Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  At 7:40 a.m. Wednesday, September 25, 1850, the two self-styled “knights of the umbrella and the bundle” stepped from the Concord Depot onto the northbound train. They must have drawn some looks: while the other excursionists were decked out in their finest clothes, Thoreau wore his oldest leather shoes, well greased to keep off the rain, with a cheap brown linen duster over his second-best coat and a palm-leaf travel hat.52 The train reached Burlington, Vermont, at six in the evening. It was too dark to see the great reaches of Lake Champlain, but after a night’s delay, they boarded a steamboat in time for dawn to reveal the long narrow lake threaded between two blue ranges of mountains. Steaming north on the Richelieu River, they crossed the invisible border into Canada—and Thoreau, for the first time in his life, was in a foreign country. His quick eye immediately picked up differences in the houses and the pirogues on the shore and in the strangeness of dual-language signs on the frontier at St. Johns, aka Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.

  After three hours of watching earnest red-coated soldiers at their drills and Canadians driving past in dust-colored homespun, the excursionists rolled overland to La Prairie, where Thoreau and Channing pushed ahead to be first in line for the ferry crossing the Saint Lawrence—a river nine miles wide! Across the river, Thoreau thought Montreal looked like a New York in the making. In early afternoon they stepped onto the wharf, pushing through crowds hurrahing welcome to the Yankees, to walk straight to Notre Dame, the heart of French Catholicism and the gateway to all that was new and strange. Thoreau the Yankee Puritan boggled at the cool silence of the cathedral, worth any thousand Protestant churches, a sanctum “where the universe preaches to you and can be heard”—almost as grand and sacred as a Concord forest. “I am not sure but this Catholic religion would be an admirable one if the priest were quite omitted,” he quipped. Coming from him, it was a compliment.53

  What most moved Thoreau, again and again, was the French language. The very street names evoked a whole French Revolution—should the omnipresent soldiers ever put their heads and hearts together for “cooperation and harmony” instead of war. At the market he stumbled through his rusty Harvard French to bargain for pears and apples, which they munched on the steamer’s deck while watching the last Yankees being ferried over in the dusk. As they steamed through the night down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, 180 miles away, Thoreau pored over the map, sounding out the poetry of such place-names as Point aux Trembles, for the aspen leaves that once trembled there: “For there is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. . . . all the world reiterating this slender truth, that aspens once grew there.”54

  Dawn found them nearing Quebec’s imposing cliffs. The moment they stepped ashore, they headed as far away from the crowd as they could get, up a narrow road, then up a set of stairs to the stone citadel at the top, back in time to the Middle Ages of Sir Walter Scott. They wandered over the stones, admiring the view and picking flowers among the guns before setting off northeast with the immense St. Lawrence on their right. On their left, an uninhabited and largely unexplored wilderness stretched clear to Hudson’s Bay. The miracle of it dazzled them utterly: only two days before they had been in Concord, and here they were, rambling not to Flint’s Pond or Sudbury Meadows but “taking a walk in Canada, in the Seigniory of Beauport, a foreign country” that seemed “almost as far off as England and France.” “Well,” thought Thoreau, “here I am in a foreign country, let me have my eyes about me and take it all in.”55

  They took in a long band of narrow farms that ran along the riverbank, with neat whitewashed stone houses every few feet—a continuous village one street wide, with no front doors and no front yards, where women worked in the fields alongside the men, digging potatoes or bundling grain. About sundown they reached Beauport near the Falls of Montmorenci, where the two Yankees asked for directions to the nearest tavern. To their shock, not one person could answer them in English. The very dogs barked in French, they fancied. So in broken schoolboy French, they finally made out that here, in this country, there were no taverns, because there were no travelers. House after house turned them away for lack of a spare bed, until they found lodgings with the master of the sawmills at the falls, where, with the roar of the falls in the background, the Yankees “talked or murdered French” all evening to everyone’s amusement before tucking in under homespun linen sheets.

