“You’ve got to understand,” he explained, “I live twenty floors up, a closed-in world. By day I travel down an elevator, walk three hundred and eight steps to a subway, emerge into the light, walk exactly five hundred and four steps to a subway, emerge into the light, walk exactly five hundred and twenty-nine steps to a door, and enter into my office building for the next eight to ten hours. At night I read Thoreau. I read a few lines and daydream. Read a few more and dream some more. It’s a way of traveling. And sometimes I come here, just to make sure it’s all real.”
One day at the pond I met a woman who was a member of the Libertarian party. She claimed, perhaps with some justification, that Thoreau was the patron saint of libertarianism.
“He was the first anarchist in the best sense of the word,” she said. “No rules need apply. Each to his or her own. And I agree.”
I met a Catholic priest at the pond one day who said that he believed Thoreau was a deeply religious man even though he never attended church. “He was a catholic in the original sense of the word—that is to say, he was universal in his thinking, accepting all paths.”
Once I met a man in a headband wearing a fringed deerskin jacket. He said he was part Cherokee and that Thoreau was the only white man in nineteenth-century America who understood the native American. “All his life Henry collected information on Indians. He lived like an Indian. He should have been born four hundred years earlier in Concord. People then wouldn’t have thought he was so weird. He was a man out of his time. That’s all.”
One Saturday I went to Walden with a band of people led by Roland Robbins, the man who, in the 1940s, had discovered the site of Thoreau’s cabin. Most of the ten or twelve people with Roland were devoted Thoreauvians of one sort or another, and when we reached the house site we found other pilgrims there, trooping through the oaks and pines as to a religious shrine. Some of them carried stones they had brought from other parts of the globe. They placed the stones on a cairn near the house site in memory of the man who had lived there, following a tradition that had begun at this spot in the late nineteenth century. Once, years ago, the state had declared the cairn an eyesore. Backhoes came and hauled away the rocks. But day by day they began to reappear, and in the end the authorities gave up. The mound of stones is now some ten yards across and about three or four feet high.
By November of 1845 Henry Thoreau had been living at Walden Pond for four months. The fogs of autumn had come, the leaves had been stripped from the trees, and the woods around him had turned a somber brown. Waterfowl began to appear in the skies above the pond and over the river to the west of his cabin. Black ducks and teal whistled by, and he heard the clamor of a solitary goose circling through the fog, “seeking its mate,” as he wrote. Hunters appeared at the pond and along the river, and for hours that fall Henry watched the swimming ducks tack back and forth in little flocks, keeping in the middle of Walden Pond, away from the range of the guns. A loon dropped into the pond, laughing and whinnying. Henry studied it, recorded its behavior, and subsequently wrote about it in Walden. He kept his journal, and as always he read deeply. He delved into Carlyle, he studied Ariosto, read his Homer and Aeschylus and Hallam’s history of the literature of Europe, which inspired him to read Abelard and Heloise, Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, and Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato.
He was Henry the inscrutable—the practical man who made his own lime, plastered his own cottage walls, and cut his own firewood; the scholar who filled his notebooks with ideas and thoughts on his readings; the journal writer who kept track of squirrels and snowstorms and examined the lives of the human inhabitants of his woodland, the Irish shantymen, the French-Canadian woodcutter Therien, and the escaped slaves who passed through Concord. Henry was forever the enigma, the naturalist, the loner, the acerbic dinner guest, the friend of children, the foe of the established. He did not pay his poll tax; he did not join the church; he did not even join the various transcendental communities his friends belonged to. And he was, finally, Henry the bachelor, the unmarried man.
Bachelorhood was perhaps not much of an issue in the nineteenth century, but twentieth-century man that I am, I could not help finding this aspect of Henry’s life mysterious. Although he had many women friends and confided in them readily, it appears that he never developed a long-standing, intimate relationship with a woman. And yet he did propose marriage once, although, curiously enough, the woman to whom he chose to offer his hand was his brother’s girl friend, as if marriage should be kept within the immediate family; and he was nothing if not a good family man, loyal to the end. In fact, he never really left home.
In the summer of 1839 Ellen Sewall came into Concord, the daughter of Edmund Sewall, whose son had been attending the Thoreau brothers’ school and living at the Thoreaus’ boardinghouse. Photographs of Ellen Sewall show a serene, half-smiling, contented woman with intelligent eyes and a strong, beautiful face. She was soon the center of attention at parties and the object of the affection of at least one other unattached gentleman in the village. But the Thoreau brothers took up most of her time. The three of them went boating together; they took walks; they went berrying and riding. Henry took Ellen to see a giraffe that had been brought to Concord by a touring circus. He also took her out alone in his boat. In fact the only thing he would not consent to do with her was go to church. She asked him to accompany her one day and, even though by this time it was clear that he was falling in love with her and would welcome almost any excuse to be near her, he refused. He knew where his priorities lay.
