Author Archives: Sandy Stott

“I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday and, taking up the hymn book, remarked: ‘We have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter.’ So I say, ‘Let us sing Winter.’ What else can we sing and our voice be in harmony with the season?” Henry Thoreau, Journal, 1/30/54

Sometimes, I feel like that crazy man.

The buzz (a sort of song) begins days in advance. For me, the mix of modern forecasting tools and work at a school ensures rumor’s percolation well before any storm coalesces off the mid-Atlantic, where our biggest, our “historic” snows all come from. Prediction of snow makes us all ten again.

None more so than my friend, Don. Yes, Don has professional reason for his weather-eye (he is in charge of our school’s plant and emergency preparations), but his weather-heart is that of a kid. Last fall, when my eponymous hurricane was making its approach to catastrophe along the mid-Atlantic, I received a series of e-mails tracking and speculating…about me. To defend myself, I had to resort to verse:

963 (my central pressure)

…I got it all goin’, me wind is up,
I got de spin, me cheeks is bowin’.
What you gonna do when de wind start blowin’…

o, donnie donnie k, gon blow you plans all away.

…forecasters now got me goin’ to new jersey,
but I ain’t goin’ dere, dem guys is crazy;
I comin’ to see you in you Concord place,
we gonna play wit de roofs and play wit you face.

S-caine

This week my inbox began the beep and chatter again. “This could be epic,” began one e-note, anticipating a Boston.com headline by days. Power-point summaries and a thick accumulation of links followed – not that I needed much prodding to begin my own cyber-sleuthing of the oncoming storm’s formation. Long before the word “blizzard” was broken out by weather’s officialdom, I’d begun to envision horizontal snow and car-shrouding drifts.

“Let us sing Winter,” I wrote back, hoping to annoy Don by quoting Thoreau, and I began my wait for winter to sing back. But, like any true ten-year-old, I was antsy with anticipation, and so, tiring of hectoring Don with minute-by-minute e-mails, I took myself out for a walk along the river. It was cold, but only the faintest flow of air reinforced that cold when I turned north. Skim ice had edged back out toward the river’s current after the recent thaw, and the water was winter-black, its swirls had the thickness of oil. Only the riverside ice and frozen pools in shallow depressions retained a scrim of snow; they shone white in the leaf-brown landscape. Saplings had on their clerical collars of ice, and in one waterside thicket, a flash of red said, “cardinal.” As close to religious sanction as I get, I walked on, the only sound the scuffing of winter-tired leaves underfoot.

As often happens during such walks, my inner-child gave way to a more contemplative self, and I was mulling over this easy, open winter and its variations, even as tomorrow it would put on its usual white coat. Near walk’s end, along the old railroad grade that approaches the vanished bridge over the Sudbury, a flood of sunlight slipped through a slat in the clouds, and, almost immediately, the little sunbank was alive with birds. “Juncos,” I thought. But then a chip of color flew by and lit on a nearby branch; I looked more closely: skyblue back, ruffous breast. Bluebirds. Heart of summer sky. Beyond their winter range, but assuredly here.

These blue reminders piled up against the predicted storm, a mash-up of seasons. I sat down in those few minutes of sun and listened to the bluebirds overturning leaves, scuffling I guessed for cold-slow insects and wondered about the way our days contain so many weathers. And I walked back wondering also where these bluebirds would be tomorrow, when, if Don and his prophet NOAA are right, the snow will be above my knees.

Perhaps I am a crazy man. Surely I have trouble sorting the silly from the serious, just as our seasons seem uncertain of themselves too.

Still, “Let us sing Winter.”

We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected…Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. (“Higher Laws,” Walden)

Ground Hog Day – a good day to look beneath the surface and see what stirs.

As a boy, I learned to shoot a rifle. It was a single-shot .22 caliber gun with a wooden stock, and its sighting was skewed to the right. But I learned to compensate, and I learned to quiet my breathing so that the barrel and I were still as I squeezed the trigger. Some fifty yards away, the old water-filled soda and beer cans I favored as targets, jumped with impact more often than not. A little later, a summer as a counselor’s aide provided my final training as I shot my way through various levels of targets courtesy of the NRA. When fully focused, I could punch the center out of my targets with a tightly-bunched cluster of shots. By August, I had won a clutch of patches and was a sharpshooter. But already, the lure of guns was waning; even as a fourteen-year-old I’d begun to see animals as fellow beings and not wild impulses to be “tamed” by lead.

Let’s go back to my twelfth year, where this began. I awaken early on a July day, and the slightest light seems to hang in the net of fog draped in this heavy New Hampshire air. I slip from the room without disturbing my brother and ease down the stairs, avoiding their creaky centers. It’s a little before 5:00 a.m.; I’ll eat when I get back.

From behind the living room door, I take the single-shot .22 that came with this old farmhouse my parents went into hock for two years ago. Already this mountain valley and its ridges are becoming foot familiar. And already I’ve learned that many animals are in motion during the hours that fringe these long summer days. I am hunting porcupine, which I’ve been told are tree-girdlers and general bad citizens; there is a fifty-cent bounty on them. My dog has already gotten two snoutfuls of quills. Clearly, he is a slow learner. Just as clearly, this valley needs “cleaning up.”

