A Fugitive in Walden Woods

by Norman Lock

  “And by fits and starts, it goes to blazes,” he replied in a voice pitched between rancor and sorrow. “And we along with it.”

  When the batteau arrived, the poor beasts panting after the strain of having hauled it over stony ground, we resumed our journey. There would be other portages before we reached Mount Ktaadn, all of them arduous for the draft horses and for the boatmen, wearing red flannel shirts and waterman’s boots, while Henry and I walked ahead in the moccasined footsteps of Indians who had carried birch-bark canoes along these same paths hundreds of years and more ago.

  In the journal entries for our expedition, the factual Henry prevailed over the fanciful one. Emerson called them “bare as a lumberman’s cabin,” although I suspect he had never been inside of one. In his prose Henry commemorated the places and things of the Maine wilderness, as a man would for whom trees, stones, and rivers were enough. He had in mind the “facts of the matter,” which, he declared, deserve mention in that what they stand for will one day vanish. A world where all is spirit can no more be understood than an essay on the spirit without the world of things and places to serve as its foil.

  “Things cast a shadow called metaphor, which partakes of two worlds at once and is all the richer for it,” said Henry.

  Just so, do I love to study old maps delineating features that time has effaced and street directories enumerating residents who long ago departed this world for glory or oblivion. Ghosts of a forgotten world hover above their worn pages; they are the graveyards and gazettes of time—lodestones to which even staunch minds will turn for comfort.

  I recall a conversation held between Henry and Emerson. A map of North America lay open on the latter’s desk.

  “The present state of cartography is, for some of us, more staggering to the mind than the revealed truths of religion.”

  “Meaning what?” said Henry.

  “We know less about the North American continent than we do the nature of God.”

  Henry the land surveyor snuffled. Emerson rounded off his thought.

  “Theologians and clergymen claim to know His will, while every Tom, Dick, and Harry has an opinion about Him. As a result, His ways are no more mysterious than clockwork or the streets and warrens of Boston. But this immensity!” His fingers walked across the empty spaces of the Far West. “None can claim to know it in its entirety.”

  The Maine wilderness was mystery enough for me. I feared it more than I did God.

  Now Henry and I began to see moose where, earlier on our trip, we had seen only their traces in the grass, imprinted on the mud banks, or left to molder down to a collation of imposing bones.

  “Moose,” Henry said to himself, and then “Indian,” as if the words were, to his mind, the poles of a creation little by little falling into ruin.

  One night, he dreamed he was fishing from his rustic bed, near to the river’s own. Waking before us while the moon was still up, he tested his nocturnal vision with pole and line—raising, he told us afterward, speckled trout and silvery roach into the moonlight that shone down on the river and on the steep face of Mount Ktaadn, which could be seen now in the distance.

  At the Aboljacknagesic, we tied up to a willow tree aslant the creek, and Henry, compass in hand, led us northeastward, toward the mountain’s tallest peak. That night, we slept in a deep ravine, keeping ourselves warm—for the air was already chill there—by a fire in which a felled spruce tree was consumed whole. Next morning, Henry went on alone, like a priest ascending to his altar, leaving behind those not ordained to administer the sacraments.

  I spent the morning nervously awaiting his return. To pass the time, I practiced my throwing skills—my adroitness with a jackknife having, by this time, become as sharp as the blade itself, so that even the Canuck boatmen marveled at my aim.

  WHEN HENRY RETURNED FROM the summit, he did not wish to speak of his experience. He seemed shaken; he brooded, as if seeing in his mind’s eye things beyond human ken, which did not bear witnessing. What I know of the hours that he spent on the mountaintop, I would read much later, in a draft of The Maine Woods. While I would leave Walden Woods before Henry had given up his experiment and had sought the company of his fellows, we remained friends until his death this year.

  To relate the experience that shattered him, I will give voice to his unspoken thoughts—a ventriloquism, in which the roles have been reversed, allowing the puppet to make its master talk.

