Thoreau’s Rivers

In the center of the town of Concord, Massachusetts, the Concord River is born where the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers come together at Egg Rock.

From here, the placid river flows past Emerson’s Old Manse and under the stone bridge that he immortalized as “the rude bridge that arched the flood,” a stone’s throw from the famous Minuteman statue by Daniel Chester French. (The photo is by Mark Wilson, from the Boston Globe.)

Published in 1982, A Conscious Stillness: Two Naturalists on Thoreau’s Rivers describes a series of journeys by canoe and foot down the two rivers that create the Concord. The book’s two authors are Ann Zwinger, author of earlier books on rivers, and Edwin Way Teale, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of more than thirty books on the natural world. Teale died before the book was completed, and it was left to Zwinger, along with Teale’s widow and others, to finish the job.

Teale was a meticulous note taker and a careful writer, so the task was not as hard as it might have been. Zwinger ekes out Teale’s finished prose with bracketed sections taken from his notes, and the notes are often hardly distinguishable from the finished product, though more likely to be written in the present tense.

Zwinger herself favors the present tense (as she discusses in the introduction) and although her writing is more effusive than Teale’s, she knows her river history and sometimes flashes out a twenty-dollar word: the “rataplan of rain” on a chilly March canoe trip, and tree branches “woven together like tiercerons” on a summer’s day.

Zwinger and Teale quote Thoreau less than I would have expected. (For Thoreau on rivers and meadows, see Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape.) One reason may be that the two authors cover more of Thoreau’s rivers than Thoreau did himself, launching their canoes at the source of the gentle Sudbury and the rockier, more turbulent Assabet and following them wherever they lead, along flowery banks, under highway overpasses, and past the outlets of sewage treatment plants.

They do commemorate the day Thoreau and a companion reached the Framingham Ox-Bow, a landmark on the Assabet.

He and his friend Ellery Channing had started upstream that day rowing Thoreau’s homemade dory, and intending to go all the way to Saxonville. It was one of the sultry dog days of summer and along the way they refreshed themselves as best they could by dipping up the warm and muddy-tasting river water in a clamshell they carried in the boat. Buttonbushes had reached the height of their blooming and swarmed with honeybees. They noticed that they could hear the humming of the insects as much as six or seven rods away.

When they came to the Ox-Bow, Thoreau paced off the distance across the solid neck. He found it was almost exactly a hundred yards. He and Channing gazed up the river from the other side. Then they turned back. This point, sixteen miles upstream from Egg Rock, was the farthest Thoreau ever ascended either the Sudbury or the Assabet.

If I didn’t learn much that was new about Thoreau from this book, I did learn more about Concord and its surrounding towns. Here is Horace Hosmer’s recollection of the mill that produced paper (and polluted the Assabet) in the 1850s.

After the Crimean War 5 tons of soldiers white shirts came to this mill at one time just as they were taken off the dead bodies, matted with blood, and were made into writing paper. I weighed one of my shirts and it weighed ¾ of a pound, so there must have been the blood of 1000 men coloring the waters of our beautiful river. I sometimes thought the cardinal flowers, and the Maple leaves in Autumn were tinged with it.

Perhaps something of this was in Thoreau’s mind on August 20, 1851, when he wrote this about the cardinal flowers.

In the dry ditch, near Abel Minott’s house that was, I see cardinal-flowers, with their red artillery, reminding me of soldiers, — red men, war, and bloodshed. Some are four and a half feet high. Thy sins shall be as scarlet. Is it my sins that I see?

Surveyor for hire

I had gotten the impression somewhere that Walter Harding’s biography The Days of Henry Thoreau was a kind of insanely detailed chronology, providing (as the title suggests) a day-by-day, blow-by-blow description of the man’s life.

In fact, it turned out to be a readable, sympathetic biography that provides more homely detail than Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind—but not too much.

Harding reproduces this handbill that Thoreau used to promote his services as a land surveyor. Thoreau was apparently good enough to justify his claim: “Areas warranted accurate within almost any degree of exactness, and the Variation of the Compass given, so that the lines can be run again.” And he was conscientious in his dealings with clients, as when he helped James Barrett Wood survey a wood lot in Northboro.

