A Transcendental Journey: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

Afterword Part I

The weather in Concord, Massachusetts was freezing. Snow flittered to the ground. It didn’t matter. It was my birthday. My present to myself was seeing Walden Pond.

I drove carefully through the slush that covered Walden Road, past the snow-silent shops of Sunday Concord and out into the lightly wooded countryside. Only a mile or so down the two-lane road, I rolled slowly into the unplowed parking lot at Walden Pond State Park.

In the summer, the parking lot filled up early. More than two million people, tourists, locals, and pilgrims like me, visited Walden each year. But that day, the parking lot was nearly empty. Even the New Englanders were being more sensible than I was.

I shuffled across the lot and past a tiny cabin-like structure, a model of a long ago residence. Ralph Waldo Emerson once owned some land by Walden Pond. In 1844, he let a young friend and protégé named Henry David Thoreau build a one-room cabin in a clearing by the north shore.

Slipping past the Ranger Station/Visitor Center/Gift Shop, I glanced down the empty road, skidded gracelessly across, and tramped down the slight decline to the shore of the pond. At the edge of the water, I paused.

I had seen the picture many times. But the pond was larger than I expected, half a mile across maybe. Ice covered all the watery surface, no telling how thick. Snow obscured any evidence of skating or other winter activities.

A wide swath of trees encircled the shore, crowding down to the waterline in all but a few spots. I examined the shoreline, fractal, like mountains, trees, clouds, and snowflakes; similar designs and patterns occurred over and over at varying scales. Standing by the frozen shoreline, I couldn’t see any patterns, just a rough wide circle with an occasional dip in or out.

On my right, an asphalt path led into the encircling woods. I knew its history. The path had been laid over an old forest trail, one that Emerson and Thoreau might well have followed as they charted a site for the cabin. They were both great walkers, and their conversations on the march through the Massachusetts countryside ranged from Plato to pines, gardens to Goethe.

An inch of snow lay undisturbed over the path. The sky, more thick white than gray, showed no sign of clearing. But I ignored the weather and began to walk (or skate really in leather-soled loafers), counterclockwise from over the pond looking down or clockwise from under the pond looking up. The frigid silence was breathtaking. I began to shiver, my slim faux-leather jacket little protection against the wind. I walked faster.

About a third of the way around the path, a small clearing opened up in the woods. More than one hundred and fifty years earlier, Thoreau had erected his cabin there. I stood silent, listening for the natural music that Thoreau might have heard on a similar winter’s day.

Instead, I heard the clatter and chatter of a troop of high school girls surging into the clearing from the other direction. They quickly flooded the cabin site, chattering and taking pictures and chattering more and taking more pictures. Then in a blink and a flash, they vanished like spirits at dawn, shivering and chattering the other way around the pond.

The snow was falling much harder, drawing a lace curtain around the clearing. Determined to complete the circuit, I continued along the path, hurrying as much as possible on the slippery surface. A little past the halfway point, where the trail neared the frozen edge of the pond, I came to a halt. The path was closed, fenced off and posted with warning signs.

I looked out over the icy surface, pondering my choices. I could return the way I had come, chancing another encounter with the high school girls. Or I could set off into the woods and try to find a way through.

Flakes like goose down were starting to flutter around me, merging into the inches now on the ground. The wind was brisk, the chill near zero. Still I took the woods.

My porous soggy jacket began to freeze. Snow crept into my loafers. Frigid wet oozed through my socks. Skating the path became trudging through woods. In the exertion, pain spread through my chest, my breathing forced and halting. I thought of the Frost poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Whoever was smart not to go in.

Bracken and branches drove me away from the shoreline. My circle around the pond curved wider, drifting, I guessed, toward Emerson’s cliff, a ridge several hundred yards from the edge of the pond.

Everywhere was thick with snow. Soon the pond disappeared altogether behind a wall of snowbound trees. I wandered blindly, unable to see or hear anyone. My body ached up and down from the cold, but the pain sprouting in my chest was sharper, shallow wheezing breaths all I could manage.

Sit, I thought.

Catch.

Breath.

Try not to die alone in a park visited by millions.

I shook my head and smiled. How foolish! What had possessed me to come out on a day like this? Why had I wandered off into the woods instead of taking the easy path back? Why was I so drawn to Walden and Concord and Emerson?

Had I been Ralph Waldo Emerson in a past life?

Had my spirit walked the paths of Walden all those years ago?

Was delirious speculation a symptom of frostbite?

I laughed and laughed, until the snow around my feet began to melt.

CHAPTER ONE

Self-Reliance

We live on the surface of the past. In the millisecond it takes electrochemical fact to scurry from eye (or skin or tongue) to brain, the present has danced away.

Now, then.

Now, then.

Every fact is a memory.

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The movie was Contact, based on a book by Astronomer to the Stars Carl Sagan. A scientist (played by the lovely and talented actress Jodie Foster) intercepts a message from aliens. The coded missive contains blueprints for building an intergalactic transporter that teleports her to a galaxy far far away where she is enlightened by mysterious beings and returned to Earth. But no one believes her story.

After the movie, I left the theater and walked to my car beside the steaming pavement, glistening wet under metallic pink street lights from the earlier rain. Sometime during the film, I realized, I had made a decision. I was going a journey of my own.

