Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  CHAPTER TEN

  Wild Fruits (1857–1859)

  A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State.

  Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

  The Last Excursions to Cape Cod and the Maine Woods

  “It is time now to bring our philosophy out of doors.” It was June 1857, and as the softening air brought out the earth-song of the crickets, Thoreau longed for a good long walk. When Channing said he was game, Thoreau cleared his calendar—and when Channing backed out, he went anyway, setting off on the bright Friday morning of June 12 for the broad, bleak sands of Cape Cod. In Plymouth, Marston and Mary Watson brought him along on a Sunday sail to Clark’s Island to investigate lobster pots and grackle nests with Uncle Ned.1 Monday morning, after a visit with James Spooner at his farm amid the woods, the Watsons drove Henry to Manomet and, with a twinge, watched him shoulder his knapsack and head down the beach alone.2

  For the next week Thoreau followed the bay shore, turned east to cross the peninsula to the outer banks, then trekked north to Provincetown—a good eighty miles navigating by map and compass.3 By the time he hit the outer banks, the wind and drizzly fog had soaked him through and plastered his legs with a carapace of sand. After shivering in a cold “Humane House” for a spell, he walked on to visit John Newcomb, the Wellfleet Oysterman—until a neighbor told him Newcomb died the previous winter, ninety-five years old. It must have been a strange conversation: Thoreau had just found a dead storm petrel which, with perfect Thoreauvian logic, he tied to his umbrella to measure once he found shelter. “They may have taken me for a crazy man,” he admitted. That afternoon he reached the Highland Lighthouse for three delicious days of rambling over the dunes, visiting the new telegraph station, and chatting with the lighthouse keeper, the neighbors, and the carpenters repairing the lighthouse. One of them remarked that the Cape Ann beach had no equal for grandeur. Thoreau took note. Sunday he headed to Provincetown, drinking in the dunes’ solitude like medicine, “sweet to me as a flower.” After a night in the Pilgrim’s House, scratching at bedbugs while listening to feral cats, he boarded the steamer to Boston on June 22 and made it home in time for supper.4

  It had been a good trip, restful and invigorating. Thoreau took more than fifty pages of notes, almost none of which made it into Cape Cod. Though he tinkered with the book’s final chapter, for the most part the manuscript had tucked in its corners and declared itself finished. So he let other projects claim his attention; not until spring 1865, nearly three years after his death, would Cape Cod be published. Interestingly, his long-alienated Catholic friend Isaac Hecker gave one of its strongest reviews, acknowledging Thoreau’s “deep religious feeling” despite his skepticism toward all organized religions: “Had he lived in the fifth century he would have been a father of the desert.”5 Hecker catches something of the strangeness of Cape Cod, Walden’s dark twin. Into the one Thoreau confessed all the metaphysical terrors that the other would allay. He never altered the narrative structure given him by chance on his first trip there: the long, tedious approach by stagecoach; the astonishments of the beach, strangely disorienting, populated with anomalous creatures shaped by the rough chaos of the littoral zone; the mordant hilarity of the Wellfleet Oysterman; the earnest labors of the lighthouse keeper, keeping his lamps “trimmed and burning to the last”;6 the searching inquiry into history, until the shifting sands of the Cape and the shifting forces of time nibble at the foundation of all certainties.

  Most important of all, Thoreau kept his narrative embedded in his shocking opening, the ghoulish shipwreck of the St. John wrenched through the unspeakable pain of Fire Island. He did not dispel the existential darkness of this opening but held it in view, right through the cosmic wreck of humanity in the locked-up “humane house” to the bitterness of “naked Nature” turning the carcasses of men and beasts alike in their beds, tucking fresh sand under them, “inhumanly sincere.”7 Cape Cod is a work of late-century naturalism, as dark as anything by Stephen Crane: “The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor?” Like Crane, Thoreau leavened his nightmare with touches of weird beauty, but unlike Crane, he relished it with a visceral joy, making this book of darkness blaze with light. Cape Cod was Thoreau’s own Highland Lighthouse, beaming from the edge of chaos across “the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls,” a beacon to reach all humanity at sea. “A man may stand there,” he ended, “and put all America behind him.”8

