Heat Wave in Concord


`"Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather..."` N.B.: Thoreau records his "fluvial walks" in the Journal for 1852. He read Whitman's Leaves of Grass, including, we assume, the song of the "29th bather" in 1856. His comment: "As for the sensuality in Whitman's `Leaves of Grass,' I do not so much wish it was not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read it without harm."

	I Farmers working the fields quit early, as much for ox or horse as for men - one old man had already died; exhausted by heat, wrung out, wrinkled like dried fruit. Their women, buttoned, laced, strapped under petticoats, skirts, sleeves, sit and work, work and sit in the dim, dead heat of parlor, kitchen, and shed. But one, an exceptional one, in a windowless storage room, stands, naked and white in a wash tub's cold ring. Her cast off clothes spilled like dried discarded flowers. The tinned dipper lifts water, still cool from the well, again and again. The water passing over her body like unseen fingers and back to the tub again. Perhaps one of them also dreams of the river, of young men who float there, pale bellies tempting the sun.	II From houses on opposite sides of the elm-roofed main street Henry and Ellery, leaving dishes and scraps of cold dinner behind, meet, retreat to the river. A man stands in a barn door, his shirt stained with sweat, hat hanging slack in his hand. A woman in the shed's dark cave churns the morning's milk the heat would soon sour. They shake their heads. What beside envy do they feel as these renegades slip away? Do they imagine how it feels to peel close, sweaty clothes away, let the waters have their play? At the river Henry explains that banks have a gender, this one, for example, being convex, alluvial, gradual, and feminine; the opposite, concave, undercut, and masculine. Ellery makes some comments that Henry's Journal will never repeat. They strip and wade in.
	III Soon, by the opposite, masculine, shore, up to their chins, they face the current. The heat of the day is carried down, away. They wade upstream, wearing their hats against the sun. They hold their bundled clothing high. From deep holes to shallows the water falls, rises again. Chest, ankle, knee, belly, chest, and down again. Rounding a bend they see the plank bridge. Boys, their work done, race and strip and plunge. Boys breaching and splashing; marble boys riding imaginary dolphins. On the bank one boy sits, lifting a foot to examine some bruise, fixed in an instant as an engraving in an antiquities book; but subtly colored, sunburned, bare. The two men put on shirts now, feeling the sting of the sun. Bridge rails bleed pitch, the planks shrink.	IV The drying tails of their shirts stick to their buttocks and thighs. Perhaps because of the shirts they feel undressed, retreat to the water. The water, like unseen fingers, passes over them. They wade on into a shaded, shallower reach of late afternoon, hear the clang of a distant bell. Some farmer's wife signaling an early supper. They climb out on the feminine side. They wait for the air to dry them. How long this single mile of fluvial walk has seemed, passing from present to pastoral to classical, back to the present again. They dress, turn toward the world of women where mother, sister, or wife waits. The day slides toward evening and the moon.