Being Henry David - By Cal Armistead Page 0,63
sure. It’s complicated, Danny. I don’t expect you to understand.”
He was right. I didn’t understand why my family’s world continued to fall apart and I was completely powerless over everything. Whether it was fair or not, I blamed my father for not making it better. He was the dad, and it was his job to make it better. Without another word, I unrolled my sleeping bag by the fire, turned away, and pretended to go to sleep. We didn’t talk about hiking the Appalachian Trail again for the rest of that trip. In fact, neither of us ever brought it up again.
At Walden Pond my thoughts are full of these things I’d forgotten. Like losing Cole and fighting with Dad. Camping and the Appalachian Trail.
If Cole had lived, we would’ve taken him camping, and I would’ve shown him how to do everything—like build campfires, find stars and planets in the night sky, and hunt for wild blueberries. But I never got a chance to show him much of anything.
Picking up flat stones on the shores of the pond, I chuck them at an angle and they skim across the surface, five, six, seven times. I was a rock-skipping champ. I would’ve taught Cole how to do that too.
I pick up a couple more stones from the edge of the water and examine them on my open palm. One is a perfect oval of quartz, smooth and white. The other is a chunk of gray granite, with rough edges and tiny mirrors of mica in it.
Maybe if I’m lucky, Thoreau will visit me in my dreams, so I can talk to him one more time. Sounds goofy, but I really want to know: if he were in my place, What Would Henry Do? Would he go home and face the mess he left behind? Or would he strike out on his own, start a new life and never look back?
A few feet away from Thoreau’s cabin site is a huge pile of rocks called a cairn that has been growing on this spot for decades. People who visit the site place rocks on the cairn, basically to honor Thoreau, acknowledging that he was somebody special, to say hey Henry, whassup, I was here to see you.
I set my gray stone on top of the pile gently, like a sign of respect. Or a good-bye. The smooth white stone I slip into my pocket, a tiny souvenir of Walden to take with me, wherever I end up next.
Then, instead of settling myself on the hearth of Thoreau’s former cabin like that first night, I find a dry, hidden spot to lay out the sleeping bag behind a boulder. The warmer weather has attracted a lot of random hikers, and I don’t want any company. Hopefully I’m still close enough for the spirit of Thoreau to know I’m here.
Please come, Henry. Please. I need to talk to you.
The minutes tick by, but time seems to pass slower here in the woods. The sky is sprinkled with a million stars, and the pines are silhouetted against the deep blue stretching over my head. An owl hoots from somewhere high in an oak tree. Some small animal rustles in the bushes at the shore of the pond. A mosquito whines in my ear.
I wait. And wait. The night stretches on before me and all around me, envelops me. It’s also waiting but for nothing, it turns out, other than itself.
A loud chorus of singing, twittering, trilling birds wakes me up the next morning, and I duck my head inside the sleeping bag to muffle the sound, but it does no good. The birds have decided it’s time to get up, and it’s pointless to try to get more sleep. Okay, okay. I’m up already.
Thoreau never came last night. There was no visit, no dreams. Nothing. I avoid the chilly morning air by hunkering down in the sleeping bag with only my hair sticking out of the top, listening to the songs of all the birds, like a crazy orchestra tuning up. Here in the woods, I can almost convince myself that my problems in the human world don’t even exist. Which is maybe what Henry has been saying all along. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. Don’t take more from the world than you need. Don’t need more than you take. Somehow nature puts things into perspective.
“What the—are you kidding me? Hey, kid! Get back here with my stuff!”
From somewhere near the pond, I hear a guy’s voice