Chapter 7 / SAVING WALDEN POND OR RAISING THE MONEY WON'T HELP IF THE OWNER WON'T SELL

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 parked the car and took a brisk walk, setting out to circle the water counterclockwise.

There was a typical dirt footpath like the kind that usually follows the edge of a mass of fresh water - uneven, inherent to the motion of the shoreline. The trees were bare on this November day, so it was easy to see through the surrounding woods. After a short walk of enjoying reflections on the surface of the pond, I spied his tiny cabin.

It was pint-size, perhaps twelve feet square, and one of the most compact living quarters I'd ever seen. And of course it was neat. With a single bed, a stove, a couple of windows. I stood there squinting and pictured how it might have looked in March of 1848 after Thoreau had spent a long winter inside. In my imagination, it was strewn with colored leaf specimens and rocks and various natural wonders, which I'm sure Henry brought inside. Not like now, with its brightly painted walls, cleaned up spic-and-span by a current member of the Walden committee.

When I turned my attention back to the surrounding landscape, I saw it: the most important area in the whole historic scene.

At first I thought it was a small hill, though its shape was uncharacteristic compared to the nearby terrain. Energy drew me to this rise about one hundred feet from the cabin. I felt something compelling, like a strange, beautiful sound that draws attention out of silence. The only audible sounds were a soft wind broken by another visitor's footsteps through crisp, fallen leaves. As I got closer to this odd mound, perhaps ten feet at its highest point, I realized it was a pile of small rocks: individual rocks, each carefully placed.

It was the Walden Pond rock cairn.

As I eyed this strange structure, the fellow pilgrim appeared and explained how it came to be. An empathetic visitor started a rock pile years ago, in tribute to Thoreau's life and words. Over time - one by one - thousands of individuals had placed thousands of stones and pebbles on top of other stones and pebbles. Staring at this man-made knoll, I could almost hear individual temperaments coming off the crystalline pieces of Earth placed by a multitude of hands. I envisioned: people who had walked up solemnly to pay tribute, children helping their parents who were teens in the sixties, people sidestepping and twirling over to the pile, older people with sparkles in their eyes. I also saw hope in the eyes of yuppies that had given up their dreams to make money for their own, more demanding homes.

The rock cairn was embraced by rich, silent, airy woods brimming with magnificent trees. Yet the vision which commanded focus was this grey-toned bottom half of a giant's oversized hourglass. Each small rock dropping down one by one like grains of sand. Finally! What man had created there was a monument in marvelous keeping with magnificent surroundings. Moist, chilly air floated amidst the mound, the naked branches, the ground and the sky.

People had tossed rocks toward the middle to make the mound higher, so the center was steep. Did they add a rock to say goodbye to a lost time? Or did they acknowledge the actions of this earnest man? For like anyone, now or then, one can choose to live intimately with Nature, rather than in the bustling town not far away.

I was moved by the experience, and walked slowly back to the car, traversing the other side of the pond. Just a pond. Just one man's life. Yet it was a person who reminded me that satisfaction and comfort could be drawn from a life led in the pursuit of love for and balance with Nature.

I did not think again of Henry Thoreau until I journeyed back to Aspen about a year and a half later. I live at the base of several mountains in my small Colorado town. There is one 7,000+-foot bump I often hike in the summer. The trail is named for the creek that wanders down in the groove between two giant sentinels.

This hike is my medicine path. I learned from a Native American friend that one could walk a focused ascent for healing. On a medicine walk, one can simply ask what is a good knowing for a particular day. I was feeling fresh from having traveled, so went up this path on an early summer morning with nothing in particular in mind. As I climbed, I became aware of the Walden Pond again, as if someone had whispered the name in my ear. It seemed that an issue about the place was being raised, right in my hometown. And it was clear that a bridge of understanding needed to be built. I did not know how or why, but I knew it was important.

The next morning, I learned that the rock-and-roll singer Don Henley was planning a fundraiser to gather funds for Walden Pond. To my surprise, the man who wanted to develop it was also in town.

What needed supporting?

Tickets for the event were on sale at a local restaurant so I went there. When I got to the ticket table, I asked to see the list of sponsors. The names included a friend and former mayor. I called him up.

"Hey, Bill, it's Sarah. I just got back from Maine where I played Governor Baxter on the CBS 5 o'clock news. I put my hair up in a bowler hat and even those crusty New Englanders didn't mind that I played a man. They loved it. He created Baxter State Park. Kept the sacred mountain for the people."

"Good for you. Takes an actress," he answered.

"And a television broadcast."

"What's up?"

"I see you're on this committee for Walden Pond."

"Yes, I am. It's an important American landmark," he said like a former mayor.

"Absolutely, but why the fundraiser?"

"The land has been bought by a developer." My breath stopped. He continued. "They plan to put condos around the pond. The plans are already drawn up."

