Thoreau Farm

By Corinne H. Smith

A typical Friday afternoon at 341 Virginia Road.

The sun was shining. Cumulus and cirrus clouds decorated the crystal blue sky.

The air was full of summer heat, but thankfully, not summer humidity.

A string of small planes eased down at the rear of the property, aiming for the east-west runway at Hanscom Field.

High overhead, larger jets in the clouds roared due east, on schedule to arrive at Boston’s Logan Airport.

A waste management truck picked up the garbage and emptied the recycling bins.

Mail was delivered.

Coneflowers and stands of Queen Anne’s lace turned to face the warmth of natural light.

Catbirds took turns calling – mewing — from a nearby thicket.

House finches chattered as they flocked above the house.

A green-bodied dragonfly landed on the page of the book I was reading.

Smaller blue-bodied dragonflies visited the garden, as did a number of flies and bees. So did an inquisitive groundhog, with his nose held up to sniff the air. He disappeared when I stirred.

A stiff breeze caught the leaves on the green corn stalks. They leaned onto and into each other and waved to the west.

A chipmunk ran across the porch.

A few cars drove by. A few bicyclists followed.

A tractor rattled through the working farm behind the house. A red-tailed hawk soon began to hunt the rodents that had been displaced by it. He caught several and carried each one to a nearby tree. When he had his fill, he sailed off toward Concord center. Two small birds nipped at his tail the whole way. His scream of annoyance echoed through the air.

To honor the 196th year of the man who suggested that we “Simplify,
simplify,” it was a perfect time spent among the lives — great and
small – who make their homes on Virginia Road. Happy Birthday, Henry.
.

By Corinne H. Smith

Have you ever walked with or followed a butterfly? Recently, I set out to do this.

For years now, I’ve been entranced by the little cabbage white butterflies that flit and float across the Thoreau Farm kitchen garden. They’re our most frequent visitors. To me, they look like tiny slips of blown paper riding on the stream of a steady breeze, cruising just inches above all of the shrubbery. They seem always to be here. I thought it was time to learn more about them. And maybe I could get a decent photo of one, too.

My Leader

When I told our garden expert Debbie Bier that I was going to write about cabbage whites, she told me explicitly, “I don’t like them.” I wasn’t surprised. Each print and online source I consulted was quick to point out their caterpillar predecessors’ penchant for damaging plants in the mustard family, which includes cabbages and radishes. But I also discovered how to determine their gender. The male butterflies have one black dot in the center of each upper wing, and the females have two. And so armed with fascination and this information and my camera, I was ready.

As you may imagine, the path of a butterfly is not easy to follow. The differences between feet and wings become quite clear. I had to wait while he (with one dot) explored the tops of the lilac bushes. Then he fluttered behind them, out of sight. No straight lines for him! His was a whirlwind trail: back and forth, hither and yon. Every ten seconds he landed: perhaps on a plant, like the purple flower of the nearby cow vetch. But then he began to light on various spots on our driveway. What could possibly attract him to dirt or gravel? I couldn’t tell. And he never stopped long enough for me to investigate. Still, I wandered on behind my erratic leader.

At one place in the road, I watched him land next to something white. Oh, no! It was the body of a fallen comrade. He (also with one dot) must have flown too close to the front of a moving vehicle. He lay on his left side, his lower wings already tattered and deteriorating, his little life already going to ground. The live one stopped at the body, then flew a few feet away, and then came back for a second look. He sat next to it for a few seconds, then flittered away again. I lifted the dead one and placed him among the goldenrod growing along the roadside, where he would not be run over again.

Henry Thoreau noted only occasional insect and butterfly sightings in his journal. In his day, there were no illustrated guidebooks to help observers identify species. In fact, Thoreau lamented that the only publication to address these small creatures was a 459-page document called “A Report of the Insects of Massachusetts, Injurious to Vegetation.” It had been written by Thaddeus William Harris, the Harvard College librarian, who had also served as Thoreau’s natural history professor. But even with a personal connection to the author, the report could not escape Thoreau’s judgment:

“The catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, which of course is applicable mainly to God as seen in his works. Yet the only account of its beautiful insects – butterflies, etc. – which God has made and set before us which the State ever thinks of spending any money on is the account of those which are injurious to vegetation! … Massachusetts has published her report on ‘Insects Injurious to Vegetation’ and our neighbor the ‘Noxious Insects of New York.’ We have attended to the evil and said nothing about the good. This is looking a gift horse in the mouth with a vengeance. … Though God may have pronounced his work good, we ask, ‘Is it not poisonous?’” (Journal, May 1, 1859)

Alas, the cabbage whites are yet another example of a life form that Henry Thoreau never saw. They are not natives, and they were brought to North America in the later 1860s. Would Henry have gone with me today, to watch this little guy, and to see if we could find some attributes of good amidst the bad? I’d like to think he would.

My winged friend made one more loop around the garden. Then he suddenly sped toward the woods to the east, flying faster than I had expected. By the time I rounded the house, he was out of sight. Where he was headed and what he would do there, I could only imagine. He left me with one good photo and the experience of an hour well spent. And the anticipation of again meeting him or another cabbage white soon.

The narrow trail bends up around a corner and the young birches arch overhead. A small sign reads, “Drover’s Path,” and, given a choice between the gravel road I’ve been running and a path twisting up out of sight, I know my route. I stub my toes into the steepening grade; I go up. And, though I am more than 3000 miles from home terrain, the close birches and narrow way, even the scuffed stone underfoot, seem familiar. Then, the light ahead that presages a clearing begins to shine, and I pop out into the open. “Whoa,” I say involuntarily, “Whoa.” And I slow to a walk and watch the Sound of Sleat unfold before me. Some 500 feet below the gray water sets up in rows akin to print; a lighthouse winks on a point; and across the water the mountains of Knoydart poke into the clouds.

Knoydart and the Scottish Mainland across the Sound of Sleat

The path ahead runs through a field of ferns grown up around recent logging and then sweeps around a contour; the footing is firm, the drizzle that insists feels like a balm. I begin running again, feeling the usual tension between admiring the sweep of land and attending to the footwork of the trail. I am on my way to Leitur Fura, a village abandoned 200 years ago when its mix of short-season agriculture and smuggling finally couldn’t sustain its hundred people. Those leaving Leitur Fura set out for Nova Scotia, and here on the Isle of Skye in old Scotia, they have left behind their stone cellarholes and the gray light of Sleat.

Stones at the house-sites in Leitur Fura

Reading Henry Thoreau’s journal, with its closely observed record of his daily walking, reminds me of travel’s merits. Every time we set out for terra-less-known, we gain new eyes, and, with those eyes, we see afresh. This recent travel in my family’s ancestral land, Scotland, has suggested long roots to my affinity for two landscapes – New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Maine’s intricate coast. In the Highlands and on the Isle of Skye, I kept rounding corners or looking down and seeing reminders of home; then, the land would turn exotic before my eyes. These twin perceptions made every moment rife with awareness and possibility; I was travelling a good deal a long way from Concord, even as its adjacent lands flashed before my eyes.

Then, I did what all vacation-travelers do: I came home; there, I returned to my daily trails and wanderings. But I also resolved to keep my traveler’s eye. And that, it seems to me, is part of the knack for living that Henry Thoreau mastered – he could travel “a good deal in Concord” because he found the ways and the awareness to see with a traveler’s eye.