  The next morning, they found the mill owner’s private grounds blocked the Falls of Montmorenci from view. Natural wonders, grumbled Thoreau as he trespassed over the fences, should be kept sacred from the intrusions of private ownership. Of the falls themselves, a hundred feet higher than Niagara, he said little. Soon they were slogging through rain down a muddy clay road toward the Falls of St. Anne, twenty-two miles farther, noting the humble houses, the people washing and cooking outdoors, the wooden crosses and shrines, and the ubiquitous red woolen caps and sashes (which Thoreau, chilled in his thin duster and straw hat, began to envy). Everywhere they were greeted with the universal salutation “Bon jour” and everywhere the great feature was the Great River of Canada, which looked, even 325 miles from the mouth, as if it were opening into an ocean. Near the house they lodged at that night stood a church whose walls were adorned by crutches left behind by the miraculously cured. To Thoreau, it looked as though the village carpenter turned them off new-made. They breakfasted on bread and butter, tea and maple sugar, and potage, the local dish of boiled potatoes and meat. Then they spent their Sunday in this “thoroughly Catholic country,” self-consciously aware of being the only Protestants in sight.

  At the Falls of St. Anne, a three-mile bushwhack “by guess and by compass,” Thoreau made a grand scramble deep into the gorge, a “most wild and rugged and stupendous chasm.” This was the limit of their walk. The travelers retraced their steps. The country looked, Thoreau thought, “as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard of Europe and the Middle Ages,” including saintly names that made him “dream of Provence and the Troubadours” and feudal patterns of land tenure that challenged his sense of modernity—especially when he learned that a higher percentage of people could vote in Canada than in the United States.56 That night they lodged at a farmhouse where they warmed themselves in the great kitchen and parleyed their murdered French to a merry family, who swept clean the oiled tablecloth so they could chalk it over with local geography and French vocabulary, spreading it with local plants and produce, plums and senelles (or hawthorns) and hard glossy apples, Thoreau scribbling notes all the while. Back in Quebec, eager to see yet another waterfall, they hired a calèche to take them nine miles southwest to the Falls of Chaudière. By then Thoreau was tired of waterfalls, but the rainbow they made so entranced him that they missed the ferryboat and had to stay the night at a pension, where their obliging hostess sewed a warm woolen lining into Thoreau’s straw hat.57

  By October first they were back in Quebec, but Thoreau was coming down with a cold, so they cut their trip short and booked passage back to Montreal. They rambled through the Upper Town while they waited, visiting the memorial to Wolfe and Montcalm and counting cannon—twenty-four thirty-two-pounders arrayed against American invaders. Thoreau, inspired, mapped gates and noted positions as if he were on a secret reconnaissance mission. Back at the market stalls in the city below, he bargained for cake and fruit and searched for souvenirs that weren’t imported from elsewhere. To his disgust, even the genuine Canada crookneck squash seeds were from Boston. With an hour or so to kill before the steamer raised anchor, he dashed back to a restaurant and stood on their mahogany table to copy the great map of Canada on their wall. That night Thoreau nursed his cold in a berth on the steamer.

  Back in Montreal, he felt well enough to climb the city’s namesake Mount Royal, following in the footsteps of Jacques Cartier himself, who had climbed it in 1535, nearly a hundred years before the English set foot on Plymouth Rock. Where Cartier had looked down upon “an Indian town in the interior of a new world,” Tho
reau looked down upon “a splendid and bustling stone-built city of white men,” with only a few “squalid” Indians left to sell them baskets.58 Late that afternoon they rejoined their boisterous Yankee countrymen. For a night and a day, they retraced their steps by railroad and steamer, reaching Concord on the evening of October 3. They had been gone exactly a week and two days, traveled eleven hundred miles, and spent, in Thoreau’s case, $12.75, including $1.12 for two guidebooks and a map.

