i.
The child was still warm when they pulled its body from the shallows.
See: The tern wheels overhead. It calls, once, a long, caustic wail.
Kneeling in the spume, they pressed the brine from its lungs, a stream of viscous bilge passing from between its lips.
See: the dunes harbor the nest of the brooding plover. You’ll know by the underfeathers caught in the brambles, white pennants fluttering.
Unbidden visions of deep midnight: the echo that splays outward from every footfall against wet sand; hollow, chitinous fragments of crab, bleach-white; bladderwrack uprooted, spread along the lee of a cove, rotting to mucus.
All stones wish for the sea.
See: a boy chases a sandpiper along the shore. The bird flees to the air, where the boy cannot follow.
The sun breaks through the thick mist. The water’s surface simmers, gray, to blue, now gray again.
Beneath the waves, perfect silence.
ii.
Possibly, the island’s name was inspired by its sunsets, unfurling from the distant horizon into a proud canopy of flame before ceding to purple twilight. Or (more likely) it may have resulted from an Englishman’s misreading of the Dutch word vier, meaning “four,” on colonial maps of New York. Barricading the Great South Bay from the open ocean, Fire Island is one of several thin leavings of erosion, separated by narrow inlets, scrawled along the southern underside of Long Island—hence the possibility that “Fire Island” is merely a bungling of Vier Eilanden, or “Four Islands.” A 1779 English map labels the barrier islands only as “South Beach of Sand and Stones,” deserted rocky traps about which sailors must keep their wits, slipping through the treacherous straits as they enter the Great South Bay, as though navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.
Another theory holds that the name is to be taken quite literally. The waters around New York and New Jersey were fertile whaling grounds during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and crews likely stoked fires along the inlets at night to guide their vessels into the shelter of the bay. Whalers used the stony island as a kitchen of sorts to boil down whale blubber, great iron try-pots set atop gargantuan cooking fires, rendering the animal’s fat into precious oil as noxious clouds of greasy smoke choked the salt air.
A man by the name of Jeremiah Smith was the island’s first permanent resident, and built a house near what is now Cherry Grove in 1795. Smith was a wrecker, a popular, if criminal, profession. Wreckers used fires to lure ships to shore in the night, like the phosphorescent bait of the anglerfish, false lights leading not to the safety of the inlets and the bay beyond, but to the cragged teeth of the rocky shoals. The wreckers then rowed out and plundered the floundering ships, often killing those remaining crewmembers who had not yet jumped overboard.
In 1825, a lighthouse was finally erected on the far western edge of Fire Island, a signal-torch stretching tall above the cordgrass, its whale-oil flame shining miles out to sea, both a warning to and guide for vessels seeking harbor from the pitch dark dead of night.
Fire has its place in the wild. It might be thought of as dangerous, deadly, even unnatural, preying on dry grass and papery bark, a threat to delicate habitats. The scorch marks and blackened scars fire leaves in its wake mar the verdant luster of field and forest. the scorch marks and blackened scars it leaves behind a blight on the verdant luster of field and forest. Yet fire serves an integral part in the biotic harmony of things, evicting invasive species and infusing the earth’s rich loam with vital nutrients.
We humans, too, have learned to exploit fire to our benefit. To steal into the night, set the shore ablaze and wait for the wreck, the plunder, the drowning that must follow.
iii.
In her celebrated 1844 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller writes of an imagined acquaintance named Miranda, who functions as her alter ego. Miranda, writes Fuller, was educated by a father who firmly believed in the equality of the sexes, providing his daughter with a rich education and instilling in her a sense of self-worth. Fuller’s choice of the name “Miranda” harkens to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The exiled Prospero’s only daughter, Miranda, is raised on an enchanted island. The play opens with the titular storm and a shipwreck conjured by Prospero, which Miranda observes from the shore. “O, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer,” Miranda cries to her father, “a brave vessel, who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her, dash’d all to pieces. O, the cry did knock against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish’d.”
One of only a few women in the Transcendental Club, Fuller was herself a popular journalist, essayist, and lecturer, editor of the journal The Dial, and foundational figure in the history of feminism. In 1846 she traveled to Europe and would never again set foot on American soil. In Italy, she met and fell in love with Giovanni D’Ossoli, a darkly handsome, impoverished, illiterate revolutionary ten years her junior, with whom she had an illegitimate child. Effectively working as an embedded foreign correspondent, Fuller wrote to American periodicals, reporting on the revolutions of the Italian states seeking to liberate themselves from Austrian control. Surrounded by explosions and working in a hospital for the wounded in Rome, Fuller also composed a history of the revolution which she considered her most important work. Fleeing Italy as republican forces met defeat, Fuller, her husband, and their child, Nino, decided to board the Elizabeth and make the five-week journey to America.
The year of her death, Margaret wrote to a friend, “I am absurdly fearful and various omens have combined to give me a dark feeling... It seems to me that my future upon earth will soon close... I have a vague expectation of some crisis—I know not what.”
iv.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing to Horace Greeley, Concord, July 23, 1850:
The best thing we can do in these worst news of last night concerning Margaret Fuller, is to charge Mr. Thoreau to go, on all our parts, and obtain on the wrecking ground all the intelligence, and, if possible, any fragments of manuscript or other property. [...] I shall cordially unite with you in any expense this calamity makes necessary.
v.
A glove, linen, cast up on the strand. Its fingers filled with sand, as if there were a hand still within, keeping itself warm.
The sand fills the pockets of coats, too. Coins, handkerchiefs, billfolds, letters, pickpocketed by the sea and exchanged for fine dark silt.
When he walks the streets of Concord, he is known by everyone. When he smiles, he does not show his teeth. Here, at this last gasp of land, no one knows him.
He only arrived this morning. They see a man of thirty or thereabouts, aquiline nose, his jaw resolute, the corners of his mouth dimpled into mirrored crescents. He wears a coat pulled close about him despite the descending summer sun, and stands quite still, a few paces back from the wrack line, a raised cicatrice of foam and weeds, gray driftwood, broken shell.
He has been standing here for some while, looking out over the water.
A pair of drunken Dutch sailors weave, arms about each other’s shoulders, singing, among the salvage. Their jackets and shirts are unbuttoned, exposing the skin of their torsos, ludicrously pale compared to their dark sun-stained faces.
Listen: the sailors’ bawdy song carried along by the wind.
He waits until the final sliver of the sun dips and hides itself behind the lip of the horizon. The sky is heavy and wet, the sunset staining the clouds crimson. Beneath heavy lids, his eyes, hardly blinking, reflect only the darkening water. Soon, as evening deepens to night, sky and sea will be indistinguishable.
It is five days since they found the boy, four days since the burial. The scavengers from Islip and Babylon have claimed much from the free commons of the sea. Hats and skirts and half-rotted furnishings. Some coins. But still he waits. The water has much to relinquish still.
They tell him how they cleaned the child, washed the body, dried and dressed it for the grave. The sand gave them some trouble. Sand in its mouth, sand in its hair, sand in its ears, sand under its eyelids. Every time they turned it, a dusting of sand would spill from some new place.
Listen: a sudden splash and groan as one of the Dutchmen vomits. The shrill laugh as the other watches.
Soon, he will turn away. There will be light enough yet for an hour or so in which to walk the shore. His back to the sea, he will pass by the sailors, now asleep in the dunes, one’s head on the other’s chest. He will pause above them, find such beauty in the broad, homely faces, mouths hanging open and ringed with bile.
Walking on, he recalls that the breast feathers of the storm petrel are waterproof. One finds them floating, boat-like, upon the surface of the stillest water, the quietest days. The bird’s call deep and insectile. As the evening deepens, he tries to replicate that sound in the back of his throat.
The morning they were to bury the child, its hand began to bleed.
vi.
