Walden
The climate and soil may make the Vermonter hard-shelled, but only rarely is he a snapping turtle at heart. His character is more like that of a chambered nautilus, with recesses of beauty not easily seen but nevertheless there.
Charles Edward Crane, “Let Me Show You Vermont”
Place names are redolent with romantic mystery for me, so I was looking forward to exploring Walden. Would I find something of Thoreau there, perhaps a pond with a tiny and charming hand-built cabin on its shore?
But as it happened, I drove through Walden without stopping to find out. So far as I could tell at 25 mph, it is more of a pronounced curve in Route 15 than a town. All I could find when i got to the place I thought Walden should be was a shuttered general store on one side of the road, and a frozen brook on the other,.
But that doesn't mean that Walden doesn't have an identity for the 935 people who live here, or that my brief view of that bend in the road, brook and empty store didn't produce an impression on me. In addition to Thoreau, I’ll now think of a solitary drive on a winter’s day through a lonely stretch of the Northeast Kingdom when I hear the name “Walden.”
As I explore Vermont and make paintings inspired by the places I’m finding along the way, I keep returning to a central idea: landscape is powerful. Where we live and what we see every day affects our character, our emotions, our thoughts, our health, and our happiness.
I’m also finding that there are no clear answers to what makes for beauty, or good and bad, in landscape. Sometimes even what makes a town a town is as intangible and difficult to define as a bend in the road, or a view to a cerulean blue mountain.