Living Deliberately

Dreaming of a Canadian Jam Knot: Thoughts on Work, Thoreau, and Living Deliberately

christine o’connor

“I want to tie a Canadian jam knot.”That’s what the voice said when I first woke that morning. If properly constructed, jam knots can secure almost anything. The basic premise of a knot is the strain that pulls against it is the same force that draws it together and makes it strong. It may have been a strange thought to take from the dream world, but we were in the strangest of times.

It was day seventy-two of lockdown. The world was at the mercy of a virus. Some scientists assessed that it was born of a bat and then introduced to humans at an overcrowded market of caged animals, cruelty, and commerce: what looks like another abuse collectively inflicted on the natural world and those who share it. But this time the consequences were immediate and severe. Like droplets of Covid, new, uninspiring, unnatural words soaked into our everyday vocabulary: respirators, ventilators, and PPEs. Stories of devastation, body bags, and mass graves looped through news stations and our subconscious.

Maybe, in this world of uncertainty, that dreamy jam knot was a symbol of security, of the collective drawing together? Maybe it was a message from my subconscious that the adversities of these times would make us stronger. But might it have arisen from the other end of the spectrum: the dark end, where the noose tightens, and horror closes in? How do we untie the truth behind our dreams, and what lies in that space between the conscious and unconscious as the first light of day creeps beneath the shade?

“It’s Not What You Look At, It’s What You See”

The voice telling me to tie a jam knot was immediately recognizable, it was my own; and the message wasn’t surprising. Jam knots are a staple in the art of bushcraft, the study and practice of certain woodland skills. Over the years I had become a devoted armchair follower. YouTube is replete with a number of practitioners. Video after video has taken me along the inlets, lakes, and woodlands of North America; I’ve traversed the frozen tundra of Baffin Island, reached the Height of Land, and crossed the width of Newfoundland. Working in a city environment, I’ve found these vicarious trips to the Northwoods a release, a tonic to the demands of daily life.

As a lawyer for Lowell, a mid-sized municipality in Massachusetts, I was part of a

skeleton crew reporting to work during the shutdown. Lowell is known as the birthplace of America’s Industrial Revolution, and in the nineteenth century it was the largest industrial center in the United States with nearly six miles of canals and over forty manufacturing mills, all powered by the Merrimack River. By the turn of the century, this once pristine, 117-mile river had become so polluted from manufacturing dyes, it reportedly changed colors daily. The “wet market” in Wuhan, was hardly the first assault on the natural world.

There were three of us working in an office that once housed eighteen. The gravity of what the world faced was reinforced by every empty desk and darkened space I passed. Our days were filled with work, worry, and the occasional temperature check. One such morning, I was making oatmeal at my desk. Stirring it round and round till it thickened, I suddenly thought of Joe Robinet, a bushcrafter I follow. He was sitting at one of his many morning campfires, doing much the same thing. Around him the sun was rising in the eastern sky, its light flickered off the lake, a loon let out a singular cry, and old Joe whispered: “She’s a real beauty, eh?” As the sun stretched across my desk, I thought, “Yah, she is.” It was a morning to behold, yet consumed with an unrelenting sense of dread, I hadn’t even noticed.

Eating my oatmeal that morning provided a sustenance of a different kind. And in the days to come, it marked the start where everyday tasks took on a deeper meaning: from the weight of my backpack as I headed to work, to each spin of the rowing machine, I followed the imaginary lines of an unseen topographic map. The naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, once said: “It’s not what you look at, it’s what you see.”

Thoreau had always been a presence for me. I read his books and journals; visited the cabin site; climbed some of the same mountains; and stuck a “In wildness is the preservation of the world” bumper-sticker to the back of my Saab. For several years, I even served as counsel to the Henry David Thoreau Society, until I got too busy with work and had to give it up. But, in those early months of the pandemic, Thoreau was very much in my thoughts. “It’s not what you look at, it’s what you see.” So, night after night, as I pulled the blankets close, I slid into an imaginary sleeping bag, or a lean-to of conifers, the light of a crackling fire warming my face. The dream begins.

A Case of Cabin Fever?

