After the divorce she began to look for work. She had a high school degree; she had worked for a while in a garden center and as a teacher’s aide in her children’s school, and she had held a variety of summer jobs, none of which gave her any skills. She did have a high degree of native intelligence, however, and was an avid reader, and when she applied for a secretarial job at Digital she got it, even though she barely passed her typing test.
Six months later she was promoted to a higher-paying job. After a year she applied for another job within the company and got that, too. Step by step she moved up until she was put in charge of a small promotional group, with a staff, a high salary, and a semiprivate office.
“My only complaint about this company,” she said, “is that the people on the lunchtime volleyball teams are getting younger and younger, and I can’t keep up with them anymore.”
Whenever you talk to anyone about Digital, reference will be made to a man known as “Kenny” or “Uncle Kenny.” Kenny is Kenneth H. Olsen, founder and chief executive officer of the Digital Equipment Corporation. I happen to work in the town where Uncle Kenny lives, and sometimes in autumn and spring I see him out in front of his substantial but unpretentious home, raking leaves in his shirtsleeves or laboring behind a clunky lawn mower. He shops at the local grocery store. Sometimes I see him there as well, a vague look in his eyes, the lower buttons of his shirt undone, humbly pushing a cart down the aisles, checking the price on each package. Uncle Kenny is, in the view of his employees, a humane, ethical man. By his very nature, his concern for his people, his customers, and his product, he keeps his employees loyal. Uncle Kenny does not drink. He does not approve of drinking, will not allow liquor to be served at Digital social functions. Uncle Kenny believes in keeping his workers happy. He gives them turkeys at Thanksgiving, free dental care, free trips for their children to local amusement parks, as well as all the usual fringe benefits. Uncle Kenny is shy and somewhat bumbling. Once at a Digital Christmas party a friend of mine, who had just started working for the company, was cleaning off a table when a large man passed along the table picking up the scraps and eating them. She turned to him and offered him a wheel of cheese to take home, which he refused.
“Take it,” she said. “This is Christmas.”
Somewhat embarrassed, he carried it off. My friend turned and saw her boss standing in a nearby doorway, doubled over with laughter.
“Don’t you know who that is?” he asked. “That’s Kenny Olsen.”
Not long after, Kenny himself reappeared in the room, sought out my friend, shook her hand, and told her that the cheese was the best Christmas present he could possibly have received.
Kenny cares. “Do it right,” he tells his workers, even if it means disobeying your immediate boss. “Do it right.” He rakes his own leaves, is kind to his workers, bestows gifts, is deeply religious. He is also a consummate businessman, ruthless if necessary, dogged, smart, and a skilled manager of people and machines.
Uncle Kenny made his billions by designing minicomputers specifically for engineers and scientists. Before Kenny came along, all computers were immense workhorses stabled in specialized centers and curried only by a few experts. Kenny’s small, relatively inexpensive machines gave the computer to the people. Starting with a mere $70,000, in a section of a crumbling woolen mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, he expanded his small company over a twenty-year period into a multibillion-dollar operation. He did this through a combination of striking the right markets at the right time, using unorthodox management techniques, and displaying a willingness to change course whenever it was necessary—not after it was too late. In the parlance of the business community, he never succumbed to what is known as “founder’s disease.” He learned early on to delegate responsibility, and he decentralized his company. But Uncle Kenny not only transformed the computer industry with his innovations; he also has had a hand in transforming the landscape of eastern Massachusetts. Digital and its many imitators and competitors have been steadily developing some of the last open space in the former farmland and forest just beyond the suburbs of Boston, especially along the major highways.
One wouldn’t want to take the analogy too far, but there are certain similarities between Kenny Olsen and Henry Thoreau. Both involved themselves with the primary calculation and communication instrument of their age—Uncle Kenny with the computer, Henry Thoreau with the pencil. For all his poetry and mysticism, Henry had an exacting, scientific mind. For years, later in his life, he made his living as a surveyor, and his measurements were so precise they are still used today in Concord. During the mid-nineteenth century the Thoreau pencil became one of the best-known pencils in the United States, thanks in part to Henry’s inventiveness.
Henry’s father, who ran the family business, was never a rich man. He made do with a variety of small enterprises before he ended up making pencils in Concord in the 1830s. Henry’s Uncle Charles had discovered a good source of plumbago, used in making pencil leads, and because of this discovery, and in spite of a certain amount of incompetence in business affairs, the company began to expand. Periodically Henry would work in the family business, and every time he did, he would make some innovation that would improve production. American pencils at the time were inferior to those imported from Europe, especially the German models. American pencil lead was fabricated with plumbago, wax, and glue, and made an irregular, scratchy line. In 1838 Henry did some research and discovered that German pencils were manufactured with Bavarian clay, which was already being imported into Massachusetts. He changed the formulation of the lead and then designed a new grinding mill to produce a fine graphite. The result was a vastly improved American pencil, and the Thoreau family business prospered.
