A year ago this week, I was living and writing at Trail Wood, the home of the late naturalist Edwin Way Teale and his wife, Nellie Donovan Teale. The Connecticut Audubon Society owns the property now, and I was honored to be one of last year’s six artists-in-residence, each of whom was granted a week to create at the Hampton, Conn., property. In memory of that time I have been walking, alone and with Tim, along some of South County’s lovely trails – around Browning Mill Pond in Arcadia, to Ninigret Pond in Charlestown and to Trustom Pond in South Kingstown.
Teale had a penchant for anniversaries. Each year he celebrated his own personal Independence Day, Oct. 15, 1941, the day he quit Popular Science magazine and struck out on his own to write books and freelance articles. The job and the commute to New York City from his Long Island home oppressed him deeply, although it did connect him with important people in the scientific community. Ever after he would mark the day in his journal, such as in 1964, when he called the 23rd anniversary his “escape from Popular Science.” Readers indeed are lucky that Teale was able to leave the 9-to-5 treadmill and devote his life to observing and writing about nature.
On the Fourth of July, he rang the bell clapper at their door to celebrate the country’s independence and their move to Trail Wood, which occurred on June 11, 1959, as auspicious an occasion as Teale’s own birthday on June 2. The property – now a total of 168 acres – was their Eden, with its trails crisscrossing marshes and woods and upland, its swamps and beaver pond, and the 11-foot-deep pond they had dug several years after moving in. Eventually he had a summerhouse built for Nellie where she could observe birds on the pond unmolested by mosquitoes, and a writing cabin for himself that was fashioned to the specifications of Thoreau’s small house on Walden Pond. Before that, Teale often would take his work outside to what he called his brush-pile study, a small copse covered in twigs from which he could watch wildlife without being detected.
So it seems right to find a way to mark the anniversary of the week I spent there, which lives in me still. A year ago today was Tuesday, my third day at Trail Wood. I woke late (it was hot) but by 9:30 I was in the writing cabin, working on a chapter about my grandmother’s house until early afternoon. My companion that morning was a woodchuck who could have waddled straight out of one of Teale’s books, or Thoreau’s journals. In mid-afternoon I sat on a bench at Turtle Rock (Teale also loved to name things), where I could hear the plucked banjo of a bullfrog, feel the breeze ruffling the lily pads and see, what else, a turtle climb up onto the aforementioned rock.
Later in the afternoon, a storm blew in, but it brought only a brief thunder shower before winging its way east. As I walked to Beaver Pond around 5:30, the trails were wet and the ferns and grass flattened from the rain. Thunder came again shortly before 7, and the power cut off twice but came back on again.
Every day brought work – some afternoons I wrote in the Teales’ bedroom, now an office with air-conditioning – and the joys of wildlife sightings. In the cabin, I was visited by a catbird, a mouse, and a bee. In the sky, I saw hawks and crows, swifts and swallows, goldfinches, blue jays, cardinals, and a hummingbird. A to-do outside the cabin one morning alerted me to a great blue heron diving into the pond for a fish, which it failed to catch. I heard, but did not see, what was probably a muskrat diving into the pond. Like Thoreau mesmerizing the woodchuck, I was able to inch up to a chipmunk, who had gathered a tiny pile of blackberries on one of the paths leading away from the writing cabin. Butterflies were everywhere – black swallowtail, monarchs, yellow swallowtail. Always I felt that Edwin and Nellie would have heard and noticed more than I was able to.
One night, at about 8 p.m., I decided to take a walk – the time of day Teale called the “angelic hour,” of “perfect stillness in the fading moment.” I saw the white half-moon, a dragonfly hovering like a helicopter, and swallows black against the dusky sky.
On my last day at Trail Wood, huge cumulonimbus clouds gathered low on the horizon in the late afternoon. I walked about the yard, photographing them, taking video and sketching them in my journal. I had never seen such clouds – great dramatic puffs with underbellies of gray, the sun lighting some to a glaring swan white, and in the background, faint streaks of cirrus. Beams of light seemed to streak down from the very heavens. Soon it was pouring, although the sun never stopped shining. This was Trail Wood – darkness and light, all the glory of creation, where even the storms seem to portend joy.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of that week is remembering what it was like to live each day in an extraordinary state of awareness. On this anniversary week, I’m trying to get back to that state of mind.
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