Were these occasional detachments from reality, these moments of bushcraftdaydreaming, the result of “cabin fever?” I wondered. No one really knows the origins of the phrase “cabin fever,” other than it’s American, that it likely entered our vernacular around the nineteenth century and is the psychological response to being isolated in a small space for an extended period. As pioneers settled the western plains, farms were often up to twenty miles apart. In addition to the isolation, settlers faced snow measured in feet, temps below zero, and loud, howling winds that continued for days. Occupants grew weary, claustrophobic, and unbalanced. The affected commonly suffered from lethargy, irritability, frustration, and anger.

There are other terms to describe this peculiar behavioral phenomenon. From prisons came the phrase “stir crazy”; in the Inuit populated regions of Greenland it’s known as “arctic hysteria”; and on the American frontier it was called “prairie madness.” None are recognized as actual medical conditions, but the effects of too much time on the inside of

hand-notched, wooden walls is real and well documented.

Now here’s the curious thing. Many in lockdown lived in highly populated, urban areas. Today’s shut-ins were connected through cell phones, satellite dishes, cable tv, and wireless internet. People joined forces on YouTube, Facebook, and Zoom, and still, many claimed to be experiencing the same symptoms of that long-ago, frontier ailment.

Perhaps it’s just the nature of some individuals. In The Shining, was Johnny driven mad by a haunting or an extreme case of cabin fever? “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” he typed again and again. Arctic hysteria on the other hand, was attributed to vitamin toxicity or demonic possession. When lighthouse keepers “lost their beans,” doctors pointed to mercury poisoning. But maybe the madness in these cases merely comes from stress. Is fear what actually tightens the knot on all of us?

In the Company of Solitude

While the confinement of a remote cabin has driven many mad, others have deliberately sought out such places. Perhaps innately vaccinated against cabin fever, there are those for whom these cabins in the wild are curative. They’ve experienced healing, peace, and productivity while in isolated places for extended periods. For example, after the atrocities of World War I, Henry Beston built a small structure on the sand dunes of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod. He spent an entire year alone on the beach, and there took notes for his masterpiece, The Outermost House. Dick Proenneke, of One Man’s Wilderness, built a cabin in Alaska following World War II. In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac hiked 6,102 feet, and for sixty-three days stayed atop Desolation Peak, filling his notebooks with the material for his novel Desolation Angels.

Of course, these writers, cabin-builders, naturalists, adventurists had ancestors, those who first packed a bag and headed into the wild: there were the early Christian monks living in small, stone structures on uninhabited islands in the Atlantic; the Puritans whose errand into the wilderness brought them to America; and even Jeremiah Johnson, “bettin’ on forgettin’ all the troubles he knew,” escaped into the mountains. Out of a rich lineage, Thoreau is likely the best known. For two years, two months, and two days, he lived alone in a cabin he built at Walden Pond. During that time, he wrote about a week spent with his brother John, canoeing on the Concord and the Merrimack rivers in the summer of 1839. Both rivers run through Lowell.

Three years before Henry moved into the cabin, John died of lockjaw. Like Beston, Proenneke and Kerouac, Thoreau’s time at Walden was likely as much about healing as it was about writing, and while there he worked on what was to become his first publication, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a tribute to the memory of his brother. In those early days of Covid-lockdown, my dream to retreat to a cabin in the wild, was not only a necessary distraction, but a welcomed connection to those who came before in search of Nature’s refuge. We are sometimes stitched together in unusual ways.

It Was Time to Suck the Marrow Out of Life, So I Got a Tent

Since building a cabin wasn’t a possibility, I settled on an even smaller space, a tent. And since I couldn’t go anywhere, I decided to camp in the backyard. If Thoreau could “travel a

good deal in Concord,” I could do the same on this little patch of land. I went online and for a bit north of one hundred dollars I bought a tent, paracord, a fire-steel, and a titanium cup with a lid. I knew what I wanted in a tent: a mesh top for stargazing, and something easy to assemble. As for the esthetics, I went with a yellow, dome-shaped structure.

All the items were scheduled to arrive mid-week. This gave me time to start planning. Accompanying me on this overnight escape, would be an enthusiastic, three-year old, Irish terrier named Jack. I made a list of food for dinner and breakfast, the tools I’d need, and extra clothing for bedtime. The overnight would take place over the Memorial Day weekend. Looking at the weather forecast, I decided on Sunday. I’d arrive at my site in the early afternoon and set up camp at farthest point from the house.

