by Tom Shafer
May 7, 2023
Over the winter of 2022-23, I embarked on forging a trail along the creek that defines the eastern border of our woods. In the years we have lived here on our property in the center of Greene County, Ohio, I have cleared and refined several paths on the bluff above the creek, but I had never formally created an easy route down to it, nor a passage along its slow, meandering waters. I wasn’t very far along in the process when a philosophical passage from noted writer and non-conformist Henry David Thoreau popped into my rather large noggin, a passage that I shared with my American literature students for many, many years.
When Thoreau was twenty-seven years old, he realized that he was essentially — in today’s parlance — lost. He had graduated from Harvard College, spent a couple of years teaching (unsuccessfully), and worked as a surveyor, but he was dissatisfied with the misdirection of his life. With inspiration likely spurred by neighbor and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau built a small ten by fifteen foot cabin near a pond on Emerson’s property and endeavored to live there in near isolation to “find himself,” and to discover meaning in life. In a book he would pen about his experience there, simply called Walden, he summarized his experiment with these now-famous and galvanizing words: “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.”
In no way am I comparing my “experiment” with Thoreau’s, but a lesson he learned rather quickly was one I experienced as well, and one that speaks to human nature of every time period in history — then, now, and tomorrow.
Thoreau was noted for his nonconformity, even in his own time, and he explained his nature in his own inimitable way: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” So, imagine his horror (okay, that may be a little overly dramatic) when he himself fell prey to the shackles — and comfort — of conformity just walking about in his wooded abode: “I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”
As a purely coincidental note, I am transcribing this while listening to the British coronation of King Charles, perhaps the most perfect example of our rutted history on earth.
Back to my own story and back in my own woods, the first order of business for this new trail was to engender a safe transition from the bluff to the creek, so I utilized a pair of trees and some climbing rope to fashion a swinging handrail down a natural wash to the valley floor. From there, I began removing shrubs, downed trees, and other obstacles above the creek bed, using the unwanted debris to generate “natural” piles for usage by my feathered friends and other small mammals that populate our woodland. After several days, the pathway started to take shape, and I was pleased with the final product.
Immediately, I introduced my three outdoor cats — Boots, Rainbow, and Luna — to the new trail. If you have read a few of my other entries, you are aware that I walk my cats daily, much as you might walk your own dogs. I grew up with dogs, but at my wife’s insistence early in our marriage, we became cat people. Still, that didn’t necessarily mean that I had to treat these cats like cats. So, for almost forty years, I have attempted to “train” my cats to be dogs — of course with limited to no success. However, over time, these three have been more-than-willing companions on frolicking excursions through the woods.
And now, we had a creek to play in!
But what happened with Thoreau happened with me as well. It is probably a couple of months since I completed my little project, but if I were to walk you along that path now, you might think that it had been there forever, that Native Americans, early settlers, and animals routinely traipsed along the creek, using the water for its necessary and life-sustaining qualities. Based on the volume of artifacts and relics I have found on the bluff and in and around the creek, a trail (or trails) must have existed at one point, but it (or they) were slowly erased as large-tract farms were created here after the Ordinance of 1787 established a government for the Northwest Territory and opened the lands to fee simple ownership.
I know that Thoreau’s message about the path from his door to his pond is more metaphorical or allegorical than physical, but that’s what popped into my brain — of which I have very little control.
Of course, he’s right about the “worn and dusty” highways of the world and the deep “ruts of tradition and conformity.” I have been railing against the stranglehold of conformity since I was first introduced to Emerson and Thoreau when I was a snot-nosed fifteen-year-old student in Jack Farnan’s American literature class nearly fifty years ago. But even with recognition of the limitations and failings of conformity, it is strangely difficult NOT to fall prey to its adherence and compliance.
And I have evidence in my own woods — and my own life.
