Monthly Archives: October 2006

Don’t go to “Walden Woods”

We awakened to a clear, cool autumn day. I spent the morning writing, and after a late lunch I decided I’d drive out to Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord. I wanted to walk from the parking lot there down to the Concord River, figuring I might see some interesting birds and get to walk through the autumn woods. When I got to Walden Pond, I discovered that the state now charges for parking year-round. I don’t blame them for doing so; parking fees help pay for the erosion damage all the tourists do; but it didn’t logically follow that I was going to pay to park.

So I drove a mile down the street and parked at the town forest. I walked past Brister’s Spring, which still doesn’t have an interpretive marker even though Thoreau mentions it. A little farther on, several acres of land had long ago been bulldozed, stripped of topsoil in anticipation of a hotel being built right off the highway. The hotel never got built, and the land had grown up with grass and scrubby trees. People used to ride dirt bikes and go off-roading up there; that, and the fact that it looked pretty barren, tended to keep casual walkers out. A good place to look for birds. Fewer people to scare the birds away.

When I got up to where I could see the old dirt bike track, I saw that someone had erected a stone marker, thrusting up three feet into the air. The word “phallic” comes to mind. The stone had been carefully and neatly cut, and on the side, in laser-cut letters, was the slogan “Walden Woods.” On top was a bronze cap that turned out to be a tablet with a crude map that purported to show “Thoreau’s path on Brister’s Hill.” Well, maybe, but any evidence of old paths got stripped off with the topsoil. A sappy quote from Thoreau, in raised bronze letters, encircled the map.

A hundred feet down “Thoreau’s Path on Brister’s Hill,” a discreet metal marker informed me that I should “Please stay on the path. Restoration Area. Walden Woods.” It looked like the signs you see on the mall in Washington, D.C., where there’s a D.C. cop lurking in the distance daring you with his eyes to step off the path so he can politely reprimand you. Then I realized that the black pipe I had seen in the ground earlier, a pipe with a funny piece of metal across the top, had once held another one of the signs. Someone had ripped the sign off. I tested the sign that was still intact. The metal was flimsy, and I guessed that if you bent it back and forth half a dozen times, it would break right off the black pipe. I was tempted, I even looked furtively up and down the trail to see if anyone was lurking and watching, but I didn’t.

Another hundred feet, and I looked down at four long pieces of granite, about three feet long and eight inches wide, embedded in the ground. A quote from Thoreau had been engraved into the stone, like that judge in Alabama had the Ten Commandments engraved into a piece of stone in his courthouse. I kicked at one of the pieces of granite. It was firmly anchored to the ground in anticipation of potential Vandals like me. I kicked again, It still didn’t budge, so I walked off the trail into the “Restoration Area.”

I slid down a steep slope into a shallow gravel pit. Someone had dumped several truckloads of wood chips down that slope. I followed deer tracks up the other side. There in some scraggy pitch pines and white birches I saw a warbler. Unbelievably, instead of flitting about and hiding in the leaves, it stayed in plain sight long enough for me to really see it (and the light was perfect, slanting autumn sun through crystal-clear air): olive-green back with light streaks, wing bars, streaking on its white breast, white undertail coverts: a Blackpoll Warbler in fall plumage. I watched it pick insects off the leaves of one small birch tree, and then fly away. I crashed through the brush, stepping on leafless blueberry bushes, and suddenly I was surrounded by birds. If you kiss the back of your hand, sometimes the birds will come quite close: a dozen chickadees and Yellow-rumped Warblers flitted down to perch on branches not twenty feet from me.

I found my way out past more granite markers, and crossed the highway to the site of the old Concord dump, where the town still maintains a composting facility. Birds flew from one big compost windrow to another: sparrows, a flycatcher or two, and bluebirds — bluebirds! I love seeing bluebirds. I walked up onto the hill that used to be the dump, now capped off and planted with some kind of grass that grows six or seven feet high, proud to think that I had dumped lots of trash here over the years. I saw my first Ring-billed Gull here, and my first Lesser Yellowlegs, here at the dump. When I got up to the top of the huge trash pile, two meadowlarks flew up out of the grass and circled around me. I love town dumps.