Although much of the city’s center is densely populated, there are parts of Lowell that have a modest suburban feel. I live in a section of the city known as the “Highlands.” The backyard is mainly an open, grassy plot bordered by strips of trees and brush. Just beyond the trees and growth at the yard’s far end, is Mount Pleasant Country Club, a private golf course.

In preparation, I watched some bushcraft videos: Shawn James cooking a brook trout over an open fire; Justin Barbour canoeing across Labrador; Jim Baird making a snow wall for his tent as it glowed in the Arctic night; and Joe Robinet, building a fort in the woods. The term bushcraft, like cabin fever, was an invention of the nineteenth century, and refers to the “Australian bush.” The bush was the uncleared woodland of British colonies— in other words, the part of society that remained wild. Even though I had seen all these techniques countless times, I watched them again with great purpose: feathering a stick for burning, making a bow drill, picking wild garlic, making chaga tea over a fire, and learning to tie a series of knots.

I also started rereading sections of Walden. I had always thought of it as nature writing, but maybe it’s really philosophical-bushcraft-lit. “It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life,” he wrote early on in Walden. And a major part of the book is about Thoreau’s “life in the woods.” If Thoreau were around today, perhaps he’d manage the “I Want to Live Deliberately” channel on YouTube? Although maybe today’s bushcrafters are modern-day Transcendentalists? Consider that Shawn James’ channel is named “My Self-Reliance,” after Emerson’s essay of a similar title. Regardless, for as long as I can remember, I’ve loved this story of leaving society and creating a space in the woods. It’s primal. It draws us back to the beginning, to the seed and the place of growth.

Confronting Only the Essential Facts of Life

On the morning of the camp, I set my alarm for 5 a.m.; excited, I woke at 4:30. Although it was nearly June, it was just 42 Fahrenheit (5 C). There, at the yard’s end, was my tent. I put it up the day before to air it out. Thoreau dedicates nearly a chapter to setting up his shelter, but setting up my temporary structure took just minutes. Before the real light of morning, the yellow globe sat low, like a giant, tropical bird bent feeding.

The day was beautiful, with the sky a color blue that I didn’t think was possible anymore. While gathering stones and wood for the fire, I saw and heard a countless number of birds. Not far from my tent I discovered a large animal hole. How long it had been there was anyone’s guess. But for my camping “trip,” I would never have noticed it. Thoreau didn’t

need a lockdown to realize the wonder that lives all around us: “As travelers go ‘round the world and report natural objects and phenomena, so faithfully let another stay at home and report the phenomena of his own life,” he preached.

I began to think of how, over the years, this narrow stretch of woods bordering the yard had seen a fair bit of wildlife. The most exotic visitor was a moose, but there were others: deer, foxes, and coyotes; hawks, eagles, and wild turkeys. Like the moose, most have involved a single sighting. They are our unseen neighbors; known only by the rustling of the bush or the sound of their movement through the trees. Our presence, on the other hand, is unmistakable. The footprint we leave is unlike theirs. It does not lead to clean waters or to an untamed woodland. Our prints do not wash away in the rain. As the lockdown continued, more and more people reported wildlife sightings. Just when we thought Nature had come undone, she grew strong.

In Remembrance of Former Inhabitants

After setting up “camp,” I sawed and split some wood. For my tinder bundle I used some scattered wood chips, along with some dried reeds from the previous fall. The fire pit was open in the front, had three walls, and some flat-surfaced stones laid at its base. Joe Robinet advises having a bundle of twigs at the ready to place on top, then larger kindling pieces, and eventually the quarter pieces. A few strikes of the fire steel and the tinder lit. Within seconds, fire was shooting between the openings of twigs and wood. Something in me sparked too.

After a stretch of winter-like temperatures, that Memorial Day weekend held the first promise of summer. In the United States, the holiday is a time to honor and remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in a time of war. The months of food shortages, curfews, and deaths also evoked a wartime feel. The first recorded corona-death in the U.S. was in February. That Sunday’s New York Times ran a historic front page: “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss.” In a little over three months, the coronavirus had already claimed more lives than the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined.

