Thoreau Farm

In my 22nd year, I spent an end-of-the-road winter in a wood-heated house with no insulation or plumbing. Well, there was a hand pump, but its leathers froze when true cold arrived, and, that winter, true cold never left my midstate New Hampshire valley beneath the mountain I saw as a friend. So, I burned my semi-dry wood, melted snow and adapted to bathing once a week on a plywood sheet in the dooryard. I learned to choose windless days for that.

My nearest neighbor was a half-mile away, and most days I wandered the valley and ridges on snowshoes and thought about what I might write. Writing had been, ostensibly, the reason for moving there, but really I’d moved into winter’s absence because of an absence of ideas in the aftermath of college.

Rescue from aimlessness arrived when it snowed sufficiently. Then, my neighbor, Donald, who was also the town’s road agent, would pull up in the town plow and hire me as co-driver. Really, I almost never drove; my job in the shotgun seat was twofold: keep Donald awake; dig the wheels free when he slid into a ditch. I grew reasonably adept at both, telling Donald long, convoluted stories about hippies – with my long hair and beard, I was the valley’s sample – and their reasons for wanting to drop out into valleys like ours, or making dopey jokes, which made him laugh enough to stay on course…most of the time. When Donald slept or caught his blade on the edge of a ditch and we yawed into it, I’d dig out the wheels, while he napped or strung a come-along to a tree across the road. Then, we’d struggle out and return to freeing the 65 miles of town road that were Donald’s domain.

But this is a story about a storm when Donald never arrived. In fact, it was an 8-inch snowstorm that no one plowed, and I was reminded of it during the recent uber-cold snow that fell on us all. Here, in Maine, the temperature topped out at minus 2, even as snow filled the air; in the evening it was minus 7 by 9:00, and that was a few miles from the sea. Inland, temperatures dropped as low as a stunning minus 42.

More Rare Snow – in this case a Snowbow

A long life of weather-watching has given me a broad sample of experience, but this week’s frigid snow is only the 2nd such snow of my life. The other was the day that Donald stayed home.

That morning I dug myself out from bed’s thick covers to start the stove. I’d grown acclimated to waking to sub-freezing temps indoors, but as I felted kindling into the firebox, I felt uncommonly cold. I lit the paper understory, fitted the circular lid over the firebox and opened the drafts. Then, I shuffled over to the window to look at the thermometer. The window was frosted and iced thickly over, and I grabbed a butter knife and set to scratching. Zero seemed a good guess, and so I cleared the ice from the window near where zero might lie. Nothing. No trace of red. Scratch, scratch – minus 10. Nothing. Scratch, scratch, scratch – minus 20. Still, nothing; whoa. Scratchscratchscratchscratch – minus 30. Is that a hint of red? Scratch, scratch – 33 below.

Well, that was my thermal lowpoint (and it stands still today), and I dressed and went out into this wonder. It was absolutely still. But the trees were in voice, or, more accurately, full complaint. Snaps, groans, pops and general tension echoed all around me; it felt as if the whole sky weighed more than usual. My nose-hairs webbed immediately and my breath caught in my throat. The winter I knew felt transformed; the cold had made the land alien.

Later that day it snowed a windless snow, a snow so light that 8 inches later I cleared it from the doorway with two sweeps of a broom.

This week’s snow was that light.

By Corinne H. Smith

In my five-and-a-half decades of taking breath on this planet, I’ve lived within the boundaries of some of our major American watersheds: the Chesapeake Bay, the Ohio River, the Great Lakes, the Upper Mississippi River, and the Connecticut River. But it’s only in this last year that I’ve paid almost daily attention to the water course now flowing closest to me, the Susquehanna River. Mostly because my weekday office sits just a block away from it.

Though I rarely go down to its edge, I often look at the river from our second-story windows. I’m amazed at how its appearance differs daily, even from this distance. In dramatic weather, it changes hourly. Here its mile-wide span must surely affect our own east-bank weather, especially on those days when fog or snow flurries swirl around our building. Not bad for something that begins in Cooperstown, New York, as a stream small enough to jump across. (Yes, I’ve done this.)

Henry Thoreau seems to have written most often and experienced his most introspective moments when he was near water. I don’t believe this was by accident. Yes, he documented the seasonal growth and infinitesimal changes in his local flowers, plants, bushes, and trees. But he knew that – the sky, notwithstanding — nothing on earth illustrates drama better than a body of water. He learned this information firsthand, after paddling the Concord and Merrimack Rivers for two weeks and after living at Walden Pond for two years.

