Following the Transcendental Trail: from Lake Padden to the Bellingham Bay

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Following the Transcendental Trail from Lake
Padden to the Bellingham Bay
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A lake is the landscapes most
beautiful and excessive feature. It is earths
eye looking into what the beholder measures the
depth of his own nature (Thoreau, 168).
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We become so distracted by our own agendas that,
even when face to face with the grandeur of
nature, we can only exclaim with Wordsworth,
Great God! It moves us not (Elder, 16).
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God himself culminates in the present moment,
and will never be more divine in the lapse of all
the ages (Thoreau, 87).
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• wilderness possesses great spiritual value. It
  offers a realm for human activity that does not
  seek to take possession and that leaves no
  traces it provides a baseline for strenuous
  experience of our own creaturehood (Elder, 18).

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We do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon
us (Thoreau, 83).
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• In our most trivial walks, we are constantly,
  though unconsciously, steering like pilots by
  certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if
  we are beyond our usual course we still carry in
  our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape
  and not till we are completely lostdo we
  appreciate the vastness and strangeness of
  nature (Thoreau, 154).

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• The idea of wilderness refers to the absence of
  humanity, yet wilderness has no meaning outside
  of the context of civilization that defines it
  (Byerly, 27).

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• Before I built a wall I'd ask to knowWhat I was
  walling in or walling out,And to whom I was like
  to give offense.(Frost lines 1 3).

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• Little did the dusky children think that the
  puny slip with its two eyes onlywould root
  itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in
  the rear that shaded it, and grown mans garden
  and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the
  lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown
  up and died (Thoreau, 236).

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• The old roads and bottles and piles of stone
  scattered beneath the pines and hemlocks of our
  ridge always reminded me that I am not Adam after
  all, just as the sounds of chainsaws and traffic
  I could hear from Route 116 almost the whole way
  up insisted that this hike would not take place
  in Eden. These are healthy reminders, encouraging
  me to understand wilderness as an experience
  including family and work, rather than as an
  idyll or escape (Elder, 112).

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• I understood, too, that a sense of place would
  remain a vague concept if founded only in my
  researches into the natural and human history of
  Bristol, and in my readings of Frost and
  Wordsworth. The galvanizing stories of place are
  finally those we suffer for ourselves (Elder,
  42).

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• Oh, just another kind of out-door game,One on a
  side. It comes to little moreThere where it is
  we do not need the wallHe is all pine and I am
  apple orchard(Frost, lines 33 39).

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• Human existence, personal relationships, and
  settlements are always encompassed by particular
  intervals of time and space (Elder, 137).

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• The life in us is like the water in the river.
  It may rise this year higher than man has ever
  known it, and flood the parched uplands even
  this may be the eventful year, which will drown
  out all the muskrats. It was not always dry land
  where we dwell (Thoreau, 296).

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Credits

• Tour Guide and Photos
• Nathan Sun-Kleinberger
• Text by some of my favorite Transcendental
  Authors
• Allison Byerly from The Uses of Landscape.
• John Elder from Reading the Mountains of Home.
• Robert Frost from Mending Wall.
• Henry David Thoreau from Walden.