Category Archives: Henry David Thoreau

Return to Two-Boulder Hill

Posted on August 5, 2014 by | 1 comment

By Corinne H. Smith

I last led a nature writing walk to Two-Boulder Hill at the end of March. Back then, we had to walk around a few patches of ice, but we still had a terrific time. (See https://thoreaufarm.org/2014/04/a-visit-to-two-boulder-hill/ for the whole story.)

What a difference three and a half months can make! During The Thoreau Society’s Annual Gathering in mid-July, three of us took the same walk. Well, it can never be the SAME walk. We followed the same general path, and we witnessed the sights and sounds of Summer this time.

Charles and Lucy and I met at Thoreau Farm and began walking north. After we passed the Gaining Grounds fields and the woods behind them, we reached a little-used access road. Here we caught sight of flowers that like to live in these kinds of disturbed areas: the yellow bird’s foot trefoil, yarrow, tiny Deptford pinks, and Queen Anne’s lace. We watched as the smallest butterfly we’d ever seen lighted upon a small dark log. Upon further inspection, we thought that its perch may have been coyote scat. We had indeed approached Wildness pretty quickly.

On this steamy July day, with no clouds in the sky, the sunlight was too strong for us to stand in one place for very long. We walked along the trail and looked around for a shady spot to sit. We ended up just plopping down in the middle of the path, only an arm’s length away from one another. But we all had writing experience, and we quickly got ourselves into the proper frames of mind. We watched, we listened, and we quietly wrote in our journals.

We were surrounded by a dense forest that the wind brought to life. Breezes fluttered through all of the trees and branches above us. Lucy noted later that it sounded as if we were sitting at the edge of a big green ocean, with waves of leaves cooling us off instead of water drops.

After about fifteen minutes, I caught a hint of familiar flute-like tones. No! Was it possible? Had we been discovered by Henry David Thoreau’s favorite bird, the wood thrush?

I waited a few seconds, and the call came again. I was sitting a little closer to Charles, and I whispered to him, “I don’t believe it.” He cocked his ears and listened, and we heard the song again. Charles understood and nodded. He lifted his binoculars to see if he could see the bird. We alerted Lucy, too. Somewhere in the overgrown thicket in front of us, a wood thrush sang its beautiful tidbit song.

Thoreau called the wood thrush “the finest songster of the grove.” He wrote glowingly of the bird and its music. His journal entry for July 5, 1852, puts the thrush on an especially high pedestal, for the length of a full long paragraph. “Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring,” he said. It was true. The temperature suddenly became more tolerable for us. We listened as the bird came and went: always out of sight, but always sharing its music. I scribbled a rough transcription of the thrush’s jagged but magical melody line:

thrushsong

(You can hear the typical wood thrush song on Cornell’s All About Birds web site at http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/wood_thrush/id.)

Eventually I glanced at my watch. It was time to start walking back. I told my companions that we had to leave. Charles looked at me and said, “I could stay here all day.” Lucy and I felt the same way. Now THAT’s the sign of a worthwhile nature-watching and writing outing. Reluctantly we got up, brushed ourselves off, stretched our legs, and sauntered back to Thoreau Farm.

Charles was inspired to write a poem about our forest visitor.

Wood Thrush

Sitting in woods listening for sounds —
airplanes the winds shifting in the trees
cicada catbird then the faint
silvery voice, “come to me” “come to me”
the winds blow hard tossing treetops
we wait longer then the bird is nigh
“come to me!” yet closer “come to me!!”
I aim binoculars cannot see him
then silence — only the wind remains
this shy liquid-voiced singer
is the soul of the listening forest
~ Charles T. Phillips

This was indeed a day that the three of us will remember. And all we really did was take a walk in the woods.

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Posted in General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

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Outward or Upward Bound

Posted on August 2, 2014 by | 1 comment

One of the writing projects I’ve taken on is a biannual column about mountain accidents and searches and rescues for the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Appalachia Journal. The column’s primary purpose is educational – if we read the stories of those who fall or go astray in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, we may become wiser walkers. At least that’s the theory. The column’s readership also knows the lure of disaster stories. Along with these stories of misfortune and perseverance in the backcountry, I offer analysis of what went wrong (and right) in each instance. And I hear from readers who like to point out their own takeaways and share their own stories.

So during the warm ease of summer’s heartland, I take some days to revisit mountain tales accrued during the winter past; the column then will appear at the outset of winter next, and, theoretically, its readership then goes wiser into the winter hills.

The Winter Hills - White Mountains

The Winter Hills – White Mountains

The other day, as the rain pattered companionably on the roof, I was mulling over an incident, and, at the same time, wondering what familiar walk I would take later when the rain let up. This wondering brought Henry Thoreau to mind. Famously and early in “Walking,” Thoreau sets his criteria for a walk: “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”

It is, of course, an “extreme statement,” and in its extremity designed to jar us from the complacency of routine – a little work, a little walk…ho hum…what’s for dinner?

