Each Day a New Creation

A glorious autumn day and it falls on a holiday. Walden Pond’s parking lots fill up, the ice cream truck takes up three prime spaces, but no one cares. The temperature reaches the high sixties. No wind and a brilliant sun lure swimmers—some wearing bathing suits— some swimming across the pond or around the pond. According to Thoreau’s reckoning the pond is 17.5 rods long— or a little over half a mile. If you swim the circumference it’s 103 rods or 1.7miles.

I count four people pulling on wet suits. Even in the dead of winter and before the water freezes the pond’s aficionados swim back and forth—daily.

This is not a shallow pond—102 feet deep. We call it a pond, but if you want to be precise, call Walden a “glacial kettle hole”.

Two weeks ago a swimmer started out, but never surfaced. For several days everything stopped—no visitors walking around the pond, no swimmers—no visits to Thoreau’s cabin.

Divers scoured the pond; rescuers searched the woods.

Two days after the start of the month a body was discovered, name not initially released—but in time the body was identified as the missing swimmer. He was familiar with the pond, swam there often and was simply taking an evening swim.

You can’t plan for all possibilities; life interrupts our plans—sometimes that intervention, that surprise delights us. Other times we want to step back in time and restore equilibrium.

Yet who wants to know the future?