Yin and Yang

When it comes to most everything, my husband Scott and I are yin and yang, opposite, but complementary. He is the eternal idealist, given to frequent wild flights of fancy, I am the realist, pragmatically rooted to the ground. He is a scattered scientist, I remember names, dates and details. He pushes limits with his ideas, I enjoy convention. Somehow we have survived forty three years yoked together. I make sure his shoes are tied. And he often coaxes me, against my better judgment, to join him on his lofty forays.  

Such was the morning of the Fourth of July. Impulsively, Scott announced on the holiday eve that he intended to see dawn break on the 250th anniversary of our nation on the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. No matter that “the shot heard round the world” did not take place there until mid-morning. Scott wanted to be at the bridge by dawn. At first, I assumed he was trying to compensate for our hijacked plans to celebrate the semiquincentennial as a family in Boston. Brutal heat and cranky grandkids had forced us to abandon our plans to walk Boston’s Freedom Trail and tour Lexington and Concord. But it soon became apparent he simply wanted to seize the moment.

To be fair, Scott did offer me a pass. He told me I did not need to get up at 4 in the morning with him. But because I had spent the United States’ Bicentennial in a small hotel in Guatamala City, I felt obliged to celebrate this patriotic anniversary, compelled to experience a new dawn. So off we went in the predawn hours. We arrived just before dawn, and in the quiet of the morning took it all in. We walked the footbridge, surveyed the slow moving Concord River, and stopped at the memorial to the dead British soldiers and the monument to the minutemen. Just the two of us. And a chorus of birds.

Against this backdrop, Scott recorded his birthday tribute to America. I captured his tribute: Yin to his yang–he had not thought to bring a tripod or selfie stick. Soon after we were interrupted by someone.yammering away on a speaker phone. I hated to admit that perhaps Scott had been right. Greeting dawn at the Old North Bridge had given us a stillness to consider our American heritage in solitude.

As we turned to leave, I saw the Old Manse just to the right of us, and I was drawn back into the Transcendental world of Concord, an ephemeral world I had inhabited during graduate school.  I remembered the history of the Old Manse. The Rev. William Emerson had watched the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War from an upstairs room. His grandson Ralph Waldo had written “Nature” in the house. And Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody had spent the early years of their marriage there, eating from the Emersons’ orchard and the abundant garden Henry David Thoreau had planted for them. I looked back again at the slow, meandering Concord River and remembered how enchanted I had been of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of it in “The Old Manse.” I also fondly recalled how the joint journal he and Sophia had kept during their newlywed years that had inspired Scott and me to do the same in our early marriage.

It was not yet six o’clock when we returned to our car, so I wondered if we dared also stop at Walden Pond. I had read Walden, or, Life in the Woods, in high school, college, and graduate school. Thirty years ago, when I went to see the woods where Thoreau had “wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see . . . what it had to teach,” I had been sorely disappointed by the chaos of modern outdoor recreation. The Walden I saw that day was not the Walden Thoreau knew. We could not even find a parking spot in the overflow parking lot.  

My instinct was right. This time, I saw Walden Pond–though it is hardly a pond in my eyes as it covers 61 acres and is roughly half a mile long. It is true as I looked down on the pond through the trees, I could see a few open water swimmers wading in and a canoe skimming its surface. But I caught a glimpse of what Walden might have been. And a glimpse was enough to satisfy.

As we began the short drive back to our Airbnb, I was glad I had fallen sway to Scott’s persuasion. In the early morning hours, I had not only celebrated the dawn of our nation, but also reclaimed memories of my intellectual past. And as I thought of those days when I was young and when I was idealistic and when my mind resided in Concord, Massachusetts, I was left to wonder. When did I become so cynical? Or is it possible that my model of yin and yang is not completely accurate. Maybe Scott and I are more alike than I think.