Edwin Way Teale (1899 - 1980)

 Another Pandemic Reading Project

   For those running low on reading material, I last recommended books by George R. Stewart, who wrote about a variety of subjects and produced both works of fiction and non-fiction.  Edwin Way Teale, who, like Stewart, died over forty years ago, wrote mainly non-fiction and his subject was 'nature.' He was a popular author who worked at Popular Science Monthly and wrote articles for magazines like Colliers.  He was the friendly neighbourhood naturalist who often appeared on TV; a kind of Marlin Perkins for insects. At some point he became popular enough to be a freelancer and he and his wife Nellie, hit the road and wrote about everything they saw, including the road kill. 

   Even if you are not interested in nature, you will enjoy the books pictured above, particularly if you are a fan of road books or road trips. I wrote earlier about the American Trails Book Series and the series by Archer Butler Hulbert, Historic Highways of America. The travels of the Teale's are about The American Seasons, as those seasons existed on this continent between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. The last volume in the series, Wandering Through Winter, earned a Pulitzer Prize for Teale in 1966.

   The sub-titles of these books will indicate how unusual they are: North with the Spring: A Naturalist's Record of a 17,000-Mile Journey with the North American Spring (1951); Autumn across America: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey through the North American Autumn (1956); Journey into Summer: A Naturalist's Record of a 19,000-Mile Journey through the North American Summer (1960) and Wandering through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey through the North American Winter (1965.) 

   Even if you failed elementary geography or have forgotten how long a mile is, you probably are aware that it is much less than 17,000 miles from the Everglades to Mount Washington in New Hampshire or less than 20,000 from Monomy on Cape Cod to Point Reyes, California. These were routes not taken by typical 'snow birds' or as the crow flies. The Teales meandered and stayed within each season for the entirety of each trip. Spring travels north at a rate of about fifteen miles per day, as did the Teales who rambled east and west to remain always in the spring as they moved slowly north between February and June. 

   Unfortunately I cannot provide examples from the books to entice you to have a look at them. I borrowed them from the libraries up at Western University and returned them all a while back. Now they are in storage and because of the pandemic, it is not possible to retrieve them. I have already provided one example from North With the Spring. See my post about the "Eagle Man", Charles Broley from Gorrie, Ontario, who the Teales met in Florida. I do recall that they also wrote about Point Pelee and birder readers will appreciate their many observations about the winged wildlife they spot along the way.

   I did also discuss another of Teale's books in my post about Parks Along the Great Lakes. As a young boy, Teale loved to spend the summers at his grandparents who lived near Lake Michigan. From that experience he wrote, Dune Boy. I was able to get a copy of that from the London Public Library system, but it now appears to be missing. For more about his Indiana days, see the links provided below. 

   A while back, the Guardian asked some famous authors what books they would choose to give their younger selves. Here is part of Julian Barne's answer: Also, books about the true nature of Nature. I was a blind townee for half my life before slowly discovering the countryside. So I would instruct my younger self to learn about soil, wind and water; trees, animals, plants and birds. And bees. That’s another thing: I’d also give my younger self some truthful books about sex. (Dec. 2, 2017.)

   If you have children or grandchildren, Teale has a lot of books you could purchase for them. Western has a surprising number of them, because, up until quite recently, there was an Education Library which had a fine collection from which aspiring teachers could choose good "Kiddie Lit", as could the students at what used to be called the "School of Library Science."

Re-Tracing the Trips

   Given the detailed observations made by the Teales, I wondered what one would find now. Someone else thought the same thing. John Harris followed the Teale's springtime route and wrote: Returning North With the Spring. Unfortunately, a copy is not available locally. Here is a description from the University of Florida Press:

Retracing Teale's route, writer John Harris reveals a vastly changed natural world. In Returning North with the Spring, he stops at the very places where Teale once stood, paddling through Everglades National Park, the Okefenokee wildlife refuge, the Great Dismal Swamp, and trekking across the Great Smoky Mountains, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and Cape Cod. He is stunned to see how climate change, invasive species, and other factors have affected the landscapes and wildlife in the years since Teale saw them.

Yet Harris also discovers that many of the vulnerable sites Teale described have been newly "rewilded" or permanently protected by the government. He looks at current restoration projects, models of sustainable residential development, efforts to control invasive species, and environmental success stories such as the alligator, the bald eagle, and the black bear. Along the way, he meets an array of ecologists, naturalists, and beloved authors who join in his adventure by sharing their memories and experiences of the natural environment in Eastern North America.

