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| INTRODUCTION To "The Seasons
in Estabrook Country"
This is an anthology of a place--the Estabrook Country. All the selections were written in or about the roughly fifteen hundred acres in Concord and Carlisle, Massachusetts called the Estabrook country, the Estabrook Woods or, by Henry Thoreau, the Easterbrooks Country. The anthology celebrates this place by gathering the words of fifty people who over three and a half centuries have written or spoken about life here. Some tell of the passage of the seasons; some write of the impact of the place on them; some tell about what this place has meant to them; and some tell how this landscape (and by extension potentially any landscape) can connect to science and to spirit. Few people know of the uninhabited Estabrook Country, and many who visit do not visit again because the place is not charismatic. Now modestly wooded and intimate, it is not as starkly beautiful as it was in Thoreau's day. Not being famous has protected it. Still often empty and with a beauty that must be teased out, Estabrook is not hard to get lost in, not hard to be surprised in. Though it was not wilderness even in Thoreau's time, it was his first-named "great wild tract." It became the final resting-place of his Walden house. It is split down its middle by the old Estabrook road, down which Minutemen hurried to join the Concord fight at the North Bridge. Nearby to the south is the Minuteman National Historical Park, the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War. Nearby to the east are the Concord River and the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Rocky, rough and swampy, Estabrook Country is different from the sandy Walden Woods, and people over the centuries have used and perceived it differently: Emerson called it "the savage fertile houseless land," but his daughter called it "dear Easterbrook." By happy chance, the care of some of its owners, and the perseverance and generosity of citizens, much of Estabrook Country remains undeveloped and available to us to experience. It is time to celebrate that. Estabrook's friends have long known of a few evocative passages in Henry Thoreau's writings about his "Easterbrooks Country." There was, however, much more to discover both in his writings and in the words of other people who have known this place. For example, Thoreau's massive two-million-word journals contain about fifty thousand words about the Estabrook Country; and there are other Estabrook passages in his "Wild Apples," "Succession of Forest Trees," "Dispersion of Seeds," "Huckleberries," Walden, and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Not only do these passages tell a vivid story about Estabrook Country, they also tell much about Thoreau the man, the writer, the transcendentalist, and the naturalist. The landscape had many levels of meaning. Thus, the heart of this anthology, The Seasons in Estabrook Country, is Thoreau's ever-fresh journal, which Paul Brooks called Thoreau's "great poem." Walter Brain adds, "Although Thoreau never got to writing a book or essay on the Estabrook Country, it was in the Journal that, for over twenty years, he tracked its poetry of place." Though I use in this anthology only about seventy passages from Thoreau's Journal (containing only half the words he wrote about Estabrook Country), these passages capture the tensions that were hidden in Estabrook's landscape and in Thoreau's inner terrain. Is it a deserted or a peopled land; a wild or a congenial place? Does it have open moors or dark woods? Are the people there coarse and pinched, or simple and direct? Do they find there sterility or fertility, or starvation or satisfaction? Though Walden-less, Thoreau found in Estabrook Country its own spiritual metaphor--the old Carlisle road as a pilgrim's way. This road (now the Estabrook road) was and is the spine of the Estabrook experience. In addition to Thoreau's words, I have included in The Seasons in Estabrook Country about one hundred passages from about fifty other people who have written or spoken about Estabrook Country since 1653. These are the voices of farmers and their wives, Emerson and his children, poets, naturalists, schoolchildren, Revolutionary War soldiers, college presidents, suburban wives, grocers, walkers, scholars, and ne'er-do-wells. These very different voices connect this landscape to its various histories--geological, Native American, colonial, early industrial, revolutionary, agricultural, natural, spiritual, ecological, playful, and, of course, literary. In sum, author John Hanson Mitchell said that "There is no place on earth where the sense of place is better documented." Another history is suggested by these selections--Estabrook's inspiring but controversial conservation history. It is inspiring that twelve hundred acres of the Estabrook Country has been acquired by Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, by the towns, and by local land trusts, as an ecology study area, as Thoreau said it should be--for instruction and re-creation. But controversy continues, as the adjacent Middlesex School, once a partner in preservation, now proposes to develop 2000 feet or more into the Woods. Thoreau would remind the offending schoolmasters,
This clash can be seen to represent the same tension of expectations and goals so well expressed in Thoreau's writings and life. Scholar Thomas Blanding adds, speaking of the importance of the wild to body and soul, "If the Estabrook woods go, there won't be any place to get lost in the woods...If Concord doesn't think that's essential, Concord's very much mistaken." Famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, who was the godfather of Estabrook's ecological study area, once wrote, in a way Thoreau would have found sympathetic, about a needed connection between a hands-on educational experience with nature and the wise conduct of human affairs:
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