Category: USA

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Two Cans of Coke Zero & a Salami Sandwich

We went out to Old Rag in the Shenandoah today.  The weather was beautiful.  Old Rag is the best hike in Virginia.  In the roughly eight miles, you get lots of variety, including very interesting rock scrambles and excellent views.   I don’t go on the weekends, since it gets too crowded.  On weekdays it is just right.

Below – This rock has been hanging there since the last ice age, or longer, but I am always afraid it will let loose just as I am squeezing below.

Alex & Espen are in good condition these days.   I used to have to drag them behind me; now I am the one being pulled along.  They were making fun of me.  With each jump they asked me if I was worried about breaking a hip.   I have to admit that I am not as nimble as I used to be and I am more likely to shimmy down and less likely to leap.   You re better off, BTW, wearing softer bottom shoes.  Stiff bottomed hiking boots protect you from the rocks, but it is good to have shoes that allow a little toe dexterity. 

Below – ditto this rock

Old Rag is one of my “home places”.   This is my 24th year of coming here.  I first took the boys when Espen was only seven years old.  They still remember that time, or at least remember the story of that time.  It was a very foggy day and the low visibility gave the whole place a surreal, end of the world type look.   Somebody brought a dog names Spike.   We couldn’t see them, but we heard the group behind us.  Now it is against the rules to bring dogs, with good reason.  Dogs do not do well on the rocks and they might knock somebody off.  In this case, it was Spike himself who had the problem.   We heard barking and people calling to Spike.   Then we heard somebody say, “Spike no.”   After that, we heard Spike no more.   What happened I don’t know, but I don’t think it was good.

Below – You can imagine the problems a dog might have climbing those rocks ahead of Espen.  They are steeper than they appear in the picture.

My friend Doron Bard and I once hiked up here with his dog called Tuckahoe.   I had to literally throw Tuckahoe up some of the rocks; Doron caught him and he did not suffer Spike’s fate, but we learned that dogs and sheer rocks don’t mix.  Their little paws slip and canines just cannot climb as well as hominids.

Below – This used to be labeled “Fat man passage” but the PC crowd scrubbed it off.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures and do the hike.  From Sperryville, go south on 522 to SR 601 and follow the signs.   Nearby is another great hike in White Oak Canyon. 

Below – How great thou art.  Every time I am up in the hills, I feel newly inspired.  The words of the old hymn come to mind: O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, How great Thou art, How great Thou art. Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander, And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees. When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Fits well, doesn’t it.

I am enjoying my trip home and I have to admit the thought of returning to Iraq is not a pleasant one.  But, what can you do?   I often make this mental experiment.  Imagine you have lost everything and then you got it back.  How lucky are you?  I am lucky now and will be again. 

Below – For the good (non-Iraq) times.

Below – Not all is well.  Over the last 20 years almost all the hemlocks have died out, victims of the hemlock whooly agelgid, introduced from Asia in 1924.    Invasive species are as much of a threat to our forests and ecosystems as global warming.

Hemlocks used to line this stream.  It was dark and beautiful and the shade cooled the water.  There is no easy replacement for the niche formerly occupied by the hemlock in Eastern N. America.

BTW – Espen & Alex wanted to drink the water.  I think the water is clean, but drinking it is not a good idea.  We each had two cans of Coke Zero & a salami sandwich.   What other rations can you need for a hike like this? 

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Shenandoah and Appomattox

Below is Tom Newbill, this year’s tree farmer of the year, next to his biggest oak tree.  It stands in one of the five family graveyards on his land.  In the old days, people buried their relatives on the old farmstead. Tom says that some people still visit the graves, but less frequently as time goes on.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

The most poignant is a grave of a nine year old girl called Goldie, who died just before Christmas in 1914.  Her grave is alone, near where the farmhouse stood, but away from other family members.   I am sure there is a story, but nobody will ever know.

This year’s tree farmer of the year lives in Hardy, near Roanoke, a little more than a four hour drive from Vienna.   Since I had to get there at 9am, I set out early in the morning.   I took 66 to 81 and made good time and was almost to Lexington by the time the sun came up.   It is tough driving on 81.   81 is the truck route that serves the East Coast and it is uncomfortable to be the little guy among the giant trucks.