Some thirty minutes up the old, abandoned road that once went over the mountains to Hebron, I catch movement in my peripheral vision. There, some forty feet up in a maple is my quarry, a hunched shape against the rising light in the sky. I am elated and confused. I’ve found what I am hunting, a primal thrill; I must now hunt – aim and pull the trigger? I’ve never done this before. It feels vaguely worrying. Unused to such ambiguity, I do what a twelve-year-old boy does – I act. It takes four shots to bring the porcupine down, and even as he falls, I feel a flush of shame wash through me. Now what? I stand twenty feet away from his body for long minutes, unable to will myself forward. Finally, I settle on burial and digging and scraping with a stick take more long minutes; I become aware that I am crying. During the walk downroad and home, the whole forest feels sad.

That, having been spared service in a war, is the last time I aimed a rifle at a breathing being. Two years later, I shot a rifle at a target for the final time, and my NRA membership lapsed. Fifty years later, I sign petitions and watch debate and revulsion about guns swell in response to the serial horror spewed from their barrels. And I wonder: are not we meant to evolve, as Henry Thoreau proposes in his difficult chapter, “Higher Laws,” over a lifetime? Should not each life in some way mimic the long walk toward a brother-and-sisterhood with our world’s beings, a taming of the hunter, who first walked out of Africa long millennia ago?

by  Corinne H. Smith

In the fall of 1847, Henry Thoreau closed the door on his house at the
edge of Walden Pond and left this sanctuary because he “had several
more lives to live.” During the decades that followed, other frugal
Yankees of Concord dismantled the wooden structure (which Thoreau
himself had recycled from a railroad worker’s hut) and used its pieces
to repair or enhance a variety of buildings in town. Its fragments
were scattered so well – like the seeds of a wind-blown dandelion –
that authentic re-assembly of the original home could never take place.

But Thoreau’s literary and inspirational reputation escalated during the 20th century. Along with this attention came the symbolism found in the image of that simple house in the woods. Readers longed to have one of their own, perhaps even one made from “tall, arrowy pines.” Thanks to amateur archaeologist Roland Robbins and Thoreau’s own written details, blueprints became available so that anyone, anywhere, could construct a Walden house. We hear of them standing in various locations from around the globe.

Henry Thoreau never set foot in western Pennsylvania. He came to within 275 miles of this area only twice: when he lectured in Philadelphia on November 21, 1854; and when he traveled across New York State in May 1861, on his way to Minnesota. Yet a new connection now links Thoreau with this place. A Walden house replica was recently built by students at the Altoona campus of The Pennsylvania State University.

The school is on the northwestern edge of Altoona, a city of 46,000 residents that lies among the Allegheny Mountains. The campus has always had strong ties to the nature surrounding it. Tall trees tower over the paths between academic buildings. A reflecting pond is home to a variety of ducks, who are the unofficial but beloved mascots of both current students and alumni alike. In 2008, Penn State Altoona bought 40 acres of adjacent woodland, including a hill that rises 300 feet above the campus. This tract is now known as “Seminar Forest.” Environmental studies students created hiking and mountain biking trails that lead to its summit and to an outdoor classroom at the top. At the foot of the hill and next to the posted trail map stands their new Walden house.

Its appearance is similar to the one that Thoreau constructed near a cove at Walden Pond in Concord in 1845. But there are noticeable differences. Instead of “three chairs for society,” the interior design of this house includes built-in wooden benches along three walls. Instead of a body of water lying outside, there’s a nearby hand-driven water pump. Instead of a rail commuter line with cars that speed toward Boston, a two-lane road leads “up the mountain” to Wopsononock, a high overlook that is peppered with radio towers and is a popular parking spot for young people.

Henry’s House – Altoona

I lived in the Altoona area for fifteen years. Thanks to professors Sandra H. Petrulionis and Ian S. Marshall, I recently had a chance to return and chat with the students about Henry Thoreau. We were due to meet at the Walden house at noon. I walked over early to take in the atmosphere before the others arrived. What a peaceful site! And yet, it wasn’t too far away from the school. I could hear the Winchester chimes of the chapel carillon ring on each quarter hour. At the stroke of noon, the melody of “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” wafted through the air. If I went to school here, I’d spend as much time as possible in this natural place.

As I admired the autumn foliage and gazed up the hill, I was reminded of something Thoreau wrote in the “Tuesday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He recalled the moment when he once stood upon Mount Greylock in the Berkshires, and looked down upon Williams College:

“It would really be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a mountain, as good at least as one well-endowed professorship. It were as well to be educated in the shadow of a mountain as in more classical shades. Some will remember, no doubt, not only that they went to the college, but that they went to the mountain. Every visit to its summit would, as it were, generalize the particular information gained below, and subject it to more catholic tests.”

Mirroring Thoreau’s suggestion, this college campus now has its own mountain. Kudos to the Penn State Altoona administration and students for recognizing the value of this natural setting. It’s the perfect place to put Henry’s house.