Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Walden was supposed to have been his breakout book, buoying the rest of his work. That April, with Putnam’s reviving the dormant Cape Cod, an encouraged Thoreau had prodded his publishers: wasn’t it time, with Walden leading the way and Cape Cod in press, to reissue A Week? After all, he still had those 700-plus copies boxed in the attic. But there they would stay. Late in September, Ticknor and Fields reported back that Walden was selling, but not selling well. They still had 256 copies of the initial print run of 2,000; after a promising start, sales had plummeted. They were very sorry, “for your sake as well as ours.”45 Sales would stay slow. By February 1857, only sixteen copies were left, but by December 1858 they calculated even the tiny handful of copies remaining were enough for the foreseeable future.46

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  Thoreau was too ill to write, but he wasn’t totally housebound. There was bathing in the river, boating with Channing, and, though it was a bad year for berries, a-berrying as usual with the Emerson children. He even managed a little surveying: sometime that August he hauled his tripod and compass (or had someone haul them for him) out to Sleepy Hollow, where he leveled for a new artificial pond in a meadow behind what would be known as Author’s Ridge.47 Workers began to dig out the new pond soon after, gradually deepening it over the years. By mid-September, as cool fall weather approached, Thoreau was reporting that “after four or five months of invalidity and worthlessness, I begin to feel some stirrings of life in me.”48

  What he yearned for was not nature but society, and his friends rallied around him. Ricketson arrived on September 21 and was instantly thrilled with all things Concord: “How charmingly you, Channing, & I dove-tailed together,” he bubbled, and Edmund “Solon” Hosmer was the “real ‘feelosopher.’” Though his headaches cut short his stay, Ricketson had barely returned home when he invited Thoreau for a visit, enclosing railroad fare. “You are the only ‘millionaire’ among my acquaintance,” he assured him, covering for the handout. “Cars sound like cares to me,” sighed Thoreau as he started to say no—until suddenly, once again, he changed his mind. “Perhaps your sea air will be good for me.” For all was not well. As he wrote Blake, “I do not see how strength is to be got into my legs again.” The night before, he added poignantly, he had dreamed “that I could vault over any height it pleased me. That was something.”49

  On September 29, when the rest of Concord was dedicating Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Thoreau was on his way to the Ricketsons’. Life was good there: the boys, Arthur and Walton, met him at the railroad station with a string of fish they’d just caught. There were rambles along the river, rides to the ponds or to New Bedford, hours perusing the boys’ collection of shells and Indian artifacts or their father’s library. There was “feelosophy” in the Shanty and piano in the parlor, with violin and flageolet. One day Ricketson drove Thoreau to see “the old Indian burying-place” and meet the widow of his friend John Rozier, who’d been part Indian and part black. While nosing along the shore, they noticed an old Indian couple fishing. Ricketson called them over: “Don’t be afraid; I ain’t a-going to hurt you”; he and Henry were “interested in those of the old stock, now they were so few.” “Yes,” the “squaw” shot back, “and you’d be glad if they were all gone.” On their last day, the friends drove to Plymouth, where Thoreau introduced Ricketson to the Watsons over tea. Next morning Thoreau returned to Concord to rest, while Ricketson, “much fatigued,” rode home to revise his original impression of Thoreau: “He improves, unlike most people, upon an intimate acquaintance—modest and gentle in his manner, the best read and most intelligent man I ever knew. . . . My respect for his character and talents is greater than for any man I know.”50

  Back home, two letters awaited Thoreau’s attention. One was from his old Harvard classmate William Allen, to whom he had given his copy of Emerson’s Nature as a graduation present and who had taken over the Concord School classroom after Thoreau resigned. Allen was coming to Concord for a Sunday school convention and wanted to board with the Thoreaus and revisit his old haunts. When Allen arrived, Thoreau was disgusted that he didn’t want to call on any of his former students, but only walk around Concord’s New Burying Ground and pore over the epitaphs. Thoreau waited for him at the gate, muttering that “that ground did not smell good.”51 His schoolboy friend was growing old in all the wrong ways, living in the past, prying into graveyards—the very last place Thoreau, so hungry now for life and health, wanted to be. Far better was the second letter, from Thomas Cholmondeley: he had enlisted as a soldier in the Crimean War and was settling his affairs before going into battle. In the interim he had busied himself collecting “a nest of Indian books” for Thoreau, a token of their deep friendship. Keep an eye out for them; meanwhile, Cholmondeley added, should he survive the war, he was going to buy a Waldenesque cottage on the south coast of England and lure Thoreau away to join him there, where a room would always be his for the asking.52

