On my way back to my dorm, on this uncharacteristically balmy night in October after a Jane the Virgin screening with lovely friends and crocheting, it hit me. Here I was, at ten o’clock at night on a Monday, and I had forgotten to update you, my beloved readers! Well, not forgotten entirely. More just gone through my day putting one step in front of the other: breakfast with my prospie, class on consciousness itself, early problem-set cranking, making sense of how insect eggs induce plant defenses against herbivores, making sense of all I forgot about genetics lab over break, dinner, laundry, and finally Jane the Virgin.
My Mondays usually only consist of one class, Cognitive Poetics. One of the reason that this one was so jam packed was because this weekend was Family and Friends weekend, and I was lucky enough to have my parents come visit me on campus. This entailed a lot of great food and even better company, but very little work being done. The near-entirety of Saturday was taken up by a visit to Walden Pond, which is just a thirty minute drive from Wellesley. We’d actually driven past it on an outing last semester, and having read Thoreau’s Walden my sophomore year of high-school, I was curious to see the reality of the place. I was expecting some remote, isolated and untouched corner of wilderness, with a log cabin nestled next to a small pond.
We never found the hut…
Walden Pond did not live up to expectations, I’m sorry to say. Ironically, as Thoreau wrote Walden to urge others to go out and experience nature, he didn’t realize that future generations would go out and experience nature by damaging Walden Pond. Before it became a Massachusetts State Park, the site was really quite environmentally abused. Now, it’s recovered somewhat, but buses of tourists pull up each day. The paths are as worn as the waters are shallow from the drought. Waters which, apparently, have the highest concentration of urine of any Massachusetts park. People were having full photoshoots on the shore, and I couldn’t help but think about what Thoreau would say if he saw his revered pond in such a state, a state so far removed from his own reality.
The puns we came up with: do you want your duck “wall-done” and “Thoreau-ly cooked”?
It may look empty, but I assure you, the place was packed
We had a Thoreau-ly good time at Walden (do you see what I did there?), but I have to tell you that despite the hundreds of tourists that flock to see this historic site…Lake Waban is prettier. There, I said it. Wellesley’s own Lake Waban, literally in my own backyard, is flushed full with fall colors and manicured topiary and dense rhododendron thickets far more vibrant than the bare limestone strips of beach circling a place in history. Now that I think of it in the current climate, Wellesley is a place in history too, a place that makes history, a place where history starts to form. How lucky I am to have Lake Waban to look at every time I walk home. All it took was an unassuming pond to call it to my attention.
I know the sunset gives it an advantage, but there’s really no comparison…at least in my heart <3