   A birder also had the same idea. See this post from the website of the American Bird Conservancy. Bruce Beehler tracked migrant songbirds from their landfall on the Gulf of Mexico, north through the Mississippi Valley, and into the Great North Woods of Ontario, where many of the birds settle down to breed in those raw boreal forests with the ever-so-long days of the summer solstice.

   The Teale's donated their farm to the Audubon Society and additional information is found at the website of the Connecticut Audubon Society. See the links for "The Story of Trail Wood," and "The Teales's Legacy. Nellie Teale lived there until she died in 1993. 

   The state of Indiana also provides considerable material about Teale's time among the dunes of Lake Michigan. See: "Edwin Way Teale: Traveler in Little Realms" and this 28 page research summary. 

Teale Books:

Bolded titles are available in the libraries at Western University in 2021. For a proper list, check the catalogue or consult with a Western librarian.

The Book of Gliders (New York: Dutton, 1930).

Grassroot Jungles: A Book of Insects (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1937; London: Putnam, 1938; revised edition, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1944; London: Hale, 1944); republished as Exploring the Insect World (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1953).

The Boys' Book of Insects: Interesting Facts about the Lives and Habits of the Common Insects, Together with Simple Instructions for Collecting, Rearing, and Studying Them (New York: Dutton, 1939); republished as The Junior Book of Insects (New York: Dutton, 1953).

The Boys' Book of Photography (New York: Dutton, 1939).

The Golden Throng: A Book About Bees (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940; London: Hale, 1942); republished as A Book About Bees (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1959).

Byways to Adventure: A Guide to Nature Hobbies (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942).

Near Horizons: The Story of an Insect Garden (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942; London: Hale, 1947).

Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943; London: Hale, 1949).

Insect Life (New York: Boy Scouts of America, 1944).

The Lost Woods: Adventures of a Naturalist (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945; London: Hale, 1952).

Days without Time: Adventures of a Naturalist (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1948).

North with the Spring: A Naturalist's Record of a 17,000-Mile Journey with the North American Spring (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951; London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1954).

Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist's Year (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953).

Insect Friends (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955).

Autumn across America: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey through the North American Autumn (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956); republished as Autumn Journey: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey through the North American Autumn (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957).

Journey into Summer: A Naturalist's Record of a 19,000-Mile Journey through the North American Summer (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1960).

The Lost Dog (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1961).

The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962).

Wandering through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey through the North American Winter (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965).

Springtime in Britain: An 11,000 Mile Journey through the Natural History of Britain from Land's End to John O'Groats (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970); republished as Springtime in Britain: A Journey through the Land (London: Cassell, 1971).

Photographs of American Nature (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972).

A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974).

A Walk through the Year (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978).

A Conscious Stillness: Two Naturalists on Thoreau's Rivers, by Teale and Ann Zwinger (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).

The Bonus:

In case you missed it, the Teales wandered in the spring in England all the way from Land's End to John O' Groats. (11,000 miles)

Teale also won the John Burrough's prize for Near Horizons: The Story of an Insect Garden.

Northshire Bookstore

   A couple of years ago, we visited Saratoga Springs. If you want to take a short road trip when the pandemic ends, it is a destination highly recommended. As is the Northshire Bookstore which has several books by and about Edwin Way Teale.

    

A Fish Tale

   This story was spotted and I should have known it was too good to be completely good. It involves a kid who is actually outside and he is alone. He is fishing. Not from the shore, but from a kayak. He lands a big one. A salmon from Lake Huron. The family has a nice salmon dinner. He looks happy.

   I find it refreshing that these parents let their 12-year-old outside and that he must have chosen to be there - out on Lake Huron in a kayak. In Lake Huron, where there was actually a fish. Not inside, watching video games. 

   Now, if you are a parent, you may think I am joking about the above, since items in this blog are often presented facetiously. Particularly if you are what I perceive to be a 'typical' parent, who might think the behaviour of the parents of this pre-teen, borders on the criminal. How could they allow their child to be outside and alone? And in a kayak. On a lake.

   Well, as I said, I found the tale to be a refreshing one and congratulate both the boy and his parents. It would have been a perfect one, but there was one small spoiler spotted and I present it at the very end of the account. 

