Haunted by Waters: A Journey through Race and Place in the American West

foreword

We are all haunted by waters—and by water. I suspect that the abundance and relative purity of this simple but almost universal compound helps explain why. Not that we encounter water in potable form in our daily experience . Far from it. The by now nearly ubiquitous little plastic vade mecums of spring water or filtered water or god-knows-what that have become our fetishes attest to how rarely we expect to find the real thing as we make our way through the world. Yet even when we encounter it in a less than ideal form, murky or even turbid, perhaps with a slick on it, water remains almost always recognizably itself. It has the strange power of absorbing other things, disguising them or even hiding them in the process, without profoundly altering its own magical liquidity. It has no real shape, is restless in its Newtonian quest for lower ground, and cycles endlessly through profound physical changes that nevertheless tend to purify it. It is a rare thing to find a substance that, while constantly on the move, all the while endures—and returns. So water threads its way through our minds and imaginations, as through the valleys of the earth, with a down-cutting, erosive insistence. And it carries a peculiar burden as it passes. In nature writing, at least since the time of Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), it is not always there merely as a fact of the world. It also takes on a profound role as the bearer of memories. Some of this symbolic meaning we may certainly ascribe to the way that water, always changing even in a puddle, images time. But part of it, certainly in American nature writing, has to do with Thoreau’s potent example. The two-week river trip chronicled in Thoreau’s book took place in late August and early September , 1839. Thoreau and his slightly older brother John, to whom he was very close, began the trip by passing down their slow-moving home river to the place where it lost itself in the more vigorous Merrimack at the recently founded mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts. (They traveled in a rowboat they had made themselves, a modest dory-like vessel named the Musketaquid , after the Indian name for the Concord. Eventually the boat was foreword Wayne Franklin foreword purchased by their sometimes fellow townsman Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in turn gave it to Henry Thoreau’s good friend, poet William Ellery Channing, thus making it the most literary of American small craft.) Once afloat on the Merrimack, the Thoreau brothers turned upstream and rowed against the current until, having passed through another mill city, Manchester, they beached the boat because the water route was too tough above there. Instead, the travelers continued by foot and by stage to Mount Washington, which they ascended before returning to their boat and hurrying home. They reached Concord again just as the first chill of autumn was descending. This was no great Homeric voyage, no Lewis and Clark venture, but a relatively domestic passage amid cultivated fields and villages (partly by means of canal locks on both rivers) as well as through industrial sites notable for the way they were forever altering American society. We know about it only because Thoreau insisted on writing about it—and later wrote about an even less adventurous experience, solitary this time, that he contrived to have on the shores of a sleepy pond just outside the bustling village of Concord. How and why he wrote about the river trip illuminates the sorts of freight that water has come to bear in American literature . Thoreau jotted down now-lost field notes during the trip itself, later copying and reconstructing and extending them in his journal in the period from 1840 to 1844. About the latter year, Thoreau began to think of the trip as worthy of a more extended treatment. When he went to live at Walden Pond in 1845, writing the river book was the most pertinent part of the “private business” that drove him to take up residence there. He wrote two drafts of the book while at Walden, in between hoeing beans, contemplating the deep pond, keeping his journal, and running off to, among other places, Maine. Eventually the book was published in May, 1849, almost a decade after the trip. That long interval helps explain why Thoreau wedded water to memory. There would...