Nature Blog

This is an excerpt from "DANCING DOWNSTREAM: Journey of the North American Performer and Activist SARAH PLETTS. Thank you for reading. Remembering an early Aspen Summer in the late 1980's As I meandered through the New England landscape one fine autumn day, I actually came upon a sign indicating Walden Pond. The Walden Pond? I had gone east to Massachusetts to visit family for Thanksgiving. I renamed their quaint colonial town Foamingfarm, and pretended the neighborhood cows got rabies from wandering packs of wild dogs. My family turned the corners of their mouths up a little and did their best to humor me. They lived in a condominium on Concord Street. One day I went out their front door, turned right in my rental car and drove north. When I saw a state road sign that read "Walden Pond." I was stunned. This couldn't have been the place where that remarkable human being, a man born on this continent, lived in a most notable way. Henry David Thoreau had built himself a small cabin on the outskirts of Concord where he lived alone from July 1845 through September 1847. His book, Walden, was published in 1854 and was still in print! The book speaks of his simple, harmonious life with Nature. It's a definitive classic about Man and Nature. Walden loomed large in my memory. So when I saw this state road sign, I turned off the main road instantly. On this, my first visit, I park…