Thoreau Farm

By Corinne H. Smith

We recently moved into a 1950s ranch house in southeastern Pennsylvania. One of the lease requirements was that I maintain the yard for this corner-lot. No problem, I thought. I don’t mind mowing grass, raking leaves, or shoveling snow. Heck, I even enjoy doing such mindless tasks. They force me out into Nature and give me time to think. I gleefully signed the contract.

I didn’t notice one particular tree until a week or two later, when I literally stumbled onto its produce.

Most of our backyard is fenced in. But along one outside edge, a four-foot wide strip of grass lies next to a locally-busy street. Leaves and other natural litter were merging into the roadway there. So on a nice afternoon, I grabbed a rake and a few bags dedicated for “yard waste” and headed out to clean up. That’s when I discovered that all of the leaves had five narrow fingers, and that they were surrounded by hundreds of spiky seed balls. All this scatter had come from one of our trees. The annoying balls were everywhere. Walking here felt like skating on quarter-sized pincushions. I gathered up three bags full of the offspring of that one lone tree. Then I went inside and checked my field guides. It was a sweetgum tree. I’d seen them once or twice before, but I’d never lived close to one.

Two weeks later, after a long day of rain and wind, I was out there again. Those darn balls just kept on falling. I looked up. The sweetgum branches were leafless. But hundreds, if not thousands, of seed balls were still hanging on. I could see them silhouetted against the white winter sky. What a mess I was in for. Usually, I aim to keep an open mind when it comes to Nature and her bounty. But this seemed like a never-ending penance that I had unknowingly volunteered for.

In desperation, I turned to Henry Thoreau’s journal to see what observations he might have had about the sweetgum. Unfortunately, these trees are not natives to Massachusetts. Thoreau encountered them only in the fall of 1856, when he was undertaking a surveying job in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. There the sweetgum trees were “very common and large, oak-like,” according to his journal entry for October 27. “The fruit was a coarse, rigid, spherical bur, an inch or more in diameter, which opened and dropped much fine seed in my trunk.” Henry had it good. He didn’t have to collect any sweetgum seeds himself, because the darned spiked casings fell right into his own open receptacle. And since he was just visiting, he didn’t have to clean up anything afterward. Lucky man.

Sweetgum Heaven

In sweetgum frustration, I looked online. The anonymous author of the Wikipedia entry was a kindred spirit: “The long-persisting fallen spiked fruits can be unpleasant to walk on; sweetgum is banned in some places for this reason. In abundance, they can leave a lawn lumpy.” No kidding. The neighbors who tip-toe along our part of the street can verify this.

Some enterprising folks sell batches of sweetgum balls online, I discovered. Crafty people use them in projects consisting of natural elements, like holiday decorations or handmade wreaths. Hey, maybe money does grow on trees! I could just pack up these seeds and send them elsewhere.

White-winged Crossbill

A benefit of the sweetgum finally appeared a few weeks later when a flock of colorful birds landed in our yard. The males had red bodies, and the females were greenish. They ran around and picked ferociously at the sweetgum balls still left on the lawn. My guide book identified these birds as white-winged crossbills, which I had never seen before. I watched them for at least an hour in fascination. I guess the sweetgum tree has fans after all. And I guess I should leave some of the seed balls in the yard.

For many readers, Henry Thoreau seems like an insistent finger, always poking and prodding, always wondering in a tactile way if you are awake. And some – I’m thinking now of those assigned readings in Walden or one of the essays – stir grumpily and follow along. Picture so many sleepy bears poked from what they hoped would be their long winter’s naps.

Poke: “But men labor under a mistake.” (Walden)
Prod: “It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you lead…” (Walden)
Poke: “…lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility…” (Walden)
Prod: “Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.” (Walden)
Poke: “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.” (Walden)

And that is all within the first seven pages. “Whoa,” I recall a student saying early one semester, “the man should ease up.”

All of this assigned attention would, I imagine, mildly gratify Henry Thoreau; he was, after all, a writer who wished to be read. But over time, I’ve come to think of Henry’s finger as a pointer rather than a poker. Once we are awake and ambling along with him, he is forever pointing out what he sees and senses. And in that pointing Henry Thoreau becomes the teacher.

All of this came to mind the other day when I read an opinion piece written for The Chronicle of Higher Education by an Emory College professor (see link below). The essay was another lament about the preparedness of said professor’s students and the decline of secondary education brought on by what he saw as too much attention paid to narrative writing at the expense of its analytic cousin. O, the indignities this pro-fessor must now put up with. Perhaps he must teach.

