I don’t even know where to begin. I have no idea how to put into words the feelings I felt today as I walked through Concord, Massachusetts. I have dreamed about Walden Pond and Orchard House and The Old Manse for as long as I have known about Louisa May Alcott and Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Let me begin by saying Concord did not disappoint.
We had a drive of about an hour and a half from Springfield to Concord, and this time, we programmed the GPS accurately so that we missed unnecessary Boston traffic. As we approached the hallowed grounds, we saw signs telling us to take exit 29A for Walden Pond State Reservation. Yet, when we reached exit 29A, Marc said he saw a construction sign that said exit 29A was closed. I didn’t react like Clark Griswold right away; I thought logically at first and decided that if exit 29A were truly closed, then a detour would be designated. Yet, as we drove past exit 29A, I saw cars riding clearly on exit 29A. “I swear,” Marc said. “I swear it said the exit was closed.”
We had to drive to the next exit and make a u-turn across the bridge and return to exit 29A, and Marc even suggested we try an alternate route, but as soon as he saw the look on my face, he knew I didn’t want to experiment with our paths. So, we returned to exit 29A, which was perfectly clear, but I do think they had been working on that area over the last few days. Regardless, we made our way into Concord. Interesting enough, though, as we made our way around a traffic circle, we passed a jail – a Massachusetts correctional facility. I couldn’t quite understand why officials would put a jail so close to Walden Pond. An area of forced confinement and rules adjacent to a legendary space of independence and nonconformity. Obvious irony.
Yet, our battle with CLOSED signs was not over. As we turned into the state reservation area, more than one sign read “Walden Pond closed. At capacity. Will reopen at 1:30.” We had just arrived a little before 11 am.
Now was the time for Clark Griswold. They couldn’t close Walden Pond. I had traveled over 1000 miles on this pilgrimage. I had to see the pond and his camp site and even the replica cabin. My breathing became shallow as we drove up and down the road with dozens of other visitors, frustrated with the park rangers who kept us moving and would not let us stop and watch. “NO DROP OFFS AND NO WALKERS” the signs said. No way. No way. No way. This couldn’t happen to me.
“We can come back at 1:30, Kristie,” Marc said. He knew I was close to breakdown status, so he offered a little levity. “We can go look at something else and come back at 1:30. Unless you want me to go find a sporting goods store.”
That made me laugh a little, so I agreed to go to Orchard House next while we waited on Walden Pond to reopen. I don’t know if they made the patrons from the morning leave by 1:30 or what, but Marc promised to have us back there by 1:00 so we could be ready and waiting on the 1:30 parking lot opening.
For those who don’t know, Orchard House is one of the houses where Louisa May Alcott lived. I love Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women. I love her daddy, Bronson Alcott, too, since he was a prominent progressive and Transcendentalist who spent time with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, but Little Women is a very special piece of literature for me. I first read Little Women when I was in ninth grade after my friend, Jennifer, suggested I read it. She knew I loved Civil War stories, and she knew I would identify with Jo March. In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I would say Jo March was created just for me. Jo is a tomboy who wants to be a writer, a girl who battles between her longing to be accepted as a girl with her longing to be accepted as a writer. She wants to be selfless, and sometimes she manages selfless acts, but she still has ambitions for herself. She loves her family but longs for an exciting life. In the end, she becomes a writer and a teacher and falls in love with a German professor, and they become progressive teachers together. If you know me, you know how close Jo and I are. So, Louisa May Alcott was my introduction to Transcendentalist philosophy, and through Jo March, I fell in love with Concord and the amazing minds that met around her house. I had seen Orchard House in the movies and online countless times, and she was just a couple of miles away.
We had no trouble finding Orchard House at 399 Lexington Road. We pulled in to a parking space easily, and we immediately began taking photos. As we began walking the path toward the house, a woman who was watering the flowers there said, “You know the house isn’t open until 1:00, right?”
Detour #2. I asked her where to find a public restroom, and she pointed me toward downtown to the visitors center, and we thanked her and drove less than a mile to the center of Concord village. I passed a sign for Authors Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and The Old Manse, mentally marking where I would begin as soon as I took a restroom break. I could feel tears welling as I trekked downtown toward the visitors center. I was here. Really here. Where they had walked and written and changed the world.
