Romantics

in which a walk in the woods leads to a fishing expedition

The Secret Life of Teaching, #7

By Horace Dewey

            "OK kids, listen up!" Denise Richardson bellows to the crowd of students on the edge of Walden Pond. "I'm going to go over the assignment one more time. You must follow the directions ...."

            I’m stunned by how beautiful the pond is on this autumnal morning. The foliage shimmers on the still water and bursts against the crystalline sky. Dubious about this part of the overnight field trip—instructing students to go into the woods and have a Transcendental moment strikes me as a contradiction in terms—I’m nevertheless delighted to be here. In the afternoon, I’ll be one of a set of teachers leading classes along the Freedom Trail. I’m looking forward to indulging with a cannoli at Quincy Market.

            I’m jostled back into attentiveness by an unexpected moment of silence that is apparently the result of Denise looking at her watch. "You will have fifty minutes," she tells the students. "That's enough time to walk around the whole perimeter if you want to, but you'll have to keep a good pace. She turns and points to her left. "If you simply want to see the site where Thoreau had his cabin, walk straight this way. It will take you about ten minutes. Whatever you decide, you have to be back on the bus at 11 sharp. Hey! Alan!" Denise claps twice and points at a sleepy student I don’t know (which is most of this batch). "To be awake is to be alive!" Some chuckles; I wonder if they get the allusion or are simply amused by the contrast between Denise’s no-nonsense energy and Alan's torpor. "All right then," she concludes. "Go!"

            The students stand around dumbly for a moment, but begin to disperse with growing momentum. "I'm going over to the gift shop," Denise tells me. "I have to make some phone calls. I'll be over in a little while to help round up this herd of cats." I nod and begin walking around the pond, beginning at the far side from the cabin site.

            I have ambivalent feelings about Thoreau. I’ve no patience for the cranky misfit of "Civil Disobedience," who thought he could simply opt out of paying taxes he didn't like. And no man who has his mother and sister do his laundry can call himself self-reliant. But for all his prickliness, I sense an inner struggle to live the words, and know that dismissing him as a phony is a little like complaining that sinning churchgoers are hypocrites: it's missing the point. I’m intrigued that Walden Pond is not—was not—the wilderness, in fact within easy walking distance from the village of Concord. I read that a railroad ran near the actual site of the celebrated cabin in Thoreau’s time, and apparently still does. Looking ahead I see a cluster of students, and evidence of a rail bed off to the left. I veer away from it so I can continue to savor my solitude.

            I haven’t gone far off the main trail when I see two still figures lying side by side in a bed of pine about 100 feet away. They are not engaged in an overt sex act, but the sense of intimacy is unmistakable. From the angle of my approach I can only see sneaker bottoms clearly; the rest is partially hidden in evergreens. One kid apparently has his hands behind his head; the other appears nestled beside him. I don't recognize them, but either or both could be my students. Though I feel obligated to break up this idyll, I’m charmed by it. Years from now, long after Denise Richardson’s (undone?) assignment is forgotten, this will be what these two remember from this trip. Surely even a loner like Thoreau would, or should, approve.
            I hear a voice shouting off far to her right. "Horace? Is that you?" It's Denise, motioning a cluster of students to keep moving toward the group's starting point. "Yes!" I respond forcefully. As I do, the two students scramble to their feet and begin running away, presumably to circle behind the cabin site and rejoin the group there. As they do, I see that they're both boys.

            "Will you backtrack a bit and round up any slackers?" Denise asks.
            "Sure,” I say, turning around and walking in the opposite direction. While I scrunch my eyes, trying to determine if I recognize either boy, I’m approached by my favorite student, Wilhelmina Sperry, notebook in hand, clearly running to make up lost time and ground.
            "It's OK, Willie," I say reassuringly. "Is there anybody else back there?"
            "No. I’m the last one," she says as she slows to a walk and adjusts her glasses, clearly out of breath. "I wanted to take a few more minutes to make some notes about a spider web I found. I guess I lost track of time."

