Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  The idea was not new. Thoreau had dreamed of living in a cabin by a pond ever since his idyllic summer with Wheeler, reading and writing in a shanty overlooking Flint’s Pond—a dream he shared with Margaret Fuller as far back as the autumn of 1841.7 Summerhouses, writer’s shanties, and wilderness retreats were all the rage: in December 1843, even as Thoreau was packing up on Staten Island, his city friends Giles Waldo and William Tappan were packing up to move into a log cabin deep in the upstate New York wilderness. Undeterred by December’s snows, they planned to hunt and live off the land and, as Emerson optimistically wrote Fuller, “in that wild boundless country” find words for their dreams. It didn’t turn out quite that way. The log cabin proved so cold and drafty they couldn’t write at all. Waldo’s feet were frostbitten, and Tappan huddled so close to the fire that he burned his feet and had to find a doctor. Their bold experiment collapsed after a mere six weeks.8 No wonder, wrote Charles Lane, still stinging from the collapse of Fruitlands: “The experiment of a true wilderness life by a white person” could be nothing more than an “interesting dream. He is not born for it; he is not natured for it.” For true progress to the soul, one must “look in some other, some new direction.”9

  Ellery Channing thought he had found that new direction. At the end of April 1845, tired of stewing away in New York City, he laid out six hundred dollars for a farm on Concord’s Punkatasset Hill. That September, he moved in with his family. To his bachelor friend Thoreau, he suggested something similar: “I see nothing for you in this earth but that field which I once christened ‘Briars’; go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you. Eat yourself up; you will eat nobody else, nor anything else.”10 Thoreau talked it over with Emerson. He had found a site on Flint’s Pond, but Flint had denied him permission to build. Now here was another chance. Sometime early in 1845 they shook hands: Thoreau, not Emerson, would build his “poet’s lodge” by Walden’s shore. Thoreau—who no doubt reminded Channing that farms are more easily acquired than gotten rid of—was content to claim nothing more than squatter’s rights. In exchange, he agreed to clear and plant the cultivable land and sell his house back to Emerson, who meanwhile would build his own poet’s lodge high on the cliff. Thoreau obligingly drew up some plans for him, to which Alcott added his own design for a tower.11 There was room enough in the wide woods for each of them to forge his own way.

  While these schemes went forward, Thoreau labored on, finishing up the Texas House and some fresh essays, too. Once again abolitionism was roiling the town, though now the fight was getting personal. Late in November 1844, Samuel Hoar traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, as the official emissary from Massachusetts, charged with lodging a formal protest against South Carolina’s practice of incarcerating free black citizens of Massachusetts who docked in Charleston’s port. Anticipating a peaceful diplomatic mission, he brought his daughter Elizabeth, Thoreau’s friend and a virtual sister to Emerson; she planned to visit family friends. The moment they stepped ashore, lawmakers ordered Hoar to cease his hostile actions and leave immediately. When he refused, Governor Hammond permitted mob violence to escalate until, after a terrifying week, the Hoars were forced bodily into a carriage to a northbound ship. Back home, they told and retold their story of harassment and expulsion until Concord burned with fury. Even the cool Reverend Frost erupted, penning vengeful resolutions “so fiercely redolent of disunion, independency, and Massachusetts dignity, so sadly blood and thunderous” that the committee in charge of the town meeting at first refused to read them aloud.12 Emerson, too, flirted with disunion and darkly meditated retaliation. Though the conservative Hoar tried to tamp down the angry talk, the town’s radicals were quick to seize the moment. The lyceum curators must invite Wendell Phillips for a third time, to give the town some hard truth about slavery and Texas annexation.

