Canoeing in the Wilderness by Henry David Thoreau

Far into his text, he recalls boatmen, in low water, mowing the grass of the Concord River as if it were a hayfield, the better to deliver their freight. In half a mile, we came to Egg Rock, an outcrop of granite gneiss, as impressive in its size as in words inscribed in the rock: “On the hill at the meeting of these rivers and along the banks lived the owners of Musketaquid before the white men came.” The rivers Sudbury and Assabet join at Egg Rock to form-as Thoreau tells us in the first words of his book-“the Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River.” It had been renamed Concord River, but “it will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here,” he says, suggesting a viewpoint not widespread in his time. Across a swamp on the left was Nashawtuc Hill, but in 2003 we could see neither school nor hill from the tree-screened Sudbury. Henry Thoreau founded an earlier Concord Academy, in 1838. In addition to houses with sloping lawns, Concord Academy was off to our right. On August 31, 1839, as the brothers prepare to launch, “a warm drizzling rain” rains all morning, so the Thoreaus delay their departure until the “mild afternoon.” On August 31, 2003, a cool and sunlit day, we were on the Sudbury soon after breakfast. “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” Henry’s first book, rehearses their journey as a species of memorial, the fact notwithstanding that Thoreau never mentions his brother’s name. After nicking himself with a razor, John died of tetanus at the age of twenty-seven. John was his brother’s best friend, perhaps his only close one. He and John grew up in a now long-gone dwelling thought to have been very nearby.

Across Main is the house where Henry David Thoreau died. It is now the back yard of a couple named Kate Stout and Pete Funkhouser, who live at the intersection of Thoreau and Main.

On the thirty-first of August, 2003, with a college roommate who has long lived in Concord, I set out in a sixteen-foot Old Town canoe at a put-in site on the Sudbury which is Thoreau scholars’ best guess as the place where the Thoreaus took off. They carried two sets of oars and a sail. The boat was fifteen feet long, styled like a dory, and new. They were bound for Hooksett, New Hampshire, about fifty-five water miles north. On the thirty-first of August, 1839, John and Henry Thoreau-brothers, aged twenty-five and twenty-two-set out from their home in Concord, Massachusetts, in a small skiff on the Sudbury River. The river's “wild and noble sights,” Thoreau wrote, are “such as they who sit in parlors never dream of.” Illustration by Edward Sorel

Canoeing in the Wilderness by Henry David Thoreau