            "Good for you." Willie and I are now walking toward the bus at exactly the same pace.
            "I love it here," she says. "That was a good assignment. Now that I've actually seen the pond, I need to re-read the parts of Walden we discussed in class."

            "Sounds like a good idea."
            A pause. And then: "Mr. Dewey, would you call Thoreau a Romantic writer?"
            "Well, not exactly. Not in what I think of in the classic sense of the term, like Wordsworth or Emerson. But I'm sure a lot of people would."
            "I just love him."

            "Fair enough. But remember, Willie: it's a big world out there. There are lots of fish in the pond."

            Willie turns her head at me, smiling. "You're not talking about how they restock the pond with fish."
            "No, Willie, I am not."
            Willie’s smile breaks into a chuckle. "OK, Mr. Dewey. I'll keep my standards up.”

            "Thatta girl, Willie. Any writer would be lucky to catch you. Any non-writer, too."

Romantics

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet witness some non-self reliance on Walden Pond

The Maria Chronicles, #23

"OK Kids, listen up!" Maria's colleague from the English Department, Deborah Pryor, bellows to the crowd of students on the edge of Walden Pond. "I'm going to go over one more time what I want you to do for your assignment that will be due on Monday morning. You must follow the directions . . . . "

Maria is simply stunned by how beautiful the pond is on this autumnal morning. The foliage shimmers on the still water and bursts against the crystalline sky. Dubious about this part of the overnight field trip -- instructing students to in effect go and have a Transcendental moment strikes her as a contradiction in terms -- she finds herself delighted to be here. In the afternoon, she will be among the history teachers leading classes along the Freedom Trail. What's she's really looking forward to, though, is a cannoli at Quincy Market.

Maria is jostled back into attentiveness by an unexpected moment of silence that is apparently the result of Deborah looking at her watch. "You will have fifty minutes," she tells the students. "That's enough time to walk around the whole perimeter if you want to, but you'll have to keep a good pace. She turns and points to her left. "If you simply want to see the site where Thoreau had his cabin, walk straight this way. It will take you about ten minutes. Whatever you decide, you have to be back on the bus at 11 sharp. Hey! Alan!" Deborah claps twice and points at a sleepy student Maria does not know (which is most of this batch). "To be awake is to be alive!" Some chuckles; Maria wonders if they get the allusion or are simply amused by the contrast between Deborah's no-nonsense energy and Alan's torpor. "All right then," Deborah concludes. "Go on."

The students stand around dumbly for a moment, but begin to disperse with growing confidence. "I'm going over to the gift shop," Deborah tells Maria. "I have to make some phone calls. I'll be over in a little while to help round up this herd of cats." Maria nods and turns begins walking around the pond, beginning at the far side from the cabin site.

Maria has ambivalent feelings about Thoreau. She has no patience for the cranky misfit of "Civil Disobedience," who thought he could simply opt out of paying taxes he didn't like, which strikes her as the worst kind of Anglo male libertarianism. And as far as she's concerned, no man who has his mother and sister do his laundry can call himself self-reliant. But for all his prickliness, Thoreau's prose gleams. And although she may be projecting it on to him, she senses an inner struggle to live the words, and knows that dismissing him as a phony is a little like complaining that sinning churchgoers are hypocrites: it's missing the point. Now that she's actually seeing it for herself, Maria is intrigued that Walden Pond is not the wilderness, and she sees now that it's within easy walking distance (in nineteenth century terms, anyway) of the village. At a replica of the cabin the group looked at near the parking lot, Maria read that the railroad ran near the actual site, and apparently still does. Looking ahead she sees a cluster of students there, and evidence of a railroad bed off to the left. She decides to veer off toward it, if for no other reason that to continue to savor her solitude.

Maria hasn't gone far off the main trail when she sees two still figures lying side by side in a bed of pine about 100 feet away. They are not engaged in an overt sex act, but the sense of intimacy is unmistakable. From the angle of her approach she can only see sneaker bottoms clearly; the rest is partially hidden in evergreens. One kid apparently has his hands behind his head; the other appears nestled beside him. She doesn't recognize either, but either or both could be her students. Though she's going to have to break up this idyll, she's charmed by it. Years from now, long after Deborah Pryce's (undone?) assignment is forgotten, this will be what these two remember from this trip. Surely even a loner like Thoreau would approve.