My sympathy waned, however, when I noticed that the professor characterized himself as an “educator.” There, in a word, was the difference. True to the word’s root in the Latin verb ducere, to lead, this educator saw himself as leading students out – clearly leading them out of darkness and into the amply-lit spaces of his mind. He would educate; they would follow.

How different, I thought, from a teacher, who, true also to her or his word’s roots (the index finger is an old definition of the word), points out what s/he sees and often expects the student to create her or his own meanings from it. Here was Thoreau’s finger, pointing to all he encountered, to everything he saw and sensed and then asking in a hundred different ways, What do you think of this? What do you see?

Long after my student said “Whoa” and hoped that Henry would “ease up,” we emerged from the pages of Walden and that student looked up. “So,” he said, “the last thing Thoreau wants us to do is follow him.”

Exactly, I thought. Thoreau’s a teacher; if you wake up and walk with him for a while, he’ll point out what he sees. But he’ll insist also that you make your own meaning, lead yourself, finally, to your own life.

Link to the Chronicle of Higher Education article (Note: I found the responses more lucid and pointed than the article): http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/02/07/teaching-writing-through-personal-reflection-bad-idea/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en#

by Corinne H. Smith

On February 20, 1855, Henry Thoreau listed “the quadrupeds of Concord” in his journal. He named more than two dozen mammal species. The largest one he found was the Northern river otter.

This was not the first time that Thoreau outlined this group of animals. In his 1842 essay, “Natural History of Massachusetts,” he reminisced about encounters with muskrats and foxes. He was somewhat silent about the rest of the mammals said to be then living in the state. “The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten, have disappeared,” he wrote. “The otter is rarely if ever seen at present; and the mink is less common than formerly.” We can sense his dismay at having missed the chance to meet many of these creatures himself.

If we generated such a list today, we would come up with a number of animals that Thoreau never had a chance to see. Among them would be the afore-mentioned beaver and the white-tailed deer, but also the Eastern coyote.

Long-time saunterer J. Walter Brain has spent decades following in Thoreau’s footsteps, exploring the landscapes of both Concord and Lincoln. He recalls an afternoon when he was walking alone through the area behind Thoreau’s birth house and suddenly came upon a pack of at least a dozen coyotes. “They stood their ground,” he says. “They didn’t move. They didn’t make a sound. They just stared at me, the whole pack.” Walter backed up quietly, slowly, and deliberately, until he felt comfortable enough to turn away and head in another direction. It’s a memory that returns each time he passes through the neighborhood, even though the encounter took place at least fifteen years ago. He hasn’t seen coyotes there since. But his experience has led him to claim that the area framed by Old Bedford Road, Virginia Road, and Hanscom Field is “the wildest part of Concord.”

Looking at You

Coyotes are not strangers to us. Researchers with the Cook County Coyote Project in Illinois (http://urbancoyoteresearch.com) say that coyotes generally go unnoticed but live all around us: especially in the suburbs, in drainage ditches near shopping centers, and at the edges of overgrown acreage. On most occasions, we co-exist without interaction or interference. It is the rare rogue coyote that will attack a human. Unfortunately, when this happens, the whole species tends to be unduly blamed because of the actions of a few. Coyotes can get an unwarranted bad rap.

You don’t have to trek out to the American prairie or plains to hear coyotes at night. Wildlife illustrator and printer Abigail Rorer once told me that she enjoyed hearing the barks and yips from the pack that lives close to her home in Petersham, out by the Quabbin Reservation on the western edge of Worcester County. She wished she knew what they were doing, and what they were saying to one another.

Because coyotes are crepuscular and appear most often at dusk and dawn, it’s rather unlikely that hikers will encounter them in the acreage behind the Thoreau birthplace in Concord. Instead, you’re apt to find mere paw prints in the mud. No worries.

And yet: “We need the tonic of wildness,” as Henry wrote. He spent many hours walking this same territory, in search of The Wild. Is it enough to know that we share this place with such creatures as coyotes? Or must a gray shadow slip past us in order for us to believe it? Should we long to be confronted with it eye to eye, as Walter once was?

I am happy enough to merely know of and to hear; I find it not necessary to experience. Still, I think Henry Thoreau would have sought the animals out. And he’d have been pleased to include “Canis latrans, Eastern coyote,” on his list of Concord’s quadrupeds.