A Fugitive in Walden Woods

by Norman Lock

  “I could walk out your door, Samuel, into the night and onward to the next world.”

  I opened my eyes on the darkness of the room. Had he spoken to me?

  “Did you say something, Henry?”

  “I said that night is a magical passage to eternity,” he replied with the fervor of an evangelist crusading for lost souls.

  . . . the lost sheep, the lost spoon . . .

  “We say ‘the light of common day’ because we acknowledge the extraordinary nature of night.”

  I could see nothing anymore of Henry, who had succeeded in turning himself into words. He went on, expatiating on night in a veritable rapture. An owl put a word in, but the meaning was obscure. I was becoming impatient.

  “What about the field beans?” I asked.

  “What can I learn of beans or beans of me?” he replied Socratically.

  “They need weeding,” I said. “Preferably by the light of common day.”

  “You are right to remind me,” he said. “One world at a time.”

  I lighted the candles, and the phantasms fled.

  Henry unhooked his ankles from the chair legs and stretched his luxuriously. He is just a man after all, I thought as I put away the bread and cheese.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll go to Shattuck’s store and buy a piece of glass and, afterward, to Bush, where I will give you a lesson in glazing.”

  VI

  HENRY HAD READ OF BURTON’S TRAVELS in Arabia, Franklin’s in the Arctic, Mungo Park’s in Africa, and Darwin’s in the Galápagos; travel books were a secret pleasure for the man who boasted, “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” But the precincts of Concord, made increasingly smaller by the Fitchburg and its right-of-way, by the hewers of trees and lake ice, by trivial minds and backbiting factions, would sometimes fret him. Regardless of how widely Henry had traveled in Concord, there were times when he yearned to avail himself of the novelties of distance.

  “Walden Woods can be a narrow place for a man with seven-league boots,” I had once overheard him grumble to a blue heron wading stiff-legged in the shallows of the pond.

  The heron gave no reply, being too haughty a creature to concern itself with the humors of our kind. Nature’s mute indifference has never stopped a man from apostrophizing a bird or an animal or even the tongue-tied ocean, which, if it could hear, must listen to our lamentations above its own awful roar.

  At the end of August, Henry was seized by an urge to travel—“to put distance between Shattuck’s tinned meats and my appetite.” And so it was that, on September 2, fifty-six miles up the Houlton Road from Bangor, we found ourselves waiting impatiently at Mattawamkeag Point for Louis Neptune and a shabby cohort of Indians. Two days before, on Indian Island, near Old Town, we had arranged with him to meet us farther up the Penobscot, at the point, whence Henry and I would be carried in one of Neptune’s canoes on the river’s western branch.

  Henry and I had come ashore in hopes of finding the Abenaki peaceably smoking pipes in their wigwams. We had found only a remnant of savages, greased with bear fat against the mosquitoes and blackflies. Our Walden huts seemed like palaces compared to those tumbled-down shacks, our clothes finery worn by country gentlemen. The Indians were raggedly dressed in old shirts and pantaloons that had once belonged to Canuck boatmen. Equally tattered but with a regal air, Louis Neptune appeared to be the chief ragamuffin on that small island in the Penobscot.

  “God made them noble, and the white man degraded them,” said Henry bitterly after we had left the island to continue on our way north along the riverbank.

  “At least the moose are as He made them,” I replied—sagaciously, I thought, although I had laid eyes on neither.

  Henry turned an angry gaze on me and said, “I begin to worry that they, too, will one day be no more than a boy’s pretty dream. Better for them that they be forgotten or slaughtered than they fret away their days in a menagerie.”

  My eyes shied from Henry’s, as though his were live coals. I went down to the water’s edge and looked at nothing in particular. I heard him behind me, kicking at stones.

  The sawmills we had seen downriver, where white pines were milled into matchsticks, as well as Indian Island’s squalor, had soured Henry, but he hoped to discover in the wilderness surrounding Mount Ktaadn the primitive state of the earth’s first people. In the granite and timbered heart of Maine, he sought a vestige of the primeval forest that, at the time of the first North American settlements, had been as common as air. The land had belonged to its ancient inhabitants by right of possession, but, careless of law, they had not stopped to acquire the deed to it and, as a result of their negligence, would lose it.