Many quotable passages about rivers and lakes can be found in Thoreau’s writings. Here are a few of my favorites:

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.” ~ “The Ponds,” Walden

Walden’s Fringe

“For the first time it occurred to me this afternoon what a piece of wonder a river is – A huge volume of matter ceaselessly rolling through the fields and meadows of this substantial earth making haste from the high places, by stable dwellings of men and Egyptian pyramids, to its restless reservoir. One would think that, by a very natural impulse, the dwellers upon the headwaters of the Mississippi and Amazon would follow in the trail of their waters to see the end of the matter.” ~ Journal, September 5, 1838

“A river is superior to a lake in its liberating influence. It has motion and indefinite length. A river touching the back of a town is like a wing, it may be unused as yet, but ready to waft it over the world. With its rapid current it is a slightly fluttering wing. River towns are winged towns.” ~ Journal, July 2, 1858

Naturally, nothing can beat the following quote. And in my mind, it has absolutely nothing to do with the act of catching a fish.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” ~ “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Walden

Metaphor was one of Thoreau’s favorite literary devices. An ever-moving river makes a terrific symbol for time and eternity. Here Henry gives us two concepts (and many more, if you read the rest of this passage in the book). The first is that each one of us could be the hook at the end of the thin filament of a fishing line, cast into the current of Life. We each make an inconsequential drop into the watery world. Plop! We’re just that tiny, in the grand scheme. But we’re invisibly connected to the other little plops – uh, people – who are traveling downstream, too. We’re all in this together.

The second idea is about living Life fully and deliberately: “drinking” at this stream. Thoreau goes on to say, “I would drink deeper.” I interpret this wish as saying, “I would like to stay on this earth as long as possible and do more exploring into it. There seems to be not enough time to do and see everything that I want to.” We all feel this way sometimes.

No matter where he went and what others he saw, Thoreau’s favorite river remained the Concord. Maybe its attraction was not just that it was his hometown waterway. Maybe it was the pace of the Concord that was more to his liking. Its current is often barely discernible. Just like the courses of our daily lives and the progression of Life.

As this year winds down, I think I’ll spend a few minutes sitting beside the Susquehanna, just watching. I can contemplate the passage of time: the past, the present, and the future, all at once. I can consider my own small cast and what adventures may lie ahead for me at the next curve. The river doesn’t know 2013 from 2014. It just flows on from one day and month and year to the next. It heads for the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, doing what it has done since the last glacier receded. When it meets an obstacle, it either passes around it or, if the object is light enough, it carries the weight along until it can find a place to drop it.

The Susquehanna
credit: Robert Hollis

Another nice example to follow.

On one of the year’s last days, I leave home to walk to the sea. At the driveway’s end I turn right, then soon right again until I reach the end of our cul-de-sac. There, I join a woodland path that threads first through new developments and then into the Town Commons, established in 1719. I am on my way.

Though my proposed walk was a trifle shorter than John Muir’s walk to the sea in 1858, I think the same impulse set each of us walking. Muir famously walked from his Wisconsin home to the Gulf of Mexico, a months-long, thousand-mile venture, the first of his many long walks in a lifetime devoted to first learning and then preserving the natural world (founding The Sierra Club in the early 1900s). But on this first walk, Muir was leaving home to see the ocean, and he was leaving home to find himself. A thousand miles seemed little as obstacle to two such goals.

I too set out to see the ocean, and the icy four miles of trail and road I had to walk seemed short enough. The previous day’s rain had washed away the season’s early snows and all that remained was the foot-beaten track of gray ice, uneven and slick. No one else was afoot in the woods; the sweep of north wind rushed in the high pines.

Like Muir I had walked away from home to be alone. Muir was leaving more than I and for longer, however. Behind him as the miles multiplied faded the defining force of Muir’s Scottish father, a dour, strict man who established order with day-long, pioneer labor and evening and Sunday worship of Calvin’s God. Muir and his siblings lived lives of tedium, exhaustion and fear as they hacked a life from the Wisconsin woods.

My happy home amid a fringe of white pines in Brunswick, Maine contains none of what oppressed Muir, but it does hold the predictable me; the paradox holds that you must leave home to find yourself (a truth certainly apparent to all of the students I teach as they look outward at college and its surrounding world). Re-enacting this departure daily has always seemed to me a necessity. Otherwise I become too sure of myself, too certain that what I see and feel has the inevitability of fated truth.

The trees in the Town Common stand and wave between forty and seventy feet in height, and it was their collective voice I listened to as I walked south. Trees, of course, walk nowhere (unless you count Tolkien’s ents); they are masters of staying put, sending down fingery roots that, over time, sometimes exceed the tree’s airy reach. Few of us linger with trees, especially as we pass beyond the age of imagination, when climbing them seems a discovery of both distant worlds and a trusted relative. On this day, however, even with the sea calling, I stopped with a few and ran my hands over the rough corrugation of their trunks. Looking shyly both ways first, I half encircled one big fella with my arms, pressing my cheek to its bark’s roughness. Its tonnage rose above me; its girth exceeded my longest reach; I felt satisfyingly small. Then I walked on and emerged from The Town Common onto a series of backroads that lead to the sea.

Middle Bay Solstice Sunset

Why did Muir choose the sea? I can’t recall whether, in his essay, he said so or not. But in mid-walk among the fields that open down to Middle Bay, I sense what Muir may have felt: expansive freedom and a return of sorts to some lost, original place. I go to the sea daily when I’m in Maine, and it never loses its strangeness. Well, let’s see: here we have familiarity and strangeness, an odd, perhaps self-canceling combination, yes?

Thoreau – forewalker to Muir – knew such mixtures – he called it being awake.