Henry David Thoreau may have died because he needed $30. In his day, Thoreau didn't retreat to Walden just to prove a point; he had little choice. As a marginally employed pencil maker and surveyor—considered "lazy" by the upright citizens of Concord—he took work where he could find it, and his biggest paydays were on the lyceum circuit.
Thoreau's last paid gig was in Waterbury, Connecticut exactly 148 years ago last Thursday, where he gave a talk called "Autumnal Tints" to the city's Young Men's Institute (a precursor to the YMCA), for which he was paid $30. His doctor told him not to travel, but Thoreau needed the money; he also felt honor bound to speak. The trip exhausted him, shattering his already delicate health, and he never recovered. More than a year later, he died from lung complications at age 44. Adding insult to injury, the local paper had called his talk "dull, commonplace and unsatisfactory."
Last week, Thoreau impersonator Richard Smith delivered Thoreau's "last lecture" again, this time at Waterbury's Mattatuck Museum.
Two questions hung in the air, at least for me: What great things would Thoreau have accomplished had he not prematurely died? And if necessity demanded, could we do what the "lazy" Thoreau had done—build a house, clear land, plant beans, potatoes and corn, keep a voluminous journal, write two books and several lectures, all while living virtually outdoors?
The latter question is not just hypothetical. Indeed, as the financial troubles of the nation worsen, the road ahead is as bleak as any since the Great Depression. "Lifestyle as usual" is out the window. If there is a silver lining to the current situation, it is that we may all have to become our own Thoreaus—modified, of course, by contemporary realities. This could mean working in community gardens or farms, buying produce locally and seasonally, learning to do more with less, recycling intensely, composting, sharing, bartering. In short, can we collectively do what Thoreau did individually?
In October, I paid a visit to Walden Pond. The perfect stillness there is a solace to my soul. However, on this past visit my reveries were interrupted by angry voices. "Hey, lady!" a fisherman shouted at a wetsuit-clad form 25 feet from shore slogging slowly across the pond. "Don't you know we've got some lines in the water?"
The oblivious swimmer—in October?!—having found one of the aforementioned fishing lines wrapped around her forearm, came to a halt. Huffing like a harpooned whale, she pulled her goggles over her bathing cap. "I have as much right to swim here as you have to fish here!" she announced in a matronly Yankee voice that suggested a lifetime of brooking no compromise. Mustering as much dignity as possible under the circumstances, she uncoiled her arm from the fishing line, readjusted her goggles and flopped away, a wee bit further from shore.
It seemed somehow fitting and proper that this confrontation took place within a stone's throw of the site where Thoreau, the ultimate cranky Yankee, built his famous cabin. It was here, just above a secluded cove, that Thoreau retreated for "two years and two months" in 1845-47, to earn "my living by the labor of my hands only."
"Stone's throw" is no idle expression. Here, beside the original site of his cabin, sits a mound of stones, placed here by visitors who've made pilgrimages from all over the globe. Each stone has a name (or initials) and the date of the visit. Beside the pile is a sign with a quote from Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
