CONCORD, June 30, 1858.
FRIEND RICKETSON,--I am on the point of starting for the White
Mountains in a wagon with my neighbor Edward Hoar, and I write to you
now rather to apologize for not writing, than to answer worthily your
three notes. I thank you heartily for them. You will not care for a
little delay in acknowledging them, since your date shows that you can
afford to wait. Indeed, my head has been so full of company, etc.,
that I could not reply to you fitly before, nor can I now.
As for preaching to men these days in the Walden strain, is it of any
consequence to preach to an audience of men who _can_ fail, or who can
be _revived_? There are few beside. Is it any success to interest these
parties? If a man has _speculated_ and _failed_, he will probably do
these things again, in spite of you or me. I confess that it is rare
that I rise to sentiment in my relations to men,--ordinarily to a mere
patient, or may be wholesome, good-will. I can imagine something more,
but the truth compels me to regard the ideal and the actual as two
things.
Channing has come, and as suddenly gone, and left a short poem, "Near
Home," published (?) or printed by Munroe, which I have hardly had
time to glance at. As you may guess, I learn nothing of you from him.
You already foresee my answer to your invitation to make you a summer
visit: I am bound for the mountains. But I trust that you have
vanquished, ere this, those dusky demons that seem to lurk around the
Head of the River.[87] You know that this warfare is nothing but a
kind of nightmare, and it is our thoughts alone which give those
_un_worthies any body or existence.
I made an excursion with Blake, of Worcester, to Monadnock, a few
weeks since. We took our blankets and food, spent two nights on the
mountain, and did not go into a house.
Alcott has been very busy for a long time repairing an old shell of a
house, and I have seen very little of him.[88] I have looked more at
the houses which birds build. Watson made us all very generous
presents from his nursery in the spring. Especially did he remember
Alcott.
Excuse me for not writing any more at present, and remember me to your
family.
* * * * *
In explanation of the next letter (October 31, 1858), it may be said
that Ricketson had formed a plan for visiting Europe, which he gave
up, and had recommended an "English Australian" who proposed to see
Concord. In Thoreau's reply, he mentions Mr. Hoar, who was not only
his companion in later journeys, but, while in college or the Harvard
Law School, had assisted Thoreau in that accidental forest fire,
mentioned in the Journal, which brought both the young men into much
disrepute among the Concord farmers and owners of wood-lots. At the
date of the letter, Channing was flitting between New Bedford and
Concord, and soon returned to spend the rest of his days in Thoreau's
town, where he died, December 23, 1901, the last survivor of the group
of friends to whom these letters relate.
In July, 1858, as mentioned in this letter to Mr. Ricketson, Thoreau
journeyed from Concord to the White Mountains, first visited with his
brother John in 1839. His later companion was Edward Hoar, a botanist
and lover of nature, who had been a magistrate in California, and in
boyhood a comrade of Thoreau in shooting excursions on the Concord
meadows. They journeyed in a wagon and Thoreau disliked the loss of
independence in choice of camping-places involved in the care of a
horse. He complained also of the magnificent inns ("mountain houses")
that had sprung up in the passes and on the plateaus since his first
visit. "Give me," he said, "a spruce house made in the rain," such as
he and Channing afterward (1860) made on Monadnock in his last trip to
that mountain. The chief exploit in the White Mountain trip was a
visit to Tuckerman's Ravine on Mt. Washington, of which Mr. Hoar, some
years before his death (in 1893), gave me an account, containing the
true anecdote of Thoreau's finding the arnica plant when he needed it.
On their way to this rather inaccessible chasm, Thoreau and his
comrade went first to what was then but a small tavern on the
"tip-top" of Mt. Washington. It was a foggy day; and when the landlord
was asked if he could furnish a guide to Tuckerman's Ravine, he
replied, "Yes, my brother is the guide; but if he went to-day he could
never find his way back in this fog." "Well," said Thoreau, "if we
cannot have a guide we will find it ourselves;" and he at once
produced a map he had made the day before at a roadside inn, where he
had found a wall map of the mountain region, and climbed on a table to
copy that portion he needed. With this map and his pocket compass he
"struck a bee-line," said Mr. Hoar, for the ravine, and soon came to
it, about a mile away. They went safely down the steep stairs into the
chasm, where they found the midsummer iceberg they wished to see. But
as they walked down the bed of the Peabody River, flowing from this
ravine, over boulders five or six feet high, the heavy packs on their
shoulders weighed them down, and finally, Thoreau's foot slipping, he
fell and sprained his ankle. He rose, but had not limped five steps
from the place where he fell, when he said, "Here is the arnica,
anyhow,"--reached out his hand and plucked the _Arnica mollis_, which
he had not before found anywhere. Before reaching the mountains they
had marked in their botany books forty-six species of plants they
hoped to find there, and before they came away they had found
forty-two of them.
When they reached their camping-place, farther down, Thoreau was so
lame he could not move about, and lay there in the camp several days,
eating the pork and other supplies they had in their packs, Mr. Hoar
going each day to the inn at the mountain summit. This camp was in a
thicket of dwarf firs at the foot of the ravine, where, just before
his accident, by carelessness in lighting a fire, some acres of the
mountain woodland had been set on fire; but this proved to be the
signal for which Thoreau had told his Worcester friends to watch, if
they wished to join him on the mountain. "I had told Blake," says
Thoreau in his Journal, "to look out for a smoke and a white tent. We
had made a smoke sure enough. We slept five in the tent that night,
and found it quite warm." Mr. Hoar added: "In this journey Thoreau
insisted on our carrying heavy packs, and rather despised persons who
complained of the burden. He was chagrined, in the Maine woods, to
find his Indian, Joe Polis (whom, on the whole, he admired), excited
and tremulous at sight of a moose, so that he could scarcely load his
gun properly. Joe, who was a good Catholic, wanted us to stop
traveling on Sunday and hold a meeting; and when we insisted on going
forward, the Indian withdrew into the woods to say his prayers,--then
came back and picked up the breakfast things, and we paddled on. As to
Thoreau's courage and manliness, nobody who had seen him among the
Penobscot rocks and rapids--the Indian trusting his life and his canoe
to Henry's skill, promptitude, and nerve--would ever doubt it."
Channing says:[89] "In his later journeys, if his companion was
footsore or loitered, he steadily pursued his road. Once, when a
follower was done up with headache and incapable of motion, hoping his
associate would comfort him and perhaps afford him a sip of tea, he
said, 'There are people who are sick in that way every morning, and go
about their affairs,' and then marched off about his. In such limits,
so inevitable, was he compacted.... This tone of mind grew out of no
insensibility; or, if he sometimes looked coldly on the suffering of
more tender natures, he sympathized with their afflictions, but could
do nothing to admire them. He would not injure a plant unnecessarily.
At the time of the John Brown tragedy, Thoreau was driven sick. So the
country's misfortunes in the Union war acted on his feelings with
great force: he used to say he 'could never recover while the war
lasted.'" Hawthorne had an experience somewhat similar, though he,
too, was of stern stuff when need was, and had much of the old Salem
sea-captains in his sensitive nature.