Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Thoreau still had mountains on the mind. A month later, on July 2, Ed Hoar hired a horse and wagon, Thoreau tossed his knapsack aboard, and the two rattled off, intending to circumnavigate the entire range of the White Mountains and live “like gipsies” along the way, meeting Blake and Brown on Mount Washington. Walking, complained Thoreau, would have been better: “You have to sacrifice so much to the horse,” which confined them to good roads, dreary roadside campsites, or “trivial” inns, “pestered by flies and tavern loungers.”70 Three days later, mountains came into view and his mood lifted. In Tamworth, New Hampshire, the innkeeper captivated them with bear stories; the next night they camped near the home of one Wentworth, who told them of killing bears and rearing the orphaned cubs at home. They hired Wentworth as their guide up Mount Washington, and next morning, July 7, they rode through Pinkham Notch to Glen House, where they sent the horses back to Wentworth’s and spent the night with two merry colliers, busy making coal for the two hotels on the summit. While the wind shook the shanty, the five men sat up drinking goats’ milk and eating boiled beef tongue.

  Thoreau was out at first light, anxious to reach the summit before the clouds rolled in. Hoar and Wentworth followed behind with the colliers herding their goats. There on the summit of Mount Washington, the highest peak in New England, Thoreau again had no epiphany. The clouds and mist arrived with the men and the goats. They chatted with an artist taking the view, and with Spaulding and Hall, landlords of the Summit and Tiptop Houses who competed for the tourists, who arrived by the scores. By 8:30 a.m. Thoreau had had enough of summit society. He led them over the rocks into Tuckerman’s Ravine, the fog so dense they navigated by compass. The ground was so rough they stopped short of their goal and camped amid the dwarf firs. Wentworth, ignoring Thoreau’s advice, kindled a fire that the wind whipped into the firs. Soon the whole ridge was on fire. No harm done, said Wentworth—the more trees that burned, the better. As the fire raged up the mountainside, the three men waded downstream to a small lake, where they set up Thoreau’s white canvas tent. A faint “Halloo!” from above alerted Thoreau that Blake and Brown had arrived, and he scrambled up to meet them, “wet, ragged, and bloody with black flies.” Thoreau noted ruefully that he’d told Blake “to look out for a smoke and a white tent, and we had made a smoke sure enough.”71

  Somehow the five men cozied up into Thoreau’s tent, there in the soaking rain. It would be their home for four nights. Not the original plan, but Thoreau sprained his ankle the next day, costing him several days’ walking. He made the best of it, studying all he could see, hear, and reach from camp, stoking the campfire to keep off the flies while the others pottered around in the mizzling weather. Finally, on Monday, July 12—Thoreau’s forty-first birthday—they packed up and walked off the mountain, picking up the horse and wagon at Wentworth’s, then jouncing off toward Mount Lafayette, their next goal, arcing west then south around the base of the range. Heavy rains shuttered the scenery until Tuesday evening, when a short walk above Jefferson Hill brought the whole Presidential Range into glorious view, the fogs rolling beneath and the sun glimmering off the peaks: “the grandest mountain view I ever got,” exulted Thoreau. Two days later he stood on the summit of Mount Lafayette, beholding shaggy forest to the south and west, and to the north and east, half-cleared woods: “the leopard-spotted land.” While they ate dinner, he cut some dwarf spruces and firs and counted their tree rings. The tiny trees were, Thoreau realized with a shock, hundreds of years old—the largest perhaps over a thousand. The fire Wentworth sent blazing up Tuckerman’s Ravine had killed an ancient forest.72

