“They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay.” – Henry David Thoreau

There is a photo of me at 5 years old lying in a pile of leaves. Most of my body is buried within the heap all you can see is my small hand holding up a single amber leaf and my blue eyes staring at it curiously.

My father took the picture one not-so-important afternoon after we raked my mother’s gardens. After his death, I hung the photo on my bedroom wall to remind myself of our adventures in the great outdoors. Whenever I look at the photo, I can still smell of musky damp earth that surrounded us while we worked – a scent that would remind me of him throughout my life.

Being a history buff, he would tell me random historical facts (generally while we worked outside together). One being: around 1805, Boston’s Beacon Hill, was the first railroad in the United States constructed and operated. Built in Anglo North America as a product of railroading transferred from Great Britain, the line was a direct ancestor of later pioneering lines that progressed this country.

My father’s fact, ideas of progress and the critical role of trains during the expansion Westward during America’s youth ran through my head a few Wednesdays ago when my Historical Perspectives in Literature class met at SUNY Fredonia’s College Lodge. There, we found “Thoreau Trail” and sat outside on broken sticks, tilled soil and fallen leaves to discuss Thoreau’s “Walden, Or Life in the Woods” (1854).

In the piece, Thoreau attempts to lead by example: he spends two years living next to Walden Pond – near Concord, Mass. – living a simple life supported by no one, while discussing the benefits of moving away from society and coming back to nature.

While in the woods, Thoreau claims to have lived a life of self reliance in nature by building his own house, growing his own food and thinking of new ways to experience life by rethinking Native American and Eastern thinking (a rich wilderness tradition that is tied to nature) that was being paved over by European American and Western discourse (industry and Christianity).

Possibly his most crucial chapter – the first section titled “Economy” – is a manifesto of social thought and meditations on domestic management. In it, Thoreau comments that people have no time to be any thing but machines. He claims that the “luxuries” (expensive houses, clothes, cars and all other “comforts of life”) are really hindrances to the elevation of all people because they end up owning us.

While building a modest home with his own hands, he considers how most people have never thought about what a house is, and are needlessly poor for their entire life because they “think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have;” people are overlooking necessity in the name of luxury.

As the class discussed Thoreau’s arguments that these “comforts” in our lives are merely an “improved means to an unimproved end,” several automobiles noisily drove up the road that paralleled the lodge, which echoed through the trees and interrupted our thoughts and attempts to connect with nature.

I couldn’t help but think that it was the same emotion Thoreau felt when he heard the sound of the locomotive in the distance echoing through the forest.

With the recent bailing out of billion dollar Wall Street companies and present housing and economic crises looming over America’s head, it was impossible not to draw frightening connections of the country’s current situation to the warnings of the affluent scholar who chose to move away from “progress.”

His years spent in nature reminded me of my childhood home in Eden where I would spend every season in the woods with my father cutting down trees, raking paths and working on our house (that my father and mother repaired with their own hands).

As a child, autumn seemed to be the most important season because we would chop firewood to heat our house throughout the winter and rake leaves off our gardens before the first snow fell in order to prohibit plants from being smothered.

In the public arena, my father was a welder and a truck driver he embodied the idea of industry by literally making/driving machines that paved over the earth. In his private life at home, however, he was constantly in the woods.

In order to pay the bills and survive, society demanded my father be removed from nature and placed into a career path that destroyed it. This is how it is for most Americans.

Thoreau’s main hopes are for people to notice that these “modern improvements” are merely “pretty toys” that distract attention away from serious issues in life.

All of these thoughts flooded my mind after class. As the class walked up Thoreau Trail, moving back to our cars and back into town – back to reap the weeds we’ve sown – all I could do was look down at the ground and think, “Those are our leaves,” and feel wistful.

Originally published Sunday, Oct. 19 2008