Storming the Gates of Paradise (2 page)

Since then, I have been fascinated by trying to map the ways that we think and talk, the unsorted experience wherein one can start by complaining about politics and end by confessing about passions, the ease with which we can get to any point from any other point. Such conversation is sometimes described as being “all over the place,” which is another way to say that it connects everything back up. The straight line of conventional narrative is too often an elevated freeway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. It is not how our thoughts travel, nor does it allow us to map the whole world rather than one streamlined trajectory across it. I wanted more, more scope, more nuance, more inclusion of the crucial details and associations that are conventionally excluded. The convergence of multiple kinds of stories shaped my writing in one way; this traveling by association shaped it in others. Early in my history of walking, I wrote that “if fields of expertise can be imagined as real fields, fenced off and carefully tilled, then the history of walking is a path that trespasses through dozens of fields.” So are most unfenced lines of inquiry. I learned two kinds of trespassing at the test site, geographical and intellectual.

There I also learned that the sunset is no less beautiful when you are wearing handcuffs (or more so, as I discuss in “Justice by Moonlight”). That is to say, experience never gets sorted out, except by the mind that insists it must be, and the most truthful are the passionate impurists. One of the people I met at the test site
was the landscape photographer Richard Misrach (whose pictures of clouds and skies are the nominal subject of “Excavating the Sky”). At the time, the early 1990s, he was making images that many people found deeply disturbing. I was told again and again that he was “glorifying violence” with his pictures of the ravaged military landscapes of Nevada’s endless expanse of military land. These critics wanted the beautiful to be synonymous with the good, beauty never to be seductive unless that seduction was the path to virtue, evil to be easy to reject, and pictures about politics to be able to fit into the dry sensibility of photojournalism rather than the voluptuousness of large-format color photography. The environmental magazines mostly obeyed these mandates, as I have been complaining ever since: oil spills were always in small, ugly pictures; and the big color pictures of pristine nature excluded any sense of history, violence, or even, for the most part, decay. (Photographer Eliot Porter was at the root of much of this, as “Every Corner Is Alive: Eliot Porter as an Environmentalist and an Artist” elaborates, but it wasn’t his fault; he was better than his followers.)

Richard’s work challenged us to feel the conflicts of being fully present in a complicated world, and I was trying to do the same. We were not alone: perhaps that struggle to put the world back together was the major mandate of the late twentieth century. And we have, in many ways, by learning to think about the politics of food; by becoming more sophisticated about where the material objects and energy we use come from and go (thus the lingerie in “The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans” and the nuclear waste and gold mines in the section “Trouble Below”); by learning to think about the world more in terms of systems than discrete objects; by pursuing ideas and histories across fields and genres; by remembering at last, those of us who are not indigenous, that all the terrain of the Americas has a human history as well. It was a long way back. I think of that fork in the road and the subsequent great divide as the Thoreau problem. It surfaces in considerations of his work again and again, and because Thoreau is so important to American thought (and to the writing in this book—he appears at least briefly in several of the essays), it seems worthwhile to revisit his seamlessness and the interpretive apartheid that divided up his territory.

Thoreau was emphatic about the huckleberries. In one of his two most famous pieces of writing, “Civil Disobedience,” he concluded his account of his night in Concord’s jail with these words: “I was put in jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour,—for the horse was soon tackled,—was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the state was nowhere to be seen.” He told the same story again in the other,
Walden
, this time saying that he “returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill.” That he told it twice tells us that he considered the conjunction of prisons and berry parties, of the landscape of incarceration and pastoral pleasure, significant. But why?

The famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson’s woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nature, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn’t fit into
Walden
’s narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics.

Says the introduction to my paperback edition of
Walden
and “Civil Disobedience”: “As much as Thoreau wanted to disentangle himself from other people’s problems so he could get on with his own life, he sometimes found that the issue of black slavery spoiled his country walks. His social conscience impinged on his consciousness, even though he believed that his duty was not to eradicate social evils but to live his life independently.” To believe this is to believe that the woods were far from Concord jail not merely by foot but by thought. To believe that conscience is an imposition upon consciousness is to regard engagement as a
hijacker rather than a rudder, interference with one’s true purpose rather than perhaps at least part of that purpose.

Thoreau did not believe so or wish that it were so—and he contradicted this isolationist statement explicitly in “Civil Disobedience,” completed, unlike
Walden
, shortly after those years in the woods—but many who have charge of his reputation do. They permit no conversation, let alone any unity, between the rebel, the intransigent muse to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and that other Thoreau who wrote about autumnal tints, ice, light, color, grasses, woodchucks, and other natural phenomena in essays easily and often defanged and diced up into inspiring extracts. But for Thoreau, any subject was a good enough starting point to travel any distance, toward any destination. There were no huckleberries in his passionate defense of the violent abolitionist John Brown, but there were arguments about freedom in the essay on huckleberries written about the same time.

This compartmentalizing of Thoreau is a small portion of a larger partition in American thought, another fence built in the belief that places in the imagination can also be contained. Those who deny that nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country are inextricably interfused have undermined that route for all of us, Thoreau’s short, direct route so few have been able to find since. This makes politics dreary and landscape trivial, a vacation site; it banishes not merely certain thoughts—chief among them that much of what the environmental movement dubbed wilderness was or is indigenous homeland, a very social and political space indeed, then and now—but even the thought that Thoreau in jail must have contemplated the following day’s huckleberry party, and that Thoreau among the huckleberries must have ruminated on his stay in jail. That alone is a major route to and fro, and perhaps the most important one. We are usually in several places at once, and the ways our conversations and thoughts meander is a guide to the connections between all things or any two things. People in cities eat the fruits of the country; people in the country watch the strange doings of city-dwelling politicians and celebrities on TV.

