A Transcendental Journey

June, '05

Authors' Ridge, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Every year, we take next year's senior AP group to Concord. We visit three locations there: the cemetery where several famous authors are buried; the site of the Old North Bridge and The Old Manse, and Walden Pond.

The cemetery is mystical and evocative...students speak in whispers without admonition. Author's ridge is a hillock near the back; you ascend a semi-circular path among ancient, moss-encrusted trees. You come first to the graves of the Alcott family.

Although there is a large memorial stone marking the family plot, Louisa May Alcott's marker is a simple stone set into the earth. A bronze historical plaque announces its location.

A bit further up the path is the Thoreau family plot. Nothing on the memorial suggests that Henry David was a celebrated family member. Nor is there anything to suggest his eccentricities. The man who made "simplicity" the watchword of his life would probably have approved of the tiny marker that indicates his final resting place.

No such humility is apparent at the grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson. At the summit of the ridge, his grave marker looms above the headstones of his family like an obelisk. Emerson, of course, had earned fame during his lifetime.

The cemetery is an enchanted place, a place where the ghosts of activists and writers and philosophers seem to whisper to their reverent visitors. Rhododendrons and peonies lend a sweet essence to air that carries the mossy heaviness of the centuries.

Concord Bridge and the Old Manse

Our second Concord destination was the Old North Bridge. The bridge spans the meanders of the Concord River, and was the site at which the Minutemen (having been warned by William Dawes and Paul Revere) turned back the British after retreating from nearby Lexington. The bridge was undergoing reconstruction this year, but I was able to get an unobstructed photograph of it from the boat dock of the Old Manse.
Emerson’s poem was written for the dedication of a stone monument erected on the east side of the bridge on July 4, 1837. It is widely thought to be former President Clinton’s favorite poem.

CONCORD HYMN

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept,
Alike the Conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone,
That memory may their deed redeem,
When like our sires our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, or leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and Thee.

In 1875, a Minuteman statue was erected on the opposite side of the river, and Emerson’s poem was inscribed on the base of the statue.

Adjacent to the bridge is the Old Manse, at various times home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; it was the center of the American Transcendental Movement before Brook Farm. Legend has it that the dark, brooding Hawthorne (a descendent of the judge in the Salem witch trials) spent his happiest days here. His wife Sophia used her diamond ring to scratch loving messages to him in the glass of their bedroom window--messages that are still somewhat legible.
The Old Manse has a back yard that slopes gently down to the riverbank. There is a shallow backwater there, filled with water lilies not yet in bloom. A rustic boathouse on the bank must have housed the canoes and punts of the literary masters who occupied the Manse. Standing alone on the shifting boathouse dock, I could sense the passage of the years as the waters of the Concord slid softly by on their way to the Sudbury and then on to the Merrimack, and finally, the Atlantic.

Walden Pond

Walden. There are few place names in America that carry as much meaning to as many people. Individuality. Nature. Simplicity. Henry David Thoreau walked frequently, lived deliberately, suffered fools poorly, and spent a brief part of his life in a small cabin in the woods along the shore of Walden Pond.

Today, the pond is used for recreational purposes. There is a beach and bathhouse near the main road. Fisherman wade the shore in search of smallmouth bass; kayakers form bright dots of color against the wooded banks. The entire remaining shoreline, however, is free of development, largely due to the Walden Woods Project, an effort led by musician and environmental activist Don Henley.

Thoreau’s cabin was neither as rustic nor as remote as is popularly believed. The actual site of the cabin is outlined by granite posts, and a granite slab marks the place where the hearthstone was unearthed. A sign bearing the author’s statement of purpose from Walden is adjacent to a makeshift cairn, where a replica of the cabin, located across the road from the pond, has been furnished according to his records. Thousands of visitors have left stones as testimony to their pilgrimage.

You are allowed to walk inside the enclosure and stand before the site of Thoreau’s hearth. When you turn and exit, you can look through the trees and see the shimmering of the pond just as Thoreau must have seen it. You feel at once a loneliness and a kinship. For me, the words that came to mind were these: “Heaven is under our feet, as well as over our heads.”