A LETTER TO HENRY DAVID THOREAU
By Roger L. Whittlesey
 

Icy starlets twinkled down from heaven. Three inches of wintry fluff lay upon the ground, a half dozen more would fall today.

I steered my car onto Belknap Road. 

One hundred and fifty years ago, you strode across the Boston-to-Fitchburg railroad tracks, and then along this road beside the railway station. You: a sloped-shouldered man with a long straight nose and intelligent blue eyes. With each determined step, the snow creaked and compressed under your boots, as you left behind a shadowy trail of slowly disappearing footprints. Your mother’s house lay several hundred yards down Belknap Road, then named Texas Road, and then considered the very outskirts of Concord. The opulent gingerbread houses on Main Street stood 12 rods Northwest and the rude bridge arching the flood, 24 rods. You pulled at your unkempt beard as your stomach grumbled. “Mother will have a hot pie waiting for me on the stove,” you thought. “Experiment or no experiment, I can only eat so much Indian bread and beans  . . .”

My three-month-old boy slept in the car seat next to me. He had coughed once or twice this morning and my wife pulled me out of work to bring him in for an examination.

“It’s not as if it’s a sepulchral cough,” I said to my wife over the telephone that morning. “I didn’t see arterial blood on his bib. I’d say consumption is out of the question . . .” 

“In any case,” she said, unfazed by my sarcastic remarks, “he’s coughing and he’s a little guy and I don’t want to take any chances.” 

I shifted my car into drive and crawled toward Concord in the hour-old snowstorm.

One hundred and fifty years ago, horses drew large sleds along this road, sleds loaded with ice blocks nestled in hay and sprinkled with the sweat of the Irish ice cutters. Perhaps, if I opened the car window I might still smell the frozen hay, the sweat of my forefathers.

This was the third time in two weeks that I left work to tend to my infant son—each time I feigned guilt and humility for the benefit of my mono-brow supervisors. 

One hundred and fifty years ago, you required no one’s assent to step out into nature. You moved as you pleased—or stood statue still, as you did one spring day, knee-deep in a frog pond, the low sun reflecting in the muddy water and pollywogs waltzing in a wind-produced ripple. Oh how your neighbors laughed at you. “Crazy,” they all said. Were you to perform such a stunt today—to stand knee-deep pondering a pond for eight hours—you might collect hundreds of verdigris pennies while becoming privy to the shiny wishes of the superstitious passersby. 

 “Sniffles, that’s all. An infant decongestant will do the job.” The doctor washed his hands and left the white room. It was not consumption. A reckless woodsman’s ax would not prematurely fell my sapling.

One hundred and fifty years ago, half of Boston possessed a peculiar raspy cough. Half of Boston wiped its perspiring brow before shaking the hand of its neighbor. On more than one occasion you, yourself, averted your thoughtful blue eyes as a doctor, grasping at straws, prescribed a good jostling in a horse-drawn carriage over a bumpy road to alleviate your consumptive symptoms. Perhaps a lengthy sojourn in the Deep South would help, too. After all, it had benefited Mr. Emerson greatly. Nevertheless, you refused to leave your beloved Concord.

I carried my baby boy, now clothed in an aqua snowsuit with no pant legs (more like a sleeping bag with arms than a winter coat), into the house on Belknap Road and handed him to our baby-sitter.

One hundred and fifty years ago, you pressed on just a little past here toward your mother’s house, amid that blizzard. You wore a ragged woolen pea coat and a gray woolen scarf wrapped three times around your long slender neck: the tendril ends of the scarf fluttered in the storm’s gusts. You covered your head with the knitted cap Mrs. Emerson gave you. You thrust your bare hands under your biceps as your snow-covered right shoulder cow-poked the weather, barreled into the blizzard. Your mind warmed with tender thoughts: A spiraling gray stream of steam rising from a browned-over pie; the familiar warm tones of your mother and sisters; and the warm, radiant glow of the fireplace’s conflagration . . . only moments, steps away.

It was noontime. The sun burnt an opalescent hole through the gray clouds and the snow fell in moth-like flakes. I shifted my car and drove toward work.

”No,” I decided, as Walden Pond appeared beyond the slanted descent of snow in front of me. “I will visit your woods and pond and dusty cabin . . .”

That day, the timeless pond grew hard in the arctic air. 

One hundred and fifty years ago, you carried poles out onto that pond, cut holes in the ice, and threw water in the face of fallacy—bottomless, Ptt! 
 
