1Henry David Thoreau started working as a professional surveyor in 1849, a few years after his sojourn at Walden Pond (Chura 2010, 73). The job allowed him to make a living while spending most of his time outside, walking around his native village of Concord, Massachusetts. 165 manuscript plans drawn by Thoreau throughout the 1850s and until his death in 1862 are kept today at the Concord Free Public Library and attest to his skill and meticulousness. As a surveyor whose main task was to inscribe property lines, Thoreau knew a lot about how borders and lines of separation are marked upon the land and mapped. In 1851, for example, he was tasked by the elected “selectmen” of Concord with the “perambulation” of the town—an old official duty dating back to the late-17th century that required town officials to literally walk along the town limits every five years to ascertain the location and the presence of stone markers. This familiarity with borders and lines of separation parallels what can be found in many of Thoreau’s texts, which can be described as explorations of border spaces. Walden, for example, is not so much about his “life in the woods” (the original subtitle of the book, which Thoreau decided to remove when he revised his text at the end of his life) as it is about the border space between the village and the woods. In Cape Cod, Thoreau examines the liminal space of the beach as an “anomalous” place between land and sea (Thoreau 1988, 55), while in The Maine Woods he visits a largely unexplored area that he describes as a Frontier territory situated along the border with Canada. In other words, while Thoreau the surveyor spent his time tracing borders, his texts themselves are also concerned with border spaces in their own right.

2In this article, I examine the interaction between Thoreau’s direct experience of borders and his work as a writer. By so doing, I also question our own critical assumptions when we consider the question of borders in literary texts. For various reasons, our most common reading is to envision this issue as a tension, or a necessary opposition, in which the task of writing would be to challenge and subvert the fixity and stability of artificial human borders.

3This is at least true of Thoreau’s texts, for reasons that are linked both to the historical context of his writings and to his own polemical voice. Thoreau wrote the bulk of his texts in the 1840s and 1850s, a period that can be described as a moment of crystallization and stabilization of borders—especially, the outer borders of the country. Following the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the subsequent acquisition of the other Western territories, it is during those two crucial decades that the country reached its final “shape” on the maps that were widely circulated to the general public (Schulten 2012). As a professional surveyor and someone deeply interested in both ancient and contemporary cartography, Thoreau was very familiar with these maps and the discourse they validated. But Thoreau was also a vocal critic of several defining features of his own time. In Walden, as well as in his more overtly political texts such “Resistance to Civil Government” or “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Thoreau violently attacks the logic of Westward expansion and the perpetuation of slavery, which he attributes to the passivity of Northern States. For that reason, the excursions into border spaces that Thoreau evokes in several of his texts can be easily read as efforts to challenge the permanence and the relevance of human borders, seen as the most visible expression of the new order that was being instituted around him.

4My first purpose here is to show that this challenge takes the form, in Thoreau’s case, of a fluidification, through language, of the deceptive stability of borders. But I’d like to try and move beyond this initial reading, to look at borders as more “complexly productive.” I am here borrowing a phrase from Lawrence Buell who, in The Environmental Imagination, tries to develop a reading of maps as “more complexly productive than when seen merely as agents of cartographical imperialism” (Buell 1995, 270). Noting that maps are used by several of the writers he examines in his book, Buell argues that we must find a way to look at them as positively productive. What Buell suggests about maps is also relevant about borders and might help us account for the interactions between borders and writing in a more fruitful way. In other words, if Thoreau was so interested in borders, it’s probably not only to criticize them. There must be something else.

5As Thoreau was a surveyor himself, and as it is mainly on the surface of maps that borders are drawn, I look at Thoreau’s writings through the lens of three distinct cartographic figures that can be found in his papers and manuscripts, and that illustrate his interest in border spaces. The first one is a detail on a map of the state of Maine that Thoreau used during an excursion in 1857 (Fig. 1). The second is a pair of hand-drawn maps of a swamp made by Thoreau in 1854 and 1860 (Fig. 2 and 3). The final image is an engraving of the outline of a scarlet oak leaf chosen by Thoreau a few weeks before his death in the spring of 1862 (Fig. 4). While not a map in itself, the image turns into a map-like figure when Thoreau explores its outer border in his text.

Fig. 1. Joseph Colton. Map of the State of Maine. 1855.

6The first figure is a detail of a map of the state of Maine published by Joseph Colton in 1855 (Colton 1855). This is one of the maps used by Thoreau during the three excursions in the forests of Maine narrated in his book The Maine Woods (1864).1 As Thoreau explains in his text, the state of Maine was, in the 1840s and 1850s, a sort of “lesser Oregon and California,” by which Thoreau means a Frontier territory that remained largely unexplored and mysterious because of its dense forests (Thoreau 1972, 82). The northern border of the state, separating it from the colony of New Brunswick in Canada, had been the object of a long territorial dispute between the United Kingdom and the United States. The dispute, now known as the “Aroostook War,” after the river of the same name, dated back to the Treaty of Paris of 1783 that had ended the American War of Independence. The location of the boundary line between the two countries had not been defined clearly, which allowed the United Kingdom to claim sovereignty over the entire basin of the Saint John River. This would have meant seizing control of the entire production of lumber in the area, but also of the circulation of men and goods along the waterways. The dispute lasted for several decades and threatened to turn violent (local militia units started to gather in the early 1840s) until it was resolved by the Webster-Ashburton treaty of 1842 that established the border just north of the basin of the Saint John. Thoreau was aware of the dispute when he visited the area, especially as the map by Colton that he was carrying in his pocket indicated the exact location not only of the final border, but also of the boundary line claimed by the United Kingdom before the treaty of 1842. This hypothetical border is represented by the meandering dotted line that runs from east to west on figure 1.2

7In The Maine Woods, Thoreau recounts how he once found himself straddling this potential border, in a space that had been constrained and debated from a distance by invisible geopolitical forces. Characteristically, though, the text reaches a sort of anti-climax when Thoreau eventually crosses the exact location of that invisible dividing line between the basin of the Saint John and that of the Penobscot river. The line played a key role in the diplomatic negotiations held in government offices on both sides of the Atlantic, but when Thoreau reaches it, there is nothing “dividing” about it. It turns out to be a vast swampy area in which the waters of the two rivers meet indistinctly:

as my feet had hardly been out of water the whole distance, and it was all level and stagnant, I began to despair of finding it. I remembered hearing a good deal about the “highlands” dividing the waters of the Penobscot from those of the St. John (…) at the time of the northeast boundary dispute, and I observed by my map, that the line claimed by Great Britain as the boundary prior to 1842 passed between Umbazookskus Lake and Mud Pond, so that we had either crossed or were then on it. (…) Truly an interesting spot to stand on,—if that were it,—though you could not sit down there. I thought that if the commissioners themselves, and the King of Holland with them, had spent a few days here, with their packs upon their backs, looking for that “highland,” they would have had an interesting time, and perhaps it would have modified their views of the question somewhat. (Thoreau 1972, 216)

8On Colton’s map, the place that Thoreau is describing here can be found just west of “Mud L[ake],” near the center of figure 1. Summoning the unexpected figure of the King of Holland (William I of the Netherlands, who had been chosen as a third-party arbitrator of the dispute), the text dramatizes in a sarcastic way the tension between the neat and clean boundary on the map and the swampy, muddy reality of the terrain. This tendency to fluidify, or “muddify,” in the text what is usually hard and solid is a trait of Thoreau’s writing that can be found in other texts. In a famous passage of Walden, for example, Thoreau rejoices at the spectacle of the strange shapes produced on the ground by the melting snow as it mixes with sand:

Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, (λείβω, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; λοβός, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. (Thoreau 1971, 306)

9The spectacle of the thaw allows Thoreau to describe an experience in which the borders that structure language melt and disappear. The language of the writer does what it describes: it becomes fluid and flexible. In The Maine Woods, similarly, Thoreau’s humorous description of his wading in the swamp derides the apparently meaningless efforts of the authorities to superimpose an artificial border on a world that is, in reality, as muddy as it is messy. Read in this light, the passage can be related to the conclusion of Walden, when Thoreau declares: “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds” (Thoreau 1971, 324). The act of writing appears as an act of resistance against the very idea of a border.

10It wouldn’t be accurate, though, to say that Thoreau’s texts are only about subverting and challenging borders. In most of his texts, Thoreau simply turns his back on human borders and pays attention to the configuration of the natural environment. This is particularly evident in Thoreau’s later writings such as The Dispersion of Seeds and Wild Fruits, which he nearly completed before his death in May, 1862 but which were only published at the end of 20th c. (in 1993 and 2000, respectively). In these lesser-known texts, Thoreau offers the results of a careful study of the natural environment that he conducted during more than ten years around Concord. The two texts take the form of long catalogs and, as such, they give the impression that Thoreau is trying to offer exhaustive lists of all the seeds and all the fruits around Concord. As he explains, his study allowed him to gradually learn how to find his way in what he calls the “maze” of unknown species, slowly becoming able to detect the irregular and moving boundaries that organize the natural world (Thoreau 1906, vol. IX, 157–158: Dec. 4, 1856). While studying the different shapes of seeds, he realized that these shapes had a direct impact on the distribution of forest trees:

As a consequence of the different manner in which trees which have winged seeds [and those which have not] are planted—the former being blown sometimes all together in one direction, the latter being dispersed irregularly by animals—I observed that the former (pines, white birches, red maples, alders, and so on) often grow in more or less regular rounded or oval or conical patches, as the seeds fell, while oaks, chestnuts, hickories, and so on merely form woods of greater or less extent, whether pure or mixed, and of irregular boundaries. (Thoreau 1993, 163)

11In his text, Thoreau performs the cartographic task of bringing to the fore the boundaries that structure the natural world, thereby revealing the ecological connections between species within a given habitat. Here, the task of writing is not to erase borders, but rather to make them visible, in an effort to clarify and illuminate the interconnectedness of the environment.

Fig. 2 and 3. Hand-drawn maps of Gowing’s Swamp (Concord, Mass.)

12A look at Thoreau’s archives shows that this concern was central to him. Figures 2 and 3 are hand-drawn maps of a place called Gowing’s Swamp, located just east of Concord, Massachusetts. Swamps were neglected by the inhabitants of the village, not only because of the smell and the mosquitoes, but also because of their perceived uselessness and unprofitability. For Thoreau, though, the swamps were “sacred” places, precisely because these out-of-the-way microcosms were overlooked by his fellow-citizens (Scheese 1992, 142–146; Howarth 2001, 71). In “Walking,” he writes: “I enter a swamp as a sacred place,—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature” (Thoreau 2007, 205). Thoreau’s Journal shows that he deliberately spent a considerable amount of time exploring, observing, but also mapping those very swamps. Figure 2 is a map made by Thoreau on Feb. 3, 1860 and showing the general configuration of Gowing’s Swamp (Thoreau 1906, vol. XIII, 125; also reproduced in Thoreau 2002, 291), while figure 3 is a survey of the spatial distribution of plant species, drawn on Aug. 23, 1854 (Thoreau 1906, vol. VI, 467). The sketches suggest not only an impressive familiarity with a place that remained largely invisible to Thoreau’s contemporaries, but they also imply a considerable amount of work to reveal the living boundaries that structure the ecological balance of the swamp.

13On a larger scale, The Dispersion of Seeds and Wild Fruits perform very similar tasks: in these volumes, Thoreau not only lists the different types of seeds or fruits he can find around his village, he also inscribes the organic and changing borders that organize the natural world. These lines are flexible and porous: far from assigning a neat and exclusive territory to each species (oaks, pine trees, ferns, etc.), Thoreau rather uncovers how these habitats are coterminous and mutually beneficial. In “An Address on the Succession of Forest Trees,” for example, he solves the so-called “mystery” of the succession of trees (why pines often spring up when an oak wood is cut down) by showing that young pines have been growing under the old oaks, bidding their time (Thoreau 2007, 172).

