The Nature of Walden Pond, 150 Years Later
W. Barksdale Maynard, author of Walden Pond: A
History (Oxford University Press, 2004), was in a canoe
on Henry David Thoreau's famed pond doing an interview with
BBC radio recently when the taping was forced to a halt.
The crew had been trying to capture some of the ambient
noises of the place — water lapping, birds calling
— but the roaring airplanes overhead ruined their
efforts again and again.
And then from the crowded beach came a call that was hardly
evocative of Thoreau: Some kids were screaming the theme
song to the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon. The BBC
people were less than pleased by the interruption. But
Maynard, a lecturer in Johns Hopkins'
Department of the History of Art, chuckles when he
recalls the incident. "That's just the nature of Walden,"
he says. "It's an absurd modern paradox — a constant
collision between modernity and nature."
That's true today at Walden Pond, a site that attracts
700,000 visitors per year, many who come after reading
Thoreau's Walden. And it was true in 1845 when Thoreau went
into the woods 15 miles west of Boston, in his words, "to
live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of
life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach."

Walden Pond, photographed by
Herbert Wendell Gleason in
1899
Photo courtesy Concord Free Public Library
"I think the number-one misunderstanding people have about
Thoreau was that he was living in the wilderness," Maynard
says. "He could see the highway from his front door. His
bean field was right along the road. He picked that
location not to live like a hermit but to make a kind of
public demonstration of a one-man utopia."
Maynard came to Walden Pond for the first time in 1986.
Then a sophomore at Princeton University, he struggled to
figure out the geography of the 62-acre pond using
Thoreau's book, which details the author's two-year stay.
Maynard, an architectural historian, returned to Walden 13
years later to study Thoreau's house. He realized then that
a history of Walden Pond had never been written and set out
to chronicle what he calls "this very small, very fragile
pond that symbolizes solitude."
Says Maynard, "Walden has always been studied by literary
scholars, but most historians have had surprisingly little
interest in the real place."
In the course of his research Maynard made some surprising
discoveries. One was that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau's
friend, owned much of the land around the pond, including
the parcel where Thoreau built his house. "This makes the
role of Emerson seem far more important than it was thought
previously," Maynard says. "If Emerson hadn't bought the
land around the pond just a few months before Thoreau moved
there, then there would have been no book
Walden."
In Thoreau's time, Walden Pond went from being a spot where
locals hunted and fished to a Transcendentalist mecca. In
the 150 years since Walden's publication, the pond
has become a world-famous symbol of the conservation
movement. Numerous times in the 1990s environmentalists,
visitors, and potential developers of the woods surrounding
Walden Pond locked horns over plans to build an office park
and condominiums, not to mention a proposal to ban swimming
in the pond.
"In microcosm, Walden Pond is the history of the
environmental movement in America," he says. "Just the way
the environmental movement has developed, so too has
conservation around the pond."
As more people discover Walden Pond, the controversy
surrounding development continues. Alien plant species are
threatening the ecosystem. Owners of the nearby airfield
want to expand from private planes to commercial jets. And
visitors continue to make the pilgrimage to Walden —
some 70 million of them in this century. Their visits may
be meant to honor Thoreau, but their cars and rubbish and
footsteps are all taking their toll.
"Walden has such widespread appeal to people," Maynard
says. "I'd like to think that my book would inspire people
to reread Walden." He stops talking for a moment and
considers what he's just said. "But I'm not sure I want to
increase visitation since I've spent so much time railing
about that." —MB