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stevewiegenstein

~ News, announcements, events, and ruminations about my books, including Slant of Light, This Old World, The Language of Trees, and Scattered Lights, and about creativity, fiction, Missouri, the Ozarks, and anything else that strikes my fancy

stevewiegenstein

Tag Archives: winter

Back to Walden

21 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Personal, Writing

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nature, Thoreau, winter

I read Walden about once a year, or at least dip into it for refreshment. Lately I’ve been reading the “winter” chapters: “Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors,” “Winter Animals,” and “The Pond in Winter.” These are much quieter chapters than the showy, occasionally verbally extravagant flourishes of “Economy” and “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” and they tend to get overlooked, I think. But I’m appreciating them anew this time around.

The “former inhabitants” section is a quiet catalogue of the abandoned houses and waste places Thoreau encounters as he walks around his Concord neighborhood, and a recollection of what he knows about the families who once lived there – which in some cases is very little. One might wonder what he’s up to with this melancholy inventory. I wondered, too, until I noticed, this time around, that the people he memorializes are almost all Black, poor, or both. All that is left of their life’s labor is an overgrown hummock, a portion of a cellar wall, a vague tale of their occupation.

This section of the book is a meditation on disappearance and loss, and it’s especially telling that this meditation focuses on the poor. Thoreau approaches their stories with his usual wry humor. In one instance he tells of a comical adventure with the volunteer fire department, when they respond to an alarm and mistakenly think the fire is some distance away, when it actually turns out to be an abandoned hut just down the road. But that scene is followed by the poignant description of the sole remaining member of that hut’s last family, who returns to the home of his childhood and pokes through the ashes for any remnant of his family’s existence, turning up only the hook from which the well-dipper was fastened. “I felt it,” Thoreau writes, “and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family.”

Disappearance, withdrawal, diminishment. These chapters are full of such things. The visitors are few; the animals go into hiding; even the pond itself, frozen over, is sawn into blocks and carried away, ice to cool the beverages of the privileged in distant cities. But this condition also yields new perspectives. Thoreau takes advantage of the winter to go out on the ice of the pond and observe, to take measurements and to peer to the bottom, activities that would be impossible during warmer times.

Winter brings clarity as the essential parts are revealed. There is melancholy in this, of course, but also opportunity for a deepened understanding. And of course, the chapter that follows “The Pond in Winter” is “Spring.”

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A Dose of Something Like Reality

08 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Personal

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freezing, history, water, winter

The overnight dose of cold weather caught me off guard, and I woke up this morning with a frozen pipe. My first response, predictably, was frustration and a momentary dose of depression – My day is ruined! – followed in short order by a plan to get it thawed out and see if it has burst. A burst pipe is not the end of life as we know it. At worst it’s a damn nuisance.

As a novelist who writes about past eras, my next though was of course to think about such setbacks for our ancestors. Frozen pipes did not become a problem until the advent of indoor plumbing, and in the era when homebuilders relied on designs from before the indoor-plumbing era, I doubt if they were much of a problem either. Houses were built to keep in the heat, typically had cellars where feasible, and we only large enough to accommodate the direct needs of the family. With one centrally located bathroom in the house, and one kitchen sink, and a laundry room that was likely to be detached with shut-off valves for cold weather, it wasn’t too much of a task to defend your pipes against cold air.

With the housing booms of the twentieth century came inexpensive construction methods. Deficiencies of construction could be compensated by cheaper and ostensibly better energy sources; the gas furnace replaced the woodstove, forced-air fans took the place of radiators. But you also see pipes running up exterior walls, and (as in the case of my house) concrete-slab construction that in some cases puts water pipes overhead in the attic spaces.

The worst house I ever lived in for frozen pipes was in Louisiana, where keeping houses cool in the summer was much more of an issue and as a result pier-and-beam construction was the norm. Whenever a bad cold snap came, and they came like clockwork every two or three years, everybody in the neighborhood would be out under their houses, blow driers and heat tape in hand.

I’m not claiming that life would be better if we had to go out to the well and bring in buckets of water, but I do recognize that frozen pipes are something of a modern problem. So I watch my space heater and wait for the thaw.

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