14Thoreau’s texts work as descriptions of what we would now call ecosystems—milieus in which species are interconnected and which are understood as constantly evolving processes rather than as stable and passive settings. As such, his writings amount to a remapping of what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible, that is to say the way the occupation of both time and space defines the place of each member of the community, and his or her “share” in the common (Rancière 2004, 12–3). By spending time in the swamps, but also by making us spend time reading about the swamps, Thoreau enacts a new distribution of the sensible. He occupies space and time in a new manner and effectually puts them “on the map.” In this new distribution, the swamps shift from the status of useless, neglected places to the status of crucial, meaningful spots.

15This shift is achieved, characteristically, by turning the border of the swamp “inside out.” On a conventional map of the village, the swamps are not named nor even marked out (Walling 1852). As they appear as blank spaces, their locations can be inferred only negatively, in the neglected interstices of human infrastructure. In “Walking,” though, Thoreau writes: “Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp then, […] so that there be no access on that side to citizens” (Thoreau 2007, 205). While the swamp was only represented by an empty area on the map, its edge now becomes a bulwark against the encroachments of society. Not only is Thoreau provocatively turning his back on his fellow-citizens, he also signals that the swamp itself is the actual symbolical center of the map.

Fig. 4. Outline of a scarlet oak leaf

16Elsewhere in his texts, Thoreau explores the full potential of this idea that a border can be reversed or turned inside out. Figure 4 is an engraving of the outline of a scarlet oak leaf selected by Thoreau himself for the publication of his essay “Autumnal Tints,” published in 1862 shortly after his death and first read as a lecture in 1859 and 1860. As the title suggests, the text begins as a commentary on the beautiful and multiple colors of the trees during the fall. As the text unfolds, though, it gradually turns into a reflection on the problem of perception and what we are able to see in the world. To explore this question, Thoreau used to show an oak leaf to his audience during his lecture, inviting them to observe its complex structure. The same rhetorical device is replicated in the essay. This explains why a simple black-and-white outline appears in a text that is seemingly devoted to color.

17The presence of this image is remarkable because there are only two illustrations in the entire corpus of the texts that Thoreau intended to publish (that is to say, not including his Journal and later manuscripts on seeds and wild fruits). The first one is the famous map of Walden Pond included in Walden (published in 1854), and the other is the oak leaf. While the two images are not directly related to each other, strange similarities appear when Thoreau asks his audience to marvel with him at the beautifully intricate outline of his leaf. He writes: “The eye rests with equal delight on what is not leaf and on what is leaf” (Thoreau 2007, 251–2). The object itself immediately disappears in his description and Thoreau’s focus is rather on the border or the edge of the object, which becomes a meaningful interface. From that perspective, the outline of the leaf becomes very similar to a topographical feature on a map.

18What this map represents, though, remains ambiguous. Thoreau continues: “Regarded as water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each side, while its watery bays extend far inland…” Compared to a pond, the leaf becomes here a body of water, very similar to the map of Walden Pond included in Walden. The two images happen to have a similar outline. This is significant because the map of Walden Pond plays a complex role in Walden. While it was designed to be included on a very specific page of the book, Thoreau never directly refers to it in his text. The map is present, but it is never explicitly acknowledged, and therefore appears to the reader as a sort of silent enigma whose exact meaning or function is never completely clarified. A similar sense of mystery or fascination pervades the passage about the oak leaf, especially when Thoreau suddenly turns it inside out and reverses the image:

But it oftener suggests land, and […] so this leaf reminds me of some fair wild island in the ocean, whose extensive coast, alternate rounded bays with smooth strands, and sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habitation of man, and destined to become a center of civilization at last.