With a little bushwhacking, I skirted the Walden Pond parking lot and found the road up to the top of Pine Hill. It goes straight up the steep hill, so I went up it as fast as I could, my heart pounding. Ahead of me, two people went up more slowly. I reached the top at the same time they did. We all stopped where you can see Mount Wachusett through the trees. I recognized one of the two (name and gender withheld to protect the guilty) from conservation meetings we both attended seven or eight years ago, someone who worked for the Walden Pond State Reservation; I was pretty sure he/she recognized me, too.

“Wow, what a great view of Wachusett today,” I said. “The air is so clear today.”

Silence. They pointedly turned away from me, sat on the grass, and carried on a conversation in low tones. Who can blame them? If you work at Walden Pond, you must feel like you’re in a constant state of siege from hordes of tourists, Thoreau nuts, swimmers, and anglers. The park gets ten thousand or more people on a hot summer day. I’d probably be just as hostile as those two if I worked there.

The view of Wachusett was incredible, though, the mountain’s flanks reddened by the fall foliage. “The air is so clear, I can see the flashes of the car windshields from the top of Wachusett,” I said out loud.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw their backs stiffen. I could almost hear them thinking to themselves, “He’s talking to us, the bastard. He wants to engage us in conversation.” The one who knew me had enough remaining human instincts to half turn towards me, until catching him or herself. They turned back to each other and pretended to be carrying on their conversation in low tones. Merrily I bounded off down the hill, running in the sheer exuberance of a perfect fall day.

As long I was experiencing the Walden hostility, I figured I might was well walk all the way around the pond. Dozens of people clogged the narrow paths along the shore of the pond, even though it was a weekday. Some of these people obviously had been deluded into thinking they could find some kind of Thoreauvian solitude at Walden, and I watched them flinch as I hove into view, smiling at them as if I might talk to them. They avoided my eyes as we brushed by each other — you have to brush by each other because the trail is only about two and a half feet wide, and lined on either side with four-foot high wire fence to keep you safely separated from Walden Woods. God forbid you should go into the Walden Woods.

So I skipped up to the trail that follows the high ground around the pond. It’s wider, less crowded, doesn’t have fences, and one woman I passed actually said hello and exchanged pleasantries with me, my first human encounter at Walden that day that lacked all hostility. Thoreau’s misanthropy must be infect most people who visit Walden Pond. Or maybe the hostility comes from the increasing numbers of signs and interpretive plaques and stone commemorative markers. They now have a granite marker commemorating Thoreau’s bean field, for Pete’s sake. We should just develop all the land around Walden Pond into luxury houses. Think about it — the state could get millions for a single house fronting onto Walden Pond. A luxury house development could generate fifty to a hundred million dollars, which could go towards conserving what little wilderness is left in the state. Enough of Walden Pond.

Across the highway, back in the town forest, I walked around the little pond there. A man was fishing at the far end. “Catching anything?” I asked.

“A couple of small ones,” he said. “I just missed one.”

“Sunnies?” I said.

“Yep, bluegills,” he said. “There’s bass in there too.”

“Bass?” I said.

“Yep,” he said. “Once I talked to a guy who caught a twelve-pounder and brought it over and released it.”

It was hard to imagine that a twelve pound bass would find enough to eat in that little pond, but you never know. The man was fishing with long cane poles, not rods, dangling his bait and bobber twelve feet out into the little pond at the ends of the poles. They were beautiful, burnished a warm brown, with silver-colored ferrules. I secretly admired them while we chatted. He was from North Cambridge, he said, and he took the train out to Concord and walked over here to fish.

I wandered off down paths lit by the slanting autumn sun, and after a time found myself in the middle of a pine woods, of not very great extent, with no underbrush, only a soft covering of deep, quiet pine needles. On the northwest edge was a field, and there the pine wood was bordered by red maples covered in bright yellow and red leaves; the light filtering into the wood was golden. The black trunk of the pines drew my eyes up into the heights of the trees with mysterious dark pine needles. To the north, through the neatly spaced black tree trunks, the setting sun lit another line of red maples into a blaze of orange and red, and the light made me catch my breath. I may have stayed there a while, or maybe I just passed through. I could find no path leading out of this wood, so I pushed my way through the underbrush between it and the field, and emerged under blue sky and pink clouds. Transformed.

