A Visit to Walden Pond

by Woody

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‘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.

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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.

1WoodyThoreauCabinToo, 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.

1WaldenPondUnlike 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.”1LaundryRock

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.

Wooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upCheck 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”