Walking with Thoreau
It’s impossible to walk around Concord, Massachusetts without thinking about Thoreau. Concord is the modest town 26 miles west of Boston that Henry called home essentially from the time he was born until his death in 1862 at the egregiously young age of 45 (speaking as someone in her mid-forties: you’re barely not an embryo!). Some might consider that a kind of “failure to launch” situation where the person really never gravitates away from his hometown, ends up living with family members throughout his life until things reach their natural conclusion. But Henry did travel extensively—throughout New England, out into the Midwest, and even Canada, always returning the idyllic, rambling preserves of his beloved Concord.
Concord was resettled on Algonquin land in the mid-1600s. Its native name is “Musketaquid,” which means “grassy plain.” In his lifetime Henry roamed over every inch of Musketaquid, getting to know every blade of grass that made up the sprawling fields of his friends and neighbors; every variety of tree in the woods surrounding the town; and every type of bird that made their way to the shores of Walden Pond and the other local tributaries. In short: Henry noticed like a boss. He devoted his life to the habit of “observe and report,” which became a sacred, devotional practice. In addition to publishing the book Walden about his year- long sojourn living in a one-room cabin on the edge of Walden Pond and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, chronicling his canoe expedition on these local waterways, Henry published numerous essays and articles on topics that ranged from the merits of civil disobedience and the evils of slavery, to an exploration of Massachusetts’ landscape. It was not just Henry’s gaze upon and into nature that made his observations rich. It was the conscientiousness he applied, the genuine care he invested in everything he saw that animates the writing. I’ve read a lot of his essays and it takes more than just someone who knows how to string a few sentences together to make a bone-dry subject like “the succession of forest trees” feel like you’re getting a Buddhist teaching on the value of creation. Damn, Henry. Buy me dinner first!
Not everyone appreciated or even recognized Henry’s gift. Robert Louis Stevenson said that Thoreau was a “skulker” who “hoarded” his virtue so as not to have to share it with his fellow man. Believe me-this was definitely a sick nineteenth-century burn. His friend and fellow writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne took a more measured assessment of Henry: “He is a keen and delicate observer of nature—a genuine observer—which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness.” But he also criticized Henry as, essentially, a grade-A slacker: “[Thoreau] repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to live an Indian life among civilized men.” Hawthorne really sounds like a Dad in 1963 telling his long-haired son he’s about to ruin his life dropping out of pre-law to go be in a band. What. A. Drag. Even in the 1800s people put a premium on specific types of labor, which did not include spending hours crouched by a bog, oogling a particular plant species. File under: big mistake. Huge. Because it’s people like Henry who are willing or, more likely, called to be in some kind of intimate communion with the earth or any of if its inhabitants, who ultimately teach us how to see. You can’t even begin to try to understand anything-a swamp, a heron, a person-without paying attention. That requires living in a form of deep time, often at odds with what Hawthorne called those “regular modes” of modern existence, where nothing seems more pressing or important than gazing at the head of a dandelion to wonder over the divine geometry of its tufts.
I don’t live very far from Musketaquid. I visit often in every season, which is one of the best ways to get to know a place. The stand of birch trees by the river that fade out of sight in the summer are suddenly ivory show-stoppers against the royal blue of a winter sky. Like people, places have many faces, many layers. I think of Henry as a I wander. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to take a walk with him. Quiet, I imagine, because silence is its own kind of presence and it is a constant companion to folks like Henry who preferred to live by leaning in and looking and listening attentively. But every so often his voice would gently stir the amicable peace between us as he’d call attention to the bark patterns on a tree or stop to point out a patch of matted ground not far from the road where a deer likely bedded down. There in the oval the blades of grass bow together, prostrate like thousands of the devout while Henry and I look on together, bearing witness.