  The return trip took four more nights, heading due south through Plymouth, where Thoreau said farewell to the mountains, through Franklin and Weare, then over the state line and home by noon on Monday, July 19. Thoreau wrote a long, detailed account in his Journal, suggesting an essay in the making, but neither of these two mountain excursions took on a life beyond the Journal. Monadnock had promise, and in 1860 he would return, but the White Mountains were a bust; the wagon trip had not been “simple and adventurous enough.”73 It seemed about on par with Emerson’s adventure later that summer to the Adirondacks with a hunting party, where he, Louis Agassiz, and some friends “broke some dozens of ale-bottles, one after another, with their bullets.” Emerson did manage to shoot a peetweet for Agassiz—“the first game he ever bagged,” snorted Thoreau, who’d been a crack shot in his youth before he swore off guns. “Think of Emerson shooting a peetweet . . . for Agassiz, and cracking an ale-bottle (after emptying it) with his rifle at six rods!”74 Wilderness just wasn’t what it used to be. Indeed, the whole world was turning into something Thoreau disliked intensely. While scouting out huckleberry fields for the annual berry party, he was horrified to find stakes set up with “No Trespassing” notices. The “evil days” had come: pickers had to pay for the privilege of gathering wild fruits; huckleberries were being butchered and sold like beefsteak.75

  But no one cared. All that mattered was the trans-Atlantic telegraph. It arrived in Concord on August 5, and on August 16, when Queen Victoria used it to congratulate President Buchanan, towns all across America erupted in celebration. In Concord bells pealed merrily, pillars were wreathed, banners were hung, houses were lit up for block parties—one neighbor even fired off a cannon—and the fireworks were splendid. It was perfectly sublime, inspiring, an emanation from the Deity—unless you were Thoreau.76 Of course the telegraph was important, he snarled, but what was the real meaning of it? Not how many blasted guns were fired or what each and every little town had done to celebrate. The world was ruled by cliques who filled the news with “a tissue of trifles and crudities,” ignoring what really mattered. Things had reached a tipping point, but no one else seemed to notice. It even got personal: when someone shot the summer ducks he had befriended, Thoreau took it hard. Those ducks had belonged to everyone, to Thoreau just as much as her, “but it was considered of more importance that Mrs. —— should taste the flavor of them dead than that I should enjoy the beauty of them alive.”77 Wherever Thoreau looked that summer, from village to mountain to river, he saw the commons under assault.

  He made one more excursion, for he had not forgotten the Cape Cod carpenter’s remark that no beach equaled the outer banks of Cape Ann. So he reconvened the “knights of umbrella and bundle”: on September 21, Thoreau and Ellery Channing visited John Russell in Salem, who took them botanizing in Marblehead. The next day the knights walked from Russell’s house to Gloucester, sounding out the “musical” sands near Manchester—the beach indeed squeaked, like waxing a table—and dined on ship bread and herring in a salt marsh while watching the stars come out. Next morning they cut south to the beach and followed it all the way around the Cape in a long day’s circle back to Gloucester, nooning on the outermost point of Cape Ann facing the rocky reefs of the “Salvages,” by which, reasoned Thoreau, early navigators must have set their course. At sundown they boiled tea over a bayberry fire in a field of big round boulders and watched the moonrise—“she was the biggest boulder of them all”—then got lost in the moonlight on their way back to Gloucester. Next day Thoreau examined the curiosities in Salem’s East India Marine Hall—lynx pelts, a fossil turtle, a British sword abandoned during the Concord fight. It had been an “interesting” walk, but no more. At least he had reconnected with the elusive Channing, that troublesome “creature of moods.”78

  It was time to reconnect with Ricketson, too, who was pining for a visit. Late in November 1858, the peripatetic Cholmondeley wrote out of the blue that he was in Montreal and heading south, planning to winter in the West Indies and hoping Thoreau would come along. On December 7, Thoreau brought the English gentleman-adventurer along for a visit with Ricketson. The three sat up late in the Shanty talking of English poetry—Gray, Tennyson, Wordsworth—and for two days alternated walks in the dull, cold drizzle with fireside talks “of mankind and his relationship here and hereafter” before returning to Concord on December 10.79 Later
that winter Cholmondeley indeed headed south, but without Thoreau. He made it no farther than Virginia, where he abandoned his plans to travel—anywhere, ever again, he told Thoreau on his return. Though their correspondence continued, it was their last conversation. “He is a good soul,” Thoreau wrote to Ricketson. “I am afraid that I did not sufficiently recognize him.”80

