Poems by Daniel Bourne

Instinct

by Daniel Bourne

From Canary Summer 2018

Daniel lives on one of the small upland ridges between the Funk Bottoms and the Killbuck Marsh, two important bird migration stop-overs along the east/central Ohio corridor. Killbuck Creek, which flows through the Marsh and also gathers the waters from the Funk Bottoms, eventually flows southward into the Walhonding, then the Muskingum, and then the Ohio River.

A small car, and a big snapping turtle
laying eggs in front of its bumper

as we turn a corner
in the Killbuck Swamp. This boy

looking through the windshield
of his rusting Plymouth

doesn’t move an inch. He’s here
on this planet

to protect this clutch of eggs,
or at least

to wait decently
for the turtle to finish

before he kills her
for grilling or for soup.

But the turtle
is oblivious:

her hard beak
curved like the earth.

Big paws scraping
through the gravel

the local township
deposits each spring

to try and stop the mud.

© Daniel Bourne

Sharing the Water with Thoreau

(Walden Pond, The Dead of Summer)

by Daniel Bourne

From Canary Summer 2020

When arriving at Walden Pond in the dead of summer, as in all seasons, the easy question is WWTT—What Would Thoreau Think? Not what he would do (take a dip in the lake himself or lie down in protest in front of a Range Rover bumper on the dark blue asphalt at the parking lot entrance), but what sort of weather would be taking place inside his head. The easy answer might be to think that he’s outraged to see his precious lake turned into a public swimming hole, but my wife Margaret isn't so sure. She says Henry David was also just a fleeting visitor here, thankful (or at least he should have been) to Ralph Waldo Emerson for the very land on which to build his cabin—just as all the splashers and sprayers around us are beholden to the Emerson family as well. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Emersons (along with the Forbeses and the Heywoods) bequeathed a chunk of land around Walden Pond in trust to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in order to honor and preserve "the Walden of Emerson and Thoreau, its shores and nearby woodlands for the public who wish to enjoy the pond, the woods and nature, including bathing, boating, fishing and picnicking." To live deliberately might mean to choose a responsible sunscreen, and not the preservation of sooty cabins or sacred cows at all.

And couldn't you imagine Thoreau would applaud the people floating on their backs or pulling on an oar, rather than visiting a museum of old ideas, even if these great truths labeled clearly in the exhibit case were generated by his own inspections of the land? Would he see a mindless herd of cattle confined in a farm pond here, or a polity of self-actualized individuals exercising their spirits along with their bodies?

Last night in the motel in Concord, when I was checking on the internet to see what time Waldon Pond opened up, I came across a website rating various swimming holes of the world. And in this context, Waldon Pond was not at all famous for having once hosted Henry David Thoreau, but that it sported the highest levels of uric acid of any freshwater body in Massachusetts—all because of the hordes of children not just flopping about in its waters day after day, but also going urinating in it. Again, we're talking numbers here, a significant invasive species, day-trippers from nearby Concord and Lexington as well as all the tourists in the area to visit the old stomping grounds of plucky minutemen and consternated redcoats—the numbers of vehicles often high enough to close down the two or three acres of parking lot, the earth made to say asphalt. The Pond's own website warns that you won’t be alone: "To protect the natural resources of the area and ensure that Walden Pond remains a pleasant place for people in the future, the number of visitors is limited to no more than 1,000 people at a time. Dogs, bicycles, flotation devices and grills are prohibited. To avoid disappointment, visitors are encouraged to call the park in advance and check on parking availability."

Even without all the dogs and the bicycles, the beach grills and noodles and floating dragons—and not demonizing too badly the high concentrations of children with indeliberate command of their bladders—we're talking about a type of existential eutrophication of the "Walden experience," the outcome of a lot of like-minded people wanting to do the same thing in a limited amount of space. I'm not trying to be flippant. I've always wanted to link environmental issues to the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant: if everyone did what you do, would it be a good thing? Indeed, one of the nagging problems I have always had with Thoreau and others who advocate marching to a different drummer is: what would happen if everyone did the same thing, not just in such high numbers, but also within earshot of each other? For Thoreau to go alone to the woods when he did was remarkable. Now it is part of the norm, be it the lazy afternoon of a swimmer or the earnest pilgrimage of a student. (At the same time, is it better or not to have thousands of "re-creators" here on Walden Pond—or have the entire place given over root, stock and barrel to the luxury homes of a privileged few. Or, should only the literati or other suitably deserving personages be awarded the right to come here, an idea that I'm certain would make Thoreau snort coffee from his nose...)