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  Thoreau told Ricketson he needed to rest, but in truth, he was waking up: “I am planning to get seriously to work after these long months of inefficiency and idleness.”53 He watched the workers at Sleepy Hollow dig out the pond he had leveled for that summer; on the ridge overlooking it was the new Emerson family plot, “rudely staked on the pine-grove mound.” Alcott, seeing it, had decided on the spot that he, too, must be buried there, in calm repose near his benefactor and friend.54 All around the pine needles fell, laying a new mold for future soil. “How much beauty in decay!” Thoreau marveled, holding an oak leaf up to the light. Surely the leaves were not dead, only ripe. He brought a few home, birch and maple; laid them on white paper; and passed them around the supper table, where everyone admired their colors, beautiful beyond anything any artist ever painted. He brought home chestnuts, too, knocking them down by casting a stone into the branches, then shamed himself for his violence to the tree. “Old trees are our parents. . . . If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.”55 He took to gleaning driftwood from the river, rowing each piece home and recalling its history when he set it on the fire; he built driftwood bookshelves to hold Cholmondeley’s books. He filled his pockets with wild apples—in the October wind they tasted spirited and racy, but at home so harsh and crabbed he spat them out; they should be labeled “To be eaten in the wind.” His thoughts, too, should be wild apples, food for walkers—not warranted “to be palatable if tasted in the house.”56

  It was a triumph merely to eat, that fall of 1855, and every walk was a celebration: “When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery to walk in.” Here were no vain or lying epitaphs. “I buy no lot in the cemetery which my townsmen have just consecrated with a poem and an auction, paying so much for a choice. Here is room enough for me.”57 As the days shortened and the leaves fell, a new Thoreau emerged: pensive and sadder, slower, deeper. As he fought to regain strength, fighting the grave, he turned to the most common activities and the most mundane needs with intentionality and deliberation. Walden had been his book of spring and summer. Now, willing his recovery, he was learning a mind of autumn. In these darkening and haunted pages of his Journal, Thoreau began to trace the outlines of Walden’s sequel: he would call it Wild Fruits, and it would be his final harvest.

  In his deepening sense of worldly poverty, too ill even to write, Thoreau renewed his commitment to getting his living “in a simple, primitive fashion,” elevating his life as much as possible. But what worked at Walden proved a challenge on Main Street. What use was it here to raise one’s own food, build one’s own house, glean one’s own firewood, when the people to whom one was yoked “insanely want and will have a thousand other things”? Every child’s birthday was a crisis: Thoreau wanted to make them presents, but given their luxurious museums of expensive gifts, it would cost him a year’s income “to buy them something which would not be beneath their notice.” Yet he delighted in the ingenuity of making do. One day, late in November, he found a solid pine log in the river;
he hauled it in, sawed off two stout rounds for wheels, and fitted them to an axle—also reclaimed from the river—to make a cart with which to roll his boat around. Three days later, when the river iced up, he proudly rolled his boat home for the winter. He chuckled, remembering how he’d flummoxed the tax assessor when he was called in for an inventory of his taxable property. Any real estate? No. Stocks or bonds? No. Any taxable property? “None that I know of”—except his boat. Well, they thought, perhaps that was taxable as a pleasure carriage. Now that he had it up on wheels, perhaps they were right!58

  Cholmondeley’s books arrived that very evening. A month earlier the mail had brought a packing list “half long as my arm,” and on the spot Thoreau had started an overwhelmed letter of gratitude to his distant friend, still fighting in the Crimean War. Now here they were! The family made a festive evening of it as Thoreau unwrapped each volume, drew it forth from a growing heap of papers, and handed it around for everyone’s admiration, spreading his treasures on the carpet and “wading knee deep in Indian philosophy and poetry”: the Institutes of Menù, the Upanishads, the Rig Veda, the Vishnu Purana, and crowning all like Cotapaxi’s cone seen against the sun in Church’s painting The Andes of Ecuador—the Bhagavad Gita! Cholmondeley had sent not just a few books but an entire library, probably the best of its kind in America at that moment: twenty-one works, in English, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, forty-four volumes in all.59

