| To the TOC for "The Seasons in Estabrook Country" |
[Page 42]
The Seasons in Estabrook Country
AUTUMN (Part 1 of 2)
Sept. 2, 1857. Thoreau and Emerson often walked together. This day, Thoreau wrote, "To Yellow Birches. . . . The third, or largest, yellow birch, at the cellar [fn.31], was, at three feet from the ground on the inside or at the ground on the outside, just below the branches, ten feet nine inches in circumference. It divides to three branches at ground on the upper side, and these almost immediately to three more, so low and horizontal that you can easily step into it. It extends two rods east and one west, the ends of the branches coming down to height of head all round, nearly. It is about two thirds as high as wide, or thirty-three feet high. Looking from the west, of an irregular diamond shape resting on the ground. The roots inclose some cellar stones."
Emerson in his journal added, "A valuable walk through the savage fertile houseless land, where we saw [passenger] pigeons & marsh-hawks, &, ere we left it, the mists, which denote the haunt of the elder Gods, were rising." [065]
Emerson ended his journal entry for the day by summarizing two remarks his friend had made during their walk. Testifying to the powerful impression the day had made on him, he included these two remarks (emphasized below) in his eulogy of Thoreau:
"He said, 'You can sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed. Nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. But things respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstasy was never interrupted' . . . His power of observation seems to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole." [066]
Fall, 1970. Mary Fenn, recorder of the Concord Walking Society, preserved the memory of many Thoreauvian sites. Here, she wrote about finding Thoreau's Yellow Birch Cellar, visited by Thoreau and Emerson in the preceding item:
"One of the pleasures of the Walking Society has been discovering the actual places which Thoreau mentioned in his walks. One of these whose location has remained a complete mystery to us, has been the Yellow Birch Cellar Hole. Thoreau spoke many times of that cellar hole northwest of Yellow Birch Swamp, with the great tree growing out of it. A man named Flint had started building a house there and had framed it before deciding to live down by the river instead. There was a swamp in back of it. Sometimes Thoreau approached it from the Old Carlisle Road, and sometimes from Punkatasset. A letter written by the Bartlett sisters well over 100 years ago mentioned walking out the Old Carlisle Road to the Yellow Birch Cellar Hole. It seems incredible that a place so well-known in Concord only a generation or two ago should be completely unknown today by even our oldest inhabitants, but this was the case.
[Page 43]
"Since we had spent many days searching almost every foot of ground northwest of Yellow Birch Swamp, we were convinced that the cellar must be somewhere along the footpath between the stone bridge and the Old Carlisle Road. It would be highly improbable that we could plunge into a large wooded area at random and discover one small site, but we could try. Once more we entered the woods looking for breaks in stone walls where a road might once have gone through, and particularly investigating any higher ground which a prudent housebuilder might select to ensure a dry cellar. We came across a large bed of lily of the valley, surely a sign of civilization, but no cellar hole was near it-quite a mystery. In another place we found several pieces of cut granite. One encouraging sign was the presence of yellow birch trees here and there, grown up among the struggling cedars and junipers which bespoke former pasture land.
"Then we entered into one of those inexplicable places sometimes seen in the midst of woods which resemble a park with great pines towering above the lower growth. As we penetrated deeper, the land began to rise, and there on its height, with a swamp directly behind it, was a cellar hole-a large one at that, and what's more there were yellow birch trees growing out of it. We could hardly believe that after all our searching, map study, and combing through the Journals to find references to it, that we had at last found this elusive spot-the Yellow Birch Cellar Hole. Foundation stones were visible here and there, the sloping sides were covered with ferns and rattlesnake plantain, there were a couple of fresh foxholes, nearby a ditch had once been dug though we found no well, and at the edge of the swamp an old stone wall ran through the woods.
"But at last we can follow in Thoreau's footsteps a century and a quarter later, and walk as he did through the beautiful Concord woods to the Yellow Birch Cellar Hole." [067]
Sept. 2, 1873. Emerson's daughter Ellen writes of poetry picnics to Estabrook country: "Friday we spent at Easterbrook, a beautiful warm day, and father read aloud 'The Trust,' after picnic dinner." [068]
Sept. 3, 1849. On this date, which was two years after Thoreau left Walden Pond, farmer Daniel B. Clark, Jr. wrote in his diary about helping his brother James,
"Helpt James move his building from Walden pond."
o This building had been Thoreau's now-famous cabin at Walden Pond. After Thoreau left the pond, it had been bought by James Clark, and oxen pulled to the Clark family farm on the Estabrook road. James, who admired Thoreau, is said to have had ideas of emulating him and may have lived in it for a short time. He was ill, however, and may have been committed shortly thereafter. [fn.32] The hut became his family's granary and storehouse. Though it became a place of minor pilgrimage, gradually its boards were dispersed and it rotted away, except for scraps now in museums. Ellery Channing recorded its decline in disconnected marginal notes he made in his personal copy of Walden. One of Sanborn's versions of Channing's notes follows, in which Channing reports on the decline of the hut:
[Page 44]
"[The hut] was standing, Sept. 5, '63, near old Clarke's, and still perfect. I visited it, next above old Clarke's on the Deserted Road, March, '60, also Feb., '62, Sept. 5, '63, and Jan., '66; torn down June 4, 1868. . . . I saw H.'s rafters, June 4, 1868, the ruins of this house on the old Carlisle Road, just pulled down. . . . The house stood in perfect conditions as far as the frame and covering, to June 4, '68, a period of 23 years, and would have lasted a century. It was well built, the covering being poor. . . . The windows were gone in '63, and the plaster mostly cracked off, from the moving to old Clarke's, in the N. part of the town, very near the opening of the old Carlisle Road. Used as a place to store corn-[I] visited with [H. G. O.] Blake and [Theosophilus] Brown, Sept. 11, '64." [069]
o The Walden cabin probably once stood [070] close to the west side of the dirt Estabrook road, within a hundred yards north of the small brick cottage. Walkers can imagine it being on the left as they approach the woods.
Sept. 3, 1860. Thoreau: "To Bateman's Pond. . . . Here is a beautiful, and perhaps first decidedly autumnal, day,-a cloudless sky, a clear air, with, maybe veins of coolness. The dense fresh green grass which has sprung up since it was mowed, on most ground, reflects a blaze of light, as if it were morning all the day. The meads and the slopes are enamelled with it, for there has been no drought nor withering. We see the smokes of burning on various sides. The farmers are thus clearing up their pastures,-some, it may be, in preparation for plowing. Though it is warm enough, I notice again the swarms of fuzzy gnats dancing in the cooler air, which is also is decidedly autumnal."
Sept. 4, 1849. Farmer D. B. Clark's diary is an almanac of his farming life. This day he wrote, "Piled up peat in the eleven acre meadow -- travelled up to the Estabrook place." Later that month, he wrote of carting the peat [071] out of the meadow, piling it, and covering it.