The rush of the air—
the pull of the earth—
the weight of the body—
vii.
In the dark and early hours of July 19, 1850, the small American brig Elizabeth was at the end of its return journey from Italy under the inexpert command of first mate H.P. Bangs, the ship’s captain having died of smallpox only a week after setting out into the Mediterranean. Taking a sounding of twenty-one fathoms, Bangs believed the ship to be well on course somewhere off the southern coast of New Jersey. The wind was strong, the water roiling, the rain thick, and the Elizabeth labored northward. What circumstances, exactly, led to the ship’s wreck remain unclear. It is certain that Bangs was gravely inaccurate in his estimation of the ship’s location, and that, considering the tempestuous weather and the murk of the night, he would have been better off anchoring until daybreak.
Surely, Bangs saw a light in the distance. Likely, he believed it to be the lighthouse at Navesink, south of the entrance to New York Harbor, the ship’s final destination. In reality, it was Fire Island Light, some thirty-five miles to the northeast of Navesink. The lighthouse’s bright, hot flame drew Bangs onward. He let the wind carry the ship toward that glinting promise of safety.
A broken promise. At four in the morning the Elizabeth, laden with a cargo of Italian marble, struck a sandbar, driving a hole through her stern.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith Oakes recalled that there had been no storm like it in the eleven years they had lived on Fire Island. By noon the next day, the waves had torn the ship to pieces.
The sailors who swam to shore first—those who survived the swim—would not risk returning to the wreck in the lifeboat kept moored beneath the lighthouse. They waited until the storm began to abate. Nothing but debris and the ship’s shattered hull remained when they at last rowed back out.
Two days later, the papers reported that well near a thousand scavengers had flooded the island to pilfer the washed-up cargo. By then, the news of the wreck had only just reached New England.
viii.
Henry David Thoreau to Horace Greeley, July 24, 1850:
Dear Sir,
If Wm E. Channing calls – will you say that I am gone to Fire-Island – by cars at 9 this morn – via Thompson – with Wm. H. Channing
Yrs Henry D Thoreau
ix.
See: skeletal husk of hull in the distance, silhouetted against the sky, waves licking at it still, greedy.
He will record their testimonies, the facts of the matter, the order of events. He will reconstruct what he did not witness.
What has gone unseen is of less importance than what we may see now. The dream is far truer than the memory, the memory far truer than the event.
Waldo had urged him to travel to Fire Island and recover what he could. They both knew that Margaret had drowned. But her body, and that of her husband, were yet to be accounted for.
Though he writes down the notes of his journey and interviews with witnesses and survivors, he will not write of any of this in his journal. Two and a half million words written over twenty-five years, and not a single one recalling these days of grim, fruitless beachcombing.
See: the flesh of the chest peeled from the ribs, body little more than bones, little more than gleanings.
Yet, fragments will surface now and again as he writes on other subjects. Waking at dawn over a year later, he will set a queer dream to paper before its memory fades like ink poured into open water. I sailed over the sea in a small vessel, he writes. I saw the buttons which had come off the coats of drowned men.
He knows that in his desk drawer he will find such a button. Mother of pearl, bred in darkness on the sea-floor. The second mate had assured him that the coat was Giovanni Ossoli’s, Margaret’s husband. So, he took his pocket-knife and sundered the button from the heavy, waterlogged cloth.
Of the bodies of Margaret, Giovanni, and their little son Nino, only the boy’s was recovered.
Margaret carried with her across the Atlantic the recently completed manuscript of her book. Her writing desk was salvaged, the manuscript lost.
Of the six passengers being transported on the Elizabeth, one survived. She oversaw the internment of the drowned boy in a sea-chest, burying him three feet down in a nook between two dunes far from the water. The boy’s nurse, two sailors, and the ship’s steward were buried nearby.
From the shore, he looks out.
See: the white gleam of moonlight on the stygian water, reflected for a mere instant on each ripple, dappling the surface with innumerable sparks. Like pale hands reaching up, flashing. Thousands of white-gloved hands breaking through the skin of the ocean.
Beneath, he knows, blocks of raw white marble rest monolithic on the sea floor, where they will remain for the epochs it takes to erode them into sand. Cenotaphs visited only by barnacle and anemone.
See: each patch of moonlight like a sheet of paper. Thousands of linen leaves scattered across the surface, stretching to the horizon.
Margaret, beside the mast, spectral in her white gown. A wave comes; where she stood, now only stars.
x.
It is impossible to look out on a broad expanse of water—sea, or lake, or pond—without feeling as though something has been lost. Water is penetrable, but inscrutable; it clings to and has its way with the light; far beneath its surface one realizes the illusion of transparency, as its most benthic reaches are all darkness.
Water is so like a living thing, too. It moves as though of its own accord. It has a face. In its presence, one senses knowledge, a dark knowledge, curious probing eyes roving across your flesh. A deep and silent wisdom.
Breaching the water’s surface is a violent transgression. Humans hardly belong there. And yet, how we are drawn to it. To plunge, to wade, to dip, to float, to swim. We do not understand the limits of our bodies until we are in water. It restricts our movement, changes our weight. Like a lens, it distorts our ability to see.
And it covers us. Enshrouds us. Every point on our skin’s surface is touched by it. And it wants nothing more than to enter us. Water will take the shape of its vessel. There is space within us for it to fill.
We approach the water wondering what we have lost, enter the water to find it. A preposterous proposition: to seek for that which we do not know has been lost.
xi.
Narcissus has been lying at the bank of the pool for years now. Or has it been decades? Echo believes it likely that centuries have passed since the boy first glimpsed his own image in the water. Neither eating nor drinking, sleeping nor standing, Narcissus reclines in the mud, gazing down, reaching out every now and again with a finger to touch the pool’s surface, only to snatch it back once the image ripples, multiplies, fractures. On his left arm are two raw red scratches left by the stiff sharp reeds when he first approached the water so long ago. After all this time, they have not healed.
xii.
In his public as well as private writing, Thoreau refers frequently to a “companion” or “friend” who often accompanies him on his walks through the Concord woods, who joins him in conversation and in silence while sitting upon a hill, rowing across a pond, or casting off the winter chill before the hearth. It is a curious choice, to leave this companion unnamed, when elsewhere he is clear and direct about those with whom he speaks or wanders. William Ellery Channing, for instance, husband to Margaret Fuller’s younger sister and Thoreau’s most frequent co-conspirator in his excursions. Or Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s mentor, patron, and perhaps closest friend. Thoreau’s sister Sophia, too. There was Alek Therien, an itinerant Canadian woodchopper whom Thoreau befriended, and little Julian, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s young son, who later in life would write of Thoreau’s “terrible blue eyes.” But more often than not, Thoreau keeps mum about the identity of his “companion.” It is enough, it would seem, to know that he is not alone.
Sometimes, eschewing the singular “I,” Thoreau will write of “we.” Companion, friend, familiar go unnamed, unspecified. Only that plurality of the first person. The multiplicity of being.
To himself, Narcissus whispers: The echo of the self.
To Narcissus, Echo replies: The self that floats above the body lying naked and supine beneath it.
One night in early October 1851, Thoreau and his companion row out to the middle of Fair Haven Pond. The moon is gibbous and bright.
The pond rests in a basin surrounded by higher ground, its surface silvered as a broad pool of mercury in the moonlight. They paddle slowly, deliberately, hardly wanting to disturb the sacred hush. Even the crickets are quiet, an early frost having lulled most of them into a permanent slumber.
Once they reach the middle of the pond, they haul in their oars and wait for the boat to cease rocking. The inverted image of the surrounding hills and woods is reflected on the water’s surface, night-pale and rippling as if a mirage. An answering reflection, Thoreau will call it in his journal.
Answer to what? Narcissus asks.
Replying Echo: Answer to the question substance asks of shadow.
