The Guide To Walden Pond: An Exploration of the History, Nature, Landscape, and Literature of One of America's Most Iconic Places

By Robert M. Thorson

An exploration of the history, nature, landscape, and literature of one of America’s most iconic places

This is the first guidebook to Henry David Thoreau’s most defining place, visited by half a million people each year and widely known as the fountainhead of America's environmental consciousness.
   Using this guide, both armchair readers and trail-walkers alike can amble around the pond’s shoreline, pausing at fifteen special places to learn about people, historic events, and the natural world. Thoreau will be a constant companion via quotes from Walden. Stop by stop, the place of his book will merge with the book of his place.
   Abundantly illustrated with photographs, drawings, and maps, this guide is a must-have for a meaningful, engaging tour of Walden Pond as well as a souvenir of a visit.

Special Thanks
 
Concord Free Public Library
Concord Museum
Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation
Thoreau Farm Trust
Thoreau Society
Walden Woods Project

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781328969842

Robert M. Thorson

ROBERT M. THORSON is a professor at the University of Connecticut. An award-winning author, scientist, and journalist, he's an expert tour guide for Thoreau's Concord and a frequent speaker and consultant. From his home in Storrs, Connecticut, he walks to work on a trail through the woods.

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title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Maps

Copyright

Dedication

Timelines

Preface

Preparation

The Tour

Northeast: Our World

1: Simple House

2: Terrace Edge

3: Eastern Shore

4: Boulder Wall

Northwest: Thoreau’s World

5: Bare Peak

6: Thoreau’s Cove

7: Wyman Meadow

8: House Site

9: Bean Field

10: Waterfront

Southwest: Walden’s Star

11: Ice Fort Cove

12: Sandbank Cove

13: Deep Cove

14: Observatory

Southeast: Re-entry

15: Panorama

Looking Back

Acknowledgments

Notes

Organizations

Further Readings

Index

A Message From the Walden Woods Project

Maps

About the Author

Map of Walden Pond showing the path of our counterclockwise tour. Beginning at the Visitor Center (right), we will travel through four different sectors, each with its own theme. The edges and deep portions of the lake’s four kettle basins are shown schematically, along with several other features. North is up.

Map of Walden Pond showing the number, name, and location of each of our fifteen stops. The stops are color-coded by sector and theme. To locate stops on the park’s official Trail Map or on the modern topography, consult the two maps on the back endpapers of this guide. North is up.

Copyright © 2018 by Robert M. Thorson

Except where otherwise indicated, all photos are © Robert M. Thorson

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thorson, Robert M., 1951- author.

Title: The guide to Walden Pond : an exploration of the history, nature, landscape, and literature of one of America’s most iconic places / Robert M. Thorson.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017054034 (print) | LCCN 2017052209 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328969842 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328969217 (paperback) | ISBN 9781328489173 (paper over board)

Subjects: LCSH: Walden Pond (Middlesex County, Mass.)—History—Guidebooks. | Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Homes and haunts—Massachusetts—Walden Woods—Guidebooks. | Authors, American—Homes and haunts—Massachusetts—Middlesex County—Guidebooks. | BISAC: NATURE / Ecosystems & Habitats / Lakes, Ponds & Swamps. | HISTORY / United States / State & Local / New England (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT). | SPORTS & RECREATION / Hiking.

Classification: LCC F72.M7 (print) | LCC F72.M7 T54 2018 (ebook) | DDC 974.4/4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054034

Cover design by Christopher Moisan

Cover photograph © Scot Miller

Author photograph © Peter Morenus

Ebook design by Melissa deJesus

v1.0218

To enthusiasts of Walden and Walden

Timelines

Walden, the Author

A native son of Concord, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) spends most of his life living with his family on an American Main Street. Though writing is his chosen vocation, he supports himself as a day laborer, pencil manufacturer, teacher, and land surveyor.

Walden, the Book

Thoreau’s masterpiece about living deliberately at Walden Pond is published in Boston on August 9, 1854, by Ticknor and Fields. The final bursts of writing over a period of nine years.

Walden, the Place

Thoreau’s world-famous residency at the pond (1845–1847) is only one of many historical events responsible for creating the place we know today. Nearly as important were the arrival of the railroad (1844) and automobiles (1902) and donation of land for the park (1922).

Walden, the Landform

Walden Pond is created when groundwater fills a slowly deepening void being made by the underground melting of buried glacial ice. The ice has been trapped in a bedrock valley and is later filled with sand and gravel during retreat of the last ice sheet. Dates are approximate.

Preface

My first trip around Walden Pond was on a hot summer day in 1985. For me it was a personal pilgrimage to Henry David Thoreau’s original House Site, where I dropped a smooth granite pebble from Alaska. For my wife and toddlers, it was a happy family adventure. I recall a crowded sandy beach, a trout fisherman in a kayak, a young woman reading in woodsy shade, and the astonishing clarity of Walden’s turquoise water.

