Amble: To walk or
move at a slow, relaxed pace, esp. for pleasure. To saunter.
To stroll. To wander.
Each day seems to be better than the last, which is really
saying something after Sleepy Hollow. We
spent our second and last day in Concord, and once again we did something impromptu
and unexpected.
Yesterday, at Emerson’s house, we found out that Emerson
liked to take walks in the woods around his house every day. His most-used path was a trail going from the
back of his house, through the woods, over to Walden Pond where Thoreau was
living in a one-room cabin. The two
would just amble along together, enjoying the companionship of friendship, talking
about Transcendentalism, communing with their Maker, and collecting their
thoughts (which they promptly wrote down when they returned home). We decided to journey back in time, grab our
favorite walking hat (as Emerson would say), and walk with Emerson over to
Thoreau’s cabin.
The Emerson-Thoreau Amble Trail is a 1.7-mile hike through
some beautiful woods. The trees are old,
thick trunks extending over fifty feet in the air, the intertwined branches
forming a dense canopy overhead. Parts
of the woods are dark, where the thick tangles of branches have cut off most of
the light from reaching the forest floor.
But the darkness is serene and tranquil, rather than ominous and
foreboding. There are wide open spaces
between the trees, and a soft carpet of pine needles and leaves covers the
forest floor. Here and there, patches of
light filters through the leaves and a clump of new pine trees would spring up
and bathe in the golden warmth. The
weather was perfect today, sunny and cool, ideal for an amble down the
trail. The path wound through the woods,
around several ponds, and across several little bridges, climbing and dipping
over the rolling countryside, until it finally ended at Walden Pond.
The cabin that Thoreau lived in for two years as a study in
the simplicity of human living is no longer there. According to the sign, nobody thought to
preserve it until it was too late. But
the site of the cabin is marked, and pilgrims from all over the world have come
to visit the site and leave behind a stone with their name or favorite Thoreau
quote on it. An ambitious adventurer can
climb over and around the pile of stones and read the messages left behind to
their favorite author. Walden Pond
itself is much larger than I imagined, more like a lake really. But the pond is crystal clear with a slight
breeze stirring the water and rippling waves across the surface.
After a nice jaunt around the lake and the surrounding
woods, we headed back down the trail to our car. We took a different way back, cutting across
Brister’s Hill. The spot is marked by
slabs of marble nestled along the path, almost imperceptible, Thoreau’s
immortal words etched into their surfaces.
“The snow falls on no two trees alike, but the forms it assumes are as
various as those of the twigs and leaves which receive it. They are as it were, predetermined by the
genius of the trees. So one divine
spirit descends alike on all, but bears a peculiar fruit in each.”
The slow, aimless amble that we used to get to the pond was
replaced by an almost mad sprint back the other direction. We were tired and hungry, being after lunch
time by this point, and my wife got us lost (she’s still claiming that we
weren’t lost, and I just need to trust her more, but I’m here to tell you that
she’s wrong). It’s funny how much longer
the trail seemed going back the other direction. When we finally arrived at the car (thanks
mostly to my expert navigational skills, don’t listen to my wife if she tells
you that she’s the one that read the map and figured out how to get us back), we
drove through town, located our favorite pizza place in Concord, Sorrento’s
Pizzeria (having found this little gem in 2005 when we last visited), and had
the best brick oven pizza of our lives.
Nothing which has been written here is a lie…it all happened exactly how
I perceive it in my head.
