparation for some other end, not an end in itself.\u201d[xxi]<\/a> She thought only in the future tense. \u201cWhen I was young,\u201d Edwin reflected in 1974, \u201clittle was done just for the fun of it\u2026it seems to me I was one of the most bent twigs the world has ever known.\u201d[xxii]<\/a> He struggled for the rest of his life to understand the choices his mother had made, to check his extraordinary bitterness about the \u201cschizophrenic world\u201d[xxiii]<\/a> she created for him, and to render the experiences of his earliest years in honest, fair prose.<\/p>\n Prior to her marriage, Clara Way had been a school teacher in \u201cvarious country schools near Furnessville, at Boone Grove and elsewhere in northern Indiana.\u201d[xxiv]<\/a> It was, for her, a period of great personal fulfillment, defined especially by the memory of a particular end-of-school picnic, \u201ca memory that she cherished as long as she lived.\u201d[xxv]<\/a><\/p>\n She and the children rode on a hayrack to the picnic site and the pupils had put a chair, decorated with flowers, in the middle of the wagon. She sat on it with the children grouped around her.\u2026It symbolized her dream: to be surrounded by small children looking up to her for advice and counsel. For her great passion was molding the minds and characters of the young.[xxvi]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Here was the culmination of her efforts, and, as importantly to her, the adulation that could accompany such efforts.<\/p>\n By the fall of 1899, the East Washington Street home had become her classroom, Edwin her star and only pupil. \u201cIn this, her lifelong goal of bending tender twigs,\u201d Edwin wrote, \u201cshe found I was the closest, the one around the most.\u201d[xxvii]<\/a> But Clara\u2019s was a doomed effort crippled by self-absorption. Any adoration, any veneration that Edwin openly offered his mother, despite its sincerity, only veiled deep resentment that grew with time and came to define his recollections of her. But Clara could not, or would not, see this. She clung to the image of admiring children surrounding her on the hayrack. When Edwin was in high school, Clara arranged to have a studio portrait taken of the family. In it, Clara is seated at center, her right hand holding an open volume that she peruses. Oliver stands to her left, one hand steadying the book, as Edwin, standing directly behind his mother, looks on. Clara looks blissful, her son and husband rapt with admiration. The pastoral image, preserved for the annals of time, belies the turbulent waters that roiled beneath.<\/p>\n Clara Teale\u2019s pedagogical methods haunted Edwin\u2019s childhood. \u201cIn her desire to train me as I should be trained,\u201d he wrote later, \u201cmy mother wanted to be with me every hour, to know what was going on in my mind and heart all the time. She wanted to be inside me. She wanted to have no secrets\u2026she wanted me to be transparent glass that she could look through.\u201d[xxviii]<\/a> Once, returning home from grade school, Edwin found that his mother had left \u201ca note on the kitchen table saying she would be away for two or three hours.\u201d Later, however, he discovered her \u201csitting quietly in another room apparently waiting to see what I would say and do when I thought I was unobserved and alone.\u201d[xxix]<\/a> Later, when he befriended a girl he had met during a stay at Lone Oak, Clara steamed open the girl\u2019s subsequent letters to Edwin for first inspection.[xxx]<\/a> Such extremes, she argued, were necessary to make Edwin \u201cthe kind of person she wanted me to be,\u201d a result that \u201cmeant more to her than anything else in the world.\u201d[xxxi]<\/a> But such measures served only to fog the transparent glass Clara sought. They rendered Edwin \u201cslightly secretive, throwing up barriers beyond which people [could] not go.\u201d Under his mother\u2019s unrelenting gaze, Edwin found himself \u201ccontinually retreating within myself to some secret room that should, for everyone[,] be inviolable.\u201d[xxxii]<\/a> \u00a0Formed early, Edwin struggled in adulthood to shed the defenses of a childhood that \u201cwas largely an ordeal at a time when it should have been fun.\u201d[xxxiii]<\/a><\/p>\n Though Edwin found his mother\u2019s training painfully oppressive, he did not question her motives, at least not publicly. In his 1943 Dune Boy<\/em>, he wrote of his parents as \u201csincere, hard-working, religious people,\u201d offering only one muted complaint: \u201cAt home I was trained for Heaven rather than for the world as it is.