But this was nothing new. Disease has always been the big killer, at times wiping out large swaths of populations. In the fourteenth century the Black Death killed as many as fifty million (possibly sixty percent of the entire European population); and even worse, an estimated ninety percent of Native Americans died from diseases introduced by Europeans.

Since the start of the pandemic, every morning in the office began with a review of Lowell’s overnight numbers: how many new positive cases; how many negative; how many hospital admittances; how many masks and gloves on hand; how many cases at the homeless shelter and nursing homes; and how many fellow Lowellians had died? Originally, we met in the Mayor’s Reception Room. Maskless, elbow to elbow, the City Manager and her municipal team sat around a thick oak table original to the 1893 building.

This was likely the same table city officials gathered round in October 1918 as they faced an earlier pandemic. Commonly referred to as the “grippe,” the numbers from City Hall then were eerily similar to ours: “October 3, 1918, Thursday, Lowell grippe situation still very bad. 233 new cases.” Despite technological advances, the basic methods of controlling a pandemic changed little over the past century: the closure of public spaces; the wearing of masks; the washing of hands; the creation of makeshift isolation hospitals;

and finding space for the dead.

At one time, the most feared disease in the world was tuberculosis, commonly known as consumption, and in the nineteenth century it was the leading cause of death in the United States. In May of 1862, consumption took the life of Thoreau. He was just fortyfour years old. In the months he lay dying from tuberculosis, final arrangements were made with publishers. His lectures were to appear in the Atlantic; Walden would be reprinted, but without the subtitle, Life in the Woods; and he reworked his final essays, Life Without Principle, Walking, and Wild Apples. But his last book, The Maine Woods, would be published posthumously. Struggling with its conclusion, he said: “It’s a knot I cannot untie.”

Living Deliberately

As the last of the daylight disappeared, I cooked over my campfire. In some foil, I wrapped small spuds, garlic, and bits of butter. I placed the bundle snug into the coals of charred wood. On a small rack, I cooked a ribeye, and like Joe Robinet, rubbed in some seasoning. Mushrooms and zucchini filled the last bit of foil. Once everything was cooked, I treated myself to a stray, ice-cold can of Double Thunderfunk IPA that had been left in the fridge from happier days. The fat and grizzle were mixed into Jack’s bowl of kibble.

But it wasn’t until the sun went down, and the fire freshly stoked, that I sensed the quiet and solitude I was after. Normally on such nights I’d hear the hum of the not-so-distant highway, or even the muffled sound of speedboats bouncing off the Merrimack some two miles away. But that night, like the past seventy-two, everything was quiet. There had already been times, over these months, that I experienced the guilt of preferring certain aspects of this new life. That night, the only sound was the crackling of the fire, and as its embers rose into a black abyss above, it was impossible to not revel in it.

There is something soothing about a fire. Beston described it as an elemental presence in his outermost house. I pulled aside some glowing embers and took out my titanium cup. It was like the one Joe Robinet used in all his videos, minus the graphic of Scout, his beloved and deceased Shepherd.

When the water came to a boil, I cupped a few fingers around its foldable handles, and carefully removed the lid. Steam rose into the night. More than the tent, the paracord, or the fire striker, this tin cup was what excited me most. I recall as a kid getting my first “official” baseball. The packaging noted that it was the same as the ones used by the Major Leaguers. Staring at it, I felt connected to Boomer, Tiant, Fisk, and Yaz. Sometimes objects can speak to us in ways words can’t because they tell us things that are to be felt, rather than said. Blowing on my first sip of hot chocolate, I drank in this world of bushcraft.

Above me that night was a new moon. A time of new beginnings, a moment in nature that could describe where we all found ourselves. From the front of my backpack I pulled out some paracord. “Two on the inside, one on the outside,” says Joe Robinet, as he teaches viewers the art of a taut-line hitch. I decided to use the jam knot to hang my food bag from a tree branch. I tied a knot about an inch from one end, and a second another inch down. This second knot is left loose. I ran the paracord through the food bag, around the branch, threaded the opposite end through that second knot, and pulled. “Bam son!” as Joe is fond of saying, I tied a Canadian jam knot! The dream had become real.