  Thoreau placed them lovingly in the driftwood bookcase he had built for them, and when he awoke the next morning, childlike in his joy, he could hardly believe they were real until he “peeped out and saw their bright backs.” He read relatively little in them, partly because his interests had moved on to colonial history, exploration, and the literature of Native Americans, but also because he had long since read and reread many of them, absorbing Hindu philosophy and poetry so deeply that Walden reads, at times, like a successor in the same tradition. As he wrote to Ricketson, “I am familiar with many of them & know how to prize them”—which included lending them out to his friends. Ricketson himself had little use for such “namby-pamby,” so Thoreau, writing on Christmas Day, explained it to him this way: “I send you information of this as I might of the birth of a child.”60

  What mattered most about Cholmondeley’s gift, together with the steady friendships of such men as Blake and Brown, the Watsons, Ricketson and Russell, was the affirmation they all gave Thoreau in these months of illness and disappointment. Amid all the reminders that he was leading an anomalous life against the grain of modern society, the fact that he had the respect and admiration of such people helped Thoreau move past his moments of self-doubt. As he wrote to Calvin Greene, a new disciple from Michigan, “I am gratified to hear of the interest you take in my books; it is additional encouragement to write more of them.”61

  Thoreau greeted the winter of 1856 with zest, reveling in the deep snows and notching his walking stick in inches so he could keep track of snow depths wherever he went. After watching a frozen pickerel revive, he took to measuring water temperatures under the ice, and when the great elm at the center of town was cut down, he mourned the loss of this vital link to the past—then measured it and counted the tree rings: 127 years at nine and a half feet. Few of the sidewalk spectators guessing its age wanted to hear his science—“Surely men love darkness rather than light,” he sighed—but he went on measuring other fallen trees. He drew pictures of crow and mouse tracks in the snow, and untangled the cryptic stories they told. He collected old birds’ nests and, teasing them apart, marveled at the precision with which they were engineered.62 When Min, a Maltese kitten, joined the household, her wild freaks delighted him and he played with her by the half hour, pausing to shake his head in his Journal: “What sort of philosophers are we, who know nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?”63 With the same zest, he recorded the voices of men and women, stopping nearly every day at the post office to get the mail and the gossip, talking with anyone with something interesting to say. Only a great talker himself could have generated so much material. Sometimes he reported friction, too. When he started collecting tree sap and boiling it up in the kitchen to make sugar, his father had had enough. What’s the use of making sugar, he quarreled, when one could buy it cheaper at the grocer’s? “He said it took me from my studies. I said I made it my study; I felt as if I had been to a university.”64

  Thoreau was also looking back, recording family history as if aware he might someday have biographers: a list of all the houses they had lived in, family stories of his childhood in Chelmsford and Concord, the Jones family genealogy. Then, on March 27, 1856, Uncle Charles, the beloved family eccentric, died in the night at age seventy-six. In this winter of deep snows beyond living memory, the snow still lay thick on the ground. It fell to Henry to make burial arrangements, and together with the sexton he located a site in the New Burying Ground where the earth was not frozen. There, the next day, they buried Charles Dunbar. In his Journal Thoreau recorded a brief eulogy: “He was born in February, 1780, the winter of the Great Snow, and he dies in the winter of another great snow,—a life bounded by great snows.”65 As the old-timers traded stories about his uncle—his card tricks and hat tricks, the way he could “burst” any man at wrestling, or run up a twelve-foot ladder and down the other side—Thoreau remarked how many old people died that winter, just as spring was approaching. It seemed to prove the old adage: as the sap begins to flow, “diseases become more violent.”66

  The sap was flowing and the river was running, and it was time to roll his boat back down to the riverbank. As Thoreau eased it into the water, it occurred to him, with some surprise, that despite all, he was still alive. Why? “To perform what great deeds? Do we detect the reason why we also did not die on the approach of spring?”67

