Surveying Walden Pond | Thoreau

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 sounding holes through ice that was sixteen inches thick was in itself a substantial feat, requiring of Thoreau's relatively small frame considerable stamina and physical power. 

Amazingly, the hard work did not blunt Thoreau's perceptions but stimulated his interpretive faculties. 

Read the full story by Patrick Chura, author of Thoreau The Land Surveyor in the August 2010 issue of POB magazine