  Ready for more, on July 11 Thoreau wrote George Thatcher that he was strong again and “bent on making a leisurely and economical excursion” by canoe with perhaps two companions—say, up Moosehead Lake to the Allagash River and beyond to French Canada, some hundreds of miles, a good month’s trip. Would his son George, who had grown up on these waters, be willing to come along? When George declined, Thoreau decided to hire an Indian guide instead. He wrote Eben Loomis, too: would he care to join a party of three on a “leisurely” trip? Loomis came to visit, and they boated the Assabet together where, at the outflow from Barrett’s sawmill, Thoreau lit the methane fumes belched from the sawdust shoals with a match, and they heard it flash—but no, Loomis could not go, either.9 Next on his list was Edward Hoar, who long ago had been his partner in setting Walden Woods ablaze, and who had just returned to Concord: Ed’s wanderlust had taken him to California to practice law and pan for gold, then to Peru, where he learned of his father’s death. Back home to help his family, the prodigal son was proving a thoughtful man and skilled naturalist who respected Thoreau’s way of doing things. Years later Hoar recalled what that meant: “To walk long & far; to have wet feet, & go so for hours; to pull a boat all day; to come home late at night after many miles. . . . If you flinched at anything he had no more use for you.” Thoreau knew few of his friends were rugged enough to be true “wayfaring” outdoorsmen.10 Blake, though he longed to go, was not. But the quiet and capable Ed Hoar was.

  They set off for Bangor on Monday, July 20, 1857. The cars to Portland were hot and cindery, but Maine was springlike, cool and fresh, and the steamer into Bangor was delayed by fog. By early afternoon they reached the Thatchers’ house. The locals warned Thoreau not to hire an Indian guide—insisting they were dirty, obstinate, prone to drunkenness, and hard to understand—but Thoreau “was bent on having an Indian at any rate.”11 So next morning, the cousins drove to Oldtown and ferried over to Indian Island, where they found the village almost deserted. Whoever wasn’t off hunting, gathering shellfish, or canoeing the waterways of New England selling baskets had evacuated to other Indian settlements in fear of smallpox, which had broken out in Oldtown. Thatcher and Thoreau walked up to the first person they saw, a sturdy man dressing a deerskin in the yard of his solid two-story frame house amid a garden and fruit trees. It turned out to be Joe Polis, whom Thatcher greeted as an old friend; they’d grown up together, and Polis’s brother had been Thatcher’s guide the year before. Would Polis like to take them up to the Allagash? “Yes me want to get some moose,” he answered, still scraping the deer skin. Thatcher bargained Polis down from $2 to $1.50 a day—Thoreau had a very limited budget—and they shook on it.12

  They were lucky, reported Thoreau—Polis was known to be “a particularly steady and reliable man.”13 Just how very lucky, time would reveal. Thanks to Polis, what could have been another boy’s adventure would be an adult’s exploration, a mutual encounter along a vexed cultural frontier. Polis was a tribal leader equally at home in New York and Philadelphia as in the deep woods. He had represented his people before the governments of Maine and the United States and helped secure the Penobscot a permanent place in the white world, whose own leaders had leveraged away nearly all of the Penobscots’ immense lands. By treaty they retained possession of Indian Island, one of their ancestral homes. From this small but protected sovereign base, the Penobscot people were fighting to establish thei
r niche in a rapidly modernizing economy: expanding their traditional gardens into market farms, their subsistence hunting into a commercial economy, their crafts and technologies—above all, basketry and birch-bark canoes—into products they themselves marketed across commercial networks extending into the Northeast’s urban centers.

  Thoreau had some awareness of this, for he habitually struck up conversations with the Penobscot camped along the Concord River or on the riverbanks near Harvard. Ed Hoar knew this, too, for he recalled from childhood how the Penobscot Indians would canoe down the coast from Maine outside the surf, carry their boats around Lowell, and continue up the Concord River, where they would put up their cone-shaped bark shelters and “sell those fragrant baskets they make.”14 But Thoreau did not realize the Penobscot were fighting for cultural sovereignty as well. On this front, too, Polis was a leader, honored by his people as a meteoulin, a teacher and shaman. As a guide for white adventurers, Polis was responsible for educating white society about the Penobscot world. Saying yes to Thatcher meant taking Thoreau in hand. Perhaps he could teach this New English villager a thing or two about the Penobscot way of life in their ancestral lands.

