In the staycation era, the art of deliberate escape

Thoreau, I think, might have understood our collective predicament. Or so it seems on this dank April day in a spring that meteorologists are calling New England’s coldest ever. I am in Concord, Massachusetts, standing in front of a replica of the hut where Henry David Thoreau undertook his version of self-isolation at Walden Pond. I peer at it like I expect it to speak.

Have you seen it? It really is small. Ten feet by 15 feet – the size of a lawnmower shed you could buy at a hardware store. One room, one door, two windows, a fireplace. (In building a dwelling, Thoreau would later write in “Walden,” “Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary.”) Inside, behind the locked entry but visible through the window: a cot, a three-legged desk, two wooden chairs, and on this day the anachronism of a day-glo sandwich board urging people not to forget the visitor center 100 yards away.

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The hut, like the visitor center, is beside the parking lot at what is now Walden Pond State Reservation. The park is officially “closed to aid in the prevention of the spread of COVID-19.” Yet here and there a few people wander in the chill – having come for the trails (still accessible, though now routed in one-way loops), or maybe just to escape the house. Occasionally they glance at the tiny hut, which, even though a replica, somehow looks genuine – antique and careworn and moss-eaten. You can imagine Thoreau huddled inside it, sheltering in place with no plumbing but the pond, no heat but burning

“Travel recovery”Solitude as companionTo live deliberately