Thoreau Farm

His Hands Your Hands – Meeting Thoreau’s Copy of Walden

It is, to begin with, a plain, brown book; shifted from its climate-controlled home and away from its guardian curator, it wouldn’t draw your eye at a tag sale. But you pull on the white cloth gloves that are a size too small, and you reach forward to where the curator has nested the book on a protective, foam wedge; in doing so you reach over the years – at least that’s the feeling – and somehow the book still feels impossibly far away. From July 22, 2013 to August 2, 1854, which, according to his journal, is when Thoreau first lifted his ‘specimen” copy of his book and opened its plain cover.

You wonder: did he scrawl his name on the first page immediately, an odd redundancy since his name was already embossed on the book? And, whenever he did so, was it with one of his own pencils, the graphite riding smoothly over the paper? Surely, you think, of course, though a second glance shows that he chose ink – my copy, indelibly.

It is about the size of your own modern copy, and so you notice that the pagination isn’t far off – favorite passages are near the page numbers that are lodged in your mind from teaching and rereadings. What has drawn you, however, the first reason you reach across this span of years is that this copy contains his emendations -pencilled-in notes as he reread his pages and brought to bear what he knew now on what he knew then. Here is evidence of his passage among his own lines.

Your curator has thoughtfully printed out a list of the pages (only a handful) with emendations – it will save you both time and, more important, it will save wear on the book, which you learn at the end of your visit is Middlebury College’s second-most valuable holding (which explains also why you are never left alone with it, and why it goes back into a vault with shiny locks as soon as you are done). Purchased in 1940 for $2000, its value now outpaces numbers.

Not many notes, you think, as your hand rests on your own heavily-scribed copy. But then, his book is the distillation of so many notes, while your copy is record of how he has expanded your thoughts, of the way they have furled out from it.

Your curator has also marked the three lengthiest comments, each with a lace that allows you to draw open the book to that page without having to search for it. The fantasy is that you will discover a hidden key, some little authorial confession that unlocks part of the text, but there is no such baring of hidden purpose. Well that makes sense, you think: his book is a baring of purpose; why would he obscure its meaning?

A long note at the bottom of a page in The Ponds chapter noses deeper into the naming of Walden Pond, specifically into the possibility that it is derived from Saffron Walden. You squint at the famously difficult scrawl and find the note clearer than the copies of manuscript pages you have tried to decipher in the past. But then, you think, this is a note, a detail, and not the broad and wild course of his mind, which he must have had to hurry his writing to ride, its current whirling, leaping, hurrying as he bent to his journal’s or manuscript’s page. And so, beside the clear pool of this finished writing, there is this quiet note that speaks also of the writer’s precision, his drive (even after nine drafts) to get each detail right.

And then you go the ending, read its final paragraphs – “The sun is but a morning star.” – and you are cast out of Walden (as he intended, you think) and into the world of your eyes and imagination. You close the plain, brown volume, reach with your gloved hands and heft it for a moment. Its weight is precisely what he felt when he lifted it to consider what he had made of his world.

Note of Thanks: to Danielle Rougeau, Assistant Curator of Special Collections & Archives/Exhibits Designer at the Middlebury College Library.

Three Points from the Berry-patch

Yes, I’ve been out in the pitch pine patch again, even as our recent heat has thickened the air and slowed me. It is, after all, prime picking season. Here are three thoughts brought back from the pines with a quart of blueberries.

For the best effect, I should have had a shiny tin pail, the notes of first berries drummed on its resonant bottom. But I ran here, and I would run home, and so a pail with its wide mouth wouldn’t work. Instead I have my own device, a container with handle and variable mouth cut to the size I want. Here’s how to make one: take a thoroughly-washed half-gallon, plastic milk jug (or, if wildly optimistic, a gallon), and, leaving the handle intact, cut the opening away, trimming it to the desired width – enough inches across for easy stowing of berries, but not so many that the berries bounce out. Perfect for pick-and-carry at any pace.

Wherever you do your picking it pays to note where little umbrellas of shade set up; beneath them you’ll often find the fullest berries. I call them fatberries, and I comb my patches for them; often they can be 50% greater in girth than their neighbors. I’ve noticed that some of the heftiest and sweetest fatberries grow in the partial shade of ferns. Perhaps it’s the mix of sun and shade, perhaps it’s some fern-flavoring, but there they are – routinely. I look for the ferns and step around them as I pick. Other small shades work as well, though they are also often harbinger of the waning of a patch as the forest reclaims its open space.

What about washing your berries? A number of years ago my wife and I were picking berries on the side of a New Hampshire mountain; the year was a good one for berries and they were everywhere. At some point we wound up picking near a mother and her nine- or ten-year-old daughter. Mom was an earnest sort, the type who offers lessons, whatever the moment or task at hand, and she was intent on her daughter’s appreciating how bears depend on their annual berries to grow heavy for winter. Her daughter was more interested in eating her berries and wondering aloud about possible pies, but mom persisted. Finally her daughter began to imagine bears, but her vision took a different child-shape: “Ew, gross, Mom,” she said. “I bet all these berries have bear slobber on them. I’m not eating any of them.” And the girl sat down and, even as Mom ruefully explained that she would wash all the berries, she refused to pick or eat anymore.

Berry Search

My advice: leave the bear-slobber on; they are kindred spirits. May you too grow berry-heavy for winter.

Ten days ago, it seemed good to measure my picking in pints, but the days of quarts are here. Do I hear a gallon?

The calendar turns to obsession.

I’m on foot in the scrub of a pitch pine forest, minding its roots and enjoying the warm breeze; I’m thinking of nothing in particular. And so my peripheral vision, a strong suit, is open; often it catches animals or birds, now it catches a wink of blue, then another. Even before I turn, I know what’s there: one berry two – promise has become particular, and it is blue.

I break away from the track and out into these open woods, where three springs ago loitering teens set a fire that shows still in black scorching on the trunks of the scattered pines. But the open ground is a riot of growth and amid the leafy cacophony are swatches of low-bush blueberries – one berry two, turning blue.

What registers a little more slowly are all the pale green berries that will be blue. Given some water and some sun – both in long supply recently – this patch will be a trove, blue riches that will people even my sleep during prime picking season. Instinctively, I look up – is anyone watching? Such a patch brings out the possessive in me.

Henry Thoreau knew the lure of berries, wild fruits that grow unbidden, often on the burnt lands in fire’s wake. Near the end of his long first chapter in Walden, he is mulling the various lines of work he could have pursued; among them is berry-picking:

I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, – for my greatest skill has been to want but little, – so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought…But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles.

And so, for Henry, the berries never became business and remained a free fruit, happy distraction when walking, object of afternoons away “a-berrying.”

So it is for me today, where I find these season’s-first berries. I too “want but little,” on this summer day, though I confess I want this little a lot.

Should you not find your patch and set to picking?