\u201d[xxxiv]<\/a> In 1974, in the most revised draft of The Long Way Home<\/em>, he wrote:<\/p>\n As I look back, nobody I have ever known ever tried harder to do what she thought was right than my mother. Nobody ever wanted more to help make the world a finer, better place for all. She was sincere. She was honest\u2014so far as she understood her own motivations\u2014in her striving to be a force for good in the world.[xxxv]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n His assessment was extraordinarily tempered when viewed in light of his private notes. \u201cProbably nobody ever born\u2026understood less what made her[self] tick,\u201d he noted privately. She was \u201can interesting case for a psychologist,\u201d he added. \u201cBy fooling her mind [she] got so her mind fooled her.\u201d[xxxvi]<\/a> His understanding of her terribly skewed self-knowledge did little to mitigate his deeply-rooted anger. In undated autobiography notes, he considered titling a section of the book \u201cLies My Mother Told Me.\u201d Below the notation, he enumerated a full page of these.[xxxvii]<\/a> Elsewhere he reflected, \u201cNot all people who do good deeds deserve credit for good motives.\u201d This he followed with an assessment of his mother\u2019s increased involvement in church work as Edwin grew older: \u201cDo a good deed and get away from house-work and children by doing it!\u201d[xxxviii]<\/a> Clara\u2019s chronic absence during Edwin\u2019s adolescence hurt him deeply, especially because she had labored so intently in his early years to create in him an absolute dependence upon her.[xxxix]<\/a> On New Year\u2019s Day, 1911, six months shy of his twelfth birthday, Edwin enumerated a set of resolutions for the coming year, the first of which is especially heart-rending: \u201cI hope that mama will stay home and I will do all that is in my power to help and please her.\u201d[xl]<\/a> He had just spent the Christmas holiday at Lone Oak, about which he had noted two days earlier, \u201cThis is the greatest vacation I ever had.\u201d[xli]<\/a> He was sorry to leave Lone Oak, he added below his list of resolutions, but \u201cI am glad to come to mamma<\/u> if sheel only stay home.\u201d[xlii]<\/a> But Clara would not stay home, driven less by her desire to escape domesticity and more by \u201cthe limelight\u201d church work afforded her, \u201cthe sense of being somebody,\u201d the affirmation that accompanied highly public righteous acts.[xliii]<\/a><\/p>\n Elsewhere, Edwin lamented the times his mother \u201ccried because I used a more pleasant tone of voice to the telephone operator\u2019\u201d than to her. \u201cNeurotic atmosphere\u2014\u201d he added, \u201cwonder not breakdown or suicide.\u201d Of this latter wonder, he did not specify Clara or himself.[xliv]<\/a> Of her wedding vow to be faithful unto death,\u201d Edwin questioned, \u201cFaithful to whom?\u201d and answered succinctly: \u201cHerself.\u201d[xlv]<\/a> Still, he was reticent to share with his reading public the full depth of his bitterness. In a paragraph later struck from the most complete autobiography draft, he wrote:<\/p>\n I am well aware of the awesome power that lies in the hand of anyone writing of his own life, the power to emphasize one aspect, to tip the scales in favor of himself, to color events almost unconsciously. The writer can state his story; the one written about cannot correct the impression. So I hope the reader will give every benefit of the doubt to my mother in reading this chapter of my recollections for my first years.[xlvi]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n While Edwin later cut this qualification, he nonetheless exercised great restraint in wielding his power to shape the reader\u2019s view of his mother.\u00a0 In the last revision completed before The Long Way Home<\/em> was put aside in the fall of 1974, Edwin offered the following view of Clara:<\/p>\n My mother not only read to me, she encouraged me to try to write and she taught me that ever-valuable lesson\u2014to get up and try again when I failed. She appreciated wildflowers and, as I noted in the dedication of my first nature book, Grassroot Jungles<\/u>, saw beauty in humble things. I loved my mother. There was no one I revered more. I recognized she was completely dedicated to my improvement.[xlvii]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n It is impossible to know how much the decision to include this praise was born of obligation and how much from authentic feeling. Its substance was certainly true. Still, even in the public venue of autobiography, Edwin could not leave it unqualified. It was his \u201cdifficult aim,\u201d he told the reader, \u201cto tell as exactly as I can what life has been like for me.