Since that first trip, I’ve been guiding all sorts of groups around Walden Pond: students, friends, relatives, church groups, park naturalists, and participants in national conferences and workshops. My take-home message has been the same for everyone. This 62-acre lake wasn’t the backdrop for Thoreau’s famous experiment in deliberate living. It was the centerpiece of his experience, a body of water that defined and shaped Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden. In short, the place of his book gave rise to the book of his place, which spawned America’s environmental consciousness.

As the 2017 bicentennial celebration of Thoreau’s birthday approached, I began a conversation with the staff of the Walden Woods Project (WWP) about developing a guide based on the tours I’ve been leading. The WWP is a nonprofit organization devoted to the land, literature, and legacy of Henry David Thoreau to foster an ethic of environmental stewardship and social responsibility. This book is the result of that conversation, conceived as a copiously illustrated guide to the outdoor experience at Walden Pond to complement the indoor experience of the park’s Visitor Center. By park, I mean Walden Pond State Reservation, a 335-acre parcel managed within the state park system by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR). By Visitor Center I mean the beautiful 2016 wooden building, now with introductory exhibits, video theater, bookshop, and other facilities.

This oblique aerial view of Walden Pond looks north into Thoreau’s Cove. Our tour will be counterclockwise around the pond from the Visitor Center at far right.

(© Scot Miller)  

The Guide to Walden Pond is a hybrid mix of four well-known genres: travel guide, nature guide, trail guide, and travel literature. This book is part travel guide, having maps and essential information. It’s part nature guide because Thoreau’s favorite animals and plants are systematically described and placed in their natural habitats. It’s part trail guide because trail directions and landscape descriptions are provided. It’s part travel literature because the text is anecdotal and the content changes with each place. As a hybrid, this guide allows readers to pursue their own mix of interests.

I invite you to join me in exploring one of America’s most iconic places. Together, we will emulate Thoreau’s walking style, which he called sauntering—connoting pilgrimage—and sojourning—connoting a temporary remove from normal life. With great expectations, he stepped out into nature until something caught his attention. He paused to explore that something, reflected on its meaning, and then moved on to the next something. For the New England transcendentalists, this sort of slow journey was called an amble. Their predecessors, the romantic poets of the English Lake District, called it walking in the peripatetic style. The term originates with Aristotle, who created a school of philosophy based on this method of walking, pausing, learning, and enjoying.

Our counterclockwise tour around Walden Pond can be taken from anywhere in the world. All we need is a comfortable place to read and a willingness to let our imaginations guide us along. Our narrated journey will carry us around a body of water Thoreau called earth’s eye. Each of our fifteen stops has its own illustrated text. Four colored maps help guide us from one place to another, keep track of park trails, and show high-resolution topography. Four timelines provide quick historical reference. Seventy-five sidebars, fifteen At a Glance summaries, and a helpful list of resources will enrich our immersion into history, nature, landscape, and literature.

The wide, shallow beach at Walden Pond was created during the twentieth century to accommodate heavy use by swimmers.

Alternatively, some of us will travel in person to Walden Pond to this street address: 915 Walden Street, Concord, Massachusetts. With boots on the ground and this guide in hand, we’ll explore what Thoreau called a gem of the woods. We’ll be staying near the Pond Path, the official, alliterative name for Walden’s perimeter trail. It’s an easy walk that curves gently left and right, and rises and falls without being steep. I offer step-by-step directions based on local landmarks and give the exact GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates for each stop.

The ubiquity of handheld digital technology offers a third possibility. Using a favorite mobile device, we can explore what Thoreau called God’s Drop in virtual, rather than physical space. Using free software applications, such as the geobrowser Google Earth, we can access satellite imagery to fly around the pond and hover over each stop as if in a helicopter or aerial drone.

Finally, there’s a fourth option for taking the tour: using your memories to guide you along. Walden Pond has been a wildly popular tourist destination for more than a century. During recent decades, official visitation has been more than half a million people per year. People come for a variety of reasons: a summer swim, a literary pilgrimage, a walk in the woods, a school field trip, a bird-watching outing, or a bus tour. If you have memories of a previous trip to Walden Pond, this guide can help leverage them into an enhanced sense of place.

I wrote this guide to be user-friendly, keeping all four of these groups in mind: armchair readers, trail walkers, virtual tourists, and previous visitors. This allows each reader to individualize his or her own Walden experience.

Shall we begin?

Our tour begins and ends on the wooden ramp of the Visitor Center.

Preparation

Walking through the tall glass doors of the Visitor Center, we move out onto the large wooden deck and into the fresh air. Keeping to the left, we descend the long, gentle ramp until our shoes crunch the stone dust on the ground-level path. The first of our fifteen stops lies directly ahead.

Where are we going? What will we see? Who will we meet? Why does it matter?

This introduction answers those questions. Reading it will be like the preparation you might make for any trip.

The first part of our preparation, Fame explains why this beautiful, but ordinary, body of water is world famous. Preview takes us on a whirlwind, round-trip journey through the pond’s four geographic sectors, each with its own theme. People introduces readers to the cast of characters who played a role in the drama of Walden Pond before, during, and after Thoreau’s two-year stay. Questions are those that rise to the top of the