Out there on the pond, Thoreau is struck by a memory: an experiment he once tried with a piece of paper. Lightly, he drew a straight line down the center of the page. On the right side, with an ink pen, he drew half of his own face. A basic sketch only, in thick, quick lines, before the ink could dry. He folded the paper in half along the pencil line and pressed the sheet down flat to blot the drawing, rubbing it smooth with the side of his hand. He opened the paper back up, and the ink of the right side had transferred to the left, albeit spottily. His face was complete. But there was something off about it, monstrous, even, in the way the features mirrored themselves perfectly, as though he were seeing himself through some primitive creature’s eye attuned only to shape and symmetry. The image lacked the necessary imperfections and deformations that come with the face being shaped by a wilder hand.
Thoreau and his companion row out to the middle of Fair Haven Pond in order to try another kind of experiment. In the center of everything, Thoreau stretches out his oar over the water, the flat side parallel with the pond’s surface. He lifts it up, and swiftly brings it down to strike the water with a loud whap. They wait three, four seconds, when the echo rebounds back to them from the hillsides, hoarse, overlapping echoes from all sides, carrying with them a faint yet audible memory of that watery smack. They watch the ripples spreading outward from their boat, taking even longer than the sound to travel to the pond’s edge, and fading flat before they can ever return.
Whap, Thoreau strikes the water again. ((whhaat)) comes the echo’s reply.
He does this again, and again, then strikes the water in a rapid succession six or seven times. ((whhaat haat at hhat whaa tt tt)) echoes back.
Thin, gauzy clouds begin to obscure the moonlight, and the pond and surrounding hills and forests dim to dull gray. For a moment Thoreau imagines they are nestled within a volcanic caldera, gray-black walls of soot and sediment rising up and encircling them, the quaking igneous entrails of the earth anxious for release far below.
Narcissus to Echo: To whom do you speak?
Echo to Narcissus: I speak to those unutterable thoughts as yet unvoiced.
Thoreau, about to suggest that his companion try the echo as well, turns behind him. Finding only empty air, he discovers that he is alone in the boat.
xiii.
As I fall, descend, drop like a sounding plumb, the colors proceed in this order: green, blue, yellow, red.
These names are insufficient. There are hues and tints of color, subtle gradations. All we have to describe these are metaphors to which we affix our desire for precision. So, we extract and abstract from the objects around us:
grass-green / apple-green / olive-green / emerald-green / sage-green / jade-green
sapphire / forget-me-not / turquoise / gentian / ultramarine / sky-blue
topaz / gold / orange / citron
rose and cherry
ruby and almandine
blood and flame
The colors I see have nothing to do with the absorption spectrum of water. In fact, the deeper one descends into a body of water, the less the wider wavelengths like red are absorbed. Blue lingers longest. But these are the colors you see as you descend in your memory, and there’s the more vital sharper truth, there’s the bone.
The green, I think, must be the life that clings to the surface and the edges of the water, the moss and leaves and scum swirling in the whirls of currents close to where there’s still air, where there’s still time. Then, the weight of the body pulls, and the true blue of water is all around, crystalline, and for a moment the body seems caught, trapped in a shimmering amethystine resin.
Until the lungs begin to ache. The first conscious pangs telling you that you are not your body, because your body is relaying a message to you that you must breathe, please, dumb body that does not understand death in the way the mind does. The ache reaches to the fingertips, the eyeballs, begins to distort sight and sound. A ringing like cut crystal rubbed with a wet finger. Light like honey, amber light, pulsing heavenly gilded light. Until the rich red curtain begins to fall; fire courses through veins and arteries; a crimson veil of pain.
And then?
So much driftwood, so much debris.
How much of the sand beneath your feet was bone once?
And whose?
xiv.
The reeds among which Narcissus crouches reflect in the water too, downward-seeking reversals of themselves like lances poised to spear a fish. The pool’s muddy bed is translated into stars and storm clouds, minnows into magpies and airplanes.