Sept. 9, 1857. Thoreau confessed to an appetite for solitude. Daniel Ricketson, a New Bedford acquaintance, describes "walk[ing] this forenoon with Thoreau to the high land northeast of the village about three miles; ate our dinner of brown bread and cheese on the lee side of a stone wall." (Thoreau's journal identified their destination as "Easterbrooks.") Earlier, in the letter that arranged this visit, Thoreau had given his "Friend Ricketson" a wry fair-warning along with the invitation:
"As some heads cannot carry much wine, so it would seem that I cannot bear so much society as you can. I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough of it this year, I shall cry all the next. . . . However, if you care to storm the town, I will engage to take some afternoon walks with you,-retiring into profoundest solitude the most sacred part of the day." [072]
Sept. 11, 1860. Estabrook Country in the fall seemed to make Emerson exult. This day he wrote in his journal:
"Fine walk yesterday with Ellery [Channing] to Estabrook Farm. Finest day in the year, & best road, almost all the way "through the lots." Birds singing; -- got over their summer silence-- sunlight full of gnats; crickets in full cry; goldfinches . . . on the thistle. . . . Boulder Field: cooper's hawk: rock of Sinai, all books and tables of law, wonderful hedges, barberry, apple, elder, viburnum, ivy, cornel, woodbine, grape, white thorn, the brook through the wood-- . Benzoin. The big birch. Largeness of the estate. . . . A cornucopia of golden joys." [073]
[Page 45]
Sept. 12, 1857. For Thoreau, the study of nature was the study of achieving such a sympathetic understanding of the physical world as to enable him to approach an understanding of the Higher Laws that lay behind nature:
"To Owl Swamp (Farmer's). In an open part of the swamp, started a very large wood frog, which gave one leap and squatted still. I put down my finger, and, though it shrank a little at first, it permitted me to stroke it as long as I pleased. Having passed, it occurred to me to return and cultivate its acquaintance. To my surprise, it allowed me to slide my hand under it and lift it up, while it squatted cold and moist on the middle of my palm, panting naturally. I brought it close to my eye and examined it. It was very beautiful seen thus nearly, not the dull dead-leaf color which I had imagined, but its back was like burnished bronze armor defined by a varied line on each side, where, as it seemed, the plates of armor united. It had four or five dusky bars which matched exactly when the legs were folded, showing that the painter applied his brush to the animal when in that position, and reddish-orange soles to its delicate feet. There was a conspicuous brown patch along the side of the head, whose upper edge passed through the eye horizontally, just above its center, so that the pupil and all below were dark and the upper portion of the iris golden. I have since taken up another in the same way."
Sept. 12-- 20, 1851. Perambulating the town's boundaries. As a citizen and a surveyor, Thoreau was asked by Concord's selectmen to accompany them as they, over the course of a week, perambulated the bounds of the town, including the complex boundary in northern Estabrook country. The old custom (still followed to a degree) was that each neighboring town would in turn send its selectmen to meet and walk their boundaries in company. They would repair and reaffirm the towns' bound-stones. Thoreau wrote on the 12th that he looked forward to it, but the experience was affect him darkly-
"On Monday the 15th instant I am going to perambulate the boundaries of the town. As I am partial to across-lot routes, this appears to be a very proper duty for me to perform, for certainly no route can-- well be chosen which shall be more across lot-- since the roads in no case run round the town but ray out from its center, and my course will lie across each one. It is almost as if I had undertaken to walk round the town at the greatest distance from its center & and at the same time from the surrounding villages. There is no public house near the line.
"It is a sort of reconnaissance of its frontiers authorized by the central government of the town-- which will bring the surveyor in contact with whatever wild inhabitant or wilderness its territory embraces. This appears to be a very ancient custom. . . . "
o On Sept. 19th, in northern Estabrook country, Thoreau continued,
"Perambulated Carlisle line. . . . In an old pasture now grown up to birches & other trees-- [we] followed the cow-paths to the old apple trees. Mr. Isaiah Green of Carlisle [fn.33] who lives nearest to the Kibbe Place [fn.34] -- can remember when there were 3 or 4 houses around him (he is nearly 80 years old & has always lived there & was born there) now he is quite retired-- & the nearest road [probably the Estabrook Road] is scarcely used at all. He spoke of one old field, now grown up-- which we were going through, as the 'hog-pasture', formerly. We found the meadows so dry that it was thought to be a good time to burn out the moss."
[Page 46]
o The five days in the company of his neighboring townsmen came to disturb Thoreau. The day after perambulating the line in Estabrook Country, he wrote, as he walked towards Walden Pond-
"As I go through the fields endeavoring to recover my tone & sanity-- & to perceive things truly & simply again, after having been perambulating the bounds of the town all the week, and dealing with the most common place and worldly minded men, and emphatically trivial things I feel as if I had committed suicide in a sense. I am again forcibly struck with the truth of the fable of Apollo serving King Admetus [074]-- its universal applicability. A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this and the surrounding towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed, my pegasus has lost its wings, he has turned a reptile and gone on his belly. Such things are compatible only with a cheap and superficial life.
"The poet must keep himself unstained and aloof. Let him perambulate the bounds of Imagination's provinces the realms of faery, and not the insignificant boundaries of towns. The excursions of the imagination are so boundless-- the limits of towns are so petty."
o On Sept. 21, 1851, Thoreau reflected again on his experience perambulating in northern Estabrook country-
"The retirement in which [Isaiah] Green has lived for nearly eighty years in Carlisle is a retirement very different from & much greater than that in which the pioneer dwells at the west, for the latter dwells within sound of the surf of those billows of migration which are breaking on the shores around him or near him of the west-- but those billows have long since swept over the spot which Green inhabits & left him in the calm sea-- There is something exceedingly pathetic to think of in such a life as he must have lived-- with no more to redeem it-- such a life as an average Carlisle man may be supposed to live drawn out to eighty years-- and he has died perchance and there is nothing but the mark of his cider-mill [075] left. Here was the cider mill & there the orchard & there the hog-pasture-- & so men lived and drank & passed away.-- like vermin. Their long life was mere duration. As respectable is the life of the woodchucks which perpetuate their race in the orchard still. That is the life of these select-men! spun out. They will be forgotten in a few years even by such as themselves like vermin. They will be known only like Kibbe [076], who is said to have been a large man who weighed 250 -- who had 5 or 6 heavy daughters [Sally, Betty, Molley, Beulah, and Miriam] who rode to Concord meeting house on horseback-- taking turns they were so heavy they only one could ride at once. What, then, would redeem such a life? We only know that they ate, and drank, and built barns, and died and were buried, and still perchance their toomb-stones cumber the ground. But if I could know that there was ever entertained over their cellar hole some divine thought which came as a messenger of the gods-- that he who resided here acted once in his life from a noble impulse-- rising superior to his groveling and penurious life-- if only a single verse of poetry or of poetic prose had ever been written or spoken or conceived here beyond a doubt-- I should not think it in vain that man had lived here.-- It would to some extent be true then that God had lived here. That all his life he lived only as a farmer-- as the most valuable stock only on a farm-- & in no moments as a man!"
[Page 47]
o Sept. 26, 1851. "Since I perambulated the bounds of the town I find that I have in some degree confined myself-- -- my vision and my walks-- on whatever side I look off I am reminded of the mean & narrow-minded men whom I have lately met there-- What can be uglier than a country occupied by groveling coarse & low-lived men-- no scenery will redeem it-- what can be more beautiful than any scenery inhabited by heroes! Any landscape would be glorious to me, If I were assured that its sky was arched over a single hero."
Sept. 16, 1857. Thoreau: "To Great Yellow Birch, with the Watsons. . . . Walked through that beautiful soft white pine grove on the west of the road in John Flint's pasture. These trees are large, but there is ample space between them, so that the ground is left grassy. Great pines two or more feet in diameter branch sometimes within two feet of the ground on each side, sending out large horizontal branches on which you sit. Like great harps on which the wind makes music. There is no finer tree. The different stages of its soft glaucous foliage completely concealing the trunk and branches are separated by dark horizontal lines of shadow, the flakes of pine foliage, like a pile of light fleeces."
Sept. 24, 1859. A vision quest. Thoreau: "To Melvin's Preserve. . . . Going along this old Carlisle road,- road for walkers, for berry-pickers, and no more worldly travellers; road for Melvin and Clark, not for the sheriff nor butcher nor the baker's jingling cart; road where all wild things and fruits abound; where there are countless rocks to jar those who venture there in wagons; which no jockey, no wheelwright in his right mind, drives over, no little spidery gigs and Flying Childers [077]; road which leads to and through a great but not famous garden, zoological and botanical garden, at whose gate [fn.35] you never arrive, - as I was going along there, I perceived the grateful scent of the dicksonia fern, now partly decayed, and it reminds me of all up-country with its springy mountainsides and unexhausted vigor. Is there any essence of dicksonia fern, I wonder? . . . .The sweet fragrance of decay! When I wade through by narrow cow-paths, it is as if I had strayed into an ancient and decayed herb-garden. Proper for old ladies to scent their handkerchiefs with. Nature now perfumes her garments with this essence now especially. She gives it to those who go a-barberrying and on dark autumnal walks. The essence of this as well as of new-mown hay, surely! The very scent of it, if you have a decayed frond in your chamber, will take you far upcountry in a twinkling. You would think you had gone after the cows there, or were lost in the mountains. It will make you as cool and well as a frog,-a wood frog, Rana sylvatica. It is the scent the earth yielded in the saurian period, before man was created and fell, before milk and water were invented, and the mints. Far wilder than they. . . .