The incident I was contemplating and then writing up was about a college student, who during finals week, went to the mountains, purportedly to clear his head. Here’s the summary, written in the column’s reportorial style:

On December 12th at 3:00 a.m., New Hampshire Fish and Game received a call about a missing hiker in the Franconia Notch area. David F., a Lyndon State College student, had left school to go hiking and climbing in that area the day before. He was reported to be well equipped. David had also given his roommate his intended route, and Fish and Game officers decided that he might simply be delayed and to give him time to hike out on his own. Morning temperatures were very cold (on Mount Washington at 5:17 a.m. it was -15 with the wind registering 73 mph; a windchill advisory was in effect) and there was still no sign of David F., so Fish and Game began to organize a search, which would necessarily be broad and people intensive. At 12:30 p.m., as the search was getting under way, Fish and Game learned that hikers on the Falling Waters trail had come across David not far from the summit of Little Haystack.

Fish and Game believed that David F.’s condition merited an airlift off the ridge by a New Hampshire National Guard helicopter. He was treated for mild hypothermia at a local hospital. In an interview with Fish and Game, David said that he had begun his climb on the Falling Waters trail at 9:00 a.m. on the 11th, diverging later to climb an off-trail drainage called Lincoln’s Throat; eventually he became lost, spent the night in his sleeping bag and wrapped in a space blanket and tarp, then found his way to the Falling Waters trail in the morning. When found, David F. was without his pack and gear, saying he must have lost them that morning.

Such a report sets off head-wagging among the mountain cognoscenti, as it should – conventions violated, personal ability overestimated, etc. But most of us recognize too the need to slip the trap – whether it is a spate of final exams, a daily job or the overly-civil layerings of language over experience – and go free. “Westward I go free,” wrote Thoreau later in his essay, and it takes only a slight change to say, upward I go free. I remember that, even as I point out a student’s errors in pursuit of that freedom.

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

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Henry’s Children

Posted on July 20, 2014 by | 5 comments

By Corinne H. Smith

The silent Memorial Walk around Walden Pond is a tradition during The Thoreau Society’s Annual Gathering. We meet at the house replica near the parking lot at 7 a.m. on Saturday morning. When we introduce ourselves, we also share the names of people we are dedicating the walk to. The whole group walks in memory of Henry David Thoreau and scholars Walter Harding and Bradley P. Dean. Individuals may choose also to walk for family members, friends, and mentors who have gone on before. I always dedicate my participation to two of my mentors, Thoreau scholar Edmund Schofield and singer-songwriter and environmentalist John Denver. I wear Ed’s tan corduroy hat during the walk, as he often did whenever he spent time exploring Walden Woods.

On this July 12th, about a dozen people stand in our circle. We sing a verse of Happy Birthday in Henry’s honor. Then, when the introductions come around to Jeff Hinich of Ontario, he stretches out his arms as if to embrace the group and says, “I dedicate this walk to all of Henry’s children!” We laugh. We know that Henry and his siblings never married and that no direct descendants of their family exist. And yet: isn’t Jeff right? Aren’t we all Henry’s children? Didn’t he father good books and essays and opinions that in turn brought together followers like us?

I think on this satisfying idea as we walk single file across the road and down to the level of the pond. We edge past a handful of long-distance swimmers preparing to work on their pond-laps. A few are already in the water. Now we turn left in order to round the pond clockwise. As the first one in the line, I often get to see a few things the others don’t. Chipmunks squeak and scurry in front of me, almost underfoot. Robins are in abundance today, too. I play a game of tag with one bird for more than ten yards. It bobs ahead of me, stops to let me catch up, then bobs ahead some more. Finally it realizes that I am not going to stray from the path that we’ve both been using. It flies up into a small tree and watches our group pass from this vantage point. I try not to laugh out loud.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty calm scene at Walden Pond. Some fishermen quietly cast lines from boats or from the shore. Even the train tracks lie idle. The MBTA continues to make improvements and repairs on this section and has suspended weekend service for most of the rest of 2014. So we wait for the train that doesn’t come, then continue on to the site where Henry’s house once stood. Here we fan out and take our time, thinking about Henry and our loved ones, too. Some take a few seconds to stand in his doorway and look down to the cove.

For most of the fourteen Memorial Walks that I’ve been on, I’ve seen white Indian pipes growing in select spots around the cairn and outside of the house markers. This time, there are none. I tiptoe to all of the places where I’ve seen them in the past, and no white shoots are beginning to lift the leaf litter. The weather conditions must have been different this year. Maybe the heat or moisture levels haven’t been right. Maybe the unique curved heads will pop up later in the season, when they can amaze other visitors. Or maybe they were quite early, and I missed them. I feel disappointment at their absence.

What I notice instead is all of the small pine trees rising here. Many aren’t even as big as the one Charlie Brown places a single red ornament on each Christmas. One is certainly less than four inches tall. Yes, I’ve seen seedlings before. But either there are more of them today, or I’m somehow extra aware of them now. Then it dawns on me. These little guys are Henry’s children, too! He once planted hundreds of white pines in this area. Granted, we have no easy way of proving that these specific saplings came from his specific plantings. But in the grand and symbolic scheme of the Walden Woods ecosystem, we can call them descendants. More of Henry’s children. And at this thought, I smile again.

Faith in a Seedling

Faith in a Seedling

We saunter back to the parking lot. Now, families loaded down with beach paraphernalia hurry toward us, eager to stake out some sand and sun for the rest of the day. Some of them may be Henry’s children, too: if not now, then perhaps at some future moment. How many children does Henry David Thoreau have? It’s an innocent enough question that’s hard to answer. But on this particular morning, and only at Walden Pond, I count at least a dozen people and hundreds of seedling pines. Many more are sure to surface in the years to come.

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Nature, The Roost, Walden

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