"Jack Taylor reeled in a 20.5 pound king salmon over the weekend on Lake Huron. Incredibly he made the catch while in a kayak off Ipperwash Beach....
“It was on a little bait caster rod, it wasn’t a rod meant for that type of fight,” said Jack. “It took me about 20 minutes to get in. I had a small net, and I only got the head of the salmon in so I had to gill him and pull him up in my kayak. I dragged him up and had to head to shore to wait for my dad to come.”
Jack said he’s now caught three fish in his kayak but this was the biggest.
“I fish about three times a week now probably because of COVID,” he said. “The biggest fish that I’ve caught was with my uncle on Lake Ontario. It was a 27 pound salmon that went out about 600 yards.”
As for the fish he reeled in Saturday, Jack and his family had a delicious smoked salmon dinner."
And here is the spoiler: 
Jack said he was relaxing watching Netflix on a mobile device when his reel began to quickly unspool.

  I am not giving up on young Jack; perhaps he was watching a Jacques Cousteau documentary.

Source:
"12-year-old Lands 20 Pound Salmon in Kayak on Lake Huron,"
By Josh Boyce, BlackburnNews.com, April 16, 2021.

Apologizing Again

 It was announced last week that next month Prime Minister Trudeau will apologize again, this time to Italian-Canadians. In case you missed it and wondered what you  did (since I assume he is apologizing for all of us), here is the announcement from the Canadian Press on 15 April:

"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Will Issue a Formal Apology Next Month for the Treatment of Italian Canadians During the Second World War."
The government said in a news release that 600 Italian-Canadian men were interned in camps in Canada after Italy allied with Germany and joined the war in 1940.
Some 31,000 other Italian Canadians were declared enemy aliens.
Mr. Trudeau told the House of Commons Wednesday that his government "will right these wrongs" by issuing a formal apology in May.
In 1988, Canada formally apologized and offered $300-million in compensation to Japanese Canadians, 22,000 of whom were interned in camps during the Second World War.

Mr. Trudeau did not say whether there will be compensation for Italian Canadians.

   He has already apologized to the many Sikh, Muslim and Hindu passengers who were not allowed to come ashore in Canada over a 100 years ago. Former Prime Minister Harper apologized for the head tax used to restrict Chinese immigrants and for the residential schools program. Prime Minister Trudeau extended that apology to those in residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador and more recently he apologized to those public servants caught up in the "gay purge."

   I apologize for questioning what is accomplished by all of these apologies, but I do have some questions: How much should one apologize for things one didn't do? How guilty is one for acts committed by others and how responsible is one for things done long ago? What does it mean, when a nation apologizes? Should I feel ashamed to be a Canadian because of all the apologies we have had to offer? Are the wrongs righted? And, more crassly, should Italian-Canadians be compensated and for what exactly?

   I was going to title this post - Apologia Needed For Historical Apologies - since I feel that a defence of  all of this historical apologizing needs to be offered, at least to those of us who regret that bad things happened, but can't or don't feel guilty about them. It is the case, however, that there may be one in the form of the book: A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past, by Ashraf H.A. Rushday.  There is a copy in the stacks up at King's College, ordered perhaps by someone feeling guilty about the Crusades. Unfortunately, the stacks are closed during the pandemic. If anyone reads this and selects this book for their book club, let me know what is decided about the necessity and effectiveness of all this apologizing for the behaviour of others done long ago.

   The publisher of the book is the Temple University Press, from which this synopsis is taken:

Public apologies have become increasingly common scenes and representative moments in what appears to be a global process of forgiveness. The apology-forgiveness dynamic is familiar to all of us, but what do these rituals of atonement mean when they are applied to political and historical events?

In his timely, topical, and incisive book A Guilted Age, Ashraf Rushdy argues that the proliferation of apologies by politicians, nations, and churches for past events—such as American slavery or the Holocaust—can be understood as a historical phenomenon. In our post–World War II world, Rushdy claims that we live in a “guilted age.”

A Guilted Age identifies the two major forms of apologies—political and historical—and Rushdy defines the dynamics and strategies of each, showing how the evolution of one led to the other. In doing so, he reveals what apology and forgiveness do to the past events they respectively apologize for and forgive—and what happens when they fail.

The Bonus:
Another book for book club consideration that I have mentioned before:
In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memories and Its Ironies, David Rieff.

 “In Praise of Forgetting is about our collective memories: how we remember our national histories and argue about our shared past. Rieff contends that these collective remembrances are self-serving, often fraudulent and frequently dangerous. Sometimes, he thinks, we would be better off simply forgetting the grudge-filled chronicles and getting on with living our lives. He admires the suggestion of a Northern Irish writer that the next memorial to Irish history should be “raising a monument to Amnesia, and forgetting where we put it.”

