Thoreau in Winter

BY RICHARD SMITH

Winters in New England can be harsh and unforgiving with days, or even weeks, of below-freezing temperatures and with snowfalls that are often measured in feet. It’s a season when all but the heartiest of New Englanders hunker down, put on a few extra layers of flannel, crank the thermostat, and stay cozy and warm at home.

One Concordian who enjoyed the winter, though, was Henry David Thoreau. He would happily go on his daily walk “in all seasons” and a wintery landscape held just as much promise for an exciting excursion as did the fields and forests in July.

In fact, one of the first essays that Thoreau published was called A Winter Walk, which first appeared in the October 1843 issue of The Dial. From the very beginning of the piece, Thoreau graphically and romantically describes a walk around a snow-covered Concord on a bitterly cold morning. You can almost smell the woodsmoke and feel the cold biting at your nose as Thoreau traverses the winter landscape.

“The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window-sill; the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light, which enhances the snug cheer within. The stillness of the morning is impressive. The floor creaks under our feet as we move toward the window to look abroad through some clear space over the fields. We see the roofs stand under their snow burden. From the eaves and fences hang stalactites of snow, and in the yard stand stalagmites covering some concealed core. The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see fantastic forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man’s art.”

Walden Pond in Winter

©Richard Smith

Thoreau would continue to record his love of winter eleven years later with the publication of Walden. Of the eighteen chapters that make up the book, four of them specifically deal with the winter months, from “House Warming” (where he chronicles the building of his chimney) to “Winter Visitors” and “Winter Animals” to finally “The Pond in Winter.” In that last chapter, Thoreau describes the daily activities around, and on top of, a frozen Walden Pond; ice fishing by locals, ice cutting by gangs of Irish laborers, and Thoreau’s daily battle with axe and pail to obtain water, are all described in great detail, as is the ice of the Pond itself.

“Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off.”

At one point, as he was surveying the Pond, Thoreau recorded the ice of Walden to be 16 inches think! As he cut holes in the ice to measure the depth of the Pond it was, he wrote, “somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out.”

Some of Thoreau’s most romantic and beautiful winter passages are in his Journals. He loved being outdoors and couldn’t understand why his fellow Concordians didn’t feel the same way. “Why do you flee so soon, sir, to the theaters, lecture-rooms, and museums of the city?” he wrote. “If you will stay here awhile, I will promise you strange sights. You shall walk on water; all these brooks and rivers and ponds shall be your highway. You shall see the whole earth covered a foot or more deep with purest white crystals . . . and all the trees and stubble glittering in icy armor.”

Replica of Thoreau’s Cabin at Walden Pond Walden Pond in Winter

©Richard Smith

Thoreau knew well, though, the harshness and danger of winter in the 19 th -century. Even the almost daily chore of collecting or chopping firewood could mean the difference between life and death. It’s no wonder that Thoreau would write, “Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work.”

Like all of us, Thoreau knew that winter would not last. As much as he enjoyed winter, like all New Englanders he always had one eye turned to spring. While he may wistfully ask his Journal, “Is not January the hardest month to get through?” he knew that the cold was only temporary, and he always held on to the expectation for an end to the winter months as he sought to understand and accept the cycles of nature. “To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of spring. How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature.”

Yet, while Thoreau loved winter, summer was never far from his thoughts. As he wrote in his essay A Winter Walk, “A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart.”

Richard Smith has worked as a public historian in Concord for 21 years, specializing in Henry David Thoreau, the Transcendentalists, the Anti-Slavery movement, and the Civil War. He has written six books for Applewood Books and is a tour guide for Concord Tour Company.