Read an Excerpt
Deep Travel
In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack
By DAVID K. LEFF University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2009 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-58729-789-2
Chapter One
Canoe and Time Machine
We hear so much said about the mighty Missouri, the great Ohio and other tributaries of that king of rivers that we feel almost ashamed of our own comparatively small rivers. Boston Courier, August 0, 18 9
Invigorating Climate of NH Creates Boom Manchester Union Leader, August 1, 1969
FBI joins probe of Iraq Lowell Sun, September 1, 200
I dug my paddle deeply into the river, pulling hard along the canoe's stern. Each stroke seemed more difficult than the last, as if the water had become viscous, slowly solidifying like concrete. My shoulders and arms throbbed. My back ached from fighting a stiff wind that pushed the boat sideways.
"Brace yourself for another damn speedboat wake," Alan shouted from the bow. His voice seemed distant, almost lost in the breeze as he gestured toward a broad open boat with fishing rods standing at attention like antennae and huge twin Johnson outboards hanging over the transom. Unrelenting August sun sparkled on the river, stinging myeyes. I blinked at the powerboat gliding so easily while we struggled for every foot of forward motion. The wake hit us broadside like an ocean roller, and instinctively we each shifted our weight to keep the canoe from tipping.
We passed a tan brick cube of a building cantilevered over the river and marked on our map as a Lowell water department pumping station. Suddenly, I was thirsty. My lips were sun-dried and my throat parched, but I didn't dare let go of my paddle long enough to take a swig from the water bottle. With even a momentary distraction, the wind would shove us against the bank like a hockey player making a hard check.
Nearby, a couch and sink were washed up onshore along with the usual beer cans, plastic bottles, and foam cups. The city undoubtedly treated its water, but at the moment that fact hardly made the thought of drinking it more appetizing. Weren't pesticides and fertilizers running off the lush greens and fairways of the Vesper Country Club just upriver? Hadn't we seen the bubbling geyser of Nashua's sewer outfall in midstream the day before?
As we crossed beneath power lines carried from bank to bank on twin towers, a couple of jet skis whining like giant mosquitoes darted around us, leaving twisted and braided wakes. The left bank immediately above us was dotted with houses and small commercial buildings, and traffic whizzed in and out of the city on Route 113. Railroad tracks paralleled the far opposite shore. An old redbrick mill hunkered in the distance.
Why would two middle-aged guys drive hours to canoe a lakelike impoundment on the Merrimack River in a garden spot like the battered industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts? Could there be a more peculiar outdoor vacation destination than the tired mill precincts of the Northeast? If we had craved a paddle through settled countryside, the bucolic Farmington River with its treed banks and rollercoaster rapids beckoned just down the street from our Connecticut homes. Like the Merrimack, it passed a few old factories, Indian encampments, and vistas with farms, forests, and hillsides sporting new subdivisions. For adventure, I could have returned to the wild heart of Labrador or the edge of polar bear country on Ontario's James Bay. If vacations were about rest, beauty, a change of scenery, and getting away from it all, what were we doing here?
Was this a dare? Could money be involved? Did it hint at the bizarre twist of a midlife crisis? There had to be an ulterior motive.
No doubt such were the thoughts of friends and colleagues who learned we were off for a few days of canoeing. At first, they approvingly envisioned some remote stream with a thickly treed shoreline and primitive campsites far from paved roads. But when we revealed our destination, an awkward silence often resulted, soon broken by a weak smile, as if we were joking. Then they patiently waited for a punch line.
They offered cautionary words of concern for our health and safety. Hepatitis and worse lurked in such garbage-strewn and polluted waters. We could drown at abandoned and uncharted dams. Old machinery and chunks of metal lay in ambush just below the water's surface, ready to tear our small canoe apart. Regardless of positive change over the past thirty years, the Merrimack retained its notoriety as an industrial sewer.
A few explanations seemed to allay most anxieties but could not dispel concern for our sanity. Clearly, we seemed borderline lunatic to people with vacation plans for Paris or the Jersey shore. Why would two people with busy jobs, families clamoring for attention, gardens needing tending, houses crying out for repair, and volunteer activities demanding time spend their valuable vacation days on a river hemmed in with development when they could just as well float Maine's Allagash Wilderness Waterway or kayak around the Florida Keys?
The incredulous faces of friends now seemed to appear in the crests of waves driven by the wind into whitecaps as we paddled ever harder to make even slower progress toward the dam at Pawtucket Falls. The vague images made me feel like Scrooge rubbing his tired eyes at the sight of Marley's ghost. My shoulder was about to give out from an hour of exhausting paddling against the growing gusts, and my back threatened to spasm.