"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 [fn.36] near to heaven's gate [078], 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 [079], 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.
"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. [fn.37]
"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 [080], 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. [Page 49] 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 [fn.38] , 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. [fn.39]
"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 [081] 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]."
1958. Mary P. Sherwood of Walden Forever Wild took Raymond Emerson, who had lived in the Brooks Clark house since about 1912, on a bumpy ride up the old Estabrook road. She wrote,
"When I was new in Concord, the year being about 1958 or 1959, I was living on the edge of Estabrook. . . . One day I decided I wanted to walk in along the Estabrook trail. . . . I knew an Emerson lived in the old house at beginning of the trail [Brooks Clark's house, in Thoreau's time], and I felt I shouldn't go in there without permission. So I knocked on the door. A tall older man answered, and said, 'Wait a minute. I will go with you.' He had me come in and sit down, in a room with Emerson family photographs all over a wall. He did go with me, I had assumed I was going to walk, but he went right for my car and got in. It was one bumpy road, just a wagon track really. At one place we came to a fallen smallish tree and he got out and removed it. We went all the way to Carlisle, and out the town road then and back around to take him home. He thanked me for the ride, I drove back up Lowell Rd. to the town line where I was staying, and discovered I couldn't get out of the car-the door handle had been shaken off by that rough dirt road. Later I learned that was Raymond Emerson [Waldo's grandson] I toted up Estabrook trail." [082]
[Page 50]
Sept. 27, 1995. The seasons at Middlesex School. Elizabeth McLanahan (Class of 1989) remembers: "While at Middlesex, I spent four years cross-country running and skiing in just these woods. More importantly, I remember the long walks, many laughs, and peace of mind as I ventured beneath the trees, watching the seasons change. I believe, in part, that the Estabrook Woods significantly molded my life and my future." (For the memories of other alumni/ae and information on the School's proposed development in Estabrook Woods, see note 83.)
Sept. 28, 1852. Thoreau: "Pm to the Boulder Field. I find the hood-leaved [Common Blue or Marsh Blue] violet quite abundant in a meadow-- & the pedata [Birdfoot Violet] in the Boulder field. I have now seen all but the blanda-- palmata-- & pubescens [respectively, the Sweet White Violet, the Palmate Violet, and Downy Yellow Violet] blooming again. And blue birds & robins &c are heard again in the air This is the commencement, then, of the 2nd spring. Violets potentilla Canadensis [Dwarf Cinquefoil]-- lambkill-- wild rose, yel. lily &c &c begin again.
"Children are now gathering barberries just the right time. Speaking of the great fall flower which the valleys are at present-- its brightest petal is still the scarlet one of dogwood, and in some places the redder red-maple one is equally bright-- then there is the yellow walnut one, and the broad dull red one of the huckleberry-- & the hazel-- high blueberry-- & vib. nudums [Viburnum cassinoides or Withe-rod] of various similar tints.
"It has been too cold for the thinnest coat since the mid. of Sept.
"Grapes are still abundant. I have only to shake the birches to bring down a shower of plums. But the flavor of none is quite equal to their fragrance. Some soils, like this rocky one on the old carlisle Road, are so suited to the apple that they spring up wild and bear well in the midst of pines birches maples & oaks & their red & yellow fruit harmonizing with the autumnal tints of the forest in which they grow. I am surprised to see rising amid the maples & birches in a swamp the rounded tops of apple trees rosy with fair fruit. A windy day. What have these high & roaring winds to do with the fall-- no doubt they speak plainly enough to the sap that is in these trees-- & perchance they check its upward flow. . . .
"Ah if I could put into words the music that I hear-- that music that can bring tears to the eyes of marble statues! to which the very muscles of men are obedient-- "
During September. A corn-husking party. Ellen Emerson's brother Edward, many years later, remembered an idyllic evening with other young people of Concord at Minot Pratt's farm at the foot of Punkatasset Hill in the mid-1800s:
"One more picture of old times is so pleasant in memory as to call for a record. . . . One beautiful evening under the September moon, Mr. and Mrs. Pratt summoned the Concord young people to their farm for a [corn] husking. We worked gayly at the piles of bleached gold leaves and stalks to get out the livelier gold within-the lanterns shining above, and the cows beside us creaking their stanchions. After an hour we passed across the moon-lit yard, under the most beautiful elm in Middlesex into the house where we washed our hands and brushed our clothes and were then invited into the kitchen to a supper by our hostess. There was a long table with a white cloth. In the centre, in a shining milk pan, was a mountain of white-blossomed pop-corn, flanked by candles placed in sockets cut in the small ends of huge orange carrots. Next were baskets of apples, crimson and yellow and green, round towers of brown bread and fragrant soft gingerbread, with fresh cheese near by. There were candelabras made of inverted multiplex rutabagas, and here and there gleamed the tanned, yellow faces of pumpkin pies. The room was decorated with autumn leaves, probably scarlet and yellow maple, and blue gentians and asters." [084]
Sept. 11-- Nov. 29, 1860. An Estabrook Lynx. Thoreau: "George Melvin came to tell me this forenoon that a strange animal was killed on Sunday, the 9th, near the north line of the town, and it was not known certainly what it is. From his description I judged it to be a Canada lynx. . . . .Some weeks ago a little girl named Buttrick, who was huckleberrying near where the lynx was killed, was frightened by a wild animal leaping out of the bushes near her-over her, as she said-and bounding off. But no one then regarded her story. . . . Adams had lost some of his hens, and had referred it to a fox or the like. He being out, his son told me that on Sunday he went out with his gun to look after the depredator, and . . . in the woods, this animal suddenly dropped within two feet of him, so near that he could not fire. He heard a loud hiss but did not mind it. He accordingly struck it with the butt of his gun, and it then bounded off fifteen feet . . . or more, turned about, and faced him, whereupon he fired directly into its eyes, putting them out. His gun was loaded with small shot, No. 9. The creature then bounded out of sight, and he had a chance to reload, by which time it appeared again, crawling on his belly, fiercely seeking him. He fired again, and, it still facing him, he fired a third time also, and finally finished it with the butt of his gun. . . .
"It is remarkable how slow people are to believe there are any wild animals in their neighborhood. They who have seen this generally suppose that it got out of a menagerie; others that it strayed down from far north. . . . I do not think it necessary even to suppose it a straggler, but only very rare hereabouts . . . They are nocturnal in their habits, and therefore are the more rarely seen, yet a strange animal is seen in this town by somebody about every year, or its track. I have heard of two or three such within a year, and of half a dozen within fifteen years. Such an animal might range fifteen to twenty miles back and forth from Acton to Tewksbury and find more woodland than in the southern part of New Hampshire generally. . . .
"You would say that some men had been tempted to live in this world at all only by the offer of a bounty by the general government-a bounty on living . . . .I told such a man the other day that I had got a Canada lynx here in Concord, and his instant question was, 'Have you got the reward for him?' What reward? 'Why, the ten dollars which the state offers.' As long as I saw him he neither said nor thought anything about the lynx, but only about this reward. 'Yes,' said he, 'this State offers ten dollars reward.' You might have inferred ten dollars was something rarer in his neighborhood than a lynx, even, and he was anxious to see it on that account. I have thought that a lynx was a bright-eyed, four-legged, furry beast of the cat kind, very current, indeed, though its natural gait is by leaps. But he knew it to be a draught drawn by the cashier of the wildcat bank on the State treasury, payable at sight . . .
