Thoreau Farm

By Corinne H. Smith

“There’s a ripple effect in all we do –
What you do, touches me;
What I do, touches you.” (author unknown)

No, this isn’t a quote from Henry David Thoreau. This anonymous poem is printed on a 25-year-old poster that’s tacked up on a wall in my office. In the background, an ocean sparkles in moonlight, and small waves tumble toward the viewer. The words still ring true for me, perhaps now more than ever.

Recently, I spent a few minutes standing in one of my favorite places: on the slight crest of the North Bridge in Concord. To me, the fact that the American Revolutionary War began with shots fired here is ironic to the point of being ridiculous. That one of the most serene spots on the planet could have had such a violent intrusion thrust upon it, and that the event is still memorable enough to be re-enacted at regular intervals today – well, that’s a discussion for another time.

The Concord River passes oh so slowly under the bridge at this time of year. Random bits of floating leaves and twigs are the only clues that point to its sluggish pace. If no noisy visitors are walking around, chatting, or clicking their cameras, the solemn river itself sets the rhythm and the volume of the day. Left alone, it languishes in near-silence.

I was basking in this peacefulness when PLOP! A fish broke the surface and then just as quickly, dove out of sight. I watched as the ripples rolled out from the site of its outburst. Rims of perfect circles reached upstream and downstream and toward both riverbanks — without fanfare, without hullabaloo, without making any sound at all. The swaying water displaced a leaf or two, and perhaps carried swimming insects and small water creatures an inch in another direction. From where I stood, it didn’t look as if the fish had affected anything. But how could I know, being a mere human, standing on a tall wooden bridge, and not being a resident of the complex water world flowing beneath me?

As I was lost in such contemplation and was reminded of the poster back in my office, PLOP! The same fish – or another one – popped up near the first spot and disappeared. And a fresh set of mini-waves spread across the surface of the river – a visualization of 360 degrees expanding exponentially, stretching away from the source, until the wider rings were finally stopped by the solid earthen shore. It was magic to watch.

We never know what actions or words of ours may influence or inspire others.

I wasn’t physically touched by the leaps of the fish. But I was impressed enough to want to write about what I had witnessed. And now that I have written this piece, I will PLOP! it into the online universe, where its ripples will emanate electronically. If the past predicts, a few hundred folks will see the link. A few dozen may actually click on it. Some will read it. One or two readers may add comments in return. My words may always exist in the realm of the Ethernet, but they will quickly fade from the surface, from immediate view. They may re-emerge only when someone has fished deliberately for them. They probably will not create radical change.

But let’s think of Henry! Consider how many individuals have been inspired by reading Henry Thoreau’s words. Someone who did not gain fame in his lifetime has earned a great deal of it in the century and a half since he walked through this very town. How many millions have read his philosophies, across the decades and around the globe? How many of them have chosen to live deliberately because they believed that Henry challenged them to do so?

We think of the more famous folks first: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Emma Goldman, John Muir, N.C. Wyeth, Charles Ives, Jack Kerouac, Michael Pollan. The lives of these individuals are celebrated on a wall of tribute in the house where Thoreau was born. But they represent just a small sample of the people who read Walden or “Civil Disobedience” or even a special saying on a poster or greeting card. For these readers and for many more, the splash of Henry’s words has been enough to jostle them into thought and introspection. And afterward, into action.

The writings of Henry David Thoreau first fell quietly into our literary stream. But ever since, they have sent out ripples – ones that continue to reach new readers today, on every part of the planet. And many folks in turn will somehow react and respond. And their activities will help to keep the waves moving, ever outward, in all directions.

When we intuited that, at some point, Maine might become home, we planted two high-bush blueberries in our backyard, and, from the front, where it was shaded by white pines, we transplanted another. This triptych of bushes has thrived in their sun-spot, and they have begun to grow together into a backyard thicket. Early this summer, a catbird claimed that thicket (and the whole yard, it seemed); whenever I sensed a flicker of motion as I sat at the breakfast table, it was two-toned, gray and charcoal.

And just as I hovered around these bushes, flicking Japanese beetles from their leaves, so too, as the berries fattened, did the birds. The catbird maintained her seat; she was still bird-of-the-yard. But the timid doves also arrived, and the sparrows and finches, and the titmice, robins and our paired cardinals. Most insisted on fresh too, passing over the already pecked or beetle-gnawed berries that littered the ground for the green and half-green ones on the bush.

Recently, the berries have ripened in a rush, and in the morning the patch has been an aviary; it seems that the catbirds have lost control and every robin and his cousin are here; so too the jays. And, from the woods out back, a wood thrush now flies in, unusual sighting in this edgeland. And – flash of color – a goldfinch? The berries are bigger than his stomach; no way he can lug one off and swallow it. But there in a burst of yellow he goes, the half-ripe berry like a bulbous nose on his beak.