  “On Mount Ktaadn, I was like a man who finds himself suddenly set apart. No . . . I was more like an uncomprehending rock than a man. Hardly even that! A rock is too durable an object to represent a man. I was a stick, then, and liable to be broken—a mere twig snapped in two—by the strength of Titans resident on that mountain peak and in the winds that tore at it, sending the poor sparrows beyond God’s providence. I was afraid, very much afraid that I, too, would be cast out, as Satan and his legion had been for their impious revolt, their wings scorched to stumps. I stood in defiance—cowered in dread, to be honest—of a power more puissant than God’s and known only to elemental nature and, perhaps, to the ancients who had first appeared in the valleys below and on the pastured slopes of the mountain, where it reigned imperiously as fire does, careless of men and women. The mountain seemed an abandoned quarry, which had been used in the building of the world.

  “On Ktaadn, I saw nothing; I had expected to see into the depths of space, but my view was occluded by mist and cloud—more cloud than mist, so that when I drank from the springs there, it seemed I was drinking water wrung from clouds. When the mist briefly lifted its veil, I saw, if you can call it seeing, ancient scenes: Vulcan at his forge, Prometheus upon his rock, and Atlas, the earth upon his shoulders. I was none of them. I was only a man who had blundered arrogantly into a place hostile to all life. And I was afraid.

  “I recalled Milton’s lines uttered by Satan to the spirits of the abyss: ‘Chaos and ancient Night, / I come no spy / With purpose to explore or to disturb / The secrets of your realm . . .’

  “As though to affirm my abnegation—my absence—the mist fell around me once again, bandaging my eyes. I myself might have been a cloud, so vague and dissolute did I feel. I was unfinished—the raw clay merely.

  “Then the mountain spoke: ‘Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.’

  “I was a little man, who had, in his conceit, held himself aloof from his fellows, believing I had business to transact with potentates. I had traveled smugly in Concord, and now I wished to return there, where nature was not elevated above the common and the lowercase. I had had enough of prodigies.

  “I fled the mountain as if it had contained a thousand devils in its granite fastness. I hurried to rejoin my fellows, who instinctually understood that mountains can never belong to men. Nature’s monsters should be feared, if the heart is faint, or revered, if it is capable of awe—from the valley, where Flora temperately rules. I hurried to rejoice in my littleness with my companions. Pomola, god of storms and thunder, was sovereign on Mount Ktaadn and more ancient than the Ancient of Days, who must shrink from him.”

  Such words as those might have passed through Henry’s disconcerted mind. If not those, then some others equally tumultuous.

  I, too, had faced a “true source of evil”; mine had been near Carrollton, Isle of White County, Virginia, where Nature wore her malignancy beneath her pretty skirts. There evil had not been in mountains, but in men. In slavery’s inferno, I had been stewed to pulp. Each whip stroke had been an apocalypse. So I might not have presumed too much in speaking for Henry.

  He had come down from the mountaintop with neither tablets of the law nor the voice of God resounding in his ear. His hair and beard had not turned white. He had not been touched by fire, but by ice and Nature’s cold, mineral heart. Glory did not cover him; he frowned and kept his thoughts to himself.

  We started back to Bangor.

  Later, as if to mock Henry and his id
eas of the wilderness, we finally met up with Louis Neptune and his men, sitting slumped in their canoes, on the Millinocket.

  “Me been sick,” Louis moaned, his wizened, nut brown face resting in his hands. “Oh, me unwell now.”

  The Indians had been detained by too much Bangor whiskey, downriver at Five Islands, where boatmen and loggers caroused. They had exchanged their rags for the caped overcoats and wide-brimmed hats favored by Quakers. They were as far removed from the state of nature as were the frightened muskrats scuffling at the bottom of the canoes, destined to be roasted and eaten during the trip to Chesuncook Lake, where the Indians intended to hunt for moose. They looked outlandish in their somber clothes, which became them even less than had their rags.

  “They ought to have visited Oak Hall,” said Henry wryly. “Mr. Simmons, of Boston, could have turned them into gents.”