Despite the whistling breeze, I heard trucks rumbling where the road swung close to the water. The landscape grew increasingly crowded with a hodgepodge of structures. Like an ersatz flower pot, a rusting fifty-five-gallon drum sprouting a willow sapling lay at the river's edge, and a suicidal washing machine that had leapt from the steep embankment was just downstream. The whitecaps whispered, "Told you so."
"That's the Rourke Bridge," I yelled to Alan as soon as I saw the span's thin gray line stretched across the water. Rather than turning toward me and missing a paddle stroke, he nodded his head. Being in the bow, he likely saw it first anyway. But I was less interested in a landmark than in voicing my presence and giving a shout of encouragement. I was still pulling with him. We had a definable goal on the horizon.
Alan and I paddled for none of the usual reasons people interrupt their normal routines to slide a canoe into the water. There was no wilderness, whitewater, pastoral countryside, or arresting urban scene. We weren't fishing, hunting, or racing. We were deep traveling.
At its simplest, deep travel is about heightened awareness. It is careful looking. It is paying attention to what is around you. Deep travel demands that we immerse ourselves fully in places and realize that they exist in time as well as space. A deep traveler knows the world is four-dimensional and can't be experienced with eyes and ears only.
Deep travel is not so much a matter of seeing sights as it is sight-seeking. It is a searching for the patterns and juxtapositions of culture and nature and delighting in the incongruities left by the inexorable passage of time. Deep travelers revel in the wild, inspiriting call of a kingfisher as it flies over a couple of trolling anglers with Bud longnecks in one hand and rods in the other. They savor the sight of a tree-shaded burial ground squeezed between big-box retailers on a traffic-choked commercial strip.
Deep travelers look not so much for scenery or enchanting objects as for a tapestry of comprehension woven from stone walls, retail establishments, street and topographical names, transportation networks, building styles, plant and animal assemblages, advertising signs, and other artifacts. Each element makes a statement about the landscape as a whole and the relationship of one part to another. Together, they tell a story. Deep travel is an ecological way of looking where everything we see has a function and all the parts are related, no matter how seemingly disparate or contradictory.
Like animals that remain intensely aware of their surroundings and any alteration to them because predation or starvation await the unwary, deep travelers work to be keenly conscious of their environs. They strive for the alertness and acuity of wildland firefighters or soldiers whose survival depends on their knowledge of topography, history, weather, vegetation, and the observance of changes in minute phenomena. Such mindfulness simultaneously enriches experience and makes the voyager worthy of the journey.
Alan and I aspired to being the Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus of the near-at-hand. We were less on our way to a particular place than exploring a means of going places. The river's destiny meant more than our destination. But unlike the great discoverers, our goal was less to look for something different and novel than it was to look in a novel way at something familiar. We weren't trying a new route of travel or exploring new territory. In fact, contrary to the usual dream of outdoor enthusiasts seeking the grail of going where few have been, we were here precisely because others had preceded us.
The archetypal trip on the Merrimack River, as well as on the Concord, was made in 18 9 by twenty-two-year-old Henry David Thoreau and his brother John, three years his elder. They left their hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, on the afternoon of August 31, having been delayed by a light rain that morning. Their upstream voyage concluded on the Merrimack in Hooksett, New Hampshire, six days later. Hiding their rowboat in a cove, they took a side trip by foot and stage to the White Mountains, returning after a few days for the voyage home. They were back in Concord on September 13.
It was a time of accelerating change in New England, especially in the Merrimack Valley. Large-scale industrialization was on the rise in cities like Lowell and Manchester, New Hampshire. Railroads were gaining ascendancy over the canals that floated the brothers on part of their voyage.
Thoreau witnessed a still bucolic landscape, but one in which rivers were increasingly harnessed to earn human livelihoods with dams, power canals, turbines, and leather belts to turn machinery. Observing changes wrought by growing industrialism and commercial farming such as denuded forests, barriers to migratory fish, and destruction of Indian artifacts, the young man surely began developing a view of nature different from the one defined by biblical dominion and capitalistic entrepreneurship. He saw the natural world not as an economic resource merely to be subdued for human benefit, but as pregnant with intrinsic value-wildness, beauty, and organic functions. This outlook would percolate in American thought, growing in importance and ultimately providing the philosophical underpinnings in the late twentieth century for the subversive science of ecology and the environmental movement.