During the winter of 1843–44 Henry once again became involved with the pencil business. He experimented with a new system of baking the graphite and German clay; he invented a machine to cut the graphite, and he designed the pencil so that the wood could be drilled out and the cut lead rammed through the drilled hole. He also developed different grades of lead—hard line for drafting scientific and engineering work, soft line for art. He became obsessed with pencils and pencil-making machinery that winter. At night he dreamed of new pencil machines. But his obsession was comprehensible; he may have been trying to forget the events that had taken place in winter two years earlier.
On January 1, 1841, Henry’s brother, John, was stropping his razor when the blade slipped and cut a nick in the ring finger of his left hand. The wound bled a little, but John bound it up and thought nothing more about it. Later in the week he felt pain in the finger and removed the bandage to look at the cut. It did not seem to be healing properly, so John went to the doctor, who dressed the finger and sent him home. On the way back to the house John felt a sharp pain, not just in his wounded finger but over his whole body. He had to stop on the way, and in fact barely made it home. He went to bed and woke up the next day with a tightness in his jaw muscles. Later that night he was seized with convulsions. Pain shot through his body, and his muscles tightened. The Thoreaus called a doctor from Boston, who arrived in due course, examined John, and announced—one presumes with grave intonation—that nothing could be done: John had lockjaw and would soon die a painful death.
“Is there no hope?” John asked.
“None,” the doctor replied.
John was resigned. “The cup that my Father gives me,” he said, “shall I not drink it?”
Henry was not so resigned. The Thoreau family was closely knit. Of the four Thoreau children none ever really left home, and none ever married, and the prospect of losing one of the family sent the household into shock. But it was Henry who rose to the occasion.
In early January that year, shortly after John cut his finger, the wind had shifted around to the south, the weather warmed, and the world began to thaw. Under the south winds the snows melted back from the meadows, bees flew from their hives, and little flights of mayflies hovered over the open patches
of ground in the forest. Soldier beetles appeared on the south-facing trunks of trees, and plants were putting out leaves. Life seemed to be returning; the world was turned upside down, the seasons reversed. Henry was invigorated. “I derive real strength from the scent of the gale wafted over the naked ground,” he wrote. He was uplifted; the earth was his mother, he wrote.
But indoors, sequestered now in his bedroom, the shades drawn against the light, John was dying. His mother and sisters helped John in those last days, but it was Henry who served as the main caretaker. He became an untiring nurse, sitting at John’s bedside, talking to him and reading, shepherding him through his frequent periods of delirium. Henry was at his bedside when finally, at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, ten days after he had cut his finger, John died.
In the hours before his death the two brothers talked together quietly in the darkened room. Light commonly sends victims of lockjaw into convulsions, so the curtains would have been drawn against the pale winter sun. They spoke softly together of death and the other side, and then, in the hour before he died, a slow, broad smile spread across John’s face. Even in his anguish, Henry could not help but return the smile, and in this manner the two parted company, smiling face to face.
What, one wonders, was there to smile about in so dark an hour? Was the smile caused by the spreading stiffness of lockjaw pulling back the lips in a final death grimace? Or was it knowledge of something on the other shore, something seen by the two brothers in the high, windy spaces of the White Mountains at the culmination of their Concord and Merrimack river trip—some radiance discovered?
Whatever they saw, whatever the two brothers shared in that last hour, it was no consolation. The family mourned openly, but Henry went about the house with a marked serenity and passivity that the family may at first have taken for strength. Then the calmness deepened into near catatonia. Henry sat unmoving, staring at nothing, saying nothing, barely eating. His sisters led him outdoors, trying to bring him out of this state, but ten days later he too appeared to be dying.
As in life, he followed the path of his brother. Henry’s jaws stiffened, the muscles tightened, and lockjaw—or at least all the symptoms of lockjaw—set in. The family called the doctor again. He could find no cut, no cause; but it was clear that Henry was gravely ill, and once again they began to wait for death. Two days later Henry recovered slightly; but then that night the family brought him more dark news. Henry was fond of children, would spend hours entertaining them with projects, games, and stories. On the night of the twenty-fourth of January one of his favorites, little Waldo Emerson, the child of Henry’s good friends Lidian and Ralph, came down with scarlet fever. Three days after Henry received word of his illness the boy was dead.
It was the darkest of winters. Henry stayed indoors in his room. His journals dried up; his excursions into nature ceased; his singing could not be heard; he no longer danced in his singular style. Day after day that winter he remained secluded, depressed, and silent. Then slowly, toward the end of February, signs of recovery began to appear. He reopened his journal. “I am like a feather floating in the atmosphere; on every side is depth unfathomable,” he wrote. By March he was writing regularly again. “I live in the perpetual verdure of the globe. I die in the annual decay of nature.” And then on March 13: “The sad memory of departed friends is soon encrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as their monuments are overgrown with moss. Nature doth kindly heal every wound.”