  “John and I collected arrowheads when we were boys,” Henry had confided during the boat trip from Boston. He had been at the summit of good humor, in anticipation of ascending Mount Ktaadn, whose peak rose a mile above sea level. “I’ve longed to see the descendants of the people who made them, still living in a natural state, dignified by forests and mountains and unspoiled by the manufactories of things hallowed by neither practical nor spiritual necessity.”

  We would see nothing of the natural man during our twelve days in the Maine woods. Instead of him, we encountered Louis Neptune and his scant clan of Abenaki; Canuck boatmen; and lumbermen arguing the merits of President Polk’s recent declaration of war with Mexico.

  For comfort’s sake, we spent some nights, like cuckoos, in vacant loggers’ cabins, empty of any furnishings save a barrel, a pail, and a basin. We sometimes found greasy playing cards and, once to our astonishment, a pamphlet containing Waldo Emerson’s address on West Indian emancipation. We slept on the soft leaves of the arborvitae tree, which Henry relished for the Latin word’s English meaning: tree of life. Brewed, it made a strong cedar tea, employed by woodsmen as a remedy against the aches and pains of hard labor.

  “In our rustic bedding, at least, the ancient life survives,” said Henry, rolling the aromatic leaves between his palms to release their invigorating odor.

  While life as it was lived by ignoble savages and hard men of the Penobscot River Basin might have disappointed him, he took pleasure in the beauty of the way. Besides the arborvitae, spruce, larch, and balsam trees lined Houlton Road, which had been cut through the unincorporated wilderness with immense effort, like every other work of man in his subjugation of savagery. The forest on either side of the road bore no trace of human presence, but only that of deer and moose, bears and wolves, which shrank from ours as one would a plague ship. I did not like this country; to be honest, I was afraid of it and wished myself back in Walden Woods.

  Occasionally, the trees crowding the bank would open, like a theater drape, revealing a stage rough-hewn by loggers, where they could roll great trunks down into the water, which was dashing over rocks toward Bangor and Penobscot Bay—and, if they should elude the grasp of commerce, out onto the Atlantic. Sailors would sometimes happen on logs afloat in the sea-lanes, branded with the names of men who had felled them. Amid the arboreal gaps, pigeon woodpeckers came and went, like gossipy playgoers during intermission. On the river, whistler ducks, with black bellies and long red beaks, called waa-chooo to one another, a most unmusical sound, like a sneeze following a pinch of snuff. And always above the tumult of the rapids, the chickadee—sweetest bird of all—delighted us with its merry song.

  I remember Henry’s having read aloud from his journal while we reclined on soft pine needles carelessly shed by a nature that will always be profligate until men flourish their axes and pruning hooks to stunt it.

  “‘This was what you might call a bran-new country; the only roads were of Nature’s making, and the few houses were camps.’” A tremor in his voice betrayed his apprehension. “‘Here, then, one could no longer accuse institutions and society, but must front the true source of evil.’”

  Does he believe the wilderness is evil? I wondered. Hawthorne seems to have thought so; the forest was where the devil conve
ned its jubilees in some of his tales. The religious in the first settlements were convinced that the unspeakable lay just beyond the ambits of their candles’ flames, within a darkness so obscure that not even the good and the prudent could resist a second fall. I think that, for Henry, the evil of which he wrote lay not in the hearts of humankind, but in the principle of wilderness, which is an unchecked rage capable of tearing earth itself apart. It was the evil of a vegetable world that acknowledged no limit to its growth, of the mineral world that strained perpetually to remake the features of the earth, and of an animal world that would, if left ungoverned, let one man or beast tear the throat out of another.

  Disconcerted, I declared with the ardor of someone announcing a discovery, “It is a pleasant afternoon!”

  “Uncommonly hot for September,” he replied, taking off his hat and sniffing the hatband as someone might who wishes to affirm his place among the gross elements.

  Henry’s prosaic observation on the weather struck me as remarkable: Even a man such as he, I said to myself, can, in a trice, plummet from the aeries of sublime thought to the worn path of the commonplace!