[Page 52]
"This world and our life have practically a similar value only to most. The value of life is what anybody will give you for living. A man has his price at the South, is worth so many dollars, and so he has at the North. Many a man here sets out by saying, I will make so many dollars by such a time, or before I die, and that is his price, as much as if he were knocked off for it by a Southern auctioneer." [085]
Oct. 3, 1859. Thoreau: "To Bateman's Pond; back by hog-pasture and old Carlisle road. Some faces that I see are so gross that they affect me like a part of the person improperly exposed, and it occurs me that they might be covered, and, if necessary, some other, and perhaps better-looking, part of the person be exposed. . . . Looking from the hog-pasture over the valley of Spencer Brook westward, we see the smoke rising from a huge chimney above a gray roof amid the woods, at a distance, where some family is preparing its evening meal. There are few more agreeable sights than this to the pedestrian traveller. No cloud is fairer to him than that little bluish one which issues from the chimney. It suggests all of domestic felicity beneath. There beneath, we suppose, that life is lived of which we have only dreamed. In our minds we clothe each unseen inhabitant with all the success, with all the serenity, which we can conceive of. If old, we imagine him serene; if young, hopeful. Nothing can exceed the perfect peace which reigns there. We have only to see a gray roof with its plume of smoke curling up amid the trees to have this faith. There we suspect no coarse haste or bustle, but serene labors which proceed at the same pace as the declining day. There is no hireling in the barn nor in the kitchen.
"Why does any distant prospect ever charm us? Because we instantly and inevitably imagine a life to be lived there such as is not lived elsewhere, or where we are. We presume that success is the rule. We forever carry a perfect sampler in our minds. Why are distant valleys, why lakes, why mountains in the horizon, ever fair to us? Because we realize for a moment that they may be the home of man, and that man's life may be in harmony with them. Shall I say that we thus forever delude ourselves? We do not suspect that that farmer goes to the depot with his milk. There the milk is not watered. We are constrained to imagine a life in harmony [086] with the scenery and the hour. The sky and clouds, and the earth itself, with their beauty forever preach to us, saying, Such an abode we offer you, to such and such a life we encourage you. There is not haggard poverty and harassing debt. There is not intemperance, moroseness, meanness, or vulgarity. Men go about sketching, painting landscapes, or writing verses which celebrate man's opportunities. To go into an actual farmer's family at evening, see the tired laborers come in from their day's work thinking of their wages, the sluttish help in the kitchen and sink-room, the indifferent stolidity and patient misery which only the spirits of the youngest children rise above,-that suggests one train of thoughts. To look down on a roof from a distance in an October evening, when its smoke is ascending peacefully to join the kindred clouds above,-that suggests a different train of thoughts. We think that we see these fair abodes and are elated beyond all speech, when we see only our own roofs, perchance. We are ever busy hiring houses and lands and peopling them in our imaginations. There is no beauty in the sky, but in the eye that sees it. Health, high spirits, serenity, these are the great landscape-painters. Turners, Claudes, Rembrandts are nothing to them. We never see beauty but as the garment of some virtue. Men love to walk in those picture-galleries still, because they have not quite forgotten their early dreams. When I see only the roof of a house above the woods and do not know whose it is, I presume that one of the worthies of the world dwells beneath it, and for a season I am exhilarated at the thought. I would fain sketch it that others may share my pleasure. But commonly, if I see or know the occupant, I am affected as by the sight of the almshouse or hospital. . . .
[Page 53]
"Consider the infinite promise of a man, so that the sight of his roof at a distance suggests an idyll or a pastoral, or of his grave an Elegy in a Country Churchyard. How all poets have idealized the farmer's life! What graceful figures and unworldly characters they have assigned to them! Serene as the sky, emulating nature with their calm and peaceful lives. As I come by a farmer's today, the house of one who died some two year's ago, I see the decrepit form of one whom he engaged to 'carry through,' taking his property at a venture, feebly tying up a bundle of fagots with his knee on it, though time is fast loosening the bundle that he is. When I look down on that roof I am not reminded of the mortgage which the village bank has on that property,-that the family long since sold itself to the devil and wrote the deed with their blood. I am not reminded that the old man I see in the yard is one who has lived beyond his calculated time, whom the young one is merely 'carrying through' in fulfillment of his contract [fn.40]: that the man at the pump is watering the milk. I am not reminded of the idiot by the kitchen fire." [087]
Oct. 4, 1866. This day, Emerson's daughter Ellen wrote to her brother Edward of an outing to Estabrook country with Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughters. She described the jouncing ride in a hay-rick "festal chariot," -
"Friday morning the faithful Dolly brought to the door the hay-rigging, festal chariot! with hay and buffaloes in the bottom, and we set out . . . .It was the most perfect day possible. The trees had hardly begun to turn but there were occasional symptoms of autumn . . . . The hay-rigging jolted merrily down the hill after it had passed the Dakin's and into the Brooks Clark [Estabrook] road. The big white pine was all in its glory, with no yellow needles yet. When once we entered the gates of Easterbrook the jolting of course became frequent and delightful. Mrs. Sanborn was personally averse to such a shaking but for all that she enjoyed the ecstasy of the juniors. . . . At last we came to our particular apple-tree, where Dolly was left untied, and we escorted the new comers to the beautiful summer-parlour." [fn.41]
October, 1850s. Minot Pratt: "Even from our kitchen window [looking west up Punkatasset's lower southern slopes] we can show you, on any October day, a picture that the most gifted limner cannot reproduce. There is nothing very uncommon about it, no one thing to attract special attention, it is the arrangement, the grouping the shading that makes it fine. It is only a hill crowned with pines, with oaks of various kinds, hickories and chestnuts scattered about, the many tinted leaves here and there peeping out from the dark ground-work; and in the foreground halfway up the hill, the lighter hued foliage of the white birches shakes off the afternoon sun as their lithe stems are swayed by the breeze." [088]
o The young George Curtis, then boarding at the Pratt house, had looked at the same peaceful view in 1846:
[Page 54]
"It is very pleasant here at Minot's. The family are still, the household goes smoothly on, and we live in a house 150 years old under a tree of apparently almost equal age, and looking across a green meadow to a clump of pines and birches beyond. The scenery in Concord is gentle but pleasant. I have become attached to it as a taciturn friend who has no splendid burst of passion but wears always a soft smile." [089]
Oct. 5, 1857. Thoreau: "To Yellow Birch Swamp. . . . The earth shines now as much as, or more than, ever in spring, especially the bare and somewhat faded fields, pastures, stubble, etc. The light is reflected as from a ripe surface, no longer absorbed to secure maturity. . . . There is not the profusion and consequent confusion of events which belongs to a summer's walk. There are few flowers, birds, insects, or fruits now, and hence what does occur affects us as more simple and significant. The cawing of a crow, the scream of a jay. The latter seems to scream more fitly and with more freedom now that some fallen maple leaves have made way for its voice. The jay's voice resounds through the vacancies occasioned by fallen maple leaves. . . . Many maples are still quite green; so that their gala-day will be prolonged. . . .
"In the old Carlisle road I see a great many pitch pine twigs or plume, cast down, evidently, by squirrels- but for what?
"Many [people] are gathering barberries. . . . I hear the alarum of a small red squirrel. I see him running by fits and starts along a chestnut bough toward me. His head looks disproportionately large for his body, like a bulldog's, perhaps because he has his chaps full of nuts. He chirrups and vibrates his tail, holds himself in, and scratches along a foot as if it were a mile. He finds noise and activity for both of us. It is evident that all this ado does not proceed from fear. There is at the bottom, no doubt, an excess of inquisitiveness and caution, but the greater part is make-believe and a love of the marvelous. He can hardly keep it up till I am gone, however, but takes out his nut and tastes it in the midst of his agitation. 'See there, see there,' says he, 'who's that? O dear, what shall I do?' and makes believe run off, but doesn't get along an inch.- lets it all pass off by flashes of its tail, while he clings to the bark as if he were holding in a race-horse. He gets down the trunk at last on to a projecting knot, head downward, within a rod of you, and chirrups and chatters louder than ever. Tries to work himself into a fright. The hind part of his body is urging the forward part along, snapping the tail over it like a whip-lash, but the fore part, for the most part, clings fast to the bark with desperate energy."
