by Norman Lock
“I used to enjoy the cricket matches when I lived in Boston,” said Hawthorne, lolling in the stern. The mildness of the current and his two oarsmen’s steadiness made his effort at the tiller almost negligible. I could see that Henry was becoming vexed by his friend’s nonchalance and that no small talk was going to please him. So long as the talk did not concern me, they could bicker all they wanted.
“I suggest we take turns,” said Henry at last, shipping his oar. Before I could ship mine, the boat had traced a semicircle on the water like a Jesus bug.
“Certainly,” said Hawthorne, straightening our course. “I always meant to do my fair share of work. I was a communalist, remember.”
He let go of the tiller and began to make his way forward before we had agreed which of us—Henry or me—would relieve him. There followed a comical scene in which we three jostled and the boat rocked crazily, so that I feared we would soon fall overboard. Henry stood, obliging Hawthorne to take a step backward. Then I stood and clambered into the bow, leaving the seat empty. Henry and Hawthorne danced clumsily—the boat yawing—until they had exchanged places, leaving Henry free to take the tiller and Hawthorne to pick up an oar. I returned to mine, and together we dug our blades into the river, and the boat lurched toward our destination, which lay, according to Henry, now less than two miles to the south.
Henry began to sing the ditty that he and John had sung, buoyantly, during their boat trip into New Hampshire: “Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast.” Hawthorne and I hummed in concert, and any chance spark of controversy, resulting from the division of labor and our clog dance aboard the boat, appeared to have been dampened.
Motioning toward the alder trees mirrored on the river’s untroubled surface, Hawthorne remarked, “I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality.”
Henry replied, “I used to think the same, but lately I’ve been coming round to the idea that reality can be grasped by patient, careful observation. You can’t build a railroad across a surface of reflections, no matter how picturesque. It requires bedrock, timber, and iron.”
As if to illustrate his point, a muskrat slunk through the reeds, then jumped into the river, shattering the liquid mirror and the trees’ reflections it had held.
“I thought you disapproved of railroads.”
“I do. But as a symbol, they are useful. I’m afraid, Nathaniel, that the railroads are here to stay. Once conceived, an idea—good or bad—cannot be canceled or annulled. They’ll lay a track across hell, if the vested interests have their way.”
I rode on it, I said to myself. From Virginia to Concord—no return ticket, if you please.
“Symbols again! Didn’t you just tell me you’d forsworn them?”
“I said no such thing! Besides, I forswear nothing except narrow-mindedness.”
Hawthorne grunted.
“Would you like to trade places again, Nathaniel?”
What about me? I wondered in annoyance.
“You remind me of a galley slave during the Punic Wars,” Henry said to his friend. And then he recited a few lines in Latin.
At the word slave, Hawthorne had turned a little on his seat to regard my face, which I kept expressionless.
I have often wondered whether the laws governing dreams and those governing thought are identical: One thing leads to another and thence to some other, by a concatenation of ideas, figments, and vagaries bound by a secret logic, which, on the face of it, seems absurd.
Henry pinched his nostrils, the left, then the right, and blew to rid them of snot. By such homely details, not found in their biographies, do eminent men come to life for us. Hawthorne betrayed his disgust by looking at his well-tended hands. I wondered what Emerson would have said about his protégé’s uncouthness. Emerson was as polished as a chestnut, while Henry was rough as bark. Emerson could look dignified sitting on a tuffet, while Henry would not have looked so on a throne. He was a mixture of self-knowledge and unself-consciousness. I never did assay what proportion one occupied in relation to the other. I would have to leave it to the higher mathematics of the world to come.
I was spent in this one; I could not have pulled my oar again to save my life. I let it fall idle in the water. I gazed at the cardinal flowers spotting the riverbank’s meadows. I wished I might rest among them or walk farther off into the sandy uplands, among the trees whose green masses I could see swelling with a wind unavailable to us on the river.
“I’m all done in,” I said.