The Shenandoah Valley is beautiful at dawn or at any other time.   Looking at it from 81 is not the best way to see it, however.   My thoughts often return to Iraq, where I must soon return, and the effects of war.  This beautiful valley was the scene of terrible destruction, much more intense than in Iraq.   Phil Sheridan went through the Valley in 1864 and destroyed everything so that the South could not use it as a supply area.  He famously said, “If a crow wants to fly down the Shenandoah, he must carry his provisions with him”.    And he did this after the war had ranged through the place for four years.   The Shenandoah was a battleground because of its proximity to Washington, its natural bounty and the mixed loyalties of the valley residents.   Anyway, by the end of the war there was not much left.

It grew back.

I will write up and post the article re the tree farmer of the year tomorrow or the next day.   Suffice to say, this guy has done well.  He has more than 1000 acres and he got it the old fashioned way.  Well, he inherited the family farm, but then he saved his money and bought some other acreage.   It is his retirement account and his land is very well managed.

Since it was more or less on the way, I stopped at Appomattox.   I missed the big event by a couple of days (and of course 143 years.) Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia in Wilmer McLean’s parlor on April 9, 1865.  Our Civil War was unique in world history.   All that fighting and killing just ended.  Robert E. Lee was a real man of honor.  He sent his men home to become good citizens of the United States.   Civil wars don’t usually end like that.   In France, they would cut off heads.   The Russians machine gunned the opposition and the Chinese just starved millions to death.   In the U.S. Lee just went home and so did his men.  Of course, Grant’s terms were generous.   A few weeks later Joe Johnston surrendered his army to William T.  Sherman and the unpleasantness was largely over.  Johnston and Sherman became friends.   In fact, Johnston died of pneumonia contracted at Sherman’s funeral when he refused out of respect to wear a hat or take shelter from the rain.   April 1865 was also the month Lincoln was shot.   With the possible exception of July 1776, it was the most momentous month in American history. 

Of course most people remember the story of Wilmer McLean.  In 1861 he lived near Manassas, on the banks of a little stream called Bull Run.  During the first battle there, with the lead flying through his back yard and a Union shell landing literally in the soup pot in his kitchen, he decided to move to a quieter place, one where the war would not intrude.   He figured Appomattox was the spot.  Talk about luck.

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Vienna Virginia … Again with the Running

Along my habitual running trail is a neighborhood along Glyndon Street.  The little brick houses there (as above)  are disappearing. People who want to live here but dislike the current housing options have been tearing them down to build bigger and more luxurious homes. These nice homes are very different from those they displace. The people who live in them are different too. In driveways next to old houses, you find Chevy pickups holding the tools of McCain supporters. In the multicar garages of the new homes are Prius with Obama bumper stickers.

It goes deeper than that.   Whole Foods comes to displace Safeway.  Restaurant menus change from down home to ethnic fusion.  There are fewer kids playing on the streets and Virginia accent becomes less and less common in this part of Virginia.   Native Virginians have long said that you probably have to go south of the Rappahannock to get to Virginia.  That is becoming more uniformly true.  The area is gentrifying.  Lawyers and government workers are replacing the small business employees and owners.

I have mixed feelings about those things.   I am a carpetbagger myself.   I think shopping at Whole Foods is a waste of money, but my tastes run toward the gentrification.  Those houses are too big for me, but I like to look at them in the neighborhood.   (It is always better to have the cheapest house in a rich neighborhood.  You get to look at your neighbors’ houses and they get to look at yours.)  On the other hand, I have come to like many of the aspects of the neighborhood I had.   I learned to like Old Virginia.  I also don’t like the “style” of some of my new neighbors, who insist on wearing designer running suits and those tight bike pants.    

I guess on balance the change is good, but my ledger does not balance the same debits and credits as most of my neighbors.  For example, I like the density near the Metro. I think they should build high rises for residential and office space and lots of retail.  That is the only way to get “transit oriented development.”  I want my Metro area to look like Clarendon.  

Local citizens’ groups try to fight density.  Ironically, it is often the newest people leading the charge.  They moved here to escape such things and now it is following them and they want to lock the door.  I think that position is hypocritical.  We can’t expect to have a Metro stop with a low rise neighborhood around it.  All that means is more people drive more cars more often.   A Metro stop is too important an asset to be left sitting lonely.  We either build density here where commuters can use the Metro or push sprawl out onto the farms and fields in Loudon or even Harpers Ferry, from which people will commute hundreds of miles a week in their cars.  For me the choice is obvious. 