Oh yeah…

In Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989, I find this from July 7, 1977:

Letters I Wrote That Never Got Answered:…

“Dear Gary [Snyder], I like your stuff too, except for all that Zen and Hindu bull…”

You know what — yeah (except that Gary Snyder’s account of living in a Zen monastery is pretty good journalism, and worth reading).

Autumn watch

After seeing the dentist in Lexington, I had lunch with my dad in Concord, and then headed off to the clothing store in Maynard where I have gotten clothes for the past twenty or thirty years. I went through Nine Acre Corner to get to Maynard, not far from where we used to live, and I decided to stop at Verrill Farm where we used to buy our vegetables.

At the farmstand I got white turnips, regular orange carrots and yellow carrots, green beans, and curly kale. I looked at all the different kinds of winter squash, and picked out a small blue-green warty Hubbard (small for a Hubbard meant it weiched eleven pounds). I passed by the bins full of tomatoes: red tomatoes, pink tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, purplish tomatoes, orange tomatoes. I meant to look for red chili peppers to dry, but got distracted admiring all the other peppers and forgot. The fingerling potatoes looked fresh and smelled earthy. They also had locally-grown fruit: different varieties of apples, Concord grapes, cranberries from Cape Cod.

Cranberries are my favorite fruit, so I bought nearly a pound.

When I got home, I ate about half the cranberries raw: washed, dumped in a bowl, eaten in spoonfuls. They crunch softly, releasing the tiny seeds from the hollow center. The first flavor, really little more than an aroma, is a little like overripe crabapples. Then they taste like a cross between apple cider and blueberries, and then the tartness begins to kick in. After you eat a bowl of them, you can feel the tartness lingering at the back of your mouth and all down your throat. It tastes like autumn, it reminds me of fallen wet leaves and damp earth and autumn rainfall.

Three unrelated conversations

The drive up from New Bedford north towards Boston took me through the flat south coastal plain of Massachusetts. Along the highway through the plain, red maples seem to be the dominant trees where the ground is a little lower than the surrounding terrain; white and red oaks, and white and red pines, where the ground is a little higher. The red maples were bright with reds and yellows and oranges; in the lowest ground where I could see there was a swamp many of the trees were already bare. The oaks were still mostly green, although here and there a branch with brilliant red leaves stuck out of the dark green of the oak and pine woods; and here and there I saw a white oak fringed with brownish gold leaves.

I had lunch with dad, and we talked mostly about photography. Dad, who is an avid photographer, has been using digital cameras for the past three or four years. But recently, he said, he’s turned back to using his old single lens reflex film camera, a classic Pentax K-1000. He stood in the window of his condo in West Concord and used four different cameras to shoot the same picture of a sugar maple in full autumn color: three different digital cameras, and the K-1000. He got the film processed commerically, and he printed the shots from the digital camera using the same paper and printer. Then he compared the images all four sources. His conclusion: the images from the film camera had better color saturation and richer reds than any of the digital images.

Photo buffs would probably say that images from a professional-quality digital camera printed on a top-notch printer could surpass the images from commercially-processed film. But that’s not the point; dad was comparing images from cameras he had access to and that he could afford. Forget the photography buffs; dad and I agreed that film cameras are superior. We got into a satisfying discussion of which color film is best, and how both of us would kind of like to get back into a darkroom to print black-and-white film.

Dad had to go off to teach a computer class, so I went birding at Great Meadows. I worked my way down the central dike, stopping now and then to scan the water for ducks. Another birder, a man carrying a high-end telescope, was making his way down the dike at roughly the same pace as I. Somewhere in the middle of the dike, I said to him that I had got some sparrows, and he came down to see. We wound up talking while we waited for sparrows to break cover and come out where we could see them.

He asked where I lived, and I said New Bedford, and he told me about a house that his grandparents had had on Hawthorne Street in New Bedford. I said I hadn’t seen any ducks yet this year on New Bedford harbor, and he said that the wintering ducks had already started moving in to the Barnstable area. He lived down on the Cape during the warm months, and had just moved back up to his house in Weston on Tuesday. He asked how it happened that I was in Concord that day, and I said I grew up in town, and it turned out that his daughter had married a man who was best friends with Steve S—- who had lived down the street from us when I was young.

