The Essential Facts

The title of this post is drawn from Thoreau's famous line in Walden describing why he went to live in the woods. He wished to

Henry David Thoreau

This past weekend some friends and I went back to the woods. We got away to Garner State Park just south of Leakey, Texas. It was an easy weekend of hiking at Lost Maples, eating good food, and staying up late around the fire. The flameleaf sumac trees were beginning to turn, and the maples were trying to catch up. The sky cleared on the second night, and we were graced with the presence of Jupiter. With my little childhood telescope we saw its moons and bands. We got to see the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda Galaxy. The weather was crisp and fresh. There is a beauty in the Texas hill country which is hard to convey. It's a dry beauty, prairie dashed with scrubby oak trees and empty creek beds, cedar trees carpet the rolling hills, the sky is so far away that the world seems to shrink around you, and yet those hills still manage to stretch from horizon to horizon. The limestone rocks which scatter the ground are filled with fossil shells, sprinkles of the eons from an ocean long gone. Now, waters receded, the land feels old and worn like a farmer's hands, cracked and wise. On his face, a wry, knowing smile built from early mornings, long days, and supper cooked on a wood-burning stove.

Garner State Park

And yet, despite Thoreau keeping my mind on the marrow of life, the outside world kept butting in. Our campsite neighbors were loud college kids, filling our evenings with "dudes" and "bros", their noise violating some sacred rule about peace in the woods. There was a burning itch to know the score of the Texas game. Lessons had to be planned for Monday. Kids were playing basketball on the road at six-thirty in the morning.

All of which got me thinking.

What are those essential facts of life which Thoreau was attempting to confront? Are they any more than the brute eat, sleep, defecate of a newborn? Was Thoreau trying to confront life itself? Or was he trying to escape from it?

I found myself bothered and annoyed at my campsite neighbors, at the noisy kids, at the dogs off-leash. Why? Not because they were disturbing the deliberate living of my life, but because they reminded me that the true motivation of my weekend get-a-way was just the opposite: to get away from life. I'm tired of living my life. Teaching is too much work. Or rather, it's too much uncompensated work. We get paid to teach 8 hours a day, but we don't get paid to prepare our lessons or grade our papers. I could be making $90,000 a year somewhere with my degree and my level of intelligence. But I choose not to, and it makes me tired. Teachers who are good at what they do have no choice but to live deliberately. There is no other way to teach. So the woods were an escape: an escape from having to think and work constantly, from grades and due dates, from keeping track of absences and re-tests, from meetings, and from the kids who just don't do the work. And here were these noisy college kids, laughing and having too good of a time, how dare they...

The moon, taken through my childhood telescope by Nicholas Paine

The essential facts of life are legion. They do not only exist in the woods, and they do not disappear when we turn the other way. Work is part of life. Marx thought it was what made us human (hence his ire that people's labor had to be sold off so they could simply survive). But the moon rising above the Texas Hill Country is part of that life too, so is patience with people who weren't raised like I was. So are campfires, and traffic, and whisky, and conversations. Perhaps Thoreau should have looked a little harder at his daily ritual, at his labor, and confronted it head on, tried to suck all the marrow out of washing dishes, meeting deadlines, and paying for gas, instead of escaping to Walden Pond. But I guess that each teaches us about the other. The woods teach us to live deliberately back in the real world, and our labor teaches us that we need those trees, those hills, those campfires, and the people around them.