Above is part of an older Virginia suburb too.  The development is named for Stonewall Jackson and all the streets are named for his subordinate commanders or his famous campaigns.  I doubt anybody would choose those names and themes today. 

Strange the things you think about when you are running.  As I mentioned in the previous posts, running gives you a thinking opportunity.  I didn’t say it was always profound thought.

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Lawrenceville, VA

Our tree farm is about seven miles west of Lawrenceville. The property records are in Lawrenceville and that is where we made the buying deal. The city was founded just after the Civil War. It is a pretty little town, but kind of dead. Incomes are low. Everyone was friendly to me and very informal.

A very interesting are the accents. It is not quite the usual southern accent, more like a mixture of tidewater and upland.

Here are some pictures.

  • Main Street. If a cute little town was close to Washington, the houses would be worth a fortune. Here they are not. I think a dog sleeping in the middle of that street would not have much to fear from traffic
  • Every Southern town has a Confederate memorial, usually like this one: a sort of pensive single soldier standing on top of a column. In back of Johnny Reb stands the Lawrenceville Historical Society. It does not have long hours, so I have never been in inside.
  • The Court House. I had a good time looking up the records of my property. It was all contained in fat books. As you got farther back, they started to be hand written.
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American Indian Museum

I really don’t like the American Indian Museum, but I really love the grounds. You can see natural plants and plantings around the place. I recall when it used to be just a field. I used to run there. It is nicer now.

Tobacco was a big part of Indian culture and the first crop English colonists really could make money selling. It built the colony of Virginia. These are some picture of Indian tobacco. Recently when I was down at the farm the hunters told me about tobacco. Southern Virginia used to be a big tobacco growing area, now less so. The tobacco lands have often been turned over to loblolly. When the tobacco grows, the bottom leaves turn yellow. These are the first harvests. Later the whole plant is dried.

If you look closely at the first picture, you notice the no smoking sign. I dislike smoking with a passion, but it is funny that we forget the importance of this particular crop.

I am hoping to build a pond on my land, so I took lots of pictures of the pond they have at the museum. I like the mix of cattails, lilies and the bald cypress. You would not guess this was right in the middle of urban Washington.

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Chickenfest 2004

Returned from the annual family get together “Chickenfest”. Jerry and Tony Bozich do the cooking. My cousin Dorothy organizes the party. It has become a big event that a lot of people look forward to (how about that for great grammar dangling.)

It all starts with the chickens. Jerry seasons them from the inside out and then puts them on long pipes. They kind of get their heads stuck up their asses, a kind of Abu Ghraib for chickens. You can see from the picture. The machine is a local design. Jerry got some old man friend of his to make it. It is literally made of junk – pieces of metal that the old guy scavenged up. But it works well. The chickens cook slowly and the meat remains juicy. The result is chicken as good as I have had anywhere and better than most.

I personally still feel the pain from last year’s Chickenfest revelation when I learned that my grandfather was NOT a brew master, as I had always believed. He was, in fact, a candy maker. Beer . . . candy? Candy is not as cool. It wasn’t even famous candy like M&M, Three Musketeers or Milky Way. He made caramels and hard candies of dubious trademark. I really believed he was a brew master. Why? I thought he was a brew master because when he took the glory road he left a bottle of “Meisterbrau” (or brau meister – don’t recall exactly) beer in our fridge. My mother never threw it out and it dwelled permanently in the space between the catsup and mustard for at least twenty years. When we replaced our gas fridge with a new and improved electric one, the beer moved too. It was a fixture of the fridge. For as long as I could remember I saw that bottle every time I needed some cheese or coke and I ate a lot of cheese and drank a lot of coke. Meisterbrau was grandpa’s beer. I started associating Meisterbrau – brew master with my grandfather. We lived in Milwaukee, the most famous beer city of North America. The leap of imagination was a short one. Grandpa was a brew master. Meisterbrau, as I learned later, was not a good beer and not even made in Milwaukee. Its little known claim to distinction is that it was the precursor of all light beer. Meisterbrau tried unsuccessfully to make a light beer in the early 1970s. Miller bought Meisterbrau, tweaked the formula a little and created Miller Light. Anyway, I blame Meisterbrau as the source of my confusion. A lot of family histories are like that, I suspect. I am thinking of going with the original legend, maybe even embellish it with scandal to explain how we lost whatever great fortune we once enjoyed. Why tarnish the beauty of the thing with unnecessary accuracy.