Coming from Illinois, I have always bemoaned the fact that Abraham Lincoln became too famous for his own good, a brilliant and complicated man often turned into a cliché of history. In the same way I fear that Thoreau and Walden Pond are too well-known to ever be truly glimpsed again, that the same historical movements that resulted in the preservation of Walden also contributed to its current destruction. What the one hand gives, the other hand takes away. I think of the Hindi God Kali, both creator and destroyer. We talk about "recreation" bringing about a re-creation of ourselves. But what about re-destruction? What is there in our conscious awareness of the certainty of erasure that makes us want to fix the world in our minds more desperately?

More than nature seems to be under threat, and more than solitude is subject to erosion. You can even see the ongoing process of destruction in the park signage, all of which is rough around the edges, the bottom of the information panels already blurred with moisture and mildew, the words fading away as we read them, some passages hitting a hard slog as if we're on a trail that suddenly disappears into buttonbush swamp or multi-floral briar. Likewise, Thoreau's cabin was soon dismantled after his own stay was done. Even the sign that mentions these facts—how the structure was removed and used to store grain, its timbers taken away for scrap lumber and its roof reincarnated as part of a pig sty-—itself will soon be on its own way out, off to the recycling plant or to a mass internment in some landfill.

But this is economy, not desecration, and I think that Thoreau, rather than gasping and snarling at the numbers of swimmers and joggers, might be more aghast at the heavy marble commemorative stones now laid over the foundations of his long-ago-vanished chimney, might laugh at the efforts made to find the ghostly remains of his experiment in the woods, at how Roland Wells Robbins, not only a Thoreau-devotee but also an archeologist—and thus the only one on this planet who would both bother with and be capable of carrying out such a task, spent an entire three months of digging and scratching before coming across the first tangible clues—the foundation stones of the chimney—on the curious date of November 11, 1945, the day of the year that World War I ended and the year that marked the end of World War II: pure coincidence or a great cosmic sign, given Thoreau's own opposition to governmental violence epitomized in his stay in the Concord jail in protest of the American invasion of Mexico as well as his own mark given on the foreheads of prophets of social justice such as Count Lev Tolstoy or Mah?tm? MohandasKaramchand Ghandi.

The actual site of Thoreau's cabin is relatively shielded from the swimmerly bustle, at the far end of the Pond from the parking lot and beach. Still, the ground around it is hardly the same ground Thoreau would have touched. Even the rocks have changed. Still, I can’t help but be attracted to the large cairn of rocks sprawled nearby the "official" marking of the actual cabin. In Harriet Doerr's novel Stones for Ibarra, I first encountered the notion that one should bring stones to mark a sacred ground, ground on which something has happened, something that must always be remembered. In this I see the reason for graveyards, and that it is the stone in place of the body that is the most important to preserve.

The stones here speak with power. They have been brought here by disciples from all over the world, some without inscriptions, but some with locations as far flung as Russia or India written upon their sides, some with peace symbols and some with various letters of the alphabet representing the names of those bringing these offerings of reverence for H.D.T. Perched on a rather tall pile of stones in the back is a nest, a robin's nest that served its purpose for the robin and now serves its purpose for the man, and I think that maybe Thoreau would be okay with this homage made of twigs, with these fragile stacks of stones, with this trampled little site that tries to keep speaking in his name, that he would even be okay with all the swimmers and vehicles and ranger-guided tours that try to trace his own bushwhacking transits of these woods some 170 years ago, and that he would just shrug his shoulders at the level of urine in the lake or the number of "villagers" ducking in to see the full-size replica of his cabin located so conveniently on the edge of the parking lot on the way to the beach. Why bother to grab up some stone from the pile and try to drive them off? Rather, it is what is in their hearts that ought to be at issue, and how they reveal this content when it is time to reveal. And what of that woman I saw on my way around the lake to the vanished cabin's site, the woman in her brightly colored sari immersed up to her neck in an unpeopled section of the shore, her bare-chested husband waving his hands back and forth slowly in Thoreau’s water as he stares at her face, the flowing ends of her dress bobbing and dipping in the ripples. On dry land, they would both seem to be dancing, and why not think of them that way here in the water just as well, the grace of the man's hands and the woman's cotton-print fabric splashing and swaying.

Yes, this place has been both created and destroyed—loved to death, some would say. Yet there's still an important story going on here, one that deserves to be listened to precisely because we won't ever quite fathom what it means. Babies pee in the lake while grizzle-bearded professors shake their heads in desperation. And who will get their minds around it all? Better just to walk around the pond, or take a deep breath and wade in. The sun is but a morning star, and we are just a story, the beginning and the ending lapping together at the shore. —Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 2012