Walden Pond WALDEN POND “There ain’t anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.” — Mark Twain, TOM SAWYER ABROAD The Thoreau Media Center has sponsored the attitude, without offering evidence, that Walden Pond was so named because some family in Concord had come there as an early settler from the town of Saffron Walden in England. Although it was only in 1652 or 1653 that for the 1st time a Concord property record mentioned the name “Walden Pond,” obviously such a geographical feature would have had to have had a name prior to such a late point in English settlement time. That prior name would have needed to have been either 1.) some native American name which the white people didn’t bother to preserve, or 2.) some variant of Walden/Waldens Woods/ Pond as now. So, leaving speculation aside, we know at the very least that this name Walden/Waldens Wood/Pond predates the Minot family of Saffron Walden’s arrival in Concord (Samuel Minot, son of the first John Minot and Lydia Butler Minot, the first member of this family to arrive in Concord, was not even born until July 3, 1665). Since there was already a Richard Waldron, probably a younger brother of Representative William HDT WHAT? INDEX TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA WALDRON of Dover, New Hampshire associated with Major Simon Willard, the woodland may have been previously named for this man or for the Walden family of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony. An educated guess would be that the name Walden as applied to the pond would have been derived from the name Walden as applied to the woodland within which it is situated, rather than vice versa, for the simple fact that the name “Walden” means woodlands, and my working hypothesis, which of course needs to be confirmed or disconfirmed by investigation into historical records, is that we will find that at some point these woodlands had been owned by that Walden/Waldron family of which Richard Waldron was a member. Terrain such as this, utterly sandy and uneven and lacking in either fish or game, would have been useful only for the collection of firewood and the manufacture of charcoal, and thus would have ordinarily been being referred to anyway as woodland, meaning firewood-collection-area, hence the placename “Walden Woods” would have been regarded as very appropriate from two standpoints: not only the putative ownership of the region by the Walden family, but also the derivation of the name for the woodlands per a family name indicating woodlands. A theory that Walden Pond was named after some family other than the Minots, from Saffron Walden in England, would of course need to establish that some such family had arrived in Concord in the Massachusetts Bay Colony prior to 1653. I don’t myself right now know of anyone who has sponsored such a speculation. Therefore for the time being I am considering the story being told by the Thoreau Media Center to be a just-so story, being offered to the public merely because it has a pleasant sound to it. HDT WHAT? INDEX TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Walden Pond BLOODY GROUND Literature is a plant which thrives best in spots where blood has been spilt long ago. — Nathaniel Hawthorne There is a case in which this is decidedly true, and a case in which this is decidedly false. Why would Hawthorne have conflated a truth and a falsehood into one assertion? The case in which this is decidedly true is the case in which the responsibility for the bloodshed lies with someone else, whom one may blame, and in the blaming direct one’s hostility outward. The case in which this is decidedly false, the case in which literature is a blighted growth, suppressed, maligned, is the case in which the responsibility for the bloodshed lies with oneself or with someone or something associated with oneself, the case in which it does not make one’s life work to blame the perp because in blaming one would need to focus one’s hostility inward, and allow it to eat at oneself, and recreate oneself. We don’t want to be wrong, we want other people to be wrong. We don’t need to molest ourselves, we need to molest other people. The purpose behind conflating these two situations, two situations so very different, is simple: the case which is decidedly false is hidden behind the case which is decidedly true, and being hidden, need never be known. To mask a piece of paper, simply put it behind another piece of paper. To hide an act of aggression, describe it as defensive. (For instance, to hide a 19th- Century racial concentration camp at Pike Island, Minnesota, recreate a tourist exhibit of an 18th-Century frontier outpost, Fort Snelling, above it. Etc.) HDT WHAT? INDEX TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA 18,000 BCE On the basis of Carbon-14 measurements, this was the last Glacial Maximum, the coldest period of the most recent Ice Age. People made wall paintings in caves, for example in the cave of Lascaux, France. Rope was in use, according to evidence there. The extreme terminal moraine of the farthest reaching advance of the ice of our current Ice Age fell across Staten Island, where Henry Thoreau would reside, and therefore date to this period or earlier (prior to the publication of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Thoreau never lived anywhere except on top of the same sort of terrain of glacial detritus characteristic of Walden Woods — that landscape was in fact the sole landscape with which he to that point had had any experience at all). Chauvet cave in France. People living in or visiting caves in what are now Israel and Jordan were putting notches on bones to record sequences of numbers (the devices are thought to have functioned primarily as lunar calendars). By about this point or at least by 13,000 BCE, the spear thrower and the harpoon would have been invented. The first-known artifact with a map on it, made of bone, has been at what is now Mezhirich — it appears to show the region immediately around the site at which it was found. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION Based on the best global evidence available (continuous cores from abyssal marine sediments and from the summit domes of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets), the Walden paleo-valley was probably glaciated four times. These well-dated global records match the tally of four glaciations present in both the sea- cliffs of Nantucket and and [sic] drill cores of Georges Bank. Based on the best astronomical dates on hand, these glaciations culminated about 22, 130, 420, and 620 thousand years ago, plus or minus a few thousand years. During each of the four ice sheet culminations, the same source of ice moved over the same paleo-valley with the same HDT WHAT? INDEX TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA mechanisms, and reached roughly the same thickness over roughly the same resistant bedrock topography. Even more conservative was the bedrock highland associated with the Bloody Bluff Fault that divides the watersheds of the Sudbury River and Charles River. This suggests that comparable drainage scenarios were present during each ice advance and retreat, meaning that a series of broadly similar glacial lakes existed in the Sudbury Valley as the ice sheets came and went. Using Occam’s Razor, the default assumption is that previous ice sheets made previous versions of Walden. Not clones or identical twins but fraternal twins, perhaps the relationship Thoreau had in mind when he linked Walden and White Ponds. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE, pages 98-9 TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA 15,200 BCE The receding of the glacial ice past Concord, Massachusetts toward the north, creating what has now become Walden Woods (“Historic woodland surrounding Walden Pond, especially to the north. Generally characterized by irregular topography and sterile soils associated with meltdown collapse of the Walden kame delta”) and what has now become Walden Pond. (“Lake in Concord, Massachusetts, created by melting of multiple residual blocks of stagnant ice and maintained by the filling of large voids with groundwater beneath a steady state water table. Its western basin was the site of Thoreau’s famous experiment in deliberate living and the inspiration for his book WALDEN”). Were one to dig downward at the pond’s deepest point, at 102 feet of water depth, one would need to burrow through the 12 feet of soft sediments that have accumulated during the interim millennia, before reaching the relatively thin layer of “gravelly sand” detrius that had once covered over and insulated these blocks of stagnant ice — and, immediately below that thin layer, one’s burrowing would come to an abrupt halt as one encountered a smooth surface of Andover granite bedrock. Point d’appui. “Glacial polish, grooves, and striations are almost certainly present.” THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA 8,000 BCE Little information is available for the New England region during the Early Archaic Period. We know that oaks, pitch pines, and beeches were beginning to flourish. As the glacier melted, it deposited scraped up erosional debris atop the bedrock. Streams stemming from the melting glaciers formed valleys such as the Mill Brook valley. Enormous buried blocks of ice would eventually be creating water-filled depressions in the landscape.