I took my walk this week, Thursday evening, behind my mom’s house. This is a place that I have seen change since I was young. My great uncle had built the house and the first occupants had cleared a small pasture so their horses could graze. Now as I walk through a tangle of small trees underbrush, saplings, and various ground loving plants, I am amazed at how much nature has crept in and taken over this once open ground. I reach, what used to be, the end of the clearing and entered the woods.
Down a short and fairly steep embankment, with a slippery carpet of moss I might add, there is a small but fairly quick flowing brook that runs from Barry pond several miles north to a small beaver pond about ¾ of a mile into the woods. Though I thought about venturing to the pond that evening but I decided it was getting too late and I settled for the brook. There have never been any fish and only the stray crawfish that hints that any life exists there. But at the same time it is the source of life for so many small woodland creatures around.
As I continue looking around I am also saddened by nature. The woods and this brook used to be more open and negotiable but the ice storm of 1998 ushered in a maze of toppled trees and fallen limbs. Many look as if they are about to fall from their perches at any minute due to years of rot and ceaselessly changing weather. And as I was standing there I was reminded of a few lines from the chapter Spring. “Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks it in pieces.” (p. 289) The storm and ice were Thor and the ensuing Thaw left in its wake a wrecked patch of forest. This was a place that I played for hours as a little boy. My friend Luke and I would make small boats and race them down the brook splashing carelessly. But alas the storm made the woods too dangerous of a place to play.
So I began to wonder what would Thoreau have done had an ice storm hit Walden in the winters of ’46 or ’47? Would he even be affected by it? Could those who lived in towns and villages then be able to cope if their world was covered in a layer of ice? I almost feel guilty asking these questions since I didn’t even live in Maine for the ice storm (I visited my grandparents, who do, regularly as a child). Part of me thinks Thoreau would have a field day if it were to happen to him. He would have an abundance of natural wonders, all kinds of shapes and colors, to explore, analyze, and record in his own unique fashion. I also think he would find such a storm to be an act of beauty from nature as he hints, also on page 289, that, “you may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows but into.” Perhaps one who lives like Walden, even today, could get by if such a storm were to come again.
Nature can be sad or even scary at times. Natural disasters are the reason for a large number of the deaths that occur around the globe each year. When I was very young I was TERRIFIED of tornadoes. I lived in Pennsylvania, so there was not much of a threat of tornadoes hitting my home, but I was still so afraid of them. What was so scary to me, I think, was that since it is a natural thing there is not much to do about it or to stop it. Natural disasters and such sometimes just happen.
ReplyDeleteLife finds a way despite some of the elements. Scavengers and fungi even eat all of the life that is decaying. It's interesting to think about how much an area can change in its appearance. During the summer months some of the paths behind UMF and prescott field start to grow over since there are not so many students trampling over them every day. This summer I was actually afraid of ticks because of how overgrown some of the "paths" had gotten from being left alone.
I think Thoreau might have thought the same way that Emerson had about this side of nature, that it has its own kind of beauty (as Emerson said a corpse does). The two men seem to appreciate Western thought and philosophy and the Hindu teachings say that there is at least a little bit of beauty in everything since everything is a part of the "whole."
I think that Thoreau would have done perfectly fine if an ice storm had hit Walden. I was pretty young when the ice storm hit Maine, but I still remember that we did not have power for four days and what we did to compensate. Luckily, we had an old cook wood stove and an ample supply of firewood, so we could heat the kitchen pretty well and cook all at the same time. We pretty much moved ourselves into the kitchen, and I remember layering blankets on the tiled floor right next to the stove, as a makeshift bed. It worked pretty well, we woke up when we got cold and stoked the fire, because we didn’t want our pipes to burst. I remember that some of them did, but we kept most of the main ones from freezing. It seems to me that the ice storm pushed us into a very Walden-like existence, and that Thoreau probably did much of the same things daily that we only had to do for a four-day period.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Thoreau as an observer, I agree that he would have had a field day if an ice storm had hit Walden. I think he would be out in the cold, trying to describe just how ice coated things, and how freezing rain encased the trees and measuring the diameter of these encasements in order to observe how thick an ice coat would have to be obtained in order for a branch to break. I’m not sure, however, if the ice storm would have hit him with as much force as it did our society. I think that Thoreau would have found it a curious natural phenomenon rather than finding it a threat to his health (as long as he didn’t go out too much in the freezing rain!).