Author Archives: Sandy Stott

by Corinne H. Smith

One fall morning, a family of four from the Worcester area arrived at the Thoreau Farm Birthplace. I welcomed them by speaking mostly to the parents. Their nine- or ten-year-old daughter was clutching a book. Her slightly older brother lagged behind, trying to blend into the background, looking awfully uninterested in the whole affair.

Their mother quickly explained their arrival. “We’re here because of this,” she said. She grabbed the book out of the girl’s hands and held it out to me. It was a copy of The Fledgling, a middle-school-age novel by Jane Langton. I recognized the author’s name. She still lived in nearby Lincoln. Some years back, I had read the majority of Langton’s Homer Kelly mystery series for adults, many of which are set around Concord. I had not known of this one, however, which was the fourth installment in The Hall Family Chronicles, an eight-part fantasy series for younger readers. These books were based on an eccentric family who lived in an equally eccentric house on Walden Street in Concord.

As I quickly paged through it, I could see why the family standing before me had made the trip, no doubt at the daughter’s insistence. She had probably wanted to confirm for herself that the people, places, and magic in the story were real. (I borrowed a library copy of the book a few days later so that I could read and understand it, too.)

In this series, the Halls are a blended family headed by Frederick and Alexandra Dorian Hall. Their three children are Eleanor, Eddy, and Georgie. Freddy and Alex teach at their own Concord College of Transcendental Knowledge and are thus big fans of the local authors. A white marble bust of Henry David Thoreau stands in their front hallway. Similar ones of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott flank the parlor fireplace. The Halls make every attempt to live according to the philosophies of their heroes. They even talk to Henry as they walk by his statue.

In The Fledgling, little Georgie wants to fly. She meets a large Canada goose who takes her up into the sky and flies her around Concord and Walden Pond each night. Eventually the passage of time leads to a Puff-the-Magic-Dragon-like problem, as Georgie grows too big for the goose to carry her. You can probably imagine the ending, which comes during hunting season. The book may be aimed at middle-schoolers, but it’s peppered with hints and metaphors of Transcendentalism.

Our visitors walked through the house and read the text on every panel. I could tell that the daughter longed for more. With her father nodding his approval, I took her aside and chatted about being awake and aware, and being true to oneself. She stared at me with eyes wide open, absorbing every word. This one is a keeper, I thought.

When the rest of the family headed toward their car, the son still loitered. He was the only one who took the time to write something on one of our “living deliberately” cards. After they left I read this: “I don’t watch television or play video games. I try not to use electronics (although I do like my I-Pod.”

We never know what circumstances may draw a person to Henry David Thoreau, nor at what age this phenomenon can happen. I have a feeling that Thoreau’s life and words made an impression, if not an outright impact, on both young people that day. These human fledglings still have some time to grow before they leave the security of their nest. I’m betting that they’ll be well prepared for the flight.

I am some 60 minutes into my run in Estabrook Woods on this way-too-warm day, the last one of a winter that never happened, and as my fatigue deepens, I’ve turned my mind to the will needed to step smoothly, to ease along. I’m trying to cohere at a point when the whole running project wants to collapse, its wheels bouncing away, its resolve losing air. My eyes are set steadily on the trail six feet ahead, reading it for stones and good landings. Perhaps it is only that I am moving and caged by my own will, but I sense other motion along the left peripheral edge of vision; adrenaline juices my system, and before I can think, I’ve already upped my speed – I am getting ready for flight. All of this is over in under a second. As my next step falls, the gray shape on my left – crouching wolf? ready cougar? – resolves to rock; my chemistry settles. And I run on at my deliberate and deliberative pace through what must be one of safest stretches of woodland in the world.

Stone or Cougar?

Still, as I run I begin to recall other moments when unexpected shapes on the periphery of vision have brought on similar spikes of startle-juice, when I’ve been suddenly ready to go, or to have a go. And this gets me wondering about the gallery of threats hung deep in my biology, the pictures passed down along the long evolutionary chain of ancestors so that we might survive in our wanderings out from Africa, or out from town. There must be a series of shapes associated with threat that I take with me every time I run in the woods…or along the veldt.