Thoreau too experienced the transformation of a dream into reality. One night, deep

in the Maine woods, he dreamt he caught a fish: “it seemed a fable that this painted fish swam so near.” He had been fishing all that day but had little luck. A good deal of his time had been spent tying hooks onto the fishing lines of others in his group. But his dream was so powerful, that when he woke, he got up and cast his line into the night. There beneath a full moon, his rod bent, and on the shores of Moosehead Lake he landed a speckled trout. His dream too became real.

“Time Is the Stream I Go Fishing In”

No bushcraft trip can be complete without a hike. With the golfers long gone, I decided to walk the nine-hole course. Established in 1910, at roughly thirty-eight acres, it is the smallest of the city’s three area golf courses. Originally the old Bartlett Farm, my campsite and backyard were once part of it. With the aid of my headlamp, Jack and I made our way over remnants of a stone wall, a reminder of the life this land once held.

We walked along the edge of the first fairway until we reached the end of the course. Turning right, you cross the ninth, and then onto the second, and third. To my left were several acres of woods. Not far into my walk was a bridge. Every day, soft-spiked golfers crossed it. Like them, my steps made a hollow, echoing sound over its suspended wooden planks.

Beneath this tiny bridge were the running waters of what I had assumed was Black Brook. The brook is the main tributary running throughout the Highlands neighborhood of Lowell. Like many other waterways, it begins in southern New Hampshire and eventually joins the Merrimack. There are actually over fifty rivers and brooks whose waters flow into the Merrimack as it makes its way to the Atlantic Ocean.

In the dim light of the evening, however, I noticed a second tributary that flowed into it. Following along, it led to an open marshy area. The ground was soft and muddy. Dried cattails that took root in a pre-pandemic world, still stood. I was only a short distance from home, yet in these woods I suddenly felt miles from reach of the deadly virus. Beneath the canopy of trees and the sounds of slow-moving water, I felt safer than I had in months. I followed the waterway further into the woods.

What tributary was this? Over a series of rocks and built-up debris, I crossed to the other side. While I carefully navigated nature’s stepping-stones, Jack splashed across. The woods were dense, and I had to pick my way through. Eventually there was enough of an opening to reveal a wild, meandering, well-established waterway. Quiet filled the woodlands, and for a moment, even Jack was still. Everywhere, low lying green shoots were breaking through. Fiddleheads and skunk cabbages glistened in the beam of my head lamp. Suddenly, there was a splash, and a circular ring grew in the water—a turtle. Deep in the woods, life was thriving. This, clearly, was Black Brook, but what of the other?

I made my way back to the course and followed this other waterway as it flowed between the second and third fairways. It was different: much of it was perfectly straight; its width uniform; and parts of its embankment resembled a manmade stone wall. “It’s like a canal,” I whispered to myself. I knew that the old Middlesex Canal was somewhere in the back woods of the golf course, but it wasn’t until that night that I realized this water hazard was the remnants of that canal.

Constructed in the mid-eighteenth century, the Middlesex Canal was a marvel

of engineering, and played a central role in Lowell’s early industrial success. But it was also part of a complicated history where the industrialization of the world continued to grow with little regard for its impact on Nature. Now, several centuries later, its impact was approaching catastrophic levels. Alone on a golf course, unable to travel or socialize because of a worldwide pandemic, the cost of that “success” was becoming clear.

In its shallow waters, the rocks, leaves, and sediment that culminated over its long history were illuminated in my headlamp; these waters traveled over not just miles of geography, but time itself. Here is where the deer would drink, and old ghosts gather. Thoreau once said: “time is the stream I go fishing in.” Standing on the banks of the Middlesex Canal, I wondered whether the opposite was also true; whether in these, and in all waters, time gathers and connects the past and the present. On this otherwise ordinary night, the magic of the universe was shining upon me in a way I was yet to understand.

“Rescue the Drowning and Tie Your Shoestrings”

With temperatures dropping, Jack and I headed back to our camp. The night had turned cold, and my breath was now as visible as the smoke from the fire. Ever since the sun set, I could hear an occasional rustling in the woods. A neighbor had recently reported two coyotes living just beyond her back yard.