After my bathroom break, Marc suggested I go into the visitors center, and I did. I looked at some brochures, and the attendant asked if she could help me. “No, I think I am just looking. I must be one of the thousands of high school English teachers you see making this pilgrimage,” I answered her.
“But it is a worthy pilgrimage,” she said. She gave me a map of the cemetery so I could find Authors Ridge easily, and we started back up the hill. I must have been nearly jogging up the road because the boys kept making jokes about being left behind, but I had a limited amount of time to see their graves before I headed back to Walden Pond at 1:30 and then return to Orchard House and then the rest of our tour.
We made it to the bottom of the hill where their graves lie only to be thwarted again by a large woman and her skinny male companion who chose to saunter toward the graves instead. After making a few impolite pushing gestures behind her, I found Thoreau’s grave first. I really wanted to be there without strangers present because I knew my emotions were at a breaking point, but the round woman stayed close by. She just had to witness my tears because when I saw the small stone with the name HENRY on it, the emotions erupted. Fellow pilgrims had left a shrine of natural objects – rocks, pine cones, leaves and even a penny sitting on top of his little tombstone. I was not alone, even if the couple in front of me hadn’t been there. I was there with all the others whose lives had been changed by Thoreau’s words. I was not a nerdy English teacher; I was a soldier in his army of naturalists, pacifists, and activists. I tried to explain to Jordan and Joel why people had left these little trinkets on his grave, but I don’t know if they understood my explanation over my gasps and quiet sobs.
Thoreau’s family grave plots sat nearly right beside the Alcotts’ graves, which lined up in a triangle with the graves of the Hawthornes directly on the other side of the foot path. Their graves sat at the top of a hill in the middle of numerous trees – exactly where I would have expected they would have wanted to be buried. I moved to the Alcott plot next. Louisa May’s grave site was covered in pens and pencils that had been propped into the ground near her name – maybe by girls like me who wanted to write like Jo.
“Y’all don’t understand how much I identified with Jo March,” I tried to tell Marc and Jordan and Joel. They all sat respectfully in the cemetery, but I think I caused them not a little confusion by the onslaught of tears that I was unable to control. Louisa May Alcott brought me into the Transcendentalist fold; she was my first love in this web of transformation in my life. I owe her so much.
“Hawthorne is over here,” Marc said after a few minutes.
“I don’t know if I am ready for Hawthorne, yet,” I answered because I knew the tears would start again when I saw where he and Sophia were buried. As much as Thoreau changed my life, and as much as I admire Emerson’s influence on our way of thinking, and as much as I owe Louisa May Alcott, none of it compares to the way I feel about Nathaniel Hawthorne. If I channeled Jo March when I was a teenager, I commiserated with Nathaniel Hawthorne more times than I can count as an adult. I tell my students every year that Hawthorne is my dead boyfriend because he speaks to my soul. Through The Scarlet Letter, I feel his frustration with the organized church, and I suffer with Dimmesdale for his repressed guilt, and I long for justice along side Hester. Every year when I teach it, I find another line or another observation more beautiful and powerful than I noticed the year before. And every year, I am convinced his words ring truer for my generation than his own. And he loved Sophia, and she loved him passionately. He battled what he knew to be true in his heart throughout his life, and his frustrations with humanity come screeching softly through his words. I love him. I understand him. I believe him.
He and Sophia lie side by side along with the children they lost early. Some fellow pilgrims had left some plastic roses and a few rocks, as well. I wish I had a real red rose to set on his grave, to offer that same sweet moral blossom he gives us in the opening chapter of his masterpiece.
Emerson’s grave rests on past these three, a little further up the hill, his grave marked by a giant rock. All appropriate for this giant of a man who led the others in this philosophical and literary revolution.
By the time we made it back down the hill to our car, the time was close to 1:00. Marc vowed to have me sitting and waiting to enter Walden Pond’s parking lot at 1:30, so we traveled back the two miles to Walden Pond. Dozens of others had the same idea as cars lined the side of the road waiting for the 1:30 opening time. Park rangers passed through and told us we couldn’t wait – just to come back at 1:30.