Maria hears a voice shouting off far to her right. "Maria? Is that you?" It's Deborah, motioning a cluster of students to keep moving toward the group's starting point. Maria hesitates to respond, then takes a deep breath. "Yes!" she responds. As she does, the two students scramble to their feet and begin running away from her, presumably to circle behind the cabin site and rejoin the group there. As they do, Maria sees that they're both boys.

"Will you backtrack a bit and round up any slackers?"

"OK!" Maria replies, and turns around and walks in the opposite direction. She scrunches her brow, trying to determine if she recognizes either of the boys, when she's approached by her favorite student, Willie, notebook in hand, clearly running to make up for lost time and ground.

"It's OK, Willie," Maria says reassuringly. "Is there anybody else back there?"

"No. I told Olivia and Mia to go on ahead," she says as she slows to a walk, clearly out of breath. "I wanted to take a few more minutes to make some notes about a spider web I found. I guess I lost track of time."

"Good for you." Maria is pleased that she and Willie are now walking toward the bus at exactly the same pace.

"I love it here," Willie says. "That was a good assignment. Now that I've actually seen the pond, I need to re-read the parts of Walden we discussed in class."

"Sounds like a good idea."

A pause. And then: "Ms. Bradstreet, would you call Thoreau a romantic writer?"

"Well, not exactly," Maria replies. "Not in what I think of in the classic sense of the term, like Wordsworth or Emerson. But I'm sure a lot of people would."

"I just love him."

"Fair enough. But remember, Willie: it's a big world out there. There are lots of fish in the pond."

Willie turns her head and smiles at Maria in acknowledgment. "You're not talking about how they restock the pond with fish."

"No, Willie, I am not."

Willie is beaming. "OK, Ms. Bradstreet. I'll keep my standards up."

"Thatta girl, Willie. Any writer would be lucky to catch you. Any non-writer, too."

Thoreau, Recycled

Revisiting Walden through Robert Sullivan’s The Thoreau You Don’t Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant

The following review was first published at the History News Network.

I’m one of the people for whom Robert Sullivan wrote this book. Every year, the entire tenth grade of the school where I teach makes a somewhat misnamed “Boston trip” (we spend about as much time in Salem and Concord as we do Boston), part of which involves a pilgrimage to Walden Pond. As my students are sent by their English teachers to walk the perimeter and take notes about what they find there, I merrily instruct them to make sure they have their Transcendental moment before the bus is supposed to leave fifty minutes later. In conversation with them, I never fail to observe that Mr. Simplicity with his cabin in the woods would go home regularly to have his mother wash his laundry. Thoreau has always struck me as the quintessential environmentalist, the proverbial crusader who loves trees more than people (unless those people are frightening vigilantes like John Brown or utterly impractical tax resisters like Thoreau himself), and that I serve a bona fide pedagogical purpose with my insistent irreverence. Dear old Henry wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m not going to do that anymore – or, at any rate, I’m not going to do it with quite as clear a conscience. As Sullivan points out, people like me (and I suspect he’s right in his suspicion that there are many) are smug about Thoreau’s smugness. “He worships nature, monk-like, while we carry on at home, ministering to the demands of the non-natural world,” Sullivan writes of our view of Thoreau. “He tends the pure garden of Mother Earth, while we trudge through fields of the mundane. There’s even an element of jealousy: while he gets to live in the cabin in the woods, we stay at home and go to work. We have to make a living.” We can’t afford to be like Thoreau, we tell ourselves; his thrift is actually a form of excess.

Sullivan’s critique of this critique is two-fold. The first is in effect to accept many of the charges leveled at Thoreau and turn them on their head. To point out, for example, that Walden Pond, a short walk from a bustling village, was hardly an exotic wilderness, is not a fact that discredits Thoreau’s experiment but something that was very much the point of his desire for a truly integrated life. To call him out on his foolish inconsistencies is a little like calling a congregation of churchgoers a bunch of hypocrites. As for Thoreau living a life of extravagance, he literally welcomed the idea: ever the etymological maven, he cherished a notion of himself as an extra vagrant.