  I smiled, gladdened by Henry’s good humor, which the world outside Walden could sometimes darken, but was a welcome accent, an ornament in a somber hymn.

  “Me sure get some moose!” boasted Louis Neptune.

  Henry turned his back on him—a slight the Indian did not acknowledge.

  The Indians continued up Millinocket Stream, where they vanished into time’s maw, where truths are turned into myths, myths receive their tarnish, and the primordial world is rubbished.

  “Game of mumblety-peg?” asked Henry, opening his jackknife.

  We played like two boys whose ambition was the mastery of simple skills and whose summits were no grander than Brister’s Hill.

  Ktaadn and Pomola might be briefly endured, but they would never offer rest or inspire reverence in our kind. Theirs was a brutal nature to be feared. Henry would sometimes feel the itch to travel beyond Concord once again, but not in search of transfiguration that would merge him with the atoms of creation. The sense of dissolution had been too terrible to bear repeating.

  We reached Bangor on September 10—the day the Donner Party finished its agonizing crawl across the Great Salt Lake Desert. Nature is as indifferent and willful as a locomotive, which would as soon crush a child beneath its wheels as a dog.

  ON A NIGHT NOT LONG AFTER OUR RETURN to Walden, Henry invoked nature’s genial spirit. He paddled his canoe out onto the pond and—letting it come to rest, in accord with Newton’s laws of motion—looked once again at the luminous figures traced against the sky. They told familiar stories of the classical age. Stars were thickly sown on the black sky and on the blacker surface of the pond. He was, Henry later said, like an aeronaut who watches one vista yield to the next in the grand and endless recessional of space.

  “My place is here among the woodland gods. Henceforth, I’ll be like the shepherd in a pastoral who summers in the uplands with his flock and, when the pockets of the clouds begin to fill with snow and hailstones, winters in the village with men like himself.”

  I would not have called Henry a changed man. He did not go up the mountain only to come down as someone else. He was humbled, not transformed. No longer content to play the part of the outcast, he took up—though not completely, for he would always be an eccentric and a dreamer—the business of mankind and managed to transact it in a way that did not diminish himself in his own eyes. Like other men, he was afraid to die alone—to speak his last words into the unhearing night, which might usher in eternity or extinction. The dying and the fear of it come to us all, even to a New England Transcendentalist. That night on Walden Pond, Henry came out from under the stars.

  And what about Samuel Long? What became of him after having stood in the shadow of Mount Ktaadn? He had traveled as far north as he needed. He was no freer—no less liable to be seized, chained up, and hurried into bondage once again and, very possibly, death. But he had come to realize that his woeful condition was that of every man and that there was no last stop on the Underground Railroad. There could be no safe haven. This realization did not cause him to forgive his tormentors or pity them their ignorance or to fear them less. He became warier than before, hard, and a little deceitful. He worried the splinter in his heart, partly in anxiousness, partly for the strange pleasure he took in it, like wriggling a loose tooth in the gum. He became jealous of his own life and determined to hold it fast with the one good hand that was left to him.

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  December 20, 1862

  I had thought to end my story of Henry David Thoreau here. I would stay on awhile longer in Concord, but my days with him in Walden Woods were over, though our friendship would be renewed, at intervals, until his death. Emerson was as good as his word. He arranged for my manumission, and, in the spring of 1847, I became a freedman; in the fall of 1848, I entered Middlebury College, in Vermont.

  Having been graduated in due course by that enlightened institution, I went to work for William Garrison, at The Liberator, in Boston, where I took up residence in December 1851. I was employed in various capacities, including that of correspondent. In April 1864, I removed to Philadelphia, where I continued my profession at The Christian Recorder. After Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the columns of that paper could scarcely contain the fire that, for two centuries, had been no more than an ember in the hearts of my people.

  In June, the Recorder’s editor, Elisha Weaver, sent me to Washington City, where I was to make the acquaintance of Walt Whitman, poet of Leaves of Grass and a nurse at the Armory Square Hospital, located in the city. As one who had borne witness to the years of sorrow and slaughter—the chief accountant of their losses—we wanted his testimony concerning them; we wanted a précis in prose or verse to grace the pages of our newspaper.

  Not even Whitman, I thought as I looked for him among the wounded, could summarize so complex and multifarious a tragedy. He would need to be Homer in order to write our Iliad. Perhaps he was, but I did not think so at the time.

  During the two days I spent in conversation with Whitman, I became increasingly sure of his benevolence, and, on my last night in Washington City, I told him the story recounted in the preceding pages. Encouraged by his frankness and his earnestness, I confided in him—albeit hesitantly—an incident that had followed Henry’s and my return to Concord after the expedition to Mount Ktaadn. I could see that my disclosure had shaken the good man. He was silent for a time afterward.

  “Why did you tell me this?” he finally asked.

  His tone was more puzzled than censorious. It was as though I had given him an object that had no apparent use or meaning, to which gift he had responded, “What am I to make of it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly, for I did not know. “Forget that I ever spoke of it.”

  “A thing once said cannot be unsaid.”

  I looked out the window of his room at a sky that appeared suddenly alien. I might have been on Mars for all I knew of earth at that moment.

  “I must think about what you’ve told me.” My face, even by candlelight, must have betrayed my unease, for he said, “Never fear that I will betray you, Samuel.”

  We shook hands, and I never saw him again, although I have read his book many times since. The week following my return to Philadelphia, I received this letter:

  468 M. Street, South

  Washington City

  July 4, 1864

  Dear Mr. Long,

  Publish your reminiscence, if you must, but I entreat you to suppress its “final chapter,” for the sake of Henry Thoreau’s reputation, as well as your own safety. You will not escape peril until you, like him, are beyond the reach of little men. I am afraid, Samuel, that most men are pygmies.

  Sincerely,

  Walt Whitman

  I had no wish to see my memoir published. I scarcely know why I had troubled to write it. Having become, at last, a freedman, I wished nothing more than to spend the balance of my days as a private one. Nonetheless, I finished the story, adding a last chapter. I intend to put the manuscript away among my papers and souvenirs. Perhaps a descendant, if I ever marry; a legal heir, if I have propert
y to convey or business left undone; or some stranger who happens on it will decide otherwise than I have and send it to a publisher. I leave the matter in other, future hands.

  VII

  WALDEN WOODS, SEPTEMBER 17, 1846

  While Henry sat in his canoe on Walden Pond, admiring the stars and preparing to make himself adaptable to the ordinary ways of men, I was sitting at my table, cutting an apple with my knife. I was tired, having spent much of the day at Bush, helping the Emersons “put away the garden” for another year. Now at home in my cabin, I gave myself luxuriously to the sensations of the body’s easing the spring of its mechanism, which had been tightly wound by toil.

  Darkness had risen like a flood of black water. I sat eating the apple in a circle of candlelight. I was content, as a man can be taking his ease in his own house, especially at night, when his eyes are untroubled by shabbiness.

  “Each must build up his own world,” Emerson had once said to me, “though he unbuilt all other men’s, for materials.”

  I had not heard the footsteps in the dooryard nor on the step outside the door. I was too intent on my own thoughts. Suddenly, the door gave way with a noise of splintering wood. A man stood in the doorway, a black hulk against the starlit night behind him.

  For an instant, I thought Carlson, father of the drowned boy, had returned.

  “Well, nigger,” the man said, stepping across the threshold. “You been telling tales. Tall ones!” He tossed a copy of The Liberator on the table. By the light of the candle, I saw that it was the issue in which my narrative had appeared. “Your bellyaching has done for you. Your old master sent me to fetch you. He wants to hear from your own nigger lips how he hurt your feelings and all. He wants to make amends. He got a room ready and waiting for you. Cozy little room with a blanket and a pillow to rest your nappy head on. Pretty soon, you going to be in hog heaven.”

  He had a pistol in his hand, which he now cocked and aimed at me.

  “Get up, boy! Time to be going.”