 

I braked just inside the entrance of a snow-covered lot that rests where the owl used to hoot, shifted into park, and then twisted the key. The engine dieseled and died. I peered across the divine divide, restricting my view to everything in front of the railroad tracks, which appeared just below the horizon.

 One hundred and fifty years ago, this sylvan landscape had recently reflected in your eyes. What beauties did you behold? The descending light of dusk; still mornings bathed in sodium light, cloudless, moonlit winter nights; summer sun-showers; the spiraling red and gold leaves of autumn; and the budding green and yellow stems of spring, to name a few.

As I stepped from my car, I slipped and fell hard on the pavement. I knew I could never descend the steep, snowy hill leading to your beloved, half-frozen pond in those shoes.

One hundred and fifty years ago, your footprints ran like stitches in every direction throughout this snow-covered Eden. Below the trunk of a knotty pine, one might discover the imprint of your outstretched legs in the snow, and a water stain on the bark from where you rested your head. 

I inhaled deeply and returned to my car. You have been gone for too many years. Your housekeeping has slipped. The beans no longer sprout in the spring, and the mice have no pant legs to climb and no callused palms on which to rest and feed.  

I turned on the headlights, tugged at the steering wheel, and accelerated in the direction of Sudbury. I watched as the replica of your cabin receded in my rear-view mirror, eventually melting into the snowy distance. I tried to capture every square foot of woods on either side of myself, simultaneously wondering if you had collected the very last of the Indian arrowheads. I could stop the car immediately, put on the hazards, and wander into the woods. The thrill of such a notion liberated me, temporarily. Soon, your trees were behind me and I was on the road that leads back to my workplace. The pit of my stomach churned the acids of anxiety as I pictured my thumb of a supervisor: his bald pate leaning into a terminal and his deep sonorous voice spewing out trite motivations and gauzy commands. I gripped the stick and downshifted into third gear . . . The workplace: A swivel chair in front of a computer screen. The dimpled suspended ceiling pushing in on me, stealing my air. The screen’s demonic glare burning invisible holes in my eyes. The peremptory scream of the telephone crawling into my ears. The endless, ambiguous shuffle of paper destined for the gray metal basket at the outside edge of my desk . . . I downshifted into second gear . . . My heart beating faster. Dry throat. Temples hammering. Ears ringing. Mind-numbing . . . 

One hundred and fifty years ago, you launched a peaceful, cutout canoe through the bone-white reflection of the lunar sphere, the moon rippled like a sheet in a breeze viewed through water-smeared pane glass. There, on that blue starry night, you reclined, arms behind your head, and drifted off to sleep.

A brick building flickered in the distance like a giant flame in the chilled snowy air. Trucks circled, emitting the choking scent of burned diesel. The arm of the man sitting inside the gatehouse lifted a Styrofoam coffee cup and carried it behind his outstretched newspaper. A rusted railway car leaned precariously against a series of oak trees. The new snow sat gathered into dirty gray piles along the driveway . . .. I don’t know why but, again, I thought of you: your inspiring blue eyes under your unkempt coiffure, your sloping shoulders above your sinewy frame. 

One hundred and fifty years ago, you knelt and leaned toward the andirons as your coarse, heavily veined hands stuffed last fall’s maple leaves under a neatly arranged cluster of firewood. 

I downshifted into first gear, as I approached a stop sign, and then came to a sliding stop. I could go no farther—not today or any day. I needed to be outside, close to nature. Give me an ax, an ice-cutter, a sickle. Let the golden rays of light fall upon my shoulders. Let the silent ticking of nature’s clock stamp my time card. Let the voice of God whisper words of encouragement through the leaves and grass for me to hear too. 

One hundred and fifty years ago, the “plick” of a pine needle falling to the ground reached your ears.

Icy starlets twinkled down from heaven. 

From a porthole window, my supervisor watched my taillights attenuate and disappear over a hill; and the snow creaked and compressed under my tires, creating a trail of slowly disappearing parallel lines. 

One hundred and fifty years ago you, too, dissolved into the grainy distance, a bluish blotch melting into your mother’s house . . ..

 I thank you for turning me around that day. I thank you for placing thoughts of freedom in my head. I thank you for making me want to lie in the snow until the summer sunshine raised the grass around me. Most of all, I thank you for making me what I am today—unemployed and happy.