Last winter I re-read some of Henry Thoreau’s writings, preparing for a seminar at the meetings of the Association for Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). I was impressed more than ever with how much that man accomplished in his short life. One of his great achievements is the journal, 47 volumes of handwritten pages covering the period 1837 - 1861. In all of his writing he kept a critical, and sometimes appreciative, eye on his society in those early turbulent nineteenth century years. He was no recluse, though he did appreciate being alone much of the time, to use his extraordinary "paying attention" mind in furthering his lifelong project, experiencing and trying to understand nature, And he had an activist yearning, publicly protested the American invasion of Mexico.

Damn! There I am again, remembering old wars, in the shadows of newer ones.

Frederick Douglas called the Mexican invasion a "disgraceful, cruel war."

Daniel Webster ranted against it.

U.S.Grant, future president, then an army lieutenant in the invasion force, participated in the capture of Mexico City, regretted that "I had not moral courage enough to resign." The 1848 treaty negotiator, Nicholas Trist, who presided over transfer of huge chunks of northern Mexico to the United States, wrote that he felt "shame as an American." The lie used by President James Polk to cross the border in full force was that a skirmish of U.S. and Mexican patrols had shed American blood on American soil. The truth was that the blood was shed 150 miles south of the Texas border. (Neuces River).

Congressman Abraham Lincoln asked for the precise location of shed blood, received no reply.

Congressman John Quincy Adams publicly urged military officers to resign and soldiers to desert. Thirteen percent of the regular army did desert, a rate twice that of the Vietnam war. Some Irish immigrant draftees not only went AWOL, they formed the Saint Patrick’s Battalion and fought on the Mexican side. They took heavy casualties; most of the survivors faced a firing squad at war’’s end.

In 1861 France, having taken Algeria and Vietnam, went into Mexico and shipped in an archduke from Austria to be emperor. And so on; there’s more, but that’s enough. I mention these events because I have to, and because I am a member of ASLE, an organization with global outreach that tries to cross academic boundaries. War should not be exempt from such crossings, especially when war has grown into a voracious environmental bulldozer run rampant.

As an indication of ASLE’s effort, the four topics of the seminar entitled "Henry David Thoreau, Part 1," were as follows: Thoreau, nature and poetic language; Thoreauvian activism, exemplified by Long Island Baymen’s defense of their livelihood; an analysis of Thoreau’s writing about Ktaadn, suggesting that he recognized certain areas of our planet not suited for human dwelling (Remember Ed Abbey having a similar thought?); and my piece on relevance of Thoreau’s north woods and Cape Cod essays to current literary/environmental work. It was a good meeting, lots to think about.

Edward Abbey Contemplating the Bust of Thoreau...

By the way, Thoreau’s north woods essays are being translated into Japanese.

Here’s my seminar contribution, an attempt to link Thoreau’’s amazingly modern attitudes, by referring to Ellen Meloy’s bold writing and to Val Plumbwood, an equally forthright writer from Australia who describes herself as "a crocodile survivor." (Yes, I too would like to know what that means).

In one of the famous passages in The Maine Woods where he confronts Nature in the raw, Thoreau writes:

"... It was Matter, vast, terrific -- not his Mother Earth ... not for him to tread on, or be buried in,--no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there--the home this of Necessity and Fate." (1)

But at Cape Cod, where he senses the Ocean is at least as wild as the wildest north woods, we find him standing at remnants of a drowned human:

"... as I stood there they [the bones with some adhering flesh] grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out..." (2)

Contrasts like this are a recognized Thoreauvian manner: every encounter creates its own flavor, its sensual and emotional individuality, its own cluster of thoughts. The particularity, the individuality of experience, this is the thread I’m following, a thread that is especially clear in the north woods writings. Here we have three journeys into a country where the living is not easy. Thoreau and his companions encounter blackflies, mosquitoes and no-see-ums; they scramble through swampy down-timbered portages, run rapids or pole a bateau upstream in rock-strewn currents; they look for camp sites on shorelines dominated by oppressive, closely ranked growth. Coming to a lake is to reach a most welcome clearing in the endless forest. From those arenas of struggle we receive, let us say, reports.

"... we heard come faintly echoing or creeping from far through the moss-clad aisles, a dull dry rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there no mortal had heard it. When we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, ‘‘Tree fall.’’

The report continues with a comment:

"There is something singularly grand and impressive in the sound of a tree falling in a perfectly calm night like this, as if the agencies which overthrow it did not need to be excited, but worked with a subtle, deliberate, and conscious force, like a boa constrictor, and more effectively than even in a windy day."

Then, as if to undercut the fanciful interpretation, a prosaic finale:

"If there is any such difference, perhaps it is because trees with the dews of the night on them are heavier than by day." (3)

In that passage, in muted form, are some of Thoreau’s writing habits: extravagantly precise description, the imaginative interpretation, the matter-of-fact statement. But his quiver holds more than that.

