Category Archives: Henry David Thoreau

Times

Posted on November 10, 2016 by Sandy Stott | 6 comments

I am thinking today of people who live in terrible times, when whatever good we summon or create in our daily lives gets threatened by the bile we and others also harbor. And so it’s no stretch to think of Henry Thoreau living in the 1850s a decade crawling with evil and aimed surely at civil war. And I think of his huge, complex mind and attendant spirit and wonder how he rose each day to work to write to walk without being washed away by sadness. He could see so much. What sustained him?

I ask myself this question on a day similarly riven, when I feel split from country and future, when my imagination’s gone quiet before despair, when my quiet belief in innate decency fails. I didn’t go to work today; it seemed so beside the point. But after a day of sitting here, I’ll have to get up and go…where?

Well, yes, there to the work I’ve committed to and I’ll keep at it as compact with self and known others. Its daily motion will be salve of a sort.

These few days in and on, I know I will also return to personal struggle with despair. How to go at it? Thoreau sought both to address his time’s evils and live a life with joy at its center. He did not turn or hide away – he looked directly at slavery in its many forms, from primary evil to enslavement of self. In many ways, he even tugged apart some of the nature he revered – to know it, understand it, perhaps, sometimes, to change it (at least the human part). And still, as he walked out into the world each day, he brought and found reverence.

Afoot in the forest

Early in his writing, in the essay, The Natural History of Massachusetts, Thoreau set down what sustained him throughout:

Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry that leap in the ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by attrition is reflected upon the bank.

It is no small feat to be a keen analytic intelligence, stern moralist and giddy walker. So much encompassed in one being.

I am no Thoreau. But I must try to walk like him.

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Old River Tracery

Posted on November 6, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

In Concord for a short visit, I find myself with a single free hour, and, as ever, my feet answer the always-question: what should I do? “Walk, of course,” they say. “You are, of course, home in Henry-land.”

And so I set out for one of Henry Thoreau’s rivers, two in fact, which really makes it three – I’ll trace the Assabet for a bit from the hemlock bend upstream, turn back then and edge over for a look at the Sudbury, where the railroad used to cross, and then, I’ll join these two where they conflow and become the Concord. And this walk itself will be confluence, a flowing together of so many past walks and runs with this present.

The old RR grade

I’ve no revelation as I walk, kicking the leaves that lie thick on the old railroad grade, watching the light shift under the passing clouds. Instead my mind seems to quiet, seems to slide along, for a change, at the pace of these rivers, whose most hurried expression is a small swirl or three where the Assabet leaves the hemlock bend. Each thought arrives and passes like the rafts of oak leaves heading for the Concord.

Hemlock Bend on the Assabet

The Concord gathers itself of the Sudbury and Assabet at “Egg Rock”; there, the water must bring news, or at least leaves, of the mild uplands behind. The broad Sudbury is actually the lesser to the two, its water as slow as a nap. And after a dry summer with its open banks, the two rivers make one that sticks to its channel, that is so slow here that the sea is only far rumor.

The trails are a river of downed leaves, and I leave my feet low to the ground to kick through them, listening to the rustle that takes me back to childhood and walking through rather than around the pillowed leaves along the street. Up in the under- and mid-stories of the trees, the light ricochets from the still-yellow and russet fire of the leaves – it is November’s show of slanted light. Short days; purest light. Finest hour.

November Light

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost

Afterwalk After Workshop

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

Forethought: Perhaps you have had the good fortune to be part of a workshop that morphs from being a meeting of strangers to a gathering of kindreds in short order. I’m not, as is probably true for many who meander along Thoreau-like trails, much of a joiner. The singular is simple and simple is often single; in Walden the “I” is prized. But there are times…when gathering feels and looks like striking flints together near tinder; sometimes the room lights up. These thoughts then for the group of 15 writers who took up residence at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Cardigan Lodge for the weekend past (and even, fleetingly, for the 30+ middle schoolers who ricocheted around the place as their elders weighed words).

The mountain that watched it all.

On Monday, after our writers’ workshop weekend, I returned to the Cardigan region, in part so I could meet a morning appointment the next day in nearby Concord, NH. But I also felt drawn by the pleasure of the receding weekend, in the way that you may hope to revisit a place where good things happened for you. In early afternoon, I arrived in the little valley that’s one ridge over from the lodge where we met, and the morning’s clouds were thinning, winging off before a fresh northwest wind.

Even during my approach to the valley, it was clear that the weekend’s early snows had melted; only an unbalanced eyebrow of white bristled here and there in the light on Cardigan’s dome. Unpacking took two minutes, and then one of the weekend’s centerpoints reappeared: “Time for a walk,” a composite voice said. “Yes, a walk,” I answered. “Yes.”

That Walk

In the short interim, hunting season’s begun, and so, after dressing in loud, or as it’s advertised, “blaze” orange vest and thickspun hat, I set out on a 5-mile loop that high water had made unavailable to us just two days ago. The loop ambles up our little valley until it bumps up against a trail called the Back 80 Loop; from there it’s just under a mile to the cellar hole at 1642 feet. That’s the same cellar hole that Allen, one of the weekend’s crew, visited during Saturday’s walk, and it’s also the highpoint of a walk my wife and I have taken for decades.

I wonder, as I walk, if Thoreau and his Concord friends ever gathered to read from unfinished work to each other? Not as in at the lyceum, or in other lecture formats, but from, let’s say, the 3rd draft of Walden, or, after walking, a round of hastily-scribed impressions. I scan my past readings and memory and find that I don’t know. Perhaps you do, and will send on answer.

Reaching that cellar hole returned me to the past – not the deep one, but the recent one: I was now walking in one of our writer’s footsteps. I turned downhill, and, a mile later, I arrived at the lodge. The afternoon light was such that the windows were opaque – who knew what or who was inside; maybe some of our writers – but the parking lot was empty. Just so, when you walk into the past: there’s possible return hidden behind the windows, but the parking lot says that time – and everyone who lives in it – have moved on.

Still, as I stood looking back up at the mountain – clear on this day – I was happy to return to place and memory at the same time. It was, I decided, a rare gathering of people who like (and are often loopy about) mountains approached one step at a time, a line of walking that’s kin to a line of words. Follow each, and at some point you look up and say, “O, look a that. Look where I am!”

Morning light on Cardigan

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost