Out of Place: Walden, and Beyond

Out of PlaceWalden, and Beyond David Gessner This pandemic summer of 2020, while trying to know my backyard better, I began to write a book about a man who spent his life getting to know his backyard. Today, September 26, after six months of sheltering in place with my family while writing about Thoreau and Walden, and a week of working our way up the east coast, it is finally time to pay a visit. A pilgrimage of sorts, though this close to summer I know the place will be packed. I drop my wife Nina and my daughter Hadley and her friend L. J. off at the Colonial Inn in Concord Center and head out on an evening reconnaissance mission to the pond. The parking lot gates close at 7:00, and I'm cutting it close, but I decide I need to at least say a quick hello to the homesite. What would Thoreau make of this? Hundreds of people wearing masks, herded down a narrow one-way path between chain-link fences on either side. The deep irony of this temple of solitude now overspilling with people, masked people no less, myself of course included. But they are all filing out as I sneak in, and to my surprise, when I get there after a ten-minute walk, I have the homesite to myself. And as people rush toward their cars to depart, most of this, the southeast part of the pond, is mine as well. The water is deep green and the weather is perfect and bugless and though the foliage is not yet peak there are blazes of yellow from the beeches and maples in between the evergreens. Despite worrying that my car may get locked in the lot for the night, I decide a quick swim is in order. This place feels like home. Not because I am Thoreau reborn but because there is something about the feel of fall, the brisk nap in the air, that reminds me of my actual hometown. I have written books celebrating my adopted homes of Colorado and Cape Cod, and now, at last, the one I'm writing now, celebrating my home in North Carolina. These are all beautiful places, but my dark truth is that my real hometown lies less than an hour to the southwest of here. Worcester, Massachusetts has, so far, mostly escaped the paeans of poets, me included. Thoreau, however, gave it its due, looking toward it—or the mountain to its [End Page 9] north, Wachusett—as a kind of symbol of the West. Hardly Yellowstone, but a beautiful mountain. Thoreau wrote in his essay "Walking": "Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free." Even Worcester was west once. I left Worcester when I was sixteen, but returned to live right outside the city during my thirtieth year. The place dragged me down—and a week shy of my thirtieth birthday I had my right testicle removed after it was discovered I had testicular cancer. That May, as I walked around Wachusett Reservoir and watched the world bud, I also drove in every weekday to the hospital to get my middle irradiated in hopes of preventing the cancer's spread. I wrote, only half-jokingly, in my journal: "I don't know what's worse, cancer or Worcester." It has been almost thirty years since then, and the cancer has not returned. Soon after my radiation therapy ended, I escaped from Worcester and have not been back, except for brief visits, since. The search for home has preoccupied me all my adult life. In that way I am not unlike Thoreau, and not unlike you, perhaps. In this uprooted country in this uprooted time, the search can smack of desperation, especially as more of our homes are burned or flooded or shattered by storms. Having been severed from the places I love, and exiled, by the necessity of taking a job, to a region I was suspicious of, it has taken some work to establish a sense of home. My early places were love affairs, while North Carolina has been an arranged marriage. What amazes me really is...