Ellen was in town for a mere two weeks that summer—the same summer Henry and John went on their trip on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. Just after they got back, John went off to Scituate to visit Ellen; Henry stayed home. John’s visit was a success, and it appeared that he had gained the upper hand in the courtship. Henry wrote obscure passages about love in his journal, but there was no hint of jealousy or anger toward his beloved brother.
At Christmas that same year John went off again to visit Ellen in Scituate. Henry went with him this time and, on returning, to Concord, the brothers matched each other with letters and gifts. John sent her opals and books. Henry sent poems. He also sent her a lecture against tea and coffee.
Ellen came back to Concord the next summer, 1840, and Henry again managed to take her rowing alone. He recorded the incident in his journal on June 19. It was a lovely day. Ellen sat in the stern, and Henry sat amidships, facing her. Her figure broke into the line of the sky, creating a beautiful image. “So might our lives be picturesque,” Henry wrote.
There was heat lightning that night. In the streets the lowing of the cows seemed to Henry to have a friendly, comfortable aspect. The voice of the whippoorwill drifted across the fields and mingled with the sounds of the cows. The woods and moonlight wooed him. Henry Thoreau was in love.
But John, three years older and the more sociable of the two, went back to Scituate for a visit, accompanied, as always, by Ellen’s watchful Aunt Prudence, who was also a boarder at the Thoreaus’. They walked the beach one day; by good fortune Aunt Prudence became tired and sat down on a rock to rest. As soon as they were out of earshot, John began to plead his case. He asked Ellen to marry him, and somewhat taken aback, she accepted. They returned to the house, but after talking to her mother, Ellen realized she had made a mistake. She told John she had changed her mind. Ellen’s father was a Unitarian minister, and the Thoreau brothers were known transcendentalists and far too extreme in their views for her father to be comfortable with either of them.
Some Thoreau scholars have suggested that Ellen actually loved Henry, not John. Some have suggested that she truly loved John but could not defy her father’s will. Whatever the case, back in Concord, Henry seemed elated. “The night is spangled with fresh stars,” he wrote, meaning, some believe, that he knew of Ellen’s rejection and thought that the way was cleared for him.
Henry wrote her a letter proposing marriage. He made a draft of it in his journal and the
re spoke of the “sun of our love.” But Ellen wrote her father telling him of the proposal and was advised—ordered perhaps—to write “Mr. Thoreau” a short, explicit, and cold letter telling him that she could not marry him.
The romance was over. It was November. The ducks swept across the wintering skies, the guns of hunters sounded. The woods grew somber, the blue waters of Walden Pond turned gray. He slept alone and would forever.
8
The Green Man
AT DAWN on the tenth of December a stag crossed the meadow below my cottage and disappeared into the woods beyond the wall.
It had first snowed that year in late November, a light dusting that lingered in the shaded corners and brought up the color in the lion-brown grasses, the stone walls, and the bark of the hickories. Another snow came a few days later, a heavier one that covered the meadow and the woodland floor. Little flocks of sparrows and juncos passed through, feeding on the exposed weed stalks that still remained above the snow. Then the rains returned, a slow misty drizzle, and after that a cold spell that froze the world into a long sheet of thin ice.
I was up before dawn on the tenth, daydreaming at the window, when I heard the crash of breaking ice in the woods. I looked up just in time to see a full-grown buck with a great rack of antlers clear the wall on the east side of my land, bound across the meadow, and effortlessly sail over the stone wall on the southwest side of the clearing. It was moving fast, but I could see its rich brown eyes and its woods-colored coat and thick, healthy fur. I opened the door and went out onto my terrace. I could hear more noise from the old field north of my property, and I saw two large dogs there, tongues lolling and noses to the ground.
These might have been someone’s pets, but here, in the icy December forest, they had been transformed into primitive hunting canines, recent memories of warm houses and rugs extinguished within them. They were both mongrels, thick-furred and heavily infused with the genes of German shepherd, very wolflike in appearance, and far larger and more dangerous looking than the coyotes I had seen in the area. Without thinking I grabbed a stick, placed myself in their path, and shouted at them. They pulled up abruptly, stared at me for a second or two, and then turned tail and ran.
On certain days on the ridge it would seem to me that the normal direction of the flow of time had gotten stalled out, or run backward, or become confused. This was one of those days. Everything that morning seemed brown and wild—the deer, the landscape, the dogs, the icy, snow-covered meadow, and the misty woodland sky. Just after the deer disappeared into the woods, a group of crows that had been roosting in the trees beyond the wall rose and flew out over the clearing, cawing. They settled on some exposed branches not far from me. Except for the dogs it was a vision of primitive America.
The air was still, the traffic of the nearby commuters was quiet, and I seemed to be alone on the ridge a thousand miles from civilization. I walked back toward the hemlock grove following the walls constructed here by some forgotten landholder in the years when all was orchard on the hill, save for the hemlock stand. Just southwest of the hemlocks was the Indian burial ground where the last of the Pawtucket people lay. Residents of the town used to say that a few of the Indians refused to give up even after they were dead and buried, and that one in particular continued to plague the colonial farmers along the ridge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He used to steal fruit and raid barns. Sometimes farmers would see him, spear in hand, standing naked at the edge of a field. On one occasion the locals organized a manhunt to catch him, but he disappeared into the thickets in one of the hollows and they couldn’t root him out. His raids became fewer and fewer after the manhunt, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, when apple growing was at its height in the valley around the ridge, he disappeared for good.