Both men were embarrassed because they had been insensitive to the hardship of rowing upriver, even in relatively slack water, for a one-handed man. I had held my own almost beyond the limits of my endurance to prove to them and to myself that I was their equal at least in this. I had exhausted my reserves, however, and no longer cared what they thought of me.
Henry relieved me at the oar, and I took the tiller.
“We’re yours to command,” said Hawthorne, saluting me with only a hint of irony.
“Take up your oars, gentlemen, and row,” I said graciously.
The boat jumped forward when the oars bit into the river. I listened to them creak in the oarlocks and to the planked hull grumble. Manual labor makes a pretty music to the ear of idle men. Even a chain will ring out merrily for those who own and drive and break others. For the moment, we were in the river’s keeping, although it had long ago forgotten the way to Fairhaven Bay, except as blood knows the route through the body’s sluices and thoughts through the brain’s gray tangle. The boat moved by small jerks, interrupting a glassy suspense in which Henry and Hawthorne again considered the great themes of nature.
“The natural man is an unfinished one,” said Hawthorne.
“Would you send the Indians to finishing school?” jeered Henry.
“They are imprudent,” replied Hawthorne, unruffled. “They trust too much in whatever providential hand they acknowledge.”
Like most of us, I thought.
Henry retorted, “They spend no more than they need and take only as much as can be replenished and restored. They are earth’s true husbandmen.”
Only men with the means to be idle could have such an argument as this, I thought.
Hawthorne countered, saying, “You are not the natural man that you suppose.” Henry bristled, and the flat of his oar spanked the water’s surface. “You’re too well armed with Greek and Latin references, with saws and maxims, with your opinions and conceits. Do you suppose that the Penobscot Indians keep accounts?”
“Yes, but not as Shattuck the grocer does, or even as I do.”
“My point,” said Hawthorne. “Grocers see the world though ledger sheets, poets through staves and stanzas.”
“Alas, not being of savage birth, I must read nature at second hand,” said Thoreau with a sulk.
Civilized men have lost the key to Eden’s gate, I thought, and will never find it again.
“You are not usually so argumentative, Nathaniel.”
“Sometimes I like to provoke you.”
“I am not provoked!” said Henry, his voice strained by irritation.
His oar missed a beat, and the boat slewed. At the time, I believed that Henry was too conscious of nature to be entirely at home in it. One needed to be like the squirrel, lacking judgment and a mind able to ponder nature’s meaning and purposes. The squirrel gives no thought to its future, beyond burying acorns against winter’s famine. Filling journals with thoughts on the natural world, as Henry did compulsively, was like stuffing pillows with feathers, an occupation that reveals little about chickens. Like a boy who sees in his father’s calloused hands only dirt under the nails, I was determined to misunderstand Henry Thoreau and his experiment in simplicity.
“The ancients made much of rivers,” said Henry, like a man casting about for a change of subject. “They are the great figure for time, of course.”
Hawthorne grimaced in exertion or at the obviousness of the remark. Henry took it as an insult to his originality,
which he wore like an eccentric’s hat. At that time, I found it hard to tell a sincere man from a poseur. In these pages, reader, Henry is not necessarily as he was, but as he seemed to me.
“I assure you, Nathaniel, that I will not make the same mistake as the fly.”
“Which is?”
“To annoy the ear with meaningless buzzing.”
“All is buzz, buzz, buzz,” said Hawthorne with uncustomary petulance.
Having felt an insect settle on my cheek, I swatted it. My palm made a resounding slap. Hawthorne laughed, and Henry frowned, thinking I had meant to mock him.
“I had something other than platitudes in mind,” he said with a sniff, as if an unpleasant odor had invaded his nostrils. “I meant to say that we carry our own time with us to the end, just as this boat is carrying us on a river indifferent to our petty aims and histories and obedient only to the great sweep of time until we are crushed on the rocks waiting to receive us.”
I thought then that Henry was right, and nothing in the intervening years has changed my mind.
“Still, I would not exchange my time—the one that beats for me—for a past or a future that seems more glamorous or novel, no more than I would change my shirt because it has gone out of fashion, but only if, having become out at the elbows, it no longer serves its purpose. ‘Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, / Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies / Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, / In folly ripe, in reason rotten.’ Sir Walter.”
