NDER A TROPICAL SUN that burns necks and noses as quickly as it conjures clichés about lazy rivers, our kayaks swing quietly around a gentle turn in the Concord River. Before us, the river bulges like a snake swallowing a meadow vole, its banks retreating around the pond known as Fairhaven. Small birds chirp loudly, darting over the calm, brown water. Marsh grasses form a dense thicket around the pond’s perimeter, backed by a forest lush with summer green. We can hear the drone of traffic in the distance, and a couple of stately homes peek through the trees. Still, I wonder how different this scene looks today than it did to the eyes of a man whose travels along this same river a century and a half ago inspired him to alter the way we all see the natural world. Henry David Thoreau spent a lifetime exploring this waterway from his home here in Concord, Mass., and “the river was in many ways the central fact of Thoreau’s experiences,” the noted Thoreau scholar Thomas Blanding told our small group during a talk that preceded today’s guided trip down the Concord River. Four of us, along with guides Jay Monahan and Matt Leone from the Charlemont, Mass.-based outfitter Zoar Outdoor, are passing a few decidedly lazy hours on the Concord River in eastern Massachusetts. In touring kayaks, we will retrace the first several miles of the famous 1839 trip Thoreau made with his older brother John, from which came his book “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” On Aug. 31 of that year, the Thoreau brothers, on holiday from their teaching jobs, set out on a rainy morning in an unwieldy, 15-foot boat resembling a fishing dory that they’d spent a week building. They rowed down the Concord, then up the Merrimack River to the vicinity of Hookset, N.H., Blanding told us. There, they abandoned the boat and walked to the White Mountains. They climbed Mount Washington and returned to their boat, traveling part of the distance by stagecoach, within a week. The brothers then rowed back to Concord — spending, in all, seven days on the two rivers, a time Henry apparently considered more worthy of his thoughtful prose than their mountain sojourn. Someone points out a great blue heron standing ramrod-still at the riverbank, blending into the backdrop of reeds. Within 10 or 15 minutes, we spot three more herons. A fish tail dangles from the mouth of one as it gulps down the meal. A large heron lifts off and flaps its broad wings directly over us. “There’s something prehistoric about that,” Jay Monahan says after the heron passes by. The river leads us near Emerson Hospital, where a parking lot now covers the site of a place formerly known as Clamshell Bluff — a cliff “we see Thoreau going to again and again in his journals,” according to Blanding. At this inland shell midden — a place where many broken shells were unearthed, evidence of early human settlement — Thoreau wrote of seeing great flocks of birds, and finding fragments of Indian pottery and a stone tool. Thoreau’s brother John died of lockjaw after cutting himself on a rusty shaving razor, and Thoreau decided that his book about their trip would serve as a tribute to John. Perhaps the most famous period of Thoreau’s life — the two years, two months and two days, beginning in 1845, that he lived in a cabin in the woods beside Walden Pond — was in part a retreat for him to work on “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” While at Walden, Thoreau was arrested for refusing to pay his poll tax, an experience which inspired his famous essay, “Civil Disobedience.” He refused to support a government which sanctioned slavery. In fact, according to Blanding, Thoreau spent just a night in jail. The Concord tax collector, who knew Thoreau, offered to pay the few dollars he owed, but Thoreau would not have it. An aunt quietly paid the tax for him. Thoreau was furious — but freed. “‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers’ made an inconspicuous splash on the American literary scene,” Blanding deadpanned to us. Published at Thoreau’s own expense, 1,000 copies of “A Week...” were printed, and only about 200 sold. Thoreau ended up giving away many copies. “It has remained a neglected work of genius,” Blanding said. Thoreau himself would not earn the full appreciation now accorded his views until after his death in 1862, Blanding pointed out. Robert Frost called “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” America’s finest work of literature. Ghandi credited Thoreau’s concepts with greatly influencing his movement in India. None other than John Muir described Thoreau as “a pure soul” and a personal inspiration. The poet Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Thoreau was a man who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end.” We paddle slowly past Egg Rock, toward our takeout point, still miles upstream of where the Concord mixes with the waters of the Merrimack. According to Blanding, the Thoreau brothers concluded their own journey by rowing their lethargic boat 50 miles on their final day, entering Concord by the light of the stars. We have not worked so hard. But we can nonetheless appreciate a line from the writings of this founder of modern ecology, whose life’s work gathered inspiration from this very waterway: “Who hears the rippling of rivers will ultimately never despair of anything.”
Michael Lanza writes a syndicated weekly outdoor column about New
England, and he is author of “New England Hiking,” a guidebook from Foghorn Press (800-FOGHORN). His column appears in: The Springfield (Mass.) Union-News, The Quincy (Mass.) Patriot-Ledger, The Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune, The Sunday Morning Sentinel/Kennebec Journal (Augusta/Waterville, Maine), The New Haven (Conn.) Register, The Manchester (Conn.) Journal-Inquirer, The Meriden (Conn.) Record-Journal, The Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American, The Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph, The Concord (N.H.) Monitor, The Keene (N.H.) Sentinel and The Valley News (Lebanon, N.H./White River Junction, Vt.). E-mail can be sent to michael.a.lanza@valley.net.
