“Time is but a stream I go a fishing in” – Thoreau’s Time on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Set within the span of a week, Thoreau appears to give us a pretty straightforward timeline for this trip right in the title. Yet even though the number of days and nights out on the rivers are set, the time does not quite seem measurable once Thoreau has entered the current. Throughout this sort of travelogue, I think we can start to see Thoreau frame the natural history of the river and his exhaustive cataloguing of every flower and fish he comes across with the history of man. More specifically, with the history of American man. Within the framework of the expedition, Thoreau plays with the form of the travel journal as he presents us with a narration that jumps in and out of the present. Written a few years after the actual trip while the author was living at Walden (by the way the quote in the title is from Walden), this is Thoreau’s memory of time spent with his brother that is imbued with a gravity that his brother’s untimely death gave to the journey. He begins his journey with references to the American Revolution which is of course the beginning of the nation and he gives us the Indian name of the Concord. As he progresses further and gives us accounts of the skills white men acquired from Indians as well as episodes of men settling alongside and building locks and dams on the river, we see the progress of civilization into the wildness of America. Thoreau was a voracious reader of all sorts of texts including natural history and even Hindu religious texts. Much like Tennyson, he had read Lyell’s Principles of Geology and was heavily influenced by it to the extent that much of his journaling and late essays were natural histories themselves. In this work, see Thoreau putting the succession of nature alongside the succession of humanity with American civilization.