  · · ·

  The process began that evening, when Polis and his birch-bark canoe (which he had made himself) arrived at the Bangor train station. Thoreau led him up to the Thatchers’, chattering all the way in his eagerness to break the ice. Polis, who was carrying a hundred-pound canoe over his head and who, as Thoreau editorialized, “above all, was an Indian,” puffed along, only grunting once or twice. As he would later exclaim to Ed Hoar, Why do you keep asking pointless questions? “May be your way of talking—may be all right—no Indian way.”15 The next morning, Polis studied how to pack his two guests and their mountain of gear into his small canoe. Then they boarded the stage together, lashing the canoe securely on top. Thoreau marveled that Polis himself carried nothing but the clothes he wore, a blanket, an axe, and a gun—all he needed. The stagecoach was crowded, the weather stormy, and all the way to Moosehead Lake, Polis sat stolid and wordless, even when the gibes of one rude passenger made his eyes “glisten a little.” The light began to dawn on Thoreau when “a tipsy Canadian” asked Polis, “You smoke?” “Yes.” “Wont you lend me your pipe a little while?” “Me got no pipe,” said Polis with his trademark “far horizon” stare. But you do! thought Thoreau, who that very morning had watched Polis carefully pocket his pipe and a good supply of tobacco.16

  The raging storm quashed their plans to start that day. Instead they pushed past the crowds to an inn near the shore. Early next morning, they stepped gingerly into the canoe under Polis’s watchful eye (lest they tip it or put a foot through the bottom) and launched into the cloudy dawn twilight. As they paddled toward Mount Kineo, Thoreau soaked up the scenery and watched Polis narrowly. I’d like to go to school with you, he ventured, and learn your language. How long would it take? A week, Polis answered: plenty of time. Thoreau started writing down all the names Polis gave them, for ducks, songbirds, loons—and places as well. He was pleased Polis knew the meaning of Musketaquid, or Muskéeticook, as Polis preferred;17 it proved that Massachusetts and Maine were two poles of one world, linked by the Indian. Encouraged, Polis pointed to Mount Kineo and related his people’s tradition that it was a great moose killed by a mighty hunter—whose name Thoreau ignored, dismissing the tale as Indian superstition, related with longwinded “dumb wonder.” This was a serious mistake. Polis had offered one of his people’s deepest creation stories, central to their cosmography. While Thoreau could readily see the poetic and symbolic dimensions of, say, the artist of Kouroo, he was utterly deaf to Polis when he spoke in the same mythic register—showing the distance Thoreau had yet to travel in shedding nineteenth-century stereotypes. Unfortunately Thoreau’s ridicule was instructive to Polis, who recalibrated accordingly. From then on, Polis offered no more cosmologies, only names and histories. Thoreau never realized what his rudeness cost him.18

  That afternoon the group camped at the base of Mount Kineo, where Polis showed Thoreau and Hoar how to build a fire in the driving rain with wet wood. While Polis fished, Thoreau and Hoar climbed the mountain, looking down on the buildings and grounds of the Kineo House hotel far below. The mountain was made, Thoreau discovered to his delight, of the same unique hornstone as the arrowheads he was forever pocketing in Concord. There under his feet was the very rock, the source and raw material, of Tahatawan’s arrowhead. It was yet another link in the widening network that bound his Walden world to the Penobscot world of Joe Polis—and a hint, had he listened, to the deeper meaning of Polis’s Kineo story. That night, as they sat around the campfire looking into the dusky woods, Polis told them of his hay and potato farming, and pressed Hoar, the lawyer, with questions about white property law. He also identified a snake by its call—Thoreau was startled to learn that snakes had calls, but there it was—and sang them to sleep with songs he learned in childhood from Jesuit priests.19 The pages of the Jesuit Relations, which Thoreau had been reading for years, were coming alive.

  So was the wood itself. Around midnight, Thoreau awoke to stoke the dying fire and found something that moved him profoundly: the unburned end of a stick of firewood was glowing not hot with flame, but cold and brilliant white. Years later Hoar remembered how Thoreau shook him awake to show him the cold white coals of wild wood burning in his palm, lighting up his hands like fire. This was Artoosoqu’, explained Polis, and his people had seen fires like this passing by as high as the trees, making a noise. This time Thoreau was prepared to believe him. Polis’s people had been abroad in nature at all times, in all seasons, and “Nature must have made a thousand revelations to them which she still keeps secret to us.”20 Here he wanted not science, but sheer wonder—suddenly the woods were “not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.”21

  Now Polis had his full attention. Early the next morning, as they paddled to reach the Northeast Carry before the wind rose, Thoreau questioned him hard: How do you find your way in the woods? The more he asked, the vaguer Polis’s replies became. To Polis, the real puzzle was how Thoreau, or any white man, could fail to know such things. Pathfinding in the deep woods was simply too obvious to put into words. As a guide, Polis knew how easily white men got themselves turned around and hopelessly lost, and every time, laughing, he would lead them straight back to camp. But how do you do that? pressed Thoreau. “Oh I can’t tell you—Great difference between me & white man.”22

  At the Penobscot River end of the Northeast Carry, they found a group of St. Francis River Abenaki camped where Thoreau had lain awake four years before, listening as another group regaled one another with stories of which he had understood not a word. Canoes, though, he did understand, and since they were building one, he stopped for another lesson, sorry to think the art of making birch-bark canoes would someday be lost. At least he could record it, perhaps learn enough to build one himself. That night they camped early to beat another storm, cursing the mosquitoes hatching in the wet woods. The next day Thoreau was anxious to move on. Not so fast, objected Polis: How can you not honor the Sabbath?23 They compromised, perhaps encouraged by the mosquitoes, on a short day’s work, paddling to a nearby camp on the river junction above.

  Polis knew the place well—just how well, Thoreau began to realize when he saw Polis’s blaze on a tree, a bear paddling a canoe, with his name, “Niasoseb Polis / We alone Joseph Polis,” and the dates he had been there. As Polis added a new date, July 26, 1857, Thoreau realized “this was one of his homes”—in fact, every square rod of this alleged wilderness was his home. The lessons continued: Polis showed them how to tell black spruce from white and how to dig up spruce roots, strip their bark, and split them into a tough, flexible string for lashing canoes together. He made it look easy, but Thoreau found it impossible to imitate. When Polis showed them how to make a different herbal tea for every day of the week, using pl
ants within easy reach, Thoreau’s head began to spin. Tell me all you know, he begged, and I’ll tell you all I know.24 Polis agreed: the teaching would continue.

  As the Concord men learned the next day, it wouldn’t be quite that easy. Reaching the Allagash Lakes meant crossing Mud Pond Carry, then canoeing to Chamberlain Lake. Mud Pond was the wettest carry in Maine, and that summer was the wettest in years. The Concord men took a deep breath as Polis gave them careful instructions before setting off with the canoe. They gathered up their own loads—Thoreau calculated his pack weighed sixty pounds, while Hoar divided his to make two trips—and set off in Polis’s footsteps. But they could not make out Polis’s tracks on the mossy forest floor. After two miles, Thoreau knew they were lost, but a sign ahead pointed to Chamberlain Lake. How hard could it be? They pushed on. Soon they were sinking into mud up to their knees. Thoreau dropped his pack onto a tussock and waited while Hoar backtracked for his second load. After a very long time, Hoar returned with his load and a very surprised Polis, who could not comprehend how they could possibly had gotten themselves onto the tote road to Chamberlain Lake—twice the distance—instead of the carry path to Mud Pond, which his own footsteps had made perfectly obvious. He “evidently thought little of our woodcraft,” observed Thoreau in chagrin. But it was too far to turn back. On they went, while Polis returned to move the canoe and the rest of the gear on up to Chamberlain Lake.25

  It got worse. Thoreau and Hoar slogged themselves into a second swamp, this one clotted on all sides by dead and fallen trees high as their heads—trees killed when Chamberlain Lake had been dammed a few years before, reversing the flow of the Allagash to carry commercial log traffic south to Bangor. The two men scrambled miserably from pool to pool, over tree after tree, as the sun sank behind them. To make it still worse, Hoar’s boots (which, unlike Thoreau’s thinner shoes, held in the water) had rubbed his feet raw. Every step was torture, and Hoar was reaching the outermost limit of physical exhaustion. Darkness was falling and they were growing desperate until, once again, Polis reappeared and led them to the lakeshore. Too exhausted to pitch their tent, they ate a late supper and stretched out on the stones for the night. As they stared up at the night sky, Polis named the stars for Thoreau, and a loon called from far over the lake: the very voice of the wilderness, thought Thoreau. Brutal as the day had been, he “would not have missed that walk for a good deal.”26