Walden, and What I Found There

Guilt is what made me go to Thoreau’s woods.

For 22 years, I have lived 18 miles from the woods and pond made famous by Henry David Thoreau. Since I am the type of person who veers off the interstate to see sites like the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm, I’ve long considered my failure to go to nearby Walden an embarrassing personal lapse.

What has kept me away for so long? The swarms of other visitors, an estimated 600,000 per year, according to the Walden Pond State Reservation brochure. I wanted a Walden Pond experience that was more “enjoying idyllic solitude” and less “Rockefeller Center in mid-December.” Therefore, I did not go to the woods for many years.

As I was removing laundry from the dryer recently, it occurred to me that I still hadn’t been to Walden Pond, and that a Thursday in early April might be a relatively unpeopled time to go. So, I went.

I drove past the B, C, and other empty, far-flung lots at Walden Pond State Reservation and pulled into a space directly across from the visitor center. Congratulating myself on my good fortune, I set off merrily along the 1.9-mile pond path—in the wrong direction. I later found out that hikers are supposed to proceed clockwise, and I was going counter. Oops. I guess that would’ve been obvious had the dreaded masses been there with me.

But they weren’t! I took a deep breath, prepared to enter a living-in-the-moment mindset à la Thoreau, and was promptly besieged by bugs. I walked faster. More bugs. I broke into a jog, but there was no getting away. The torment continued as I scurried around Walden Pond.

Look carefully. See those black dots? Midges. Millions of them.

I finally encountered another person: a fisherman in waders and a Red Sox cap. He gave me a friendly wave and a smile that I suspect was prompted by my frenzied hand-flapping as I attempted desperately and often unsuccessfully to keep the insects out of my eyes and nose.

“Is it always this buggy here?” I hollered down to him.

“No,” he responded. “The midges just hatched. They’ll be gone by next week. It sure is bad today though!”

With that cheery observation, he turned away and cast his line back into Walden Pond.

Great, so I avoided the tourist infestation but not the Hatching of the Midges. At that moment, I would’ve happily—well, maybe—taken on the humans.

Fortunately, walking away from the water and up to the well-marked site of Thoreau’s cabin took me out of the midge zone. I stood for several minutes staring at the stone pillars with chains that demarcated the location of the 15’x10’ cabin. I observed that the hearth, designated by a fieldstone, consumed a decent chunk of the square footage. I shivered as the sun failed to re-emerge from behind the clouds. I was thankful the midges had stopped torturing me. Other than that, I felt—nothing. No awe, no connection to the great thinker and writer, no transcendence.

Before you start feeling too sorry for Thoreau—”the poor man lived all alone in that tiny cabin for 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days?”—you should know that he had frequent visitors, and he regularly walked into nearby Concord town to hang out with his fellow transcendentalists.

Perhaps, I thought, the place is so over-hyped that it couldn’t possibly live up to anyone’s expectations. Maybe zillions of visitors give it a better vibe. Maybe, like the rest of Massachusetts, Walden Pond is just kind of gray and sad in early April. Or maybe I expected to form a connection because all of the right ingredients were there: history, literature, a pre-snake-season walk in the woods. They just didn’t add up to a meaningful experience.

And, yeah, those damn bugs.

If not spiritually enlightening, the remainder of my Walden Pond outing was educationally solid, and included:

• going on a StoryWalk® Adventure, which involved reading and viewing a children’s book backwards since I had walked the wrong way around the pond. The StoryWalk® Adventure was a highlight of my trip since the book, Of Walden Pond: Henry David Thoreau, Frederic Tudor, and the Pond Between, had some excellent ice harvesting illustrations and I am somewhat obsessed with this topic. (Frederic Tudor, “Boston’s Ice King,” was the first to ship ice that remained somewhat solid from New England to the Caribbean. Eventually, he figured out how to pack the ice so that most of it didn’t melt along with his profits.)

• looking at a replica of Thoreau’s cabin and being suitably impressed with its smallness. Apparently, he fit 25-30 people in there once, though I can’t imagine how.

• watching an 18-minute film titled—wait for it—Walden at the inviting and informative visitor center. I actually felt more connected to Thoreau and the landscape during the Walden film than I did when I was in the Walden woods.

This was a fascinating find in the Walden Pond State Reservation Visitor Center. Not sure I would’ve chosen to take Walden to war with me but surely soldiers had other tiny book choices. Note to self: research this.

Thoreau left the woods after two years, two months, and two days, he said, “for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” Finally, Thoreau and I were in sync! Both rush hour and a rainstorm were approaching, so, after about two hours and let’s call it 22 minutes at Walden, I had no more time to spare.

Walden Pond is, of course, much more than a physical location: it’s a metaphor for a place with deep personal meaning. A place where you can transcend the ordinary to enter a more spiritual realm. A place that decidedly is not I-95 at 4:30 on a weekday afternoon.

Thoreau’s writings advise us to find our own Walden Ponds. His didn’t float my boat, but that’s okay. One of the joys of traveling is discovering personal Walden Ponds. If they’re far away, you can re-visit them endlessly in your memories, thereby giving yourself travel mementos that are more valuable and less costly than, say, NAME OF PLACE keychains or t-shirts. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve returned to my long-ago view of Lake Como from the huge window of my tiny hotel room in Varenna, Italy, a vision so vivid it conjures the smell of wisteria that was blooming profusely at the time.

Then there are the Walden Ponds closer to home, the ones that both my body and my mind visit frequently. There’s the Battle Road Trail at Minuteman National Historic Park, just down the road from Walden Pond. Castle Hill on the Crane Estate, with its lawn that rolls down to the Atlantic Ocean.

And, about three miles from my front door: Breakheart Reservation, whose woods I visit at least weekly and where I definitely “learn what it has to teach.” More on this special place with a shocking past in an upcoming issue of Christina’s Travels.