On one particular day they had great trouble finding the bounds and it was dark before they were ready to run the final line. Wood wondered how they would be able to see the last bound to take the bearings, but Thoreau quietly continued to work and, when he had his compass set, pulled a candle and a match from his pocket, lighted it, and told Wood to hold it on top of the stick on the last bound. In that way he finished the work and saved Wood not only the trouble of journeying out to the wood lot again but the three dollars he would have paid for another day’s work.

Red squirrel adoptions

Recently I took a moment to celebrate the ubiquitous gray squirrel, but today it’s the turn of the red squirrel—beloved in England, where it has largely been driven out by the bigger and more aggressive gray.

Red squirrel mothers will apparently adopt the orphaned children of other red squirrels. Maybe this behavior helps the whole community survive—or maybe the red squirrels are just too nice to compete with the tough-guy grays?

Here is one of Thoreau’s descriptions of red squirrels, from his Journal.

March 30, 1859
Hear a red squirrel chirrup at me by the hemlocks (running up a hemlock), all for my benefit; not that he is excited by fear, I think, but so full is he of animal spirits that he makes a great ado about the least event. At first he scratches on the bark very rapidly with his hind feet without moving the fore feet. He makes so many queer sounds, and so different from one another, that you would think they came from half a dozen creatures. I hear now two sounds from him of a very distinct character, — a low or base inward, worming, screwing, or brewing, kind of sound (very like that, by the way, which an anxious partridge mother makes) and at the same time a very sharp and shrill bark, and clear, on a very high key, totally distinct from the last, — while his tail is flashing incessantly. You might say that he successfully accomplished the difficult feat of singing and whistling at the same time.

Year of Meteors

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features an unusual painting by the Hudson River painter Frederic Church, picturing an “earth-grazing meteor procession.” The meteor was the inspiration for a poem by Walt Whitman, ”Year of Meteors.”

YEAR of meteors! brooding year! 
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds and signs;

I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia;

(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d;

I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;) ...

The old man on the scaffold was, of course, John Brown, who was hanged in December 1859 for treason after the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Researchers at Texas State have tracked down the details of the meteor.

A large Earth-grazing meteor broke apart on the evening of July 20, 1860, creating a spectacular procession of multiple fireballs visible from the Great Lakes to New York State as it burned through the atmosphere and continued out over the Atlantic Ocean.

“Any town that had a newspaper within all those states is going have a story on this,” Olson said. “We have hundreds of eyewitness accounts, but there are probably hundreds more we don’t even have.

“From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson River Valley, we’re able to determine the meteor’s appearance down to the hour and minute,” Olson said. “Church observed it at 9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman would’ve seen it at the same time, give or take one minute.”

Everything went pear-shaped

I recently read Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, the story of a German couple’s quixotic campaign of resistance against the Nazis. Published last year, the book was a big success for Melville House Press. Primo Levi praised it (and Melville House made creative use of his testimonial) and there is much to say about how it conveys the experience of living as an ordinary German under Nazi rule.

Michael Hoffman’s translation of Every Man Dies Alone is mostly unremarkable. It renders a plainspoken book about working-class people, con men, and criminals in workmanlike no-frills English. But one sentence jumped out at me as I read it: “Everything went pear-shaped.”

What an interesting phrase, I thought. This is a good example of quirks in the original language that should be preserved. But when I read some comments on the book at Amazon, I saw that someone had noticed the same phrase (let it not be said that close reading is a thing of the past!) and complained about it as a “1990s Britishism.”

Sure enough, it’s a British phrase and not a German one, and it means the opposite of what I had thought.

Pears are smooth and rounded, so I figured that for something to go pear-shaped must mean that it goes smoothly and easily.

Not at all. “Pear-shaped” refers to something that has gone seriously awry. The phrase may derive from a lopsided loop by an airplane, a distorted aircraft engine, or the shape of a crashed plane. (Many of the proposed sources are aeronautical.) It may come from the shape of a collapsing balloon, a glassblower’s effort gone wrong, or a metal bearing that has worn unevenly. But wherever it comes from, it’s not good.