“Marc, keep driving up and down this road until they let us in. I will not be denied entry because some park ranger made me leave the line.”
So that is what we did; we rode up and down the road until about 1:25 when other cars decided to block the drive in anticipation of reaching the parking lot. One park ranger with a bull horn barreled out that we should move our cars left to turn into the soon-to-be-opened parking lot, but I was afraid that moving would put us out of line, so we decided to stay put. Another park ranger came up to our car and asked us to let back in the line the car in front of us whose driver had taken the bull-horn ranger’s words at face value. Of course, we did, and we explained to the ranger what the other ranger had said, and Marc also explained, “I have an English teacher in the car who traveled 1000 miles to visit this pond, and she doesn’t want to get turned away again.” The ranger promised that we would get in, and we did. Finally.
And Walden Pond was more than I expected. I saw the replica house and enjoyed that, but I wanted to walk around the pond; I wanted to see where these writers had spent their afternoons walking and where Alcott had ice skated in the winter. The pond was a magical place; they had all told me so. And they had told the truth since I had known them, so I had to believe them again.
I waded in the shallow end for a few minutes. I watched people swimming and kayaking and paddle boarding. Marc and I were astounded at how the pond has a beach area all around; visitors can set up chairs and kayaks and picnics at any point around the water. Several walking trails line the outskirts, but Marc and I struck out on the half-mile trail that led to the original site of Thoreau’s cabin. The boys decided to chill on the steps near the beach area while we walked. Thoreau’s cabin was on the back side of the pond; all that is left there now are concrete markers, the foundation of his chimney, and a rock pile beside the markers that designated the original corners of his little cabin and his wood shed. I am pretty sure the rock pile was created as a shrine to him because I saw another pilgrim drop a rock onto the pile, but I couldn’t leave without snatching a rock from the pile to take with me. I needed an authentic souvenir for Thoreau (but Thoreau’s admonishments against unnecessary possessions didn’t stop me from stopping by the Thoreau shop to buy “real” souvenirs, either. I know – irony again). The rock pile was guarded by a sign with the famous words from 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.”
A park ranger stood guard at the marker and told vivid stories about Thoreau and his friends, but they were stories I already knew, and he quizzed me some when he found out how much I loved these writers, but I aced each question.
But one strange moment happened. When I took a photo of a sign that indicated that this trail was one Thoreau and Emerson had walked together, a white mark on the tree showed up as a hiker’s silhouette on my camera. When I loaded the photos on to my computer tonight, the hiker’s silhouette was surrounded by a golden orb. Not telling you what to think about that, but I think such an image cannot be a coincidence.
And along with that coincidence, I am nearly certain I saw an image in the attic window when we returned to Orchard House. When I lifted the ribbons on the May Pole and explained to Jordan and Joel how she would have used such a May Pole, I swear I felt something – a vibe of some sort that led me to look upward to the attic window. Fanciful daydreaming, I am sure, but these are Transcendentalists. Intuition means something to them.
I have droned on for far too long now about my day, but I still have so much more to say. I will close with just a summary of the rest of the events, and if I have a chance, I may return to record more of the evening’s adventures later. But after Walden Pond, Marc and I took the tour of Orchard House where we were allowed closer to her world than in any other tour I have ever taken. Very few areas were roped off, and we were able to walk all around the house where authentic dresses lay across their real beds. We saw May’s real drawings still etched directly on the walls and protected by plexi-glass. And Beth’s piano. I saw Beth’s piano.
After Orchard House, we toured the Concord Museum where Thoreau’s and Emerson’s actual furniture resides. The museum also housed a collection of art from Andrew Wyeth, which was stunning, and we also saw some of Paul Revere’s silver. Really. Actual silverworks from THE Paul Revere. Emerson’s house was closed by this point, but I still looked inside the windows and walked around the gardens. We ended our day in Concord at The Old Manse and the Old North Bridge, catching more Hawthorne and Emerson vibes along with some Revolutionary War lessons from a Red Coat with a musket.
I am not sure I even understand the impact of touring Concord today. I know I was moved to tears multiple times, and I know that I felt connected to the spirit of their words that transcends the writers themselves, but I will just have to take a walk in the woods later to sift through the memories, and maybe then I will be able to start to articulate just all that happened today.
