Category Archives: Science-Nature

Walking With Henry David Thoreau

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As part of this year’s Walktober festivities, the Jacob Edwards Library in Southbridge scheduled a talk by Dr Mark Wagner for tonight, starting at 6:30.  About a dozen of us gathered in the library’s reading room and were treated to a fascinating discussion of Henry David Thoreau’s reflections on walking, as well as to some facts related to his travels in Worcester County.

Dr Wagner explained that he taught English at Nichols College for ten years — and when teaching American literature, he used to take students on field trips to Concord to visit Thoreau’s haunts.  Now a professor at Worcester State, he has led the John Binienda Center for Civic Engagement for the past seven years; the Center is involved in Jumpstart, a preschool literacy program, as well as in alternative spring break trips and other reciprocal partnerships with community organizations.

Thoreau’s dates are 1817-1862 (this year marks the 200th anniversary of his birth).  Thoreau was a well-educated and accomplished person; he studied at Harvard and wrote and published throughout his lifetime.  Like so many in the nineteenth century, he died of tuberculosis.  His brother John died young from tetanus.  He and John had been close and ran the Concord Academy together, from 1838-1842.  When John died, Henry David worked only sporadically for the rest of his life: as a handyman for Ralph Waldo Emerson, as a land surveyor, and for his family’s pencil manufacturing business.

Thoreau’s connection to Central Mass was not peripheral.  For example, he was a friend of Worcester resident Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a man probably best known for his correspondence with Emily Dickinson, the belle of Amherst and a unique voice in American letters.  Higginson was a colonel in the Civil War and like Thoreau, a staunch abolitionist.  Though his anti-social tendencies might seem to contradict this aspect of his personality, Thoreau was a passionate abolitionist and a supporter of John Brown, whom he met in 1857 and whose violent tactics employed at Harper’s Ferry turned many against the movement.  Higginson provided arms and supplies to Brown; Thoreau advocated the overthrow of the Federal government because of its lukewarm opposition to slavery.

In addition to his friendships with Worcester notables such as Higginson, Thoreau hiked up Mount Wachusett a number of times; he also lectured in Worcester more often than anywhere else.  The most famous Wachusett walk began on 19 July 1842; with his companion Robert Fuller, Thoreau traveled through Concord, Acton, Stow, Bolton, Lancaster, Sterling, and Princeton.  The men took two days to travel 62 miles — quite a rapid pace.  Soon after this hike, Thoreau began writing about walking; he kept revising this essay for years and continued lecturing on the subject.  For example, on 3 February 1857, he gave a talk in Fitchburg on walking.  In 1862, about a month after his death, the essay Walking was published in the Atlantic Monthly, which indicates he worked on it for 17 years!  By his own admission, of all his writing, he was most proud of this particular essay.

Thoreau claimed that walking is central, but why does one walk?  For Thoreau it was a philosophical exercise.  Walking was a way to merge with nature, it was purification of the self.  For Thoreau, it is society that leads humans astray.  In contrast, “true freedom is found in nature.”  In his Walking essay, “All good things are wild and free” is the theme.  It was a radical idea then, and even today, we’re only beginning to unpack what this could mean, especially in terms of human health and well-being.  As a philosopher, Thoreau explored the concept of human freedom from social conditioning and constraints; as a naturalist and scientist, he was interested in animals and plants and very aware of his surroundings.  Today, his journals chronicling his observations of Concord’s natural phenomena have been rediscovered by ecologists and naturalists.

At its most fundamental level, Walking presents us with a philosophical argument.  Thoreau believed that walking helped cultivate one’s receptivity to the beauty of the universe, and “the perception of beauty is a moral test.”  Whereas Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that natural objects are symbols of spiritual facts, Thoreau rejected that, because for him, nature is not emblematic of higher truth; instead, nature is the source of goodness.  In the late nineteenth century, a stance equating wildness to goodness and truth was original and no doubt somewhat controversial.  Although Thoreau was definitely anti-clerical, we should probably not label him as either an atheist or pantheist.  Instead, his religious beliefs were meditations on divinity as he encountered the divine in wild nature.  The emphasis on preservation follows logically.  In fact, the essay Walking contains one of Thoreau’s most well-known aphorisms:

“and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

Wilderness preserves the world; hence, our ethical duty is to preserve the wilderness.