As Thoreau went into town for supplies, and famously went to his mother’s to do his laundry, I went back to the house to use the facilities, brush my teeth, and grab my laptop. Once back at camp, I gathered a few items and headed inside the tent. The air-mat under my sleeping bag was surprisingly comfortable; and since this was never about roughing it, I brought plenty of pillows so I could sit up and read or do some writing. I got into my longjohns, wool socks, and my new L.L. Bean sleeping bag. With the warmth of Jack at my leg, my fearful thoughts of encroaching coyotes subsided.

Although I was planning on rereading the conclusion to Walden that night, I was also eager to learn more about the Middlesex Canal. After googling several different search terms: the Middlesex Canal, Lowell, Mount Pleasant Golf Course, I eventually came across a 2003 article in the New Yorker, “Paddling After Henry David Thoreau.” It was a John McPhee piece, where he and a companion retraced the waterways of Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack. Scanning through, I discovered that the brothers towed their skiff along the Middlesex Canal, including what is now the water hazard between the second and third fairway of the Mount Pleasant Golf Course. The revelation that this strip of land behind my house was part of an American literary classic triggered a burst of excitement that could hardly be contained by my now too-small tent—its pegs must have surely felt the strain. Unbeknownst to me, I had earlier been walking along the very trail that Thoreau and his brother John used in the summer in 1839.

Of my many attempts to follow in the path of Thoreau came the remarkable discovery that, at one time, his path essentially crossed my own. Each autumn, after the last of the fallen leaves, our kitchen window looks out on that stretch of land Thoreau once walked. After years of seeking Thoreau in woodlands, waterways, and faraway mountaintops, on that night under the stars I learned how close he once came to my own place in this world.

That this nineteenth-century, Harvard-educated, transcendentalist pencil-maker from Concord could be so important to and have such influence on a twenty-first century,

second-generation, urban-living lawyer was perhaps as mysterious as that evening’s revelation. But there are places that transcend time: books. And here, I and many others have connected with Thoreau’s thoughts on nature, social justice, solitude, and those things of value in a life worth living. His writings speak to us as plainly as our contemporaries do, and what he has to say continues to be relevant in an ever-changing world. My camping experiment confirmed this was no less true during this time of crisis.

Early into the pandemic, Thoreau became the poster-boy for sheltering in place, the champion of social distancing, the guru of isolation. But his relevance for these times may lie elsewhere. The longest chapter in Walden is its first—“Economy,” and it is, above all, about work: a meandering, meditative, philosophical outpouring on what is really necessary to sustain us. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he famously pronounced in this chapter. Here he asks the difficult questions of why we work, and to what end.

I thought about my own work; about what I do versus what I’d love to do. And I thought back to that morning at my desk, stirring my oatmeal round and round; and daydreaming about eating by a campfire. Alone in the universe of my backyard, I was pleased at how far I had come since that morning. But perhaps the reason I was dreaming of Canadian jam knots and sleeping in a tent wasn’t the just result of a pandemic, but because of an overly demanding job filled with text messages, deadlines, and meetings gone-long. My work was consuming me, and on this I was not alone.

An average full-time worker in the United States works close to fifty hours per week; and takes little vacation time, family leave, or even lunch breaks. If their days aren’t long enough, many often check and answer emails after work. These demanding work habits separate us from our counterparts in most other countries. And for all these long hours, Americans are among the least satisfied with their jobs. The pandemic has only made matters worse.

While most adults were working remotely, many initially claimed to be getting more work done by not having to commute. But those hours saved quickly became filled with even more work. While technology enabled industry and commerce to continue, it further blurred the line between professional and personal time, until such boundaries completely disappeared. Vacations were put on hold, and Zoom became the new go-to destination. Martini glasses were filled with “Quarantine Cosmopolitans,” as “Happy Hours” became daily rituals in this perpetual out-of-office world. Many felt like they were drowning in it all.

I too felt like I was drowning, but in fairness I had felt like that for some time. The pandemic, in all its cruelty, forced many to pause, to think about the brevity of life, and what was important to them. I want to write, I thought. Whether I was good at it, or not, it’s what I wanted to do. It is what I always wanted to do. My life as a lawyer suited me, and I seemed to suit it. But, while I was as lawyer to the outside world, inwardly I was only someone who labored as a lawyer.

