Woody’s new book STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter is available for Pre-Order HERE NOW!

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Side-trip Adventure Brings a Smile

This is the fourth in a four-column series on my recent travels to the Eastern Seaboard to visit my son – and visit much more.

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The loveliness of Walden Pond in person is threefold beyond expectations, but 80 miles southwest – as Sammy Jay flies – I happened upon a small body of water that not only rivals Henry David Thoreau’s famous basin, it lives up to its own name: The Smiling Pool.

Most likely you are not familiar with Sammy Jay and his fellow characters who lived in, and played near, The Smiling Pool and neighboring Old Briar Patch in “The Bedtime Story-Books” series written by Thornton W. Burgess beginning in 1910.

My often-read copy of The Adventures of Buster Bear.

But the various “Adventures of” Jimmy Skunk, Grandfather Frog, Old Man Coyote, Bobby Raccoon, Jerry Muskrat, Buster Bear and a menagerie of forest friends wearing clothes were my dad’s favorite stories in the 1930s; mine in the ’60s; and, in turn, my daughter’s and sons’ most-requested in the early 1990s. The tattered book jackets and finger-worn pages of 20 hardcover editions reveal how often they have been reread.

Sometimes you take a trip and other times, I believe, a trip takes you. The latter can be better.

After my wife and I were shown the Mayflower Society House, where pilgrim descendant Ralph Waldo Emerson was married, in Plymouth, Massachusetts; then unexpectedly stumbled upon “Authors’ Ridge” where Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott and Thoreau are eternal neighbors in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord; followed by a visit to nearby Walden Pond, it was apparent an “author” theme had grabbed our road map.

So it was that in Cape Cod I serendipitously learned the Thornton W. Burgess Society Museum was in nearby East Sandwich. A side trip beckoned me like Chatterer The Red Squirrel to a pile or acorns.

Burgess, who was born in 1874, is certainly not as acclaimed as the Fab Four at Author’s Ridge. However, during the first half of the 20th Century, it was claimed at the museum, he was as popular as Sesame Street is today.

By the time of his death at age 90, Burgess authored more than 170 books and had 16,000 stories syndicated in newspapers across the country. His work was also published around the world in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish and Gaelic.

And yet “The Bedtime Story-Man” was far more than a children’s author. He was a popular figure on radio from 1912 to 1960, including a show about nature.

Painting of Thornton Waldo Burgess

Indeed, Burgess was at heart a conservationist. He collaborated on a series of books that proved instrumental in the growth of a fledging organization created in 1910 – The Boy Scouts of America. Too, he helped found bird sanctuaries and in 1918 successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Migratory Bird Act.

His legacy lives on in the non-profit educational Thornton W. Burgess Society with the mission: “To inspire reverence for wildlife and concern for the natural environment.” He wrote his bedtime stories with the same goal.

Housed in a two-centuries-old home that overlooks The Smiling Pool – looking down at it from a hill the curved pond resembles a smile – and Old Briar Patch of Thornton’s youth, the museum also features Green Briar Nature Center; Briar Patch Conservation Area; and Green Briar Jam Kitchen, America’s oldest commercial jam kitchen dating back to 1903 and still looks original, where school children see fruit preserves made without preservatives.

There is also, of course, a writing wing. To see hundreds of rare-edition Thornton Waldo Burgess books, some familiar to my eyes, was a time machine back to both my childhood and my early parenthood.

Outside, admiring the Smiling Pool, my trip’s author theme intensified as a quote from the other wordsmith Waldo – Ralph Waldo Emerson – came to mind: “Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”

I smiled, imaging Buster Bear and Reddy Fox doing exactly that below.

In the closing paragraph of each bedtime book, Burgess tells the reader what adventure he will write about next. This especially made sense because his books originated as serialized newspaper stories.

And so, because the advertised four columns proved insufficient for my Eastern Seaboard adventure, we will pick up from here with a bonus chapter next week.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

• Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com
• Unsigned paperbacks or Kindle ebook can be purchased here at Amazon

 Woody’s new book STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter is available for Pre-Order HERE NOW!

*  *  *

‘I went to the woods’ at Walden Pond

This is the third in a four-column series on my recent travels to the Eastern Seaboard to visit my son – and visit much more.

*  *  *

We begin today where I left off last week: “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

This quote by Henry David Thoreau aptly describes “Authors Ridge,” where he, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson rest in shaded peace beneath picturesque woods in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

Too, his sentiment beautifully depicts a scene less than two miles away, south on Walden Street through town, passing Emerson Playground and Thoreau Street, and then a bit further.

Two miles by car – and seemingly 200 years by calendar.

Indeed, this summer past marked the 170th anniversary of Thoreau’s celebrated experiment in self-examination and independence that began in July of 1845.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” Thoreau wrote in his transcendent treatise, “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” which was not published until 1854, eight years before his death at age 44. “And to see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Visiting where Thoreau lived for two years, two months and two days in a one-room cabin he self-reliantly built – at a frugal cost of $28.12 – is to see those pages brought to life.

This author’s ridge, among pitch pines and hickories, is more gorgeous than I had imagined. Conjure up the most scenic pond you have ever seen, multiply that loveliness threefold, and still you will come up short of the view of Walden Pond below.

Unlike Plymouth Rock and the Old North Bridge, both being much smaller than anticipated, Walden Pond in person is grander. It seems more a lake.

The cabin, which measured 10 feet by 15 feet with two windows – and held a bed, small table, desk and two chairs – is long gone. It was dismantled for scrap lumber – just as the Mayflower, I learned earlier in this trip, was used to build homes after its return voyage from Plymouth to England.

The cabin site – specifically, the second-hand chimney bricks – was discovered in 1945, the centennial of the start of Thoreau’s retreat. Today, nine square granite posts, each about four feet tall and connected by a chain, mark the outline of the cabin.

A few paces to the side is a rock pile, perhaps 20 feet square. It began modestly in 1872 when Bronson Alcott, a lifelong friend of Thoreau, visited Walden Pond and placed a few stones to mark the cabin’s location. Ever since, admirers and disciples from the world over have extended the tradition.

Walt Whitman came in 1881, writing afterwards: “I too carried one and deposited on the heap.” John Muir did likewise, twice, in 1883 and 1893.

I now belong in the company of Whitman and Muir.

Some making the pilgrimage embellish their tributes with Thoreau quotes: “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it,” was printed in black marker on a triangular stone I saw.

In chalk, a round stone read: “breathe deeply + live wildly”.

A book cover-sized flat stone was filled fully: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

Reflecting on Thoreau’s song, I considered how these nuggets would fit nicely in 140-character Tweets – and yet how appalled he would surely be by Twitter, by texting, by our un-simplified modern world where the masses seem too distracted by consumerism to live wildly.

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined – H. D. Thoreau,” read another stone in the pile.

One more: “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

But here was my favorite rock lyric: “Thoreau’s mom did his laundry.”

It is true. Thoreau regularly broke his contemplative solitude with a half-hour walk to his parents’ home to enjoy his mother’s apple pies and – time out from self-reliance – he would bring his dirty clothes.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

• Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com
• Unsigned paperbacks or Kindle ebook can be purchased here at Amazon