Thoreau Farm

I Meet the Happiest Dog

In the white air
of this storm
he is
wherever
you are.

Perhaps it is the full air, all that cold contact with snowflakes that must feel like so many cold noses, but whenever I meet dogs while walking through snowstorms, they seem inordinately happy. This goes especially for capering labs, who set up also resonance with the memory of our yellow lab, Elmo.

Elmo in another season

A walk, any walk, was the day’s celebration for Elmo, but snow was a holiday – snow was for snuffling and rolling; snow was the right substance for “tossing a nutter,” the sudden break into sprinted circles that mystified us even as he blurred with speed and stirred snow. When he stopped, Elmo would look at us expectantly – why, his eyes seemed to say, aren’t you running in circles? How can you stand still? Then, he’d bark once and be off, following whatever thread of scent or thought ran ahead of him.

The other day, walking the river as it snowed, I met Elmo’s chocolate cousin (many times removed). He stopped, looked up happily, expectantly. “Grrrreat!” he seemed to bark; then, he was off, snow flying up from his paws, the whole forest within reach.

Charley K on a best day

Henry Thoreau referred to most dogs as “Bose” or “Trey,” common canine names in his day. Here, I think he missed out. There are few (no?) better companions for “cross-lots walking,” the sort Thoreau preferred.

by Ashton Nichols

Thoreau Farm, and its new blog outlet, “The Roost,” are important sources for information about the links between human life and the natural world. These are the same links that Henry David Thoreau worked so hard to explore and explain in the nineteenth century. My latest book, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) explores a number of those links in detail. Most importantly, I argue that we need a new concept, and a new word to describe that concept. The new word we need is “urbanature.” The concept this word describes is the idea that nature and urban life are not as distinct as we have long supposed. Here is why.

Hawks are roosting on skyscrapers near Central Park East and Central Park West. Peregrine falcons are feeding on the Flatiron Building, and owls are nesting throughout Manhattan. Meanwhile, thousands of environmentalists board carbon-gulping airplanes and fly thousands of miles (carrying tons of Gore-Tex) to get “back to nature” in Montana. At the same time, the World Wide Web tells us that Thoreau said, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” Over 600 websites say so. But Thoreau did not say, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” He said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” This difference–”wildness,” not “wilderness”–makes all the difference.
Urbanature (rhymes with “furniture”) is the idea that all human and nonhuman lives, all animate and inanimate objects on our planet (and no doubt beyond) are linked in a complex web of interconnectedness. We are not out of nature when we stand in the streets of Manhattan any more than we are in nature when we stand above tree-line in the Montana Rockies. When nature-lovers say they long to return to nature, they are making what the philosophers call a category mistake. As Tyler Stalling has recently noted, “There is no ‘real nature’ to which to return. Rather, in the face of burgeoning technologies such as nanotechnology and genetic manipulation, the once defined border between nature and culture is obsolete.”

We are never fully cut off from wild nature by human culture. This is the central aspect of all true ecology. Nothing we can do can ever take us out of nature. There is nowhere for us to go. We are natural beings from the moment we are biologically born until the moment we organically die. Instead of describing the nonhuman world anthropocentrically—in human terms—we now have many good reasons to describe the whole world ecocentrically [eco-: oikos, house]. Our nonhuman, natural house is the same place as our fully human, cultural home.

Urbanature includes the biggest of big pictures: birds on buildings, fish in fishponds, chemists making medicines, mountaineers climbing mountains, every dolphin and domestic dog, every gust of solar wind and every galaxy. To be “natural” originally meant, “to have been born”: natura—“birth” and also “essence,” as in “the nature of the problem.” The human-made is no less natural because it has been shaped, no less born or essential because it has been fashioned by human hands. The bird makes a nest, and her nest is no less natural than the bird herself. Human hands make a house, and the house–or even the skyscraper–is no less natural than the human hands that shaped it.

Thoreau fits with this idea so well because his hut at Walden Pond was a mere mile-and-a-half from Concord. He could walk into town for dinner with his mother or a conversation with Emerson. Indeed, he was arrested and spent his famous single night in jail during his two “wild” years at Walden. These details are important because–along with his successors: Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Terry Tempest Williams, to name just a few–Thoreau and these other nature writers remind us that life away from the urban world is only part of the nature-writing story.

Walden Pond Replica of Thoreau’s Hut

Urban culture and wild nature come to much the same thing: Urbanature.

Ashton Nichols is  the  holder of the Walter E. Beach ’56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainability Studies & a Professor of English Language and Literature at Dickinson College.
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–See:
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Romantic-Ecocriticism-Urbanatural-Nineteenth-Century/dp/1137033991/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=
for more details.

Skating Upriver

In 1855 January was as variable as the one now winding down. Near its end, Henry Thoreau wrote, “What a Proteus is our weather,” and then went on to say, “Let me try to remember its freaks.” The list that follows tracks Thoreau’s close relations with all weathers, though I was heartened also to read this: “January 17. Forget.” Ah, even Henry Thoreau, he of the wide-bodied journal-memory, forgot things.

What also runs through Thoreau’s journal that month is his fondness for skating. At every opportunity, and they were many, Thoreau is out on the meadows and rivers on his skates; it seems his winter’s walking. So, it was unsurprising to reach Jan 31st and find Henry out early on that cold day, already attaching his blades to his feet and, after trying “my boatsail on the meadow in front of the house” setting out up the Sudbury. The boatsail got left behind because, though he could “go well enough before the wind,” he found “I could not easily tack.”

And so Thoreau set off, and as I followed his account of skating upriver, I thought, How different (as usual) from other skaters was Henry. That tossed me back to my own skating memories, mostly from childhood, and the way skating was often confined. Either it was rink-bound, or, even as we skated on our ponds and meadows, enclosed by land and/or conjured, snow-lined banks. And, enjoined still by our parents, we skated only on secure ice. So, we skated in circles and ellipses. Who among us skated upriver? Let alone followed its winding course for 12 miles?

Henry’s Highway – albeit, not quite icy enough

What caught and kept me in this day long ago was Thoreau’s sense that he was adventure-skating – where the bridges and causeways crossed the river he found “on every shore there was either water or thin ice which would not bear.” Okay, we’ve all seen how melt traces such the footings and beams of such structures. Time then to turn back. Instead I read this: “I managed to get on some timbers of a bridge, the end of a projecting “tie” ?, and off the same way, thus straddling over the bridges and the gulf of open water about them on the edge of the thick ice, or else I swung myself on to the causeways by the willows, or crawled along a pole or rail, catching at a tree which stood in the water, — or got in.” Ah yes, “in.” That too.

For me this small story is irresistible, both for its persistence and for its absence of complaint – nothing about soggy clothing, cold hands, uncooperative ice. No woe, o no. The day ends, however, with this advice applicable today, I think:

You were often liable to be thrown when skating fast, by the shallow puddles on the ice formed in the middle of the day and not easy to be distinguished. These detained your feet while your unimpeded body fell forward.

Just so.