Oct. 5, 1886. Ellen Emerson wrote her sister Edith about a family picnic in Estabrook Country
"Last Saturday I had an Easterbrook picnic [with] our whole family [but not her father, who had died four years earlier]. . . . We went though the lime-kiln field and the boulder-field, and in the third enclosure sought & found a spot combining all possible advantages, and settled our headquarters for the day. The children were all enthusiasm. They raced round and explored, they brought the baskets and blankets and climbed the rocks. Meanwhile Mrs. James & I read Elsie Venner. We began to feel very hungry and to consult watches and wonder why Mother didn't arrive. We gave the babes each a sandwich, and soon heard a shout and went forth to meet the rest of the party. I found Mother, on Mr Emery's arm, but utterly despairing, struggling through sweet-fern thickets. She was much cheered by finding me and still more by arriving at the camp & the cot-bed which was prepared for her with great luxury. Mrs. Emery sat down by her to amuse her, Anna started her kerosene stove, Mr. McClure cut up the cheese. Everyone chose seat & mug & the feast began. The Welsh rarebit was praised and the coffee was found very good. When the children saw that their elders had finished they filled their pockets with pears and crackers & the bottles with water & climbed to the top of the boulder where they made rowdy tableau. Then Mrs. Sanborn, the Emerys, Miss French & Mary Sage went barberrying, Mrs. James sat with Mother & Miss Leavitt & I cleared up." [090]
[Page 55]
Oct. 5, 1851. Thoreau: "2 P M to the high open land between Bateman's Pond & the lime kiln. . . . My companion [Channing] remarked that the land (for the most part consisting of decayed orchards -- huckleberry pastures & forests) on both sides of the Old Carlisle road, uneven and undulating like the road, appeared to be all in-motion like the traveller -- travelling on with him. . . .
"The rocks in the high open pasture are peculiar & interesting to walk over-- for though presenting broad and flat surfaces-- the strata are perpendicular producing a grained & curled appearance-- this rocky crown like a hoary head covered with curly hair-- or is it like walking over the edges of the leaves of a vast book [ed. This is Curly Pate Hill]. I wonder how these rocks were ever worn even thus smooth by the elements. The strata are remarkably serpentine or waving. It appears as if you were upon the axis of elevation geologically speaking. I do not remember any other pasture in Concord where the rocks are so remarkable as this. . . . "
Oct. 7, 1934. Professor Raymond Adams, who for a generation was the leading Thoreau scholar and was President of the Thoreau Society from 1941-- 55, delivered a lecture to the students at Middlesex School. He spoke in the school's Thoreau Museum of Natural History (see note 112), which was for fifty years at the entrance to the old causeway to Estabrook Country:
"I want to talk to you a little while about natural history, particularly about what seems to me to be the highest development of native animal life here in the town,-an animal that advanced so far that it observed and described its environment . . . Upstairs, in your museum, . . . at the extreme right end of the room you close the story of nature with those beautiful dioramas of civil-ization which you students made-and . . . you, too, showed man destroying his own species. . . . Now, this Concord specimen of Homo Sapiens (for . . . he called himself an animal) . . . went by the name of Henry Thoreau . . . . In what I think is the first journal entry of the thousands he made, he said of himself:
'It may be well if first of all I should give some account of my own species and variety-I am about five feet seven inches in height, of a light complexion, rather slimly built, and just approaching the Roman age of manhood. One who faces West oftener than East-walks out of a house with a better grace than he goes in-who loves winter as well as summer-forest as well as field-darkness as well as light. Rather solitary than gregarious- not migratory nor dormant-but to be raised at any season, by day or night, not by the pulling of a bell-wire, but by a smart stroke upon any pine tree in the woods of Concord.' [091]
" . . . Let us look at what he says, item by item: 'One who faces West oftener than East'; that . . . might simply mean that Thoreau liked to walk through the western parts of town. So he did, and often out your own Lowell Road until just this side of Clark's nursery (not a nursery then) he would leave the road and go across the valley toward Curly Pate Hill (I wonder if you call the hill to the east of Bateman's Pond by the name of 'Curly Pate' now) to where there is a brook coming down to the pond on the opposite side of this [Page 56] building [fn.42]. But when Thoreau says he faces West oftener than East, he means that he breaks with tradition. Civilization has proceeded westward, so that when one faces eastward, he is facing the past . . . . But when one faces west, he in a figurative way faces the future. . . .
" 'Forest as well as field.' A field, you see, is a cultivated bit of land, and so might stand for not only scenery but also mere utility. A field is valuable as it pays money to its owner; it is to be used for profit, and when it ceases to yield a profit it is allowed to lie fallow and finally to revert to the forest again . . . .So Thoreau is saying, 'I like things that are beautiful whether they are profitable or not. I like fields, also, but too many people like nothing but fields, nothing but that which pays a profit in hard cash."
"'Darkness as well as light.' In other words, it is easy enough to do the conventional thing, to follow the crowds in matters of taste, to conform to some Middlesex School standard of what a boy should do to be an honor to the School; but can you like the things you like whether anyone else does or not? Can you like darkness because you see beauty in it, even though everyone says the dark is ugly? Now perhaps you begin to see why I think that this specimen of Homo Sapiens is the highest development of the species ever to live in Concord." [092]
Oct. 10, 1860. Thoreau about learning through direct contact with nature: "They are hopelessly cockneys everywhere who learn to swim with a machine. They take neither disease nor health, nay, nor life itself, the natural way. I see dumb-bells in the minister's study, and some of their dumbness gets into his sermons. Some travellers carry them round the world in their carpetbags. Can he be said to travel who requires still this exercise? A party of school-children had a picnic at the Easterbrooks Country the other [day], and they carried bags of beans from their gymnasium to exercise there. [fn.43] I cannot be interested in these extremely artificial amusements. The traveller is no longer a wayfarer, with his staff and pack and dusty coat. He is not a pilgrim, but he travels in a saloon, and carries dumb-bells to exercise with in the intervals of his journey."
Ca. October, 1900. Indian Summer. Gladys R. Clark, Concord descendent and schoolteacher, age ca. 90, reminisces in two interviews in 1981 about her girlhood in the Estabrook neighborhood at the turn of the century:
"When crisp nights bring Indian summer days the fruited apple orchards, deep red barberry bushes, fragrant red cedars, and pungent wild grapes hanging from tangled vines along deserted Estabrook Road cause one to linger on pasture bars and bask in reverie."
[Page 57]
"Another disappearing variety of tree was the Chestnut tree. The kind that produced nuts not the horse chestnut. They were very prolific in the woods off Hugh Cargill Road, Estabrook Woods. As a child we just couldn't wait for the first heavy frost in the fall to run off into the woods to see the chestnuts that had fallen during the night. The burs are on the trees until the frost opens the burs and the chestnuts drop to the ground. Sometimes the whole bur drops to the ground. Then it was a scramble whether the squirrels or chipmunks would get the nuts or we kids would get them.
"We went into the woods with paper bags to gather all the chestnuts that had fallen freely. Then we took a burlap bag to gather the burs that had fallen to the ground. We would spend a whole morning gathering chestnuts and we would have several goodly filled bags. These would roast and eat immediately and sometimes we would just keep them a while. There were times when we would forget about them after the fantasy of running and getting them was over. We would stash them away and forget about them until the popcorn was available and then someone would think of chestnuts, too. Forty years or more ago, a blight struck those chestnut trees so that we have no more chestnuts for the children to enjoy picking." [093]
Oct. 15, 1859. Thoreau catalogues the dying year then concludes with an oft-quoted paragraph (top of next page). Its meaning is enhanced when it is read in the context of his immersion that afternoon in nature. Later, versions of this paragraph appeared in his "Huckleberries," and I have inserted in brackets some adjacent text that was added in that essay. Thoreau would thus incorp-orated a dated journal entry into a timeless final work about the seasons:
"To Botrychium Swamp. A cold northwest wind. . . . I go along the east edge of Poplar Hill. [fn.44] This very cold and windy day, now that so many leaves have fallen, I begin to notice the silveriness of willows blown up in the wind,-a November sight. . . . The oaks generally are very fair now at a distance. Standing on this hilltop this cold and blustering day, when dark and slate-colored clouds are flitting over the sky, the beauty of the scenery is enhanced by the contrast in the short intervals of sunshine. The whole surface of the country, both young woodlands and full-grown forests, whether they clothe sides of hills or their lit tops are seen over a ridge,-the birch phalanxes and huckleberry flocks, etc.,-even to the horizon, is like a rug of many brilliant colors, with the towns in the more open and tawny spaces. The beauty or effect of the scene is enhanced, if, standing here, you see far in the horizon the red regiments of oaks alternately lit up by the sun and dimmed by the passing shadow of a cloud. As the shadows of these cold clouds flit across the landscape, the red banners of distant forests are lit up or disappear like the colors of a thousand regiments. . . .
