Thoreau Farm

Corinne H. Smith serves as a weekend docent at the Thoreau
Farm Birthplace and is the author of “Westward I Go Free: Tracing
Thoreau’s Last Journey.” For more info, visit www.corinnehsmith.com
or www.thoreausjourneywest.com.

In mid-September, something changed in the air. Night-time temperatures dipped into the 40s. People were coerced – with some resignation — into closing their bedroom windows and switching cotton sheets for flannels. A week before the equinox, we could feel Fall coming on.

We weren’t the only ones. The chipmunks who live in the stone walls around the Thoreau Farm took the change to heart, too. They were spurred to action. These creatures have only two major concerns in life: having a big enough food supply for winter, and making sure they don’t become food for somebody else. A quick inventory of their storage chambers must have proven that they needed acorns ASAP, because they spent the weekend of September 15-16 in a blur of harvesting in the red oak in the front yard of the birth house. I had a ringside seat for the frenzy.

We’ve already come to an agreement, these chipmunks and I. I don’t make any sudden moves or noises, and they in turn try to ignore the fact that I like to sit on a chair dragged into the middle of their path, two days a week. While I wait for visitors, I catch occasional glimpses of a small tawny body or two, zipping through our kitchen gardens. More than once we’ve arrived in the same spot at the same time, and have both squealed with surprise. What can I say? It’s Nature’s entertainment.

But there was no funny business about the chipmunks that weekend. Three of them repeatedly ran the perimeter of the house, grabbed as many acorns as their mouth pouches could hold, and hurried back to their tunnels under the walls. Only a short time passed. Then they were out and running again, around the building, under and even up into the tree. It took about two minutes for each one to load up and to return to headquarters. Over and over. Again and again. They used the same route each time, always circling clockwise around the house, with a midpoint stop at the oak. But what would a chipmunk know of the hands on a clock? Still, they followed the pattern. If a shadow happened to cross from overhead, they paused and hid under our beans or Swiss chard. As soon as the blue jay or mockingbird moved on, so did the chippies. This otherwise nonstop action continued for hours.

Henry Thoreau observed the autumnal habits of these little ones, though he called them by a different name. “What a busy and important season to the striped squirrel!” he wrote on August 29, 1858. “[He] is already laying up his winter store.” The air must have changed earlier that year. Three days later, Thoreau ruminated on the fact that since hazelnuts grew along stone walls, the chipmunks had “not far to go to their harvesting. … As we say, ‘The tools to those who can use them,’ so we may say, ‘The nuts to those who can get them.’”

The Thoreau Farm chipmunks left a wake of non-nutritious acorn caps in the lawn. I watched one guy as he nibbled enough of the nut so that the cap could slip off, intact. Certainly the cap’s sole purpose was to attach onto a branch. It was waste that would take up too much room in both mouth and house, and thus it was discarded.

As an avid lover of metaphor, Thoreau once saw in the chipmunk’s stripes “a punctuation mark, the character to indicate where a new paragraph commences in the revolution of the seasons. Double lines.” For me, on one September weekend, they indeed marked the division between Summer and Fall.

Looking Up

I’ve begun pressing on the keys of this post with some unease. The other day, during a walk in Estabrook Woods, I found myself wondering what our former woods-wanderer, Henry Thoreau, would make of our current election and the politics that surround it. Who, I wondered, would Henry vote for? Musing about politics seems a good way to spoil a walk, but there I was. And here I am.

It’s evident, I think, to any close reader that Henry Thoreau leaned toward a Libertarian outlook. He was loudly interested in freedom, and he was no fan of the collective and its will. “Let the I in this world be me; don’t bother me with we,” he might have said. Or, hewing more closely to real text, we have these words, this “motto,” from his famous essay on civil disobedience: “That government is best which governs least.”

That’s clear, and I hear the rhythmic clapping from my right. “Henry would be drinking (or tossing) tea with us,” they’re saying. Perhaps. But would all that tea suspend the judgment of his ferociously observant and fact-collecting mind? Would, for example, the scientist in Henry concur that climate change and its myriad studies that point to human influence on it are hoaxes simply because they are inconvenient to our way of life? The “know-nothingism” at the heart of climate change denial runs so counter to his intellectual current of know-everythingism.

