Thoreau Farm

Run (or Walk) Like Water

It’s raining. Once you accept that each day’s hours hold varying measures of wetness, naming the many rains becomes the only dilemma — is it hanging rain, horizontal, a floating mist that gathers along each tendril of hair or fiber of cloth? Is it sluice of sky, straight rain, the sort of water with no space in between drops? Is it murmuring water, the steady whisper of it fallingfallingfallling on leaves? Is it the spatter of secondary rain, fat wind-shaken drops that suggest John Cage or one of his disciples may be at work on the tin or tent roof above? I have been wet with all of these rains and their composite cousins.

6/5: I go north in town to these woodlands that drew Thoreau. On one of the many maps that I read and reread, it’s easy to see the two wild poles of Thoreau’s world. Take out the USGS Maynard quadrangle – below the dense markings of Concord town, there are the waters of Walden and Fairhaven, with the railroad track famously grazing the west shore of Walden, and Route 126 nosing by the pond’s east side. Now, hanging like a scimitar above the area is Route 2. These southern woods are shot with wheeled passage.

Due north, however, beyond the town, before the map vanishes on the edge of the Billerica quadrangle, there’s a green patch, shot only with the meandering hash-marks of trails and thin blue snakes of water courses. Here is our local north pole, Estabrook Woods, our edge-terra. I go here often to run and walk, to let the glad animal out of the cage of the day.

On this midday in Estabrook, as I followed the southern perimeter trail, I found myself noting the passage of recent heavy rains. A few days before in night’s midsection, we’d had some hours of “straight” rain, the sort that plummets through the windless air, seeming – there is so much water falling -to squeeze that air aside. On today’s path I could see whole mats of duff washed down any slope worthy of the name. Where the thick softness of leaves and pine needles was gone, bare dirt and stone formed a track within the path. Unconsciously, at first, then with intent, I began to follow the water’s course, giving up my linear stepping in favor of water’s way; I began to run like water.

Water-bared Trail

Some minutes later, I realized the easy rhythm I had found; also, my shoulders – sometimes hunched with intent when I run to “get there” – had dropped. This was not trancelike running, however; not the sort of running I sometimes fall into on the smoothness of roads. I was aware, alert, the remnant of fur on the back of my neck slightly raised, and I was reading the path’s jumbled text of roots and rocks closely. What distinguished this moment was the rightness of my footfalls – one after another, I simply was getting it right. And the water was showing me the way.

Like all stretches of human endeavor, this one was finite. But what interrupted it, as I took a walking water-break, tugging my bottle from my waistbelt and ambling-drinking along, was a different water-thought. A few days before, I’d read a New York Times piece about Auroville, a utopian, international farm cooperative in India that has made a small Eden out of once-ruined land, and near the end of the article, there was short description of one of the farmer’s practices. In mid-monsoon, when the straight-rain falls and falls, this farmer dons boots, picks up an umbrella and walks his land, noticing how the water flows and where it pools. Later he takes this water-knowledge and uses it to site small ponds and crops. In this way, he and other farmers in Auroville have stored water for dry stretches and restored the land’s water table.

Link to this story about Auroville: http://nyti.ms/13577Zk

Contrast this method with the linear plowings and greedy irrigation of much modern agribusiness, its straight lines disappearing over the horizon, its water tables and aquifers dwindling, and you can see a divergence, one that restores land versus one that drains it.

Water runs and so do I. When I follow the way of water, my running gains flow, the turns I take feel unlike deviations, but rather like good choices.

By Corinne H. Smith

“When you hear him, you have got to the end of the alphabet and may imagine the &.” (Thoreau, Journal September 1, 1856)

Word of the upcoming 17-year cicada siege recently hit the front page of our local newspaper. When my octogenarian father saw the headline that morning, he scoffed over the breakfast table.

“This is news?” he asked. “The cicadas?”

“Well, maybe some people don’t know about them,” I countered. “Especially with our growing immigrant population, or with people having lived all of their lives in cities.”

“I suppose,” he allowed, as he filled his bowl with cereal. But I could see that his internal wheels were turning, and that the past would soon be called upon.

“I remember back home, when I was playing outside, I used to find locust casings all the time,” he said.

I nodded. That was at my grandparents’ small farm outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I myself often spent a week or two during summer vacations in the 1960s and early 1970s. And like most folks, my father and I both call cicadas “locusts,” even though entomologists see them as separate species.

“I used to find them in the side yard there too, on that little tree,” I said. I could still picture one of those paper-thin and lifeless shells grasping the bark with sharp but ghostly claws.

“Halfway up the trunk,” he said.

He’d read my mind. “Yup,” I agreed.

Locust Casing

In the moment of silence that followed, I considered it a pretty nifty fact that my father and I had shared similar experiences as solitary kids in that same spot, even though the instances themselves had come many decades apart. And this was a topic we’d certainly never talked about before.

“I used to watch them shed those skins, too,” he continued, as he crunched his shredded wheat.

“Wow, I never saw that. How long did that take?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe about an hour?”

“Wow. But they end up being much bigger than those shells are. I’ve seen photos. How does that work?”

“I don’t know, but yeah, they come out twice as big. One of Nature’s miracles, I guess.” He finished eating and walked over to put the bowl and the spoon in the sink.

