okiesurveyor

In the book for which he is famous, Henry Thoreau writes, "Desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in '46, with compass and chain and sounding line." But the sole reason Thoreau gives for his survey-that he wanted to make sure the pond had a bottom-is intentionally misleading. Sounding the depths of the pond was only a part, perhaps the simplest part, of an ambitious task with profound justifications. This task, along with almost everything about the extensive surveying work Thoreau did in his lifetime, deserves a closer look. For starters, it seems essential to know how Thoreau actually made the Walden survey, a three-dimensional pond map that is now one of the most important images in American literary history. Surveying the sixty-one-acre pond presented significant technical challenges, but it was also a physically arduous process requiring days, perhaps weeks of toil. Chopping more than a hundred...