Thoreau Farm

by Corinne H. Smith

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” ~ H.D. Thoreau, Walden

Last year when I read Susan Cain’s new book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, I found myself in its pages.  I already knew that my personality tends naturally toward introversion.  Cain’s ground-breaking book gives people like me a voice and validation.  She’s getting lots of well-deserved publicity, too.  Quiet has landed on many bestseller lists, and more than four million people have viewed Cain’s online TED talk. You can see that talk at   http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html.

Quiet is a book that I keep referring to in conversation and recommending to others.  I know that reading it has enhanced my life.

I wasn’t the only person I recognized in Susan Cain’s descriptions, however.  After all, introverts make up one third to one half of our population.  So we’re apt to have a few in our lives, even if we aren’t introverts ourselves.  In addition to several close friends and other family members, I was also strongly reminded of Henry David Thoreau.

Ms. Cain mentions Thoreau by name only once in her text.  He joins the ranks of famous introverts who contributed worthy ideas and words to western culture.  They include Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, William Wordsworth, Frederic Chopin, Marcel Proust, George Orwell, Dr. Seuss, Steven Spielberg, and J. K. Rowling.  These individuals found that they could best channel their creative or problem-solving juices when given stretches of solitude.

Early in the book, Cain offers readers a 20-point quiz to gauge their own habits.  You can take that quiz yourself at  http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/quiet-quiz-are-you-an-introvert/. Here are the first four statements.  Participants are asked to agree or disagree with them.

1. I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.
2. I often prefer to express myself in writing.
3. I enjoy solitude.
4. I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status.

To me, these sentences sound as if they came straight from a Henry David Thoreau autobiography, or from some of the more introspective pages of his journal.  The very traits that others have judged to be major defects – that this man didn’t seem to want to socialize with people much, and that he preferred being by himself in Nature instead – can be seen as concrete examples of his introversion.  Skim through his writings, and you’ll find ample evidence of this.  Two selections come to my mind:

“I feel the necessity of deepening the stream of my life; I must cultivate privacy.  It is very dissipating to be with people too much.  As C. says, it takes the edge off a man’s thoughts to have been much in society.  I cannot spare my moonlight and my mountains for the best of man I am likely to get in exchange.” ~ Journal, August 2, 1854

“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 can relate to Henry’s experiences.  I too have had times full of people who have “dissipated my days.”  And I too have found it best at times to get away from them.

Categorizing individuals as introverts or extroverts would have been an alien concept to Thoreau, since it was first brought forth by Carl Jung in 1921.  Susan Cain has expanded upon the topic and made it relevant to the general public.  I highly recommend Quiet to every reader, and especially to those who long to think more deeply about Thoreau.  His name may appear only once in Cain’s book, but the man himself seems evident throughout.

Ten days ago, I took clippers and crossed the then-bare ground to the fringe of brush that separates our yard from our neighbors. More winter snow was forecast for later in the week, and I wanted reminder of spring for when the white returned. There, in the untended bushes, I cut tight-budded sprays and whips of forsythia and brought them inside; I trimmed some winterkill and put them in a small pitcher of mild water. Then, I waited.

Days passed; the storm arrived, bringing with it the town plows, the new snowbanks, the shoveling; the yard went white…again. The juncos and chickadees and I communed by the birdfeeder. Often, when I passed the table where the pitcher and its stalky sticks were, I checked the buds, and a couple of times I refreshed the water. But like our recent winter, the buds weren’t budging; spring was stalled outside and in.

A few evenings ago, I burrowed into my pillow and dreams, a winter’s sleep even as the season tipped that night toward light; I rose in the morning to a longer day than the night I’d left and trundled out for the sunrise of coffee. I was greeted by a burst of yellow. The forsythia had bloomed overnight.