We had a drive of about an hour and a half from Springfield to Concord, and this time, we programmed the GPS accurately so that we missed unnecessary Boston traffic. As we approached the hallowed grounds, we saw signs telling us to take exit 29A for Walden Pond State Reservation. Yet, when we reached exit 29A, Marc said he saw a construction sign that said exit 29A was closed. I didn’t react like Clark Griswold right away; I thought logically at first and decided that if exit 29A were truly closed, then a detour would be designated. Yet, as we drove past exit 29A, I saw cars riding clearly on exit 29A. “I swear,” Marc said. “I swear it said the exit was closed.”
We had to drive to the next exit and make a u-turn across the bridge and return to exit 29A, and Marc even suggested we try an alternate route, but as soon as he saw the look on my face, he knew I didn’t want to experiment with our paths. So, we returned to exit 29A, which was perfectly clear, but I do think they had been working on that area over the last few days. Regardless, we made our way into Concord. Interesting enough, though, as we made our way around a traffic circle, we passed a jail – a Massachusetts correctional facility. I couldn’t quite understand why officials would put a jail so close to Walden Pond. An area of forced confinement and rules adjacent to a legendary space of independence and nonconformity. Obvious irony.
Yet, our battle with CLOSED signs was not over. As we turned into the state reservation area, more than one sign read “Walden Pond closed. At capacity. Will reopen at 1:30.” We had just arrived a little before 11 am.
Now was the time for Clark Griswold. They couldn’t close Walden Pond. I had traveled over 1000 miles on this pilgrimage. I had to see the pond and his camp site and even the replica cabin. My breathing became shallow as we drove up and down the road with dozens of other visitors, frustrated with the park rangers who kept us moving and would not let us stop and watch. “NO DROP OFFS AND NO WALKERS” the signs said. No way. No way. No way. This couldn’t happen to me.
“We can come back at 1:30, Kristie,” Marc said. He knew I was close to breakdown status, so he offered a little levity. “We can go look at something else and come back at 1:30. Unless you want me to go find a sporting goods store.”
That made me laugh a little, so I agreed to go to Orchard House next while we waited on Walden Pond to reopen. I don’t know if they made the patrons from the morning leave by 1:30 or what, but Marc promised to have us back there by 1:00 so we could be ready and waiting on the 1:30 parking lot opening.
For those who don’t know, Orchard House is one of the houses where Louisa May Alcott lived. I love Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women. I love her daddy, Bronson Alcott, too, since he was a prominent progressive and Transcendentalist who spent time with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, but Little Women is a very special piece of literature for me. I first read Little Women when I was in ninth grade after my friend, Jennifer, suggested I read it. She knew I loved Civil War stories, and she knew I would identify with Jo March. In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I would say Jo March was created just for me. Jo is a tomboy who wants to be a writer, a girl who battles between her longing to be accepted as a girl with her longing to be accepted as a writer. She wants to be selfless, and sometimes she manages selfless acts, but she still has ambitions for herself. She loves her family but longs for an exciting life. In the end, she becomes a writer and a teacher and falls in love with a German professor, and they become progressive teachers together. If you know me, you know how close Jo and I are. So, Louisa May Alcott was my introduction to Transcendentalist philosophy, and through Jo March, I fell in love with Concord and the amazing minds that met around her house. I had seen Orchard House in the movies and online countless times, and she was just a couple of miles away.
We had no trouble finding Orchard House at 399 Lexington Road. We pulled in to a parking space easily, and we immediately began taking photos. As we began walking the path toward the house, a woman who was watering the flowers there said, “You know the house isn’t open until 1:00, right?”
Detour #2. I asked her where to find a public restroom, and she pointed me toward downtown to the visitors center, and we thanked her and drove less than a mile to the center of Concord village. I passed a sign for Authors Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and The Old Manse, mentally marking where I would begin as soon as I took a restroom break. I could feel tears welling as I trekked downtown toward the visitors center. I was here. Really here. Where they had walked and written and changed the world.