\u201d And so, to the passage above, he added, \u201cAnd yet\u2014all I know is that as a child I was, much of the time, desperately unhappy.\u201d[xlviii]<\/a><\/p>\n *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n If Clara Teale was the righteous and dominant force of the home with whom to reckon, her husband, Oliver Cromwell Teale, was her foil. A soft-spoken, kind-hearted man of integrity, Oliver spent few waking hours in the home he shared with his wife and only child. Employed as a skilled locomotive mechanic in the Michigan Central Railroad roundhouse, he worked twelve-hour shifts, six days per week, to bring home weekly pay of fifteen dollars. In winter, he departed for work in the dark and returned thus. \u201cIn my memories of him,\u201d Edwin wrote of his father, \u201che always seemed tired. There was little play in him. But it must be remembered that I saw him mainly in the evenings at the end of a long day\u2019s work.\u201d[xlix]<\/a> At fourteen, living in his native Yorkshire, England, Oliver began work in a textile mill, and his life thereafter would be that of the laborer. As a young man, he emigrated to the United States with his younger brother, Haigh, and his older brother, William.[l]<\/a> Several years later, their parents, Jeptha and Ellen Teale, followed, settling on a modest farm at the edge of the Indiana dunes\u2014a farm adjacent to that of Edwin and Jemimah Way. There, Oliver met Clara Louise Way, his future bride. Ellen Teale died in 1895, four years before Edwin\u2019s birth. Of Jeptha, Edwin had \u201cbut the vaguest memory of him, a sturdy upright man with an immaculate white beard which he washed with soap and water every morning.\u201d[li]<\/a> In 1901, Jeptha, now a widower, sold the 19-acre fruit farm and moved into the home of George and Annie Brummit. He died in January of 1904, six months shy of Edwin\u2019s fifth birthday.[lii]<\/a><\/p>\n Oliver had grown up one of ten children, and his early life in Yorkshire had been defined by scarcity. As an adult, he stood at five feet, seven inches tall and weighed 145 pounds, his slight build making him ideally suited to enter the bellies of steam locomotives to hammer-test their iron flues. He was five inches shorter than Edwin by the time the latter graduated high school. \u201cIt may well be,\u201d Edwin wrote later, \u201cthat he would have been taller if he had had ample food in childhood.\u201d[liii]<\/a> As a father, Oliver \u201cretained the orderly habits of his boyhood\u201d and remained governed by the schooling of early poverty. \u201cMy father mended his own shoes,\u201d Edwin recalled later, \u201cand my mother cut his hair.\u201d[liv]<\/a> During Edwin\u2019s boyhood, the family was \u201cnever in need\u201d\u2014they owned their home and carried no debt\u2014but, he qualified, \u201cWe were always on thin ice. There was rarely a surplus. Living close to the edge of the precipice you must walk carefully lest a pebble roll under your feet.\u201d[lv]<\/a> Oliver labored Monday through Saturday. On Saturday night he polished the family\u2019s shoes for Sunday church. \u201cOn Sundays,\u201d Edwin wrote, \u201che was urged on by that most popular of songs at the Methodist church we attended: \u2018Work for the night is coming, when man works no more.\u2019\u201d[lvi]<\/a> On Monday the cycle began again, and one is reminded of Robert Hayden\u2019s oft-anthologized poem \u201cThose Winter Sundays,\u201d which begins:<\/p>\n Sundays too my father got up early <\/p>\n It was the common pattern for the laboring family man of the early twentieth century. A long day\u2019s labor provided sustenance and stability but little more. For the Teales, there were few luxuries.<\/p>\n Decades later, Edwin reflected thoughtfully, and perhaps a little ruefully, on the trajectory of his father\u2019s life:<\/p>\n Looking back over the span of years, I recognize that my father was a man who lived a life without surpluses\u2014without a surplus of energy, without a surplus of money, without a surplus of time. He never got enough\u2014soon enough\u2026He was not the kind for whom scrolls are inscribed and public dinners held\u2026He was quiet and hard-working. He was well-liked and respected. He could be depended upon\u2026The life he led did not embitter him. It did not break his spirit. Life did not overwhelm or conquer or crush him. Life tired him out.