By Sandy Stott
During all the years I taught Thoreau’s work and through that larger span — ongoing — when reading him has prodded and settled me, I’ve missed noting his death-day, May 6. Realizing its passage on say, May 11, or some such proximate but late date, has always felt like a deficiency.
“What sort of reader and walker are you?” I said to self on more than one occasion. “At least nod to the man’s day of passing.” Never happened, and I offered myself the usual, mealy “he’s alive to me,” reasoning, and vowed weakly to do better. Never happened.
But here it is early on May 6, 2020, and here I am already a paragraph into remembrance. I’ve also just read The Roost and found Richard Smith’s fact-rich tribute, and so, here in the morning’s slant-sun — the right time, you will agree — I have Henry in mind. And still: my “recall” of this date has been one more instance of fortuitous bumbling.
In late April, as our new adherence to home wore on, I, like many of us, wanted more companion reading that was illuminating and distracting, words that wore spring’s rising light well. Slow pony that I am, it took a little while before, during a circuit of the living room, I stopped by our gathering of the blue-bound 1906 edition of Henry Thoreau’s Journal. Over the years, I’ve often chosen stretches of time where I read through a particular year at the calendar’s pace. “Let’s go to 1854 again,” I thought, recalling points of its passage, including Henry famous, terse note on August 9.
So, as May began, so did I. It was and is spring; what’s ahead, or, more aptly, what’s coming up?
For starters: “May 1. A fine clear morning after three days of rain — our principal rain-storm of the year, — raising the river higher than it has been yet.
6 A.M. — Up railroad. Everything looks bright and as if it were washed clean…”
First Light. Credit: Sandy Stott
Even a pedestrian start soothed. Here it was, 6 A. M., light flooding in, and already we were off. It looked to be a long, light-filled, local day. Which it turned out to be. On that first May day, Thoreau went out three times, first on foot, then twice by boat on the swollen rivers. I would go out thrice too, even as our forecast promised rain. I thumbed ahead in the Journal to see how many pages the month would bring. In my volume, they summed to 88, one measure of May ’54’s expansive feel, a measure I hoped to feel one day at a time.
That May’s early pages are rife with notes of noticing. Its header reads helpfully, Observation and Life; Thoreau seems to swell with life just as the many plants and animals he finds do. Also, in that May’s early pages, I experienced a moment of sympathetic recognition that suddenly jarred.
Thoreau wrote: “The red maples, now fully in bloom, show red tops at a distance.”
I looked up, nodded. “Yes, just so,” I mumbled to self, and began reading again. And stopped. “Wait a minute,” I said aloud. “Wait a minute.”
The problem clicked clear: Thoreau and I were on to the same maple-time of spring, but I was not where he was. Instead, I live over 100 miles mostly north in Maine. My spring in 2020 was his in 1854.
So, here I am, and it’s May 6. The white pine’s needles are shining, as he said they did, and these eight years before he died, Henry Thoreau has nearly four pages of observations about life for me.
They are large, “There is no such thing as pure objective observation.” And little, “Horse-mint is an inch or two high, and it is refreshing to scent it again.”
They are the expansive and precise observations of his life and his world, and they offer me the nudge to go and inhabit my world as fully as I can.
I have set aside afternoon hours that will take me from the headwaters of a local brook I am getting to know into the forest full of glacial leavings that the brook drains. Who knows what I’ll find? I will be both Maine in 2020 and Concord in 1854, and I am getting the gift of being able to live locally in each.
“It matters not where or how far you travel — the farther commonly the worse —, but how much alive you are.”
What will tomorrow bring? On May 7, I will open this journal and this window and this door and find out.
Sandy Stott, formerly of Concord, Massachusetts, is a Brunswick, Maine resident. He is the Roost’s founding editor, and he writes for a variety of publications. His recent book, Critical Hours — Search and Rescue in the White Mountains, was published by University Press of New England in April, 2018; Tantor Media released an audio version of the book in February, 2019. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com