Reimagining the Landscape of Fear

About a month ago I planned to commit civil disobedience in New York – there were some Republicans in town, as you may remember – but circumstances beyond my control put me a few hundred miles further north at the crucial moment, so I did the next best thing: stopped at Walden Pond on my way back to Manhattan. "Walden" – the book, not the pond – turns 150 this year, but the people at the pond that day were paying more homage to cool water than to cultural history. Most of the swimmers seemed to be locals for whom the site was part of their familiar landscape, not outlanders like us paying homage to the pond and the guy who cultivated beans and contrary thoughts by its side from 1845 to 1847. It wasn't what I expected: The trees shrouded everything up to the water's edge; a secondary thoroughfare full of commuters ran very nearby, so that after paying to park in a large lot you had to dodge speeding commuter vehicles. I didn't mind that it had become a social or a suburban place, for Thoreau, in his legendary sojourn at the pond, never intended to be remote from society for long and reported on the train speeding by his retreat.

If it was a retreat. In one of the most resonant passages in his book, he enumerates among his many visitors "runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say, – 'Oh Christian, will you send me back?' One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the north star."

Politics came tramping through those woods, which were never far from Concord, where his mother and sister housed runaway slaves, or from the conflicts of the era. During his time spent at Walden, Thoreau became an outspoken anti-war activist and tax resister, spent that famous night in jail, and delivered as a talk at the Concord Lyceum on Jan. 26, 1848, the great American landmark, "Civil Disobedience."

I did wonder a little about which Thoreau the sesquicentennial of Walden events and reprints was commemorating. The pond is now "Walden Pond State Reservation," a 411-acre reserve with lifeguards on duty that day, but Thoreau is still unreserved and unsafe in his writings, advocating that "when...a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize." Homages to Thoreau sometimes seem to have domesticated him first, as have the avalanches of books of nature quotes taken from his longer writings. Those passages leave out the dangerous Thoreau, the one who went around suggesting that the abolition of the government might be a good thing and defending John Brown when he was already in jail for taking up arms against slavery.

Of course Thoreau is no longer dangerous in the sense that he was in 1849, the year "Civil Disobedience" was first published. That transcript of an earlier talk, given while he was resident at Walden, inveighs against slavery and the 1846-1848 war with Mexico (whereby we acquired that nation's northern half, now known as the American Southwest). Slavery is ended, and the long-ago war on Mexico is concluded. But Henry David is still dangerous as a man who cared more about justice than law and saw that the two were not uncommonly in conflict. He was the man who argued that voting was not enough, that any cooperation with an unjust government was complicity in that injustice, the one who still shames me for paying taxes during wartime, the voice that declares, "I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn."