Thoreau Farm

We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected…Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. (“Higher Laws,” Walden)

Ground Hog Day – a good day to look beneath the surface and see what stirs.

As a boy, I learned to shoot a rifle. It was a single-shot .22 caliber gun with a wooden stock, and its sighting was skewed to the right. But I learned to compensate, and I learned to quiet my breathing so that the barrel and I were still as I squeezed the trigger. Some fifty yards away, the old water-filled soda and beer cans I favored as targets, jumped with impact more often than not. A little later, a summer as a counselor’s aide provided my final training as I shot my way through various levels of targets courtesy of the NRA. When fully focused, I could punch the center out of my targets with a tightly-bunched cluster of shots. By August, I had won a clutch of patches and was a sharpshooter. But already, the lure of guns was waning; even as a fourteen-year-old I’d begun to see animals as fellow beings and not wild impulses to be “tamed” by lead.

Let’s go back to my twelfth year, where this began. I awaken early on a July day, and the slightest light seems to hang in the net of fog draped in this heavy New Hampshire air. I slip from the room without disturbing my brother and ease down the stairs, avoiding their creaky centers. It’s a little before 5:00 a.m.; I’ll eat when I get back.

From behind the living room door, I take the single-shot .22 that came with this old farmhouse my parents went into hock for two years ago. Already this mountain valley and its ridges are becoming foot familiar. And already I’ve learned that many animals are in motion during the hours that fringe these long summer days. I am hunting porcupine, which I’ve been told are tree-girdlers and general bad citizens; there is a fifty-cent bounty on them. My dog has already gotten two snoutfuls of quills. Clearly, he is a slow learner. Just as clearly, this valley needs “cleaning up.”

Some thirty minutes up the old, abandoned road that once went over the mountains to Hebron, I catch movement in my peripheral vision. There, some forty feet up in a maple is my quarry, a hunched shape against the rising light in the sky. I am elated and confused. I’ve found what I am hunting, a primal thrill; I must now hunt – aim and pull the trigger? I’ve never done this before. It feels vaguely worrying. Unused to such ambiguity, I do what a twelve-year-old boy does – I act. It takes four shots to bring the porcupine down, and even as he falls, I feel a flush of shame wash through me. Now what? I stand twenty feet away from his body for long minutes, unable to will myself forward. Finally, I settle on burial and digging and scraping with a stick take more long minutes; I become aware that I am crying. During the walk downroad and home, the whole forest feels sad.

That, having been spared service in a war, is the last time I aimed a rifle at a breathing being. Two years later, I shot a rifle at a target for the final time, and my NRA membership lapsed. Fifty years later, I sign petitions and watch debate and revulsion about guns swell in response to the serial horror spewed from their barrels. And I wonder: are not we meant to evolve, as Henry Thoreau proposes in his difficult chapter, “Higher Laws,” over a lifetime? Should not each life in some way mimic the long walk toward a brother-and-sisterhood with our world’s beings, a taming of the hunter, who first walked out of Africa long millennia ago?

by  Corinne H. Smith

In the fall of 1847, Henry Thoreau closed the door on his house at the
edge of Walden Pond and left this sanctuary because he “had several
more lives to live.” During the decades that followed, other frugal
Yankees of Concord dismantled the wooden structure (which Thoreau
himself had recycled from a railroad worker’s hut) and used its pieces
to repair or enhance a variety of buildings in town. Its fragments
were scattered so well – like the seeds of a wind-blown dandelion –
that authentic re-assembly of the original home could never take place.

But Thoreau’s literary and inspirational reputation escalated during the 20th century. Along with this attention came the symbolism found in the image of that simple house in the woods. Readers longed to have one of their own, perhaps even one made from “tall, arrowy pines.” Thanks to amateur archaeologist Roland Robbins and Thoreau’s own written details, blueprints became available so that anyone, anywhere, could construct a Walden house. We hear of them standing in various locations from around the globe.

Henry Thoreau never set foot in western Pennsylvania. He came to within 275 miles of this area only twice: when he lectured in Philadelphia on November 21, 1854; and when he traveled across New York State in May 1861, on his way to Minnesota. Yet a new connection now links Thoreau with this place. A Walden house replica was recently built by students at the Altoona campus of The Pennsylvania State University.

The school is on the northwestern edge of Altoona, a city of 46,000 residents that lies among the Allegheny Mountains. The campus has always had strong ties to the nature surrounding it. Tall trees tower over the paths between academic buildings. A reflecting pond is home to a variety of ducks, who are the unofficial but beloved mascots of both current students and alumni alike. In 2008, Penn State Altoona bought 40 acres of adjacent woodland, including a hill that rises 300 feet above the campus. This tract is now known as “Seminar Forest.” Environmental studies students created hiking and mountain biking trails that lead to its summit and to an outdoor classroom at the top. At the foot of the hill and next to the posted trail map stands their new Walden house.

