Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Meanwhile, the two travelers were on the beach, still minding about lunches and where to spend the night. They turned inland to overnight in Bridgewater; next morning they took the railroad to the base of the Cape. The storm was still raging, so they crammed into a narrow, crowded stagecoach, which drew them over sandy wet roads, through bare flats and scrubby hills, to Orleans on the “elbow” where the Cape turns north. It felt like being stranded “on a sand-bar in the ocean,” and in the mist they wondered whether the inn looked out on land or water. Next morning, the rain pounded on. But they had planned a walk, so walk they did, bracing their open umbrellas behind them, letting the south wind drive them north. As they crossed the desolate Plains of Nauset, they heard the Atlantic’s dull roar raging beyond Nauset Harbor. Finally they reached a bluff overlooking the beach. Down they scrambled to the ocean’s edge, letting their umbrella-sails push them north again in the blowing rain under a dark sky while the breakers beat time on the sand. The one person: a Cape Cod wrecker who showed them a cleft in the sandbank opening to the barren bank above. And so they walked on, alternating between bank above and beach below. Thoreau was finally satisfied: “There I had got the Cape under me,” riding it bareback, looking out upon “that sea-shore where man’s works are wrecks.”11

  That afternoon the showers cleared into rainbows, and the two walkers, wet and cold, tried the door of a “charity house” erected to shelter the shipwrecked. But the door was nailed shut, and, peering through a knot-hole, they could see nothing but cold stones and a few wads of wool. Shivering on, they turned inland, where they came across a house and, knocking on the door, found themselves face-to-face with John Young Newcomb, who as a boy had heard the gunfire at Bunker Hill and still remembered George Washington. Newcomb joshed them along, judging the character of the two drenched vagrants who claimed to be from Concord, until they passed the test: “‘Well, walk in, we’ll leave it to the women,’ said he.” All evening they entertained one another with stories and conversation, while “the women” served meals and the crazy son muttered away in the background: “Damn book-peddlers,—all the time talking about books. Better do something. Damn ’em. I’ll shoot ’em.” Thoreau would visit Newcomb again the following year, when he learned he and Channing had been suspected as the two thieves who, a few days later, robbed a Provincetown bank.12 Later he would memorialize Newcomb as “The Wellfleet Oysterman,” the greatest and funniest of his many character sketches.

  October 12 dawned clear and bright, and after a memorable breakfast the travelers kept on northwestward to the Highland Light. Sailing vessels dotted the horizon on an ocean now smooth and gentle as a lake. “Yet this same placid Ocean,” mused Thoreau, “will toss and tear the rag of a man’s body like the father of mad bulls.” After arranging to stay the night at the lighthouse, they rambled over the Cape’s spine to investigate Truro on the Bay, returning in time to receive their first lesson in lamplighting from the keeper, “a man of singular patience and intelligence.”13 The next morning Thoreau rose to watch the sun emerge from the ocean and the mackerel fleet set sail in the sparkling dawn. This was their last day hiking, all the way around the wrist of the Cape and down into Provincetown, where they stayed two nights at Fuller’s Hotel. On Sunday they pottered around the nearby swamps and sandhills in wind and cold. On Monday, after a final tour of the town, they took the steamer Naushon back across the bay, reaching Boston that evening.

  Thoreau turned this accidental itinerary into the armature for a book. He took three more trips to Cape Cod and began a whole new research campaign: Cape Cod struck him as the key to how New England became both “new” and “English” instead of ancient and indigenous. In the summer of 1849 he had prepared for his first trip there by opening a new notebook and copying into it the words of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, the English voyager who had named Cape Cod in 1602 and described the Indians they encountered there: “The coast was full of people that ran along the shore.”14 But who were they? Thoreau’s notebook became the first of twelve “Indian Books”—“a library by themselves,” said Channing—in which he amassed nearly three thousand pages of information gleaned from hundreds of sources: explorers, settlers, missionaries, ethnographers, and Native American accounts and self-descriptions, at a time when Native writers were just breaking into print. That September, after exhausting local libraries, Thoreau wrote to Harvard’s President Jared Sparks, requesting permission to check out books and bring them home to Concord. “I have chosen letters for my profession,” he argued, so this privilege, normally reserved for clergy, should be extended to him as well. “One year,” Sparks penciled on the letter.15 Thoreau returned in November, letter in hand, to continue his research. He was met by his old friend, the naturalist Thaddeus Harris, now Harvard’s full-time librarian. Harris never questioned Thoreau’s right to check out all the books he needed.