"The little leaves of the mitchella, with a whitish midrib and veins, lying generally flat on the mossy ground, perhaps about the base of a tree, with their bright-scarlet twin berries sprinkled over them, may properly be said to checker the ground. Now, particularly, they are noticed amid the fallen leaves.
"The bayberry leaves have fallen, and all the berries are gone. I suppose the birds have eaten them. Mountain laurel leaves are fallen. The yellow birches are bare, revealing the fruit (the short, thick brown catkins) now ripe and ready to scale off. How full the trees are! About as thick as the leaves were. The fever-bush is for the most part bare, and I see no berries. . . .The chickadees sing as if at home. They are not travelling singers hired by any Barnum. Theirs is an honest, homely, heartfelt melody. Shall not the voice of man express as much content as the note of a bird? . . .
[Page 58]
"[I find that the rising generation in this town do not know what an oak or a pine is, having seen only inferior specimens. Shall we hire a man to lecture on botany, . . . while we permit others to cut down the few best specimens of these trees that are left? It is like teaching children Latin and Greek while we burn the books printed in those languages.] [094] Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, [nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses]- a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation . . . .All Walden Woods might have been preserved for our park forever, with Walden in its midst, and the Easterbrooks Country, an unoccupied area of some four square miles in the north of the town, might have been our huckleberry field. [fn.45] If any owners of these tracts are about to leave the world without natural heirs who need or deserve to be specially remembered, they will do wisely to abandon their possession to all, and not will them to some individual who perhaps has enough already . . . .We boast of our system of education, but why stop at school-masters and schoolhouses. We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine schoolhouse standing in a cowyard at last. It frequently happens that what the city prides itself on most is its park, those acres which require to be the least altered from their original condition."
["Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let these be your only diet-drink and botanical medicines. In August live on berries, not dried meats and pemmican, as if you were on shipboard making your way through a waste ocean . . . .Be blown on by all the winds. Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. Miasma and infection are from within, not without. The invalid brought to the brink of the grave by an unnatural life, instead of imbibing the great influence that Nature is, drinks only of the tea made of a particular herb, while he still continues his unnatural life . . . . He does not love Nature or his life, and so sickens and dies, and no doctor can cure him. Grow green with spring, yellow and ripe with autumn. Drink of each season's influence as a vial, a true panacea of all remedies mixed for your especial use. The vials of summer never made a man sick, only those which he had stored in his cellar. Drink the wines, not of your own, but of Nature's bottling-not kept in a goat- or pig-skin, but in the skin of a myriad fair berries. Let Nature do your bottling, as also your pickling and preserving. For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick. Men have discovered, or think that they have discovered, the salutariness [def.: curative or salvational power] of a few wild things only, and not of all Nature. Why, Nature is but another name for health. Some men think that they are not well in spring or summer or autumn or winter; (if you will excuse the pun) it is only because they are not indeed well, that is, fairly in those seasons."]
Footnotes and Endnotes
Footnotes
Footnote 31. See, for the Yellow Birch Cellar, the next entry, "Fall, 1970," and note 67. [Back to text.]
Footnote 32. Thoreau wrote in a letter to Emerson: "James Clark - the Swedenborgian that was - is at the Poor House - insane with too large views, so that he cannot support himself." Thoreau concludes by noting how a man truly dies when he has lost his mind." (Dec. 29, 1847.) Thomas Blanding referred to James Clark as "the first Thoreauvian" (Lecture, Oct., 1997). [Back to text.]
Footnote 33. Isaiah Green had been born before the Revolution, while Carlisle was still part of Concord, and had been a selectman of Carlisle when Henry Thoreau was three years old. [Back to text.]
Footnote 34. Housewright and farmer Samuel Kibbe's (1725-1796) place in the woods was east of the old Estabrook Road, near the Carlisle line. [Back to text.]
Footnote 35. Thoreau by a footnote says 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. [Back to text.]
Footnote 36. 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." [Back to text.]
Footnote 37. The rascal! [Back to text.]
Footnote 38. Invisible writing. [Back to text.]
Footnote 39. Malic acid makes wild apples and barberries tart. [Back to text.]
Footnote 40. I believe this refers to the country custom in which an elderly, childless owner contracts to bequeath the farm to a younger person who in turn agrees to care for the owner until death. It often was a loveless bargain. [Back to text.]
Footnote 41. Perhaps Thoreau had earlier described his young friend Ellen's beautiful summer-parlour: "Methinks the true grape trellis or arbor is a wild apple tree, its top wholly covered with the vine, like a tree caught in a net, as that near the old lime-kiln" (Wild Fruits, 1999, p. 153). [Back to text.]
Footnote 42. There are thirty-one references in Thoreau's journal to the area near Bateman's Pond that is now owned by Middlesex School. [Back to text.]
Footnote 43. Possibly these were Frank Sanborn's students, of whom Frank Preston Stearns writes, in Sketches from Concord and Appledore, "There was a yearly nutting excursion [of Frank Sanborn's village school] in October to Estabrook farm where there were tall chestnut trees, flying squirrels and a plenty of wood for a bonfire." Sanborn was one of the "Secret Six," who were the financial backers to John Brown. Sanborn had missed the previous year's picnic, as he had fled to Canada because he feared arrest for treason. [Back to text.]
Footnote 44. This Poplar Hill (there are two in Concord) is in northern Estabrook Country west of the old Estabrook road near the present Carlisle line. Thoreau surveyed Squire Hoar's lot there. [Back to text.]
Footnote 45. For Thoreau, the huckleberry represented the wild and fertile in nature. [Back to text.]
Endnotes
65. The savage fertile houseless land. Emerson's surprising use of "fertile" (in the sense of fruitfulness) suggests the wild fertility of Eden in Paradise Lost and Eve's praise of the "fertile burden" of Eden's apple tree. It was "offered free to all," and the taste gave to humans "knowledge, as the Gods who all things know." I like to think that, with their mood "hight'n'd as with Wine" (PL, IX:791-797), these Concord companions climbed up out of Ebby Hubbard's swamp to sit on a rock in a high pasture, talking, eating, and reciting Eve's praise of the wild apple (PL, IX:795-804):
And thy fair Fruit let hang, as to no end
Created; but henceforth my early care,
Not without Song, each Morning, and due praise
Shall tend thee, and the fertile burden ease
Of thy full branches offer'd free to all;
Till dieted by thee I grow mature
In knowledge, as the Gods who all things know. . . .For millennia, the mythology of the mists has contained various stories of their divine inhabitants. To which mythological tradition was Emerson alluding when he referred to the haunts of the elder gods? The Norse Eddas describe an original world of mist from which the rivers and first gods came. Probably, however, Emerson's "elder gods" were the Titans, the oldest gods of the Greek mythology. They first formed earth out of Chaos but were cast out by Zeus, and dwelt thereafter in the mist. (The citation to this "valuable walk" quote is Emerson, JMN, v. 14, p. 162 [Sept. 4, 1857].) [Back to text.]
66. Emerson, "Thoreau," The Portable Emerson, Carl Bode, ed., 580, 585. [Back to text.]
67. Mary Fenn, "Report from the Concord Walking Society: Yellow Birch Cellar Hole." Thoreau Society Bulletin, 113 (Fall 1970), and LWV at p. 104. [Back to text.]
68. Sept. 2, 1873. See also, Sept. 2, 1861. The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, ed. Edith E.W. Gregg, 2 vols. (Kent State University Press, 1982), vol. 1, p. 330-1. [Back to text.]
69. Blake and Brown were two of Thoreau's friends. This version of Channing's marginal notes appears in F. B. Sanborn, Recollections, 2: 390-92. [Back to text.]
