Thoreau Farm

Late spring. Evening. Approaching Concord by car in a hurry, I lean into the curve that emerges from the woods just before the bridge on Lowell Rd. Fifty yards ahead a woman with one arm extended scurries across the road. I tap the brakes, slow down to look as she reaches the west shoulder that drops off into the Concord River’s flood plain. Across the road her car idles, its flashers on.

In her hand is a medium-sized turtle, and she bends over the bank’s slope, places the turtle there, then straightens and looks out to the river. The turtle takes a step and disappears downhill into the grass.

I cruise into town, still decelerating, and, as I slow, an image from my recent walk in the Carlisle Cranberry Bog rises from memory’s soup. It lays a claw over consciousness’ rim and climbs out like a turtle. There in vision’s sidebar is movement, a stone walking impossibly over the flat bog. It tilts to shift a leg forward, and, as it does, my mind finds the familiar: turtle. They are on the move today, and, as I circle the gravel track with my dog, we see four more, snappers between eight and twelve inches in diameter hunkered down in depressions, claws hugging the ground, laying white eggs in the dark earth.

Snapperface
photo credit: John Drew

By the time I reach Keyes Road, the story of the Lowell Rd. scene I’ve just witnessed is complete. The woman has rescued the turtle from one of our fast lanes and carried her to safety. I park and start walking. I think about what it means to stop for turtles.

I suppose the woman was hurrying too. It seems we always are. Still, when she shifted her foot to the brake, and, at least temporarily, chose the reptile over her destination, I say she became more herself, that is, more human. Of course she stands in stark contrast to those drivers who veer to hit what they catch in the scopes of their eyes or headlights, but she also offers a change from the rest of us too, the passersby.

Bypassing is one of our national habits. Who among us has not mastered the art of averting his or her eyes when street-people approach? How adept the studied disconnection of bus and subway riders when an older person hobbles in and must stand. How poor our hearing when violence erupts. How quickly we pass by turtles in the road.

To reach down and lift, by its rough-edged carapace, the kin of snake to safety is to reach across an ancient breach, to remedy a story of human separation and disconnection we’ve told since Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Such a choice on Lowell or any other road, mindful of the turtle’s beak and hooked nails, careful of the oncoming traffic, joins one with another. In that moment we stop passing by; we stop wandering; we come home.

1971 at a small college to the west:

I shift, redistributing my weight on the folding wooden chair. The sun catches in the black folds of my gown, and there the heat grows intense; it seems to swim up in waves before my eyes, which stare vaguely at the figure on the stage. A rivulet of sweat trickles down the center of my back. Were a race of ingested chemicals loose in my bloodstream, the waving arms and the white angel’s robe before me would say “hallucination.” But the hand of the sun and the bass throb of headache and the heavy morning light of May say simply, “He is just a man, a speaker; sit.”

A phalanx of black-gowned, degree-hooded professors sits patiently on a stage stretched across the courtyard’s only shade and listens while the white-clothed poet dismisses their world with a flip of his raised hands. “What do you know?” says Robert Bly to me and my rank of classmates. “Not much,” he concludes for us. “Yet.” I shift again, glance down the row to my friend Tim, try then to cast back to the comfort of last night’s darkness and its final raucous cries, a night of raised glasses and imagined worlds that are already washed up on the day’s sun-warmed rocks. “But here’s how you can begin to learn. To learn about the real life of this world. Borrow five hundred dollars from your parents, and go live in the woods.” Professors stiffen visibly; I settle back in my chair and eye the poet. “Go to the woods where the world is formed,” Bly says.

Though Henry Thoreau is still a distant, future reading and walking companion, I, an indifferent student these four years past, straighten a little in my chair, begin to take notice of instruction even as the gates of school are swinging shut. The poet’s arms rise and fall, miming flight even as he urges it. He cites others of his ilk, composers along the world’s margins, layered, revered presences in classrooms but unknown elsewhere. Here is Thoreau again — “There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life…”

Already though, in my little square of faux-shade cast by the mortarboard, I am drifting; only this light puff of advice nudges me now toward the woods.

