Thoreau Farm

By Sandy Stott

It seems a bit counterintuitive that, as the hours of daylight stretch out toward solstice and invite us outside, many of us also become expansive in our reading. But early summer brims with experiment; sleep seems distant kin of the other solstice. We sing the day elastic.

And so there seems also ample time for that sweetest of slow times, summer reading. Here is a briefly annotated list of summer books that also might have interested Henry, though, given his omnivorous reading appetite, that would be a safe wager in many instances.

This House of Sky – Ivan Doig: a lyrical first book by a noted writer of western landscapes (and behaviors), this memoir about Scottish immigrants making their way in another hard land is one of my favorites.

Reading the Mountains of Home – John Elder: Take Robert Frost’s great poem, “Directive,” topo maps of the mountains outside of Bristol, Vermont, Middlebury English professor, John Elder and ample stretches of time and combine them and you get a superb meditation on what it is to be guided into knowing a home landscape, which finally yields knowing home.

Teaching a Stone to Talk – Annie Dillard: Yes, this book of essays has knocked around for years, but it is still in print for good reason. Written after Dillard’s homage to Henry, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, these sometimes cryptic pieces were Dillard’s primary work. Some of the essays – Total Eclipse, Living Like Weasels, Teaching a Stone to Talk – have been heavily anthologized.

The Thoreau You Don’t Know – Robert Sullivan: Would Henry have picked up a book about himself? If he’d been introduced to Robert Sullivan’s earlier work, perhaps he would have. Sullivan is a quirky mind drawn to off-the-beaten-track subjects – see his books, Rats or The Meadowlands – and so his take on Thoreau avoids others’ tracks too. A very fine storyteller.

Seek – Denis Johnson: Join the essayist on his honeymoon in the Alaska bush, where he and his bride contract with a bush pilot notorious for coming down hard, aka, crashing. Finally, Johnson and wife are out there 100 miles from anyone to pan for gold so they can forge their own rings; the bush is not interested. What else do they learn? Other essays from the edges of our world, a number of them grim. One of the best stylists writing.

Street Haunting – Virginia Woolf’s classic essay about rambling the streets of London resonates – for me – with Thoreau’s daily footborne looks at his world, even as the settings are wildly different. Woolf’s writing makes more music than most writers can imagine.

And you, what are your summer reads? Send them on and we can compile a list loosely linked to Thoreau, who, after all, read globally.

By Corinne H. Smith

It was a bright and sunny day in the middle of May, almost a month ago. I was walking along the Yellow Trail at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve in New York. I had been invited to the site to speak about Henry Thoreau at the annual Lupine Festival. Henry had passed this very property on his way to Minnesota in 1861. He jotted down in his field notebook that he saw signature pitch pines in the area. In fact, the railroad tracks he rattled over lay just beyond the route of this particular footpath. So I spent more than an hour out in the woods by myself before my talk, looking around and taking photographs.

I had hoped to get a glimpse and a photo of the rails. But the summer vegetation was already in full unfurl; if the tracks came close to me, I missed them. I needed a few shots of pitch pines for my presentation, however. So as I approached some of the tallest specimens in the clearings, I stopped and leaned back and looked up. I drew the camera to my face, aimed, and pressed the shutter button. Click.

And that’s when I saw something else. A complete and seamless rainbow-ring around the sun. A helio-halo. I’d never seen one before. Truth be told, I didn’t even know they were possible. I was familiar with sun dogs, when small prisms glow on either side of the sun in wispy clouds. And I’d seen a frozen white ring around a full moon on many a cold and crisp winter night, especially in New England. This must have been the daytime equivalent. It was huge. It was more than a little scary to my omen-ready mind. And it was nothing short of amazing.

I moved along and appreciated the spring wildflowers and ferns on the forest floor, but each time I came to an open area, I put my head back and squinted. No matter where I walked, I could still see the sun-halo. I took a few more shots of it, and included some greenery and a few flood-deadened trees in the frames, not knowing whether any of the full-on images I had snapped would turn out well. Taking pictures of the sun can be difficult.

As the minutes passed, I pondered this phenomenon. Was it truly natural? I knew that a major landfill was close by; and for a time I wondered if some noxious outgases from its waste material might be skewing the chemistry of our immediate atmosphere. (Why was my initial impulse drawn to a malicious cause?) When I returned home later, I did some online research and found this not to be the case. I learned that sun halos were relatively common; and like sun dogs, they are caused by the sunlight shining through ice crystals in cirrus clouds. I also learned that people along the New Jersey and New York coastlines had seen sun halos several days beforehand, during Prince Harry’s visit to the Sandy-stricken region.

When I returned to the nature center to update my slides, I asked a few visitors if they had looked up at the sun and seen the halo. Only a few of them had. The naturalist who was my festival contact confirmed that she’d seen it and that she had also told several people about it.

But why didn’t we make a general announcement? Why didn’t we grab all of these visitors and demand that they turn their heads skyward? How many people missed this marvelous and totally free masterpiece, merely because they weren’t paying attention? Sure, the stars-of-the-day lupines stood in bluish-bloom near the parking lot, and they were indeed beautiful. But something else was even more stunning, and it soared overhead.

