In the midst of describing Hannah’s scalping of the sleeping Indians and her escape from their camp, he suddenly shifts into the present tense, thus conflating his own historical moment with that of Hannah: “Early this morning this deed was performed, and now ... these tired women and this boy ... are making a hasty meal of parched corn and moose-meat, while their canoe glides under these pine roots whose stumps are still standing on the bank.” Thoreau closes off the remembrance by returning to the past tense, evoking now the (official) voice of the historian: “According to the historian, they escaped as by a miracle all roving bands of Indians, and reached their homes in safety.” In such ways Thoreau continuously repositions himself in time and space through the mode of rivering, all the while creating his own imaginative history of New England. He is making history.

A Week thus presents a continuous dialogue between the present and the past. But very often this dialogue reveals a declension from a more vibrant and abundant past to a meager and despoiled present. In other words, Thoreau’s rivering involves him in an encounter with historical loss—the loss of people and things that have “gone downstream.” Even at the outset of the voyage, on its first day (Saturday), Thoreau evokes this sense of loss in remembering a shadowy figure from the rivers’ past. He writes of “an old brown-coated man” whom he “can just remember,” “who was the Walton of this stream.... He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river.” Noting that Thoreau himself was the sole witness of the old man’s final disappearance into “his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village,” he remarks: “I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died.” By giving witness to such figures, and their prior existence along the shores, Thoreau redeems them for his readers.

This process of redemptive remembering involves cultures as well as individual (Wordsworthian) figures like the old brown-coated man. In particular, Thoreau’s voyage carries him by New England communities whose life has ebbed away. In “Sunday,” for example, he and his brother pass the ancient village of Billerica, now “in its dotage,” with its “farms all run out, [and its] meeting-house grown gray and racked with age.” The New England landscape, as Thoreau depicts it in A Week, is covered with such ruins of community. His accounts of them remind us of the “Former Inhabitants” chapter of Walden, where Thoreau makes his way nostalgically through the cellar holes and other ruined structures he finds at the Pond. They may also poignantly remind us of similar images of ruin in the poem “Directive,” by Robert Frost, another New Englander with a redemptive historical imagination.

But if early Puritan communities like Billerica lie in ruin in Thoreau’s time, at least they have left behind a historical account of their existence. They have done so in “town records, old, tattered, time-worn, weather-stained chronicles” that, despite their condition, continue to tell the story of Puritan community life. But, as Thoreau pointedly tells us, these very same documents record the utter disappearance of another community, that of the Indians. The Billerica chronicles “contain the Indian sachem’s mark perchance, an arrow or a beaver, and the few fatal words by which he deeded his hunting-grounds away.” Because the Indians’ culture was oral rather than written, their erasure from the New England landscape is even more complete than that of the Puritan settlers.

The imperial power of the written word, and the mode of conceptual (Western) thought that stands behind it, is made eminently clear by Thoreau: “The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing well what he knows, not guessing but calculating; ... building a house that endures [unlike those of the Indians], a framed house. He buys the Indian’s moccasins and baskets, then buys his hunting-grounds, and at length forgets where he is buried and ploughs up his bones.” For Thoreau, the loss of ancient Indian artifacts, and the sacramental sense that they embody, is a tragedy. Thus, another purpose of his redemptive history-making in A Week is to try, as best he can, to recover something of the Indians’ lost world, and to give them a voice. This activity is analogous to Thoreau’s lifelong search for arrowheads and other Indian artifacts in the New England landscape.

As we have seen, much of the narrative work of A Week is the remembering and reconstructing of the river’s lost past, and that past includes places as well as people. The transformation of such places and the erosion of their features often owe to human intervention. In “Concord River,” A Week’s introductory chapter, Thoreau reports the testimony of the Sudbury shore farmers, who tell him “that thousands of acres are flooded now, since the dams have been erected, where they remember to have seen the white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and they could go dry with shoes only in summer. Now there is nothing but blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in water all the year round.”

As in Walden, the railroad and other agents of industrialization have made a lasting impact upon the landscape. In “Tuesday,” Thoreau writes, “Since our voyage the railroad on the bank has been extended, and there is now but little boating on the Merrimack. All kinds of produce and stores were formerly conveyed by water, but now nothing is carried up the stream.” He continues, “The locks are fast wearing out, and will soon be impassable, and so in a few years there will be an end of boating on this river.”

Yet, as the following passage from “Friday” shows, Thoreau’s sense of loss in A Week reaches deeper into history than changes in contemporary navigation:

Some have thought that the gales do not at present waft to the voyager the natural and original fragrance of the land, such as the early navigators described, and that the loss of many odoriferous native plants, sweet-scented grasses and medicinal herbs, which formerly sweetened the atmosphere, and rendered it salubrious,—by the grazing of cattle and the rooting of swine, is the source of many diseases which now prevail.

 

 

Like Nick Carraway’s vision, in The Great Gatsby, of “the fresh green breast of the new world,” sullied by time and irrevocably lost, the “original fragrance of the land” represented here by Thoreau is in need of remembrance and evocation.

Paradoxically, Thoreau’s encounter with loss in A Week can be considered an aspect of the book’s openness to experience, though in a different sense than that which we have recounted so far. The point can be illustrated through a comparison with Walden. In Walden, Thoreau was committed to a vision of reform and self-renewal; he wanted, as he says, to “wake my neighbors up,” and “sing like Chanticleer in the morning.” As a result of Walden’s utopian purposes, issues of loss in this work are consistently marginalized, or made into fables, like the famous enigmatic story of the lost bay-horse, hound, and turtle dove. Through such fables and other strategies of indirection, loss is given a place in Walden but never allowed sufficient amplitude or power to disrupt the dominantly pastoral and idyllic mode of that book.

A Week, by contrast, directly engages issues of loss, both historical and personal, and does so by structuring itself as a voyage in time, rather than as a timeless idyll. The two books’ watery settings—A Week’s rivers (of time and memory) and Walden’s gemlike, static pond—suggest the difference. In one of Thoreau’s various mythological renderings of the Pond’s origins, in Walden, he speculates that “in some other geological period it may have flowed [into the Concord River], and by a little digging, which God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again” (my italics). Walden, as Thoreau puns elsewhere in that book, is “Walled-in,” and is essentially impervious to the erosions of time.

Not so with A Week, whose very structure as a river voyage sets it upon an encounter with all manner of change, both historical and natural. There is good reason for A Week’s open acknowledgment of the attritions of time and loss.