4

How many a man has dated a new era in his life
from the reading of a book.

Walden, “Reading”

The second visitor to Pond View that morning was Ananda Singh.

Ananda was a young pilgrim from India. Supercharged with emotion, he got off the Boston-to-Fitchburg train at the Concord depot and looked at his watch. He had been in the United States only two and a half hours, and here he was already, setting foot in the village of his dreams.

He knew he should have been sensible and given in to his weariness after the twenty-four-hour flight from New Delhi. He should have settled in at the airport motel and gone to bed. But it had been so enticing, the knowledge that he was only fifteen miles from the destination of his pilgrimage, Walden Pond. At Logan Airport Ananda reclaimed his suitcase, cashed in his traveler’s checks, inquired how to get to Concord, hopped into a cab, and caught a train at North Station just as it was pulling out. And here he was in Concord, Massachusetts, wide awake at eleven o’clock in the morning instead of fast asleep at midnight in his father’s house in the foothills of the Himalayas.

For a moment Ananda stood motionless on the Concord platform, watching the train pull away with a long, slow jerk. The other passengers who had traveled with him from Boston were moving off purposefully, as if Concord were just an ordinary place on the surface of the earth. Eagerly Ananda carried his suitcase around the depot and looked curiously at the street. It was an American street, not very different from the village streets of England where Ananda had spent two years of his life at university. There was a pizza parlor, a liquor store, a cleaning establishment. Where would he find Walden, the pond that to Thoreau had been “sacred as the Ganges, a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet”?

A girl was standing on the sidewalk. “Excuse me,” said Ananda, “can you tell me how to get to Walden Pond?”

The girl laughed. Her laugh was musical, and Ananda laughed, too. She pointed to the right. “That way. You just walk straight for a mile or so, and you’ll come to it on the other side of Route Two.”

She was as tall as he was, but built on a grand scale, whereas Ananda was lank and thin. His mother often teased him by saying he was a pair of brown eyes on the end of a plank.

The girl reminded him of the Statue of Liberty. It seemed appropriate that the first young female person he spoke to in the United States should be like the symbol of the country. She had the same round jaw and long straight nose and huge rectangular eyes. Her teeth were dazzling, like those of the girls at home.

Ananda looked excitedly down the street in the direction of the pond. “Thank you,” he said. And then he couldn’t help himself, he had to tell her. “I’ve come ten thousand miles to see Henry Thoreau’s Walden Pond.”

“Have you really?” The girl seemed impressed.

Some people, Ananda thought admiringly, were more transparent than others. The girl’s light voice and open face were a revealing whole, and he caught her up in his mind as if she were an object on a table. For a moment he held her in his hand. Were all Americans like this?

Now the girl pursed her lips and looked doubtful. “A lot of people think Walden isn’t true to Thoreau’s memory anymore.” Her brow darkened, as if the Statue of Liberty were beholding thunderclouds over Kansas. “But they overdo it, those people. My father, for instance.” Then she groaned. “Oh, there he is, and there’s the car. I should have seen it. Oh, isn’t that typical.”

She drifted away in the direction of a tall sandy-haired man who was shouting at a woman in uniform.

“Two minutes,” bellowed the man, “that’s all. I’m only two minutes late.”

“Well, okay, Mr. Fry,” said the woman in uniform. “I’ll take your word for it.” And she took his parking ticket out from under the windshield wiper.

The girl looked back at Ananda and waved good-bye. “I hope you like the pond,” she said.

Ananda set off, marching with his long loose stride in the direction of his dream. For a moment he thought about the splendid girl and her angry father, Mr. Fry, and then he forgot them, enchanted by the clapboard buildings on either side of the street. They reminded him of the big houses in Simla, shaded by trees and wrapped in verandas.

The wooden houses petered out. So did the sidewalk. The street broadened. Cars rushed past him, and Ananda had to walk carefully to avoid being run down.

At the base of a long hill he stopped to rest, a little disturbed by the busy street. It was not the idyllic country road he had imagined.

A car pulled over, wobbling to a stop. The left front tire was flat. The driver looked at Ananda and said, “Shit.”

“Can I help you?” Ananda said politely.

Jack Markey said, “Sure,” and grinned at him. He got out and opened the trunk and lifted out the spare. “You’re from somewhere else, right?”

