Tree Rings and Things

You all will have to excuse me, I feel like this post might be a bit sentimental. This week when going on my walk I meandered through town a bit. The leaves all red, orange, and gold gave the town a charm it might not always have, setting up my nostalgia. There are moments here in Farmington that we appreciate more than others, when the leaves change, the first snowfall, and the first warm day of spring. Walking through town made me remember of all the times I had experienced these days over the years. In reading Aldo Leopold I was in someway forced to think about the past.

The reason for this is because of the scene with the tree. When he writes about cutting down the tree readers are able to see the sensitivity that he has. “Fragrant little chips of history spewed from the cut, and accumulated on the snow before the kneeling saywer”(9). I really loved this section as he seemed to recognize the necessity in cutting up the tree, yet, he appreciated what the tree had gone through to grow to be eighty years old.

As a senior I will leave Farmington in may, I have spent four years here. If someone cut me open when I turn eighty(creepy, flashback to last times serial killer) they would have to note my four years here. While walking through town I remembered some weird things from my time here. I remembered not the first time I went to Soup for You, but the time I stormed out of it because I was having a fight. The time I had to leave Narrow Gauge Cinema midway through a movie because my roommate thought she had appendicitis (she didn’t but it was an interesting experience). Anyway I began to appreciated Farmington the way Leopold appreciated the Oak tree.

I thought that Leopold did an excellent job of allowing nature to take part in his writing. He was different than Thoreau, in that he seemed to have more emotion toward nature. Leopold did not preach about nature in the way that Thoreau did. I was able to identify with it more, and think about it more.

In today’s world I think that we are very wrapped up in the taking and consuming of things. We as a culture do not appreciate what goes in to the taking and consuming. Reading this section made me wonder if we stopped to appreciate what was around us, would we be able to consume so much? It seems that we wouldn’t, because if we like Leopold stopped and thought about how many years a tree had lived though every time we wrote on a piece of paper we would not have enough time to consume so much. We would lead cleaner lives and be more in-tune with the past so we could learn from it more.

As winter approaches...

Upon my walk this week, it became increasingly clear to me that I can no longer deny the approach of the fall season. As much as I try I can no longer ignore the leaves cascading from the trees or the breeze as it blows in a new type of atmosphere. This was the best summer we have had in so long and I am not ready to let it go just yet. The encroaching cold instills some sort of primal urge that makes me want to get ready to huddle in my home for the next few months, all the while waiting for the first rays of the spring sunshine to peek out from the grayness that lingers through the New England winters. I have never lived anywhere else, so it’s not that I am unaccustomed to the particular weather, I just feel like the season is so melancholy. The leaves fall from the trees, the rivers stop flowing (visibly that is), the animals go into hiding from the world, and people seem to hide themselves away as well. Winter is just a different feel, and fall tends to put it into my head that it is finally on its way.
I suppose this is why I was drawn to a quote on page 5 of the Sand County Almanac. Aldo Leopold describes following animal tracks through the snow and coming upon the scene where a rabbit has recently been devoured by an owl. Leopold states, “To this rabbit the thaw brought freedom from want, but also a reckless abandonment of fear. The owl has reminded him that thoughts of spring are no substitute for caution”. In the rabbit’s experience, he was too excited that there was one day of warmth that he forgot about all of the dangers that live beyond his tiny winter world. I feel that we often do this as well. Whether after a long rainy spell or during a cold snap during the winter, we see the sun shining one day and we have the urge to run out into the world with our short sleeve shirts and sandals. When the air finally gets a chance to hit us it shocks us with an unexpected blast of chilliness. Just like the rabbit, we are devoured by the air and are victims to our illusion of safety… in weather that is. We assume that sunshine means warm weather and we remove our layers of armor. Leopold, here, seems to caution us all to be aware of our surroundings and the true nature of Nature and realize that it is more predictable than we want to believe.  No matter how much we want to ignore it, New England winters are full of cold. Even though we have a few days of 50 degree weather, it will return to the full-on below zero temperature. If we rely on common sense, we can protect ourselves from the violent climate, or in the case of the rabbit, owls.

Emerson's House

The NYT article I mentioned in class:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/garden/16emerson.html

Sublimity

Today will have to suffice with not so much a nature walk, as a nature drive-home. I must attribute this to the steady downpour along with my inability to lay claim upon anything resembling a decent coat.