  Curator Samuel Barrett agreed, and at the end of February he put Phillips’s name forward to the lyceum. For the third time a Keyes stormed to his feet to protest—this time John Shepard Keyes, Thoreau’s eternal rival and John Keyes’s son, who was determined to carry on his deceased father’s conservative legacy. Keyes was joined by Reverend Frost, still simmering from his humiliation at Phillips’ hands the year before. Keyes and Frost were outvoted, 21 to 15. What happened next was nothing less than a coup: the conservatives—Keyes, Frost, and the lyceum president, Mr. Cheney—all resigned on the spot. The lyceum membership hastily voted in an all-progressive slate of curators: Barrett, Emerson, and Thoreau (who declined). Emerson tore off a scrap of paper and scrawled an urgent invitation to Phillips. Someone rushed it to him in Boston, and five days later, on March 11, Wendell Phillips mounted Concord’s lyceum podium, this time to warn of the danger Texas annexation posed: admitting a new slave state would give proslavery forces a permanent majority in Congress, dashing all hope for the abolition of slavery by legal means. One woman, noted Thoreau, walked five miles through snow to hear Phillips speak. Emerson said he’d “not learned a better lesson in many weeks than last night in a couple of hours.”13

  Twice before, Thoreau had listened to Phillips but kept silent. This third time he spoke, preparing a long and spirited defense of Phillips, which he mailed to the Liberator the next morning and which Garrison published, anonymously, on March 28, 1845. How refreshing, wrote Thoreau, to hear not “‘God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,’ but God dash it into a thousand pieces,” leaving not a single fragment big enough to bear a man who dares not speak his name. The man who could not speak his name was Frederick Douglass, who, as Phillips told his audience, was at that very moment “writing his life, and telling his name, and the name of his master, and the place he ran from.” There in Concord, Thoreau wrote, under the very shadow of the monument to freedom ran the horrified whisper: “‘He had better not!’”14

  What Thoreau liked best in Wendell Phillips was “the freedom and steady wisdom, so rare in the reformer, with which he declared that he was not born to abolish slavery, but to do right.” Back on the crowded streets of New York, Thoreau had asked when the world would learn “that a million men are of no importance compared with one man.”15 In Phillips Thoreau saw his “one man,” righteous and eloquent, who, instead of collating the consensus of the million, deliberates and occupies his own solid moral ground “from which the varying tides of public opinion cannot drive him.” It was easy to give one’s assent to such a man—hadn’t Thoreau just seen most of Concord doing so? But how could one do more? Thoreau didn’t want to merely hear Phillips, waving his approval from the sidelines as the great leader passed by. He wanted to be Phillips, to stand alone before the million with just such dignity, courage, and integrity—to be, in words he would soon write, “a majority of one.”16

  Meanwhile, Thoreau had his own lyceum lecture to finish, two weeks after Phillips’s. His subject, “Concord River,” might seem to escape to nature rather than face the political heat, but Thoreau saw it as a turning toward his larger project, “to do right.” In his view, slavery was not a single cause whose cure would solve everything; rather, it was one symptom of a larger sickness preying on a universe of beings, not all of them human. In the same notebook where he drafted his defenses of Phillips and Douglass, Thoreau also drafted his defense of Musketaquid’s fish, driven out of their home by the Billerica Dam: “Mere shad armed only with innocence—and a just cause—I for one am with thee.—And—who knows—what may avail a crow bar against that Billerica dam!” No text survives of “Concord River,” but the draft shows Thoreau’s conviction that attention to the natural environment confronted the root of all political evil. In a memoir of his lecture, the local newspaper published Thoreau’s words: “I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made . . . and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom, and float whither it would bear me.�
��17 Douglass and Phillips told Thoreau that knowing the true “law” of the system and the right path to justice required deliberating his own moral ground. No person could tell him what that ground must be—this he had to learn alone.

  It was the end of March, it was spring, and the river was flowing. It was time to launch. Henry Thoreau borrowed an axe, walked down to the woods beside Walden Pond, and began to build.