[lvii]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Despite the genuine praise of the passage above, Oliver did not escape the bitterness of Edwin\u2019s private reflections on the unhappiness of his childhood. \u201cMy father was dependable, old reliable\u2014faithful Oliver,\u201d Edwin wrote in undated autobiography notes.[lviii]<\/a> He elaborated no more, but the duality of his meaning, taken in the context of other notes, is clear. Edwin appreciated deeply his father\u2019s steadfast, uncomplaining fulfillment of his duties\u2014an authentic act of love that robbed him of his health and led him, at fifty-two, to a grave fittingly inscribed, \u201cFaithful Unto Death.\u201d[lix]<\/a> Still, he was embittered just as deeply by his father\u2019s malleability when confronted with his domineering wife\u2019s will as she \u201cturned the screws of psychology\u201d on the two of them.[lx]<\/a> Oliver was an \u201cinarticulate father,\u201d Edwin complained elsewhere, \u201calways subordinate,\u201d manipulated by Clara to believe he had won a \u201cgreat prize\u201d in marriage.[lxi]<\/a> He was \u201csensitive\u2014but he could not express his emotions\u201d while \u201cothers seemed more\u201d able to do so.[lxii]<\/a> Exhausted by back-breaking labor and Clara\u2019s relentless pursuit of \u201cher great thrill [of] \u2018moulding\u2019 others,\u201d Oliver Teale \u201cleft the job of bending the twig\u201d to Clara, and by doing so left Edwin disillusioned and resentful.[lxiii]<\/a><\/p>\n Vivid amongst the scattering of Edwin\u2019s early memories of his father were a handful of visits to the Michigan City roundhouse. At these times, Oliver lifted \u201cthe veil of that mysterious world into which he disappeared\u201d each day. For a young boy, such visits were magical, and for Edwin, many years later, they \u201cmerged into one dreamlike memory.\u201d[lxiv]<\/a><\/p>\n I remember when I was five or six or so and climbing with him to the engineer\u2019s seat in the cab of a huge freight engine. Slowly he eased back a lever. With a long hiss of steam, the locomotive moved ponderously forward until we were swallowed up in the cavernous gloom of the roundhouse. There I was greeted with strange smells\u2014the odor of hot oil and metal and steam\u2014unfamiliar sounds\u2014the clang and reverberation of pounded metal\u2014new sights\u2014men moving about among the dim shapes of towering locomotives lighting their way with smoking flares formed of burning oil-soaked waste. I watched my father, carrying his flare, squeeze his way through a firebox door to inspect the boiler of one engine and heard the ring of his hammer as he tested the flues.[lxv]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n In these ephemeral hours, his father \u201cseemed like some knight on a charger, a romantic figure.\u201d[lxvi]<\/a> Later, Edwin found the composite memory of these visits \u201cstrange [and] haunting.\u201d[lxvii]<\/a> The ringing of his father\u2019s hammer was the tolling of a bell for a life absent luxury, a life foreshortened by little-noticed sacrifice. It heralded the coming night when the man, the father, would work no more. It was the peal of love\u2019s labors, of the \u201caustere and lonely offices\u201d for which thanks were neither sought nor expected, and rarely gotten.<\/p>\n *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n As an industrial center with \u201crailroads converging from all directions,\u201d Joliet, Illinois was likewise \u201ca tramp center\u201d at a time when thousands of itinerant men rode the rails hunting work or escape, driven from town to town by local sheriffs and railroad bulls.[lxviii]<\/a> Less than a mile east of the Teales\u2019 home, in an undeveloped tract named Davidson\u2019s Woods, there was \u201can extensive hobo jungle\u2026\u201d where \u201cwanderers cooked their food over little campfires and heated their coffee in tin cans.\u201d[lxix]<\/a> Clara Teale, despite her rigidness in the running of her own home, felt great empathy for the cavalcade of road-worn men who passed through Joliet. Such solicitude for the unwanted likely drew the ire of some neighbors. Such acts cast little limelight. Still, when these men appeared \u201cfrom time to time\u2026at our back door asking for a bite to eat,\u201d Clara fed them without hesitation.[lxx]<\/a> Edwin wrote of these unremembered acts of kindness in the last revision of his autobiography, perhaps to further soften his already-muted critique of his mother\u2019s twig-bending efforts: \u201cTimes were hard, and my mother was kind-hearted and our house no doubt was widely known as an oasis for tramps in their travels.\u201d He even quipped, \u201cWe began to notice cabalistic markings in chalk on the cement wall in front of the house\u2026probably notices to other tramps that easy pickings lay within.