My father stands in the doorway of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond. Of course, there is no cabin anymore, instead the cabin’s footprint is marked with narrow granite stones, giving the whole place an unintended funerary feeling. He looks out towards Walden Pond, to get a sense of what Thoreau’s view would have been, nearly 180 years ago.
“He wrote about the ice, then, too,” my mother says.
This winter has been, in every sense, the longest and coldest in recent memory. Maybe the coldest in the last ten years. The ponds on Nantucket froze, too, but not like Walden. Here, the ice is so thick you can walk out onto it, even on a day when the temperatures are hovering near forty degrees.
Visiting my parents in Concord, Mass, where they eventually settled after they left Provincetown, is always a little foreign. I rely on GPS to get around, even after fourteen years, I don’t know the winding country roads well enough to navigate by feel. There is no ocean here to orient myself against. They go to sleep early and wake up early, so I often feel a little jet lagged upon first arriving.
Thoreau is the throughline between Concord, my home of Nantucket, and Provincetown, the last place we all lived together as a family. On the Cape, we think of Thoreau as a visitor, but here in Concord, he is everywhere. I am the visitor.
The sound of ice breaking up reverberates across the pond, breaking us from our reverie.
“It sounds like a humpback whale,” my father says.
“I’m going to write that down,” I say, and I do. And all the while, I am wondering how my father—a retired Town Manager and affordable housing advocate—a man who has not been on a whale watch since we left Provincetown, has just been able to describe the sounds we are hearing so evocatively. Because he is exactly right, and now I am wondering if there is in fact a humpback whale trapped somewhere deep below the ice here in Walden.
A lot of people rag on Thoreau, and I used to be one of them. He wasn’t really alone, he had friends visit! “His mother did his laundry!” they say. The train tracks still run right behind Walden Pond, a constant reminder of life beyond this little forest.
Over the last year I have been seriously interrogating my place in the world. I am trying to find a life that allows for solitude and community, and I am not quite sure where the balance is yet. What I am finding is you can learn a little from just about every human interaction you have.
My parents and I keep walking around the pond, listening to the ice as it cracks. It is Sunday, and we have skipped Mass. I have skipped Mass for about 20 years now, but the hymns of my childhood are the songs we all know. We sing some of the 1970s folk Mass songs, On Eagles Wings, Sing to the Mountains, and Lord, You Have Come to the Seashore, as we navigate icy trails on the shady side of the pond. Other, more sure-footed hikers pass us quickly, trying to escape our off-key hootenanny.
I am older now than my parents were when I was born, older than Thoreau when he lived here for 10 years. I don’t know where the last season went, let alone the last decade of my life. Back at my parents little house—575 square feet, they are giving ol’ Henry David a run for his money—I fall asleep shortly after dark.
When I wake up, my mother has done my laundry, clean clothes folded on the kitchen table.