19He concludes:

At sight of this leaf we are all mariners,—if not vikings, buccaneers, and filibusters. […] if we succeed in doubling those sharp capes, we shall find deep, smooth, and secure havens in the ample bays. […] This is some still unsettled New-found Island or Celebes. Shall we go and be rajahs there? (Thoreau 2007, 251–2)

20The leaf reverses itself along its borders, becoming alternately a pond or an island—a body of water or a piece of land, depending on how it is perceived. While the essay was supposed to deal with colors, it becomes an exercise in perception in which Thoreau invites the reader to reevaluate the way an object stands out and is thrown into relief against the background of the real. In this description, the leaf eventually disappears within its own borders and gives way to an exotic reverie on what “we all” (according to Thoreau) dream could happen on that mysterious island. “Shall we go and be rajahs there?” Thoreau’s enigmatic question implies that an entirely new existence can be conjured up by training oneself to look at borders not as the static outer limits of objects, but as flexible and fruitful interfaces.

21The passage, though, is maybe not so much about the leaf, nor about our perception of objects, as it is about the power of the text itself to build entirely new representations by envisioning the border as a locus that is rich with potential meaning. The same thing is true about the passage in The Maine Woods where Thoreau evokes the swampy boundary line: Thoreau might be gently mocking the commissioners and the diplomats, but, in the end, he is not saying much about the border itself. Rather, he takes opportunity of the border being a space in its own right (and not just a line of separation without any width nor depth) to rejoice in the unexpected dichotomy between the cartographic representation and the real world.

22François Specq notes that Thoreau chooses to “inhabit the border” (Specq 2004). This is also true in language, as evidenced by his habit of examining foreign words within his texts. In The Maine Woods, for example, Thoreau delights in discussing the meaning of Algonquin toponyms with his Native-American guides, noting: “So much geography is there in their names” (Thoreau 1972, 270). His interest is not only with the translation of English toponyms, but also with the meaning held by these place names:

I asked the Indian name of Moosehead Lake. Joe answered, Sebamook; Tahmunt pronounced it Sebemook. When I asked what it meant, they answered, Moosehead Lake. At length, getting my meaning, they alternatively repeated the word over to themselves, as a philologist might,–Sebamook,–Sebamook,–now and then comparing notes in Indian. (Thoreau 1972, 140)

23Thoreau moves here beyond the narrow limits of a term-to-term correspondence between the two languages, and gestures at the original meaning of Sebamook. By doing so, he expands the borders of what it means to “mean.”

24Something similar happens in Cape Cod when Thoreau resorts to quotations in Ancient Greek to allow his reader to hear the sound of the waves: “I put in a little Greek now and then, partly because it sounds so much like the ocean” (Thoreau 1988, 51). The phrase “Βῆ δ᾽ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης” (Bê d’akeôn para thina polufloisboio thalassês, “He went forth in silence along the shore of the loud-resounding sea”) is included in the text without translation. The line is well-known (it comes from Homer’s Iliad, book I, line 34) and Thoreau could probably expect his readers to be familiar with it. The inclusion nonetheless warps the referential frame within which a text conventionally produces meaning: even though the Greek sentence does refer to the sea, it is used here for purely alliterative and acoustic reasons. By using words whose meaning is not immediately accessible to the reader, Thoreau forsakes their referential value and treats them as “border words” that open up the meaning and the richness of his texts.

25It wouldn’t be accurate, then, to state that Thoreau writes entirely “without borders,” in a sort of purely fluid, indeterminate space. His point is not to erase borders, but rather to treat them as useful tools of clarification, or as points of departure—in much the same way that he used maps as a limited and yet irreplaceable tool to make sense of the spaces he explored. In a post-imperialist reading, it can be argued that Thoreau challenges the legitimacy of human borders, thereby resisting the hegemonic logic of Manifest Destiny that defined his own time. From the perspective of ecocriticism, the orientation of Thoreau’s texts towards ecological connections can be read as an intuition of the complexity and interrelatedness of ecosystems as we now understand them. But what is at stake here is maybe first and foremost the act of writing itself. In a famous passage of his Journal (Oct. 18, 1856) Thoreau states: “my work is writing” (Thoreau 1906, vol. IX, 121). The text is not a tool to challenge literal borders, but the end itself. Boundary lines are the springboard that allows Thoreau’s writing to take shape by exploring the borders built into language and perception and turning them into meaningful interstices.