This morning was turning out to be one of small revelation, both about the locusts and about my father. I was happy we’d finally had this conversation.

Curious about what Henry Thoreau may have written about locusts, I then did a little cruising through his journal. It wasn’t until the fall of the year that he addressed their appearance. And as he was often apt to do, Thoreau tried to figure out a way in words of describing that unique cicada sound:

It is an early September afternoon, melting warm and sunny; the thousands of grasshoppers leaping before you reflect gleams of light; a little distance off the field is yellowed with a Xerxean army of Solidago nemoralis [gray goldenrod] between me and the sun; the earth-song of the cricket comes up through all; and ever and anon the hot z-ing of the locust is heard. (September 7, 1858)

The shrilling of the alder locust is the solder that welds these autumn days together. All bushes (arbusta) resound with their song, and you wade up to your ears in it. Methinks the burden of their song is the countless harvests of the year, — berries, grains, and other fruits. (August 26, 1860)

I’m looking forward to hearing that buzzing again. It’s always the background soundtrack for late summer, when everything is hot and crisp, and when greens are well on their way to becoming browns.

Let the cicadas come! My father and I won’t mind. We’ve got some sizable trees in this backyard. Maybe this time, we’ll have a chance to witness the skin-shedding together. Halfway up the trunk.

It’s the season when moose are on the move, and, though I’ve yet to have a spring moose-meeting, it’s also the season when, as the woods thicken with leaves, I savor past meetings. Here’s one from few years ago in southern Vermont.

More to Say

I’ve studied the map’s contours and know that I have a modest ascent of some 600 vertical feet to begin this day. I like climbing as a starter — it suggests a steadiness that can become automatic, the sort of walking where my Limmer boots kick out the cadence and I can watch the trail and nearby terrain rise and then slide away. The uphill work brings the outrush of breath that is as close as I come to making music. It is, of course, a monotonous music; it continues the way a steam-engine chuffs as the wheels turn and turn. But I also find my breathing aligning with remembered soundtracks; a few of these hover just behind my measured breaths — today, and for this walk’s duration, it’s the old (The Band, especially their song, “The Weight”) and the relatively new (Jack Johnson and his jaunty, though dark, ruminations about “your shadow”, which “walks faster than you”). My “music” becomes the measure of my walking; it is the sound of miles passing under my feet.

I am many bars of song into the morning and nearing the top of a nameless elevation, peak 3025, when something makes me glance up. There, ten uninterrupted feet away is a moose; I could touch him if I reached with the pole in my right hand. I say “him” because as we exchange a first long look, I note his rack of antlers. They are symmetrical and two pronged; they even look a little silly on his large, elongated head, like a tiny tiara. I say, breaking the silence between us, “You are new to all this, aren’t you?” The moose regards me without expression; he stays put. “Well, Mr. Moose, what are we to do next?” I say, keeping up my end.

The trail bends a bit at this point, passing ten feet to the moose’s left before it drops over a ledge and away. I wonder if I can walk this periphery or if it will take me inside whatever zone of anxiety the moose has set for himself. Faintly, I recall that this may be “rutting” season. “The rut,” intones some guidebook from my past, “is a time of unpredictable behavior for a male moose. They are best avoided during rut, when they have been known to charge people, cars, even in an unconfirmed tale, a train.”

Well past such avoidance I slip into the stasis of wonder. Thirty seconds pass. I consider it good news that the moose continues chewing the poplar leaves he’d been stripping from the stunted trees. Who charges anything while eating?, I think. The unpredictable, I answer. I would be less unnerved if a few of these wrist-thick trees were interposed between us, and yet I know that even this small moose (I figure he weighs 400-500 lbs) could snap such trees like balsawood were he to run at them. I’ve been as close to a moose before (specifically ten ledge-supported feet above a huge, fully racked male a decade ago), but I was unobserved and the wind was blowing my scent upslope, away, as he browsed his winter diet of twigs. The unblinking stare of this minor moose keeps triggering small explosions of speculation: “What’s next? What’s next?” cries the little man in my mind who likes to be in charge.

Next, finally, is a sidestep I take to the left; the moose turns a degree to face me. I step left again; the moose turns the next degree. We repeat. Until I am the same ten feet distant but now at the point where the trail begins to depart from this grove. The moose has shifted stance for each step I’ve taken, turning about 20 degrees, and we look again across the narrow distance into each other’s eyes.

A flutter of more remembered mooseology, this from an article on wolves, their lifetime dancing partners in fully-fledged woods, heartens me. My moose is behaving just as genetic wisdom would have him: over long generations moose have learned that running from their primary predators simply exposes their flanks to attack; better to face any threat head-on with your bulk and lethal hooves. (This hard-wired strategy accounts also for the burgeoning problem of car-moose collisions on New England’s roadways. Threatened by the rapid approach of a car, a moose will face it down; drivers, applying the lessons of their own logic, expect a moose to run deerlike, or at least step out of the way. Locked in strategies with no overlap, they collide, and the car is wrecked and the moose dies.) I resume our conversation: “Well, now that worked out as it should, eh Mr. Moose?” I add the Canadian “eh” in deference to his northern roots. And then, as I turn to walk away, he too turns back to the leaves, and I watch the long, head-high shanks of his hindquarters and the young, defined muscles that shift him silently back into the poplars.