Not to see aliens (necessarily). To write a book. A Carl Sagan-type book. I called myself a writer. I had written some poetry, a few stories, a play. I had never written a book. Maybe I could.

But where would I go?

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For last two years of my marriage, I was lost.

We had moved from my home just outside Washington DC to her adopted home of Minneapolis. I came to love the city, but for some reason had a hard time finding my way. I could locate the dry cleaners at one end of our street, the lake at the other end, the grocery which was that way on Hennepin Avenue, and the coffee shop which was the other way. That was about it.

In my car I had an old Rand-McNally book of state maps. I had bought it when I drove up to my new home. The Minnesota state map had a small insert for Minneapolis, and after the move I consulted it often. On the first page of the book (two pages really, across the fold) there was a map of the entire country.

Maybe you know this, but I didn’t at the time. The Federal Highway system uses even numbers for highways going east-west and odd numbers for highways going north-south. The largest east-west interstates have numbers that end in zero. I-90 is the northernmost of these highways.

I-90 passes about 100 miles south of Minneapolis, extending in almost a straight line to Yellowstone, then on to the Pacific Ocean. That line on the map called to me, even after the divorce and I left Minnesota and moved back to Washington DC. I-90 for me was The Road Not Taken.

So I thought about that Rand-McNally map and that line that led to the far ocean. And I formed a plan. My plan was not to plan. I would drive wherever I-90 and my 1992 Teal Blue Chevy Cavalier took me.

During the day, I would explore natural wonders, places I had always wanted to see, like Yellowstone and…whatever was on the way to Yellowstone. At night, alone in the light of the Western stars, I would compose my long-imagined opus exploring the philosophical ramifications of quantum mechanics.

A best-seller for sure.

I quit my job and set out on the road, kerowacking across the country with no agenda, no timeframe, and no certainty of return.

From DC, I drove north and west, junction by junction ascending the national highway system until I reached Minneapolis. I took a brief hiatus (lunch with my ex in Stillwater, dinner with my cousins in St. Paul). The next morning marked the real beginning of my journey. The idea was to head south on I-35 until I hit I-90 at Albert Lea.

I started my Cavalier, hit the gas, and turned to look behind me. For future reference, I do not recommend performing those actions in that particular order. Fortunately for the children playing in the street behind me, a warning siren loud enough to shake the windows of my car blasted the air, causing the kids to scatter (I choose to blame the siren and not my driving) and me to hit the brakes.

Universally a siren signals a disaster, an air raid or mine collapse. In the mid-west, it usually means a tornado. In the two years I lived in Minneapolis, I had heard the siren once or twice, but I had never seen a tornado. But my Iowa-born father had taught me what to look for. Low on the south-west horizon, I spotted a small purple-black cloud.

The cyclone seedling took evasive action, but somehow I managed to track straight for it. Finally I confronted the errant tempest on the bridge that spans the Minnesota River just a few miles south of Minneapolis. A sudden torrent dropped visibility to near zero and engulfed the highway. My Cavalier toiled slowly but diligently through the flood. Shrouded lights white and red fore and aft glimpsed through the glooming spray were the only sign of progress. In the middle of the bridge (as best I could tell), I glanced over the rail and down at the river supposedly below. Streaming dark grey clouds had swallowed the river. In Minnesota, the Liquid State, everything flows into everything.

Avoiding obscure oncoming beams of white, trailing vague and distant red beacons, I crossed the invisible bridge. On the other side, the curtain parted as the tempest raced away behind me.

After escaping the deluge, I turned off I-35 and postponed my I-90 rendezvous, stopping to regroup at Mystic Lake casino. It may seem like an odd choice for a rest stop, but the place had been a haven to me. Toward the end of my marriage, I often spent Saturday afternoons at Mystic Lake, buying a few dollars of peace among the swirling lights and clanging bells.

Smaller than Las Vegas and friendlier than Atlantic City, Mystic Lake was the largest and most successful casino in Minnesota. The casino and hotel are owned by a community of the Dakota Indian nation, the Shakopee Mdewakanton (pronounced just the way it sounds). The place was pleasant and well-run, with reasonably priced food, friendly service, and decent returns in the slot machines (it took longer to lose your money). Substantial income from the operation was distributed to the local Indian community, which like many such communities across the country had historically experienced high levels of poverty. So it seemed a good deal all around, in my view.

The casino was named after nearby Mystic Lake, which I imagined was the pleasant little pond just visible from the road. I never saw anything mystical about it. But then speeding down to a casino may not produce the proper mind frame for spiritual observation. I stayed that day just long enough to have lunch and drop fifty bucks or so in the whirling digital dervishes. Then I was off again.

Invoking Pythagoras, I opted for a short cut across the hypotenuse of the state. Instead of taking the major highways, I tracked the Minnesota River down Route 169 to Mankato, the Twin Cities favorite cousin maybe eighty miles southwest of Minneapolis. Then I angled off on smaller roads, winding my way around and through the broad Blue Earth country of southern Minnesota.

Blue Earth doesn’t refer to the soil, which is the same rich black prairie loam my father farmed as a boy. The name derives from the blue-green clay used in religious ceremonies by the local Dakota tribe.

But this was definitely my father’s Midwest. Two-lane roads coursed through undulating oceans of wheat and soy, bridged by fleeting main street towns of pureblood vowels and pickup trucks armored with September snowplows.

I was starting