  Had he seen Canada? Hardly, and he knew it. But he had learned something: “The Canada which I saw, was not merely a place for railroads to terminate in, and for criminals to run to.” Thoreau longed to see more, and he signed off from “A Yankee in Canada,” the travel essay he eventually published, with his hope for “a longer excursion on foot through the wilder parts of Canada.”59 For while writing up the excursion, Thoreau began to envision something wider and deeper than a mere traveler’s tale; he plunged into a new course of research, sketching a kind of sweeping, cosmopolitan, longue durée history, a “Seven-mile Panorama” of greater New England conceived across deep time and planetary space. Canada had shown him puzzles to unriddle: What accounted for the contrasts between familiar New England and alien New France? Why had the French been explorers while the English were settlers? Why had the French joined with the Indians and become so much like them, while the English and Americans cut themselves off from the Indians and destroyed them? How had the land’s rivers and mountains shaped the lifeways of nations, and how had those nations—English, French, and Indian—shaped the lands they lived on? Thoreau’s notes and observations convinced him that the great era of New World exploration, settlement, and industrialization had produced a historic shift to the modern world. He knew he was a child of this world, even as he seemed born to stand outside it and resist it; perhaps, with his learning, energy, and deep gift for languages, he could understand the causes of the changes happening around him.

  His grand and unifying vision pointed to that deeper, wider reality he’d called “the frame-work of the universe.” When one surveys the dozens of research notebooks, scores of meticulous Journal volumes, the maps and surveys and thousands of pages of natural history notes and unpublished manuscripts, one begins to comprehend the scope of his vision; but to see the full picture, one must also examine the hundreds of books he annotated and the hundreds of charts and graphs where he pooled and organized his growing data. It was a staggeringly ambitious vision—impossible, really—but Thoreau embarked on it with ferocious energy. Nearly all of this activity dates from 1850. Out of this vast front, particular nodes crystallized into a series of books and projects: “Cape Cod” and “The Maine Woods,” taken together, explore the two ultimate poles of wilderness, ocean and mountain and the rivers that connect them. A third node took shape in the Indian Books, Thoreau’s attempt to document indigenous alternatives to European narratives of social and economic life. Connecting them all was natural history, the basic environmental framework on which he could weave his portraits of social and historical change—rather as the Concord and Merrimack Rivers had given, in A Week, a unifying natural baseline, the thread for his golden ingots of study and reflection. Had Thoreau lived long enough to make that western journey through “the wilds of Canada,” it would be easier to see how his brief excursion to Canada fit—even precipitated—his larger vision.60

  Greeley admonished him to publish the Canada trip while it was still fresh, but to Greeley’s annoyance, Thoreau plunged into his ambitious research program instead, using his new library privileges to check out stacks of history books and copy reams of information into his new “Canada” notebook. Instead of working up the Canada journey for the lecture season of 1850–51, he made do with the updated “Cape Cod.” Not until the 1851–52 season loomed, with its demand for an absolutely new lecture, did he turn to the Canada material, premiering “Excursion to Canada” at the Lincoln Lyceum at on December 30, 1851,—well over a year after their return. He repeated it in Concord in two parts on January 7 and March 17, 1852. By then he knew the whole mess was a failure, a mere potboiler. Don’t expect too much, he warned his audience, for he “visited” Canada only “as the bullet visits the wall at which it is fired & from which it rebounds as quickly & flattened.” Being forced to travel so fast, he had little to say: “What I got from going to Canada was a cold.”61

