Author Archives: Sandy Stott

The shadow is small, but for a long time I’ve been attuned to any darkness that crosses the ground or water in front of me. And so I glance up and see the flickering wingbeats, the erratic glides, the glow of orange outlined in black. This is the third monarch to cross above me in the last few minutes, and, as it diminishes, then vanishes into the southwest, I begin to wonder.

Monarch Aloft

It’s been five boat-miles on a day when we have run under the seam of two weather systems – to the west, blue sky; to the east, clouds of varying thickness and height, the tail-end of the cold front that passed over last night. So the light has been superb, the water painted with colors from grey-green to lavender and blue (these to the east). We have been spectacle for seals – curious periscopes, they’ve often bobbed not far away  – and by now overhead upwards of a dozen monarchs, migrating one by one to the southwest, perhaps picking up the front’s early modest breeze from the north, though that has faded quickly. On French Island – our landing point for the day – as I water the bushes, I keep hearing a fussy sound, and the leaves of the sumac shake and rustle. Finally, a warbler shows herself, the pale yellow throat and olive head going brown. For some reason this sighting and closeness make me brim with happiness; out on the bay, it is high tide.

We lift our boats down to the water, put on spray-skirts and PFDs and point for home; it lies now to the northeast across calm water. This will be a leisurely trip. And still, every few minutes, a small shadow appears, aiming at the brightly-colored imperative that is Mexico. The southwest, I think as I press my paddle through the autumn-clear water, was also Henry Thoreau’s favored direction, the one he chose often after letting the compass needle of his intent settle before setting out on his daily walk. But for Henry the southwest was the direction of the future, the way forward in a linear sense. For these small kings of the air it is the way to their winter home, its air-soft path worn by countless generations.

I feel the tug of separation as my paddlestrokes send me forward; I am on a different route. Yes, I turn toward home almost every evening; my days are circles. But I see my life as a line aimed out at some unknown point. On a good day, it feels like a progression, perhaps a rolling forward of a daily round. And still, I look up in wonder at the certainty of each little shadow cycling the other way.

Looking Up

I’ve begun pressing on the keys of this post with some unease. The other day, during a walk in Estabrook Woods, I found myself wondering what our former woods-wanderer, Henry Thoreau, would make of our current election and the politics that surround it. Who, I wondered, would Henry vote for? Musing about politics seems a good way to spoil a walk, but there I was. And here I am.

It’s evident, I think, to any close reader that Henry Thoreau leaned toward a Libertarian outlook. He was loudly interested in freedom, and he was no fan of the collective and its will. “Let the I in this world be me; don’t bother me with we,” he might have said. Or, hewing more closely to real text, we have these words, this “motto,” from his famous essay on civil disobedience: “That government is best which governs least.”

That’s clear, and I hear the rhythmic clapping from my right. “Henry would be drinking (or tossing) tea with us,” they’re saying. Perhaps. But would all that tea suspend the judgment of his ferociously observant and fact-collecting mind? Would, for example, the scientist in Henry concur that climate change and its myriad studies that point to human influence on it are hoaxes simply because they are inconvenient to our way of life? The “know-nothingism” at the heart of climate change denial runs so counter to his intellectual current of know-everythingism.

And perhaps more centrally would Henry Thoreau find companionship in the mean-spiritedness of many on the intolerant fringe, who would misrepresent the views of others and even seek to deny a president’s documented citizenship? As I’ve read him over the years I’ve often thought, Henry was no hater…at least of the individual. What people could conjure en masse was a different story – one only had to look to slavery to see our potential for collective evil. And the foreign “adventure” of war, say with Mexico? (Or Iraq?) Only blocks of obedient men could conjure such a horror.

Trailing Henry Thoreau over the years through woods and thickets of words, I’ve noticed that each person he meets is rife with potential, even, for example, the downtrodden John Field, the bog-mucker living with his family in a lightless shanty in the Baker Farm chapter of Walden. Though his lecture on living well mystifies John Field and shows Henry to read his audience poorly, and though the encounter occasions a minor crisis of self-doubt in him, Henry’s spirit of belief in individual possibility shines. And on days when I grow weary or distressed by the group-think of the politics of intolerance, I go looking for the reed of hope that is a single being. Often a student, or a tree, or even, perhaps, a president.

And you, where’s your hope found?

Don’t Forget the Rock

by Corinne Smith

Out-of-towners aren’t always familiar with the protocols of visiting Concord, Massachusetts. Some forget to pack essential elements from home. So let this be an appeal to those Transcendental Pilgrims who plan to make their first-time journeys in the future. Be sure to bring something to leave as a tribute to Henry David Thoreau at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, at Walden Pond, or at both sites. Don’t be caught embarrassingly empty-handed.

Throughout the calendar year, people leave mementos at Thoreau’s gravesite in Sleepy Hollow. The stone carved with the simple name HENRY is often surrounded by pine cones, pine-needle sprigs, acorns, pebbles, rocks, pencils, pennies, and hand-written notes. Unprepared pilgrims sometimes pick up random natural gifts along the cemetery pathways, courtesy of the tall trees that give the place its park-like atmosphere.

In early May and in mid-July, corresponding to the dates of Thoreau’s death and birth, the piles at his marker grow taller. Thoreau’s neighbors on Author’s Ridge – the Hawthornes, Alcotts and Emersons – often attract similar but smaller heaps of tribute. Henry and Louisa May Alcott draw the most items. Not that anyone is counting, of course.

A different kind of tribute sprawls a few miles south, at Walden Pond. At the site of Thoreau’s house stands a cairn that was begun by Mary Newbury Adams on a summer day in 1872. Mrs. Adams was visiting from Dubuque, Iowa, and was walking around the pond with friend Bronson Alcott. When Alcott showed her the by-then empty plot where Thoreau’s house once stood, Mary was moved to memorialize the landmark in the Gaelic tradition. In Alcott’s words: “Mrs. Adams suggests that visitors to Walden shall bring a small stone for Thoreau’s monument and begins the pile by laying stones on the site of his hermitage, which I point out to her.” The cairn has varied in height and girth ever since. The exception came in the late 1970s, when state workers first hauled the heap away as a presumed eyesore and a safety hazard, and then supposedly brought the same rocks back three years later. (In theory.) Today, visitors still bring stones from home – sometimes inscribed — and other individuals take some of them away.

But a nearby and more deliberate rock connects Walden with the Thoreau Farm Birthplace. When granite posts were installed to outline the pond house site in the late 1940s, an additional large stone was placed where the chimney had risen. Its carved letters include a line from the Thoreau poem “Smoke,” which was published in 1843 in The Dial and later in the pages of Walden:

Beneath these Stones
lies the Chimney Foundation
of Thoreau’s Cabin 1845-1847
“Go thou my incense upward
From this hearth.”

This rock came from the original Thoreau birthplace property, courtesy of owner and local historian Ruth Wheeler. According to Roland Wells Robbins, the farm’s pastures were “littered with granite boulders of all sizes and shapes. After inspecting many, we decided on a flat surfaced boulder about three feet long and two feet wide. It weighed about twelve hundred pounds and would insure protection for the chimney foundation.” Somehow, it was hauled over to Walden Pond. Now embedded in the earth at the far end of the house site, this piece of glacial litter is a quiet link between the land Henry David Thoreau was born on, and the two-year home that served to establish his literary and cultural reputation.

So: We’ve already left our rock at Walden. Have you?