\u201d[lxxi]<\/a><\/p>\n Despite his lighthearted autobiography treatment of the hobos who plied his mother\u2019s kindness, an incident involving one of these nameless men haunted Edwin\u2019s memory. In undated notes, he recalled a tramp lying on a stretcher beside the tracks of the Eligin, Joliet, and Eastern railway, his severed leg beside him. It was one of many tragedies Edwin witnessed firsthand in his early years. Later, as he compiled voluminous notes for his autobiography over a thirty-year period, the erratic spotlight of his memory returned with striking frequency to these tragic events. Year after year, he enumerated these events on redundant lists, sometimes adding a newly-recalled detail or event. The earliest of these, his \u201cfirst glimpse of the terror that lies just beneath the bright surface of life,\u201d[lxxii]<\/a> was the death in winter of a cart-horse that slipped on ice directly in front of the Teales\u2019 East Washington Street home:<\/p>\n I saw my father disappear out the front door. I saw my mother following with an armload of blankets. I had no idea what had occurred. Peeking under the drawn curtain at the parlor window, I saw dark figures huddled around the prostrate animal. Lanterns threw shifting shadows over the scene\u2026Then I heard the crack of a rifle\u2026In the morning the horse was gone but a large red pool of blood had frozen on the ice.[lxxiii]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n The scene remained \u201calive[,] buried in the far recesses of my mind,\u201d he wrote nearly seventy years later.[lxxiv]<\/a><\/p>\n In stacks of undated autobiography notes, Edwin documented event after event that, as he reflected later, illustrated \u201chow often death has swept close to me.\u201d[lxxv]<\/a> Once, for example, while he stood at the edge of a water-filled quarry, a favored swimming hole, a boy beside him dove in headfirst, struck a submerged rock, and died from a broken back.[lxxvi]<\/a> Then there was Cube Brooks, a playmate of Lone Oak summers, who was kicked in the head by a horse and died from the blow.[lxxvii]<\/a> Another time, swimming in Lake Michigan on the Indiana dunes side, Edwin watched as a drowned girl was pulled from the water. Decades later he recalled clearly the strands of hair that hung flaccid down her waxen face.[lxxviii]<\/a> Later, working a summer job at the Starr Lumberyard while attending Earlham College, he watched in horror as a deaf co-worker, \u201cunable to hear the warning bell of a backing switch engine, was run over and killed hardly more than a hundred feet from where several of us stood helpless.\u201d[lxxix]<\/a> On two occasions, Edwin rode trains that collided with automobiles at crossings, killing their occupants.[lxxx]<\/a> These experiences and others made Edwin feel as though \u201clightning was striking all around\u201d him.[lxxxi]<\/a> They left him deeply fearful, often \u201ctreading softly, seeking the shadows, trying to avoid attracting the attention of some malign fate I could not name.\u201d[lxxxii]<\/a> He became acutely aware of the tenuous and unforgiving universe we inhabit, and that awareness haunted him for the rest of his life. \u201cI seemed skating over a deep, dark stream,\u201d he wrote later. \u201cThe ice held but I could never forget for long the water that flowed below.\u201d[lxxxiii]<\/a> Life\u2019s triumphs and joys seemed always to unfurl in the shadow of approaching disaster.<\/p>\n While these tragedies haunted Edwin, the \u201csense of uncertainty\u201d they fostered likewise heightened his \u201cintense delight\u2026in the beauty of the passing minute.\u201d[lxxxiv]<\/a> It was analogous, he wrote later, to the way in which \u201csome landscapes take on a magical atmosphere when touched briefly by sunshine while black clouds are piling up in the sky behind them.\u201d[lxxxv]<\/a> In life\u2019s frailty, beauty resided, in its impermanence, meaning that transcended time. To his lists of \u201cblack cloud\u201d events, Edwin often added the title \u201cThe Gray Cipher.\u201d In doing so, he alluded to a short poem from \u201cThe Extraordinary City of Brass,\u201d a story from The Thousand Nights and the One Night<\/em>, more commonly known in the English-speaking world as The Arabian Nights<\/em>. In the story, a traveling party enters the ruins of a great city, now \u201cburied in silence as in a tomb.\u201d[lxxxvi]<\/a> An inscription on a battlement warns the travelers that \u201cthe grey cipher of death\u201d is always near, \u201cbuilding a narrow and dark house for kings\u201d and commoners alike, waiting to spoil the sum of our imagined futures.