  On Walden Pond: The First Season

  Thoreau already knew where his house would be: nestled on a shoulder of land sloping down to the water, backed by Bigelow’s pine grove and facing southeast to the morning sun, shaded by a large chestnut tree and “tall arrowy white pines.” He cut down a few of those young pines and hewed them six inches square, leaving the bark on when he could, to make the timbers for his house; the studs he hewed on two sides only, and one side for the floorboards and rafters. There by the stumps he chiseled the mortises and sawed the tenons, fitting them so the joints would be tight and strong. At noon he rested amid the pine boughs strewn on the ground at his feet, eating his dinner of buttered bread spiced with the fragrance of fresh pitch on his hands and reading the newspaper wrappings with interest. When the curious came by, lured by the sound of his axe, he paused to chat over the pine chips. At first the pond was icy and the snow flurried around his strokes; but on April 1, the snow turned to fog and rain, and the last of the ice melted away. Every year from then on, Thoreau would watch and note down the date when Walden was ice free and open to the sky and wind.

  Early in April Thoreau bargained with James Collins, an Irish railroad worker moving up the line, to buy his shanty. It was a hillock shanty, covered with dirt, likely one of the last remaining in the pretty Irish village between the railroad and the pond. A year later the ruins of that village, all overgrown with mullein, would strike awe in the Emerson children as they came to explore their father’s land on Walden’s far shore. Thoreau thought the dirt-insulated dwelling dank and “smotherish” inside, but he followed along as Mrs. Collins held her lamp high to show him that the boards were good and solid. The deal was struck. That evening he returned with their price of $4.25, and early the next morning he returned again to take possession, meeting the Collins family on the road—one large bundle holding their all, feather bed, silk parasol, gilt-framed mirror, coffee mill, and hens. He dismantled the building and carted the boards down the woodland path to the house site, where he cleaned them and laid them to bleach in the sun.18

  By early May, the frame was ready to be raised. Thoreau called his friends to help. Emerson, Alcott, and Channing came, as did George and Burrill Curtis, lately from Brook Farm, their friend Edmund Hosmer, the “dreadful dissenter” from the farm over the hill, and his strong sons John, Edmund, and Andrew. By then Thoreau had dug his cellar, spading into the sandy soil through sumac and blackberry roots until he had a shelved hole six feet square and seven feet deep—deep enough that potatoes would not freeze in any winter.19 For a king post, they set an entire tree into the cellar floor, reaching to the ridgepole above; with the frame raised up around it, the house took shape. Thoreau finished the floor, with a trapdoor to the cellar, and laid the chimney foundation on the end by the hillside, hauling up cartloads of glacial cobblestone from the pond. Finally he boarded and roofed his new house with Collins’s good boards, planing them and feathering the edges so that, overlapped, they would keep out the rain. The result was a light and airy house, ten feet by fifteen, eight feet tall, and in move-in condition for summer weather. Thoreau put off the finishing touches until fall, when he built the chimney, shingled the roof and sides, and plastered the interior. His weatherproof and insulated house would keep him warm in even the coldest New England winter.

  As spring advanced, Thoreau turned some of his attention to his farm, hiring a team of oxen and a man to drive them. Together, holding the plough himself, they cut furrows into two and a half acres of the “briar-patch” above the house near Walden Road, breaking apart the blackberry vines, St. John’s wort, and cinquefoil, “sweet wild fruits & pleasant flowers.” The ox team pulled out enough old stumps to supply Thoreau, once he cut and stacked the wood, with most of his fuel for two winters, fulfilling the driver’s prophecy that the stumpwood would warm him twice, once when he split it and again when he burned it. Then he planted the light sandy soil with rows of white bush beans—seven miles in all, he calculated—mostly for the market, plus potatoes, peas, turnips, sweet corn and yellow corn, mostly for himself. Hosmer gave him the seed corn. The turnips and the yellow corn he planted too late, though he enjoyed feeding the unripe corn to the squirrels and birds. It was hard labor, he wrote, “making the earth say beans instead of grass,” but “I come to love my rows—they attach me to the earth—and so I get new strength and health like Antaeus.”20 After each day’s work at the pond, he walked home along the railroad tracks to the Texas House, a little over a mile away, where he was still putting in finishing touches.