Whether the old guy was a brew master or not, Beer was and is still a big part of family gatherings, but beer drinking is a declining art among us. The older generation failed to pass the torch. In days of yore, the men (they were real men in those days) would sit around a keg of beer and drink prodigious amounts of the liquid bread. Past, present and future blurred into a soft amber glow. In the parlance of the time, they would all get a snoot full. Now the our gatherings are relatively sober affairs. We still have our share of characters, as you can see from the pictures. Everyone is healthier, however, and that is a good thing. The beer now comes in bottles and cans and there is greater variety. You count cans and bottles individually. Bottles slow the drinking. The keg tended to facilitate sluckin it down, as cups held more than a standard can and you tended to fill it up again before it was empty. In other words, you never really knew how much you were drinking because you had a bottomless cup.

Milwaukee was especially pleasant during my visit, with highs in the seventies with low humidity and a breeze off the lake. I drove around a little and ended up near Whitnall Park. I used to ride my bike to Whitnall Park along Grange Avenue. I don’t recognize most of the way any more. What used to be a country road is now a suburban street, but some is preserved as park. Just past 76th Street stands Jeremiah Curtin’s house and an old lime factory. Jeremiah Curtin was a moderately famous linguist, who wrote a history of the Mongols and translated Szienkeiwicz (for those less up on Polish culture, he wrote “Quo Vadis” and won a Nobel prize in literature about 100 years ago.) Above are pictures of the old lime farm. It is that quintessential Wisconsin style. The house is made out of crème city brick, the kind you can find only around Milwaukee. The other building is stone. It would be nice to make a community in a place like that.

I went down to my old running trail in Grant/Warnemont Park. It is a really nice running trail with a little roll but nothing a reasonable person could call a hill. I ran the distance in 24:21, which is 25% slower than I used to run it when I wore a younger man’s shoes, but it was still fun. That trail was a solace through the worst of my unsuccessful job searching back in the early 1980s. I think I applied at every major firm in North America. They were amused, but not interested. The more rejection letters I got, the farther I ran. I was probably in the best aerobic condition of my life. Sometimes I ran all the way through Grant Park to the Root River Parkway, about 12 miles. I am fatter now and I can’t run that far. I blame the economy. The economy has not been that bad since then, so I have no compulsion to run very far. The trail has changed a lot since I started there. A very big oak tree that used to guard one of the kinks in the trail died some time back. Most of the birch trees have died and even the stumps have rotted into compost. A birch forest is ephemeral everywhere, but especially around here. Individual trees don’t live long and won’t reproduce naturally in southeastern Wisconsin.

The trail used to run through a mixed meadow and forest that looked like the ecosystem you would expect 100 miles farther north. Whether through indolence or design, the park system has let some places return to nature. I used to think that letting things return to nature was an unmitigated blessing, but on reflection I recall a beautiful view of the lake around the second trail bend, kind of a v shaped field with wild flowers framed by tamarack trees. It looked natural, but was not. It takes a lot of planning to be spontaneous and somebody planned it well.

Tamaracks are not native to this part of Wisconsin, so they must have been planted about forty years ago. They backed up against the native basswoods and maples and looked really good especially in the fall, when their gold needles burned against the crimson of the maples. The park system also planted some Austrian pines “randomly” in the fields about the same time. They stayed dark green through the year. It was a work of art. The tamaracks and pines are still there, but you can’t see them unless you look closely in the bushes. The exquisite interaction of tamarack, maple and pine is now replaced by the pea green banality of the box elder. Some of the box elders and ash reach about 20 or 30 feet. Box elders are nice in their place (generally next to rusty railroad tracks and pushing up through the ruins of abandoned warehouses next to rusty railroad tracks) but I never did like their unique fragrance and they block the view. That’s not good. I loved to watch the lake and the joys and sorrows of its changing face. Natural succession won’t stop, of course. The box elders are transition species. Some of the ash trees will remain but in about fifty years maples, basswoods and maybe a couple of beeches, will cover the whole place. I won’t see that and nobody will see the lake through them.