During those months of lockdown, life slowed, and the noise of commerce stopped. Birds chirped, and I listened. The voice I heard that morning was my own. A jam knot is not just something to tie, but to untie too. The dream was becoming clearer. Work had kept me from my dreams until my dreams spoke up. “Rescue the drowning, and tie your shoestrings,” writes Thoreau in this same chapter. If I had been drowning in the pre-

pandemic, workaholic-world, a rescue now seemed possible. I secured a jam knot, tied my shoestrings, and vowed to free myself from the bind of never-ending office hours. That night beneath a new moon, I vowed to become what Thoreau describes as a “day laborer,” one whose “day ends with the going down of the sun, and [she] is [then] free to devote [herself] to [her] chosen pursuit, independent of [her] labor.” Though just in my backyard, my time in nature was becoming an adventure not clocked in miles.

“Remember to Make a Knot Before Your First Stitch”

Beneath a lightweight plastic lantern hanging from the center of the tent, I stuck to my plan to reread the conclusion of Walden before ending this remarkable day. “To the sick, the doctors wisely recommended a change of air and scenery,” it begins. Without realizing it, that’s what I was doing. In the face of adversity, like many others, I sought the shelter and respite of Nature. Living in a world where travel wasn’t possible, I discovered it wasn’t necessary. Nature is everywhere; be it the shade of an oak tree, or the warmth from the sky above, salvation is always within reach. After all, Walden is about more than a place, it is about the whole of the natural world and our place in it.

Not far into his “Conclusion,” Thoreau describes a public lynching: “Tell the tailors to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.” They are the final comments of a man about to be hanged. His comments stayed with Thoreau because, the man said what was important to him, rather than what society expected him to say at such moments. In other words, he spoke the Truth—the very thing that sets us free, even from the grips of a hangman’s knot.

But what really does it take to be true to ourselves and our dreams? Is it right to follow our instincts? I knew that eventually the morning calls of Covid cases would stop, and we would be faced with the prospect of returning to normal. It is what everyone wanted, or was it? Perhaps untangling the truth was more complicated than society was suggesting.

During the lockdown I greatly missed the company of family and friends; the ease of getting groceries; the excitement of travel; of sitting in the bleachers of Fenway; of going to a brewery with colleagues; dining at a restaurant on the edge of the Atlantic; or the squeeze of another’s hand in my own. But the list was not as long as I thought.

In this changing world, we immediately saw how resilient we were, and how resilient Nature was too. Fewer people on the road and in the air made our skies brighter and our water cleaner. New economies were being created and replacing older ones. Life began to change because of the virus, and there was much of this new lifestyle that held promise. Our planet was thriving under of this “new normal,” and I wondered, might we thrive too?

People were suddenly more aware of how they felt than how they looked. They talked to neighbors. And all those birds, have they always been there? Instead of “going out,” there was now time to read that book by the bedside; to take the dog for a longer walk, to think. During these unnerving, horrific months, I was far from the only one asking how I wanted to spend my time. Resolutions were made to not just dream about what makes us happy, but to do what makes us happy. In an age of misinformation, the Truth became a most valuable commodity. But finding it for ourselves has not always been easy.

During these months someone I knew took up the cello, another decided to raise chickens; and still another got an inflatable pool for her deck, just because it made her

happy. There were record numbers of people adopting pets, reciting poetry, and improving their homes. Families were having supper together, eating healthier, and exercising more. Despite the threat of a deadly virus and a free-falling economy, many people became more relaxed. They went to bed earlier and dreamed more.

And then there is Nature. There had been a surge in birdwatching, gardening, morning swims in the ocean, and sleeping under the stars—even in your own backyard. I was not alone. Others were feeling it, an unexplained connectedness to the things around us: to Nature, to those from whom we were suddenly separated, and those physically taken from us. And in these darkest of days, the thread of love that runs through us all seemed to shine even brighter.

Drifting to sleep beneath the Milky Way, I again heard Thoreau’s well-known call: “If we move confidently in the direction of our dreams, we will live the life we’ve imagined.” “I want to tie a Canadian jam knot,” I replied, and bid the day goodnight.