[lxxxvii]<\/a> Edwin titled the final chapter of his autobiography \u201cThe Gray Cipher.\u201d In it, he wrote only one sentence, stating his intent to offer \u201creflections of various kinds, especially on life and death\u2026.,\u201d[lxxxviii]<\/a> but his sum, too, was spoiled, the pages left unfilled, a reminder of the dark, narrow house that awaited him and awaits us all.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Richard Telford<\/strong> has taught literature and composition at The Woodstock Academy since 1997. In 2011, he helped found the <\/em>Edwin Way Teale Artists in Residence at Trail Wood<\/a> program, which he now directs. He was a long-time contributing writer for <\/em>The Ecotone Exchange<\/em><\/a>. He was recently awarded a Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant by the University of Connecticut to support his work on a book about naturalist, writer, and photographer Edwin Way Teale. The Woodstock Academy Board of Trustees likewise granted him a sabbatical for the 2016-2017 academic year to support this work.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n References:<\/p>\n Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, The<\/em>, Volume 2, Translated from the French translation of Dr. J.C. Mardrus by Powys Mathers, New York & London: Routledge, 2005, Taylor and Francis e-Library ed.<\/p>\n Hayden, Robert. \u201cThose Winter Sundays.\u201d Collected Poems<\/em>. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.<\/p>\n Pendley, Trent D. \u201cJeptha Teale.\u201d Find a Grave<\/em>. https:\/\/www.findagrave.com\/cgi-bin\/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6504158. Accessed 31 May 2017.<\/p>\n Pendley, Trent D. \u201cOliver Cromwell Teale.\u201d Find a Grave<\/em>. https:\/\/www.findagrave.com\/cgi- bin\/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6504214. Accessed 27 June 2017.<\/p>\n Pople, Alexander. The Works of Alexander Pope Esq. Volume III: Containing his Moral Essays. London: J. and P. Knapton in Ludgate Street, 1752.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cDays of Hearsay,\u201d draft, 25-27 July, 1974. Most Complete Manuscript, undated. The Long Way Home<\/em> (EWT’s autobiography).\u00a0Box 63, folder 2187, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cDays of Hearsay\u201d chapter notes, drafts,\u00a01974. The Long Way Home<\/em> (EWT’s autobiography). Box 63, folder 2167, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. Days Without Time: Adventures of a Naturalist<\/em>. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1948.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist<\/em>. Lone Oak Edition. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943, 1957.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. Edwin Way Teale\u2019s Composition Book [1910]. Box 85, folder 2664, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. EWT’s early letters to parents,\u00a01909-1912. Box 142, folder 2880, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig\u201d chapter notes, drafts,\u00a01974 July 31. The Long\u00a0<\/em>Way Home<\/em> (EWT’s autobiography). Box 63, folder 2169, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig,\u201d draft, 3-7 Aug., 1974. Most Complete Manuscript, undated. The Long Way Home<\/em> (EWT’s autobiography).\u00a0Box 63, folder 2187, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMy Earliest Home,\u201d draft, 28-31 July, 1974. Most Complete Manuscript, undated. The Long Way Home<\/em> (EWT’s autobiography).\u00a0Box 63, folder 2187, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMy Earliest Home\u201d chapter notes, drafts,\u00a01974 July 31. The Long Way\u00a0<\/em>Home<\/em> (EWT’s autobiography). Box 63, folder 2168, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. Notes, Clippings, undated. The Long Way Home<\/em> (EWT’s autobiography). Box 63, folder 2163, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cThe Gray Cipher\u201d Chapter Skeleton. 20 Sept., 1974. Most Complete Manuscript, undated. The Long Way Home<\/em> (EWT’s autobiography).\u00a0Box 63, folder 2187, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. The Hampton Journal, 1959-1961, unpublished journal. Box 120, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cWoodland Days\u201d chapter notes, research, drafts of manuscript, correspondence,\u00a01974 August 19. The Long Way Home<\/em> (EWT’s autobiography). Box 63, folder 2170, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.<\/p>\n Wayne, Arthur T. \u201cDestruction of Birds by the Great Cold Wave of February 13 and 14, 1899.