MY senses of walden pond. plus a short poem.

 
    I visited Walden Pond on my birthday. I was driving five hours from Rhode Island to Vermont, and I didn’t want to be stuck in a car all day, so I veered off in Concord. It’s just off the highway, so it's fairly popular. It was nearly full, the end of September being one of the last warm days of the year for swimming. I parked in the furthest parking lot and left my cigarettes and my mind in the car. I made my way towards the first parking lot to pay. There were school trips and hikers, tourists from Quebec and families from Concord alike. I was in slippers and pajama pants.

There was a quote carved into a slab of wood at the site of Thoreau's house. “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” (sign outside of Thoreau's house, 1).

All that is left of Thoreau’s house is a slab of rock where his fireplace once was. 
I began thinking of absence, of what was once there and how it's felt. Walden Reservation attempted to recreate his house, emulating exactly what they knew his house to look like. But Thoreau built his with his hands: can a recreation be made if the process is radically different? The recreation was small, with a single bed and a window. There was a metal statue of Thoreau outside. He was shorter than I expected. How can such broad, complicated ideas come from a man so small? I towered over him. I stood in his home. It felt invasive, like I wasn’t supposed to see this. That was what reading Walden felt like for me— not quite a diary feeling, but like a manifesto, a style guide. The absence was felt at Walden Pond. What once was Thoreau’s home was a dirt platform framed with stones

I want to visit again next week. I want to see walden and wander. What a great combination of words. Here’s a poem I wrote about walden pond. 

Did you know Thoreau played the flute?
He did, he even carved it himself.
Playing his own music on his own instrument
In his own house in his own woods
By his own pond in his own town. 

It's right off the highway.
In fact, you can hear the 
Incessant honking of
Massachusetts drivers—
Even from the deepest
Corner of the woods. 

When I went to Walden, I got lost. 
I walked the wrong direction, I 
Followed the wrong signs, listened 
To the wrong noises. I wandered towards
The sound of water. It made sense to 
Me. The water I found was a machine—
Big and bulky and in the middle of a 
Crabgrass field. There was a fence 
That lined it, one I could have hopped
But didn’t. I think it was solar powered. 

 I cant help it. I repeat to myself

It's just water.
It's just dirt.
They’re just rocks.
It's just wood.

They tried to recreate his house.
Its right ned to the gift shop, 
The whole thing is smaller 
Than my bathroom. The walls
Aren’t weathered, the floors 
Aren’t scratched. There’s no
Nails in the walls where drawings
Were once hung. There is a table
For when he invited many friends 
To sardine together into his 
Tiny home. Thoreau is just like

me