In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau's River Years by Robert M. Thorson
  • Richard W. Judd (bio)
The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau's River Years. By Robert M. Thorson. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 315. $29.95 cloth)

In this book, Robert Thorson presents two fresh perspectives on America's favorite author—no mean task following on a century and a half of intense literary scrutiny. He argues, first, that Thoreau's passion was not so much for wilderness as for what we today call "second nature," the long-settled landscapes so characteristic of his Concord home. Fascinated by the interaction of people and land, Thoreau heralded—indeed embraced—the arrival of the Anthropocene, the unofficial geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant force shaping the world's biomes. Second, in his Concord rambles Thoreau was more boatman than woodsman. Drawing on Thoreau's journal, Thorson show us "the wetter side of Thoreau country," with Thoreau sailing, rowing, wading, and skating the three rivers that make up the Concord watershed (p. 3). Immersion [End Page 532] in these waters, symbolic and literal, was the true inspiration behind his transcendental interpretation of place.

Thorson avoids the philosophical and textual intricacies that preoccupy so much Thoreau scholarship and focuses on the practical, indeed scientific, connections to the waters. The river was Thoreau's highway, his commons, his primary poetic metaphor, and his sense of place, but in this account it looms largely as his most pressing scientific challenge. Thoreau explored every facet of the river's natural history—geology, botany, zoology, ichthyology, hydrology, geomorphology—and compiled data on its height, velocity, direction, source, and temperature, along with other scientific minutiae. These studies came during the climax to a long-standing controversy over the Billerica dam, which flooded the upriver meadows and damaged an essential component in the valley's agricultural system. As Thoreau knew better than those involved in the case, river morphology is a complicated phenomenon, particularly where dams, canals, bridges, and upland disturbance redounds against the essentially unpredictable natural turbulence of flowing water. It was this unpredictability, in fact, that made the river seem tantalizingly wild to Thoreau. He realized that each of these perturbations triggered a "cascade of physical wildness" that reverberated upstream and down, creating islands, mud accretions, scours, bars, and vegetational changes that kept the river in constant flux (p. 18).

River alterations were part of a larger pattern of ongoing environmental change. Upland clearing made winds stronger, ice thicker, and streamflow more volatile. Duckweed proliferated, feeding on fertilizers flushed into the waters; siltation increased; beaches formed; meadows widened; and shoreline vegetation thickened. Thoreau's goal was not to challenge these disturbances, but to understand them, and this leads into a fascinating discussion of how entire landscapes are affected by altering river flow.

More than any of his contemporaries, Thoreau understood the arrival of the Anthropocene, which affected virtually every facet of Concord land and water. Thorson concludes that the most astonishing [End Page 533] thing about Thoreau's river project was his "recognition that the natural world he fell deeply in love with was no longer wild in a traditional sense, but was even wilder with respect to the dynamism and unpredictability of landscape process" and in this retelling, we share in Thoreau's fascination with river wildness (pp. 242–43). In assembling Thoreau's river story, Thorson confronted two difficult organizational challenges: weaving Thoreau's life into the life of the river in a chronologically coherent fashion; and conveying a technical understanding of river mechanics using Thoreau's mid-nineteenth century conceptualizations. For the most part, Thorson masters these challenges, and the result is a book eminently readable and rewarding for scholars and anyone else interested in how Thoreau interacted with nature—or in this case with second nature.

Richard W. Judd

RICHARD W. JUDD is professor of history at the University of Maine.

...

pdf

Share