North with the Spring : a Naturalist’s Record of a 17,000-mile Journey with the North American Spring, by Edwin Way Teale (New York : Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963)
Edwin Way Teale and his wife, Nellie, set off in 1947 to follow spring as it inched northward from Florida’s Everglades to Maine. In 130 days, they traveled 17,000 miles through 23 states. Reading or re-reading North with the Spring, Teale’s chronicle of their journey, is a perfect way to greet and celebrate this season.
“Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide.” – from North with the Spring, by Edwin Way Teale
Our plan was to start where spring begins for the North American continent, somewhere south of Lake Okeechobee in that no man’s land of the seasons, the Everglades. There amid the sawgrass seas and hammocks, under the high, cloud-filled sky of southern Florida, spring gathers its forces. There, the first stirrings of the season become apparent. Working north, we would keep pace with its progress, zigzagging by car behind its advancing front. Above the peninsula of Florida we would swing wide along the Gulf to the Louisiana marshes, cut back to the Okefenokee Swamp, then trail the season through the Great Smokies, across the Piedmont Plateau, among the Jersey pine barrens, out to the tip of Cape Cod and through the mountains of New England to the green boundary of the Canadian line. – from North with the Spring, by Edwin Way Teale
The vernal equinox had arrived. Night and day were of equal length. It was spring, officially spring, all over the North American continent.It was spring where snow lay drifted under balsams in northern Maine. It was spring where crows settled on black and frozen bottom land in Illionis. It was spring where eucalyptus trees lifted shaggy trunks in sunshine, beside the Pacific. In all these places, and in tens of thousands more, people felt a lift of the spirit. – from North with the Spring, by Edwin Way Teale