Hiking the Bob Marshall Trail in Petersham

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At 9 this morning I joined a group of East Quabbin Land Trust friends and supporters in the parking lot of the Harvard Forest’s Fisher Museum.  We planned to hike!  And so we did.  We started out as a group of 17, plus a dog, and enjoyed a warm sunny late summer day outdoors in the semi-wilderness.  EQLT Executive Director Cynthia Henshaw welcomed the group and introduced Bob Clark, who was to be our leader on the hike.  Mr Clark, a member of the Petersham Conservation Commission for decades, told us a bit about Marshall.

Bob Marshall, as many people might know, was one of the founders of the Wilderness Society, an organization which has championed preserving wild places since 1935.  Marshall, a forester, writer, and activist, earned a master’s degree in forestry from Harvard in 1925; he did his fieldwork in the Harvard Forest, near the area we visited today.  Following these studies and then a three-year stint in the Forest Service, Marshall began a doctoral program in plant physiology at the Johns Hopkins University, where he earned his doctorate in 1930.

The land where we hiked was not always preserved.  Conservation of the 80-acre Gould Woodlot was facilitated by EQLT, who first purchased the land, then sold the Conservation Restriction to the Town of Petersham and the fee interest to the Harvard Forest.  The Saint Mary Monastery and Saint Scholastica Priory communities worked with EQLT and the Town of Petersham to permanently protect 155 acres; the agreement was completed in 2010.

Like our hike leader, Ernie Gould served on the Petersham Conservation Commission (and also chaired the group); as an Assistant Director of Harvard Forest, he created a model forest on the land he and his wife owned.  That didn’t last: when the land was sold to Jack Edwards, the new owner harvested the trees with the intention of creating a subdivision.  Fortunately, these plans didn’t go through; with “Self-Help” funds (MGL Chap 132A, Sect 11) from the Commonwealth, the Gould Woodlot was conserved and added as contiguous acreage to the adjoining Harvard Forest.

Poor timber harvest practices resulted in an unhealthy forest with spindly trees crowded together.

We saw some interesting sights along the trail.

I think these are older trees.

After the Hurricane of 1938, a tree branch became the tree’s main trunk.

The beechdrop (Epifagus virginiana) is a saprophyte, a parasitic plant which grows on the roots of American beech.

We know that Native Americans were stewards of this land prior to the colonial presence.  For example, there is a deed from the Nipmucs dated 1735, selling land to colonists.  We don’t know exactly what parcel of land the deed refers to; from the description we surmise that it was land between the current Quabbin Reservoir and Athol.  While colonial stone walls are recognized as such, Native American stone structures are not as well documented.  This stone structure suggests a Native American presence in this spot.

These stones appear to have been deliberately placed here, possibly by Native Americans.

Colonists were particularly interested in what we now call “wet meadows” — mainly because they could grow hay in these areas.  Without being able to feed their animals, particularly oxen, the colonists would not have been able to create homesteads in the wilderness.

From the beginning, the colonists were focused on what the New World could produce.  Even the English colonists who settled Plymouth could not have made the voyage without the support of commercial interests.  The Plymouth colony was granted a charter in return for exports to England.  Unfortunately, even as early as 1620, there weren’t enough beavers left for them to trap for their pelts (which were made into hats); it took the Plymouth colonists years to pay off their debt.

I myself have never seen one, but moose are fairly frequently sighted in this area.  On our hike this morning, we definitely saw moose scat.  And we saw this!

We believe this is a moose skull; other parts of the skeleton were scattered nearby.

Trail-making here has been an arduous task; for example, the bridge over Nelson Brook was brought in via the “stump dump” (a cleared area for dumping waste from forestry operations).  The Bob Marshall Trail is still a work in progress.

For long stretches, we followed these tags tied to the trees.

Our destination was the Tom Swamp, a northern bog natural community, with its scattered larch and spruces.

North of the red pine grove in the distance is what seems to be a trail, but it’s the path of a buried utility line.

In 1996, biologists first documented the presence in the Swamp of the threatened species Bog Elfin (Callophrys lanoraieensis).  The Marsh Hawk (Circus hudsonius) possibly nested here in the 40s, but this species no longer breeds in Massachusetts.

What a special place this is!  Thanks to EQLT and the many communities who worked to preserve its wilderness qualities.