Thoreau and the gunpowder mill

I generally defend Thoreau against accusations that he was peculiar or antisocial. He surely saw more of his neighbors in the course of a day than I do, and his Journal is full of the stories told to him by farmers and townspeople (many of them collected in the engaging book Men of Concord.) Sometimes, though, he does something that makes him appear rather coldblooded. In January 1853, a gunpowder mill in Concord blew up in a deafening and deadly explosion. When Thoreau arrived at the scene he described it with a rather cool tone, and ended on a jarringly practical note.

January 7, 1853 About ten minutes before 10 a.m., I heard a very loud sound, and felt a violent jar, which made the house rock and the loose articles on my table rattle, which I knew must be either a powder-mill blown up or an earthquake. Not knowing but another and more violent might take place, I immediately ran down-stairs, but I saw from the door a vast expanding column of whitish smoke rising in the west directly over the powder-mills four miles distant.... Arrived probably before half past ten. There were perhaps thirty or forty wagons there. The kernel-mill had blown up first, and killed three men who were in it, said to be turning a roller with a chisel.... Timber six inches square and eighteen feet long was thrown over a hill eighty feet high at least,— a dozen rods; thirty rods was about the limit of fragments. The drying-house, in which was a fire, was perhaps twenty-five rods distant and escaped. Every timber and piece of wood which was blown up was as black as if it had been dyed, except where it had broken on falling; other breakages were completely concealed by the color. I mistook what had been iron hoops in the woods for leather straps. Some of the clothes of the men were in the tops of the trees, where undoubtedly their bodies had been and left them. The bodies were naked and black, some limbs and bowels here and there, and a head at a distance from its trunk. The feet were bare; the hair singed to a crisp. I smelt the powder half a mile before I got there. Put the different buildings thirty rods apart, and then but one will blow up at a time.

But just when you think Thoreau has no feeling for his fellow man, you see him returning to the subject of mortality in the days that followed.

January 14, 1853 The bones of children soon turn to dust again. January 21, 1853 In the night I dreamed of delving amid the graves of the dead, and soiled my fingers with their rank mould. It was sanitarily, morally, and physically true.

Six years later, the accident is still on his mind:

July 21, 1859 The canal is still cluttered with the wreck of the mills that have been blown up in times past, — timber, boards, etc., etc., — and the steep hill is bestrewn with the fragments of the mills, which fell on it more than half a dozen years ago (many of them), visible half a mile off. As you draw near the powder-mills, you see the hill behind bestrewn with the fragments of mills which have been blown up in past years, — the fragments of the millers having been removed, — and the canal is cluttered with the larger ruins. The very river makes greater haste past the dry-house, as it were for fear of accidents.

A scandal in the life of Ellery Channing

Thoreau’s Journal contains a revelation regarding his frequent walking companion Ellery Channing (usually referred to as C.) that will shock cat lovers everywhere. As with his acid comments on Louis Agassiz, Thoreau feels that no commentary is required.

Jan. 22, 1854

When I was at C.’s the other evening, he punched his cat with the poker because she purred too loud for him.

Thoreau and hay fever

Every spring, around the time the forsythia is in bloom, Jenn has a terrible time with nasal allergies. The English scientist Charles Blackley discovered in 1869 that pollen caused hay fever, but Thoreau was among those who suspected earlier that it might be the culprit. On June 21, 1860, he wrote, “Who knows but the pollen of some plants may be unwholesome to inhale, and produce the diseases of the season?”

Bitten by a milk snake

While walking with my mother along a bike path near Burnt Hills, New York, I saw a small milk snake. I picked it up and let it run between my fingers until it became scared or impatient and bit me on the forearm. Its teeth were so small and sharp that it felt like getting a shot with a very fine needle. Impressed with its nerve, I put the snake back down in the grass. On my skin was a small V of tiny red dots. The milk snake is one of the prettiest snakes in the Northeast, and one that I’ve rarely seen. Thoreau wrote about it, as he did about nearly every creature to be found near Concord. He called it a “checkered adder” and noted the “forked light space” on the back of its head. His description of one (on May 28, 1854) was rather detailed and technical, suggesting that he killed it, but the act of doing so seems to have made him thoughtful. “The inhumanity of science concerns me,” he wrote, “as when I am tempted to kill a rare snake that I may ascertain its species. I feel that this is not the means of acquiring true knowledge.”

