Transcendentalists

Last spring, I took a group of students to Concord to connect with the roots of some of the authors they had read. Our first stop was the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which has a section called Authors' Ridge.

The first author's resting place you come to is the grave of Louisa May Alcott, buried unpretentiously among her relatives in a family plot. Henry David Thoreau is interred in a similarly plebian manner; there is a family monument, but the activist-author's small marker simply reads "Henry." At the top of the hill is the grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and here the lack of pretension ends. I generally regard Emerson as a bit pompous, and perhaps fittingly his marker is a ten-foot marble slab projecting vertically from the earth.

The students were surprisingly awestruck. During the descent from the ridge, several noticed the blooming rhododendrons and recalled Emerson's poem "Rhodora."

Our second stop was Concord Bridge, the place where the minutemen turned back the British after the "shot heard 'round the world" was fired in nearby Lexington. The reconstucted bridge is flanked by two monuments: the original "stone," the dedication for which Emerson wrote "Concord Hymn;" and a more modern minuteman statue, on which is inscribed that poem. This is a peaceful place now, and the students fed bits of their lunches to the mallards and carp swimming past.

Adjacent to the bridge is the Old Manse, a house that at various times was home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. According to legend, it is the only place where Hawthorne, descended from the judge at the Salem witch trials, could find peace. His wife Sophia used her diamond ring to etch messages to him in the glass of their bedroom window. These messages, though hard to read, are still visible.

Our third and final destination was Walden Pond, the place where Thoreau went to live deliberately, to "suck the marrow" out of life. Across the road is a replica of Thoreau's cabin, where an actor sits outside and reads from Walden. The pond is a recreation area used for swimming, fishing, and canoeing, but free of private development. A half-mile path leads along the shore to the site of Thoreau's cabin. Visitors place stones there in a makeshift cairn; granite posts and chains mark the perimeter, and a plaque lies where the chimney had been. The site is about twenty yards from the pond edge. Dappled light filters through the trees...it feels somehow spiritual there.

I indulged myself a bit at the site, as I shall now. I told the students how Walden had so appealed to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats that it had inspired his poem "The Lake Isle at Innisfree," where "midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow/And evening full of the linnet's wings." This poem was read to comfort the nation at the funeral of President Kennedy. I know it so well, however, because I chose it to read at my own father's funeral.

A few years ago, a powerful group of developers attempted to build luxury townhouses overlooking Walden Pond. Their efforts were stopped by an assemblage of socially and environmentally responsible citizens who founded the "Walden Woods Project." Foremost among these saviors was musician Don Henley. Thank you, Mr. Henley, for preserving the legacy of Henry David Thoreau.