What's In The Mail?

   The news here in Ontario is not good. The Covid situation has worsened and we have been told to stay-at-home until May 20. That news, as reported by an English newspaper, seemed even worse when it appeared under this headline: "Ontario Gives Police Sweeping Powers as Covid Crisis Spirals Out of Control," (Leyland Cecco, The Guardian, April 16.) One learns that: Police in Ontario will now have the power to stop drivers or pedestrians and ask for their address and reason for being out. Residents could face fines of up to $C750 (US$600) for refusing to comply. Although I was inclined to think that such strict measures were likely necessary to reduce the transmission of the virus, I was unaware of the unintended consequences which will cause an increase in other bad things: “Blanket powers for police to stop vehicles like this bends our constitutional freedoms too far, and will cause a rash of racial profiling,” Michael Bryant of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said in a statement.

   I am a member, I suppose, of a race not subject to the rash, but I will comply with the directives issued and stay on the property. Staying at home means I have lost many of the excuses I typically offer as explanations for my lack of blogging activity. In my defence, however, the pandemic means I don't have much to blog about, just as you don't have much to offer when your neighbours ask, "What's New?" The mail received, doesn't seem like a promising subject, but here goes. 

   If you didn't realize the mail could be exciting, you probably missed my two earlier posts about the surprising things that can be delivered to your door.  I began the year by discussing The Epoch Times, a conspiracy promoting publication that some of our fellow citizens don't want the Posties to deliver. Then in February, Druthers arrived and, among other things, we learned that vaccines should be avoided. 

   Recently we received, as I am sure you did,  a very timely, massive catalog offering "Great Courses" from the "World's Greatest Professors" which you can take right from the home you are now not allowed to leave. The list of things about which you can learn is a long one and you find them here: ShopGreatCourses.com.  And, if you act now, the courses are cheap. For example, Western Civilization -- The Way You Wish It Had Been Taught, cost $595 on a DVD, but you can stream it now for $25. (As an aside, I thought such a subject was now verboten, but maybe it is being taught the way we wish it had been and perhaps placed at the bottom, under all the other civilizations.)

   If you are thinking about enrolling during this pandemic down time, perhaps you should exercise due diligence.  I took a look for the professor offering the 'Western Civ" course and he does exist and has emeritus status from the respected university named. Although the catalog received was mailed from Niagara Falls, that is not unusual. The people at the headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia simply forgot  to tell them to change the spelling to 'catalogue'. The fact that the headquarters of the CIA is close by, means nothing, I'm sure. It is the case, however, that a little searching found a lot of customers who were not pleased with the products being offered. 

Hand -Written Solicitations For Your House

   Less substantial than the tabloid size course catalogue received, were two different hand-written notes, both of which were, I am sure, 'written' on machines.  Both badly wanted the house to which the notes had been delivered. Adelle and others offered cash and a closing that would happen quickly, perhaps even faster than the quick and problem-free closing offered by Adam & Kristyna who also said, "I don't really care about the condition of the building, as I'll be renovating it anyways." While it is nice to receive hand-written notes these days, the plural 'anyways' is problematic and I suggest due diligence again be exercised. If, however, Adelle or Adam do have the cash, I advise selling, since the real estate bubble is likely to burst before Covid is contained.

The Canadian Masters

    I see that I have not posted in ten days and part of the reason for that is I spent a fair amount of time watching the Masters, which is very American. You probably did as well, even if you are not interested in golf, just as you likely would have watched the Rose Bowl, even though not interested in college football.  It is a fine thing to see roses in January and it is a relief, up here, to see azaleas in April, which give us hope that in a few months something colourful will sprout in Ontario. 

   You are likely to be unaware of the 'Canadian Masters', unless you are thinking about that athletic event for the elderly, but that is not my subject for today. Before I get to the 'Canadian Masters', I will offer some information about the American one, because it is hard to come by. It will also be contrarian in nature, as is usually the case. I always realized that I would not be getting a green jacket as a golfer and knew that if recommended as a member, I would surely be black-balled.  But, what is even worse, I seem to have been rejected by their random lottery system, which allows a chosen few to mingle among the magnolias every April in Augusta. So I now have a dimmer view of this colourful event which we all know is, "an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines." 

