Ted Williams - Earth Almanac

The clarity of Teds focus his ability to capture, say, the dance of craneflies during a winter warm spell stops time in its tracks again and again.

from the foreword by Verlyn Klinkenborg

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Edited by Deborah Burns

Art direction and book design by Alethea Morrison

Text production by Jennifer Jepson Smith

Indexed by Nancy D. Wood

Cover illustrations by John Burgoyne and Martina Flor/Handsome Frank Ltd.

Author photo courtesy of Ted Williams

Interior illustrations by John Burgoyne

Text 2004, 2020 by Ted Williams

A previous edition of this book was published under the title Wild Moments.

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For Drew, Sam, Mae, Grif, and Macy.

May they live in a better world
and make it a better world.

The particularity of nature knows no end, and it is the admiration of all of us who tend to see the natural world clothed in generalities. I write about nature often, and yet it always feels like a summing-up to me never close enough to the hair and skin, to the bark and soil. I reserve a special envy for the naturalists and writers who dwell among the particulars, who come back from the field scratched and bloodied with precise knowledge of how things are out there. Thoreau is the great model here. It is vastly easier to grasp his literary achievement than it is to judge the accuracy and the particularity of his observations of the natural world. Most of us know what a metaphor looks like, after all, but not, as he did, the right kind of day for finding arrowheads.

This book, Earth Almanac, exemplifies that kind of particularity. In the past five decades, Ted Williams has made a distinguished name for himself as an environmental reporter, someone who can be counted on to take his readers deep into the struggle to preserve a vestige of this planets natural diversity and integrity. To some writers, environmental reporting is just another beat a place where organizations, institutions, personalities, politics, and money collide, much as they do in almost any realm of human activity. What underlies Teds reporting, what gives it its pressing value to us, is his profound engagement with the natural world.

Earth Almanac is a book of pure perception, a work in which the observers presence has been distilled into nothingness, leaving only the world the moment that he has seen. This book is a collection of those moments, grouped by seasons. The movement of time is the current flowing through these brief essays of witnessing. And yet the clarity of Teds focus his ability to capture, say, the dance of craneflies during a winter warm spell stops time in its tracks again and again. What emerges is a vision of how complex time really is in the natural world, how it pools and eddies and spills away from day into day, season into season.

You may come away from Earth Almanac feeling that somehow Ted Williams is both ubiquitous and omniscient. What he is, really, is intellectually omnivorous. His range is almost as broad as the range of the snapping turtle from the hills of Colorado to the salt marshes of the Atlantic and from Nova Scotia south to Ecuador. He is as happy taking us into the intimacies of insect life the mating strategy of the male dragonfly, for instance as he is explaining the inexplicable Gila monster. And though the native country of this book is the woods of the northeastern United States or perhaps it just seems that way because thats where I live Ted Williams is a native wherever nature is, and that, of course, is nearly everywhere.

The cardinal virtue of most good naturalists is patience. But most naturalists are far more patient with nature than they are with people. One of the most appealing traits of Earth Almanac is its unhurried practicality. There is poetry here a poetry of observation and language. But in each of these brief essays, Ted also makes room for us to stand beside him. Hes eager to make sure we know where to look, and he gives us projects to make sure we find what he knows well find. His version of nature is one to be shared, to be examined together. Pick apart some cattail seed heads, he says, and I can feel myself getting out of my chair and walking across the hillside to a spring-fed pond where cattails grow.

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Earth Almanac originally titled Earth Calendar is a seasonal natural history column that I have had the great pleasure of writing for Audubon magazine, where it was conceived and assigned to me by then editor Roger Cohn. For an investigative environmental reporter who mucks around in political dirt during most every working day there can be no tonic more refreshing than climbing out of the trenches and, for one fleeting week, celebrating the beauty and magic of nature. Writing about experiences afield is a way of reliving them. I get to do it all twice.

I am convinced that these regular retreats into what is pure and clean and right with the world have made me a better environmental reporter because they have reminded me of whats at stake and what Im fighting for. They also have reminded me that the crusade for healthy, native ecosystems is far from hopeless and that good news abounds. As you read this book, pay careful attention to the many species that have recovered from desperate trouble or that continue to do well or at least hold their own in a world in which the general assumption is that everything has gone to hell. Even now, as I reread the manuscript, I find the good news remarkable and uplifting.