Ovid wrote of the liquefaction of Narcissus and his metamorphosis into a flower. Ovid was wrong.
Narcissus drowned. One summer day, his pining grew so great that at last he bent, thrust his arms into the water to embrace his image, and fell tumbling into the pool. Finding no one beneath the surface, he swam down and down into the dark of the deep water, searching for the boy he knew was there, must be there, please, let him be there.
That night, Echo came to the pool as she always did. Where Narcissus normally lay, where he had lain for millennia, there was only an oblong patch of barren ground. Determined to wait for him, she sat down in the mud and looked out onto the still, cold, quiet water.
He did not surface for three days, as his foot had become tangled in the thick lily roots at the bottom of the pool. When they finally relinquished their grip, his bloated body rose to the surface, face down, still gazing into the water. Echo spotted it far off, white and fungal. Though there was some debate as to whether or not Narcissus committed suicide, the coroner ultimately ruled his death an accidental drowning. When asked to identify the body, Echo could only nod in assent when the sheet was pulled back, for there were, of course, no more words left for her to speak.
xv.
Water splits a person in two: the desiring body that wishes to join with the water, and the repelling body that refuses it. Both libidinal and abject.
In his 1861 book The Sea, renowned French historian Jules Michelet writes: “For all terrestrial animals, water is the non-respirable element, the ever heaving but inevitably asphyxiating enemy; the fatal and eternal barrier between the two worlds.”
Water’s heaving is felt throughout the body, its rhythmic push and pull, thrust and release, over which the body has no control. Yet it will never sustain human life. We do not belong there. It lets us know that, always.
The barrier between two worlds: in its depths, the craving one feels to breathe is at once the body’s desperation to remain alive and, should we refuse to give in, precisely that which will drive the body to drown. Either way, we cannot stay. We are alone. The shore is miles away. We clutch at the falling debris, unsalvageable.
xvi.
From the Journal of H.D. Thoreau, Jan. 14, 1853:
The bones of children soon turn to dust again.
xvii.
Henry takes the hatchet from off the shelf and walks out his front door and into the woods. It is one of those strange kinds of winter days, where the sky is a blue so pale it is almost white, and the sun a low eye of incendiary copper, winking behind the severe, barren trees. It has not snowed for nearly a week, but it has not warmed, either, and thick white drifts still mantle the ground. Compressed by its own weight, the snow has developed a thick hard crust. Henry’s boots punch four or five inches into the snow, but he knows there is at least a full foot of cover.
One might easily mistake the blanketed pond for an open field. Henry walks onto it feeling no difference between solid ground and the ice-bound water beneath his feet, stepping out from the canopy of trees into a white shock of empty space. Not empty, no: full of vibration, of causations and murmurs and interference. He walks about a hundred feet out, where he knows the ice will be thinner, though “thin” still means twelve inches thick. With the flat of his hatchet, he begins to shovel away the snow to leave a hole some three feet in diameter, all the way down to the ice. Then, Henry begins hacking. Shards scatter in all directions with a crystalline ring of shattered glass, cold needles jettison into his face. He continues striking the ice rhythmically, deepening and widening the hole. Despite the cold, he feels a trickle of sweat run down his spine. The ice is hard, denser, even, than firewood.
As he chops, he thinks of summer. Of the clear water of Hubbard Pond. Of the boys who bathe there on hot Saturday afternoons, draping their clothes on the branches of the willow tree and leaping in with a cry. The sunlight streaming across their skin, white marble stained a luminous citrine. How they smell of lilies as they walk to church the next morning.
At last, the hatchet breaks through to the water. Henry has carved a hole as deep as his forearm. He widens it a bit more, then sets the hatchet aside. Winter water is the clearest water. Ice and snow prevent detritus from clouding it, prevent the wind from stirring it up so that sediment settles to the bottom.