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Keene and Hillsboro, NH

Chrissy and I drove to Keene, NH today. Keene reminded Chrissy and me of Bedford Falls, the place where the old Jimmy Stewart movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” was set. Like so many places around here, it is really cute. The area around is features ski trails and white water rafting. It seems like a fun place to live, although probably not exciting for those uninterested in either outdoor activities or looking at historical buildings or antiques.

The yellow building in the picture is a museum for furniture and antiques from the houses of the local elite from the nineteenth century. Keene was a mill town. Factories were set up to make textiles. They took advantage of the waterpower of the Connecticut River. Chrissy was looking forward to going to the museum, but it was closed for some kind of meeting. It shows the mindset of these little towns. They close things when they feel like it. This is like another movie, “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” He comes from a little town called Mandrake Falls, NH and brings these small town values to New York. This was a good movie with Gary Cooper as Mr. Deeds. Recently the movie was remade with Adam Sandler playing Mr. Deeds. Naturally, Sandler brought all his nasty, dumb humor to the role and ruined all the subtlety and charm. I hate Adam Sandler movies.

On the way back we passed Franklin Pierce’s. He is the president that I usually forget when I am trying to think of the list of presidents. He didn’t do much memorable, but he is remembered locally because he is the only president born in the state of New Hampshire. New Hampshire is tiny state and the Piece’s hometown is a tiny place called Hillsboro. They don’t have many famous people around here. The house is better than most of the houses I have seen from the period. The rooms are large and they look comfortable. Franklin’s father built the house in 1804. He built it originally as a tavern. That is probably why the house was so nice. They needed the rooms for dinning rooms and guest apartments. The house was closed, but as we walked around outside a woman pulled up who was a curator. She let us in and gave us the tour. I guess if you live in Hillsboro, you don’t want potential visitors to miss your town’s attraction.

The drive is beautiful. New Hampshire is generally very beautiful. We are becoming accustomed to pretty scenes and don’t notice them too often. This part of New Hampshire is called Currier and Ives Country after the scenes that appeared on the 19th Century prints.

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Leaving Londonderry

Our time in New Hampshire is almost through. Yesterday we sold our house in Londonderry. I feel sad about moving, but we never really bonded with the place. I guess we will have to hit the road again searching for the home we never found. Now we are back in the Towne Place Inn in Manchester. There is symmetry. This is the same place we started and I will drive the same road to take the boys to school, only now I won’t continue on to Tufts. We are off to Virginia on June 19, stopping along the way in West Point. The Fletcher School experience is quickly receding into mythological memory. My computer crashed the last day of classes. It is courteous of the old machine that it waited until I didn’t really need it, but I lost most of my records. It goes to show that you should back up. I don’t think I lost anything I can’t replace. I remember most of the “big ideas” and they may even improve by being rethought.

I spent most of yesterday watching the Reagan funeral. What a big affair. He was my hero, a great man. Ronald Reagan’s clarion call to fight communism is one reason I went into the Foreign Service. We shall not soon see his like again. I think the outpouring of respect caught the establishment by surprise. Many of our intellectual elite liked to think of him as an amiable dunce. I always believed that history would be kinder to him than were contemporary pundits, but I am surprised how fast history is catching up with the old man. The thing I find surprising is how some memories are also changed. Dozens of pundits talked about the end of the Cold War. The ones on the right gave Reagan his proper share of credit for ending it on our terms. Those on the left said things like, “the Soviet Union was falling by itself, as we all knew.” I started the Foreign Service in 1984. I can’t recall even one mainstream pundit who thought that the Soviet Empire would disappear anytime soon. On the contrary, many thought the democracies would have to make serious accommodations to communism. World communism seemed on the ascent back then. Reagan was one of the only ones who saw the weakness in communism and for that he was derided as an “amiable dunce” or “reactionary fool” by the chattering classes, the same ones who now see the collapse of that benighted system as obviously known and forgone. I don’t really believe they have forgotten, since many have left written records, but they are covering, trusting in the notoriously short public memory to put them retroactively on the right side of history. I admit to some fault. I voted for Jimmy Carter in my first election (1976). It was a youthful indiscretion, but I am proud to say that I came to my senses and voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Mine was probably one of the few votes for him at the Webster Street polling place deep inside the “peoples republic” of Madison, Wisconsin. I am convinced if Jimmy Carter had been reelected in 1980, followed by Walter Mondale in 1984, we would still face the Soviet Union today, or worse it would have gone down in a bloody mess and taken us along. Defeatists and pessimists don’t make good leaders, no matter how intelligent, honest or admirable, and I do admire Jimmy Carter. He was much smarter in the academic sense. He had success at Camp David and started deregulation. It is just that overall he is a much better ex-president than he was a president. Maybe he should have just jumped to that step. Enough on politics.