But the other half of Sullivan’s argument is to directly rebut the charge of Thoreau as a cranky loner. He was not. That we think so, Sullivan says, is as often as not a perception of his cranky contemporaries, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, much more likely to talk the talk than walk the walk of his own philosophy, conflated Thoreau’s iconoclasm with unsociability. We forget that the lifelong bachelor had a hand in raising Emerson’s own children (the sage of Concord loved the idea of family life when he was on tour more than when he was actually at home), and that Thoreau was as comfortable with farmers and mechanics as he was Boston Brahmins. And he was as comfortable refining the process by which he manufactured pencils for the family business as he was cataloging the fate of seeds.

Perhaps the most effective aspect of this defense of Thoreau is Sullivan’s careful attempt to situate Thoreau in the economic and political climate of the antebellum decades. We tend to forget, for example, that the long downturn that followed the Panic of 1837 made social experiments like Brook Farm and Thoreau’s own cabin less a matter of bohemian sentiment than a search for a fiscally viable way of life. Far from isolated from the shifting social tides of his time, this quintessential Yankee had protracted contact and often careful observations about the Irish immigrants who surged onto New England’s shores. And that when Thoreau took on big political issues like abolition in the 1850s, he did not as an abstract dreamer but as a sharp critic willing to point fingers close to home (one more reason why he may be remembered as an irascible rascal). Like many of his contemporaries, Thoreau protested the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which legalized the spread of slavery into new territory. But he was at least as angry about the indifference to the fate of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston as he was the future prospects of Kansas. As he noted of an anti-slavery meeting he describes in his famous address “Slavery in Massachusetts, “I had thought that the house was on fire, and not the prairie ...There is not one slave in Nebraska; there are perhaps a million slaves in Massachusetts.”

It’s important to note that Sullivan is hardly the first person to make these or other points in defense of Thoreau. But he does so with pithy – yet tangy – prose worthy of his subject. “To imagine Thoreau and his writing without considering the economy is a little like thinking about The Grapes of Wrath without considering the Great Depression,” he asserts. Sullivan distills the political vision of works like “Civil Disobedience” into a series of declarations: “Stick together! Join the club and pay the dues [well, maybe not all the dues], and don’t abandon the ship, even if you have to get arrested and thrown in the brig to save it, even if you feel undervalued . . . Send the telegraph message but have something to say. Use text messaging, but for more than delivering the news that, as the narrator of Walden jokes, ‘Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.’”

Actually, such willful anachronisms go to the heart of what’s original and compelling here. Sullivan, himself a freelance writer (as well as the author of Thoreauvian books like Rats and The Meadowlands) is acutely aware that Thoreau was, too, and that this consciousness really can explain a lot. “A literary stunt is a thing that happens all the time today in publishing circles: a writer living in a particular way – or partaking in a particular community or ritual or what have you – in order to ultimately report on the event or place or people,” he writes of the circumstances that led to Walden. “It is an essentially artificial experiment undertaken with an interest in making money on publication or putting forward a not-so-artificial argument (optional) or, in some case, both.” A garden wasn’t the only place Thoreau made his living.

After finishing The Thoreau You Know I went looking for my annotated Modern Library of Thoreau’s writings from my college days, and was distressed that I couldn’t find it. So I had to browse him again fresh, online. And when I did, I remembered why it was that I’ve used Thoreau’s sentences as epigrams for two of my books. Like many of the Transcendentalists, his work is easy to mock as vague, even meaningless, from a distance, and yet it takes on a tensile vitality when you come up against it. He’ll never be on of my favorites (I’m one who finds Whitman’s embrace irresistible, as apparently did Thoreau.) But next time I’m at the pond, I’ll give Thoreau his due (which is as likely as not to mean that I’ll keep my mouth shut). I might even pick up some trash I find in the parking lot as I walk back to the bus.