  “The infinite extent of our relations”

  The first hint of an answer came on a warm afternoon late in April, when Thoreau was surveying a farm by the Old Marlborough Road. Isn’t it interesting, pointed out his assistant, that when a pine wood is cut down, young oaks spring up? Indeed it is, agreed Thoreau; sure enough, where a white pine wood had recently been cut down, “the ground was all covered with young oaks.” “Mem.—” he jotted: go look at some logged-off woods, and take note of what has sprung up. Two weeks later he had worked out a hypothesis: on the forest floor of even the thickest pine woods, one could observe many little oaks, sprouted from acorns planted by squirrels. They struggled in the deep shade, and most would die, but log off the pines, and voila!—the infant oaks, “having got just the start they want,” would spring up into an oak forest. Though no one credited the agency of birds and squirrels in spreading seeds, it must be that all the while, they were planting the forests of the future.68 The fall before, he had seen the earth as a cemetery. Now he saw it as a nursery as well.

  The odd fact of pine/oak succession had puzzled Concord farmers for years—indeed, it was just the sort of question they had formed the Concord Farmers’ Club to discuss. Every year during the off-season, they held weekly seminars to compare notes, trade ideas, and ask how Concord’s gardens and farms could be improved. At every meeting, one of the fifty-odd members would present a formal paper on an assigned topic, which was inevitably followed by a long and spirited discussion. Their minutes recorded (often verbatim) the practical concerns on the minds of Thoreau’s friends and neighbors: how to care for pigs and cattle; how to grow corn and hay, apples and peaches, grapes and cranberries; how to plant gardens, manure the land, get crops to market. Also how to educate children so they would stay on the farm instead of leaving for the cities or the West—education, they agreed, was the key—and how to educate themselves so they could incorporate the latest advances in mathematics, chemistry, geology, plant breeding, and agricultural science. In part they wanted to learn how to adapt Concord’s colonial-era farms to modern industrial agriculture, but they were also eager to care for the land and make Concord a place of great natural beauty, from its gracio
us yards, treelined streets, and innovative new garden cemetery to its farms, fields, rivers, meadows, and forests.69

  On certain questions, they all agreed, the person to ask was Henry Thoreau. Though not a member, he was friends with many who were: their founder and first president, Jacob Farmer; their dedicated secretary, Minot Pratt from Brook Farm; his childhood friends Joseph Hosmer and John S. Keyes; the town printer and librarian, Albert Stacy; Ephraim Bull, who developed the Concord grape out of the sweet wild grapes Thoreau gathered every fall; Ebenezer Hubbard, who owned the fine pine-oak woods near Walden Pond. While these men kept the town’s livestock, it became Thoreau’s job, as he had punned in Walden, to keep the town’s “wild stock.” Emerson noticed that local farmers who once remarked on Thoreau as an oddity came to admire his deep knowledge of their land.70 When the Concord Farmers’ Club wanted to know where to find native wildflowers to grace Concord’s gardens or native trees to shade its yards and streets, they asked Thoreau. In the late 1850s, as their attention turned to healing Concord’s damaged forests, Thoreau showed them the way.

  Thoreau’s quick solution to the puzzle of pine-oak succession only opened more questions. Right away, one longtime farmer asked: How do you know that the seeds haven’t been there all along, lying dormant? Others argued that one didn’t need seeds at all; the new plants were generated spontaneously, right out of the ground.71 Thoreau felt that had to be false, but proving it meant figuring out exactly where the seeds had come from, and how they had been carried, or “dispersed”—by squirrels? Birds? Wind, or water? Humans and other animals? How had they had been planted—or had they planted themselves? How had they managed to survive, if in fact they had survived at all? As answers multiplied, they cascaded into more questions. Thoreau’s new studies took him deeper and deeper into the field. Emerson noticed that Thoreau read “less in books lately, & more in nature.”72 With good reason: books held no answers for the questions he had started to ask. There wasn’t even a name for this new kind of science. Later generations would call it “plant succession” and honor Thoreau as a pioneer working in the fields of forest management and plant ecology.73