Author: Julian Richards

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life … to live so sturdily as to put to rout all that was not life … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” Well yes, sort of. Henry David Thoreau lived for two-and-a-half years, on and off, in a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond. But it’s only when you start prodding at the embers that you spot the residue of Duraflame® Everynite firelog in his his wilderness fire-circle. The hut was twenty minutes stroll from his Mum’s place, along the main road to Boston; and if he didn’t fancy walking, the commuter railway puffed along the edge of the pond, a mere half mile away. He popped home frequently for dinner and a comfy bed; and when Mum was predisposed, he could always count on such luminaries as the Alcotts and Nathaniel Hawthorne to provide grilled pike and a piping hot water bottle. Or, indeed, his patron Ralph Waldo Emerson, upon whose suburban estate Thoreau’s cabin cheerfully squatted .

fig. 1a, Henry David Thoreau

In summer, Walden teemed with picnickers and swimmers; in winter (when Henry was rarely there) ice-cutters and skaters. ‘In reality’ writes Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker ‘Walden Pond in 1845 was scarcely more off the grid than Prospect Park is today’. Rude! But not as rude as Robert Louis Stevenson who, judged Thoreau’s ‘manly simplicity’ to be the effete sniveling of a lisping New England batty boy. “Womanish solicitude” he growled, “for there is something unmanly, something almost dastardly” about the lifestyle.

On Walden Pond

It was different to how I’d imagined. But but once the dead leaves were fished out, the loungers wiped down and the Mike’s Hard Lemonade uncorked, we were able to start living deliberately. When they tried to close us down at nine, the ghost of Henry David Thoreau appeared behind the dwarf privet, reminding us that disobedience is the true foundation of liberty; so we snuck in two lengths of defiant breaststroke before toweling down and calling it a night.

fig.1, 42.4604° N, 71.3489° W

It’s rather nice, this Transcendentalism, even with the caustic scald of chlorine and thunder of the Concord Turnpike rippling the waters like jelly on a plate. When taking the road less traveled, we heartily recommend the lambent W by the luminous B. Because it is Western, and it is Best.

5 am. It took half a century to get here; no point lying on your back watching dawn granulate over the popcorn ceiling. Leaving my literary Dr Watson snoring like a manatee, I Sherlock past the potted palms, out into the car park and up the highway. I’m divining holy water with a Subaru.

5.30 am. Plumbing the Transcendent. Malingering as usual in clam digger pants and pervert hat, I make my way round the north rim to avoid the empyrean exertions of the open-water swimmers and chase the dawn light. There’s one woman bathing alone. I keep a polite distance as she emerges, dries off; and as she passes we smile, say good morning. In her 50’s, maybe she’s Japanese, she moves along the trail with a graceful self-possession blurred by the hesitation of lingering in the tangible presence of beauty. Luminous, a limpid pool. I wade out, take a few pictures, and as I walk back she is waiting for me on the trail. She points out a bird, asks if I know what it is. I guess at a gull, she laughs lightly that no, it’s a raptor of some sort, it had been flying above her while she swam. We chat for a minute; I’m over from the Catskills with my daughter who is still in bed. She comes here most mornings, how sweet it is. Because the next thing to do is to quietly shake hands and part, we do. But it’s a loss. And maybe it’s just the wind, but I thought perhaps I hear a sigh echo down the valley from up on Olympus.

fig. 2, 42.4392°N, 71.3397°W

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