Probably every American student has had to read something by Henry David Thoreau. His literary immortality is thus guaranteed forever. Pretty good for a man who never had a steady job. He published a few books, gave a few talks, and walked for (he says) four hours every day as he lived out his life in Concord, Massachusetts during the middle nineteenth century. He was one of many writers who walked a lot; Thoreau mentions William Wordsworth as a writer who walked. He was a friend of (and, I suspect, a dependent upon) Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thoreau is most famous for living out in the woods (on Emerson’s land) in a little hut that he built himself, at very little expense near the shore of Walden Pond. In case you think he lived in the hut all of his life, this is not true: he only lived there a couple of years. He just wanted to prove that it could be done.
I thought I would find a well-thought-out explanation of how and why he walked in his essay Walking. Given the essay title, it was not an unreasonable thing to expect. But in this essay, Thoreau actually had very little to say about walking other than that he would start off with no clear destination in mind and usually find himself heading southwest “toward Oregon” (which is not southwest of Concord).
But maybe this is the point. He would start walking with no particular topic to think about or problem on his mind. He would wait until he saw something that made him think, and then he would write about it later. That’s what I do, only I do not have a very good memory, so I make notes on my cell phone to remind me what I was supposed to write about. Thoreau was very observant, although (or because) he did not know what to observe.
He noticed patterns that others overlooked, especially Emerson. Emerson thought in big brush strokes and ignored details (or, in some cases, made them up). It was the details that mattered to Thoreau. As I walk around in French forests, I notice that the wild cherries ripen first, then the wild blackberries a couple of weeks later, and the wild dewberries last of all. Blackberries and dewberries look enough alike that it is easy to mistake one for the other. Thoreau had to notice the seasonal patterns of flowers and fruits, as he was passionate about eating wild fruits, especially huckleberries. I also eat wild fruits on my walks, cherries first in the summer, then blackberries, then dewberries toward autumn. Thoreau said that young people can learn more about the world in a day of huckle-berrying than a year of learning Latin.
One major example of Thoreau’s attention to detail was that many people assumed the pine woods had always been pine woods and the hardwood forests had always been hardwood forests. But Thoreau saw birds in pine trees dropping hardwood seeds onto the ground. Apparently pine woods became hardwood forests, which, when they burned or were cut, reverted to being pine woods. Thoreau may not have been the first to come up with this ecological observation, but he certainly came up with it himself. He even reconstructed the population history of pine woods by counting tree rings.
Thoreau was also a man of scientific faith. That is, he wrote down observations in his voluminous notebooks for which he had no use, but which he thought might be useful to somebody someday. Among his observations were the dates on which various species of wildflowers bloomed in the spring. He was not the first person to keep such records, which we today call phenology; in Japan, some records of cherry blossoms go back for centuries. But Thoreau’s records came in very handy when modern botanists such as Richard Primack and Abe Miller-Rushing compared Thoreau’s data with recent data. The flowers bloom much earlier today than they did in Thoreau’s time, consistent with global warming. Many other scientists, including me, have come up with similar results based on entirely separate sets of plants.
Another thing about Thoreau’s scientific faith. He kept walking because you never know what you might see, and if you are not out walking you might miss it.
And us modern scientists acknowledge the details that Thoreau noticed on his nature walks, even though he did not set out with the intention of noticing them.
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