  Thoreau recorded none of these visits in his Journal. There the hidden, interior Thoreau was busy writing the first canto of “Wild Fruits”: “Autumnal Tints,” his passionate meditation on the creation and perception of beauty in the shared human and natural world. While few could claim material wealth, this spiritual wealth was open to all, “equally distributed on the Common,” an October festival in which every tree was a liberty pole of a thousand bright flags—a gala instituted by the town’s fathers, who had planted those straggling bean-pole saplings up and down the streets. A generation later, they had grown up to give the people a festival of beauty, a living institution.81 Once the leaves had fallen, Thoreau sketched notes for a second essay, “November Lights,” on “the hundred silvery lights” reflected from twigs, from leather-brown leaves, from water and windows. Every season brought its unique phases of beauty. What others overlooked, Thoreau reclaimed: “Brown is the color for me,” he exulted, “the color of our coats and our daily lives, the color of the poor man’s loaf,” the color of earth, “the great leopard mother,” lying with “her flanks to the sun.”82

  Channing complained this fall of Thoreau’s new pedantry, a “dry rot” consuming him.83 But in this hidden molten core Thoreau was fusing and transforming his accumulated years of scientific study into a new kind of instrument, a musical instrument, where every object was a key that, struck, resonated across hidden chambers of memory and meaning. He called it his “Kalendar,” but it was far more: a symphonic rotation capable of fusing and igniting a lifetime’s immersion in a single, beloved, deeply known New England village. In his youth Thoreau had imagined writing “a poem to be called Concord”; now, on his worn green writing desk, that great poem was taking shape.84

  The problem was how to be heard when nearly everything he wrote had been rejected, ignored, or censored. While his outer self was professional—dry and workmanlike—in private he was incandescent, phosphorescing in the dark like a stick of Maine foxfire. When he identified a new species of fish, in public he proudly presented it to his scientific colleagues, who duly recognized him while they argued over its taxonomy. But in private he wrote in awe of “those little striped breams poised in Walden’s glaucous water,” unseen since Tahatawan paddled his canoe on those same waters. Walden was wild again, and America was young again. But how could he get beyond mere description? He must poise his thought “there by its side and try to think like a bream for a moment.” He thought of jewels, music, poetry, beauty, the mystery of life: “The bream, appreciated, floats in the pond as the centre of the system, another image of God.” He must convey what mattered most: the bream as “a living contemporary, a provoking mystery.”85

  Thus when Lowell deleted his attribution of souls to trees, Thoreau felt it as nothing less than an existential threat. “Freedom of speech!” he howled in his Journal. “It hath not entered into your hearts to conceive what those words mean.” The alleged freedom of church, state, school, magazine, was “the freedom of a prison-yard.” Look at the popular magazines—“I have dealt with two or three the most liberal of them. They are afraid to print a whole sentence, a round sentence, a free-spoken sentence.”86 Amid the Panic of 1857, the graffiti and the litter, hotels erected on sacred mountaintops, laughter that mocked Polis and Maungwudaus, “No Trespassing” signs on the town’s ancient commons, newspapers trivializing the most historical events—where and how could Thoreau communicate his urgent call to true freedom?

  · · ·

  The night of January 10, 1859, a cold snap cracked the ground open with explosions that jarred the house. Next morning, Henry checked the thermometer on his way out the door: twenty below at 6:00 a.m. He was en route to Cambridge, having been summoned to attest to Barzillai Frost’s will. The train was full of talk about the strange cracking of the ground. Henry took note. His thoughts must have been somber: three years before, Henry and his father had witnessed Frost’s last will and testament. Now the reverend had succumbed to consumption, and Henry was doing this work alone because consumption was taking his father, too. Two days later, he wrote Harry Blake to postpone his lecture in Worcester: John Thoreau was too weak to join the family downstairs. Even a brief trip was out of the question, as Henry dedicated himself to nursing his father. For a time John hoped to see another spring, but toward the end of January, when it became clear his hope was vain, he reconciled himself to death and took leave of his family—several times, it turned out, until he was expressing impatience at the delay. When the end finally came, they were clustered around his bed, attending closely, and he was gone “almost before we were aware of it.” His surviving son mounted the stairs to the attic, turned to a clean page in his Journal, and wrote across the center:

  Feb. 3 Five minutes before 3 p.m., Father died.87

  Of all Henry’s friends, the only one who had taken the time to know his father was Daniel Ricketson. Henry mailed him a copy of his father’s obituary, and Ricketson immediately returned warm words of consolation. John Thoreau had been “a real embodiment of honest virtue, as well as a true gentleman of the old school” who reminded him of his own father: “Both bore upon their countenances the impress of care and sorrow, a revelation of the experiences of life, written in the most legible characters.”88 Thoreau responded with a eulogy: his father had been an artisan—almost an artist—who always studied how to make a good article rather than sell a poorer one for ready gain, “as if he labored for a higher end.” No one, he added in his Journal, knew Concord’s history and people better than his father, who had been part of it for more than fifty years. “He belonged in a peculiar sense to the village street; loved to sit in the shops or at the post-office and read the daily papers.” Everyone else had come later, or kept more aloof. It occurred to Henry that of the four who had signed Reverend Frost’s will, he alone was still alive. “How swiftly, at last, but unnoticed, a generation passes away!”89

  With this thought, Henry’s letter to Ricketson drew to a close, but in his Journal he wrote on, for by some obscure link his father’s death called up the deaths of American Indians. Henry rose up in indignation, bemoaning the California gold diggers who shot an Indian “as a wild beast” and the inhumanity of historians who were every bit as lethal, only wielding “a pen instead of a rifle.” These intertwined losses felt deeply personal. “I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives,” he continued. “Each such experience is an assault on our vital source.” His only defense was to write and keep writing: sentences might lie “dead” at first, but “when all are arranged, some life and color will be reflected on them from the mature and successful lines,” the lines that “pulsate with fresh life.” Slowly the writer breathes life into the “rubblestone and foundation” of his first gropings, finds his way to his theme to “make one pertinent and just observation.” His writing must awaken the dying, give them voice, call the sleepers awake. In March he picked up the usual late-winter crop of “stone fruit”— newly exposed arrowheads—“humanity inscribed on the face of the earth,” footprints—no, he corrected himself, “rather a mindprint,—left everywhere” of the oldest man.90

  Objects as mindprints. Thoreau’s observations were linking up. In April he drafted a ringing condemnation of the fur trade, a “pitiful business” run by “famous companies which enjoy a profitable monopoly and control a large portion of the earth’s surface,” ferreting out small animals for fashionable hats and the luxurious trimmings of judicial robes, leaving their “bare red carcasses on the banks of the streams throughout all British America.” Tahatawan and Polis, Maine’s woods and Concord’s plowed fields,
the trade in tortoiseshell and animal skins—“in such a snarl and contamination do we live that it is almost impossible to keep one’s skirts clean.” Why, even “our sugar and cotton are stolen from the slave.” When he took up a handful of soil, he found it ash-colored from Indian fires with pieces of campfire coal still visible: “We do literally plow up the hearths of a people and plant in their ashes.”91 Thoreau was a haunted man. He and everyone he knew were all implicated: the evil of slavery, the damnation of the Indian, the global traffic in animal parts, the debasement of nature, the enclosure of the ancient commons—the threads of the modern global economy were spinning him and everyone around him into a dehumanizing web of destruction. Tahatawan’s arrow, planted in his pocket twenty-two years before, was bearing fruit, in the most ominous way.

  · · ·

  How did Thoreau find time to write at all? His father’s death meant he was now head of the household. The man without property suddenly had a net worth of $5,500, with legal responsibility for his mother, her sisters Louisa and Sophia Dunbar, and his sister Sophia. He was also in charge of the family graphite business: submitting bills, dunning for late payments, paying employees and contractors, managing a constant flow of orders, inquiries, and bills, which he flipped over to scribble drafts of Wild Fruits. He purchased and studied The Business Man’s Assistant and Legal Guide, and he sought improvements to the industrial process. Following his assistant Warren Miles’s suggestion, he walked the woods in Acton searching for a millstone. Stones, thought Miles, would be better than the iron balls they used. Thoreau found a good one, tried it out, and agreed.92