“Oh, yes, I’m from India. This is my first day in this country.” Ananda put down his suitcase, accepted the socket wrench, and looked at it doubtfully. He had never changed a tire in all his life.

Jack looked at him and laughed. “Here, you twist off the lug nuts.” He took back the socket wrench and showed Ananda how. Ananda knelt and unscrewed them successfully while his new friend jacked up the front bumper.

When the job was done, Jack Markey thanked Ananda and looked at him inquisitively. “I don’t suppose you’ve got time to do something else for me? Ten minutes, that’s all it’ll take.”

Ananda hesitated, then said politely, “Well, I don’t see why I should not.”

“Good.” Jack opened the car door and waved him onto the front seat. “It’s my assistant, he’s sick today, so I need somebody to hold the stick for me. I’m doing some surveying right here, just up the hill.”

Ananda’s tiredness vanished. Henry Thoreau too had been a surveyor. He beamed at this reincarnation. “I would be most happy.”

The car whizzed around in a U-turn and started up a broad drive. “This is the high school,” said Jack. “We’ll park the car and walk up. You can leave your suitcase on the seat.”

Ananda soon found himself standing on a playing field at the top of a wooded ridge, holding a long graduated stick while the man with the curly yellow hair peered through a telescope mounted on a tripod and shouted at him to stand a little to the left, a little to the right. Through the trees Ananda could see a broad highway. Cars flooded by, trucks made huge accelerating noises. Below him people were playing tennis. “Up to the net, Jarvis,” shouted the coach. “Get a move on, Kenny, get a move on.”

“Great, great,” said Jack, looking up from his telescope. “Now, hey, how about standing over there in front of that tree?”

Ananda moved quickly to the tree and held the stick again. He couldn’t admit that he was in a hurry. It would be impossible to explain that after flying ten thousand miles he couldn’t wait another moment to see Walden Pond. Obediently he moved from place to place, wondering why the surveyor was mapping this bit of countryside so close to the sacred water. Was it a geodetic survey? Perhaps the map would show flora and fauna or the nature of the geological substratum.

At last the yellow-haired surveyor was satisfied. “Gee, thanks. You’re a real sport.”

“It was no trouble. May I ask what sort of cartographic study you are making?”

“Cartographic?” Jack Markey looked at the skinny foreign kid in surprise. “Oh, we’re not mapping anything. We’re planning a shopping mall. You know, with a condo complex on the side. Grandison Enterprises. I work for Jefferson Grandison.”

Ananda was dismayed. “But is it not too near to Walden Pond?”

“Walden Pond?” Jack grinned. “Oh, you mean because of the book. There’s a book called Walden Pond.”

Ananda began to explain, but a backhoe came up noisily beside them, and his words were drowned out. Jack went up to the driver. “You see those orange sticks? Dig there, and there, and there.”

Ananda walked back to the car with a sinking heart. Extracting his suitcase, he continued his pilgrimage.

In a moment he stood at a highway intersection. A huge eighteen-wheeler thundered past him, and then another and another. The high scream of the colossal tires rose above the immense roar of the diesel engines grinding into gear.

Confused, Ananda misunderstood the traffic light. Dodging across from one lane to the next, he forgot to look left instead of right and was nearly run down. The furious driver blasted his horn and shouted at him.

Shaken, Ananda hurried along the granite curbing on the other side while another tide of cars rushed toward him along the secondary road, plunging up to the stoplight, surging around the corner, and speeding in the direction of Boston.

Then Ananda’s steps faltered. What was that vast hole, that enormous pit gouged out of the landscape?

Stumbling up to the fence, he stared in horror at the Concord landfill, gaping at the distant mountain of trash and the muddy hollow with its pile of old washing machines rising skyward, interspersed with crumpled stoves and bent refrigerators. Heavy machinery was parked on a hilltop. A couple of giant dumpsters glittered with broken glass.

Turning away, Ananda tottered back along the road, looking for a glint of blue water, that “perfect forest mirror, the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no guile.” It was nowhere in sight. Instead he came upon a trailer park. A swinging metal sign read “Pond View.” Behind it boxy dwellings were parked at angles to one another, white and turquoise.

An old man sat on an aluminum lawn chair beside the road and stared at Ananda as he trudged by. Ananda gave him a feeble smile.

Another foreigner, decided Stu LaDue, looking back at him coldly. Christ, they were everywhere, like cockroaches.