He realizes that he has forgotten his fishing-rod in his cabin. He meant to try his luck at snatching a lazy trout patiently waiting out the winter in the lightless, gelid water. Winter fish are leaner, tougher than summer fish, but they make an excellent soup.
On his knees, sunken into the deep snow, looking into the hole, Henry thinks bemusedly that it almost seems as though he has dug himself a grave.
Something gray begins to resolve in the circle of dark water. Henry peers closer.
It is the gaunt, decayed face of a boy. Cheeks caked with scum. Lips curled away from the teeth in a sneer. Sockets empty, the eyes having long since been eaten away.
He thinks of the boys at the swimming hole in the summer. How they cling to one another, unabashed. Of the knots of roots and reeds unseen below. Of the complete enveloping of the body in water, its rude entrance into mouth and lungs.
Henry flinches back in horror. He looks in all directions about the barren white pond, the trees enclosing it, the shadows they cast against the snow. The only sound his heavy breath.
With trepidation, he peers down into the hole again. Nothing.
Yet the water, before so still, so placid, dreaming—now it wavers, ripples, as though it has, quite recently, been disturbed.
xviii.
What are these traces, these faint marks, these vectors of telling that lead me astray? Leavings of twig and stone and weed.
Memory and desire join hands and leap. A lodestone twists the needle round, points, we look.
The historian as clandestine lover. The archive as sweat-stained sheets, a mattress still warm, panting breaths.
My being is provisional. So long as I remain at the shore, I am sustained in the present, I am alive. But there is a storm blowing. It drives me into rocks and sand. It breaks me open, shrapnel flies at my face, I bleed.
Lie down. Stretch your body atop the graves of those you would seek to awaken. Lay your body atop theirs. Wrap them in your limbs, your wings, your whole self. Kiss them, press them into you. This is the only way to awaken the dead whom the waves cast up limp and blue along the shore. Warm them. Press the sea from their bodies, lick the sand from their eyes.
The needle twists, spins, unguided. The ship sails on. Beneath the water, a hand takes mine.
xix.
In 1854, Thoreau delivered a lecture at the Spring Garden Institute in Philadelphia titled “The Wild.” This was a version of Thoreau’s ever-evolving essay “Walking,” which he would continue amending and revising up to 1860, until it was published a month after his death in 1862.
There is little to say about the response to Thoreau’s lecture, or indeed, of his visit. Thoreau remarks in his journal not on the lecture but on visiting the taxidermied animal specimens at the Academy of Natural Sciences.
He pulls out drawer after drawer, each filled with the tissue-silk skins of birds laid out like blessings, the glistening malachite of the violetear, grackle wings of spilled twilight, the belly of the meadowlark a marigold fury.
We know that in 1851—around the time he first began writing “Walking”—Thoreau read The Poetry of Science, an 1848 volume by British scientist Robert Hunt. The Poetry of Science is notable for its inclusion of a chapter on “actinism,” a term devised by the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce some two decades earlier. Niépce is credited today as the inventor of photography, though he called his process “heliography,” sun-writing.
Heliography, for Niépce, was a demonstration of the metamorphic force of nature. Heliography operated on the principle that the sun’s rays alter the chemistry of a substance through a process similar to burning or slicing away. Niépce also proposed the correlating process of actinism, through which the chemical composition of matter is able to restore itself and negate the destructive property of the sun’s rays. Robert Hunt considered Niépce’s theory and photographic discoveries so important that he placed them alongside such phenomena as electromagnetism and plate tectonics in his Poetry of Science. Hunt explains—in words which Thoreau would directly quote in “Walking”—that “Niépce was the first to show that those bodies which underwent this change during daylight, possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night.” Sun and light, moon and dark work in tandem, destroying and restoring. In the dark, nature is able to recover what was lost to the light.
The lines a boy etches into the sand with a driftwood stick at ebb tide are filled again at flood tide.