A few years ago I recall reading an article that proposed a positive reinforcement that has kept whatever genetic structure is behind what we call attention deficit disorder, or ADD, alive in us. As a teacher, I’ve long wondered about the roots of this scattering of attention, often at its height just when we ask daily for focus…on this passage of reading, for instance…or on these reductive equations. You, we say to students, must master these words or figures; put everything else aside. And they try. They want, after all, to succeed; they really do.

But, the article’s theory said, perhaps evolution’s wiring has another idea, and it can be found in the word I’ve just used, “aside.” Once, deep in our prehistory, perhaps when we were all still gathered in Africa, it became clear that both our curious natures and the need to find the resources of open territory would lead us out from our original continent. But walking out of Africa would be no easy journey. It would be walking in a dangerous world, one where threat – that sabertooth tiger, for example – might be right along side the trail to be taken. Who then would lead us outward? The theory proposed that we would be/were led by scouts and shamans, who were often selected for their ability to see – it must have seemed a preternatural sort of vision – what most missed, especially along the margins of vision. Those who could see aside, who could spot the peripheral rustle in the brush or conjure some vision, would have been among our leaders. And they, as leaders, would have gotten the best food, the best mates; their genes would have been selected for the next generations and passed on.

What we bring with us when we go walking or running surely shapes what we see and feel when we’re trying to get “out there.”

Note: I am well aware of the torment that severe ADHD causes and by no means want to diminish its effects.  It does, however, strike me that in its milder forms it may foster the sort of awareness that helps us see in deep woods.

Gray October, and a cool mist-rain is being wrung from the clouds; the legendary seasonal sparkle that shoots color into the sky is absent. It is a perfect day for running, however, and I go slap-footing along the tarmac on the way to the woods.

The trail that runs out to Fairhaven Bay ambles through high white pines and a mix of oaks, maples and beech trees. Today, its packed dirt is water-dark, and under the shroud of the forest canopy, I enter a world of half-light. It is either dawn or dusk; I’ve run to an all-day margin of light along the river’s edge. I bend my concentration to picking out roots and stones poking through the litter of pine needles and fallen leaves. Such fall running over cloaked ground invites a fall.

All runners know that a tense upper body produces a lurching franken-gait in the legs; the whole enterprise of moving forward tends toward stumble. I wonder if I should be here.

That’s when it happens: the speckle of dropped leaves begins to glow, especially the yellow ones. It is as if I am running over the pelt of a huge leopard, albeit one where the spots are the light instead of the darkness. The gray above and around me intensifies, and the ground pulses with light, and along that ground everything is evident. I feel that some kindly custodian of the woods has switched on the footlights. My shoulders relax, and my stiffening neck straightens; my hands, which had been lifted, ready for an imagined tumble, drop too and begin to swing in rhythm with my feet. And with rhythm comes reverie, a rivery feeling of ease and good will and attention. I am paying attention without having to work at it because I am seeing each lit leaf.

I                am                 running                 simply                simply               running;

each            leaf            is            glowing            simply            simply            glowing.

Last Tuesday evening we walked to Concord’s First Parish church to hear writer Robert Richardson and painter Lincoln Perry speak about their collaboration on a new edition of Henry Thoreau’s late-life essay, October or Autumnal Tints. The book is its own excursion of beauty, its writing and watercolors both transcendent. And it is a convenient size for carrying out into the woods, an idea implicitly encouraged by a final section called “Personal Leaves”: “We have left room for a few leaves of your own choosing,” they write, and instructions for preserving those leaves follow.
What caught my attention as Richardson read from his accompanying essay that evening was Thoreau saying this: “We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, and then we can hardly see anything else.”

Each yellow leaf. As I run in the dark woods, I can hardly see anything else.

A little later in his essay Richardson writes, “Absolute attention is prayer, said Simone Weil. Thoreau would have understood.”

Just so.

Note: Richardson and Perry’s edition of October or Autumnal Tints is published by W.W. Norton and available at the Concord Bookshop, The Thoreau Society’s Shop at Walden Pond and elsewhere. It is a perfect seasonal companion.