Kevin Dann - Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau

This town, too, lies out under the sky, a port of entry and departure for souls to and from heaven.

Journal, July 10 to 12, 1841

T he twelfth of July 1817 saw the arrival of the first of those sultry, sweaty summer days that Concords farmers knew as dog days. Their almanacs marked these as beginning July 3 and ending August 11the forty-day period preceding the rising of the Dog Star, Siriusbut they knew that the first furnace blast of austral air could come a week or more on either side of the third. This was good grass-growing weather; red-top, herds-grass, sheeps fescue, and Canadian bluegrass and the ripening rye and wheat presented a checkerboard of greens, purples, reds, and golds. Working the fields were haymakers in white shirts and straw hats, occasionally setting aside their scythes and calling out to one another.

Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau had moved to the Virginia Road house when she was eleven, after her widowed mother had remarried. From her bedroom in the northeast corner of the second floor, she could hear the haymakers out on the Bedford Levels. Their swishing scythes sent ground-nesting mother birds and their young aloft for safety. She heard bobolinks, killdeer, meadowlarks, and sparrows. Kingbirds twittered from fence posts, and a yellowthroat sang ecstasy, ecstasy from a nearby alder thicket. As dusk fell and a solitary singing toad or soaring nighthawk occasionally broke the quiet, she could hear the lowing of the cows, the cackling of geese, the beating of a far-off drum, their neighbor Joe Meriam whistling to his team. Years later, she would recall that she used to get up at midnight, when all in the house were asleep, and sit on the doorstep. Then she could hear nothing in the world but the ticking of the clock in the house behind her. At some unknown hour on July 12, 1817, Cynthia Thoreaus newborn son uttered his first cry, joining his voice with the chorus of dog-day sounds.

His mothers memories were among the few images that David Henry Thoreau ever recorded from his boyhood. She once told him that his uncle David, for whom he was named, had died when he was six weeks old and that when Dr. Ezra Ripley submerged him, at just three months old, in the baptismal waters, he had not cried. Nor had he cried when, knocked unconscious after falling down a flight of stairs, she had tossed two pails of water on his head to wake him up. She also recalled that he had cut his toes once with a hatchet; been knocked over by a rooster; on another occasion he was kicked down by a passing ox.

As young children, Henry and his older brother, John, slept in a trundle bed in their parents room, and while John would go to sleep at once, Henry would often lie awake for a long time, looking up at the stars. When his mother once asked him why he didnt go to sleep, he replied, Mother, I have been looking through the stars to see if I couldnt see God behind them. The boy had a precocious gift for expansiveness, as keen an eye for the heavens as for huckleberries.

As an adult, Thoreau never failed to be amazed by Julys overwhelming fecundity as he observed the seasons warmth turn flowers into fruits and awaken the locusts incessant buzzing. Inclined to make a separate season of those days when the locust is heard, Thoreau would come to discover countless signs marking separate seasonsthe reddening of the river shore with the years crop of red maple seedlings, their winged samaras still attached; morning glories and yellow pond lilies blossoming synchronously with the rising of the sun; the smell of milkweed and basswood flowers; pogonias and calopogons abundant in the meadows; luna moths abroad at nightfall, their gigantism suggesting what productions Nature would run if all the year were a July; the last lingering pink stars of the mountain laurel; bream on their nests at the bottom of the rivers; turtle embryos ripening in the warm sands underneath the Concord River. Thoreaus birthday, which, like Christmas, always went completely uncelebrated in his journals, fell at the apex of the growing season, when the forces of growth and ripening were strongest. During his thirty-seventh July in Concord, Thoreau would declare: Methinks the season culminated about the middle of this month,that the year was of indefinite promise before, but that, after the first intense heats, we postponed the fulfillment of many of our hopes for this year, and having as it were attained the ridge of the summer, commenced to descend the long slope toward winter, the afternoon and down-hill of the year.