Robert M. Thorson. The Guide to Walden Pond. Houghton, 2018.
The Guide to Walden Pond does essentially what the title promises: It is a guide, a nearly pocket-sized book, to take along if or when we visit Walden Pond. Walden Pond, of course, was made famous by Thoreau’s book Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The book guides us on a walk around the perimeter of the pond from Henry David Thoreau’s perspective.
The guide takes us through fourteen stops around the pond from the parking lot and visitor’s center through the woods to Thoreau’s cabin site and bean field to the railroad and back around on the south side of the pond. I grew up not far from Walden Pond. In fact, I learned to swim there. The guide has a photograph of the Red Cross Beach there, but does little to explain it or how it got its name. It was called the Red Cross Beach because the Red Cross used to give swimming lessons there.
While I have never circumambulated the pond, I have been there many times, often guiding school field trips. The Guide to Walden Pond does a good job of explaining many features and providing a history of the pond, not just Thoreau’s stay there.
After reading this book, I will have to change a few of the things I tell about Walden and the pond. I recall reading that the cabin site had disappeared from memory until it was rediscovered in 1922. The inscription on the marker at the site even suggested this. However, Thorson makes it clear that friends of Thoreau knew exactly where it was, that Thoreau, a surveyor by trade, delineated its exact location in his writings, and that by 1872 people were bringing stones to place on a memorial cairn at the site.
I suspect the confusion may have come from some details the book clarifies. Shortly after Thoreau moved away, the cabin itself was purchased from Emerson (who owned the land) and moved closer to Walden Street (now a highway). I recall reading years ago that a diary from the 1880s mentions the cabin, but by then, according to Thorson, it had been dismantled and its wood sold in a manner similar to the way Thoreau originally purchased many of the parts second-hand. Perhaps that diary was talking of the cabin site. And because it was moved, there may have been some confusion about which site was the original one. That’s a guess.
The book explains the geology of the pond. I tell my students that it was something of a mystery because there is neither an inlet or an outlet. It really is a kind of open well or spring flowing into a kettle hole. It is not part of a river or stream system but part of an aquifer that happens to surface through the kettle hole. Thoreau referred to the pond as a well, and that was an accurate description. The Guide says that the bottom of Walden Pond has the lowest elevation of any spot in the whole state.
We learn, ironically, that by the time Walden was published, seven years after Thoreau lived there, the woods were practically gone. Thoreau himself planted some pines and other trees that survived, but most of those would come down in the twentieth century in a couple of bad storms, one being the Hurricane of 1938.
While I have read Walden and visited the pond many times, some of the explanations and photographs clarify things in the book. I always pictured his bean field next to the cabin. The bean field was uphill from the cabin on a flat area that had already been partially cleared. When Thoreau said the field was over two acres, he was not exaggerating.
Thoreau mentions walking along the railroad that passed by at the west end of the pond. It is still there today. The railroad was completed just a year before he went to live by the pond, and he used it as a trail or path to walk to the part of town where his family lived.
When he spoke of an ice fort at that end of the pond, he was not exaggerating here, either. While he lived there, ice cutters cut the ice and piled it up at the end of the pond next to the railroad.. Thorson estimates about 300,000 cubic feet of ice were stacked there. Unfortunately, the people who cut that ice did not have a market, so most of the ice just sat there, unsold. It took over two years for it all to melt. When I was young, I recall visiting an ice house in rural New Brunswick. It was July but this barn-like structure had hundreds of blocks of ice inside. It was all insulated by sawdust.
Of course, there is much about the flora and fauna, both then and now. Many of the plants and creatures we can still find there. I was under the impression, for example, that loons had nested there in the 1840s, but Thorson states that one or two stopped there on migration to points farther north. Of course, back in those days the Canada Geese mainly nested in Canada and so were only passing through on migration. Some time in the fifties and sixties they began to change their habits. Some still migrate to the north, but many now nest in the United States.
If there is a conflict in the book, it is the conflict between the recreationists and the conservationists. Shortly after the Civil War ended (Thoreau died in 1862), an amusement park was built next to west end of the pond and the railroad. There was actually railroad stop there. People also began swimming at the east end of the pond where they still do today. On one day in 1952, they counted 35,000 bathers. I had friends who fished there on the opening day of fishing season in the sixties. One told me it was shoulder-to-shoulder to fish there.
At one point The Guide quotes Thoreau’s famous observation about the battle between the red and black ants. It suggests that the ant battle could represent the conflict between the recreationists and the conservationists. Obviously, that would not have been Thoreau’s intent; however, it might have suggested the Mexican War which was going on while Thoreau was at Walden. Like Congressman Abraham Lincoln and many others, Thoreau opposed the war—a fact we learn from “On Civil Disobedience.”
In the 1950s, though, the conservationists got the upper hand. Much of the land surrounding the pond owned by an Emerson descendant had been deeded to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a reservation. Conservationists were able to get planned development to stop and to encourage limits on the land use. Much of the woods has grown back, and it likely is a little more like the way Thoreau would have remembered it.
There are a few minor errors in The Guide to Walden Pond. The book says that when Thoreau called the kettle hold of “diluvial” origin, he was being “cryptic.” No, he was not. In the same passage, the book quotes Thoreau alluding to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Diluvial means “related to a flood.” Ovid, like ancient writers from around the world, describe a worldwide flood. In his telling, Deucalion and Pyrrha are the Mr. and Mrs. Noah. Ironically, though the author is a uniformitarian rather than catastrophist, the book describes the “alluvial plain” and moved rocks in terms of a large flood and ice sheet. Not much difference there, really. It helps to know Ovid to understand Walden because the book frequently quotes him.
At one point we are told that Thoreau described a hooting owl sounding like “Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo.” That is the sound that a Barred Owl makes. The book attributes that to the Great Horned Owl, what Thoreau called a cat owl because its face resembled cat’s. Both species were and are found near Walden. The Barred Owl prefers damp places. The Great Horned Owl likes woods, and in New England, pine woods especially.
The book also confuses Black Birch and Gray Birch. There is a correctly identified photo of a Gray Birch, but we are told this is what Thoreau meant by “sweet-scented black birch.” Black Birch, not Gray Birch, is sweet scented. It is a source of natural wintergreen and is used to make birch beer. Gray Birch just smells like wood. I worked as a nature counselor at a summer camp six miles from Walden and Black Birch was very common there. Perhaps because of the logging and storms there are none left around Walden according to the book, but Black Birch has black bark, hence its name, not the whitish bark that the Gray Birch has. Black Birch would have been common there, and no one would mistake it for Gray Birch, which does not grow much beyond the sapling stage.
I hope to be able to visit my hometown this summer. After reading The Guide to Walden Pond, I am tempted to bring it with me and revisit the site of my swimming lessons. It will no doubt bring back some memories, but it will also be helpful to follow in its steps. If I take any more students on a tour, I will have a better idea of how to present it. And even if I had never set foot in the state of Massachusetts, it would be a great book to accompany any reading of Walden.