My goodness it's cold. Rainy
too. I'd had a notion to go for a walk on the East Bay
Bike Path but I soon thought better of it.
We went out to brunch at Andrea's
(the restaurant on Thayer St., not my niece's house) and
browsed for a very long time at the Brown Bookstore. I
noticed a book entitled Walden Pond on the New
England shelf and picked it up automatically. Anything
having to do with Thoreau has to get a chance to be in my
library. It's a history of Walden Pond, the pond, rather
than just Walden the book. It starts with the
gates opening to let in fishermen at 5:00 AM. Wow! That
brought back a flood of memories of first day of fishing
season with my Dad at Walden. I could almost feel the
damp spring air as I read it. I could definitely see my
Dad in my mind's eye and the boat and the early morning
sun on the water and the fish...
Fishing and swimming were
Walden to me. Besides the early morning fishing trips,
there were late afternoon swims and picnic suppers on the
concrete wall by the Red Cross beach on hot summer
nights. We'd meet my Dad there as it was on his way home
from work. His carpool would drop him off there. La Madre
(who had yet to be named La Madre then and was mundanely
referred to as Mom) would pack sandwiches and fruit and
all of us into the car and we'd arrive when the day's
crowds had thinned but there was still plenty of light
and swimming time left. I couldn't tell you now what was
in a single one of those sandwiches, but I do remember
that they tasted awfully good after a swim.
I knew about Thoreau then but only
as some famous writer guy who had lived there once. I
didn't read Walden until my junior year in high
school. When we were swimming and fishing there in those
days, the reproduction of his cabin had not yet been
built. The location of Thoreau's cabin was marked and
signs pointed the way. As soon as I was old enough to go
off by myself to look for it -- a much younger age than
kids would be allowed to be out of their parents' sight
nowadays -- I did. It wasn't a literary pilgrimage then,
just a walk in the woods.
As I read on I realized that many
great writers had felt the call to pilgrimage at Walden
but somehow it never seemed like a pilgrimage to me. It
was part of the geography of my life. As I got older I
would ride my bike there in all seasons; looking for
sprouting acorns in the fall; testing the ice for skating
in winter; and always always the beginning of fishing
season in the spring. The only time it felt genuinely
like a pilgrimage was when I brought some of the rocks
from my Dad's collection, which I'd inherited when he
died, to add to the cairn as much to pay homage to Walden
Pond itself as to Thoreau.
Need I say I bought the book even
though it was outrageoulsy priced at $35.
With my head all full of Walden
memories and philosophical thoughts on fishing (it's
those darned stressed
out bait fish from the
other day), I needed to be in "nature." At Bold Point
Park I got out my binoculars to watch one of the terns
that lives on the derelict old barge chase off a gull.
Nancy and I call the barge the tern barge because common
terns used to nest there. They still use it, but I'm told
they don't nest there, just rest and hunt, nowadays.
Urban terns. Think of it. If people ever decide to
gentrify the East Providence waterfront they'd darn well
better leave that barge alone no matter how ugly and
rotten it is.
So, I'm watching the terns when I
see an immature black crowned night heron roosting in the
barge. There's a series of cubbyholes near the water
line. The black crowned night heron looked as if it were
framed by the cubbyhole. I wished I had my camera with
me. I wished that even more when I looked a little to the
left and saw an adult also roosting in a different
cubbyhole. The two of them looked like they were in some
kind of shadowbox. The adult's long white head plumes
streamed out from its black cap in the wind. It looked
magnificent. The two of them stayed there for a long
time. Nancy made me take the umbrella so I wouldn't get
totally soaked in the rain. I watched the terns go back
and forth off the top of the barge and the black crowned
night herons hanging out at the bottom. Finally the adult
turned and walked into the inside of the barge and out of
site. The younger one stayed where it was. We got back in
the car to get warm and to will Derek Lowe to finally
have a good outing.
