Tantalizing Tidbits

It’s been such a busy month so far at Gatepost Tours that we completely missed posting last week.

Therefore, to assuage our collectively guilty conscience and also to give an idea of what we have been doing with our time, we’d like to share five favorite things we’ve either read or learned more about recently.

Here they are, in no particular order:

View of Walden from Thoreau's Cove, (early 20th c.?)

 1. In Walden, Thoreau jokes that he was “desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, ”  and continues, "Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe." So in the winter of 1846, Henry set out to accurately measure the basis for these rumors with nothing fancier than a compass and a sounding line tied to a stone. The results? 102 feet, at its deepest (give or take a little with ice and annual fluctuations). Modern investigations and a complete mapping of the pond's bottom by the U.S Geological Survey, confirmed Henry's findings within 2 feet. 

2. Even grown men admit to crying at the scene where John the blacksmith dies in Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches. We’ll be kind enough not to reveal the identity of the particular gentleman who recently confessed to us this astonishing fact. And if you haven't read the book, we dare you to try and do so without laughing out loud or boo-hooing at least once! Definitely up there with Louisa's best.

 3. The American Civil War may have profoundly altered the voice of our national literary identity. If you’d like to learn more about this fascinating theory, we highly recommend the lecture, “Writing the Civil War” which will be presented Wednesday, May 25^th at The Wayside in Concord. For those who can't make it in person, we'll ask permission to post some highlights here.

 4. The Emerson children were once given a parrot that they adopted as a pet.  Daughter Edith recalls that when addressing her about the parrot, Ralph Waldo referred to it as “your green cat.”

Nathaniel "hottie" Hawthorne

 5. As tribute to the dreary stretch of clouds, rain and chill we’ve recently endured this May in New England, we offer the following insight from Mr. Hawthorne on how he beat the gloom of a similarly endless rain back in 1842.

The sunshiny Sophia

 “Still another rainy day - the heaviest rain, I believe, that has fallen since we came to Concord…In this sombre weather, when ordinary mortals almost forget that there was ever any golden sunshine, or ever will be any hearafter, my little wife seems absolutely to radiate it from her own heart and mind…As for myself, I am little other than a cloud, at such seasons; but she contrives to make me a sunny one; for she gets into the remotest recesses of my heart, and shines all through me.”

Awww...what a softie! (And a hottie!) Even the most cynical, un-romantic among us have to admit that’s pretty darn sweet.

But in the absence of Sophia Hawthorne’s evident warmth, we’ll just have to go find something else to cheer us until the sun reappears. It’s pretty much a toss-up between a pint of Guinness or a good book. Or...a pint of Guinness AND a good book! What could be nicer on a dismal-weather day?