The metaphor of natural cycles entered into his writings. He saw renewal all around him, death accompanied by rebirth, and by spring the great unifying theme of Walden, the eternal cycle of the seasons, had begun to emerge. It was as if he himself had died with his brother and been reborn. The next six months were a productive period for Henry. For the first time—according to critics, at least—he wrote with a style that was uniquely his own, addressing themes that would concern him for the rest of his life.
Nevertheless, he would die a little every winter. He was depressed and sick again the winter after his brother’s death, and it is little wonder that in the following winter—the winter of 1843–44—he would throw himself into his family’s pencil business. Obsession grants forgetfulness. In some ways the rest of his life was a quest for forgetfulness—either that or a memorial.
There was a snowstorm in New England on the one hundred and forty-fifth anniversary of John Thoreau’s death, a soft, long fall that piled up on the pine boughs and made fantastic shapes on the rock walls in the woods behind my cottage. The next few days were bitter cold and windy, with hard little plumes of sheared snow curling off the walls and streaming down across the open fields. Late in the afternoon, after the wind dropped, I went for a long ski on the solidly frozen Beaver Brook. I crossed the road, climbed over an old barbed wire fence, and skied down through a sloping old hay field where, some years ago, a small herd of heifers used to graze. The field had grown up in recent years, with multiflora rose, dogwoods, and other open-ground species. Their thorny, brittle stems pierced the snow and stretched their shadows in the late-afternoon light. Beneath the snow and the ice on the brook, somewhere unseen, life continued: fish swam and fed, green plants still wafted in the slow currents, and a few slow-moving, cold-dulled aquatic insects moved here and there. But above, in the open air, the world seemed dead.
I skied for a mile or so down the brook and then began to climb through a series of sloping fields on the other side of the valley. Here, too, the fields had been abandoned. There was an orchard on the north slope, and a small woods of young pines and oaks was taking over another pasture that had once belonged to a farm located in the valley beyond the hill.
By now the sun had set and the sky was darkening, but there was still enough light to reveal the landscape that stretched to the east. This was a Saturday evening; the traffic on Route 495 was light, and the world around me was strangely silent. Behind me, to the west, in the red sky I could see the ridge where my little cottage was situated. Below were the hay fields of the abandoned farms, the wide flood plain of Beaver Brook, and the fields and orchards of the farm I had just crossed.
This particular farm offered one of the more pleasing landscapes in the region. I used to walk there often, but for some reason I could never warm to the place, in spite of its beauty. There was something strangely lonely and ominous about the land, some vague cloud that hung over it. I couldn’t understand why I was so uncomfortable there, but then a few years ago I received a letter from a woman who had grown up on the farm. She told me that long after her family had left the place, after the house and barn had been torn down by the land developer who purchased the property, she used to come back and tend the little flower beds that she and her mother had worked while she was growing up. “After they discovered the body,” she wrote, “I haven’t been able to go back. Something changed.” It seems that the corpse of a murder victim had been found in the foundation of the house.
The wind came up once the sun dropped, a chill, bitter spear that shot across the lower fields and skidded up the slopes. I turned my back to it and faced the southeast. Beyond me I could see the light of the old town center, bright and twinkling in the frigid air, but the better part of the view was cut off by the great square Digital building with its cold glare of lights. There were, I presumed, very few people working that Saturday night—a few devoted programmers perhaps, or maybe a cleaning crew—and yet the entire building was illuminated. Unlike the twinkling glimmer of the town, this light gave no warmth. It lit the dark landscape with a hard gleam that reflected off the snow, turning it a lurid green.
“Nothing,” Henry Thoreau wrote, “is so opposed to poetry—as business.”
Weather such as we were having made me worry about Sanferd Benson in his old house in Concord, and Prince Rudolph at the Route 495 cloverleaf. Benson, I presumed, was faring well enough, since he at least had a roof over his head. Prince Rudolph was more of a concern. It was hard for me to believe that an older man, especially o
ne with a taste for alcohol, could survive some of the windy, zero-degree nights we were having, sleeping by a campfire in his overcoat, covered by cardboard boxes and blankets. But periodically I would see Rudolph in town, marching determinedly from his campsite to the local grocery store or back again.
By this time Rudolph would condescend to greet me when we met, and perhaps share a few words, although he was still aloof, as if I were a member of some lower caste of humanity and he was the King of the Road—which in a sense he was. He was one of the most independent people I had ever run across.
I saw him that month on one of those brilliant January days when the sun off the snow is so bright it hurts your eyes.
“Get through last night okay?” I asked him as I overtook him.
“Wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t, would I?”
“Guess not,” I said and began to move on.
“Well, you guessed right. You’re a smart kid, aren’t you.”
I picked up my pace a little; it was clear he was not in a friendly mood. I heard something snort behind me and saw that he had tripped and gone down on his knees in a snowbank. Without thinking, I went back and helped him up by the arm. He smelled of drink.
“Get your hands off me, Jack, I can handle this,” he said. Then almost immediately he changed his stance.
“Oh, hey, I’m sorry,” he said. “Accept my apology, all right?”
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