When we lived in Vermont we always wondered where the idea of “fisher cats” had come from. People would mention fisher cats as if they were real, they could threaten your hens, or worse. We thought they must mean fishers, which are a large species in the weasel family, but why were they called “cats”?
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When we asked if they meant the animal called a fisher, faces went blank. People were unfamiliar with fishers, secretive forest-dwelling tree climbers that eat porcupines. Vermont having been almost completely deforested in past, fisher numbers understandably were very low, but are increasing now as forests regrow.
Then, just recently, I was reading Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and came across “according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat”. When I read this to John we simultaneously said “maybe that’s where fisher cats come from!”
If Thoreau’s contemporaries in 1850’s Massachusetts believed martens, a smaller relative of fishers, could interbreed with cats, then similar ideas about fishers and cats may have existed. And the mythology survives, or at least the term “fisher cat” does.
I was reading Walden because I had Covid. I’d started it once or twice in past, but never made it past the first 20 pages or so. But now, thanks to Covid, my intensely sore throat was driving me into the bathtub, where I could sink up to my ears in hot water for long periods once or twice a day, to ease my lungs and throat. Maybe I could sweat the virus away.
I needed a book to read during my hot water therapy, but I needed a book that would survive being dunked when I dozed. I’ve learned the hard way that if I value a book I shouldn’t read it in the tub. My old Dover Thrift Editions copy of Walden would fit the bill. This experience has given me a renewed appreciation for inexpensive books, books you can get on with reading even though doing so may ruin the book.
Never having read Walden, I always felt I was an intellectual lightweight. You hear it spoken of with reverence. I hoped it would be something like Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, a book I loved.
The introductory note of this Dover edition says Walden is a “defining text” in American literature and “perhaps the greatest expression of the spirit of New England transcendentalism.” That was my warning I guess. I’m not on solid footing with transcendentalism.
It also says “As nature writing, it is one of the world’s most revered and imitated masterpieces, and continues to inform debate…” That’s the hole I was trying to fill by finally, finally reading it.
It also “inspires readers … (including Tolstoy and Gandhi) to improve their lives.”
Wow. Fasten your seatbelt!
When I started it before, I’d expected a book about nature, but instead found it was a book about economics, specifically the economics of farming in 1850s Massachusetts, of which Thoreau had a very dim view. This time I persisted and read through the economics to what followed. It wasn’t easy going. I persisted initially because it was my only bath tolerant book. Eventually sheer cussedness drove me on. I would not quit. I would read it all the way through, looking for whatever it was that had inspired so many before me. Could I find what Tolstoy and Gandhi had found?
I could not. I never found the spark. There were long (long!) sections where although I read the words I found little meaning. At one point he suggests that rather than living in a house, and taking on all the work and cost of owning it, one would be better off living in a hollow tree, having the sky as one’s roof. I imagined him in his nice clothes and educated accents, swanning about, telling anyone who would listen that he’d rather live in a hollow tree. I wonder what his neighbors thought of him. He was interesting enough that large numbers of visitors found him out in the woods, coming to engage in long philosophical discussions.
He abhors the life of labor that is farming, but he also abhors the machines that can lighten the load. He says he can walk 30 miles a day and reach a destination before the person who first must work to earn the money to ride the train. Therefore railroads are unnecessary.
His few nature comments that catch my eye are the mentions of pigeons and chestnut trees, passenger pigeons having since been hunted to extinction, and chestnut trees largely wiped out by blight.
He was an educated young man, having “been sent to school and college”. He discusses at some length the importance of reading the classics, whether you read them in their original Greek or Latin, or in another language.
I’m left wondering what this young elite says that has so moved so many readers over so many years. He has some interesting observations scattered among the long impenetrable passages, but I am not moved by his arguments to “improve” my life.
My reward for persevering through to the end was coming across the famous lines: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” We hear this refrain often. I’m not surprised it was Thoreau who first said it.
But, I cannot walk with Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi; I do not hear the music they heard.
photo credit: Ann Tiplady 2022