A fall walk on this old road, September 24, 1859.
Here's what Henry Thoreau's journals are like. Walk with him on the old Carlisle (Estabrook) road (notes follow):
"A man must attend to Nature closely for many years to know when, as well as where, to look for his objects, since he must always anticipate her a little. Young men have not learned the phases of Nature; they do not know what constitutes a year, or that one year is like another. I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sportsman knows when to look for plover.
"Though you may have sauntered near to heaven's gate , when at length you return toward the village you give up the enterprise a little, and you begin to fall into the old ruts of thought, like a regular roadster. Your thoughts very properly fail to report themselves to headquarters. Your thoughts turn towards night and the evening mail and become begrimed with dust , as if you were just going to put up at (with?) the tavern, or even come to make an exchange with a brother clergyman on the morrow. [2]
"Some eyes cannot see, even through a spy-glass. I showed my spy-glass to a man whom I met this afternoon, who said that he wanted to see if he could look through it. I tried it carefully on him, but he failed. He said that he tried a lot lately on the muster-field but he could never see through them, somehow or other everything was all a blur. I asked him if he considered his eyes good. He answered that they were good to see far. They looked like two old-fashioned china saucers. He kept steadily chewing his quid all the time while he talked and looked. This is the case with a great many, I suspect. Everything is a blur to them. He enjoys the distinction of being the only man in town who raises his own tobacco. Seeing is not in them. No focus will suit them. You wonder how the world looks to them,--if those are eyes which they have got, or bits of china, familiar with soapsuds.
"As I stood looking over a wall this afternoon at some splendid red sumach bushes, now in their prime, I saw Melvin the other side of the wall and hailed him. 'What are you after there?' asked he. 'After the same thing that you are, perhaps,' answered I. But I mistook, this time, for he said he was looking amid the huckleberry bushes for some spectacles which a woman lost there in the summer. It was his mother, no doubt. [3]
"Road,--that old Carlisle one-- that leaves towns behind; where you can put off worldly thoughts; where you do not carry a watch, nor remember the proprietor; where the proprietor is the only trespasser,-- looking after his apples!-- the only one who mistakes his calling there, whose title is not good; where fifty may be a-barberrying and you do not see one. It is an endless succession of glades where the barberries grow thickest, successive yards amid the barberry bushes where you do not see one. There I see Melvin and the robins, and many a nut-brown maid sashé -ing to the barberry bushes in hoops and crinoline, and none of them see me. The world-surrounding hoop! Færy rings! Oh, the jolly cooper's trade it is the best of any! Carried to the furthest isles where civilized man penetrates. This is the girdle they've put round the world! Saturn or Satan set the example. Large and small hogsheads, barrels, kegs, worn by the misses that go to the lone schoolhouse in the Pinkham notch. The lonely horse in its pasture is glad to see company, comes forward to be noticed and takes an apple from your hand. Others are called great roads, but this is greater than they all. The road is only laid out, offered to walkers, not accepted by the town and the travelling world. To be represented by a dotted line on charts, or drawn in lime-juice, undiscoverable to the uninitiated, to be held to a warm imagination. No guide-boards indicate it. No odometer would indicate the miles a wagon had run there. Rocks which the druids might have raised--if they could. There I go searching for malic acid of the right quality, with my tests. The process is simple. Place the fruit between your jaws and then endeavor to make your teeth meet. The very earth contains it. The Easterbrooks Country contains malic acid. [4]
"To my sense the dicksonia fern has the most wild and primitive fragrance, quite unalloyed and untamable, such as no human institutions give out,--the early morning fragrance of the world, antediluvian, strength and hope imparting. They who scent it can never faint. It is ever a new and untried field where it grows, and only when we think original thoughts can we perceive it. If we keep that in our boudoir we shall be healthy and evergreen as hemlocks. Older than, but related to, strawberries. Before strawberries were, it was, and it will outlast them. Good for the trilobite and saurian in us; death to dandies. It yields its scent most morning and evening. Growing without manure; older than man; refreshing him; preserving his original strength and innocence. When the New Hampshire farmer, far from travelled roads, has cleared a space for his mountain home and conducted the springs of the mountain to his yard, already it grows about the sources of that spring, before any mint is planted in his garden. There his sheep and oxen and he too scent it, and he realizes that the world is new to him. There the pastures are rich, the cattle do not die of disease, and the men are strong and free. The wild original of strawberries and the rest.