\u201d\u00a0The Auk<\/em>, 16: 2 (Apr 1899), 197-8.<\/p>\n Wood, Harold B. \u201cThe History of Bird Banding.\u201d The Auk<\/em>, 62: 2 (Apr 1945), 256-265.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n [i]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. The Hampton Journal, 1959-1961. 15 November, 1961.<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> Hayden, Robert. \u201cThose Winter Sundays.\u201d Collected Poems<\/em>. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 41<\/p>\n [iii]<\/a> The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night<\/em>, Volume 2, 298.<\/p>\n [iv]<\/a> Wayne, Arthur T. \u201cDestruction of Birds by the Great Cold Wave of February 13 and 14, 1899.\u201d 197-8.<\/p>\n [v]<\/a> Wood, Harold B. \u201cThe History of Bird Banding.\u201d 259<\/p>\n [vi]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cDays of Hearsay,\u201d draft, 25-27 July, 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187. 1<\/p>\n [vii]<\/a> Ibid. 2<\/p>\n [viii]<\/a> Teale, Clara Louise. Undated notes. \u201cWoodland Days.\u201d Box 63, folder 2170.<\/p>\n [ix]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMy Earliest Home,\u201d draft, 28-31 July, 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187. 1<\/p>\n [x]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig,\u201d draft, 3-7 Aug., 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187. 6<\/p>\n [xi]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMy Earliest Home,\u201d draft, 28-31 July, 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187.\u00a0 1<\/p>\n [xii]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. Notes, 7 August 1974. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig.\u201d Box 63, folder 2169.<\/p>\n [xiii]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. Days Without Time<\/em>. 20, 238.<\/p>\n [xiv]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMy Earliest Home,\u201d draft, 28-31 July, 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187. 4<\/p>\n [xv]<\/a> Ibid. 4<\/p>\n [xvi]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. Undated notes. \u201cMy Earliest Home.\u201d Box 63, folder 2168.<\/p>\n [xvii]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n [xviii]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMy Earliest Home,\u201d draft, 28-31 July, 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187. 8<\/p>\n [xix]<\/a> Ibid. 4<\/p>\n [xx]<\/a> Pople, Alexander. The Works of Alexander Pope Esq. Volume III: Containing his Moral Essays<\/em>. 192<\/p>\n [xxi]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig,\u201d draft, 3-7 Aug., 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187. 2<\/p>\n [xxii]<\/a> Ibid. 2, 1<\/p>\n [xxiii]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. Undated notes. \u201cWoodland Days.\u201d Box 63, folder 2170.<\/p>\n [xxiv]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig,\u201d draft, 3-7 Aug., 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187. 1<\/p>\n [xxv]<\/a> Ibid. 1<\/p>\n [xxvi]<\/a> Ibid. 2<\/p>\n [xxvii]<\/a> Ibid. 2<\/p>\n [xxviii]<\/a> Ibid. 2<\/p>\n [xxix]<\/a> Ibid. 3<\/p>\n [xxx]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. Undated notes. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig.\u201d Box 63, folder 2169.<\/p>\n [xxxi]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig,\u201d draft, 3-7 Aug., 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187. 3<\/p>\n [xxxii]<\/a> Ibid. 3<\/p>\n [xxxiii]<\/a> Ibid. 3<\/p>\n [xxxiv]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist<\/em>. Lone Oak Edition. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943, 1957. 5.<\/p>\n [xxxv]<\/a> Ibid. 2<\/p>\n [xxxvi]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. Undated notes. \u201cWoodland Days.\u201d Box 63, folder 2170.<\/p>\n [xxxvii]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. Undated notes. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig.\u201d Box 63, folder 2169.<\/p>\n [xxxviii]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n [xxxix]<\/a> Teale, Edwin Way. \u201cMemories of a Bent Twig,\u201d draft, 3-7 Aug., 1974. The Long Way Home<\/em>, most complete manuscript. Box 63, folder 2187. 6<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/files\/2017\/06\/TealeFamilyPortraitCa1916-1-687x1024.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nand put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
\nthen with cracked hands that ached
\nfrom labor in the weekday weather made
\nbanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n