On a hot, humid early July evening last year, my cousin Matthew and I went swimming in Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. We used to swim at Walden fairly often when we were younger, but it had been a while since we’d last been there.
As the afternoon breeze and crowds dissipated, we followed a trail through the woods to the far end of the pond and found a secluded spot among the trees and shrubs along the shoreline.
It wasn’t far from where Henry David Thoreau lived for two years during the 1840s in the shelter and solitude of a small cabin. There, he chronicled his transformative interactions with nature, and eventually wrote the renowned philosophical tome “Walden.”
Why We Wrote This
The sharp, divisive, sometimes bitter tenor of politics has ebbed and flowed during our writer’s life. Nature provides him shelter from the storm, a constant in an uncertain world.
As we waded into the pond, the cool, clear water provided welcome relief from the summer heat, as well as a brief escape from the bitter political partisanship that seemed omnipresent. We swam out about 50 feet or so and reminisced for a while about our past excursions to Walden Pond. The still water of early evening reflected the forest that surrounded the 61-acre pond, and I floated peacefully on my back as I watched the sun setting over the pine trees.
I’ve been swimming at Walden since high school, some 50 years ago. Little has changed since then. There’s a bigger parking lot, and a gift shop now, along with a nearby replica of Thoreau’s cabin.
But the mixed forest of pines and birches, oaks, and maples still looks pretty much the same as when my friends and I swam there in the 1970s. Red squirrels still scold you from the branches overhead, and chipmunks scurry away at your approach.
The water of the 100-foot-deep pond – technically a “kettle lake” because of its glacial origins – is still clear, and the bottom is rocky and sandy. Curious little smallmouth bass and sunfish swim around your feet as you wade in the shallows. And children squeal with delight as they splash in the pond.
Matthew and I swam for about an hour, before drying off and walking half a mile back to the parking lot.
We decided to grab a bite to eat. As we drove, we talked about how beautiful Walden is, and how we missed swimming there like we used to. It wasn’t until we sat down at a restaurant and saw the news on the TV there that we realized that while we were enjoying a peaceful evening swimming at Walden Pond, the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign had been changed by violence.
The fractured, divisive politics of a presidential election year had come to a head with the attempted assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Sadly, a year later, our nation is still divided on so many levels.
Thoreau wrote of his years at Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
As a boy, I went to the woods out of curiosity about the natural world and learned a lot from what it had to teach.
But I also found refuge in nature. As I grew up on various Marine Corps bases in the 1960s, the Vietnam War was a constant looming presence. Many of my friends’ dads were deployed overseas. Some never came back.
My father, a career Marine, was stationed at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in northern Virginia, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of the war. During those years at Quantico, my friends and I delighted in exploring the natural world around us, hiking along forest trails and splashing through creeks, searching for all manner of fascinating creatures – fish and frogs, snakes and salamanders, toads and turtles.
Nature also provided us shelter from the chaos around us. It was a constant in an uncertain world. The wood thrush’s ethereal flutelike song echoing in the woods at sunset, small schools of redside dace darting about in forest streams, bullfrogs calling from the edges of ponds – they were always there, and still are.
In his book “Last Child in the Woods,” author Richard Louv writes, “In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.”
As a boy, I found a separate peace in nature, a respite from the outside world, much like Thoreau found at Walden.
As a man, I still do.