Its appearance is similar to the one that Thoreau constructed near a cove at Walden Pond in Concord in 1845. But there are noticeable differences. Instead of “three chairs for society,” the interior design of this house includes built-in wooden benches along three walls. Instead of a body of water lying outside, there’s a nearby hand-driven water pump. Instead of a rail commuter line with cars that speed toward Boston, a two-lane road leads “up the mountain” to Wopsononock, a high overlook that is peppered with radio towers and is a popular parking spot for young people.

Henry’s House – Altoona

I lived in the Altoona area for fifteen years. Thanks to professors Sandra H. Petrulionis and Ian S. Marshall, I recently had a chance to return and chat with the students about Henry Thoreau. We were due to meet at the Walden house at noon. I walked over early to take in the atmosphere before the others arrived. What a peaceful site! And yet, it wasn’t too far away from the school. I could hear the Winchester chimes of the chapel carillon ring on each quarter hour. At the stroke of noon, the melody of “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” wafted through the air. If I went to school here, I’d spend as much time as possible in this natural place.

As I admired the autumn foliage and gazed up the hill, I was reminded of something Thoreau wrote in the “Tuesday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He recalled the moment when he once stood upon Mount Greylock in the Berkshires, and looked down upon Williams College:

“It would really be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a mountain, as good at least as one well-endowed professorship. It were as well to be educated in the shadow of a mountain as in more classical shades. Some will remember, no doubt, not only that they went to the college, but that they went to the mountain. Every visit to its summit would, as it were, generalize the particular information gained below, and subject it to more catholic tests.”

Mirroring Thoreau’s suggestion, this college campus now has its own mountain. Kudos to the Penn State Altoona administration and students for recognizing the value of this natural setting. It’s the perfect place to put Henry’s house.

Note: the core of this entry comes from an essay “You Have to Be Here – Teaching Thoreau in Concord,” published in the Winter/Spring issue of Appalachia, which features a number of pieces about Thoreau and his influence. Link: http://www.outdoors.org/publications/appalachia/

Martin Luther King Day always makes me think about freedoms, the ones we take for granted and the ones we see as threatened. Famously, King had a dream about freedom, and, almost as famously, he had a method for approaching freedom. That he traced some of this method of civil disobedience to Henry Thoreau is equally well known. When my students and I read Walden and its meditation on freedom and enslavement, and then read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography and On Civil Disobedience, I ask us all this question: We go out with our freedom for what? Thoreau wrestles with this question throughout his work, saying at one point, “Don’t just be good; be good for something.”

While this question arrives early in the semester, as the term ages, we return to it, especially when we reach the end of Thoreau’s Walden “experiment,” (he is insistent on using this word in its scientific fullness; Walden itself can be read as a sort of poetic lab report) and consider his landmark essay, “On Civil Disobedience.”

Early in Walden, Thoreau launches a startling comparison: “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” I read this aloud and look out over the class. They have all taken a required and demanding United States history class; they are versed in the long nightmare of slavery and its ongoing effect on relations in our country. They have read Thoreau’s contemporary, Frederick Douglass, and his story of self-liberation, first from illiteracy and then from his southern overseer. “What do you think of that?” I ask.

“Pretty easy to say for a free white man who gets to go home for dinner whenever he wants,” says Percy, giving summary voice to generations of readers nettled by Thoreau’s finger-pointing and crowing and what seems to them posing. But here we are at the heart of Thoreau’s moral universe, and in “Civil Disobedience” he works to answer Percy’s charge. What should he, a free, white man, do in his era, when he saw slavery as its primary metaphor and evil? His answer is complex, and we wrestle with its various reasonings as we read his essay that has rippled beneath and through protest and change movements around the world. “So different,” says Charlotte of the writing. “Where’s the nature, the pond looking back at him, the friendly pine needles, the neighborhood animals and misfits?”

“It’s true,” I think and say. “The language of ‘Civil Disobedience’ is moral and mechanical. “Let’s look at his advice about response to society’s machinery when its turns unjustly.” We turn to a midpoint in the essay and Tessa reads aloud: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine.”

“What would that look like?” I ask in the quiet that follows.

“Heat and pain,” says Adam, and physics students chime in with friction’s characteristics, describing the burn of being rubbed the wrong way, or, at length, any way at all. While Thoreau was facile with machinery—see his family’s pencil business and Thoreau’s improvements to it—he did not love its promise as central to whatever improvements or revolutions might better people and this world. For that hope he turned to the individual. And part of Thoreau’s appeal to high school students is their kindred feeling that they, with their questions and insights, should be and are counterfriction to the machine of the societies they will inherit.

“Our whole life is startlingly moral,” Thoreau writes in the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, and once you are awake to this perception, prodded perhaps by the insistent finger of his prose, life gets complicated. I look out over my classroom, full of both privilege and promise. Bent to their books, bowed some by the work of becoming, they are, even in their wearied states, inspiring.

Like Thoreau, I have put much of my faith in a better world in the “I” each one represents, and in what each may do with her or his freedoms.