   Since you are eager to know more about the Canadian Masters, I will present quickly some Factlets, a term loyal readers will be familiar with, before I get to our main subject for today. 

   * In the old days, the only Black folks allowed on the course were caddies and perhaps a few in the kitchen. Now many of the caddies are millionaires and none of them are black. This year, Lee Elder, the first Black golfer to compete in the tournament, was honoured. There is no indication that the tournament will change its name, although the word 'masters' is now problematic. Although the All Star Baseball game was removed from Atlanta, I don't think there was any attempt to move the Masters from Augusta.

   * Women are now allowed membership and one of them is even a Black Woman - Condoleezza Rice. Back, just a few years ago, when the lack of women became a feminist issue, the members decided to hold the Masters without sponsors, to save them from embarrassment. I don't know if Dr. Rice is allowed to use bikini wax while on the premises (see below.)

   * If you behave badly, the Pinkertons will pitch you out. A spectator was jailed for stealing a cup of bunker sand in 2012 (it is not really sand, but feldspar and the bird sounds are often piped in and some grass tinted green.)
      Back in 1994 when golf commentator, Gary McCord said, "They don't cut the greens here at Augusta, they use bikini wax," he was banned from the broadcast.
      This year, Gary Player's son, Wayne, was banned after he tried to upstage the Elder ceremony by holding up a sleeve of branded golf balls.

   * I recently offered a couple of posts about major landowners and Augusta National is another one of them. If you are attempting to offer a 'Technicolor fantasyland" you need to make the surrounding territory presentable and the National is doing that: 

In the areas immediately surrounding golf's most exclusive club, there are generally only two types of properties: the ones Augusta National has acquired -- and the ones it will acquire....In the last 20 years, the club has spent around $200 million to buy more than 100 pieces of land totaling no fewer than 270 acres, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of property and tax assessor records and interviews with people familiar with the transactions....The extent of the land grab, which vastly exceeds any previously reported estimate, has been obscured by the club's use of limited liability companies. Rather than buying land in its name, the club has instead done so using more than a dozen LLCs, which have no other known purpose. The National is a very private, for-profit operation.

   * The press building on the course is described as the "Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling" and the ink-stained wretches leave it only reluctantly to actually visit the course outside.

   * Another structure somewhere along a fairway is described as an  "Oz within Oz". Known as 'Berckmans Place', the 90,000 square feet contains five restaurants and for an entry fee of around $10,000 you can graze through each of them.  Like most of the things at Augusta National, including the golf course, it is used only a few days throughout the year.

Unlike Any Other

   The tag line you have heard Jim Nantz utter over the years - "A Tradition Unlike Any Other" - could be spoken in French along the St. Lawrence in Quebec where what I am calling, "The Canadian Masters" is held.  The equivalent of Augusta National in Canada is Les Quatre Ventes, in Malbaie, Que.  Just like Augusta it has bridges. The one Georgia.

The one in Quebec.

Just like Augusta National, Les Quatre Ventes is private and only open to the public for a very few days each year. Unlike Augusta, however, the flowers, gardens and birdsongs are all real. The only thing missing is the golf. 

Sources:

   The gardens at Les Quatre Vents were created by Francis H. Cabot and they are regarded as among the most beautiful in the world and if you go to this website you can take a virtual tour. Tours are allowed for small groups over a few days each year, but they may not be offered in 2021 because of the pandemic. 

   This beautiful book is available and it contains almost 400 photographs along with a history of each garden.  I happen to have a copy so don't attempt to buy one. On the Amazon website, one sees this: 

I think at the website offered above you will find a more reasonably priced copy.

   The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offered a very good documentary - The Gardener - which you may be able to access.  It is about 45 minutes long and is offered on CBC Gem.

For most of the quotes in this post see: "Unlike Any Other," the very good account by Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker, June 24, 2019 and "Augusta National Makes a Land Grab --- The home of the Masters has expanded its territory by more than 75%, paying massive sums for surrounding properties," Brian Costa, The Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2019. 

Post Script:

   Unfortunately I have to admit that, just as Augusta National is an enclave for very wealthy Americans, Les Quatre Ventes is owned by very wealthy Americans. Francis H. Cabot, who died in 2011, was a Boston Brahmin. His grandmother was given the Malbaie property as a wedding gift in 1902.