We finally saw Swamp Sparrows and Savannah Sparrows (and I was pretty sure I had also seen an immature White Throated Sparrow). But most of the ducks we saw were Mallards. “It’s so quiet out here,” he said. “Listen to those geese. I can even hear that tika-tika-tika sound they make when they’re feeding.” He scanned the ducks with his binoculars. “Twenty years ago, you’d see ninety percent Black Ducks and only a few Mallards. Now it’s the other way around. I used to shoot ducks,” he continued. “What I liked was using the calls to bring the ducks, and working with dogs, and being outdoors. I ate everything I shot. But I stopped in 1982, and haven’t been duck-hunting since.” He put his binoculars up to his eyes for one last scan of the lower pool, hoping to see the Pintails he had thought he had seen earlier; and then he headed back to Weston.

I spent another two hours at Great Meadows. I walked way around to the other end of the lower pool, where I did see eight or a dozen Pintails half obscured in the middle of some wild rice. An hour later, up at the sewage treatment plant, I did see a flock of White-Throated Sparrows, along with a Palm Warbler bobbing its tail, and some other sparrows that I couldn’t be sure of because it was getting dark by then.

It was still too early to brave the traffic on the drive into Cambridge. I decided to stop at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. They had moved Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s body back to Concord, to rest beside her husband Nathaniel Hawthorne, from where she had been buried in England, and I wanted to visit the new grave. Across the path, a man was crouched down, taking a picture of Henry David Thoreau’s grave in the dim light; a woman stood next to him watching. I asked if he was a fan of Thoreau, and he allowed that he was. I told them why I was there. The man asked where Louisa May Alcott’s grave was, and I pointed it out.

They said they had driven ten hours to get here today, and I asked where they were from. “London, Ontario,” said the man. And now as I listened for it I could hear the faint accent of central and prairie Canada: the slight differences in the vowels, especially “o” sounds, and the more precise consonants. “We already have snow on the ground up there,” said the woman. “What’s the climate like here?” I said that we used to have snow on the ground for most of three months, but it was definitely getting warmer. “What with global climate change, you’re probably living in the right place,” I said. “Soon your climate will be temperate.”

As we walked back towards town, we wound up talking about North American politics, particularly the way that both Steven Harper and George Bush have strong ties to the religious right. “But it’s a minority government,” said the man. “Canada is still pretty much liberal,” he continued in his soft Canadian accent. “Harper’s going to have to moderate his views or he could wind up facing an election.” The woman added, in what was not quite a non sequitur: “After all, Elton John came to Canada to get married.” I told them I was counting on the Canadians to hold out against the influence from the south. What I didn’t say was that as a religious liberal, I actually do worry about the United States turning into a theocracy of the religious right, and it would be nice to have a place to flee to.

On a positive note…

Great video story on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site about a couple and their five adopted sons, ages 6-13.

All the boys were hard-to-adopt kids, who probably would have languished in foster care until they were 18 if this couple hadn’t come forward. Oh, and the couple happens to consist of two men. Oh, and both men happen to be white, while the boys are all kids of color. Oh, and one of the men happens to be the new minister at the Unitarian Universalist church in San Francisco. And just by chance, quite a little drama unfolds while the Chronicle is filming.

Maybe I’m a little sentimental, but this video tugged at my heart-strings and lifted my spirits: Link.

Ecofeminism defined

My partner Carol sent me a definition of ecofeminism, while I was writing last Sunday’s sermon on ecofeminism. Her definition is much better than mine (she probably should have preached the sermon), and she has given me permission to reprint it here:

eco-feminism: the new era of the green paradigm will be championed and fronted by strong, sexy women, ages 30 to 90, but especially 35 to 68—when wisdom meets energy. They are more likely to be systems thinkers, partly thanks to their internal purpose and sense of a web of relationships and their relationships to others.

they are less prone to seeking off-the-shelf solutions and more likely to look to broader systems

after a generation of attempted protest-based change, the new age of change will be led by solutions-based change driven by women (and men).

the image of a woman suggests nurturing, abundance, sexiness, fecundity, potential — which is why i try to get women into as many images as possible in my books, etc.

environmental restoration/right relations with ecosystem won’t be implemented with intervention (a penetration model). it will be effected by creating a whole other potential, one that combines the forces of many and is nurtured by many (a birth model)

(Now that’s what I call being born again….)

