Teale Tales

Today was the culmination of a yearly adventure that actually began forty-six years ago. In 1972 I was introduced to Henry David Thoreau by Edwin Way Teale’s “The Thoughts of Thoreau” and I have been reading Thoreau ever since. I finally read “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” in June of 2017 and I was inspired to retrace the Thoreau’s brothers’ voyage with my wife Marsha that August – in the bicentennial year of Thoreau’s birth. I returned to Concord, Massachusetts to spend this past week in the very room where Thoreau was born in the house at Thoreau Farm – at a replica at his desk at Walden Pond – to write my book about our adventure last year  – “One Week in August Together on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers – in the Wake of Thoreau”. It seemed only fitting that I end this odyssey with a pilgrimage to Trail Wood, the last home of the man who first inspired me to read Thoreau. I have been here from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. I walked around the smaller pond, to Teale’s writing cabin, and Nellie’s Summerhouse, took a nap in the hammock, and wrote at this picnic table.

I was going to suggest that the Connecticut Audubon Society initiate a writer’s retreat in Teale’s writing cabin like they have done at Thoreau Farm when John Morrey happened by serendipitously and told me of the Artist Residence Program they already have here at Trail Wood. So, I do hope to return again…and again…and again…

Keith Charles Mueller

Athens, New York

August 26, 2018