“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

--Two quotes from Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau

         Yesterday, I drove my two daughters to the neighboring town of Concord to visit Walden Pond. They are sheltering with me at my parents’ home in Acton Massachusetts as we wait for our opportunity to return to our own home in China. We have been to Concord many times over the past few months, mainly to visit the old town center with its cafes and its wonderful bookstore, and also to walk in the Great Meadows Wildlife Preserve, one of my favorites in the region. Last March, we took a walk in the woods near Walden Pond along with their grandparents, on a trail that memorializes the words and deeds of Henry David Thoreau. Yet we hadn’t made our annual pilgrimage to Walden Pond itself, and it was high time to do so.

         Having grown up in Acton, I paid many visits to Walden Pond during my childhood, and I have fond memories of walking around the pond in all seasons, and swimming in it during the summer months. In one of my earliest memories, I recall first seeing the delicate and mysterious pink orchid known as the Lady Slipper growing along the trail that surrounds the pond. This must have been in the month of May. So now, whenever I see Lady Slippers in our local forests, I am reminded of Walden Pond. Over the decades, I have visited the pond countless times with family and friends, and it always calls me back for another visit.

         There is something magical about this pond, something very unique indeed, which attracts so many visitors, and which attracted Henry David Thoreau back in the 1840s, when he lived there in his famous cabin in the woods, and later wrote his most famous book Walden (1854). First, the pond is startlingly deep. I believe it was Thoreau who first measured the true depths of the water. Looking online, one sees different stats, but they seem to converge at around 108 feet in depth, which is 33 meters to those of us more enlightened folks who use the metric system. That is an astounding depth for such a small body of water. 

Thoreau was also puzzled by the mystery of its source, and whether it was fed by an underground spring. Today we know that this is an example of a kettle hole, which was created during the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which had covered all of New England 20,000 years ago and which gouged out the five Great Lakes during its retreat 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. The retreat of the glacial age also created all of the conditions of soil and terrain for the New England region, making ours one of the most fertile agricultural lands in the world, and supplying the large squarish or roundish stones for all the New England stone walls. This and the relative proximity of New England to Old England as well as the similarity in conditions brought the colonists here starting in the 1600s, when they began to displace the original human inhabitants of the land. In his book Walden, Thoreau speculates about the origins of the pond and its name, citing some local myths. He was always fascinated by those people we still refer mistakenly to as “Indians.” 

One does not need to know about the unique depth of this small body of water—the deepest natural body of fresh water in the region—to feel its mysterious qualities. The pond seems strangely located, relatively high up in the hills of Concord. You have to walk uphill for quite a ways from Concord Center to get there. And if like me you are fond of cycling in the area, you know how much energy it takes to get from downtown Concord to Walden Pond. By the time you arrive there on a hot summer day, you are ready for a plunge into the cool waters of the pond.

Yesterday, while we were walking around the perimeter of the pond, we noticed that each niche was occupied by a small group of people, or else by a romantic couple seeking a bit of privacy. It helps that in these COVID times, the pond isn’t nearly as popular as it would be in normal times. Also, it was a relatively cool day, but still many people young and old were enjoying their bit of beach and a swim in the cool refreshing water. There were people of many different nationalities there, including a sizeable group of Korean visitors, who were enjoying a splash in the waters and a game of catch (we heard them speaking Korean to each other; my daughters are very tuned into this language these days, since they are big fans of KPop and Korean TV shows). Suddenly, I was reminded of a visit to the pond maybe 25 years ago with one of my best college pals, Alan Chun, who was studying architecture at Harvard at the time. 

It seems that every time I visit Walden Pond, I am reminded of previous visits, in a chain of time that goes far back, as I mentioned already, to early childhood. I have probably spent some time in just about every nook and cranny of the pond, and at some point, I must have swum across it—or did I? Maybe that pleasure still awaits me.

During our hike around the perimeter of the pond, we passed by the railway that skirts the edge of the pond, taking travelers back and forth between Boston and Fitchburg, stopping at West Concord Depot and then South Acton. So many times have I been on the train heading back and forth to Boston from South Acton station, with its tantalizing glimpse of Walden Pond. The girls stopped to rest on the fence overlooking the train tracks. Suddenly, a train whizzed by on its way to Boston, and within two minutes, another rushed by heading the opposite direction, much to their delight. Afterwards, they jumped over the fence and touched the tracks to feel if they were still humming from the vibrations of the trains. I told them that during his stay at Walden Pond, Thoreau befriended some of the workers who created the original tracks back in the 1840s. These men were from Ireland, which was sending its sons and daughters by the thousands to Boston and environs at the time.

As we reached the main entranceway and beach at the end of our hike, we noticed a loon poke its head above the water near the beach, only to dive down again. Was this the spirit of Thoreau saying hello, or that of one of the original inhabitants of the land before us white folk arrived in the 1600s? Or perhaps it was just a loon. Still, it was a treat to see if not hear the loon as it surfaced again not too far from where it had dived down into the cool waters a minute before.

After our visit to Walden Pond, we drove down to Concord Center, where I took the girls to one of my favorite restaurants from my own childhood, Helen’s, which used to be called Brighams in my time. I told them that I used to order a drink called a lime rickey. They didn’t know what that was, but it sounded good. Sarah ordered a lime raspberry rickey, and Hannah just had a lime rickey. After our long walk around the pond, which took well over an hour with stops along the way, that lime rickey sure was refreshing. I chose to order a cup of black raspberry ice cream, another tradition of mine that goes back to when I was Hannah’s age.

Following our stop at Helen’s, we drove over to the nearby Sleepy Hollow Cemetery on Bedford Street. To get there, we passed by Monument Square, where we saw a group of young people holding up Black Lives Matter signs (a common sight in these parts these days). This reminded me of Thoreau’s efforts to speak out against slavery and to help fugitive slaves. In fact, it was an ex-slave woman I believe whose remarkable example of self-reliance first inspired Thoreau to live in his cabin in the woods.

At the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, we drove up the hill to the Author’s Ridge, where we paid homage to the gravestones of Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Louisa May’s gravestone was decorated with all sorts of small gifts including pens and pencils, stones, and flowers, and even a letter. The girls speculated that the recent and latest film depiction of Little Women sparked this renewal of interest in our local author. 

Henry’s gravestone was very modest. It was covered with small stones, and surrounding it were pinecones, a few pens and pencils (we’d forgotten to bring ours), and a photograph of Henry, or was it a postcard? Despite his towering prominence in the history of letters, science, arts and humanities in our nation and the world, somehow it seems fitting that he earned a small stone with only his first name on it, positioned in a plot surrounded by his family members and by his friends.

By contrast, Emerson’s stone is quite magnificent: A large and natural-looking block of quartzite, forged in the fiery furnaces of the earth far below us. Were it not for Emerson’s patronage and support over the years, Henry would not have been able to conduct his experiment at Walden (Emerson owned the land), nor would his words have traveled as far as they did. Emerson was the man of influence, who recognized Thoreau’s genius above all others, and who despite an often difficult relationship, supported him until the end. When Thoreau died in 1862, Emerson wrote, "The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost." Now, more than 200 years after his birth in 1817, hopefully, we do.