"What?" I had no idea it was so far along already.

"It's unbelievable. Don's doing everything he can to raise money to buy and preserve it."

"Bill, I heard the developer is in Aspen."

"Really?"

"Does he want to sell it?" I asked.

"Good question, Sarah." There was a quiet pause. He continued. "To be honest, I don't know." Silently, my part in the whole rigmarole revealed itself.

"Why don't you invite him to the event?" I asked in my most infinite-possibility way. No answer. I pushed on. "It may make him feel included." Longer pause. This was treading on enemy territory. I spoke again, "Bill, you were in the Peace Corps, for goodness sake. This is one small pond. We've got oceans to clean up."

Another pregnant pause. He finally answered, "I'll think about it. Maybe I'll call Don."

I didn't hear anything else until the night of the dinner. Mother and I put together the three hundred and fifty dollars for my ticket. My dress was the only dress I owned that cost nearly the same amount. We had about five hundred dollars in savings at the time. As I came around the corner of our brick mall toward the restaurant hosting the stellar occasion, I was moving slowly. My dangerous dress-up shoes required caution.

There was a public commotion at the front door of the club. A crew from the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" TV show was filming in lightening white light. I immediately turned around to walk back home. The other things we could do with three hundred and fifty dollars flooded my brain.

Then just as if my own grandmother had caught me running off in the middle of the night to smoke a cigarette, I felt something. It was as if a giant invisible hand grabbed me by the back of my neck and said, "And where do you think you're going, young lady?"

I stopped in my tracks. Like the Native Grandmother spirits that swirl in clouds in the afternoon sky over warm prairie grass paintings, the collective, benevolent White Buffalo Calf Woman Goddess spoke to me.

"They need you in there."

I turned around, put my head down like a horse heading for the barn, and stormed toward the door with determination. About fifty feet from the entrance, one of our county commissioners called my name. He looked warmly into my eyes, cocked his elbow like a prince who wanted me to take his arm and said, "May I?"

He was an angel, a knight. I took his arm and together we waded through the blasting words of an unabashed Englishman ogling over celebrities. It was like walking through a firewall. My escort stayed tall, unswayed and steady. Looking directly at me, he said, "We don't have a thing to do but go through the door." I relaxed and ignored everything else as we stepped on the same old bricks we'd crossed a hundred times.

Inside, the buffet was sumptuous and the hype was thick. I sat at a table with some politically active old friends and several political leaders from the Los Angeles area. Sometime during this enjoyable, informative evening I saw Bill talking with Tom Hayden. He introduced me and I felt as pretty as Jane Fonda, his former wife, for a minute. Bill quietly said into my ear, "I got your point. I called Don. He invited Mr. Z."

"Oh, goody," I said. "Did he come?"

"No," said Bill. "But it's a start." Bill worked in real estate. With his eyes he agreed with me, "If he doesn't want to sell it, all the money in the world can't buy a thing."

I didn't speak with Don, but I stood behind him at one point during the evening and silently congratulated his courage. "You are a warrior of the heart my friend," I said mentally into the thick disco music and conversation. He turned his head to the right as if he heard something. He was keeping the peace, since he was terribly upset about the cameras assaulting guests at the entryway. About two weeks later, he sent a letter of apology to those who had supported the event. He explained that he'd had no knowledge of the television crew and reassured us that the fundraising was going well.

The really good news was this:

Our event and others around the country, gathered enough money to keep Thoreau's cabin and the rock cairn intact, and prevent the condos from rising. All agreed the historic site was worth keeping! Couches and sports cars would go elsewhere. Anyone, who has the impulse, can walk the path around the water forever. Walden Pond will stay much like it was in 1847 when Henry wandered in from a walk back from Ralph Waldo Emerson's place down the road, the birds chirping above his head. Who knows how high the rock cairn is today?

A few years later, in a shuttle ride from a friend's house in northern Massachusetts, we got stuck in a big traffic jam in the middle of a rural setting. "What's all this?" I asked, leaning forward to speak to the driver. I had finally learned to leave early, so I wasn't feeling rushed.

With an expression of total satisfaction he answered, "President Clinton's flown in for a special dedication this morning." He added proudly, "It's at Walden Pond."

I leaned back into my seat with a smile the size of Texas welling up from inside my well traveled little heart.

"That's where Henry David Thoreau lived," the driver said with confidence, looking into his rear view mirror to check my response.

"Yes, I know," I answered, from my eternal hippie core, sassier than ever. He might have thought I was an uninterested businesswoman on a trip, I don't know. He put his satisfied eyes back on the road.

But I wasn't just a person out to make a dollar. I am a flower child, a child of the sixties who, thankfully, mostly never gives up. And I was going to bask in the glory of victory all the way to the airport.