"Nature, the earth herself, is the only panacea. They bury poisoned sheep up to their necks in earth to take the poison out of them.
"After four days cloud and rain we have fair weather. A great many have improved this first fair day to come a-barberrying to the Easterbrooks fields. These bushy fields are all alive with them, though I scarcely see one. I meet Melvin, loaded down with barberries, in bags and baskets, so that he has to travel by stages and is glad to stop and talk with me. It is better to take thus what Nature offers, in her season, than to buy an extra dinner at [the Parker House]." [5]
Notes:
The photo at top is a faceted version of a fall photo of the Estabrook
Road by Ann Chapman.
[1]. Notes on the first paragraph. Melvin and Clark lived at the
edges of the Easterbrooks country. Melvin was a trapper whom Thoreau saw
so regularly here Thoreau nicknamed the landscape Melvin's Preserve, though
Easterbrooks country was Thoreau's favorite name. The old
Carlisle road is now called the Estabrook road. Flying
Childers was a famous racehorse owned by the Duke of Devonshire.
It ran the course at Newmarket, England at a speed of one mile a minute. (RWE.
Jnls & Misc. Notebooks. V. XI, p. 58.) Thoreau added a
footnote to say that this "gate" is really the
"heaven's gate" he mentioned two paragraphs later. The "garden"
may invoke the Jardin des Plantes (and Cabinet of Natural History) in
Paris, at which the profusion of nature gave Emerson a powerful moment of
insight.
[2] Notes on paragraph 3. Sauntering . His saunters were not simple nature walks, but combined aspects of pilgrimage, quest, and meditative practice. As he wrote in the essay "Walking," "So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn." Heaven's Gate. As Thoreau had said only two paragraphs earlier, heaven's gate is a gate at which one never arrives. Compare, "Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven" (the poem opening "A Walk to Wachusett"); and on Saddleback (Greylock), "It seemed a road for the pilgrim to enter upon who would climb to the gates of heaven." in the Tuesday chapter of A Week ; and, the poem in his Oct. 29, 1857 journal entry, "Forever in my dream and in my morning thought," which say "...The woods that way are gates; the pastures too slope up / To an unearthly ground." As his friend and disciple H. G. O. Blake said, "It was the divine presence in nature by which Thoreau was haunted" (Reading #3, Summer School of Philosophy, Hillside Chapel, 1881). Vision quest. Joseph Campbell describes a vision quest to Bill Moyers: "There's a certain type of myth [we have in common] which one might call the vision quest, going in quest of a boon, a vision, which is the same in every mythology. That is the thing I tried to present in the first book I wrote, The Hero with a Thousand Faces . All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you're in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. Then you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon, and trying to hold on to it as you move back in to your social world again. That's not an easy thing to do" (J. Campbell, The Power of Myth , B. S. Flowers, ed., NY: Doubleday (1983), p. 129).
[3] The rascal!
[4] Malic acid makes wild apples and barberries tart. Earlier in the paragraph, "drawn in lime juice" refers to invisible writing.
[5] Barberrying and a wild harvest. I wondered what in the world for what purpose prickly barberries and their red berries were harvested. I found that barberries has a suite of uses, which is typical for the pre-industrial time. It not only made a tart, flavorful jelly but also, being high in pectin, is usefully blended with fruits low in pectin, such as strawberries, to make other fruit jellies and products. Some used it as a tonic. Young leaves were used in salad. Also, preserved in vinegar, the leaves made a sour sauce to complement meat and fish. The roots were a purgative and other parts were a digestive binder. Under the obsolete "doctrine of signatures," which suggested that the appearance of a plant foretold its uses, the yellow lining of the stem was supposed to indicate it was a remedy for jaundice. Native peoples had called it sour berry. By 1865, the plant had been almost exterminated locally because of the "rust panic," a fear that it would spread a disease to grains; soon it was realized there were many other hosts.