  As soon as he’d shaken the sand out of his shoes, Thoreau got busy. Soon he had three lectures for the 1849–50 lyceum season. Aunt Maria pronounced a practice run “very entertaining, and much liked.” Concord booked him for January, but only for two nights, so he made a few cuts before taking his audience through the shipwreck and up the beach to meet the Wellfleet Oysterman. Some were puzzled by the eerie first lecture, but at the second they “laughed till they cried.”16 Emerson tipped off South Danvers that Thoreau had a crowd-pleaser, and they invited him to speak on February 18—for only one night, so Thoreau rolled the two into one. This streamlined version pulled in several more invitations. Altogether things were looking up, thought Alcott. Just a few years before, he and his friends had been not merely unpopular, but “obnoxious”; now, even Thoreau read lectures “with a decided acceptance.” For the following year, Thoreau freshened up “Cape Cod” with material from his second visit, including the delicious tidbit about their being suspected bank robbers, and delivered it three more times. These lecture trips opened up new windows on local histories: in December 1850, after giving “Cape Cod” at Newburyport’s Market Hall, Thoreau was entertained by a local naturalist, who gave him a microscope’s view of the circulation of fluids in plant cells. Three weeks later, when he repeated “Cape Cod” at the Bigelow Mechanics Institute in Clinton, Massachusetts, his host gave him an insider’s tour of the cotton mills.17

  Not all these audiences were friendly. The earnest Clinton millworkers thought “Cape Cod” was “one of those trifles, light as air,” that whiled away the hour pleasantly, but one didn’t learn anything; lectures should be for self-improvement, not mere poetic whimsy. One grumpy auditor in Portland complained—through his laughter—that the lyceum committee should “pay him for the time lost in listening to such trash!” And another dressed Thoreau down for quoting profanity, huffing that “such language is in bad taste.” But in Portland Thoreau was blessed with one reviewer who sketched a rare portrait of him as a lecturer: “He bewilders you in the mists of transcendentalism, delights you with brilliant imagery, shocks you by his apparent irreverence, and sets you in a roar by his sallies of wit,” all without any apparent effort. Thoreau’s style, voice, manner, were all “a part of himself,” along with the “peculiar look which prepares you for something quaint, and adds its effect far more than words.” It was all too much to transfer to paper; one had to hear him in person. Sure, slow plodders were bewildered, but anyone with any imagination found him “a rich treat,” quaint, infinitely amusing—a true American original.18

  Slow plodders still miss the deadpan wit in Thoreau, a master of the humorous story in the tradition of Mark Twain. But Cape Cod came to life before audiences that laughed through their tears: whimsical, irreverent, knowing, mischievous and lyrical, a macabre dance with darkness. As Thoreau worked it up for publication, deepening the dark undertones and calibrating his historical research to undermine America’s smug narratives of Manifest Destiny, a second front opened to the north, in the Maine Woods and French Canada. All through the 1850s Thoreau pressed forward on both fronts, filling one Indian notebook
after another—by 1851 he was already at work on his fifth volume—and pursuing fieldwork whenever he could. As his vision clarified, he returned to the Cape alone, from June 25 through July 1, starting from Provincetown and retracing his original steps backward, interviewing the new lighthouse keeper, visiting John Newcomb, spending more time on the harbor side. The first trip had been a lark; the second was a research trip, notebook in hand, book in mind. Back home he wrote on, tearing the evolving drafts out of the Journal, leaving nothing in it but shreds and patches. “Seeds beginning to expand in me,” reads one fragment, “which propitious circumstances may bring to the light & to perfection.”19