Thoreau began writing his essay the year after Margaret Fuller’s death, the year after he combed the beaches of Fire Island awaiting the return of her body or her book. Perhaps Henry found some comfort in reading about Niépce’s theory of actinism. That the destruction witnessed by day—the long battering of the Elizabeth, the roiling aftermath of the storm—was smoothed, healed by the night. That the chemistry of the sea could be reconstituted under the glow of the moon. That Margaret and Giovanni, wherever they lie, were now part of that marine chemistry, joined with it in a molecular affinity.
The momentum exhibited at the edge of the sea, never resting, never still.
In his journal, he scrawls: The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.
If only that were true.
xx.
Think of the lie we are told as children: that when it is inside us, our blood is blue; as soon as it is exposed to air, it turns red. We can only ever see the blue of our blood by peering through the thinnest skin of our hands, wrists, feet. A trick of the light, only. Veins, thicker and closer to the surface of the skin carry oxygen-depleted blood back toward the heart. The skin absorbs most wavelengths of light, but the shorter ones, like blue, are not absorbed and, instead, reflect back. Our eyes catch only these waves of light, and the blood in our veins appears to us as blue.
When we look at the pale blue veins beneath the skin of our hands, we remain oblivious to the blood rushing rapidly through them, hidden from our view. Until the skin breaks and we suffer its flow. The body always an alien revelation. A trick of the light.
xxi.
In 1835, only eighteen years old, Thoreau contracted tuberculosis. He lived with the disease for the rest of his life, often causing bouts of ill health. In 1860, he was struck with bronchitis, and his health severely declined over the next two years. He died in 1862. His last words were, “Now comes good sailing.”
Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection of the lungs. Tuberculosis bacteria eat the lungs from the inside out. The chest cavity fills with a mixture of blood and the liquefied remains of the lungs. The infected individual is unable to get enough oxygen into their system, and death is usually the result of respiratory failure.
For twenty-seven years, Thoreau was slowly drowning.
xxii.
Let us call the boy Blue.
His parents named him Angelo, nicknamed him Angelino, little angel, Nino for short. But that was his name in life. Let us call the boy Blue in his death.
Blue has grown up to be a fine young man, and handsome. He has his mother’s high, wise forehead, his father’s haunted eyes.
Blue is the name of the boy who will meet me at my death. The boy with sand in his eyes.
Like many of the drowned, Blue cannot speak. He tried, once, and succeeded in producing only a kind of low whine.
Blue is the name of the boy I love. With every blink, a fine spill of sand dusts the crests of both cheeks, the triturated remains of mollusk and marble.
Blue is the name of the boy who will kill me. In death, I will take his name.
Blue, little angel, usher me to the burial-places of the drowned.
xxiii.
Between the five senses, the most closely related are sight and touch, especially when that which is sighted and that which is touched is another living body. Sight is always undergirded by touch. What we see, we associate with its potential to be touched. In this way, touch always precedes sight. We see in order to gauge our distance from tactility; the tactile is the full realization of the visible.
xxiv.
From the Journal, Feb. 21, 1842:
I must confess there is nothing so strange to me as my own body.
xxv.
A memory: I once set fire to the woods.
Camping in Fair Haven, the fire he had kindled atop a stump caught on the surrounding brush and spread swiftly with the wind. It gnawed hungrily at the dry undergrowth and blanketed a hundred acres in flame. Helpless to stop the conflagration, he instead climbed above it.
Perched on Fair Haven cliff, Henry watched the tide of flame advance with the guiltless, objective perspective of a naturalist. It was a glorious spectacle and I was the only one there to enjoy it.
This was three years past. Now, Henry stands at the Atlantic shore, bleary-eyed from the long journey, waiting.
See: the moon is shuttered behind a cloud. The ocean settles once more to an indifferent black. The radiant beam of Fire Island Light sweeps across the water.
What else might that bright flame yet have to call to the wrecking ground?
~
Lee Huttner earned his MFA at Chatham University, where he teaches in the English and Cultural Studies departments. His writing has been published in At Length, Southeast Review, Hippocampus, Palimpest, and elsewhere.
