Thoreau

One day at work, there was a serious unexpected firm wide meeting. There were 120 employees gathered in a room. At the front, one of the partners explained the grave situation. There was a person within the firm recently infected with tuberculosis. Those working in the immediate vicinity of the person were notified and being monitored. I wasn’t notified, so I knew my desk was not near the infected. Due to patient privacy rights, the identity of the infected person was not revealed. I looked up TB on the internet that night. It  is a bacterial infection. Sometimes it can lay dormant in the body, other times it could result in bad coughing... and death. There were a number of Filipinos in the office. I suspected one of the people who traveled to the Philippines had it and was infected abroad. In fact there was an old matronly Filipino secretary who was absent for a month around the time of the announcement. 

A month later, I asked my friend Chris to lunch. It had been a while since we ate together. He had helped me on a project and was a nice guy. You wouldn’t guess it by his soft spoken demeanor, his catholic school upbringing, short stature but he was a Punk rocker by night, architect by day. His father used to be a glam rockstar apparently so both he and his brother grew up playing in bands. Although we never jammed together, we talked about music a lot. 

We were sitting outside eating lunch when he excused himself.  “Sorry, I have to take a video of myself taking medicine and send it to a health safety officer to avoid quarantine.” He then told me, he had found out he got TB while training for the marathon. Initially he thought it was a pernicious cough, but he was diagnosed with TB. It was strange since he hadn’t gone out of the country or anything crazy... somehow he got infected. Once infected, the government monitors you and all your contacts. His wife had to take the antibiotic regimen as well to avoid spreading TB to others. I finished my lunch... all the assumptions I had regarding who had TB were wrong. The knowledge that my friend had it was strange. Given my hypochondriac tendencies had I known he had TB, I don’t think I would’ve eaten lunch with him. I was comforted that we chose an outdoor place to eat. 

Velvet underground only sold 30,000 albums their first five years but they were all bought by people who started bands. When Thoreau wrote Walden,  his books didn’t sell out but eventually these books influenced many critical thinkers like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, E.O. Wilson, frank lloyd Wright, Rachel Carson, Tolstoy, and Glenn Murcutt. The environmentalists were inspired by his thoughts on nature, scientists were drawn to his unrelenting observations, architects were inspired by his emphasis on simplicity and nature, pacifists were drawn to his thinking of justice and government.... each line of Thoreau’s thinking questioned authority and social norms and relied on ideas meditated in solitude. 

I have read Walden pond 3 times. Once in college, the second time before making a trip to the Maine woods and Kathadin, and the third most recently in middle age. Each time I read Thoreau I find a new interpretation. Walden pond is similar to the time Thoreau lived there in that it is still near the train tracks in concord, the pond is still crystal clear and 100 feet deep, and the secondary growth forest consisting of white pines and oaks still prevail. Contrasting to the time he lived there however, the adjacent meadows are now submerged under water due to beaver dam activity, the hills are grown over with trees that obscure long views, and annoying fences funnel visitors like cattle around the pond loop shores. Step beyond the fence and you can imagine trekking alongside Thoreau in his daily 4 hour hikes. Many times he referred to certain trees as his friends... the destination of his sojourns. His writing is first person as if spoken in conversation. Surprisingly I found he took 7 years to write Walden, after he spent over 2 years living there starting at age 27 on July 4th 1845. 

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”

Transcendentalist Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write daily. Thoreau kept a daily journal in his hut by Walden. It was his prized possession— the only possession he locked in his desk when he went on his walks. The notes in his journal formed the basis of his lectures, and then later the chapters in his book. A year earlier, Thoreau had gone fishing in the hot summer of concord. He and his friend decided to cook their catch in a tree stump, but the flame spread to pine needles and eventually burned 300 acres. After the fire was put out, he went back to the tree stump to find his fish completely ‘broiled’. Sick of people whispering and joking arsonist behind his back, it is speculated that Thoreau asked Emerson permission to live on Emerson’s land in solitude on Walden pond and begin a two year writing experiment.

While the first shots of the American revolution were fired in Lexington and concord 4/19/1775, the next revolution of america started in concord with Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, and hawthorne spearheading forward thinking ideas of veganism, anti-slavery objections, anti-war protests, nature conservation, and transcendentalism that would later shape the world. 

600,000 people visit Walden every year now. Like Thoreau, people are drawn to the pond for its clarity and beauty. 12,000 years ago, large masses of ice separated from retreating glaciers were submerged under sand and soil. When they melted, a kettle pond formed. Today, this pond is which measures 100 deep is the deepest pond in Massachusetts today. 

3 years ago, a shiny glass visitor center was erected by the parking lot across the road from the pond. Inside are a collection of thoreau’s diary entries, quotes, scores of music popular during his time, pencils, contoured maps, and photographs. An old clean cut white-bearded bespectacled parks employee stood behind a counter waitIng to share information and his love of Thoreau and the transcendentalists to visitors. 

