Thoreau and the toads

As a sort of follow-up to my post on Camus and the toads, today we have Thoreau and the Toads: a poem by David Wagoner that’s featured on Garrison Keillor’s site The Writer’s Almanac.

The poem ends with Thoreau tying his rawhide shoelaces into a square knot. From this we can conclude that Thoreau was at least 36 years old at the time the poem takes place, as it took him that long to learn the difference between a granny knot and a square knot. On July 25, 1853, he wrote a lengthy entry on the troubles he has had with shoelaces coming untied.

I thought of strings with recurved prickles and various other remedies myself. At last the other day it occurred to me that I would try an experiment, and, instead of tying two simple knots over the other the same way, putting the end which fell to the right over each time, that I would reverse the process, and put it under the other. Greatly to my satisfaction, the experiment was perfectly successful, and from that time my shoe-strings have given me no trouble, except sometimes in untying them at night.

On telling this to others I learned that I had been all the while tying what is called a granny’s knot, for I had never been taught to tie any other, as sailors’ children are; but now I had blundered into a square knot, I think they called it, or two running slip-nooses. Should not all children be taught this accomplishment, and an hour, perchance, of their childhood be devoted to instruction in tying knots?