  Our trip was not entirely given over to the rigors of mind and body. Much of the way was pleasant. We did not always go by shank’s mare, but traveled, at intervals, by coach or wagon, canoe or rowboat.

  On the western branch of the Penobscot, we stayed briefly with a Kennebec Scotsman named McCauslin, who had built a large house at the mouth of the Little Schoodic. A convivial host, though seldom afforded an opportunity to prove it, he lavished on us luxuries indicative of a genuine hospitality. Henry and I slept on feather beds and dined on shad, ham and eggs, potatoes and cheese, mountain cranberries, white sweet cakes and yellow hotcakes. McCauslin kept dairy cows, and Henry and I buttered our boots against rain and river water. During the rain, which drummed against his shingled roof, we browsed—for reading’s sake—among his books. In his scant library were cheap editions of flash novels, Eugène Sue’s Wandering Jew, Parish’s geography, and a volume bearing the lurid title The United States Criminal Calendar: or, An Awful Warning to the Youth of America; Being an Account of the Most Horrid Murders, Piracies, Highway Robberies. He also owned several of the Leatherstocking Tales—more to our liking.

  James Fenimore Cooper’s idea of the ancient forest and its indigenes was at variance with the Almighty’s adjuration to the Edenic couple, as expressed in Genesis 1: “. . . and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it . . .” Like William Bartram, Cooper had found, in wilderness, an ample balm to soothe the anguished souls of men—a paradise thought to have been granted us in perpetuity, but which was fated to be annulled by human greed. Already, the overthrow of nature’s sovereignty could be seen in Middlesex County and—to Henry’s eyes—even in Maine’s Piscataquis County, where trees were valued as a commodity.

  After Henry and I had been sufficiently rested to continue our search for “mankind’s first habitation, where the original dust of creation lay yet upon the doorsill,” we set off once more, this time in the company of McCauslin, who had agreed to guide us. An able waterman, as well, he would obtain a vessel farther up the western branch, at Millinocket, which would carry us on the string of spacious lakes that led to Mount Ktaadn.

  At the “Burnt Land,” we left the road and made our way along the merest sketch of a path following the river’s northern bank. Apart from a half a dozen loggers’ cabins near the shore, which would stand empty until the river froze, there was not a trace of men or livestock. The loggers would arrive in late fall on the ice-paved Penobscot, fell pines, spruce, yellow birch, fir, mountain ash, and hickories, and—come spring—roll them into the river, which would carry them to Bangor. Before the thaw, most of the men would have traveled the frozen river south, taking their animals. The log drivers would later follow them.

  We made camp at the Penobscot’s meeting with the Millinocket, the latter more a stream than a river. We had acquired two other skillful boatmen for the better management of our boat, known as a “batteau,” a corruption of bateau. In its shape, it resembled the French fishing dory, which had been brought to North America during the French and Indian Wars. Unlike a canoe, it had a shallow draft, flared sides, and a narrow stern and bow. By using twelve-foot iron-tipped spruce poles, the boatmen could punt them through the rapids.

  By the Millinocket, we drank a wondrous beer favored by the woodsmen of those parts, which Henry, who did not require stimulants to encourage his ecstasies, praised. He extolled its manly virtues in his journal with a J. Thoreau & Co. pencil:

  “It was as if we sucked at the very teats of Nature’s pine-clad bosom in these parts,—the sap of all Millinocket botany commingled,—the topmost, most fantastic, and spiciest sprays of the primitive wood, and whatever invigorating and stringent gum or essence it afforded steeped and dissolved in it,—a lumberer’s drink, which would acclimate and naturalize a man at once,—which would make him see green, and, if he slept, dream that he heard the wind sough among the pines.”

  While McCauslin and the boatmen dozed at the bottom of our batteau and I rested in the shade of the jack pines, Henry, clearheaded and eager, searched for relics of the Penobscot tribe. He found only stone flakes left from their arrowheads. Seeing him squatting on the dusty ground, like Niobe weeping for her slain children, I joined him in his search.