All that I knew of Thoreau up to that point was through his writing. Because of the immediacy of his words, I had assumed Walden was written at Walden. I did not know Thoreau spent 7 years crafting his book on Walden.  Nor did I know the first book he wrote at Walden about Merrimack rivers was dedicated to his deceased brother... or that he was granted access to the land by poet Emerson, or that he developed a pencil to rival European brands, or he tutored Louisa Alcott in writing, or that Alcott’s father Bronson had started a vegan commune in western Massachusetts called the fruitlands, or that the trees have grown in thicker now than in Thoreau’s time, that all the trees were chopped down to provide heat, or that beavers flooded the meadows on the northwest, or his sister posthumously published thoreau’s writings he made of katahdin while living at Walden posthumously, or that he influence e.o. Wilson, Rachel Carson and Gandhi.... I left the visitor’s center with more questions than answers. 

Outside the visitor center is a replica of the modest hut Thoreau made for himself using salvaged wood and materials he bought for $28.50.  It is rather small, especially when you think he entertained 25 people in there during his stay at Walden. For all his talk of solitude, I think Thoreau must have been quite enjoyed socially as an interesting conversationalist. 

100 years after he first settled at Walden, an amateur archaeologists found and excavated the site of thoreau’s cabin built in 1845. Surprisingly to me, his site is nestled on the eastern side of the pond, set back behind tall trees. Today a quote on a plaque sits amongst a heap of visitors’ stacked stones paying homage to Thoreau. The cabin foundations are marked with a rectangular footprint of stone markers and iron chains. The hut footprint is rotated 30 degrees from the pond, so its siting reminded me of Greek landscape sensibilities... not an axial Roman  relation to the pond.... a more dynamic and humble relation to the pond.

Equally interesting to what Thoreau wrote about was what he didn’t write about. The Walden book was carefully crafted to inspire challenging social norms, living life with eyes wide open. Reading his books, one would think his life mirrored the narrative... but the artifacts at the museum showed a much richer and complex tale to his life.

In a glass case at the Thoreau visitor center were  3 original Thoreau pencils. Pencils were first used in Cumbria england. In the 16th century, Legend had it that a storm overturned a tree exposing plumbago. A Solid and black and greasy material that resembled lead (hence the misnomer)  it lefts marks on anyone who handled it. It was soon used to mark sheep. At first, people wrapped it in sheepskin. Later they found it was useful for marking paper. Over time the plumbago was wrapped in twine before zoologist Gesner proposed wrapping the plumbago in wood in 1565. His conception of the pencil -two pieces of wood with a groove to house the lead glued together to form the pencil revolutionized art. Pencils were portable graphic devices capable of fine lines that replaced etching, silverpoint, chalk and charcoal. 

Britain held a monopoly over pencil manufacturing till 1794 when Britain went to  war with revolutionary France. The plumbago in England was very pure and could be formed into rods easily. Continental Europe didn’t have access to pure graphite like England, so engineer Nicolas Conte in France was tasked with creating a viable pencil alternatives. He experimented adding clay to low grade graphite powder and baking it to for lead rods for pencils. 

After graduating Harvard, Thoreau worked as a teacher but was reprimanded for not beating unruly kids. He was fired a week later when he beat 5 students with a ruler. Now unemployed,  thoreau helped out with his father’s pencil making business. At that time American pencils were not as good as European ones... his father’s brother In law and associate Dunbar had found a graphite ore in New Hampshire. They mixed the graphite dust with spermaceti or wax to create lead rods to insert into wood.  concord was a hotbed of pencil innovation. The hexagonal easily gripped pencil was introduced to in 1818 by concord pencil maker ebeneezer wood. 

To achieve a higher quality pencil for america, Thoreau pored through English and French texts on the subject. He tracked down a particular clay used in ceramics manufacturing to mix with plumbago dust. He developed processes to grind plumbago with 7 foot tall grinders and collected the fine dust that rose with boxes at the top. 

Once the pencil lead was formulated, thoreau left with his brother to start a qschool. One of their first students was eventual noted author, Louisa may alcott. When Thoreau’s brother died in 1842. Thoreau started his tenure at Walden in 1845. Thoreau used the sale of his pencils to fund his first book about Merrimack rivers written in tribute to his late brother. Later he would sell plumbago dust to electrotyper businesses. When his father died in 1859, Henry took over the business. In August of that year he paid to have Walden published. Walden didn’t sell well, and Thoreau didn’t live long after that. He died on May 6, 1862 of tuberculosis, though the fine particles of sawdust and plumbago he inhaled at the pencil factory probably contributed to his early death.