Walden Pond: Spend a Summer Day at This Historical Landmark
If you live in Massachusetts and are looking for a great place to spend a day enjoying the warm summer weather, you might want to consider Walden Pond. The pond was made famous by author Henry David Thoreau, who lived by the pond years ago in isolation to be one with nature while experiencing life in its most simplistic form and wrote a book about it, appropriately titled “Walden”. Walden Pond is now turned into a gathering place for swimmers, kayakers and those who wish to sit on the beach like shore or take a stroll around the narrow wooded path that encircles the beautiful body of 102 feet of water. The entire reservation encompasses a whole 400 acres of land, but a small path has been paved around the pond for tourists to walk through and it doesn’t have huge signs indicating that straying from that path is prohibited but the wooded area beyond it is all around very wildly growing in frantic directions, surely with lots of things to trip on and maybe thorny bushes. So it is not too common to see anyone beyond the path or the pond, which is kind of a shame with all of that available land.
To some, it may seem there’s little to do at Walden Pond, being that the only other obvious park overseers are the ice cream men their truck of frozen treats out in the parking lot, one might assume a day at Walden Pond to be boring. After all, one could reason, you can only swim in the cold water for so long and it’s somewhat of an hour or two long commitment to start the hike around the pond. But surprisingly, there is such an aura of peacefulness and silence in our thoughts that is evoked by the ponds atmosphere that even people who need constant stimulation have been known to be content just sitting on the sand or grass people watching or quieting the mind. Walden Pond is a great place to bring a notebook to write, to meditate and also to skinny dip if you can sneak in with no one watching. It is a very inspiring place.
There is also the feat of swimming across the entire pond lengthwise for those that can handle the chilly water. The water is clear and the coldness refreshing, so much so that you can almost feel your skin getting smoother and rejuvenated on the spot.
Walden Pond, due to its historical significance with Henry David Thoreau, just seems to have an uplifting, motivating feeling to the air. It is inspiring also to learn about Thoreau’s experiences there and if you have read the book Walden and are familiar with his activities he performed while a camp there, it is even more fascinating. Henry David Thoreau lived in a very small little shack like cabin from 1845 to 1847. There are two versions of this tiny tiny abode on the Walden premises, one of them supposedly the place where his house really existed and the other, a replica. Either way they are both minuscule with barely enough room to stand up and get from the bed to the door and they clearly show how many material amenities Thoreau must’ve given up to proceed in this conservational experiment. The whole idea of the book Walden was to become one with the environment and show a respect for nature while living as simply as possible, devoid of nearly all material goods. The book is very much a reflection of Thoreau’s mind processes as they develop and as he becomes more accustomed to living in nature and is less of a book of action and more of an outline of the developing philosophy of conservationalism. Due to Thoreau’s success and esteemed fame, Walden Pond has been officially designated as the National Historic Landmark that marks the start of the conservation movement.
Walden Pond is located in between Lincoln and Concord, on the outskirts of the city of Boston. To ascertain directions on how to get to Walden Pond, see the directions on the state park section of the Massachusetts Government website.
