Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack

Foreword

{ i x } In the record of famous river odysseys in American history, from that of Joliet and Marquette down the Mississippi in 1673 to the legendary gauntlet of one-armed John Wesley Powell on the Colorado in 1869, the brief excursion of a pair of Yankee schoolteacher brothers down the Concord and up the Merrimack in 1839 ought to have little more than a footnote. Those two rivers, after all, hardly impress one by their size or scope. The Concord, on the shores of which the brothers lived, is hardly a river at all by most definitions of the term. It arises from the juncture of the Sudbury and Assabet rivers in the town of Concord and dozes along a nearly flat course until it loses its name and identity in the Merrimack at Lowell, Massachusetts, a mere fifteen miles away. Compared to the Concord, the Merrimack is of another order of magnitude altogether. Eight times longer, it drains an area fifteen times as large. Even so, by continental and indeed hemispheric standards , the Merrimack tips merely a thimbleful of New England water into the infinite sea. The Mississippi discharges sixty times the volume of freshwater into the Gulf of Mexico; the Amazon, sometimes called “the river-sea,” floods the Atlantic with an amount of water so great that the Merrimack’s contribution amounts to merely one-tenth of 1 percent of it. Gertrude Stein to one side, a river is not a river is not a river. To be sure, the Merrimack has turned many mills in its day, including those in the junction town of Lowell, as well as in big-named Manchester , New Hampshire, some miles upstream. And for its length the Merrimack does run a significant volume of water down its course. Its floods have crumpled human structures and torn away great swaths of the land and its multifarious life. But it is not the water, or the watershed , that has made the Merrimack and its little tributary loom larger f o r e w o r d o  f o r e w o r d in the American imagination than they otherwise might. Rather, their notoriety stems from the book that one of those Concord brothers published in 1849 about their short trip. Called A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, it was written by Henry Thoreau while he lived in a one-room cabin by a small pond in the town of Concord, a small pond that, in a more famous book Thoreau published in 1854, would acquire its own Amazonian presence in the national, and indeed inter­ national, mind. Thoreau could grow things by putting them into prose, such was his magnifying skill as a writer. His account of a battle between two nations of ants in Walden gives epic, and indeed tragic, scope to the little affairs of their Lilliputian world. Moreover, he had the true naturalist ’s profound patience, the will to outlast the momentary boredom of many of our instants on earth in order to be there when the extraordinary things do occur. To be sure, in his 1849 book, written as a kind of belated eulogy to his brother John (who cut off his fingertip while stropping his razor on New Year’s Day in 1842 and died from lockjaw on the eleventh), Henry Thoreau had not yet fully discovered that patience and its transformative power. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers considered as a structure seems glued or nailed together more than germinated and nurtured. While he and John wait for canal locks to fill, or when the landscape is shrouded in such dense mist that he can see very little, Henry inserts a miscellany of short essays and observations preserved in the formaldehyde of his notebooks. But at its best, his prose in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers does anticipate the bright illuminations of Walden. It has, for one thing, an array of subtle atmospheric effects. Its ability to parse mist and cloud and darkness, and to visually calibrate the river world, still can enlighten a postimpressionist mind. Had Thoreau not been living at Walden Pond when he wrote his river book, I think he would not have been able to recover as finely as he does the sense of water-mixed-with-air that A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers exhibits. And that is one of Thoreau’s finest effects as a nature writer. When I was...