If “black slavery spoiled his country walks,” you can imagine that it spoiled the slaves’ country walks even more. Thus the unresisting walk to jail. “Eastward,
I go only by force; but westward I go free,” Thoreau wrote elsewhere, but the route to the free west (which, for slaves, was the free north of Canada) was not always direct. You head for the hills to enjoy the best of what the world is at this moment; you head for confrontation, for resistance, for picket lines to protect it, to free it, to make it better. Thus it is that the road to paradise often runs through prison; thus it is that Thoreau went to jail to enjoy a better country; and thus it is that one of his greatest students, Martin Luther King Jr., found himself in jail and eventually in the way of a bullet on what was called the long road to freedom, whose goal he spoke of as “the mountaintop.” We were lucky at the Nevada Test Site in those days; the prison and the mountaintop were pretty much the same place.

Bertolt Brecht once wrote, “What kind of times are they, when/A talk about trees is almost a crime/Because it implies silence about so many horrors?” He wrote in an era when the trees seemed marginal to the realm of politics; in recent decades, everything from climate change to clear-cutting has made forests pivotal. To imagine the woods as an escape is to have already escaped awareness of the political factors weighing in on their fate and their importance. This is the most unfortunate way that schism has closed up. But it has also undone the false dichotomy between the city and the country: if the woods are being cut down to build houses, we can see the fate of the forest and its bodily remains in the new subdivision; we can protest it in the urban administrative headquarters or the overseas shareholders’ meeting. Conventional environmental writing since Thoreau has often maintained a strict silence or an animosity toward the city, despite its importance as a lower-impact place for the majority to live, its intricate relations to the rural, and the direct routes between the two. Imagining the woods or any untrammeled landscape as an unsocial place, an outside, also depends on erasing the societies who dwelt and sometimes now dwell there, the original Americans. One more thing that can be said in favor of Thoreau is that he spent a lot of time imaginatively repopulating the woods around Concord with Indians and even prepared quantities of notes for a never-attempted history of Native America (and the third section of his
The Maine Woods
is mostly a portrait of the Native guide Joe Polis).

Not that those woods were unsocial even after their aboriginal population was driven out. “Visitors” is one of the chapters of
Walden
, and in this chapter (mentioned in “Jailbirds I Have Loved”), Thoreau describes meeting runaway slaves in the woods and guiding them farther on the road to freedom. Rather than ruining his country walks, some slaves joined him on them, or perhaps he joined them in the act of becoming free. Some of those he guided were on the Underground Railroad, in which his mother and sisters in Concord were deeply involved; and a few months after that famous night in jail, Thoreau hosted Concord’s most important abolitionist group, the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, at a meeting in his Walden Pond hut. What kind of a forest was this, with slaves, rebels, and the ghosts of the original inhabitants all moving through the trees? He had gone to jail, of course, over his refusal to pay taxes because he considered both slavery and the war on Mexico immoral.

The American landscape in his time was crossed by many invisible lines: those that separated slave and free states; those that demarcated the rapidly shrinking Indian territory and the new reservations; those that laid out the new national borders drawn up at the conclusion of the war on Mexico, whereby the million square miles or so that had been Mexico’s northern half became the U.S. Southwest. Even the name of the short-lived Free Soil Party of the 1840s implies that something as tangible as soil is embedded with something as immaterial as ideology. Though Thoreau remarked in his essay “Walking” that the principal surveyor of wild lands must be the Prince of Darkness, he himself was such a measurer of land. He knew that what exists as landscape for one kind of experience exists as real estate for another. Fair Haven Hill, up above the Sudbury River, may have been his favorite place of all, a promontory from whose rocky crest the view was considerable, but he surveyed a portion of it for Reuben Brown on October 20–22, 1851 (and did some surveying for his jailer, Sam Staples, on various occasions long after the famous night in jail).

You can see that two-mile journey from the jail to the berries another way. Thoreau began that essay/lecture on walking with, “I wish to speak a word in favor of nature, of absolute freedom and wildness.” If he went to jail to demonstrate his commitment to the freedom of others, he went to the berries to exercise
his own recovered freedom, the liberty to do whatever he wished—and the evidence in all his writing is that he very often wished to pick berries. There’s a widespread belief, among both activists and those who cluck disapprovingly over insufficiently austere activists, that idealists should not enjoy any pleasure denied to others, that beauty, sensuality, delight all ought to be stalled behind some dam that only the imagined revolution will break. This schism creates, as the alternative to a life of selfless devotion, a life of flight from engagement, which seems to be one way those years at Walden are sometimes portrayed: escape. But change is not always by revolution; the deprived don’t generally wish most that the rest of us would join them; and a passion for justice and pleasure in small things are not incompatible. It’s possible to do both, to talk about trees and justice (and in our time, justice for trees); that’s part of what the short jaunt from jail to hill says.

Perhaps prison is anything that severs and alienates; paradise is the reclaimed commons with the fences thrown down; and so any step toward connection and communion is a step toward paradise, including those that take the route through jail. In Thoreau’s case, I think of the modern term
prefigurative politics
, which means that you can and perhaps ought to embody what you avow—that you cannot get to peace through strife, to justice by bullying; that you win a small victory by embodying freedom, justice, or joy, not just campaigning for them. In this sense, Thoreau was demonstrating on that one day in Concord in June of 1847 both what dedication to freedom was and what enjoyment of freedom might look like—free association, free roaming, the picking of the fruits of the earth for free, free choice of commitments—including those that lead to jail—and of pleasures. That is the direct route to paradise, the one road worth traveling.