70. The fate of Thoreau's Walden Pond cabin in Estabrook Country. [Back to text.] My Saunterer article contains information on how and why Thoreau's cabin came from Walden Pond to the Estabrook Country and what happened to it. It seems to me that the most likely site of the removed Walden house (initially used as James Clark's residence) is marked by a black square on the 1852 Walling map (opposite). Thoreau is listed as assisting in the preparation of this map, which shows only habitations, not outbuildings. This square is probably somewhat further north along the old dirt road than the brick cottage (built later by Raymond Emerson) near #393 Estabrook Road. I am not aware that any surveyor-historian has attempted to locate on the ground the site of the Walling map's black square.
A new piece of evidence may support this hypothesis: A 1906-era card-mounted, folding, pocket-sized, annotated map by Herbert Gleason has come to light in the CFPL. Unlike the well-known Gleason map used in the Houghton Mifflin editions, this Gleason card-mounted map used as a base map a simplified version of the 1852 Walling map and includes an annotation "Thoreau's Walden House Removed." This label apparently refers to the general area of the Walling black square. A frustrating tear, however, prevents more exact identification. Gleason, [Annotated, Pocket-Sized] "Map of the Town of Concord ... 1852 [?] and, on the reverse, "Note to Map of Concord (Dec. 1906)."
Some assume that the small brick cottage nearby marks the site of the Walden cabin. The current owners, the Rasmussen's, noted that, when they refurbished the cottage, they discovered a second, 10 x 14-foot, fieldstone foundation underneath (pers. comm. Sept. 26, 1996). In a 1998 conversation, however, neither David Emerson (who grew up on the property) nor his wife could confirm that the brick cottage was built on the site of the removed Walden cabin. He said that, instead, his father Raymond (RWE's grandson) had built the brick cottage in the 1920s on the site of a small structure called "the portable," in which their hired help had lived. Neither he nor his wife had any memory of hearing that this was the former site of the Walden cabin. (Raymond Emerson would join his vacationing family on Naushon on weekends but built this cottage as a place to live as a summer-bachelor during his work week.) (D. Emerson, pers. comm., Aug. 13, 1997.) [Back to text.]
71. It would have been used for either fuel or mixed with manure for "muck." See, Minot Pratt. "Muck, its value, use, and effect." (a lecture to Concord Farmers' Club, ca. 1855). See, David R. Foster, Thoreau's Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape, Cambridge: Harvard UP (1999) p. 103. [Back to text.]
72. Thoreau's letter of Sept. 9, 1857, to Daniel Ricketson and Ricketson's journal entry describing his walk with Thoreau are in Ricketson, Daniel Ricketson, 77, 306. Thoreau identifies the destination as Estabrook in his entry for Dec. 20, 1857. [Back to text.]
73. Sept. 11, 1860, Emerson, JMN, 14:357. Emerson's Estabrook Farm paradise with its apples gone wild. Emerson included the Estabrook Farm "paradise," its tart apples, and the invading forest in his lecture "Country Life":
"In old towns there are always certain paradises known to the pedestrian, old and deserted farms, where the neglected orchard has been left to itself, and whilst some of its trees decay, the hardier have held their own. I know of a whole district, Estabrook Farm, made up of wide, straggling orchards, where the apple-trees strive with and hold their ground against the native forest-trees: the apple growing with profusion that mocks the pains taken by careful cockneys, who come out into the country, plant young trees and watch them dwindling. Here no hedges are wanted; the wide distance from any population is fence enough; the fence is a mile wide. Here are varieties of apple....The 'Tartaric' variety, and 'Cow-apple,' and the 'Bite-me-if-you-dare,' the 'Beware-of-this.' Apples of a kind which I remember in boyhood, each containing a barrel of wind and half a barrel of cider. But there was a contest between the old orchard and the invading forest-trees, for the possession of the ground, of the whites against the Pequots, and if the handsome savages win, we shall not be losers" (Atlantic Monthly 94 [November, 1904]: 597-98, emph. added). [Back to text.]
74. The myth of Apollo, god of poetry, as slave to a mortal, Admetus. This was a favorite myth of Thoreau's. In it, Jove punished Apollo (god of poetry, music, and wit) by banishing him to be a shepherd for the mortal King Admetus. Though the fable has other elements (e. g., the favor of the gods, their implacability once a bargain has been made with them, the fragility and hypocrisy of human relationships, and the intervention of the half-god hero, Hercules), Thoreau seemed most struck by the image of the god of poetry being banished to the service of mortals. It was for him an multi-purpose myth, but generally represented the diminution of the god's genius by the mortal world. Experiences in Estabrook twice evoked it. See, e. g., after December 6, 1845; August 5, 1851; August 6, 1851; and, April 5, 1854.
In June 22, 1853, however, he wrote this stunning reconciliation, in which he (the poet-philosopher) would give up his divinity and his muse if he could but spend his time in the wild:
"I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. I would go after the cows, I would watch the flocks of Admetus there forever, only for my board and clothes" (emphasis added). [Back to text.]75. Are the marks of the Kibbe's cider mill still visible? "There was usually a cider mill in back of the house [of a typical settler], and this mill was turned by an old dobbin. Evidence of such a mill may still be seen on the old Kibby Farm, as the circular path followed by the horse is still visible." Donald A. Lapham, Carlisle, Composite Community (ca. 1970), p. 3. The author is not sure whether he can still find the path. In certain slants of light, he thinks he can see it. [Back to text.]
76. Walking along the Estabrook Road trail, one can imagine the people from this tiny settlement coming down the road to go to the village. Or perhaps they were going to church in Concord for services (for they would have been disciplined if they did not attend), or for funerals. Perhaps they would occasionally rest the coffins of their dead, so they would not touch the ground, on the "mort stones" alongside the old road, of which Mary Fenn found references in church records. [Back to text.]
77. Flying Childers. "Flying Childers" was a famous racehorse bred by Leonard Childers and later owned by the Duke of Devonshire. It was known to have run the course at Newmarket at a speed of one mile a minute. (RWE. Jnls & Misc. Notebooks. V. XI, p. 58.) [Back to text.]
78. 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). [Back to text.]
79. 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). [Back to text.]
80. Cf. the masculine wild-eyed woman of the fields in "Huckleberries" (NHE, 245). [Back to text.]
81. 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. [Back to text.]
82. Letter, Mary P. Sherwood to Helen M. Bowdoin of Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance, July 24, 1995. [Back to text.]
83. The seasons at Middlesex School, and Middlesex School's development plans in Estabrook Woods. [Back to text.] In a 400-page document, entitled In Our Own Words: Letters to the Board of Trustees from the Alumni and Students of Middlesex School (Nov. 1995), many alumni/ae and students petitioned the School's trustees and wrote personal notes about their treasured experiences in the Woods, illustrating the traditional relationship between woods and school through the various seasons. They expressing concern about the School's development plans. Here are a small fraction of the comments about the seasons and their education in the Woods: (See also, the April 1988 entry herein about goshawks.)
S. W., Class of '85: "The Estabrook Woods became my retreat and reward during the long winters....In the Woods, I could hear the rhythm of the skis in the white silence. In the Woods, I learned how to listen and, gradually, I learned how to ski....In the fall, running for the cross-country team, I'd watch for rocks and holes under the cover of red-golden leaves. In the spring, Sisyphus' plight took on new meaning, when we trudged endlessly up and down the same steep hill that edged Bateman's Pond."
P.A.C., Class of '52: "[K. B.] and I spent several winters in that wild area while we were there cutting primarily birch fir use in masters' and common room fireplaces. Monk regarded us as the best woodcutters the school had ever had. We became best friends and that friendship was bonded in part by the most satisfying work we did so well together in the 'wild' woods near school which we grew to respect."
T. J. B., Estabrook neighbor and Class of '72: "As a young, inquisitive child, I enjoyed an idyllic life in this rural community--wondering [sic] off each morning into Easterbrook Woods--setting out daily in an arbitrary direction, searching for adventure and always returning home in the late afternoon fulfilled by my exploratory sojourn. I learned about nature (God), by feeling the cool wet mud between my toes at the edges of the small pond in the woods behind my house. There I would adeptly stalk the giant bullfrog or the painted turtle or the milk snake.... Surely this was paradise. At least once a week in the summer, with my fishing rod in hand, I would hike up the old dirt road that led from my house to Bateman's Pond and fish for pickerel or perch--seldom returning home empty-handed. Dare I say never has a young boy ever had a more delightful childhood than I experienced here in Henry David's and my hometown."