After my bathroom break, Marc suggested I go into the visitors center, and I did. I looked at some brochures, and the attendant asked if she could help me. “No, I think I am just looking. I must be one of the thousands of high school English teachers you see making this pilgrimage,” I answered her.
“But it is a worthy pilgrimage,” she said. She gave me a map of the cemetery so I could find Authors Ridge easily, and we started back up the hill. I must have been nearly jogging up the road because the boys kept making jokes about being left behind, but I had a limited amount of time to see their graves before I headed back to Walden Pond at 1:30 and then return to Orchard House and then the rest of our tour.
We made it to the bottom of the hill where their graves lie only to be thwarted again by a large woman and her skinny male companion who chose to saunter toward the graves instead. After making a few impolite pushing gestures behind her, I found Thoreau’s grave first. I really wanted to be there without strangers present because I knew my emotions were at a breaking point, but the round woman stayed close by. She just had to witness my tears because when I saw the small stone with the name HENRY on it, the emotions erupted. Fellow pilgrims had left a shrine of natural objects – rocks, pine cones, leaves and even a penny sitting on top of his little tombstone. I was not alone, even if the couple in front of me hadn’t been there. I was there with all the others whose lives had been changed by Thoreau’s words. I was not a nerdy English teacher; I was a soldier in his army of naturalists, pacifists, and activists. I tried to explain to Jordan and Joel why people had left these little trinkets on his grave, but I don’t know if they understood my explanation over my gasps and quiet sobs.
Thoreau’s family grave plots sat nearly right beside the Alcotts’ graves, which lined up in a triangle with the graves of the Hawthornes directly on the other side of the foot path. Their graves sat at the top of a hill in the middle of numerous trees – exactly where I would have expected they would have wanted to be buried. I moved to the Alcott plot next. Louisa May’s grave site was covered in pens and pencils that had been propped into the ground near her name – maybe by girls like me who wanted to write like Jo.
“Y’all don’t understand how much I identified with Jo March,” I tried to tell Marc and Jordan and Joel. They all sat respectfully in the cemetery, but I think I caused them not a little confusion by the onslaught of tears that I was unable to control. Louisa May Alcott brought me into the Transcendentalist fold; she was my first love in this web of transformation in my life. I owe her so much.
“Hawthorne is over here,” Marc said after a few minutes.
“I don’t know if I am ready for Hawthorne, yet,” I answered because I knew the tears would start again when I saw where he and Sophia were buried. As much as Thoreau changed my life, and as much as I admire Emerson’s influence on our way of thinking, and as much as I owe Louisa May Alcott, none of it compares to the way I feel about Nathaniel Hawthorne. If I channeled Jo March when I was a teenager, I commiserated with Nathaniel Hawthorne more times than I can count as an adult. I tell my students every year that Hawthorne is my dead boyfriend because he speaks to my soul. Through The Scarlet Letter, I feel his frustration with the organized church, and I suffer with Dimmesdale for his repressed guilt, and I long for justice along side Hester. Every year when I teach it, I find another line or another observation more beautiful and powerful than I noticed the year before. And every year, I am convinced his words ring truer for my generation than his own. And he loved Sophia, and she loved him passionately. He battled what he knew to be true in his heart throughout his life, and his frustrations with humanity come screeching softly through his words. I love him. I understand him. I believe him.
He and Sophia lie side by side along with the children they lost early. Some fellow pilgrims had left some plastic roses and a few rocks, as well. I wish I had a real red rose to set on his grave, to offer that same sweet moral blossom he gives us in the opening chapter of his masterpiece.
Emerson’s grave rests on past these three, a little further up the hill, his grave marked by a giant rock. All appropriate for this giant of a man who led the others in this philosophical and literary revolution.
By the time we made it back down the hill to our car, the time was close to 1:00. Marc vowed to have me sitting and waiting to enter Walden Pond’s parking lot at 1:30, so we traveled back the two miles to Walden Pond. Dozens of others had the same idea as cars lined the side of the road waiting for the 1:30 opening time. Park rangers passed through and told us we couldn’t wait – just to come back at 1:30.
“Marc, keep driving up and down this road until they let us in. I will not be denied entry because some park ranger made me leave the line.”