I took some pictures of the area around our now former NH home. They are about a month old, so they are springtime pictures, but still applicable.

  • Our street
  • The lake and dam from down the hill from our house. The Army Corps of Engineers created the lake about 20 years ago by damming a couple of streams. They still maintain the small dam. The water is clean. On a calm day, it reflects the sky and the neighboring trees like a mirror. The lake view is one of the reasons we got a good price for our house.
  • Path to the lake. This looks like a postcard. It is surprisingly beautiful. I sometimes forget that.
  • Road on top of the hill from our house.
  • Big white pines near the house
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Portsmouth, NH

We drove through mostly pine forest. I am continually surprised how much forest covers this state and most of New England. Portsmouth, NH was about a half hour drive down Hwy 101. It is a pleasant little city. The highlight is a place called Strawberry Banke. This is the original downtown. At one time an arm of the ocean reached up here and it was a seaport. Over the years it silted in until the city filled in what remained. It became a working class neighborhood and after that a non-working class neighborhood. I think the politically correct term for a neighborhood of welfare recipients in this case is leisure class neighborhood. In addition, in this land of forest and streams, I think we can call the homeless “outdoorsmen”.

No matter the terms, by the 1960s, the neighborhood was blighted and the Federal Government wanted to tear it down and build low-income housing. Local residents didn’t want this to happen, so they got together to buy and restore the buildings. They did a good job and now the area around looks solidly prosperous and well painted. We did talk to one outdoorsman. He told me that some sort of food stamp coupons were worth $100,000.00. He once offered to trade one of these coupons for a Canadian $2.00 bill, but the fool wouldn’t take the trade. He seemed more prosperous than outdoorsmen in Washington, since he had his possessions strapped to the back of a bike, instead of in an old shopping cart. Still, I don’t know whether to believe this guy. When we met him, he was fishing change out of a fountain. I figure he should get a job at Strawberry Banke playing a street person from the blighted neighborhood of the 1960s.

Strawberry Banke is not like Williamsburg, where all the history centers on one era. The buildings here are restored to various times in the life of the neighborhood. One house, for example, half is from the late 17th Century, while the other half is a working class house from the 1950s. They have a Jewish immigrant house from 1919, complete with a Jewish housewife (Mrs. Shapiro) who tells the story of her family and how they came to America from Ukraine. Living history also included the wife of a governor at the governor’s house and a woman at the grocery store. They all did a very good job of assuming the roles.

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Little Women and the Transcendentalists

We visited the home turf of Thoreau and Emerson in Concord, MA. Actually, we spent a lot more time with Louisa May Alcott, who wrote “Little Women”. They all lived near each other and interacted on a regular basis.

“Little Women” was Chrissy’s favorite book when she was a girl. I suppose there are men who have read it voluntarily, but we were not the target audience. I did enjoy touring the house, however. Louisa’s father was named Bronson. He was an interesting guy who came from extreme poverty. His father was probably illiterate, but Bronson taught himself. I never knew anything about him, but evidently he influenced many people besides his famous daughter. Emerson’s essay on the American scholar is supposed to have been based on him. In his house was educated a local artist who went on to sculpt the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln memorial. Thoreau was a frequent guest. All that said, the man was obviously weird and probably hard to live with. He didn’t support his family well, and they were always poor until Louisa May made big money from “Little Women” and her subsequent writings.

Louisa May never married. According to the guide, her mother and father had different personalities. I think that is docent code for family conflict. That, and her father’s remarkable inability to earn a decent living for his family, may have soured her on the opposite sex. If a movie were made about Louisa May Alcott as an adult, Glen Close would certainly play her. I am not fond of Glen Close, but you have to give Louisa May Alcott credit. She supported her whole family, on to the third generation, with the money she earned and never seems to have complained about anything. She traced and paid all her father’s debts, which were many, sent her high-strung little sister to art school in Europe and paid for the family house, which we visited.