Great men will often speak as if for the ages, though their audience be only a black man in a boat going nowhere except a bay that might just as well have been called a pond, for it was not much larger than Walden.
The keel scythed through a stand of water lilies. The startled frogs jumped from their green pads, turtles pulled in their heads, and a sunfish sought its own eclipse in the perpetual darkness of the riverbed.
The two Olympians considered next the lilies of the field, a sentimental economy close to Henry’s irreligious heart. But I will spare you their tiresome “shuttlecock.”
When we arrived at Fairhaven Bay, the ice that Hawthorne had brought with him to keep our boiled eggs fresh had melted in the summer heat, regardless of its insulating thatch of hay.
I am thinking at this moment of poor John Franklin and his men, famished aboard the icebound Erebus and Terror, near King William Island, in the Arctic’s Victoria Strait. While we were having our river outing—pleasant despite the spoiled eggs—they had been dead some weeks or months. What had they made of nature? I cannot help thinking of my “heroic voyage” down Ballard Creek to Ragged Island. No . . . To call it a voyage is to exalt what a log or a muskrat does mindlessly; to call it heroic is equally false, since I was in terror for my life and would have crawled through ooze and muck to escape the vengeful rod. Fear, not beauty or love or even ambition, is the great driver of men and women. What a book I could write! I thought then. This one, in fact. I had meant to take out a few of memory’s things from my valise, so to speak, and find that I have been unpacking a portmanteau or a magician’s tall hat, from which there seems to be no end of scarves and rabbits. Writing, too, is a river in whose irresistible current we embark, sail, and, with luck, disembark with our shoes and tobacco dry.
The meadow on either side of the Sudbury was flooded. I might have steered a course through it as I had once seen Hawthorne do across the Old Manse’s lawn after a heavy rain had brought the Concord River nearly to his doorstep. Watching him sail Pond Lily where cows had grazed was, I think, the most perfect image of freedom I have ever seen. What is freedom if not to go wherever the spirit wills, careless of restraints and accidental hindrances like the banks and beds of a river?
“I haven’t been in Adam’s Woods since I burned them down,” said Thoreau.
In Adam’s Woods . . .
“Damn ‘woods burner!’” jibed Hawthorne, invoking Henry’s misadventure with char cloth and a phosphorus match.
“It was a glorious spectacle!” said Henry, pleased with himself.
You will ‘know’ a woman but not love.
A light wind arose, agitating the river water into chop slapping at our bow. The moment was confused by the spice of wild primrose, the rattle and trill of a marsh wren, the reeling of the azure sky. The rudder shivered, and I felt a thrill in my hand; the tiller might have been endued with a mind all its own. I had not yet passed beyond the magnetism of my superstitious youth, with its stories of the strange practices of Haitian slaves, for whom a stick held aloft could, and did, conduct spirits from the next world into this. The yew-wood tiller throbbed with desire that might have belonged to the river, a naiad, or the ghost of the young woman Fenda Freeman had been long before she foresaw my coming to Adam’s Woods. It prodded me to steer toward the meadow. The meadow might have wished it, and the boat also. I could not help thinking there might be a woman waiting for me on the far side of the marsh grass, where the sandy uplands rose. But I did not waver; I held fast while Henry and Hawthorne rowed against the current—its desires as heedless of my own as were theirs, and just as secret.
“But not love!” I had shouted the words to myself, but they had escaped my mouth, so fervent had been the thought behind the utterance.
“What’s wrong, Samuel?” asked Hawthorne, who had been silent, as was his custom, while Henry had been chattering about river grapes.
“Nothing,” I said. But then I was moved to speak my mind. “I feel knotted up.”
“The strain on your arm,” said Henry sympathetically.
“Will you please be quiet!” I cried with strength enough to make an egret shy from its solitary angling in the marsh grass. I did not want Henry’s sympathy; I wanted his hatred to chew on like rancid meat.
