Thoreau Farm

Today’s post is inspired by Corinne’s recent meditation on winter’s first shoveling following hard on fall’s last raking. In her post, Corinne invoked Thoreau’s “inspector of winter,” and that got me thinking about the sorts of inspections winter encourages. Surely one is of what lies overhead. Here then, is one inspector’s report. What inspections must you make to satisfy this season?

Shoveling the Sky

The sun inclines toward evening and
what wind there was lies down, the way
deer yard up to winter sleep in the
protective pines. From the ladder’s top rung
I shovel a way onto the roof and step

cautiously into its field of snow its broad
expanse pitched slightly (sun-state design)
to the southwest’s rumor of spring
and filtered sun. Here is settled sky,
the layerings and leavings of a dozen storms,

each weighing on its forebears, winter’s journal,
finally ice. With my shovel I am precise, cutting geometries – squares, rectangles, and everyone’s
favorite, the trapezoid, its four lines happily
askew in the irregular world. Even with my

back-saver shovel, its shaft bent so
the blade levels for easy lifting,
I have to divide each sector into three passes,
ten pounds that I can heft and hurl 500 times
and the blocks of snow fly with the direct

intelligence of stone; they thud repeatedly
adding to the haystack corpus of old sky
that rises now near roof level. Each block
a million flakes sliding from the slick
shovel a brief comet trailing its tail

of spray arcing over the gutter –
gone, already the next chopped free of the fallen
sky; I am the roof-god coiled, his shovel beginning
its rotary swing – who would have thought
the sky could weigh so much?

What keeps it aloft?

By Corinne H. Smith

One day I was raking leaves. The next, I was shoveling snow and ice. Just this quickly did we move from Autumn into Winter.

“Live in each season as it passes,” Thoreau wrote in his journal on August 23, 1853. “Breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let these be your only diet drink and botanical medicine.” He continued at length on the subject, promoting the intake of the foods that surface throughout the year, in a paragraph that would find favor today with folks aimed toward holistic health. “For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well,” he claimed. “She exists for no other end. Do not resist her.” This remains good advice, no matter which century it comes from.

I like to go back to his opening credo: “Live in each season as it passes.” He surely didn’t mean just to “live” or to “survive” in each one. He could have easily substituted the words “embrace” or “appreciate.” The changes are going to happen anyway. Why resist them? Why not enjoy them, and see what new fruits they have to offer?

As a confirmed Winter Lover – yes, one friend has even dubbed me a “Snow Queen” – I have little tolerance for fellow Northerners who hate this weather. I freely admit it: I love winter and snow. I can understand how bitter cold temperatures and reduced light can wear upon a human body and spirit. But snow? Snow is beautiful. It evens out the landscape and covers up its imperfections. It says quietly, Look at the freshness I can create out of a place you thought you knew. Snow is good for plant life and for our water supply. Even shoveling it can be a joy, if you time the action and your own movements wisely. And if you don’t know how to drive in it, then stay home. Don’t clutter up the highways with your quirky quick turns or bad braking techniques. Or at least don’t complain when you end up in a ditch. The rest of us will move along just fine. Slowly and surely, and with good tread on the tires. And that’s okay.

Why do our TV broadcasters seem utterly surprised whenever snow and ice appear? They treat the intrusion as an enemy invasion, making it the top story of the day. They send reporters out amongst the falling flakes, where they point to a convoy of maintenance vehicles that have been sent out on a mission to do combat: to either plow away the offensive stuff, or to spew something on the surfaces to allow speedy and necessary travel to resume as quickly as possible. Experts are brought in to tell us how much longer the inconvenience is expected to last. I’m guessing, until at least the end of March. We live in the North, and this is winter.

Now another Thoreau quote comes to mind: the one where he touted his self-imposed title of “inspector of snow-storms.” If he were here today, we’d give him a job. We’d dress him up in an L. L. Bean snowsuit, give him a microphone and a ruler, and aim a camera at him. Inspect away, Mr. Thoreau. Tell us how bad it is out there. Give us a reason to change our plans and to stay home tonight. What if he instead looked at us, looked at the snow, shrugged, and said, “Live in each season as it passes”? What a relief that would be!

This time, our first snowfall was expected. The flakes came steadily, almost in theatrical fashion, falling nicely and evenly and with perfectly vertical orientation. This was no blizzard. And we had no need to go out into it – though at least six NFL teams had to work in it, and their games were fun to watch. The only task I had was to walk a block to the nearest grocery store for milk for the next day’s breakfast. I enjoyed the perks of suburbia as well as the peacefulness of a nice snowfall.

Yes, at this time of year, I like to lie awake in bed at night, listening to the tapping of sleet and snow against the windows and on the roof. I hear the heavy metal scrape of the local snowplow resounding throughout the neighborhood, and the truck’s orange warning light swirls around my bedroom walls. ‘Tis the season, and I’m living in it. I can even say I love it.

I know there are still leaves lying beneath the snow. I should have raked them a week ago, when I had the chance. But you know what? Winter has arrived and has made the world beautiful. I am living in this season now. The leaves will have to take care of themselves.

One of the pleasures (and occasional curses) of deep familiarity with a book is our tendency to “see” it in other readings. While this tendency may at times make us into so many Procrustes (the mythic Greek blacksmith and (of course) son of a god, who showed his hospitality by stretching or cutting his visitors to fit his guest bed rather than adjusting the other way), more often, it enlivens our readings and adds new visions to them.

Here’s one such mash-up brought to me during recent reading. I wonder if you have the same sort of experience when reading Thoreau?

Thoreau and Bly – What We Drag Behind Us

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow (Harper and Row, 1988), Robert Bly writes about what we express and what we hide as we grow to be our adult selves. Chapter 2 is a short essay entitled “The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us,” and, for me, the image has always made me think of Henry Thoreau and his move to the pond. Bly suggests that, as we grow and decide what parts of us to show, we put the other parts – often those that are socially difficult – in our bags. But, of course, because our bags are full of us, we must take them along wherever we go. It is labor to drag such a bag behind oneself.

Each time I read Walden with students, this image returns to me. There, in 1845, is the 27-year-old Henry Thoreau, building his 10′ by 15′ house in the woods by Walden, and as he works – getting “well pitched” by the “tall arrowy pines” that are becoming this house, another sort of ‘bag’ – he must be thinking about what he will put into it. What will he carry out from town in his cart? How will he furnish it? What, in short, is “necessary?” Who will he be out here?

What Thoreau makes clear in “Economy,” his long stumbling- block of an opening chapter, is that answering these questions carefully is vital to the life that will follow. And so some 60+ pages into the book, he thinks about furnishing his house:

Furniture! Thank God that I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men…

And – no surprise – Thoreau goes on to tout a minimalist approach to such possessions. He wants his cart to be light, easy to pull; it is practical advice. But then a shift in imagery and tone arrives, and the reader realizes that Thoreau is – no surprise here, either – intent on making metaphor of his thoughts on furniture:

If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it…

Here is a version of Bly’s long bag we drag behind us, a mix of possessions and pieces of self that we feel we must have and, at the same time, hide. Such work – this walking and hauling of self out into our own lives.

Perhaps this is what Thoreau means when he nudges himself (and us) toward realization – when we both realize who we are and what choices we have made to become that person. And, in doing so, we make that person real. Perhaps then, we unpack, sell off what we don’t need and set off lighter into our lives.