So that is what we did; we rode up and down the road until about 1:25 when other cars decided to block the drive in anticipation of reaching the parking lot. One park ranger with a bull horn barreled out that we should move our cars left to turn into the soon-to-be-opened parking lot, but I was afraid that moving would put us out of line, so we decided to stay put. Another park ranger came up to our car and asked us to let back in the line the car in front of us whose driver had taken the bull-horn ranger’s words at face value. Of course, we did, and we explained to the ranger what the other ranger had said, and Marc also explained, “I have an English teacher in the car who traveled 1000 miles to visit this pond, and she doesn’t want to get turned away again.” The ranger promised that we would get in, and we did. Finally.
And Walden Pond was more than I expected. I saw the replica house and enjoyed that, but I wanted to walk around the pond; I wanted to see where these writers had spent their afternoons walking and where Alcott had ice skated in the winter. The pond was a magical place; they had all told me so. And they had told the truth since I had known them, so I had to believe them again.
I waded in the shallow end for a few minutes. I watched people swimming and kayaking and paddle boarding. Marc and I were astounded at how the pond has a beach area all around; visitors can set up chairs and kayaks and picnics at any point around the water. Several walking trails line the outskirts, but Marc and I struck out on the half-mile trail that led to the original site of Thoreau’s cabin. The boys decided to chill on the steps near the beach area while we walked. Thoreau’s cabin was on the back side of the pond; all that is left there now are concrete markers, the foundation of his chimney, and a rock pile beside the markers that designated the original corners of his little cabin and his wood shed. I am pretty sure the rock pile was created as a shrine to him because I saw another pilgrim drop a rock onto the pile, but I couldn’t leave without snatching a rock from the pile to take with me. I needed an authentic souvenir for Thoreau (but Thoreau’s admonishments against unnecessary possessions didn’t stop me from stopping by the Thoreau shop to buy “real” souvenirs, either. I know – irony again). The rock pile was guarded by a sign with the famous words from 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.”
A park ranger stood guard at the marker and told vivid stories about Thoreau and his friends, but they were stories I already knew, and he quizzed me some when he found out how much I loved these writers, but I aced each question.
But one strange moment happened. When I took a photo of a sign that indicated that this trail was one Thoreau and Emerson had walked together, a white mark on the tree showed up as a hiker’s silhouette on my camera. When I loaded the photos on to my computer tonight, the hiker’s silhouette was surrounded by a golden orb. Not telling you what to think about that, but I think such an image cannot be a coincidence.
And along with that coincidence, I am nearly certain I saw an image in the attic window when we returned to Orchard House. When I lifted the ribbons on the May Pole and explained to Jordan and Joel how she would have used such a May Pole, I swear I felt something – a vibe of some sort that led me to look upward to the attic window. Fanciful daydreaming, I am sure, but these are Transcendentalists. Intuition means something to them.
I have droned on for far too long now about my day, but I still have so much more to say. I will close with just a summary of the rest of the events, and if I have a chance, I may return to record more of the evening’s adventures later. But after Walden Pond, Marc and I took the tour of Orchard House where we were allowed closer to her world than in any other tour I have ever taken. Very few areas were roped off, and we were able to walk all around the house where authentic dresses lay across their real beds. We saw May’s real drawings still etched directly on the walls and protected by plexi-glass. And Beth’s piano. I saw Beth’s piano.
After Orchard House, we toured the Concord Museum where Thoreau’s and Emerson’s actual furniture resides. The museum also housed a collection of art from Andrew Wyeth, which was stunning, and we also saw some of Paul Revere’s silver. Really. Actual silverworks from THE Paul Revere. Emerson’s house was closed by this point, but I still looked inside the windows and walked around the gardens. We ended our day in Concord at The Old Manse and the Old North Bridge, catching more Hawthorne and Emerson vibes along with some Revolutionary War lessons from a Red Coat with a musket.
I am not sure I even understand the impact of touring Concord today. I know I was moved to tears multiple times, and I know that I felt connected to the spirit of their words that transcends the writers themselves, but I will just have to take a walk in the woods later to sift through the memories, and maybe then I will be able to start to articulate just all that happened today.
Kristie Camp 