Author Archives: Sandy Stott

Note: the core of this entry comes from an essay “You Have to Be Here – Teaching Thoreau in Concord,” published in the Winter/Spring issue of Appalachia, which features a number of pieces about Thoreau and his influence. Link: http://www.outdoors.org/publications/appalachia/

Martin Luther King Day always makes me think about freedoms, the ones we take for granted and the ones we see as threatened. Famously, King had a dream about freedom, and, almost as famously, he had a method for approaching freedom. That he traced some of this method of civil disobedience to Henry Thoreau is equally well known. When my students and I read Walden and its meditation on freedom and enslavement, and then read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography and On Civil Disobedience, I ask us all this question: We go out with our freedom for what? Thoreau wrestles with this question throughout his work, saying at one point, “Don’t just be good; be good for something.”

While this question arrives early in the semester, as the term ages, we return to it, especially when we reach the end of Thoreau’s Walden “experiment,” (he is insistent on using this word in its scientific fullness; Walden itself can be read as a sort of poetic lab report) and consider his landmark essay, “On Civil Disobedience.”

Early in Walden, Thoreau launches a startling comparison: “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” I read this aloud and look out over the class. They have all taken a required and demanding United States history class; they are versed in the long nightmare of slavery and its ongoing effect on relations in our country. They have read Thoreau’s contemporary, Frederick Douglass, and his story of self-liberation, first from illiteracy and then from his southern overseer. “What do you think of that?” I ask.

“Pretty easy to say for a free white man who gets to go home for dinner whenever he wants,” says Percy, giving summary voice to generations of readers nettled by Thoreau’s finger-pointing and crowing and what seems to them posing. But here we are at the heart of Thoreau’s moral universe, and in “Civil Disobedience” he works to answer Percy’s charge. What should he, a free, white man, do in his era, when he saw slavery as its primary metaphor and evil? His answer is complex, and we wrestle with its various reasonings as we read his essay that has rippled beneath and through protest and change movements around the world. “So different,” says Charlotte of the writing. “Where’s the nature, the pond looking back at him, the friendly pine needles, the neighborhood animals and misfits?”

“It’s true,” I think and say. “The language of ‘Civil Disobedience’ is moral and mechanical. “Let’s look at his advice about response to society’s machinery when its turns unjustly.” We turn to a midpoint in the essay and Tessa reads aloud: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine.”

“What would that look like?” I ask in the quiet that follows.

“Heat and pain,” says Adam, and physics students chime in with friction’s characteristics, describing the burn of being rubbed the wrong way, or, at length, any way at all. While Thoreau was facile with machinery—see his family’s pencil business and Thoreau’s improvements to it—he did not love its promise as central to whatever improvements or revolutions might better people and this world. For that hope he turned to the individual. And part of Thoreau’s appeal to high school students is their kindred feeling that they, with their questions and insights, should be and are counterfriction to the machine of the societies they will inherit.

“Our whole life is startlingly moral,” Thoreau writes in the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, and once you are awake to this perception, prodded perhaps by the insistent finger of his prose, life gets complicated. I look out over my classroom, full of both privilege and promise. Bent to their books, bowed some by the work of becoming, they are, even in their wearied states, inspiring.

Like Thoreau, I have put much of my faith in a better world in the “I” each one represents, and in what each may do with her or his freedoms.

Thaw – the thermal yo-yo rises. This morning the air is still and grey and the remaining snow looks like shucked-off clothing. Along the winter-black river, the ice that was edging out into the current has pulled back, and the ice-collars on the waterside trees drip drip drip.

Even Mt. Washington, where a few days back the wind-chill dropped below -50 degrees farenheit, is melting. I look at the water-thick air through the lens of one of the mountain observatory’s weather-cams – more grey; everything running downhill.

As happens to those whose 3rd-eye is turned always to the weather, I begin to wonder about this warmth, linking it reflexively with the daily stories of climate change, the warming that spreads out from our bodies and intent. And, as corrective, I remind myself again of the gulf between the immediate weather and the climate, that I would be a ninny to attribute daily variation to global shift.

And yet as a creature of the immediate, given global information, I can’t help but make this linkage. Perhaps that’s one reason why, as a sort of time-spanning outrigger, I read for balance a little each day from Thoreau’s journal. Right now, I’m following along through January, 1854, and the 159-year straddle across days brings me to this:

Jan. 13. Still warm and thawing, springlike; no freezing in the night, though high winds…These thawing days must have been to some extent lichen days too.

Lichen Days Along the River

Yes, it’s January’s thaw, New England tradition, and in that year there are two within January’s first two weeks; and in this false spring, Thoreau is out and about, looking closely at what stirs and what is revealed. Just as in the middle of a snowstorm, we pay attention to the snow, its shapes and swirls, lose sight of what it covers, now we see what presents above it as it shrinks – the dark tree-bark, the tan grasses, the grey-green lichen, the junco gleaning seed, the black specks of snow fleas. I am drawn into the little lives of the day. And in this fascination, I am free for a while from my large, time-hopping mind’s global habits.

And you, what do you see when the snows recede?

In the beginning of one of Walden’s winter chapters, Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors, Thoreau writes this: “For human society, I was obliged to conjure up the former inhabitants of these woods.”

In Maine, the snow has come and come again, followed by a preserving cold; on two nights the temperature has slipped below zero. So the snow, when walked upon or poked with a toe, is still fresh, still soft. But along the pathways in the woods of the Town Commons, someones have beaten a track, a record of passage, and each day I go out to walk with them.

Thoreau knew that in winter we often must conjure our company. Fewer people venture out, and those who do often seem to prefer to walk solo; they bend forward, hunch in; they study the slippery ground ahead. And he goes on to offer thumbnail sketches of these conjured folks. It turned out that Walden Woods had once been a thriving neighborhood for those most of the town’s “selectmen” didn’t want as neighbors – former slaves, migrants, those seized by drink – in a word, marginals. And Henry Thoreau, in repeopling his Walden with them, savors and walks too in this company, along these marginal ways.

Today again, this time at twilight, I’m out with the marginals, the company I would keep. It’s not that I expect to meet anyone or everyone, it’s rather that I will follow their tracks, and, as I do, I will wonder about them. The track through the white pines is hard packed; our passing feet have sculpted its bed with icy knobs and shallow depressions. As I walk, I adopt winter’s gait, a stride-shortened shuffle that keeps touch with the path, allowing my feet to “read” its slippery oddities; everyone who walks regularly in New England winter has such a gait.

At the first turn, a dog has cut its corner, leaving a small saffron apron the base of a tree. Others will follow. One boot print says that he pulled his “owner” in behind him. The straightaway that follows pulls me along under its pines that are tipped slightly to each other by their searches for light. Ahead, the light changes; I am nearing an open patch that signals pitch pines. Their short stature and sparse branching leave the sky alone, and across that sky’s fringe are the delicate, inked cirrus in the south. It is stillness and I stop.

The pitch pines are the color of smoke rising in columns from the white ground. The path winds on between them, through the sandy section where in summer the blueberries proliferate. There’s no one here, but I follow the prints of former inhabitants to the turn for home. Always, we walk in their prints.

Who’s out there with you when you walk in winter?