Another wind blows high over the country, a kind of reverse jet stream that courses from east to west. Big-bellied planes descend from it and disgorge fatigue-cloaked eighteen-year-olds and fat-wheeled vehicles on the airstrips of Vietnam. Bly has been invited to this launching of young men because he is famously against this poorly-explained war that seems intent on soaking up a generation of unaffiliated young men. Yesterday, in the school’s chapel, he railed against the distant war and its besuited prosecutors. He implored our cohort of three hundred soon-to-be graduates to resist; he talked about loss of humanity, loss of self, and he read anthem-like verses from the long generations of robed poets, who turned from the savage beauty rendered by their ur-brother Homer and said “no.” He read to young men who sat there counting the touches of the slow finger of the Selective Service as it pointed singly to birth-date after birth-date. I weighed mine against the coming months. One hundred and fifty-five. The current call had reached seventy-seven. Up high, the wind roared.

The sun lies in tiger stripes across the rugs in the quiet house. Both parents are at work, and my brother still has weeks of school before late June’s release. At the breakfast table, slowly eating milk-sodden cereal, I sketch the lines of my plan. The five hundred dollars is out of the question. Already, the past four years has added a complex of debt to my parents’ calculations, and I am the first sibling out of the house. But there is the old house, a thin-walled, unplumbed, old clapboard cape set at road’s end on a New Hampshire knoll, looking out over reclaimed pastures and guarded by a paternal barn. There is the old house. And around it there is the valley, circumscribed by the high arms of two ridgelines that sweep finally up to the mountain.

My parents bought the house and surrounding land ten years ago as a place of distant retirement, and as a family retreat. Summers of sawing and scything and winters of trudging and skiing have taught us all the valley’s first lessons, given us first rewards — small but open fields for meandering and berrying, and thick, regrown woodlands for a sense of original land. I first drove myself there a little over four years ago. In a rare instance of overlap where school and life intersected, I wrote about this journey and submitted it to the college’s student literary magazine. Its near-acceptance — they asked for revisions, and I never gotten around to making them — was a high point in an otherwise mired, final year. I still had the dog-eared sheets and the note asking for revision. The house and the essay are the thin walls of my plan; they are a beginning.

A Commencement Address

By Henry David Thoreau
Assembled and slightly augmented by Corinne H. Smith

Corinne H. Smith is a tour guide and program coordinator at the
Thoreau Farm Birthplace, and is the author of ‘Westward I Go Free:
Tracing Thoreau’s Last Journey.

Thank you for inviting me to speak on this occasion. As some of you may know, I am not without opinion about the experiment you are about to launch. Here are a few thoughts for company along the way.

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. (Walden, “Conclusion”)

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (Walden, ”The Village”)

Perhaps you have heard of a particular endeavor, which I once embarked upon.

I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. (Walden, “Economy”)

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life … (Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”)

It is worth the while to have lived a primitive wilderness life at some time, to know what are, after all, the necessaries of life and what methods society has taken to supply them. (Journal, 1845-1846)

I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. (Walden, “Solitude”)

I thrive best on solitude. If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected. It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it.
(Journal, December 28, 1856)

I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. (Walden, “Economy”)

My retreat also gave me the chance to write, to think, and to question.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. (Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”)

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. (Walden, “Economy”)

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. (Walden, “Conclusion”)

I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…. (Walden, “Economy”)

Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. (Walden, “Baker Farm”)

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. (Walden, “Conclusion”)

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest man thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problems of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. (Letter to H.G.O. Blake, March 27, 1848)

If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. (Walden, “Higher Laws”)

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, — that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. (Walden, “Higher Laws”)

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. (Walden, “Conclusion”)

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. (Walden, “Conclusion”)

I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account … I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. (Walden, “Economy”)

For more than a decade, you have participated in, and perhaps have learned from an educational system. I ask,

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. (Journal, 1850)

Today marks the opportunity to break through these banks of clay, and to begin to flow where your own waters will lead you.

Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. … Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful. (Journal, April 24, 1859)

If there is an experiment which you would like to try – try it. Do not entertain doubts if they are not agreeable to you. Remember that you need not eat unless you are hungry. … Do what nobody else can do for you – Omit to do anything else. (Letter to H.G.O. Blake, August 9, 1850)

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. (Walden, “Conclusion”)

The Universe is wider than our views of it. (Walden, “Conclusion”)