This question arose when I started wondering who invented this autumnal ritual. Certainly, a philosopher must have created this slow and contemplative activity, so why not the man who invented nature itself? Or at least who invented the way we think about nature today.

Some people have been going around saying that nature is coming to an end. But it turns out that they only mean that the age of Thoreau is coming to an end.

Thoreau is the American poet and philosopher who scorned the evils of the city and went out into the countryside. Here, he believed, he would be closer to nature. What he wrote about this experience gave us the modern view of what nature is all about.

Nature, everyone came to believe, was peaceful and quiet and a good place for soul-searching. Even better was the idea of actually living, as Thoreau did, amid the trees. Which, pretty soon, everyone was doing. Which in turn, explains why suburbs today have streets named Walden Lane or Walden Circle or Walden Path. Or why the subdivisions themselves are named Walden Woods or Walden Estates.

These days, not an environmental impact statement gets filed without paying at least lip service to the idea of a natural lifestyle in a natural setting; which is to say the good life lived in the approved Henry David Thoreau way.

This makes Thoreau the father of the American suburb. What would he think of the way it turned out? Would he himself, had he stayed at his shack in the woods longer than a few months, have decided that adding a breakfast nook would be a good idea, maybe a deck as well - perhaps even a hot tub to help take the edge off the New England chill?

Thoreau was certainly no stranger to creature comforts. He did not have to hunt and fish to keep body and soul intact. He allowed his mother or sister to bring hot meals every day to his home away from home. A smart philosopher was Thoreau, one who knew better than to commune with nature on an empty stomach.

Remarkably, Thoreau was the first American to bother communing with nature at all. The Pilgrims didn't care for nature much, since it often meant bitter cold and starvation. And Daniel Boone just blazed a trail through it, hurriedly, lest nature turn out to be a hungry bear. Even in Thoreau's own time, in the western wildernesses of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, nature was still red in tooth and claw - a force to be feared and respected, not contemplated.

But Thoreau was discovering nature, not the wilderness. And he did this in tame and tidy old New England, not in the wilder West. And so he discovered a tame and tidy vision of nature - a place where you might pause in your contemplations to brush away the leaves from the porch.

It is this tidy vision of nature that is coming to an end as we find out that, unlike Thoreau at Walden, there's nowhere we can go to escape the ozone problems, the acid rain or the greenhouse effect.

How would Thoreau have coped with these problems? It doesn't really matter. He was a philosopher who believed that nature was essentially safe, while we are now back to an older philosophy, one that says that if you make a single mistake, nature will snarl only once before it strikes back.

Daniel Boone could have understood that. So could the Sioux on the plains or the Cheyenne in the mountains. Even the Pilgrims have the advantage on Thoreau in this. It is no longer a matter of living simply. From now on, we have to live carefully, as if our very lives depended on it.

At least, that is how it seems from this side of the rake, this year, at the end of the age of Henry David Thoreau.

By STEVE PALAY
October 19, 1989

Music by John Torp ~~ "Melancolia"

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