Thoreau would have admonished them: “To be awake is to be alive.” (Walden) And: “We have always a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view.” (Journal, November 17, 1837)

Too, too often, we don’t look up. We attend to matters at our own level. And when we walk, we’re more apt to look down at our feet than to lift our chins up and to scrutinize the sights above our heads.

When my talk was over and I headed for my car, I looked up at the sun again. The halo had dissipated. But I smiled, remembering its supernatural glow. I was proud to have witnessed it. And I have the photos to prove it.

Fog

This post is joined to Henry Thoreau’s world only by his and my affinity for experience of water from a boat. As summer promises itself, floating seems a good choice. And when floating, fog will come.

“On the pond [Fairhaven] played a long [time] with the bubbles which we made with our paddles on the smooth, perhaps unctuous surface, in which little hemispherical cases we saw ourselves and boat, small, black and distinct, with a fainter reflection on the opposite side of the bubble (head to head). These lasted sometimes a minute before they burst. The reminded me more of Italy than of New England.” Thoreau, Journal, June 3, 1854

“Why does the fog go off always toward the sun – is seen in the east when it has disappeared in the west? The waves of the foggy ocean divide and flow back for us Israelites of a day to march through.” Thoreau, Journal, June 17, 1854

The fog, wispy, seeming to burn off, gathers itself, rides the south wind back in. I’m 10 minutes off Flag Island, aiming for Ragged, which puts me somewhere around 3 miles offshore here in midcoast Maine. First, Mark Island disappears; over my left shoulder Wood Island vanishes. A few minutes ago, I had considered both places. The light’s been fog-filtered all morning, and Ragged Island begins to shift toward phantasm, its back arched like a frightened cat, floating now, its darkness indistinct; now it’s gone. I pause.

I’ve left my deck compass home. Often in warm-water summer, there’s little need of it, and you could spin me three times rapidly, and I’d still recognize every island out here. The wind’s from the south-southeast and the tide’s flowing in, pulling on the lobster buoys at about half a knot. I know the way in. On the other hand, aiming across at Ragged, out without a bearing, even though I think the fog will burn up and off, feels foolhardy; I turn to follow the tide. Visibility’s about 100 yards, plenty of time to see one of the boats muttering now out of sight.

It doesn’t burn in any way. Now I can see only 100 feet in my round, gauzy room, and I feel a clench of anxiety. The two-foot swells are lifting me and I’m paddling easily, angling slightly west of the tide’s flow to get to the ledges off Yarmouth Island (and therefore out of the flow of boat traffic on the New Meadows River). To my left and behind, muttering comes closer; then I hear the wash of water being split by a boat’s bow. The lobster boat just materializes before me: nothing’s there; then there’s 30 feet of boat 50 feet away. But he’s going very slowly, perhaps 3 knots, and I watch him glide by and then disappear; 15 seconds later his small wake reminds me he was here.

I relax. No truly big boat will be in here near this strew of ledges and out of the channels; no one here will be revving his engines and seeing kayaks as speed bumps. As if to prove my point a cabin cruiser appears from my left — quieter engine, it is even more ghostly. Its course is wobbly. Whoever’s got the helm seems nervous at the way the world has disappeared. I doubt they see me hanging here in the fog’s edge.

And so I am left to myself for long minutes. When I check my watch and find that only 20 have passed since I turned in, I’m puzzled — that seems so wrong; I should be getting somewhere. The swell raises me, lowers me; the few buoys I can see point the way; still, I begin to doubt them.

And yet it’s also pleasant here in my little room of fog. I feel drifty and need to remind myself to pay attention. A steeper swell that lifts and skews my boat to the left, forcing me to a mixed high brace and sweep, helps. So too does the sound of breaking water. In front of me I see a slice of white sea. “It’s far enough away,” I say aloud. I ease left and only as I’m level with the ledge do I realize that I didn’t miss being lifted on to it by more than 10 yards. Good thing the swell stayed at today’s two feet; a four-footer might have broken early enough to take me for a rocky ride. The streak of adrenaline this shoots through me wakens me to the fog’s lull. I know there are more ledges out at this half-tide because I am aiming for them.

I have been in the fog long enough to stop straining to see. A form of acceptance has spread through me. Already it’s been longer than I thought it would be, and no bulk of island has darkened the steady gray in front of me. “I will get there when I do,” I say aloud again.

When land appears, it’s unrecognizable. Where am I? I wonder, and yet I know I can’t be far from Yarmouth Island, though it’s also clear that I’ve been far from Yarmouth Island. I finally rotate the map in my mind to admit little Raspberry Island and see I’m just to the east of the Quahog Bay boat channel, along which I see three sailboats creeping in under motor-power. I land and watch the boats ease by, nearing safe harbor. A lot of people have been surprised by this fog, it seems.

The fog pulls out with astonishing speed, like a dream breaking up; the Elm Islands, more than a mile out from me are suddenly there, sharp-edged. Then, just as quickly, they’re gone and the light has become indistinct again.

Summer’s here, but who can track time in the fog? Has the whole season passed in this morning of it? What have you found in fog?