Thoreau Farm

By Corinne H. Smith

Near the end of his life, Henry Thoreau understood that his time was limited. He worked with his sister Sophia for more than a year to firm up some of his manuscripts for posthumous publication. He died in 1862. Four books — Excursions; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod; and A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers — were released soon afterward.

These details came to mind when I spied copies of two of these volumes on a shelf at Mullen Books in Columbia, Pennsylvania. I had started working at this used and antiquarian bookstore in March 2013. Naturally, as a Thoreau fan, I searched the store catalog for Henry’s name first. I was amazed to find originals of Cape Cod and A Yankee in Canada in stock. I touched them, opened them, and studied their markings. Both had come from Delaware and had interesting ownership stories to tell.

The Wilmington Institute purchased the copy of Cape Cod after it was issued in 1865. By then the Institute already had more than five thousand volumes in its collection. It also served as an education center for local tradesmen.

As the next century approached, the Institute became the Wilmington Public Library, a free service for all citizens. More and more people borrowed and read its books. Eventually, a librarian saw that Cape Cod looked a bit ragged. The book was rebound with a new durable blue cover. The words “Thoreau” and “Cape Cod” stood out on the spine. Then the book was ready to be circulated again, with a fresh face.

In 1944, local antiquities collector and benefactor Titus C. Geesey donated his 1866 edition of A Yankee in Canada to the Wilmington library. It still carried its original gold cloth cover. The spine credited Thoreau as “Author of Walden and A Week on Concord River.”

Library services continued to grow and expand. In the second half of the 20th century, Wilmington’s staff created a closed stacks section for its oldest books. The aging, original copies of Cape Cod and A Yankee in Canada were both relegated to these shelves. Fewer people had access to them now, though they could still be checked out upon request.

In the 2010s, the Wilmington library launched a “Library of the Future” capital campaign to renovate and update its facility and services. The old stacks section was due to be eliminated entirely. Regional museum representatives were invited to retrieve worthwhile titles from the collection, so that they could add them to their own. The library held at least one book sale, too. Finally, Pennsylvania bookseller Kevin Mullen was invited to scrutinize the shelves and to “rescue” and purchase as many volumes as he wished. Mullen spent nine days assessing the books and putting aside the ones he wanted. The copies of Thoreau’s Cape Cod and A Yankee in Canada were among the thousands of books that filled his truck as he drove back north across the border. He knew that whatever had been left behind at the library would soon be discarded.

Kevin’s employees spent months cataloging these new arrivals. Now it wasn’t just the contents that created value. It was a matter of condition as well as supply and demand. How many copies of each one were already on the market? What shape was each volume in? How much money would people reasonably pay for them? Descriptions and prices were entered into the store database. Cape Cod was offered at $150, A Yankee in Canada at $90. The details were published online. Anyone in the world who was looking for original Henry David Thoreau volumes could land on these entries.

Each time I catch a glimpse of these two books on the shelves, I can’t help but think and wonder. How many households did they visit? Whose hands held them? What did their readers think of Mr. Thoreau? Did any of them go on to read more of his writings? Were any of them inspired to later visit Concord, Massachusetts, and to see Walden Pond for themselves? Or Cape Cod? Or Montreal?

And what will be the next chapter to this story? Where will these books go from here? Like their author, these volumes have travelled a good deal throughout one locale. But it seems to me that they may have many more lives to live … and to touch.

This walk begins tentatively. Plenty of snow remains in these hills, and I wonder how a slow-healing tendon will respond on slippery uphills. Still, the winter-blue sky and the hundreds of story-rings from this 5-mile loop insist that I try. “Take short strides,” I say to myself. “Scuff your way up in the sun-softened snow.”

And, to reach Oregon Mountain’s top knuckle, I have done just this, booting along for the first few miles and then strapping on clawed snowshoes for the climb onto the ridge. Along the way my only company has been the meandering tracks of moose, who have been browsing the trailside brush and trees for their buds in this deep winter. Thin fare, I think, as I look at the spiky, gnawed-off branches and twigs.