  “Even this may be the year”: 1850

  The drought of 1849 gave way in spring 1850 to rains that flooded the meadows and raised Walden Pond to heights not seen for many years—“quite into the bushes, excluding all walkers from its shores” and killing back the pines. Thoreau, out walking in the rain, was exhilarated. “The life in us is like the water in the river,” rising to unknown heights, flooding the uplands—why, “even this may be the eventful year—& drown out all our muskrats.”20 It was. By the end of 1850 Henry Thoreau had found his groove, setting his life and his writing into a new pattern.

  His family’s support enabled this new direction. The Thoreaus were proven market leaders in the pencil business, but late in 1849, profits starting coming in from an unexpected source. Thoreau pencils earned their market share by the high quality of the ground graphite, or “plumbago,” which thanks to Henry’s milling process was finer and smoother than their competitors’. When orders for their ground plumbago arrived from the Boston printing firm Smith & McDougal, the Thoreaus feared a competitor was edging in. But after swearing the family to secrecy, the firm explained: they needed great quantities of the finest plumbago for a new print process, electrotyping. They would buy it exclusively from the Thoreaus if the Thoreaus, in turn, protected their trade secret. Thus Henry Thoreau’s graphite mill not only made possible the highest-quality American pencils; it also fostered the fledgling technology of mass printing. Many times Henry carted ground graphite home from various mills to refine, package, and ship to Boston and, eventually, around the nation. As the new business grew, the Thoreaus made fewer and fewer pencils. In 1853, about the time German pencil-makers in New York flooded the market, they gave up making pencils altogether. Henry, to put off friends who asked why, was said to have answered, “Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.” Profits stayed high even as prices plunged from ten dollars to two dollars a pound; the Thoreaus shipped up to six hundred pounds a year of the precious commodity. But friends noted how the fine, slick graphite dust covered everything in the house. Breathing it must have shortened Henry’s life, which might have been shorter still had he not been taking vigorous daily walks outdoors.21

  Henry had always liked the Texas House, on the edge of town surrounded by his thriving orchard. From his window he could see cows grazing on Fairhaven Hill, and he could walk to Walden or the river without going through town. But Cynthia was restless again, and with their new prosperity they could afford to look at some of the finest houses in town. The “Yellow House” on Main Street caught their eye, just down from the Parkman house they had rented for so many years. The storekeeper Josiah Davis had built it in his heyday, but lost it to bankruptcy during the Panic of 1837. After bouncing from owner to owner, it had come to the shopkeeper Daniel Shattuck, who was happy to sell. So it was that John Thoreau bought the Yellow House on September 29, 1849, for $1,450. Cynthia drew up a long list of repairs and renovations: raise the entire house so the ceilings would be nine feet high; put in new partitions and doors, new window glass, new sinks, new shingles; and on and on. They hired a carpenter, and Henry helped attach the pencil shop (moved from the Texas House) to the back corner. It would be nearly a year until renovations were complete and the family could move in, on August 29, 1850. Henry, who didn’t want to move “at all,” found himself despite his protests living once again on Main Street, near the heart of town in one of Concord’s finest neighborhoods.22