Despite our mix of pleasure and frustration in trying to envision the river as Thoreau saw it, ours was no mere Love Boat nostalgia cruise. We weren't paddling for escape or as an armada of reproach at the onslaught of development since his time. But with construction within the river corridor accelerating and "Smart Growth" buzzwords in nearby communities, could there be a more pertinent place to confront contemporary dilemmas at play on the landscape? Its artificial and natural attributes posed questions and offered lessons on the viability of cities, forest conservation, transportation, historic preservation, waste disposal, sprawl, and even global climate change. Being armed with Thoreau's more than a century-and-a-half-old observations as we gazed at today's countryside would give us a more acute perception of change over time, helping us understand the present and anticipate the future. We were not just looking around, but learning how to see.
Floating a small boat away from the routines of daily life, Henry and John Thoreau lived their Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalist dictum of self-reliance and an "original relation to the universe." Buoyant with this philosophical energy, they peered past the gunwales in search of universal truths from a mundane slice of the world. With muscle power and keen observation, couldn't Alan and I do the same despite the cluttered twenty-first-century landscape?
Perhaps more instructive to the deep traveler than what Thoreau saw is the Transcendental way in which he looked at things. In addition to seeing worldwide verities in small facts and occurrences, he sought connections among diverse thoughts and phenomena that could make commonplace experiences epiphanic. Most significantly, Thoreau perceived correspondences between the landscape and a person's inner state. Geographical experience was about more than being in a place, more than visual and aesthetic reactions. Emotional resonances tied spirit to topography and gave singular dimension to what he observed. In Thoreau's youthful voyage are the roots of deep travel.
Although Thoreau is most famous for sojourning at Walden Pond several years after his river trip, the "private business" he proclaimed to transact while living there was the writing of his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which was published in 1849. A series of philosophical musings tied together by a river voyage narrative, the volume is shaped as much by Thoreau's complex friendship with his brother, who tragically died shortly afterward, as it is by the topography of the Merrimack Valley. Though hidden below the text's surface, the outer landscape clearly corresponds to an inner emotional state. At the book's end, Thoreau's inward sentiment about John's death blossoms in the natural world when he uses autumnal imagery, though it is barely mid-September, to describe the last glorious day traveling with his brother.
That Thoreau's travel recollections are heavily colored by his brother's death emphasizes how our viewpoints always depend somewhat on our experiences with companions. Human relationships frequently frame our understanding of the places we travel. However distant or fleeting our connection to an area, we see a place distinctly if, for example, we met a lover or lost a friend in a tragic accident there. Even less intense experiences with a partner often influence our outlook and distinguish a location from the perceptions of others. This effect of companions was manifest as I shared my canoe on the Concord and Merrimack rivers at times with my neighbor and old friend, Alan; my eleven-year-old son, Josh; and my sweetheart, Pamela.
My perspective was shaped not only by personal relationships, but also by the experiences my companions brought with them. Alan's landscape acuity as a veteran city planner; Josh's fresh, boyish inquisitiveness; and Pamela's compassion for people as a professional caregiver broadened my vision and added depth of field to what I saw. Their company would not only mold the journey, the journey would shape and grow our relationships and give further texture to our most routine future interactions. My fellow paddlers, in turn, no doubt benefited from my years as a top government official in natural resources policy, an experience that taught me not only about the connections among diverse and divergent features in the countryside, but about the intersection of places and social politics.
With its perceptive descriptions and emotional resonances, A Week was our principal travel guide. No doubt dated compared with the latest Frommer's or Michelin, it remained relevant to our trip as a methodology and a yardstick of progress. The old book enabled us to see things that no longer existed and perceive the tenor of a distant era. Wherever we went, I tried to imagine the world through the eyes of the Concord naturalist. His perceptions allowed us not only to reconstruct and see the past but to measure change and the passage of time. Alert the keepers of Guinness World Records! Surely we hold the record for using the oldest travel guide.
Although A Week is a bit stale as a reference, its use recognizes that much outdoor travel and writing are inevitably mere footnotes on Thoreau. Indeed, it is nigh impossible to pen an outdoor adventure, however originally conceived or well written, without drawing a comparison. If we inescapably follow in Thoreau's footsteps or paddle strokes regardless of our itinerary, I thought, why not confront that essential fact explicitly, thoroughly, and Thoreauly by traveling the first of the familiar routes he pioneered? Could there be a finer acid test for measuring the Transcendental originality of our own relationship with the universe and the landscape? After all, deep travel is a lot about upsetting expectations of the familiar.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Deep Travel by DAVID K. LEFF Copyright © 2009 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
