Unregarded Berries

By Paul Gray

During the last decade of his life, Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) began a systematic survey of the Massachusetts vegetation surrounding Concord, where he lived in the third-floor attic of his parents' house. His mission, as he told his journal, was "to find God in nature," the Transcendental imperative he absorbed from his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. True, the 26 months Thoreau had spent living alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, memorialized in Walden (1854), involved a similar quest for some "trace of the Ineffable," but now he wanted to remove himself from the center of his observations and let the natural objects he studied speak for him. He hoped, in short, to be less romantic and more scientific.

That he only partly succeeded is one of the many charms of Wild Fruits (Norton; 409 pages; $29.95), which finally sees print thanks to the heroic editing efforts of Thoreau scholar Bradley Dean. Thoreau left the Wild Fruits manuscript neatly stacked and wrapped at the time of his death, but much jumbling and shuffling occurred as the papers passed from owner to owner. That confusion, plus Thoreau's notoriously hen-scratched handwriting, kept Wild Fruits a closed book until now. Readers will find that its preserved contents have aged not at all.

In one sense, the freshness of Thoreau's long-undeciphered writings should surprise no one. He, along with Mark Twain, essentially invented the plain but supple American prose style, carefully composed to sound casual. So, to stress the point that "high blueberries" must be looked for in swamps, Thoreau writes, "When I see their dense curving tops ahead, I expect a wet foot." He dresses his adages in homespun: "All kinds of harvestry, even pulling turnips when the first cold weather numbs your fingers, are interesting if you have been the sower and have not sowed too many."

Thoreau orders Wild Fruits as a botanist might, collecting his notes on each plant in the order in which it blooms. He records the dates of his sightings and the measurements he has made: "September 24, 1859. The common shrub oak is apparently the most fertile of our oaks. I count two hundred sixty-six acorns on a branch just two feet long." But he has trouble keeping poetry out of his descriptions: "August 23, 1858. Abundantly shedding its downy seeds, wands of white and pink." And sometimes the objective mask slips completely: "July 30, 1860. Beautiful."

The tension between Thoreau the naturalist and Thoreau the missionary for nature's wonders invigorates nearly every page of Wild Fruits. He portrays his subjects with keen clarity, but he also wants his Concord neighbors to wake up to the error of their ways: "We cultivate imported shrubs in our front yards for the beauty of their berries, while at least equally beautiful berries grow unregarded by us in the surrounding fields." He argues passionately against the careless destruction of the wilderness around him. Hearing that huckleberry pickers in his area have been ordered off privately owned fields, he fumes, "What becomes of the true value of country life--what, if you must go to market for it? It has come to this, that the butcher now brings round our huckleberries in his cart."

Thoreau knew that his cause--"Let us try to keep the New World new"--could not withstand the spread of civilization, but the methods he proposed for limiting the damage now sound eerily prescient. "It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment." Municipalities across the nation are pondering ways to keep themselves from being swallowed by development. Thoreau would argue, of course, that his advice is being heeded more than a century too late, and it is hard to imagine him wandering about and viewing contemporary America with anything but horror and chagrin.

This makes his thoughts resurrected in Wild Fruits seem all the more welcome and valuable. The world he saw and so lovingly portrayed has indeed largely vanished. But it does live on vividly in his words. They may be, in his estimation, a poor substitute for the real thing. But they memorably communicate his wonder and joy.