My mild seasonal mania for forcing forsythia is a gift from my father, who was fond of cuttings and bouquets in any and all seasons. Most of them came from fringes of fields and yards and woodlands rather than from gardens; they featured stalks of grass, sprays of juniper, flowering “weeds,” and, in their season, sprigs of the totem-blueberry (best of all ground-dwellers). Even as I join Henry Thoreau in my enthusiasm for getting out and walking to see what’s at work on any given day in the meadows and woods, I like also the reminder of where I’ve been (and will go again) atop the table in early spring.

A bouquet or spray of flowers is the habit of optimism, a looking ahead…though not too far: I am no futurist; I like to be present. But, even against the current of news and history, I am an optimist, at least under the influence of flowers, a believer in the yellow promise of spring.

The north-country is full of sweet rumor. Driving the backroads at this time of year, you look up from the challenge of deep mud and see occasional shacks or smallish barns billowing steam. Then, you roll down the window and breathe in the sweetened air. It’s sugar time in the woods.

Or, more accurately, sap time, and this year’s run of cold nights and sunny days, salted by occasional snows, has set up a classic season for maple sap and syrup. To be sure, most sugar-bushes look markedly different from their ancestors, whose trees featured gray metal buckets, slung from hooks beneath taps inserted into drill holes in those trees, the whole bush also laced with the tracks of trudgers (sometimes horses) dragging a collecting vat from tree to tree, gathering the sap. Today’s sugar bush is webbed with plastic tubing, often in bright colors, and these veins shunt the sap from tree to tree, ever-down toward a collecting point, often the sugar house itself, where they drip into containers prior to the boiling.

Still, the old buckets with their shallow triangular hats persist in places, often as small family operations that make syrup and sugar for personal use and gifts. These little sugarers, with steam rising from a shed out back or from a vent over the kitchen stove, are my favorites. They cast me back to when I was a little sugarer too.

In my early 20s, I spent a winter in a wood-heated, old farmhouse near the end of a dirt road in west-central New Hampshire. Uncertain about my future, I’d decided on a writing-winter, but really it had turned into a wandering winter, where my scripts were snowshoe tracks into the various corners of the valley and ridges above. I learned a lot and wrote little.

As spring neared, pails appeared on the row of maples that lined the dirt road. A farm family in town had asked for and received permission to tap these roadside trees, and, every so often, I began to lift the bucket’s lids and check on the sap levels. After a few days, I noticed that many of the buckets were full, and I figured the collecting truck, a sort of small tanker, would be there to gather the bounty soon. A day passed. No tanker. The buckets dripped steadily with overflow now eroding the collars of snow below.

Living at road’s end had made me a bit of a scrounge, and now I did what any good scrounge would do: I got a big bucket, took my ladle from beside the water-pump and began to skim ladlefuls from the overflowing buckets. This went on for some days, and by then, I had gallons of sap.

What to do? Time, surely, to fire up the cookstove and break out the broad turkey pan and do some boiling. I had a lot of wood, a lot of time, and, even when the tree-tapper emptied his pails, I soon had a lot of overflow.

For the next two weeks, I made syrup of varying intensities. Those who know anything about making maple syrup will recognize the oft-cited 40 to 1 ratio of sap to syrup. In short, it takes a lot of sap and boiling to make sweet immersion for your pancakes. What may be less known is the sweet world a room or house becomes if you do your boiling indoors. Saphouses are well-vented, outdoor enterprises for a reason.

Still, I got used to the always-sweet, humid air, and, aside from a little crystallized sugar on the beam above the stove, the old farmhouse seemed to adapt too. Entering the house from a day of woods wandering, or from some bucket-skimming was like coming into a large maple confection. And as the sap boiled down from water-clarity to various shades of amber, I began to eat only foods that called for syrup. I became, in short, a sort of sugar bear.

By March’s end, I had a couple of gallons of dense amber syrup. A few, hand-labeled quarts went for gifts. And, when I left the valley as spring came on, I carried the rest with me as the sweet writing of maples.