Under an overcast November sky layered with ragged clouds in several shades of gray, my wife Mary and I took a counterclockwise walk around Walden Pond. Oaks were in full metallic bloom, with leaves of bright gold, bronze and copper that glowed despite the flat light. They appeared especially glorious as we looked across the water to the high banked south shore where they blazed against the soft, airbrushed green of white pines.
At this late date the wide public beach was empty, although a man in a wetsuit was backstroking across the pond. Soon after leaving the sandy area, we came upon a granite post incised with an arrow and the words “To Site of Thoreau’s Hut.” Having made the pilgrimage many times over four decades I hardly noticed the monument. Continuing along the path, we marveled at the foliage and the pond’s reflection of shifting clouds as they floated over the mirrored colors of overhanging branches.
On reaching Thoreau’s Cove we took the short trail leading to the dwelling site. A pointed wooden sign in routered letters read “House Site.” Ascending a slight rise, we were soon at the spot well marked by nine stone bollards joined together by arcing chains. “Site of Thoreau’s Cabin” was carved on one of the nine. The nearby cairn had lost some of the elaborate stacked stones in the Japanese garden style that it had sported during the summer, but for the first time I noticed a few brightly painted so called kindness rocks, albeit quite small. One was oblong shaped, painted red and lettered in white with the word “Home.”
Though the stone was small, the term “home” loomed large. It seemed to settle, for me at least, a kind of signage multiple personality disorder among the markers around the pond that referred to Thoreau’s shelter as a hut, house, or cabin. Hardly noticeable on the large amorphous cairn, the tiny stone appeared closest to the correct nomenclature.
“I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house (emphasis added), and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber,” Thoreau writes as he starts describing the structure’s construction in Walden. In fact, Thoreau almost invariably refers to his pondside dwelling as a house. So did Emerson in his eulogy, and his son Edward in his 1917 recollection Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend. Thoreau’s friend Bronson Alcott was among the few who called the structure a “hermitage.”
Thoreau biographers and scholars have frequently referred to the Walden dwelling as a cabin, although they also sometimes use the term hut, camp or house. The tendency toward the word cabin has continued into the twenty-first century as evidenced in recent biographies by Robert Sullivan and Kevin Dann. Henry Seidel Canby’s 1939 Thoreau plays the field and at one point uses hut, house and cabin in just two pages.
A poet and meticulous prose craftsmen, Thoreau used words as carefully as any writer, cognizant not only of definitions, but nuance and weight. Despite its diminutive size, as a house his residence would be on the same terms as that of any leading citizen of Concord. It was decidedly not a shanty, a word he uses for the structure he bought for its boards from railroad worker James Collins. Thoreau “almost always” called his Walden abode a house, “insisting on the solidity and dignity he worked so hard to attain,” writes Laura Dassow Walls in her epic life of Thoreau published in 2017.
Taking my inspiration from that little red kindness rock on the cairn, I maintain that Thoreau’s Walden residence was more than his house. It was his home. No doubt he built a house. But in the process of living there he created a home. It was the only home he was ever to have that was his alone. “My home, then, to a certain extent,” Thoreau confided to his journal on August 19, 1851, “is the place where I keep my thick coat and my tent and some books which I cannot carry; where, next, I can depend on meeting some friends; and where, finally, I, even I, have established myself in business.”
Thoreau’s home at Walden was a place of deep domestic affection where he could work relatively free of distraction, enjoy the physical comforts of hearth and household routine, entertain friends, and let his restless mind wander where it would. Considering the house at the pond as a home infuses Thoreau with greater humanity and makes his legacy more readily understood. After all, be it a house, apartment, condominium, or tent, what we really need and love is home.
