Late in May, 1849, Henry Thoreau published his first book. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, met little public enthusiasm, and because Thoreau had taken on some debt to get his book out, in the end he owed money. The best he seemed able to realize from the venture was his famous “library” joke, wherein he boasted to owning over 1000 books, 700 of which he had written himself. Not a promising start for a most famous writer.
Still, May is a month for fliers – for seeing them, and for taking them – and I’ve returned to the rivers and thickets of A Week as an appreciation for flight, for the setting out that is all enterprise – on water, on air. Pick your liquid. But, once you have, set forth on it.
Thoreau opens A Week with a short chapter of long sentences about the Concord River, and he is intent on epic associations before setting out on his own. He describes his local river as,
…a huge volume of matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains and valleys…making haste from the high places of earth to its ancient reservoir. The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here,…many a poet’s stream floating the helms and shields of heroes…The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame;…
Ah, to Troy even. All this before we cast off with Thoreau and his brother John, who set out on Saturday, the next chapter.
At length, on Saturday, the last day of August, 1839, we two, brothers, and natives of Concord, weighed anchor in this river port; for Concord too, lies under the sun, a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men;…
It’s near noon, and now’s the time. I shuck off my work, putting aside my keyboard. And…avert your eyes…I shuck off my clothes too…in favor of others less long-sleeved and leg-sheathed. Then I tie my feet into trail shoes, and I’m off.
The way
When you run, however slowly, the land too is liquid. And, after the obligatory whinging from everything that’s been sitting all morning, I begin to flow along the spring-soft trail, and on into the woods. I am, along this wave-wrinkled land, a foot-pilot, steering first between those two pines, then over the crest of a rise.
What’s on the other side? Let’s go see.
Along a long way
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