Thoreau imitates a Canada goose

March 20, 1855 Trying the other day to imitate the honking of geese, I found myself flapping my sides with my elbows, as with wings, and uttering something like the syllables mow-ack with a nasal twang and twist in my head; and I produced their note so perfectly in the opinion of the hearers that I thought I might possibly draw a flock down.

Agassiz and Thoreau

Thoreau had a prickly relationship with Harvard, his alma mater, and particularly with the celebrated Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born professor of geology and zoology at Harvard. I don’t know whether Thoreau was aware of Agassiz’s racial theories, which have been exposed and dissected by Stephen Jay Gould. They would surely have rankled Thoreau, who participated in the Underground Railroad and delivered fiery speeches on the subject of John Brown. At any rate, Thoreau never lost an opportunity to puncture some of Agassiz’s more dubious pronouncements on natural history. Whenever he does this in his Journal, it is in straight-faced New England style, utterly without comment.

May 18, 1856 R.W.E. says that Agassiz tells him he has had turtles six or seven years, which grew so little, compared with others of the same size killed at first, that he thinks they may live four or five hundred years. 

June 2, 1856 Agassiz tells his class that the intestinal worms in the mouse are not developed except in the stomach of the cat. 

July 26, 1856 Agassiz says he has discovered that the haddock, a deep-sea fish, is viviparous. 

March 20, 1857 Dine with Agassiz at R.W.E.’s. He thinks that the suckers die of asphyxia, having very large air-bladders and being in the habit of coming to the surface for air. But then, he is thinking of a different phenomenon from the one I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter.... When I began to tell him of my experiment on a frozen fish, he said that Pallas had shown that fishes were frozen and thawed again, but I affirmed the contrary, and then Agassiz agreed with me. 

May 14, 1858 Picked up, floating, an Emys picta [painted turtle], hatched last year. It is an inch and one twentieth long in the upper shell and agrees with Agassiz’s description at that age. Agassiz says he could never obtain a specimen of the insculpta [wood turtle] only one year old, it is so rarely met with, and young Emydidæ are so aquatic. I have seen them frequently.

Frozen creatures

One of Thoreau’s most endearing habits was his repeated attempt to revive frozen animals that he encountered on his rambles. I’ve found eleven examples in the Journal where he attempted to bring a creature back to life, and three other discussions of attempts by others. The creatures included a striped squirrel (chipmunk), a toad, a tortoise, caterpillars (including the woolly bear caterpillar), dor-bugs (scarab beetles), grasshoppers, pickerel, and snow-fleas. The other day, The Blog of Henry Thoreau featured Thoreau’s unsuccessful attempt to revive a toad that he found frozen on the sidewalk in Cambridge. Here are two more of my favorite examples.

March 15, 1853 There were fewer colder nights last winter than the last. The water in the flower-stand containing my pet tortoise froze solid, — completely enveloping him, though I had a fire in my chamber all the evening, — also that in my pail pretty thick. But the tortoise, having been thawed out on the stove, leaving the impression of his back shell in the ice, was even more lively than ever. His efforts at first had been to get under his chip, as if to go into the mud. Feb. 20, 1860 J. Farmer tells me that his grandfather once, when moving some rocks in the winter, found a striped squirrel frozen stiff. He put him in his pocket, and when he got home laid him on the hearth, and after a while he was surprised to see him running about the room as lively as ever he was.

Rails covered with lichens

During my latest journey through Thoreau's Journal, I was struck by this amazing sentence from January 27, 1852. It strikes an uncharacteristically melancholy note for Thoreau, it takes more notice of the inner life of Thoreau's neighbors than is usual for him, and at 436 words it must surely be the longest sentence in his collected works. (If any knows of a longer one, let me know!) I'm not aware of any critic who has taken notice of it.

