Thoreau Today

Henry David Thoreau in the Literature and Culture of the 21st Century

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

May/June 2009

From a February 28, 2008, article by Greg Booth in the Grand Forks Herald (North Dakota) about the death of Minnesota author Bill Holm: "His book 'Cabins of Minnesota' may be . . . the only prose on weekend cottages that cites in fairly equal measure Thoreau, the Buddhist Sutras, Chaucer, Frost, Yeats, Bach, Ted Kooser, Jim Harrison and Po Chiii."

Bob Bowles, nature columnist for the Packet & Times in Orillia, Ontario "What to Watch For"), writes of ice-out dates in his early April 2009 column: "Famous American naturalist Henry David Thoreau kept ice-out records for Walden Pond in Massachusetts in the mid-1800s and recorded them in his celebrated book, Walden. Thoreau wrote of simplicity, of finding your own way of life, and of watching the natural environment around you. Journey North, which started 15 years ago, is an organization that documents migration and natural happening around us. They decided to include the monitoring of ice-out dates for Walden Pond following in the footsteps of Thoreau. Here is a comparison of the Walden Pond ice-out dates first from Thoreau and then from Journey North:

Thoreau's dates were April 1, 1845, March 25, 1846, April 8, 1847, March 28, 1851, March 23, 1853, and April 7, 1854.

Recent dates by Journey North are March 18, 1995, March 23, 1996, Feb. 22, 1997, Feb. 26, 1998, March 1, 1999, March 9, 2000, April 12, 2001, Feb. 23, 2002, April 2, 2003, March 21, 2004, April 5, 2005, March 13, 2006, March 28, 2007, and March 20, 2008.

This year, the ice went out at Walden Pond on March 23. We have records of ice-out dates for Lake Couchiching in Orillia for over the last 100 years and have been recording these dates ourselves for the last 15 years.

Bob Blaisdell's review of Robert Sullivan's The Thoreau You Don't Know, published in the Sunday, April 5 San Francisco Chronicle, notes, "To say that Sullivan is no Thoreau is no insult; he, like Thoreau, has earned himself a living as a freelance writer, which is one of the regular and most interesting of his foci. In Rats (2004), Sullivan was, he writes, "using Waldenas my structural centerpiece, taking it more head-on, mimicking its structure, not that anyone noticed." (I admit I didn't notice, but no book on rodents, I'll bet, ever quoted so much good poetry or took so many Thoreauvian pains to describe evocatively the habits and characteristics of alley rats.) That book was light, engaging and digressive, casual, slack and over-airy, while this one is tighter, finer, more revealing of Sullivan without trying to be.

Robert Sullivan's The Thoreau You Don't Know (Collins, 2009) is a book on a topic I've long thought about (and never succeeded in getting a magazine article assignment to write about): Thoreau the musician, family man, worker, joker, citygoer, etc. It's well done, and also interesting to read some truly new takes on Thoreau (for example, Sullivan calls him "America's proto–James Joyce, just in terms of wordplay"). Sullivan has done his research (quoting, for example, from an obituary of Thoreau's sister Helen, lines that could have been describing her author-brother: "She had the patience to investigate truth, the candor to acknowledge it when sufficient evidence was presented to her mind, and the moral courage to act in conformity with her convictions, however unpopular these convictions might be to the community around her"), and he uses some fresh comparisons, noting, for example, that the walking distance from Concord to Walden Pond is "about forty New York City blocks."

Caron Smith, a writer for the Examiner-Enterprise, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, reported in April on two local fifth-grade teachers who "were fortunate enough to be chosen to attend the National Council for History Education Conference in Boston" in March. Smith glosses over a day trip to Concord --"on Thursday, they spent the whole day on a tour bus visiting the historic literary homes, in Concord. . . . They also visited the Old North Bridge, the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (burial sites of Hawthorne, Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau), and Walden Pond where the replica of Thoreau's cabin sits"--but finds the duo's dining experience newsworthy: "They said the food was spectacular. They enjoyed clam chowder, oysters and clams. They were also introduced to a fabulous bakery in Boston. Mike's Bakery has the best cheesecake and chocolate-covered strawberries."

D. B. Johnson, artist and author of four previous picture books about Henry David Thoreau (depicted as a bear)--Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, Henry Builds a Cabin, Henry Climbs a Mountain, and Henry Works, all nicely conceived and carried out --has a new one just published by Houghton Mifflin, titled Henry's Night, about one of Thoreau's moonlit walks.

Laura E. Huggins's "On Earth Day, think Thoreau," in the April 22, 2009, issue of the Los Angeles Times begins, "Earth Day is upon us, and with it, several 'green' events, including the broadcasting of 'Walden: The Ballad of Thoreau' on public television and in schools. This is surprising at a time when government involvement in the environment is all the rage. Henry David Thoreau, who wrote that "government is best which governs not at all," is probably writhing in his grave." The article ends: "Next year marks the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Let's celebrate the environmental entrepreneurs and the people making decisions on the ground rather than Big Brother from Washington. As Thoreau observed: 'The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished, and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.'"

The late Roger Deakin's book Wildwood: A Journey through Trees, first published in the UK in 2007, has been published this year by the Free Press in the United States. The top blurb (of seven) on the back of the dust jacket quotes Robert Macfarlane, "author of The Wild Places": "Roger Deakin is a latter-day Thoreau." The book has no index, but a thumbing turns this up on page 13: "I think of something artist Roger Ackling said to me, quoting Thoreau: 'Electricity kills darkness, candlelight illuminates it.'" That line's a puzzler, since electric lamps were not developed until after Thoreau died, though some were in development (pre-Edison) by the likes of Humphry Davy. My guess is that Ackling (and/or Deakin) were paraphrasing someone other than Thoreau. Can anyone shed more light on this?

Thoreau Yesterday

From a blurb by Phil Caputo on the back cover of Doug Peacock's Walking It Off: A Veteran's Chronicle of War and Wildness (Eastern Washington University Press, 2005): "Doug Peacock is a direct literary descendant of Thoreau, with a few genes from Audubon and his mentor, Edward Abbey." So that's who Audubon's mentor was.

Philip Haillie's In the Eye of the Hurricane: Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (Wesleyan University Press, 1997) contains a chapter about Thoreau's walk on Cape Cod ("Thoreau's Walk on the Wild Side," pp. 114-34). Haillie, who doesn't regurgitate the typical pablum about Thoreau, writes, "His foster mother was Concord; his real mother was the wild. . . . He often acted as if he felt that human societies were like transitory clumps of toadstools standing for a while along the fringes of the great pathways of nature. His home was on the pathways, not in the clumps."

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