Easy Pickings

Years ago I asked at the hardware store about this “sharing” with birds and was advised to get netting to drape over the bushes. Dutifully, I bought some and set up protection for “my” berries. An hour later I happened to look out and see movement behind the bushes; when I checked I found a robin partially wrapped and flightless in the netting. “O, no,” I said aloud; the robin was panicked and immobile. I went to find my wife and some scissors. Gently, she cupped and held the robin, who struggled and then went quiet, and gently I began to snip the strands of netting. It took 5 minutes to undo the misappropriation and confusion. But when my wife opened her hands, the robin flew to a nearby tree where he paused and looked back as us. Then, he was gone. We took off the remaining netting and tossed it. And so it was set: each August morning I was to watch this show in the bushes.

Over the past week, the redbird has become ascendant. Not that our resident cardinals have chased away the robins and sparrows and jays that come to dine a la bleu, but they are always within eyeshot. Today, the red streak arrowed across the yard, put on his airbrakes and settled in on a branch as I sipped coffee. Why, I wondered, does he want that green berry, which, given a still-tight bond with its branch, keeps resisting? The blue ones – and they are many – are ripe and pliant, ready to drop; they are also sweet. But it had to be the green, and, after some flurried hovering and tugging, it was. Off he flew to the bank of rhododendrons with his green prize.

All these bird aeronautics have attuned my eye to movement, and tapped into my fondness for the peripheral. Later in the morning, while I was supposedly focused on some dense reading about Romanticism, red wings drew my eye again. But what I was saw wasn’t usual: the redbird, for a change, wasn’t in the berry bushes. Instead he was on the ground beneath the bedroom window; as I watched he flew straight up and hovered, appearing to peer into the room. Then he settled back to the ground. New genus, peeping redbird? I wondered. He did it again, and then again. Now I was watching closely, and I realized that he was plucking spiders’ egg-cases from just under the sill of the window, and those cases were the size of berries. Perhaps he only practices with the green berries.

Minutes later, however, he was back at the bushes. And always, on the periphery of vision drawn to his flashy red is his mate, her dun coloring tinged with a yellowy orange; she brings her romance and gets her berries too.

And each afternoon, after all the avian feeding, I go out and get ours.

By Corinne H. Smith

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a
book.  The book exists for us perchance which will explain our
miracles and reveal new ones. (Thoreau, “Reading,” Walden)

When we marked the 159th anniversary of the publication of Walden; or, Life in the Woods on August 9, 2013, I was returned to the story of my own first copy of the book.

I suppose I became an unofficial “Thoreauvian” after reading the essay “Civil Disobedience” in Harold Sachwald’s tenth-grade English class at Hempfield High School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It was in the early 1970s. I was an only child who felt that she was under the daily scrutiny of a domineering mother. Thoreau’s spirit of independence and inclination toward non-violent protest immediately resonated with me. “The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right,” Henry told me. Wow. I sure wanted to drink more water from this well.

Walden was the book I knew I had to read next. So I checked out the copy from our school library. It was several inches thick, had a leather spine, and was probably from the 1930s or 1940s. It had a leafy decoration on the cover and a few nice engravings that illustrated each chapter. But I couldn’t quite get into it. The opening section on “Economy” had me stymied. But I still sensed that the contents would be important to me, so I kept renewing it and kept hoping that I would someday understand it. I carried that book around for most of my junior year. Finally, I returned it to the library, heavily fingerprinted, but unread.

In the second semester of twelfth grade, I took an elective American literature class that included the reading of Walden. For no recorded grade and for only half of one academic credit. I bought my own paperback — ironically enough, at Walden Books in the Park City Mall — so that I would be free to underline the good parts. I even liked the way this edition looked, with its funky and colorful 1960s cover showing a solitary individual, sitting under a tree, gazing across a body of water. I paid 75 cents for it. I wanted to be that person.

MY Walden and one of its sisters

I’ll admit that it took the intervention of English teacher Thomas McVey for me to finally begin to digest Thoreau’s prose. But suddenly nearly every page contained at least one nugget that I felt was inspirational and worth saving: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” for instance; “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” for another. I underlined them all with my see-through, blue Bic pen. These were powerful words for a teenager, especially for one who was on the verge of carving out her own place in society. I took the philosophy of Walden to heart. I was hooked on Henry for life.

Many years have passed. (Just how many and where they have gone, I cannot fathom.) I now own at least half a dozen copies of Walden; including a German edition I bought in Munich in 1986 and a Canadian reprint that I picked up in Ontario in 2009. But whenever I need to find a favorite passage, I turn to my well-worn paperback. I open it up and smile at my youthful wavering blue underlines. And I find just what I was looking for.

At used book sales, I have sometimes spied sister copies of this edition, MY edition, with the person sitting under the autumn-leafed tree on the cover. I used to buy them as I saw them so that I could have multiple copies of MY Walden. Recently, I changed my mind. I now leave the books behind so that someone else can find them. I hope that their new owners will be as inspired by Thoreau’s words and THEIR editions as I have been.