It’s the birthday of nature writer and novelist Harold “Hal” Borland (1900-1978), who for years wrote “outdoor editorials” for the New York Times. Some of his work was eventually collected into almanacs comprised of 365 mini essays, such as Hal Borland’s Twelve Moons of the Year (1979, available used on Amazon for the low low price of $86.89) and Hal Borland’s Book of Days (1985, only $13.72 in used hardcover). So. If you’re into almanacs.

Borland was born on the Nebraskan plains—everybody just calm down: no one loses an eye to snow blindness in this post—to parents who published a weekly newspaper in Colorado. When Borland was 10, the family moved there to homestead. Borland went to the University of Colorado to study engineering but worked for newspapers at the same time, and finally ditched engineering to study journalism and lit at Columbia University in New York. For 15 years, he worked at papers around the country and also started writing short stories and novels, often under the name Ward West. He joined The Times Sunday Department in 1937 but quit just six years later to freelance, and by then his nature editorials had become  a regular thing.

Borland’s first wife, Helen, died at the age of 44 in 1944, the same year that one of their three sons died. (I can’t find out why the son died, which is driving me crazy, but he and another of the sons were evidently twins.) Borland remarried; both his wives were also writers.

While working his desk job in the city, Borland had commuted from a home in the suburbs “at the edge of the country.” When he quit to freelance, he spent much more time at home but also traveled to wherever his assignments took him—Colorado, Florida, Michigan, etc. Then he had a brush with death. As Borland explains in his preface to This Hill, This Valley (1957), he nearly died in the early 1950s of a ruptured appendix and peritonitis. He entered the hospital in winter, where he was entirely cut off from the weather and the outdoors, and left in March as winter was giving way to spring: “March and I were alive, getting acquainted with each other all over again…I was part of some universal magnificence, as I had not been for a long time.” He and his wife sold the suburban home and bought 100 acres in Weatogue, Connecticut, that included “one whole side of a mountain and half a mile of river bank.” There he immersed himself in the nature surrounding him and in his writing.

Several of his best-known works include his memoir, High, Wide and Lonesome: Growing Up on the Colorado Frontier (1956); a book about his relationship with a dog, The Dog Who Came to Stay (1961); and When the Legends Die (1963), a novel about a Native American boy which became an enormously popular YA classic. Borland died in 1978 of emphysema.

Have a fine Monday full of nature’s best and stay scrupulously honest to the data.