Boston Bucket List: Walden Pond

We visited Walden Pond with Neil's parents on a rainy Friday afternoon. The canopy was so thick that we barely got wet as we hiked to the original site of Thoreau's cabin and around the rest of the pond. In light of the heavy rains and flooding this past Spring, the park service quoted what Thoreau wrote about the changing levels of the pond from year to year. (Apparently this weather happens in cycles. Who knew?) The trail immediately next to the pond remains flooded, so we took the higher, more hilly trail. Despite the rain, it was a fun hike for all of us. Along the way we saw these brilliant orange plants that Audrey loved. They looked like a cross between a mushroom and a piece of coral. Although the rain thwarted our visions of writing in our journals at the cabin, Ann and Syd attempted to compose poems as they hiked along.

The hike up to the original cabin site is not far from the entrance to the park. There are stones that mark the cabin's dimensions, and it was tiny. Next to the cabin site there is a large pile of stones. I cannot figure out why they are there, but it reminds me of an outdoorsy, classy public restroom door: visitors sign their name to a stone and leave it there. Zach enjoyed adding on to a small tower that someone built out of tiny rocks.

The following is part of a quote engraved in a small memorial to Thoreau:

"...I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived..."

My thoughts on this are that it is less difficult to do when you are alone on a beautiful pond with no responsibility outside of caring for yourself. The real trick is to integrate this idea into our busy lives. I read the quote to the girls and attempted to explain in two minutes what it means to live deliberately and how it would be possible for someone to have lived but at the same time failed to live. Somehow, they didn't get it. We will have to keep going back until they do.