Henry David Thoreau rarely takes on the fall. Across his published works -- and I'm talking mostly about Walden here, but also others: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Faith in a Seed -- Thoreau moves consciously from season to season, exploring the things that make that season the same year after year, as well as the things that make that one season its own particular instant in our ecological history. Walden has three chapters with the word "winter" in the title. It has a whole chapter called, simply, "Spring." The first half of the book is about the summer and the author's famous decision to move out of Concord and into the woods on July 4th. Those hundred pages of Walden simply breathe summer.

But the fall gets little direct mention beyond the naming of an October activity here and September occurrence there. And yet, the season is important to Thoreau. It has gravity in it. It is in this season that he says, "I now first began to inhabit my house." A grand statement in a book that is first and foremost about inhabiting a place.

One of those October activities, described in Walden, is charming and revealing and, well, beautiful. I'll reproduce it here: "As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days especially settle onto the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before. He maneuvered so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this want and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water an at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon."

The fall, like the bird, was elusive to Thoreau. But elusive in this homey, playful way. I spent this weekend in the Adirondack Mountains, one of the last places in America you can still find loons. I go every year around this time -- in search of the fall and the bird -- and this year, for the first time, I saw none.

Always having a reputation among the nature set as loners, loons are literally their own birds. They may look like ducks, but there are not related to them. Not even a little bit. They have solid bones; their feet are so far back on their bodies that they don't so much walk on land as shove themselves forward on their bellies; and they laugh like crazy people. Their solitary nature goes all the way up to the level of Order in the taxonomic tree.

In recent years, Loons have virtually disappeared from the Lower Forty-Eight. Acid rain has rendered many of the lakes they live in barren of food, mercury poisoning from Midwestern powerplants has damaged their nervous and immune systems, and development of their habitats has severely limited the number of places that can accommodate the territorial needs of adult loons. In the Adirondacks, several groups have begun sharing resources to form a group called The Adirondack Cooperative Loon Project. It is an interesting model for nonprofit groups, government agencies, and academic institutions working together to seek a common cause.

As the members of the Cooperative chase the elusive bird, like Thoreau before them, they chase a feature of a landscape that is almost a relic. Thoreau's effort to live directly by his own hand, directly from his own land, was a way for him to catalogue and document a way of life that was fast disappearing from the Lower Forty-Eight. And during the fall, that effort took on a special sort of tone. The fall was a time that was particularly evocative of that elusiveness. But in a homey, playful way.

« Previous Next »