The Bonus:

  One of the founders of Augusta National was Clifford Roberts. In the 1970s he had a stroke and made the decision to exit  on his own terms:

"Roberts organized his suicide with the same attention to detail he had applied to the club and the tournament. On his last day, he got a haircut from the club barber and asked a receptionist to buy him a new pair of pajamas in town. He asked a waiter to help him walk from his room to the first tee, where he looked at the trees behind the first green to assure himself that the house that had once stood there - the only result of an early club plan to sell home sites - was indeed gone. He took dinner alone in his room.

Late that night, he called security to report hearing something outside his room, and a watchman came and helped him load the .38- caliber Smith & Wesson pistol he kept there.

His body was found the next morning on the club's par-3 course, near Ike's Pond. There was a single gunshot wound to the temple. He was wearing slippers, the new pajamas (with trousers pulled on over the bottoms) and a raincoat.

Roberts was the second suicide in his family. His mother, Rebecca Scott Key Roberts (a relative of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the national anthem), had killed herself with a shotgun in 1913."

"The Man Who Made the Masters," Alan Tays, Palm Beach Post, April 4, 2001. 

Famous Road Trips

 

    I am again behind in my blogging and am not really ready to begin this post. It is important, however, to share this information with you and I will try to think of an introduction as I type. The subject is "Road Trips" (or should that be 'are'?) A famous one was taken by Ken Kesey and the 'Merry Pranksters' in the Magic Bus pictured above.  The search for a suitable picture for this post allowed me a little more time to figure out a way to introduce it. The picture does not really have anything to do with what follows, but it is about a road trip

   Let me begin this way. In the last two weeks I read two articles that both begin with sentences about road trips. Just as there are contests and arguments over such things as the "Best First Lines in Novels", there should be some for the "Best Opening Sentences About Car Trips in Articles." Here are my two nominations. The first one is about a very short trip, the second is  much longer, but length shouldn't matter.  If anyone can come up with any that are better, they will be given a year's subscription to Mulcahy's Miscellany.

In 1947, Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, and Oskar Morgenstern drove from Princeton to Trenton in Morgenstern’s car. The three men, who’d fled Nazi Europe and become close friends at the Institute for Advanced Study, were on their way to a courthouse where Gödel, an Austrian exile, was scheduled to take the U.S.-citizenship exam, something his two friends had done already. Morgenstern had founded game theory, Einstein had founded the theory of relativity, and Gödel, the greatest logician since Aristotle, had revolutionized mathematics and philosophy with his incompleteness theorems. Morgenstern drove. Gödel sat in the back. Einstein, up front with Morgenstern, turned around and said, teasing, “Now, Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?” Gödel looked stricken.

That is from the March 22, 2021 issue of The New Yorker and the article is by Jill Lepore, ("When Constitutions Took Over the World.") While Gödel may have been nervous, his compatriots were worried that Gödel might choose to argue about the logical inconsistencies he had found in the Constitution. 

   One week later ( the March 29, 2021 issue of The New Yorker), Madeleine Schwartz begins this article, "Sybille Bedford and the Unruly Art of the Origin Story," with these sentences:

In the summer of 1940, when she was twenty-nine years old, Sybille Bedford took on an unusual assignment: driving Thomas Mann’s poodle across the United States. Bedford had known Mann, nearly forty years her senior, since her adolescence, which she spent living among German expatriates in the South of France. An aspiring but so far unprolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, she had come of age under his shadow. Now both she and Mann were refugees in another country. Mann and his family, moving from Princeton to Pacific Palisades, took the train; the country was experiencing a heat wave, and the compartments were air-conditioned. Bedford drove the writer’s car with her girlfriend and Nico, the poodle, stopping every once in a while for a bottle of Coke, which she spiked with rum.

Well, unfortunately I still haven't figured out what to say about what I have just posted, but you will have undoubtedly have enjoyed these sentences and a year's free subscription will be given to anyone else who thinks they were worth calling to your attention.

The Bonus:

I could probably find something bonus-like if I bothered to look up Jill Lepore, the author of the first article. But, without doing so I know that she writes such pieces almost weekly, teaches at Harvard and publishes books regularly. She probably also has a blog. 

Careful readers will have noticed that both trips began in Princeton in the 1940s. If you want to read about a road trip in the 1920s that has Princeton on the itinerary see this account by F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda - The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.  They left from Connecticut to visit her parents in Alabama and to search for "biscuits and peaches." Unfortunately, her parents had just left to go and visit them in Connecticut. 
The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, F. Scott Fitzgerald, intro. by Paul Theroux, Hesperus Press, 2011.