  This season Thoreau was writing not in words, but in deeds. The most symbolic of them approached as the calendar turned from spring to summer, when he borrowed a hayrick, loaded it with some carefully chosen books, writing supplies, and a few pieces of furniture—his green writing desk, a small table, three chairs, his cane bed—and drove to his new address on Walden Pond. “A good port and a good foundation,” he would later write, from which to open trade with “the Celestial Empire.”21 It was Friday, the Fourth of July 1845—a cloudy day at first, but that afternoon, as Thoreau unpacked and arranged his new life, the sun came out and shone on his own personal declaration of independence.

  The next morning Thoreau took out a fresh notebook and opened it with a flourish: “Yesterday I came here to live.”22 His “house,” he continued, reminded him “of some mountain houses I have seen, which seemed to have a fresher auroral atmosphere about them”—like the miller’s house at Kaaterskill Falls, high in the mountains, where he had stayed the year before. Such was his model: an airy mountaintop hall, open to the breeze, above quicksilver water where he could read the reflections of the sky or the writing of the winds. Here in this open shelter, he could reflect and write like a double of the pond, whom he addressed as a fellow: “True, our converse a stranger is to speech, / Only the practiced ear can catch the surging words, / That break and die upon thy pebbled lips.” So he had written back in 1838, in his poem “Walden”: it seemed all his life had directed him here, to this morning dawning on a vision he had cherished since childhood. “Walden, is it you?” he would ask in astonishment; in his notebook, his very handwriting bubbled into loops of ecstasy.23

  Others have called the shelter on Walden’s shores a cabin, hut, or shanty, but Thoreau almost always called it a house, insisting on the solidity and dignity he worked so hard to attain. As Emerson commented, “Cultivated people cannot live in a shanty.”24 Thoreau’s whole experiment hinged on the distinction. Had he built only a “poet’s lodge” for “the good hours,” his move would have troubled no one; lots of people did that. But spending all his hours there made him a pioneer—not a Western one, but an inward one, “the enterprising and independent thinker, applying his discoveries to his own life.” Outbuildings or vacation retreats only exercised a self already established. Thoreau wanted a house to embody a new self, so that building that house meant building that self, literally from the ground up. It was so small that “two was one too much,” said Channing, after living there for two weeks that August. Really, it was a kind of “durable garment, an overcoat, he had contrived and left by Walden.”25 To Thoreau’s family it looked dangerous, or at least uncomfortable. On his first night away, Cynthia and Sophia were so worried they tossed and turned until dawn. Cynthia packed up some food and Sophia brought it to her preoccupied brother. He “didn’t like to receive it very well,” she reported, and “the house seemed very bare of everything.” They missed him at home.26 Nevertheless, Henry’s family supported him staunchly and agreed to let him carry out his “experiment” in his own way.

 
But why exactly did Thoreau go to Walden Pond? The question still lingers today. On one level, the answer is easy: he went there to write. As Waldo Emerson explained to his brother William, Henry had always had a room of his own, to write, to dream, “and always must.” But now, instead of claiming a little space in a communal house, an alcove or attic, he would claim an entire life, and declare that writing would be not an occasional hobby but the central hub of his whole being. From now on, Thoreau would be a writer in an entirely new sense: instead of living a little, then writing about it, his life would be one single, integrated act of composition.

  On his second full day at Walden, Thoreau put it to himself like this: “I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts . . . face to face, and so I came down here. Life! who knows what it is—what it does?”27 This declaration of purpose has the force of a vow, a sacred commitment to confront, “face to face,” the conditions of possibility for life itself. Hawthorne, that most acute of psychological analysts, had previously observed that Thoreau “morally and intellectually, seems not to have found exactly the guiding clue,” putting him “physically out of health”—out, that is, of both wholeness, and holiness. Emerson, too, caught something of Thoreau’s larger intent when he pondered how his friend, like his Irish gardener Hugh Whelan, was pocketing “every slip & stone & seed, & planting it.” This was the true writer’s vocation, he thought: “Nothing so sudden, nothing so broad, nothing so subtle, nothing so dear, but it comes therefore commended to his pen, & he will write. In his eyes a man is the faculty of reporting, & the universe is the possibility of being reported.” Tell Thoreau that some things just cannot be described, and he knew better: he would “report God himself or attempt it.”28