I Went to the Woods

My boots lay by the door, caked with mud, one sitting upright whilst the other had tipped onto its side. Outside, as the birds chirped, the sun was shining.

“I’ll be back, ma! Going out for a hunt!”

“You better fuckin’ kill something” my fathers voice startled me.

My shoulders tightened as I turned around to face him.

“I’ll try my hardest, Pa.”

My voice shook and heart sank as I read the clear contempt in his eyes.

I bent down, got on my boots, and grabbed the musket. I did it slowly in anticipation of a response. There wasn’t one.

It was pretty obvious I was a huge disappointment to my Dad. Too much of a thinker, he’d always say. In his eyes I needed to get some dirt on my “pretty” hands before I “sat around being useless and driving myself crazy”. I sure felt crazy but I was not being useless: I was thinking.

As usual I was out on this walk to do just that: to think. I never really went out on a hunt to actually hunt. I hadn’t the faintest clue how to even find an animal. The woods were large and usually the only animal I could find was birds, squirrels, and owls. If I saw a deer, I told myself, I’d shoot it. Maybe Pa would like me better if I came back with some venison for the family. If it were up to me I’d befriend the deer. Today, however, was a special day for me to go “hunting”. Maybe I’d be in luck.

About a week ago I had gone out on a “hunt” to meet up with my heroes Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They were two intellectuals, just like I’d like to think of myself, and they loved to watch me think as I “sat around being useless”. They didn’t think it was crazy: in fact they had referred to my ways of thinking as very “Transcendentalist”. They told me that if I went out for a hunt at Walden Pond, come noontime today, then I’d run into an colleague of theirs who I would purportedly resonate with. His name, they said, was Henry David Thoreau. He had apparently become so frustrated with blokes like my father that he had decided to live in the wilderness, all by himself, like a hermit. As I walked away from my house, with yet another mile to walk until I’d arrive at Walden, excitement raged nervously like a fire inside my belly. Today I would meet a man who would make me feel less crazy and maybe, just maybe, I’d find a deer.

• • •

“Your tongue is more of a weapon than that contraption will ever be.”

His tongue spoke the words to me with a murmur that reminded me of a river. I didn’t have to look; I knew it was him. For the past twenty minutes or so I had sat overlooking the pond, became disinterested, and began cleaning my musket to the point that I feared it would disappear. Now his eyes were upon me, and I felt them, but I didn’t know what to say.

“You are frozen like ice in the winter.” He murmured again.

Slowly, I turned around. He was seated about 10 feet behind me. I had no idea how long he had been there.

His eyes were spectacularly calm and very hard to read. In his hand was a pad of paper. It read, at the top, “Notes for Walden” in pencil. His wisdom was etched upon his sun beaten, muddied face as he quizzically held me in his eyes and erupted into a pleasant and friendly smile.

“I’ve heard you’re a smart one. I’ve two ears and one mouth for a reason. Let us walk like it is a dance. A dance of joy: we will appreciate the wits of another, yes?”

“Yes” I babbled.

He kicked a pebble, from the shore, and watch as it splashed into the water and undulated into a festival of ripples upon the water that had been so stagnant.

“We are not so unlike the stone; causing ripples. I suppose it is up to us: what ripples will we create?” He began to walk. I fell in behind him like a duckling chasing after its mother... Such wisdom he had!

“How do you feel about that?” he asked, after a few paces, as he stared off into the still water. The ripples had completely dissipated from the pond.

“The ripples disrupt the serenity. Is it better to be a stone, or a leaf?” I questioned uncertainly. I sound stupid.

Surprisingly his eyes lit up as they turned to meet mine.

“A beautiful answer, young one.”

His eyes were like crystals that pierced mine for mere seconds before he turned and began to walk again. I stood speechless as I watched him wander along the shore. He never once looked back to make sure I was following.

“Thank you sir! But it was a question!” I called out, slinging my musket over my shoulder and hurrying after him.

“Precisely” he retorted.

• • •

Our conversation sits in my head to this day. I haven’t forgotten a single moment of the interaction between us that day. We spoke for about an hour before parting ways: I had to get home to my family before they started getting suspicious. I seldom saw him again as my family moved out west about a month later.

That day, as I made my way home, a deer walked out in front of me; a buck. It walked right in front of me. I was only a half a mile from my house. I was on a well-trodden path. I wasn’t even in the deep woods. It even stopped in its tracks and had the courage to look into my eyes with an expression that seemed a lot like pride.  The buck’s eyes reminded me of Henry’s: I stood frozen, like ice in the winter; my musket was readily locked and loaded.

Nothing from that day makes sense to me, still: not the rhetorical questions Henry asked me, nor the answers he ambiguously offered, and especially not the reason why I didn’t pull the trigger.  Maybe I was afraid I would miss: perhaps missing would validate the opinions of my father; I was useless. Maybe it was the harmony with nature that Henry seemed to have that I desperately wanted.

Regardless, the main mystery remains: I’ll never discern whether or not I was wrong not to.