Alcott in Concord
Amos Bronson Alcott was Louisa May’s father and, by most accounts, something of a crank. He used to sit along the Concord Road with a basket of apples, waiting for passersby; when he saw a traveler, he’d call out, offering to trade an apple for a conversation. Were people flattered, confused, wary? What did he hope to gain?
It’s a little like the phenomenon of the gam, which Ishmael explains in Moby-Dick. When ships met on the high, lonesome seas, they’d pull near each other and take time to exchange news and letters. Maybe Alcott, marooned in his brilliant village, hungered for the thrill of an unfamiliar face, news from elsewhere. Or maybe Alcott’s urge is related to Benjamin Franklin’s drive toward self-betterment: education on the cheap, just an apple and a moment of your time. An apple exchanged for a stranger’s knowledge sounds familiar, apocryphal. Would that make it less true?
Late one winter, about this time of year, I found myself in Concord on a raw afternoon, trudging along the busy turnpike, trying to get to Walden Pond. I kept my head down, walking over shattered ruby taillights, cigarette butts, crushed cans, a bent license plate. Salt-rimed transfer trucks blasted past in gusts of cold air. I hummed Lyle Lovett songs to keep my spirits up, and the only sign I could find that someone had walked that way before was a pair of old shoe prints in the sand. How grateful I was to see them. Make me the cup of strength to suffering souls, Episcopalians pray. You never know what your cup of strength might look like.
Twice a year and always alone, I used to make the thousand-mile drive from Houston to South Carolina. How many times during those long drives did I stop in a diner and order something—a patty melt, a cup of coffee—not because I was hungry, but because I needed to hear people talking? I remember a boy’s narrow shoulders as he bent over the deep cookstove. Eyes on something else, he reached for the steel dipper of oil, or a bucket of half-frozen hash browns. I loved watching him work. The wire basket of eggs above his head, and the finger-marked chrome toaster reflecting his grasping hand. If he noticed me, he didn’t show it.
Why did Alcott do it? The impulse seems generous at first; maybe he hoped to welcome strangers to his town with a kindness. But it’s self-interested, too. Conversation as transaction. Just talk to me. I’ll pay.
A grasshopper blunders into a spiderweb, snagging a leg, and tugs fruitlessly at the silk. Calmly, the spider drops to where the snared insect struggles, secures it with a few bights of silk, then rolls it rapidly into a bundle, spindling it into a white skein as the doomed creature’s legs shiver and work. Dark tobacco juice stains the shroud. She slips in her fangs, then tacks and weaves her way back to web’s center to wait.
Alcott’s watched the whole lopsided struggle, mildly interested. A basket of wrinkled apples rests by his side, perfuming the air with decay. Bright leaves twist in the wind. It won’t be long, he knows, before he’ll brush snow from this very spot.
Sometimes he thinks he could wait right here, as day sinks into night, leaves dulling then dropping, cased in ice, as tracks mar the first heavy snow and deer strip bark from young willow trees. Wait as wind carves the snow into dunes, scouring down to bare dirt in the low places, apples deflate into limp puddles spiky with mold, and the earth slowly turns back to warmth. He could wait through all that, melting snow dropping from the brim of his crumpled hat; he could wait, eyes flicking from side to side. Steel-gray hair reaching farther down his collar, fingernails growing articulate as talons. He could wait. For someone to talk to.