As I was driving home from my expensive educational institution, going seventy miles an hour in my Jeep, eating a sandwich that someone else made for me because I have very little idea how to grow my own sandwiches, paid for with money that someone gave me for making food for those who also are far too lazy to create their own, I realized that nature really does offer a man, at his fingertips, everything he might need.

I very much enjoy berries—berries of all colors and persuasions: Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries and cranberries. It was the last that I was able to savor this afternoon. Falling out of my sandwich. All over me. If ever there existed a situation one might call ‘sticky,’ this was it. Napkin after pure, white napkin failed me as I hurtled through the storm, until I was struck by inspiration. I reached my hand out the window, stretching my fingers toward the heavens. The rain drops bit into my skin, but with every sensation I could feel myself cleansed, thanking nature for her bounty.

Such a pleasant experience with berries confirmed my desire to write about what might be my favorite passage in Walden:

“Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flints’ Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usual lichen hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dog-wood grow, the red alder-berry glows like the eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild-holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste.” (189)

These opening lines to Baker Farm move me; ordinary, beautiful descriptions are transformed into an overwhelming, multi-spiritual experience. My imagination and my appetite are as tempted as Thoreau’s.

At many points in my studies, as happens with Transcendentalists or Romantics, I have run headlong into the concept of the sublime. We bandy the term about, and certainly it was always expected that I could spit out some definition of the word—and I could. I could point to a painting, or a passage and scholarly air that “oh yes! That, Sir, is quite sublime.” Content, perhaps, with a pat on the shoulder, or concerned with greater pursuits, it was not until this moment in Walden that I realized what a gulf existed between definition and meaning.

It is with little pride that I claim this revelation. Thoreau certainly presents few—if any—obstacles to it. Here is a place where the natural borders upon the super natural—a place worthy of Celtic worship—worthy of comparison to the mighty Norsemen—a place evoking a modern, Miltonian, Christian view of temptation—where imps abound, and roundtables evoke the English mythology of old. No, Mr. Thoreau pulls no blow when confronting the reader with the ordinary turned extraordinary.

I hope it says less about any density on my part than it does my imagination, the degree to which this passage strikes me, but I am struck. So, I will bid farewell, for now, to this guide of our imaginations and of our souls.

Optimism

I think that, personally, the most important thing about my weekly nature walk is that it gives me a chance to lessen my exposure to the loud bustle and hurried energy of this town (however sleepy it might be compared to other towns.) I live in an apartment that faces Main Street, and it is only recently that I noticed how much noise pollution I hear on a daily basis. Whether I am hanging out at home or just sleeping, there is the constant drone and clatter of cars, motorcycles, skateboards, and those terrible logging trucks (the last being something I have come to equate with Thoreau's train.) On my last walk, I headed back down to the same valley and field where I was last time, and rather than close my eyes and try and zone out for a while, I kept my eyes and ears open. I determined to try experience what remained of the day's waking moments amidst the calm quiet with full concentration. I still had to tune out that always-present drone of traffic, but you'd be surprised at how focused you can get once all you can hear is the wind in the grass. I prefer to go walking near sunset, when I can almost feel the heat being sucked from the ground and the air as the light dies behind the low hills of the valley. I found myself staring at the clouds for a long time, watching them get steadily darker and drift so slowly that it felt as if I were tracing the movement of the hour hand on a clock tower. I thought a lot about the myth of permanence, and of the nature of all human effort, and mostly the things that I had read in Thoreau's Conclusion.

This final chapter seemed to me the culmination of everything Thoreau wanted his audience to hear, almost as if he acknowledges that they might have lost their way, somewhere around his dramatic chronicling of the status of the ice on Walden Pond over the course of an entire New England winter. I like to think that he is rewarding diligent readers with his most condensed, purpose-driven musings. Among these I remembered clearly one of his more proverbial quotes, “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly from the rich man's abode...I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace” (307). Indeed, this seems like the kind of wisdom that you might get out of any religious text—it's a reminder of the merits of practicality and an encouraging take on how you can best view your own life. Many of these kinds of passages in Conclusion are partly expressions of one of the many major underlying themes in Walden, which is preoccupied with putting a mirror up to the face of his audience's worldview. Once you hear the piercing truths in Thoreau's simple observations, you know instantly that what you've just read is something you should have realized all along, and it is all the more sweet if you are able to retain a fraction of that sensation after having set the book down.