Your comment may have been deleted

Another huge attack of comment spam — my spam filters caught 72 messages in the past eight hours. I tried to review them all (some were pretty disgusting), but there may have been one or two legitimate comments that I deleted by mistake. If so, I hope you will post your comment again.

Autumn watch

Some fall days chilly melancholy sweeps in like the chill air following a cold front sweeping down from the north. That happened to me yesterday. By early afternoon I was feeling sorry for myself because it would be dark by six, instead of staying light until eight as it did just a couple of months ago. I knew that the best thing to do would be to go for a walk. The stiff cold northeast breeze that I encountered crossing the bridges from New Bedford to Fairhaven almost drove me back home, but I plodded on. When I got to the short stretch of beach at Fort Phoenix, that same wind blew some of the melancholy out of my head — that, and seeing a Great Blue Heron, its head hunched down in its shoulders, standing on a rock in the water and staring out to sea — but melancholy came rushing back in when I left the beach to walk through the neat gridwork of residential streets in that part of Fairhaven. Something about suburban streets can seem so gloomy. Each street with its neat houses looked pretty much like the last street, to the point where I wasn’t quite sure where I was, or where I was going; I had to find my way by keeping the sun over my left shoulder, as if I were walking in a trackless waste somewhere.

At last I made it to the bike trail, which follows the route of the old railroad grade. Following the bike trail, I walked through an old industrial area, with big open spaces, an old beat-up brick factory building, occasional pieces of heavy equipment to look at, a row of empty red Dumpsters lined up. After crossing a little side street, the trail passed through a swamp, with a few red maples still glorious with crimson leaves and silver maples thick with with yellow and green leaves. Asters growing together in a loose clump stood nearly six feet high, covered with the most amazingly purple flowers; their flowers stood out against the brilliant red leaves of a thick growth of poison ivy growing over shrubs and trees. The intensity of those colors, the purple flowers and the red leaves, drove most of the melancholy out of me. That, and getting out of the urban gridwork of streets. Immature White-crowned Sparrows flew to and fro in the tangle of brush on either side of the bike trail, chirping merrily to each other as they went.

I climbed up the old road to the top of the hurricane barrier, where the wind hit me again, and I looked out over the green-gold salt marsh hay, over the blue water of the bay, to the Elizabeth Islands shimmering in the late afternoon warmth. Then I turned and walked back, the setting sun in my eyes the whole way home.

More about Altoids

My sister Abby wrote to Wrigley to comment on the change in peppermint Altoids. Here’s part of the reply she got:

Thank you for contacting us to comment on your experience with Altoids® Peppermint Mints. We are always happy to hear from our consumers and truly value your feedback. By receiving input from consumers like you, we are able to constantly make improvements and ensure that we are always providing our consumers with the highest quality products.

The look of Extra packaging has recently been changed to make this brand more globally recognized. There was a slight change in formulation to the Extra Polar Ice gum at this time — there was no change to the Altoids mints.

We are sorry you had this experience with a Wrigley brand and appreciate your help in maintaining the quality of our product. We sincerely appreciate your patronage and send our best!

Sincerely,

Ryné King
Consumer Affairs Representative

“No change to the Altoids mints.” –Um, well, no, that can’t be right. There was a change to the Altoids mints. As I noted in an earlier post, the ingredients list on the newly redesigned packaging is significantly different than the ingredients list on the old packaging (and it would be a federal offense to falsify lists of ingredients).

And I’m not the only one to notice this change. For example, I got the following information from the Wikipedia entry on Altoids just now:

Ingredients and Nutritional Information
As of January, 2006

Peppermint: Sugar, oil of peppermint, gum arabic, gelatin, corn syrup. In April of 2006, the ingredients were changed to Sugar, gum arabic, artificial flavor ( Which caused the “Curiously Strong Peppermints” to lose some of their strength) , oil of peppermint ( a smaller percentage), gelatin, glucose syrup.

And see this blog entry, this blog entry, this blog entry, and this blog entry too.

Given the evidence of my senses, confirmed by other blogs, I have to assume that Ryné King is curiously wrong.

Update:

As of January, 2007, I can no longer find the “fake” Altoids for sale anywhere. Looks like Wrigley figured out what a mistake they had made, and went back to the old recipe. However, Altoids tins no longer proclaim “Made in Great Britain,” so that change remains.