So much in this 5-mile loop: the strata of a thousand memories, jumbled like quake-shot earth, one poking through here, another there; swirl of more memories beneath, a molten core; audible, in the heart of this pocket of wild, the chorused howls of wolves and wolf-hybrids from a sanctuary set there five years ago; to the north, the white triptych of Mt. Moosilauke, the Franconias and Mt. Washington, and along the Tenney Ridge and one a little farther north, the outsized stalks of wind turbines, their blades slowly rotating in the day’s northwest wind; and below the ledges, on the way down, losing the old trail in recent logging before faintly recognizing the little drainage that curves around the outlook and striking its path above Cream Hill.

Track to the Wolf Sanctuary

For once, I have slung my camera around my neck and left arm, where it is accessible, making a small album of walking. These are the word-shots to go with them: snow-machine track for the first mile and half; the wolf-folk have hung on through another winter; where the sun catches it, the track’s soft; in the shade it’s icy. At the turn up the Old Dicey Road, my back is to the sun, which means the track is sun softened as it steepens – perfect for booting along; no need for snowshoes yet. This track is already reverting toward woods, even as the land around has been laid bare by two spates of logging in the last ten years; ten-foot high birch and poplar crowd the track to trail. The sky is a deep blue, the snow unsullied white. I am back.

On a sun-opened ledge, I prop myself against my pack and close my eyes. The northwest wind hurries by at about 20 mph, and the temperature must be in the 20s as well, but the April sun offers a perfect thermal balance; I drift off to the voice of that wind in the stiff firs that endure here on Oregon Mountain’s summit. Two thousand three hundred and one feet above sea level the sign says. Not exactly alpine, but here, on this seldom-visited ridge in midstate New Hampshire, I am finally “up there” after a long season of being down and away.

Family of Mountains

I awaken with a small start, prodded perhaps by the unlikely dream of a mountain lion. There they are, my home mountains, Cardigan and Firescrew, stone duo humped in the west, faces shot still with snow setting off their stubble of firs. What or who better to awaken to? Again…I am imprinted on these two. Should they stand suddenly and begin to walk west, or north, toward their brother and sister hills, I would follow.

Part of the pleasure of reading Henry Thoreau’s journals lies in their humdrum nature. Day after day, Thoreau gets up, goes about his day, takes his walk and records what he finds. He is, of course, an uncommon observer, but what he sees and hears each day is often common nature. Miraculous, yes, but there, everywhere, readily seen…if one will look.

On the first day of April, there is hum and drum to my walk as well. On my way to Fairhaven Bay via a loop around Walden Pond, I scuff the dry leaves and crunch over the last stretches of foot-beaten ice, ambling at an easy pace. The only hurried part of the world whistles by above the white pines; rumor of cold front is becoming word of arrival. The sky in the northwest is bruised.

But here at ground-level, where I live, the day is placid, and my middling mix of polar-tec top and shorts-clad legs seems the perfect arrangement. The pond, lightly-ruffled and glittering in its greens, is low, I note; the pondlet near the house site is separated from the main body by a dry ridge of ground. And, out in midpond, what look like small, rogue burgs of ice are really white-bottomed birds, too indistinct for my distance-fuzzed eyes to ID. Happily, given license, I deem them loons. Given kindreds, I walk on.

Beyond the pond, as I skirt the Andromeda Ponds, I hear my first chorus of spring; the peepers are singing sex; they are in riot along the eastern shores, where the direct afternoon sun slants in. I ease down near the swampy water, then close my eyes. The peepers insist; shrilling fills my ears; “hereherehereherehere…here,” they call, “here.”
Where else?

What, I wonder as I walk on, is this hatch of insects? Black, winged and many, they are little meteors across my sightlines; I inhale a few, wave aimlessly at others. Do they know the cold front is on the way? It is a one-day life. It is. Though the water-snake I come upon stretched out in a slat of sun is thumb-thick and, even in his spring torpor, he looks like forever.

And now, along the cliffy stretch just downriver from Fairhaven, the front arrives. A gray sheet of rain wavers in the air, and whitecaps leap on the river. Is that thunder, tentative, unsure of its season? Yes, rumble, yes. No hum now, only drum. Here, amid the flying water, I pull over to follow its suggestion. The wind, all the waters, the flying air, the river in tumult, it makes me want to laugh.

Then he does…the laughing bird. A long ahahahahahah issues from the pine above. Ahahahahahahahahahahah. There he is – pileated woodpecker. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!