"This was what you might call a bran new country; the only roads were of Nature’s making, and the few houses were camps. Here, then, one could no longer accuse institutions and society, but must front the true source of evil." (4)

This bare-boned shocker is preceded, nine lines up the same page, by a sentence nearly pastoral:

"The evergreen woods had a decidedly sweet and bracing fragrance, the air was a sort of diet-drink ..."

Locked in north woods travel, Thoreau "fronted" change and contradiction and mystery. But he’s always doing that, whether in Concord’s pastoral scenes or in wilderness extremities. Nature and man, a shifty duality. He adheres stubbornly to nature and the self as inevitably bound together in a changeful continuity rather than as static storehouse of analogies and correspondences. That is one prime feature that makes his work relevant to us, today.

F.O. Matthiessen claimed that Thoreau’s "more characteristic mood is that of the Sunday worshiper of Pan." (5) That’s misleading. I like to think of Thoreau as an investigative reporter. When in that role, he plays no favorites. Further, if we take seriously his north woods writing, we have to note that worshiper is not a useful term for experiencing that text. We have to notice that his characterizing of nature often emerges, not from passive or rapt observation, but from human striving.

The War Between the States ushered in the Gilded Age, a relentless march into industrial conquest, Manifest Destiny and more war, bringing with them a strain of nature writing and promotion that valorized dwindling tracts of unbridled nature as refuges for troubled souls. The rift between nature and our burdensome lives, of which Thoreau continually complained, widened. Today, our great disappointment seems to be that there are so few places on earth untrammeled by our species. That was not Thoreau’s attitude. His disappointment was that the Indians were not wild enough to point the way toward a full engagement with nature, a human presence, a revolutionary move into the wild. He was a visitor to the north woods, but he tried to imagine a life there.

Wildness alone will not preserve the world. Ellen Meloy grasps this nettle firmly. In The Last Cheater’’s Waltz she explores a century where science ventured into the sub-atomic structure of the universe and waged war on an unimaginable scale. The consequences are now everywhere, embedded in us and in skies, oceans, snow, ice, tundra, farmlands, forests, the dust of cities, the very fabrics of mountain waters.

"Out here in the red-boned desert, I once thought, the human voice seemed less consequential than in other places, at best a remote echo of intellectual asceticism. Now it was the only voice I heard, the desert itself an accomplice to betrayal." (6) Meloy has seen huge tracts of land set aside for military experiments; she has travelled Nevada test sites upwind of Salt Lake City, White Sands, Alamagordo, Los Alamos (where tourists can buy little chocolates shaped like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). She returns to the eight acres of desert land "owned" by her and her husband, and there, with a hugely expanded sense of place, she takes her stand.

"... I try to live here as if there is no other place and it must last forever. It is the best we can do. Everyone’’s home is the heartland of consequence."

Val Plumbwood, makes a similar claim:

"... the conception of the self, and the conception of nature ... normally such essential relation would involve particularity, through connection to and friendship for particular places, forests, animals, to which one is particularly strongly related or attached and toward which one has specific and meaningful, not merely abstract, responsibilities of care."" Emphasis in original. (7)

And Thoreau, on the Allegash:

"I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,--not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house--and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them." (8)

Fellowship, Responsibility, Adherence to Consequence. These are born of our nature when, or if, we front the world. References (1) The Maine Woods, 70. Princeton University Press, 1972. Paperback Reprint. (2) Cape Cod. 126-27. Ticknor and Fields, 1864. (3) The Maine Woods, 103-04 (4) The Maine Woods,16. (5) Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance. Art and _Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford University Press, 1941. (6) Meloy, Ellen. The Last Cheater’’s Waltz. University of Arizona Press, 1999. (7) Plumwood, Val. Nature, Self and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism, in Environmental Philosophy. Michael Zimmerman et al. Prentice-Hall, 1998. (8) The Maine Woods, 181. THOREAU ONCE MORE

Can’’t seem to stay away from this man’s work. Maybe because so often it literally forces further thought.

"What a cold-blooded fellow! [a muskrat] Thoughts at a low temperature, sitting perfectly still so long on ice covered with water ... What safe, low, moderate thoughts it must have! It does not get on to stilts." Journal, Nov. 25, 1850.

I fasten on "safe" and "moderate," wondering if safe, middle of-the road thoughts are being honored here, and I recall Jim Hightower’s remark that the middle of the road has nothing but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

But two days earlier we have Thoreau in a more cut-and-slash mood: "I find it to be the height of wisdom not to endeavor to oversee myself and live a life of prudence and common sense, but to see over and above myself, entertain sublime conjectures, to make myself the thoroughfare of thrilling thoughts, live all that can be lived. The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he not do?" Journal, Nov. 23, 1850.

It’s like running rapids, you never know how rough or beautiful or dangerous or just plain tame the next run might be. That makes good reading!