And perhaps more centrally would Henry Thoreau find companionship in the mean-spiritedness of many on the intolerant fringe, who would misrepresent the views of others and even seek to deny a president’s documented citizenship? As I’ve read him over the years I’ve often thought, Henry was no hater…at least of the individual. What people could conjure en masse was a different story – one only had to look to slavery to see our potential for collective evil. And the foreign “adventure” of war, say with Mexico? (Or Iraq?) Only blocks of obedient men could conjure such a horror.

Trailing Henry Thoreau over the years through woods and thickets of words, I’ve noticed that each person he meets is rife with potential, even, for example, the downtrodden John Field, the bog-mucker living with his family in a lightless shanty in the Baker Farm chapter of Walden. Though his lecture on living well mystifies John Field and shows Henry to read his audience poorly, and though the encounter occasions a minor crisis of self-doubt in him, Henry’s spirit of belief in individual possibility shines. And on days when I grow weary or distressed by the group-think of the politics of intolerance, I go looking for the reed of hope that is a single being. Often a student, or a tree, or even, perhaps, a president.

And you, where’s your hope found?

Don’t Forget the Rock

by Corinne Smith

Out-of-towners aren’t always familiar with the protocols of visiting Concord, Massachusetts. Some forget to pack essential elements from home. So let this be an appeal to those Transcendental Pilgrims who plan to make their first-time journeys in the future. Be sure to bring something to leave as a tribute to Henry David Thoreau at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, at Walden Pond, or at both sites. Don’t be caught embarrassingly empty-handed.

Throughout the calendar year, people leave mementos at Thoreau’s gravesite in Sleepy Hollow. The stone carved with the simple name HENRY is often surrounded by pine cones, pine-needle sprigs, acorns, pebbles, rocks, pencils, pennies, and hand-written notes. Unprepared pilgrims sometimes pick up random natural gifts along the cemetery pathways, courtesy of the tall trees that give the place its park-like atmosphere.

In early May and in mid-July, corresponding to the dates of Thoreau’s death and birth, the piles at his marker grow taller. Thoreau’s neighbors on Author’s Ridge – the Hawthornes, Alcotts and Emersons – often attract similar but smaller heaps of tribute. Henry and Louisa May Alcott draw the most items. Not that anyone is counting, of course.

A different kind of tribute sprawls a few miles south, at Walden Pond. At the site of Thoreau’s house stands a cairn that was begun by Mary Newbury Adams on a summer day in 1872. Mrs. Adams was visiting from Dubuque, Iowa, and was walking around the pond with friend Bronson Alcott. When Alcott showed her the by-then empty plot where Thoreau’s house once stood, Mary was moved to memorialize the landmark in the Gaelic tradition. In Alcott’s words: “Mrs. Adams suggests that visitors to Walden shall bring a small stone for Thoreau’s monument and begins the pile by laying stones on the site of his hermitage, which I point out to her.” The cairn has varied in height and girth ever since. The exception came in the late 1970s, when state workers first hauled the heap away as a presumed eyesore and a safety hazard, and then supposedly brought the same rocks back three years later. (In theory.) Today, visitors still bring stones from home – sometimes inscribed — and other individuals take some of them away.

But a nearby and more deliberate rock connects Walden with the Thoreau Farm Birthplace. When granite posts were installed to outline the pond house site in the late 1940s, an additional large stone was placed where the chimney had risen. Its carved letters include a line from the Thoreau poem “Smoke,” which was published in 1843 in The Dial and later in the pages of Walden:

Beneath these Stones
lies the Chimney Foundation
of Thoreau’s Cabin 1845-1847
“Go thou my incense upward
From this hearth.”

This rock came from the original Thoreau birthplace property, courtesy of owner and local historian Ruth Wheeler. According to Roland Wells Robbins, the farm’s pastures were “littered with granite boulders of all sizes and shapes. After inspecting many, we decided on a flat surfaced boulder about three feet long and two feet wide. It weighed about twelve hundred pounds and would insure protection for the chimney foundation.” Somehow, it was hauled over to Walden Pond. Now embedded in the earth at the far end of the house site, this piece of glacial litter is a quiet link between the land Henry David Thoreau was born on, and the two-year home that served to establish his literary and cultural reputation.

So: We’ve already left our rock at Walden. Have you?