“I don’t understand you, Samuel!” he replied sharply.
“Must you always talk so?”
A passion had been kindled in me by an obscure emotion that belittled me. I knew it, but I fumed nonetheless.
“Talking is an art of civilized men,” said Henry patiently, as if to a child.
“And of Margaret Fuller,” said Hawthorne to his boot tops, where his eyes had lighted in embarrassment.
“I’m sick of art and sick of civilized men,” I muttered.
I don’t know what possessed me. I was like a clock that cannot fathom its own inner workings.
Henry took off his straw hat, and his face and eyes came out of their eclipse. I saw—or thought I did—a person clear and frank as the bottom of a lake when the sun is momentarily put out by a passing cloud. In his nut brown, weather-beaten face and weak chin, I saw Henry Thoreau for what he was: generous and mean, gregarious and reclusive, gentle and uncouth, erudite and common, confident and afraid, as are we all.
“I apologize,” he said, without elaborating, and then he put on his hat again.
I nodded and let the tiller lie lightly in my hand.
AT FAIRHAVEN BAY, OUR BOAT CAME to rest on the graveled beach with a pleasing scrape of her hull against the pale yellow pebbles that ground underfoot when we walked up onto the shore. Henry had forgiven me my outburst; he was not one to hold a grudge or nurse a grievance. Hawthorne appeared to be embarrassed still as he busied himself with housekeeping. He shook out a tablecloth and laid it—a nicety Henry scorned—set out bread and smoked meat, while Henry cut melons he had grown and brought as his contribution to the feast. I took a cane pole from the boat and a worm from the tangled knot inside a tobacco tin and threaded it on a hook. Bream, pike, and hornpout were ample in the bay, and we had come prepared to make a supper of them on our return to Concord.
While I fished, the two men ate and talked. Henry was more garrulous than his usually reticent friend. I listened to them with half an ear. I thought about the underside of things—fish always brought it to mind. Theirs is a dark and liquid world where all is vaguely seen and heard, remote from ours, though we have only to dangle a morsel of bread or meat to rip them out of their universe and into ours, where the rock is waitin
g to cudgel them, the knife to disembowel them, and the fire to cook what flesh remains, in a pan or on a stick held to the flames. Do fish fear them, the instruments of their destruction? Is their fate common knowledge with them—born or bred in their tiny brains or wherever fear, which is only the keenest of expectations, lies? Maybe there is an organ, the color of gall, where terror awaits the cruel ascent—or the Rapture, if fish have an instinct for resurrection into the waters of the firmament. Foreboding yields in an instant to the bitter recognition of hook, stone, knife, and fire comprising their sad destiny.
In slave pens and hovels where we laid our heads in silence, I would shrink into the darkness behind my closed eyes—there, to work out the reason for my having been born or, more often, to take refuge in a night given over to forgetfulness, where oleander and jasmine sweetened the foul air of our sty and rare words of kindness were sown like bread for careless birds. Prodded by whip handle, boot, or the light from a lantern rudely unshuttered with a rasp near my face, I would open my eyes in bitter recognition of my own sad destiny.
What, I wondered, could nature have meant by us?
“I have imagined a forest,” said Hawthorne, gesturing toward Adam’s Woods.
They had been talking about—what else?—nature. It was their common meat—more so for Henry; but Hawthorne, Emerson, Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller—they all went at it like starvelings, ardently and avidly, with knife and fork, hammer and tongs. They would suck it to the marrow and then lick the greasy bones.
“A wilderness, dark, vast, and impenetrable stretching from the ancient world to the new. I could walk from Walden Woods to Germania’s Schwarzwald or to the Charcoal Forest of the Franks—”
“An ocean and fifteen hundred years separate them,” said Henry, snorting in derision.
“In my mind. I could walk there in my mind. Don’t be contrarious!”
“Walden is enough for me.”
“The woods I have in mind survive only as a fable for the darkness in which we are engulfed, never mind the light from our lamps and tapers, which are only a little less sooty and dangerous than savage torches.”