  He might have shelved the whole thing, but, again desperate for money, he shipped it to Greeley. “It looks unmanageable,” Greeley groaned, too long and, let’s face it, outdated. By then plenty of others had traveled to Canada—and published, too. After a discouraging run of rejections, Greeley placed it with the new Putnam’s Monthly, whose editor, George Curtis, had helped Thoreau raise his Walden house. Curtis broke Thoreau’s “unmanageable” narrative, “An Excursion to Canada,” into five parts, starting with the magazine’s inaugural issue of January 1853. Trouble flared immediately: Curtis, though an old friend, knew enough not to publish heresy. He deleted Thoreau’s ironic and absurdly offensive sentences about Montreal’s Cathedral of Notre Dame: “I am not sure but this Catholic religion would be an admirable one if the priest were quite omitted. I think that I might go to church myself sometimes, some Monday, if I lived in a city where there was such a one to go to.” When Thoreau discovered the bowdlerization, his fury almost ended their friendship. A distraught Greeley begged Thoreau to calm down: “Don’t you see,” he reasoned, that since Putnam’s conceals the names of its authors, “the elimination of very flagrant heresies (like your defiant Pantheism) becomes a necessity?” No, Thoreau did not see. The quarrel continued, and Putnam’s pulled the series after the third installment—because, as Thoreau fulminated to Blake, “the editor Curtis requires the liberty to omit the heresies without consulting me—a privilege California is not rich enough to bid for.”62

  No other publisher would touch the aborted series. “Excursion to Canada” was a flop. Nor would this be the last time an adversarial Thoreau crossed pens with an editor too afraid of public outrage to print his words unexpurgated: “Cape Cod” and “Chesuncook” would meet the same fate, with similar results. The more Thoreau knew his own mind and spoke it aloud, the more the era’s outraged guardians of public morality sought to cut off his tongue. Even a potboiler like “A Yankee in Canada,” as it was eventually retitled, proved inflammatory. But in Thoreau’s defiant mind, the closed-door Sunday Cosmos had exploded, which meant that if God was anywhere, God was everywhere, including right underfoot at home in Concord. Call it pantheism, call it heresy, but the question remained: how to live this truth, there on Main Street in full view of everyone, as well as how to write it—and in living it and writing it, to show it forth to others.

  · · ·

  What Thoreau did just after returning from Canada defies calculation or explanation. For three more weeks he continued to use the Journal, as he had for nearly ten years, as a writer’s workbook. But on November 8, 1850, he wrote up everything he noticed and thought during his daily walk as one long entry. Remarkable, he opened, how quiet everything is this time of year, as if it were waiting for winter. The next day he did the same, this time concentrating on seeing the landscape through layers of memory, as if to look around were to look back into time. Then two days later—writing all this up must have taken the intervening day—he did it a third time: “I am attracted by a fence made of white pine roots,” he opened, filling pages with a stream-of-consciousness flow of words as if he were writing while walking: “I pluck,” “I heard,” “I saw yesterday,” “I notice.”63 Again on the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth—when he wrote a huge entry on how to see the smallest rill as if it were the Orinoco or the Mississippi, and how to write about seeing in this odd new way. Thoreau’s new experiment made the very act of writing visible on the page—as if I were to tell you about the warmth of a May afternoon seeping through my open window as I type these words—even interruptions: “Somebody shut the cat’s tail in the door just now & she made such a catewaul [si
c] as has driven two whole worlds out of my mind.”64 But soon Thoreau had his “two whole worlds” back, for he continued for more pages. The next day, he did it again. Two days later, again. And again. And again.

  And this is what truly staggers the mind: from this point, Thoreau did not stop doing this, ever—not until, dying and almost too weak to hold a pen, he crafted one final entry. Until November 7, 1850, he had treated the date as incidental. Starting on November 8, 1850, he treated the day and the date as essential to his artistry. The date, and what he can write of his life on that one day, is no longer incidental to some larger quest—it is the quest. Virtually every day from then through the end of his life, with few exceptions, Thoreau wrote a dated entry that explored whatever caught his mind that day. Whereas before he had scissored out entire chunks of his journal, sometimes leaving little behind but ribbons and fragments, from then on he cut out very little, and soon, he would cut out nothing at all, carefully preserving each Journal volume intact. In short, without announcing it, Thoreau simply stopped using his Journal as the means to the “real” work of art somewhere else, and started treating the Journal itself as the work of art, with all the integrity that art demands.65 Or, perhaps all the integrity that science demands: in this new mode, his Journal volumes were something like scientific notebooks, laboratory records whose value lay precisely in their regularity and completeness.