The Alcott house was built first in the 1600s and later extended and improved. It is a pleasant place, but the ceilings are very low and the floors badly warped. In fact, the place is crumbling. Powder beetles, which have a diet a lot like termites, have eaten most of the supporting pillars. Besides that, Bronson put some of the house on the dirt – no foundation. Direct contact with wet earth is not good for wooden structures. I guess the house lasted long enough for his purposes. The place is being restored by some society created specifically to do that, probably consisting mostly of earnest old ladies with a lot of money. I have no doubt they will succeed.

I enjoy such houses because of the personal insight you get into the people’s lives. In the Alcott case, I was impressed on how contemporary the family seemed. Sure, they did a lot of things we no longer do, but they had similar problems, hopes and dreams. As I wrote, Bronson was weird. He imposed tasks on his family and made them all vegetarians. From all indications, however, they didn’t really listen to him. It sounds a lot like a modern sitcom, maybe Frazier with five kids. Bronson also dreamed big. He built “The Concord School of Philosophy” next to his house. It is sort of a fancy barn with a big lecture hall. It is unheated, so classes were held only in summer. His faculty consisted of himself, but he printed up programs and managed to get most of the famous people who passed through Boston to come out and give lectures. A freelance university – you just couldn’t do anything like that today, but it is easier to start a dot com.

The picture below is one of the fine New England stone walls behind the Alcott place.

Walden
After the Alcott place, we visited Walden Pond, where HD Thoreau wrote the famous journal about his life in the wilderness. It is not wilderness now, and it was even less wilderness then, when the area was heavily farmed. You can walk from Concord to Walden in about a half hour and there were always people around even in Thoreau’s time. Thoreau was kind of going out to live in the local park. I am sure he was a local curiosity – strange old Henry living next to the lake. It is as if I found a guy along one of my running trails who thought he was living in the wilderness because there were a few big trees and a couple of fierce chipmunks prowling nearby. If Thoreau was really looking for wilderness, he could have easily found it in 19th century America. The truth is that Thoreau didn’t like wilderness, at least how we would use the term today. The one recorded time he came in contact with the real thing was during a visit to the State of Maine, when he complained that it was too lonely up there. His quest for the simple life was obviously a hobby. But like Bronson Alcott, he dreamed big and left a lasting mark.

Walden pond is bigger than I thought it would be, even if not so big. I bet I could swim across it. Chrissy doubts my bold claim. In fact, some people were swimming, although they were wearing wet suits. Didn’t look that hard. Where we saw the lake, there was a beach with sand brought in from somewhere else. These little mud-bottomed lakes don’t naturally have sandy beaches. It reminded me a lot of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis. Bunches of teenagers were loitering around. I bet the place gets even more popular with them when the sun goes down.

Thoreau’s Wilderness
I listened to a lecture by a forester from the University of Massachusetts called “Thoreau’s Country”. He pointed out the Massachusetts looked much less like wilderness in Thoreau’s time than it does today. In those days, farming was inefficient (although organic) and a lot more acreage had to be under the plow or in pasture. It leads to an interesting dilemma for preservationists. What do we preserve? If we leave the land alone, it will quickly be covered with forest, but heavy forest is not the landscape that Thoreau, Emerson or Alcott would recognize. Of course, farming with the old methods is not economical and the upscale local communities would object to the pungent presence of pigs, horses and cows needed to keep the fields from becoming forests. (Maybe horses would be okay. Upscale people like horses. Grazing horses are picturesque; running horses are graceful, but cows are a stretch, especially on the graceful running, and pigs have none of these redeeming characteristics.) He guy also said that modern people don’t really understand where their resources come from. In Thoreau’s day, people knew some of the local trees were for fuel or furniture and today’s pig was tomorrow’s pork. When food and fuel comes from far away, people can delude themselves about nature being a big park full of benign creatures that are to be seen but not touched.

Thoreau’s Tool Shed
Back to our trip. We saw a reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin. The real thing has long since become compost. That is Chrissy with Thoreau’s ghost in the picture in front of his cabin. He really craved Coca-Cola, but water was all we had. Thoreau’s place was much like a shed for the lawnmower.