Thoreau's Life in the Woods

The other title of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is Life in the Woods. It is the story of his life in the woods during his two years at Walden Pond, but it is also very much a natural history of the animal and plant communities in that part of eastern Massachusetts just before the middle of the 19^th century.

H.D. ThoreauToward the end of Thoreau’s classic book-length essay in a chapter called “Spring” he deploys a method that he has used throughout. He begins with the concrete and elides into the abstract. He begins with a description of the glacial cut banks,

“Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village … Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation.” He goes on to call it “grotesque vegetation” that resembles the foliage found as architectural ornament, acanthus, chicory, ivy, and vine.

As the sand is eroded off of the bank it is re-deposited at the base, splaying out into more expressive forms, which Thoreau also felt resembled “sand foliage.” “No wonder the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea itself inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are impregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype,” he wrote.

Thoreau manages to find in the etymologies of the words lobe and leaf and a letterform analysis  paths that lead from the earth into the air and the water where he finds the ice forming leaves as it crystallizes. He then begins to see the form of the leaf everywhere from the shape of watersheds to his own hand “a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and its veins.” After two pages of this associative writing Thoreau comes back to earth. “Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.”

For the first time reader of Walden much of this is startling, confusing, and even off-putting. Thoreau is often described as one of the forerunners of American environmentalism. But compared to most of the other progenitors his point of view seems distinctly obscure and the landscape receives the bulk of his passion seems distinctly unlike a wilderness.

Walden Pond“The scenery of Walden,” Thoreau wrote, “is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description.”

The other 19^th century cynosure of environmentalism, John Muir, wanders the nearly untouched landscape of the Sierras marveling at the immensity and grandeur of the mountains, valleys, meadows and glaciers. His tone is that of an evangelical preacher, rhapsodic about his objects of affections and infuriated by the agents of destruction. Even the blameless sheep are “hooved locusts” to him.

In the early 20^th century Aldo Leopold is the cool rationalist moved to measured ardor first by the dying fire that sees in the eyes of she-wolf that he has killed early in his career with the Forest Service and later by the labor of restoring a ruined farm in Wisconsin. Both Muir and Leopold are moved beyond rationalism to describe Nature in emotional language, but they don’t have the nearly hallucinogenic tendencies of Thoreau’s rants.

At one point in his sojourn Thoreau momentarily doubts the value of solitude. And then a gentle summer rain begins to fall.

“Every little pine needle expanded and swelled in sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in the scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.”

The cabinThoreau lived at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847. The Wampanoag had cultivated the landscape heavily for generations before European settlement in the 17th century. Throughout Walden he frequently refers to past land use, making it clear that he is living in a place where resources have been exploited widely and repeatedly and yet it is still beautiful and its spirit is still alive.

“Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought welling up to its surface that was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to it and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me. It is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was not guile! He round this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it with this thought, and in his well bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?”