A wall separates my land from the land that belongs to the farmer who lives over the hill. That still morning, just beyond that wall, barely visible on the sheet of ice, I saw what I thought was a human footprint. There was another a few feet beyond. I stepped forward and broke through the ice, took a few more steps following the track, breaking through each time I moved. The prints were not very clear. They were the size of a human foot, but they seemed slightly wider, and the trail was erratic. They would turn left or right, zigzag oddly, circle back, and then continue on toward the hemlock grove. They seemed to disappear completely at one point, and I figured I had lost them. But then fifty yards farther on I saw them again. They entered the hemlock grove and then disappeared altogether.
I went under the trees and stood there for a few minutes. The crows that had gathered when the stag crossed the clearing began calling loudly again just outside the hemlocks, cawing periodically and making deep croaking noises. The resident porcupine was back. I could see its droppings and a few quills under one of the hemlocks, and high up in the trees the rounded shape of its body. It had spent last winter in a single large tree in the grove and now it had returned. A squirrel materialized out of one of the nearby oak trees and dashed wildly across the canopy of the forest. A little flight of chickadees and titmice moved through the woods. I heard a flock of winter finches go by above the trees. Other than these natural passages of a winter day the grove was empty. And yet I felt there was something nearby. I went back and looked at the footprints outside the stand of hemlocks. The tracks were barely perceptible, and, unless they had been made when the ice crust was thicker, whoever made them should have broken through the ice. I was getting cold in the woods, and it was clear that whatever had made the tracks was not going to reveal itself to me that day, so I went back to my cottage, put another log in the wood stove, and made some more coffee.
I had been reading my father’s journal that morning, and I was thinking about him while I was in the hemlocks. He was something of a trickster and had a number of routines that my friends and I used to enjoy. One was his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde act, in which he would approach with his hand extended in greeting and then spin around, ram the brim of his hat down, and reappear as Mr. Hyde, snarling and growling, his fingers crooked like claws. Even though I had seen this trick many times, I was always a little shocked, frightened even, by the horrific energy of Mr. Hyde and my father’s ability to transform himself so thoroughly.
Another one of his tricks involved bears. He had learned to make an exact replica of a bear track in sand or soft soil by dragging the palm of his hand backward a few inches and then making the indentation of claws with his fingers. Once he terrorized one of his city friends who was visiting us at a summer place we had on a lake in northern Vermont. My father forged bear tracks on a sandy beach on the other side of the lake, and later he brought his friend to the spot in the canoe and “discovered” the tracks. He went off to look for the bear, leaving the poor man shaking in the canoe. Then my father set up a horrid growling in the woods, raced out of the forest, and pushed off in the canoe as if the bear were hot on his tracks.
This transformation from man to bear was not so far-fetched. The Eastern Woodland Indians used to say that the bear was their instructor and guide, a half-human intermediary between the spirit world and the world of human affairs. A thousand years ago, according to Pawtucket legend, there dwelt on the ridge behind my cottage a shaman who could change at will from bear to man. The local folklore of the Yankee farmers who supplanted the Pawtuckets holds that it was this being who was killed in the hemlock grove behind my house in 1811.
Such legends made me wonder, of course, about the origin of the curious footprints. But there were other explanations, perhaps more likely. The most logical was that Prince Rudolph had been around. Of all the people in the community, save the hunters who would patrol the meadows along Beaver Brook, he was the only one who spent any time in the forest. Furthermore, I had not seen Rudolph’s fire in a few weeks, and, since the ridge was one of the last large undeveloped tracts in the town, it would not have been surprising if he had set up camp nearby. I had begun to feel a certain communion with Rudolph with th
e onset of winter. Living close to the edge of cold myself, I had come to appreciate the precarious nature of his existence.
A week or so after he disappeared from the exit-ramp site where he usually camped, I went to the police station to ask about him. The dispatcher at the desk was suspicious and wanted to know the purpose of my visit. Before he would tell me anything, I had to give my name, address, reason for inquiry, occupation.
“You his lawyer?” he asked.
“No, I’m just curious.”
“What are you, his lawyer?” he repeated.
“No,” I said.
“What do you want to know about him for?”
I began to worry that something nasty had happened to Rudolph. “Is he all right?” I asked.
“What are you, a relative or something?”
“No, I’m just curious about him. I haven’t seen him around in a few weeks. Is he all right?”
“So why are you curious?”
I caught the drift and gave the answer he wanted. “I’m a journalist doing a story for the Christian Science Monitor on the homeless,” I said. It seemed to satisfy him.
Another policeman was standing behind the desk. The dispatcher turned and repeated my occupation. The policeman nodded.
“Wants to know about that bum by the highway,” the dispatcher said.
The policeman was an easygoing, heavyset man whom I had seen around town.
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