Edwin Way Teale
Wandering Through
Winter: An adventurous 20,000 mile journey through the North American winter
Illustrated with 49 black and white photographs by the
author
370 pages
Dodd, Mead & Company, New York (1965)
This coast-to-coast journey, which took the author and his
travelling companion Nellie from southern California to north of Caribou, Maine
during the winter of 1961–2, is the predictable last instalment of a series
that documents journeys in the USA during each of the four seasons. This is not
nature writing elevated to the pitch of Lopez or Thoreau but rather an
easy-going travelogue, Sunday-supplement style. (The author might have
benefited from Thoreau’s injunction to look closely at one place rather than swiftly
at many.) Nevertheless, Wandering Through
Winter is included here on the strength of its representation of ice
conditions in parts of North America that other writers may have overlooked in
their headlong rush for the arctic regions. While not all the areas through which Teale
travels experience freezing temperatures in winter, he has plentiful opportunities
to observe ice, including a historic ice jam at the Alton Dam of the
Mississippi, an ice storm in Indiana, and – when contemporary ice is lacking –
the bones of ‘Ice Age elephants’ in Big Bone Lick. Illustrations include
cataracts of ice in the Adirondacks and the snowshoe maker Charles Holway at
work in Maine.
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