To me, and I think to many other people in generations after Thoreau, what makes these otherwise common proverbs resonate so clearly is that they were written by a man who lived in a time so relatively close to ours, who lived so near us geographically, and who appears to be fighting against the same problem-ridden society that we find ourselves slaves to. Along with his humble admissions of self-contradiction and fallibility, what makes me so willing to take Thoreau's ideas to heart is an underlying tone of earnestness and a concern for the well being of his fellow man. This book is thick with his own voice from beginning to end, and I suppose it would be best to leave you with my most recently-discovered favorite quote: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them” (303). This reassuring quote, I believe, is one of many final calls to Thoreau's neighbors, where his voice is heard with authority and experience. He is commanding his readers in the last sentence, telling them not to throw away the dreams of the life they might have wanted, but instead to forcefully take their lives and build them into the kind of foundation that can meet their dreams from the ground up. It's powerful stuff, and what amazes me is that it is but a small fraction of the optimism that Thoreau has for his world.

Remembering The Past

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.

Rainy Days

I found it hard the last few days to take my solitary walk because of the massive amounts of rain that we have had. Fortunately, last night was a goegous night out and I felt it the perfect time to take a walk. Even though the ground was still wet and a light sprinkle would come every so often, I found it to be one of the most relaxing, serene walks I've taken in a long time. The great thing about the night is that it's mysterious and dark and there are many things that you seem to miss that you wouldn't normally. I think that this also makes you notice things more because you're a little more alert than normal. I guess it really depends on the person that you are. For me, walking last night really made me pay attention to the things that I couldn't really see. I found that in walking by tree lines and dark streets, I was drawn to look down them and really try to figure out what was hiding in the darkness. What really came to my attention was the eeriness sourrounding the darkness and really got me thinking about the idea that there are so many things about our life in which we cannot answer, things that remain in the darkness and although we search and search, a lot of times, there is no answer to be found. Another thing that I really took notice to were all of the stars in the sky. I know, it sort of sounds cliche to think of the stars as guiding lights or things to look to, but to me, they seem to represent some sort of line between the mortal world and what we think or hope comes after. We always think of the sky as some sort of gateway to heaven or afterlife (whichever you prefer to believe), but in all it's vastness, we tend not to be able to comprehend something so great as an eternity or the absence of time. In a way, the stars become this reminder that there is something else out there and by being able to see them as humans, I feel that we find some sort of comfort and are able to ground ourselves and have faith in the unknown, even though we can't see it or feel it.

So I suppose you're wondering how I tied this all into Thoreau. I found the ending of Walden to be incrediably insightful, full of philisophy and metaphors. The parts that really stood out to me was when Thoreau chose to discuss the depth of Walden pond and how he, at one point, thought it to be bottomless. Out of curiosity (I'm guessing), Thoreau decides to measure the depth of the pond, and even after finding a depth, still feels that there is a degree of mysteriousness about what lies under the surface when he writes, "I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless" (pg. 269). If we think of Thoreau's curiosity as a means to find an answer, his search for the depth of the pond is like man searching for answers to "the infinitie" or what comes after this life. Because we usually can't see down to the bottom of bodies of water, it is easy to think how they could be considered bottomless, in the same way that because we can't see what comes after we die or what is beyond the sky, that our search for reasoning becomes merky and most times, unanswerable, in a way remaining "bottomless" like the pond. Thoreau asks, "What if all ponds were shallow?" (pg. 269). If this were the case, there would be no reason to go searching for the depth, same as if heaven or afterlife could been seen or understood now, there would be no reason to go looking for it or try to make sense of it. This passage becomes a sort of metaphor for the way in which we as humans search for answers and sometimes, there are things that remain in the darkness, things that are unanswerable. From here, Thoreau uses water again as a metaphor, claiming that, "the life in us is like the water in a river" (pg. 311). I find this even more interesting because it furthers the idea of water as a metaphor. We are constantly changing and having periods of good and bad and we move with time, the same way that a river is constantly moving and changing, sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad. I find it most interesting that Thoreau chose to use a river rather than a pond in this passage because a river is constantly moving, whereas a pond is moving, but the bulk of it is stationary to a specific area. The pond represents an unchanging place where time doesn't matter, whereas the river represents time and the movement that comes along with it. I don't find this passage as deep as the previous, however, I find it most intriguing that Thoreau uses these two bodies of water to try and explain two concepts that we have perhaps the hardest time grasping; the afterlife and fate of human existance and the passage of time.