As I stand under the hill beyond J. Hosmer’s and look over the plains westward toward Acton and see the farmhouses nearly half a mile apart, few and solitary, in these great fields between these stretching woods, out of the world, where the children have to go far to school; the still, stagnant, heart-eating, life-everlasting, and gone-to-seed country, so far from the post-office where the weekly paper comes, wherein the new-married wife cannot live for loneliness, and the young man has to depend upon his horse for society; see young J. Hosmer’s house, whither he returns with his wife in despair after living in the city, — I standing in Tarbell’s road, which he alone cannot break, — the world in winter for most walkers reduced to a sled track winding far through the drifts, all springs sealed up and no digressions; where the old man thinks he may possibly afford to rust it out, not having long to live, but the young man pines to get nearer the post-office and the Lyceum, is restless and resolves to go to California, because the depot is a mile off (he hears the rattle of the cars at a distance and thinks the world is going by and leaving him); where rabbits and partridges multiply, and muskrats are more numerous than ever, and none of the farmer’s sons are willing to be farmers, and the apple trees are decayed, and the cellar-holes are more numerous than the houses, and the rails are covered with lichens, and the old maids wish to sell out and move into the village, and have waited twenty years in vain for this purpose and never finished but one room in the house, never plastered nor painted, inside or out, lands which the Indian was long since dispossessed [of], and now the farms are run out, and what were forests are grain-fields, what were grain-fields, pastures; dwellings which only those Arnolds of the wilderness, those coureurs de bois, the baker and the butcher visit, to which at least the latter penetrates for the annual calf, — and as he returns the cow lows after, — whither the villager never penetrates, but in huckleberry time, perchance, and if he does not, who does? — where some men’s breaths smell of rum, having smuggled in a jugful to alleviate their misery and solitude; where the owls give a regular serenade; — I say, standing there and seeing these things, I cannot realize that this is that hopeful young America which is famous throughout the world for its activity and enterprise, and this is the most thickly settled and Yankee part of it.

A strong and beautiful bug

Years ago I learned to set type by hand and to print broadsides on the old Vandercook proof press at the Bow & Arrow Press in the basement of Harvard's Adams House. I printed several favorite quotations from Thoreau, including this one, from the end of Walden. My mother recently remembered it and asked me for the exact quotation. Though it refers to a "perfect summer life" it seems appropriate now, when we are seeing the first stirrings of spring.

Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts -- from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb -- heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board -- may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

Jeffrey S. Cramer, in his annotated edition of Walden, traces this story to John Warner Barber's book Historical Collections, but doesn't attempt to identify the bug. Perhaps it was the golden buprestid beetle, whose "metallic green and burnished copper" certainly make it sound beautiful. (Photo is by Scott Tunnock of the USDA Forest Service.)

Woodchucks

From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, October 10, 1858

"As I go along the Groton road, I see afar, in the middle of E. Wood’s field, what looks like a stone jug or post, but my glass reveals it is a woodchuck, a great, plump gray fellow, and when I am nearly half a mile off, I can still see him nibbling the grass there, and from time to time, when he hears perchance, a wagon on the road, sitting erect and looking warily around for approaching foes. I am glad to see the woodchuck so fat in the orchard. It proves that is the same nature that was of yore."

Woodchucks are an underappreciated creature, but my friend Lucy has a couple of pages (with quotations from Thoreau) dedicated to them, including a tribute to a gentle woodchuck who met his end too soon.

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau

Beginning in July 2004, around Thoreau's birthday on July 12, Greg Perry began posting excerpts from the 14 volumes of Thoreau's Journal as if they were the daily entries of a blogger -- as in a way they were. The Blog of Henry David Thoreau is handsomely designed and surprisingly effective. Thoreau's prose is so concentrated, often so poetic, that it may be best taken in small doses.

The Thoreau blog wasn't refreshed for a while -- though you could always look up the entry for today -- but lately it's been back on track again, and Perry has added titles to the newer entries. Here's one of my favorite recent entries:

Early Sap, 23-Feb-1857

I have seen the signs of spring. I have seen a frog swiftly sinking in a pool, or where he dimpled the surface as he leapt in. I have seen the brilliant spotted tortoises stirring at the bottom of the ditches. I have seen the clear sap trickling from the red maple.