R. B., Class of '42: "In my day, 'Walk East' was an accepted afternoon activity when one was not on an active sports team of the season. I 'walked east' many times....I loved these woods and was more familiar with second-growth woodlands than with striped grass fields.....I did a biological survey of Estabrook Woods as an assignment for biology class I took from W. J. R. 'Foggy' Taylor."
C. J. P., Class of'28: "I have fond memories of this area and about much time roaming around the area, which may account for my failure to graduate!...I certainly would hate to see it go, because to this day those memories still exist."
H. S., Class of'61: "I do know that it was in the woods (and Loring Coleman's art classes) that I was happiest. Almost every Sunday I would head to the woods and purposely get lost, find a beautiful place to eat a picnic lunch and come back to the School a lot healthier in spirit. I banded birds with Peter Mott in those woods and learned from him about the science of 'ecology', fifteen years before the word became common parlance and a world movement."
H. J., Class of '96: "The fact that I can sit on the [Olmstead] circle with my friends and retreat into the woods is amazing. How many other schools have acres of woods for hiking, walks, cross country skiing and running, meditation and exploration? Now, how many schools have soccer fields? It was these woods which drew me to this school and it was the woods which drew many of my friends. Can you imagine being from a city and having the chance to lose yourself among trees, wetlands, and nature! It must be breathtaking."
Valedictorian's Address. On May 24, 1996, Nathan Kraft, Class of '96, included in his Valedictorian's Address a respectful remonstrance to the School's trustees about their plans for a development in the Estabrook Woods:
"Responsibility, however, needs to be born equally by all. The school has responsibilities as well. Middlesex, like any other school, is always seeking to improve its facilities, to make this a better place for students to live in and learn and grow. But our best facility already exists, in our own backyard, in Estabrook Woods. The woods are our greatest physical treasure. No other school can claim what we already have. Buildings and dorms can be renovated and remodeled and rebuilt, but the woods and the natural environment that exists out there is far more difficult to restore once taken. We have a responsibility to our woods' rich history and to our mission as an academic institution to make the best of our treasures out there.
"I, for one, hope that students 5, 10, 20 years down the road will be able to enjoy the woods as they are now, untouched by development. A number of my classmates and I are wearing green arm bands today to indicate that we share this concern. We are the alumni of tomorrow. This is an issue that concerns us. I mention this out of my love for the school, and out of my desire to see it make wise decisions. But know whatever course you choose, children will listen. Be mindful of what lessons you teach your students."
Development plans of the Middlesex School in Estabrook Woods. At the present writing in June of 1999, the Middlesex School is persistently advancing its plans to develop at least 2000 feet into its part of the Estabrook Woods with a causeway, road, athletic facilities, possible housing, and an eight-inch sewer. A future development area B would be even deeper in the Woods, to within sight of the old Estabrook road. It awaits only approval to fill wetlands for its access causeway. On Oct. 7, 1998, the then-retired Dr. Ernst Mayr, former director of the MCZ, wrote the author the following, objecting to the School's plans:
"The news...is indeed most distressing....Monk Terry, at that time headmaster of Middlesex School, was one of our most enthusiastic supporters. We did not have to buy this land because at that time Middlesex School was as passionately for the preservation of their piece of Estabrook Woods as we were. I am afraid there was no formal agreement on that point, but it was a 'gentleman's agreement.' I am sure Monk Terry would be horrified about [the School's] present plans."
This is consistent with the memories of MCZ Curator Barbara Lawrence and Acting CFS Director Charles Lyman. (See, Letter, B. Lawrence (Schevill) to Concord Journal, Dec. 8, 1996; and letter, Acting CFS Director C. Lyman to M. Fraser of Estabrook Woods Legal Defense Fund, Concord Journal, May 21, 1970.) Some Middlesex students and graduates continue to hope that this project will happen elsewhere. In the fall of 1995, four hundred petitions from alumni/ae of Middlesex School opposed to the development in Estabrook Woods were bound and presented to the School's Trustees. The Concord Land Conservation Trust and sympathetic Middlesex alumni/ae have purchased an alternate site, worth $400,000, and offered it to the School without charge, but so far without success. [Back to text.]
84. Edward W. Emerson, "When Louisa Alcott Was a Girl," Ladies Home Journal (December 1898): 15-16. [Back to text.]
85. Thoreau identified the animal (the skin and skull of which he now owned) for the Boston Society of Natural History. (Letter of Oct. 13, 1860, to Dr. Samuel Kneeland, Corresp., p. 591.) Thoreau had been a corresponding member since 1850, and his paper was later read at the Society. This text about the lynx is drawn from Thoreau's entries of Sept. 13, Oct. 13 and Nov. 29, 1860. F.B. Sanborn, a Concord resident since 1855 and an early editor and biographer of Thoreau, confirms that the lynx was killed in "Estabrook country." Channing, E., Poems of Sixty Five Years, ed. F.B.Sanborn (Phil. & Concord: 1902) p. 96. [Back to text.]
86. A transcendentalist's vision of harmony. This concept of harmony is a central one for a transcendentalist, signifying the state of understanding of the spiritual laws--the higher laws--that are expressed in nature's appearance. Thoreau here presents a dark view. Compare the following, from Emerson's book Nature (Bode, Portable Emerson, p. 37):
"The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both....It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law." (Emphasis added.) [Back to text.]
87. Harmony? Thoreau expressed fear that his vision of harmony, central to a transcendentalist, may be impossible, a mirage of our hopes, and that beneath this idealized roof are the "haggard poverty and harassing debt," "the indifferent stolidity and patient misery" of a family that mortgaged its farm and "long since sold itself to the devil and wrote the deed with its blood." Thoreau was troubled by social disharmonies ("the idiot that sits by the kitchen fire") as well as by spiritual and natural ones, and he was seeing that they were connected. Concord (indeed, America), he believed, could be harmonious in a spiritual, social, and natural sense but was instead wasting itself. Harmony, such as he expressed it in his poem Inspiration, could be mystical--a connection between the human and divine.
The quest continues for various harmonies--for "man and nature in productive harmony" (National Environmental Policy Act); "the Harmony of Man and Nature" (English Countryside Commission criterion); A Continuous Harmony (Wendell Berry). And, whatever it means, harmony is also officially the first environmental principle of the earth--human beings "are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature" (Rio Earth Summit Declaration, 1992, Principle 1). [Back to text.]
88. M. Pratt. "Farmer's Compensation." [Back to text.]
89. Letter date is June 6, 1846. From L.E. Richardson, "Minot Pratt" ms. p. 9 (CFPL). [Back to text.]
90. E. Gregg, ed., Letters (1982), vol. II, p. 572. [Back to text.]
91. Walter Harding identifies this as a manuscript fragment in the Berg Collection that was written about 1841-2 (Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau [Princeton: 1982] p. 124). [Back to text.]
92. Raymond Adams, "Lecture on Thoreau," Middlesex School Anvil, XXXII (October, 1934): 1, p. 19-23. [Back to text.]
93. Mary Rogers Clark (Gladys R. Clark). "Afield in Concord," undated in CFPL. And Gladys Clark, "Life on The 'Plain'," Oral History Project, R. Garrelick, Interviewer, July 29, 1981. The wonderful American Chestnut has everywhere fallen victim to the blight. Youngsters still sprout from the dead stumps in Estabrook Country but die before they bear fruit, or soon thereafter. See, update "American Chestnut: Its Continuing Story," Wild Earth 9:2 (Su 1999). [Back to text.]
94. This paragraph closely resembles text in "Huckleberries" (in Natural History Essays, 1980. p. 259 and Wild Fruits, ed. Dean, 1999. p. 238). I inserted the bracketed text from "Huckleberries" to illustrate how the journal passage enriched later works. On May 20, 1860, Thoreau wrote his friend Blake, "Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves, they learn to make houses, but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? If you can not tolerate the planet it is on?" [Back to text.]