[January 30th marks the 150th anniversary of the English-language publication of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that book and other travel stories!]
On two
complementary reasons to read Thoreau’s often-overlooked Cape Cod (1865).
Between
1849 and 1857, Henry David Thoreau traveled four times to Cape Cod (no quick or
easy journey for any Concord resident in those days, much less one who preferred
walking to the train). He was as taken by the place as have been so many
of its visitors, and eventually compiled his observations and reflections on those
journeys into a single book manuscript, treating the four trips as one symbolic
meta-visit to the Cape. Not yet published upon his untimely death in 1862, the
book was released in 1865, but has I would argue been largely forgotten in the
century and a half since; when the Thoreau canon is expanded beyond Walden and “Civil Disobedience” to
include his travel writing, the choice is often A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). A Week, like all those works, deserves our attention to be sure,
but there’s a case to be made that Cape
Cod offers two significant contributions of its own to our collective
memories.
For one
thing, it gives us a far different Thoreau. As was known even to his
contemporary Concordians and has become clearer and clearer ever since, the
Thoreau of Walden and the like was a
carefully constructed persona, an imagined version of the self created in order
to model a perspective and identity for those neighbors
he was hoping to wake up. Whereas I very much agree with Thoreau scholar Henry Beston (in his
Introduction to an edition of the book) that in Cape Cod we find “Thoreau as a human being,” and more exactly “what
he was at the time, a Concord Yankee gone traveling.” He was also one of our
keenest observers of and writers about nature, both scientific (particularly
as a botanist) and human—and while he included those observations in all his
works, the lack of an overt moral or social purpose to Cape Cod allows them to take center stage in a particularly
compelling and successful way. Cape Cod
may not be as immediate or authentic as Thoreau in
his Journals, but it’s
a far more concise work and one written with audience engagement in mind, and
thus it complements his other published books with a more intimate glimpse into
Thoreau than we otherwise get from them.
Moreover, Cape Cod also offers an important
glimpse into both the natural landscapes and human communities of the region
prior to its full development as a tourist getaway. In Chapter IV, for example,
Thoreau finds himself on a Wellfleet beach that would become part of the Cape
Cod National Seashore (on which more tomorrow): “In short, we were traversing a
desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary brilliancy, a sort
of Promised Land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. Yet, though the
prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of
trees, a house was rarely visible--we never saw one from the beach--and the
solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could
not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of
the scenery, as their footsteps in the sand.” And in the very next chapter, he
ventures inland to converse with one of the most finely observed human subjects
in all his writing, “The Wellfleet Oysterman.” Taken together, these two
chapters give us a striking glimpse into Cape Cod in the mid-19th
century, a world quite apart from Concord and the rest of Massachusetts, and
one captured with the unique precision and power of which Thoreau was capable.
Next
travel story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Travel stories or writing you’d highlight?
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