  Even he had to admit his new quarters were splendid: the entire attic, a slope-ceilinged room stretching the length of the house, with a staircase opening in the middle and windows overlooking the town on one end, where he put his desk, and the river on the other, where he put his bed so he could look out on the weather before rising. The attic was so hot in summers that for weeks at a time he spent evenings downstairs with the family, but it was roomy enough to hold his cane bed, his writing desk, and his driftwood bookshelves. It also had ingenious nooks and crannies to hide his rolled-up canvas camping tent and display his arrowheads, Indian relics, herbarium, mosses, lichens, birds’ nests, birds’ eggs, mineral cabinet, insect collection, hatching turtles, and whatever else he dragged home. The Yellow House attic became his bedroom, parlor, workshop, nature museum, and window on the world. As Sophia apologized once, escorting a friend up the stairs, Henry regarded the dust on his furniture “like the bloom on fruits, not to be swept off.”23 For a crowning glory, the Concord River was right across the street, in Ellery Channing’s backyard. For in June 1849, his old friend had sold his Ponkawtasset farm and bought the house on the riverbank, where Thoreau could moor his boat; in years to come, John Thoreau enlarged their backyard by purchasing the adjoining lot, where Henry planted a splendid orchard, transplanting one of his beloved “Texas” Baldwin apple trees. This would be his home for the rest of his life—his busiest, happiest, and most productive years.

  Thoreau was used to earning his keep, and between paying his father for room and board, paying off the debt to Munroe, and funding his books and travels, bringing in a steady income was a priority. Lecturing paid little—most out-of-town lectures earned twenty dollars or so, less travel expenses—and so did manual labor; once he even considered speculating in cranberries.24 Far more reliable was the income he earned from surveying. In 1850, Thoreau became a fully professional civil engineer: he invested in his own equipment, including a surveyor’s chain and a set of ten chaining pins, a measuring tape, drafting paper, tools—protractors, triangles, a T square, and various rulers and straightedges—and, most glorious of all, a top-of-the-line fifteen-inch compass made of lacquered brass with a silvered five-inch dial. He even printed up a handbill advertising his warrant of accuracy “within almost any degree of exactness, and the Variations of the Compass given, so that the lines can be run again.”25

  Thoreau’s claims of accuracy were not hyperbolic. After his death, his Concord surveys were deposited with the town library, where for decades they provided invaluable documentation of town property boundaries. Later measurements have shown Thoreau’s work was fastidious: he even took the unusual step of ascertaining the “True Meridian,” or true north, rather than using simple magnetic bearings—a complex two-day procedure that he performed early in 1851, in front of the Yellow House.26 His first full season brought a wave of jobs: a survey of the Yellow House lot, a commission from Emerson to resolve a long-festering boundary dispute, sixty house lots up in Haverill on the Merrimack River, the town’s new courthouse grounds, and a new road to the depot. Thoreau was earning a reputation as a careful and resourceful civil engineer. One client told how, when darkness fell before they could finish surveying his ten-acre woodlot, Thoreau finished the job by lighting a candle and sighting to the flame.27 All in all, he completed at least fifteen surveys in 1850 and another eighteen in 1851—making, as Alcott remarked, “the compass pay for his book.”28

  It was not lost on Thoreau that, though the work suited him, surveying made him complicit in destroying the forests he loved. In November 1850, he walked over land he had surveyed the year before, which the owner had clearcut and subdivided into fifty-two house lots. As a child he’d played in those woods, but, he consoled himself, cutting the trees opened a fine view of the distant blue mountains. Still, he was pestered with guilt. “To day I was aware that I walked in a pitch pine wood which erelong—perchanc
e I may survey and lot off for wood auction and see the choppers at their work.” Surely the trees would grow back? After all, a grassy field he remembered from his youth was now pleasant woods. But two days later he couldn’t forgive himself: “I saw the fences half consumed . . . and some worldly misers with a surveyor looking after their bounds,” ignoring the angels singing all around him, “looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen surrounded by devils . . . and looking nearer I saw that the prince of darkness was his surveyor.” Had he sold his soul to the devil? “Trade curses everything it handles,” he muttered darkly.29 A particularly difficult survey, the perambulation of the Concord town boundaries in September 1851, left him feeling he had “committed suicide in a sense.”30 Long stretches spent surveying always left him grouchy and snappish.