  “The earth’s fossil record,” he said gloomily, “like arrowheads and pottery shards, the pyramids of the pharaohs, or the skeleton of what had been a moose, in whose bones I found no trace of the muscular animal to which they had once belonged—all point to one end, which is extinction.”

  He was referring to a bull moose, macerated by wolves and insects into a lathwork of bones, which we had stumbled upon downriver, near Enfield.

  He threw his arms wide, as if to embrace what his eyes could take in, and said biblically, “All this will pass into bog meadows and mires, fens and sloughs, where it will be consumed by time. The silver birch trees, the osprey steadying itself above the Penobscot, the river itself with its multitude of fish and water walkers striding across its surface like tiny bateaux will pass, as will also the raucous loons crying over a tragedy known only to loons and the eagles towering above the bastions of Mount Ktaadn, where, according to the Abenaki, the god Pomola, a beast with an eagle’s talons and wings, a man’s body, and a moose’s head, dwells and sends furious storms against the valley’s creatures.”

  He rocked on his heels and pulled at his beard like Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem.

  “They will survive for a time in the words I set down in my journals, until the words, too, are destroyed and there is nothing left to tell that this animal or tree, that fish or man had ever been here.”

  I remember being stricken by Henry’s prophesy. I felt like a limed bird or the fish at the end of a line pulled up into the coruscating light that will finish it. I was glad that McCauslin and the others slept through Henry’s forecast of the apocalypse. Stoical and pragmatic—their minds riding upon the rails of the present moment and its dangers—they would have laughed at him. I would not have wished him shamed. By now, I had acknowledged his rarity, though his waywardness would sometimes spoil my good opinion of him.

  “Don’t be alarmed, Samuel. The end will not come in our time, but in a thousand or ten thousand years hence. Life will take a long time dying. Smell the air, Samuel—how pure it is! There is not an atom of the stench of the dying animal that will someday be ubiquitous until the end has been accomplished.”

  There was, however, the rancid stink of our buttered boots, which the flies loved!

  Henry crouched by the river and drank from his cupped hands.

  “Taste the water—how it seems almost to evaporate on the tongue. It is a clear spirit that does not intoxicate—the aqua vitae, supernal water of baptism, even more pristine than our own Walden Pond. Last winter, it was snow falling on cedars in the North Maine Woods. Mark me, Samuel: One d
ay handbills will be given out on the streets of Boston in praise of Hiram Ricker’s Poland Spring, and Frederic Tudor’s heirs will send blocks of the frozen Penobscot to Calcutta and Charleston.”

  Henry’s mood could be as changeable as the wind; in an instant, it had turned from despondency to rapture. His mind, like a great bird roaming the sky’s upper stories, took an effort for him to steady in the sometimes contrary gusts of his thought.

  We were then six miles upriver from McCauslin’s place and twenty-four from the point, where we ought to have met up with Louis Neptune and his men. We visited the house of Old Fowler, father of one of our boatmen and the oldest inhabitant of those remote woods. His was “the last house” to be seen northwest of Bangor, the lumber town that Henry likened to “a star on the edge of night, still hewing at the forests of which it is built.” Henry would pronounce “the last house” with the relish of a man who delights in isolation. In the flattened meadow grass, we saw where moose had lain down to sleep. Old Fowler said that the meadows thereabouts were pasture for thousands of the great beasts, which, in their grotesqueness, seemed almost a thing extant before the Flood.

  Our batteau now needed to be carried two miles round the Grand Falls of the Penobscot, the first of our portages as we rowed toward North Twin Lake. Horses were brought up, and the boat put onto a sled made of saplings. Henry and I walked ahead to the falls above the river, near the outlet of Quakish Lake. There, we were surprised by the sight of a pine tree stripped of bark, its sap used to glue a placard to the trunk, announcing to the moose and the Indian the existence of Oak Hall, a haberdashery owned by George W. Simmons, of Boston. Henry raged against the rapacious claw of commerce, while I grew anxious for the existence of an aboriginal world.

  “Not all men work with pen and paper,” I said—kindly, to placate him. “Most use the ax, the cleaver, the saw, and the sewing needle, especially here where there is nothing. They make things, Henry. . . . The world progresses by fits and starts.”