Charles Olson, Thoreau, and the Distance to Mt. Wachusett

 The author Robert Sullivan, in The Thoreau You Didn’t Know, several times notes that Mt Wachusett is on the edge of Concord or vice versa. It’s probably more than an hour by car between the two. I think I am even under-estimating. In his research, Sullivan maybe didn’t haul out to Wachusett, it is not a significant place in the Thoreau annals. He probably looked at a map and judged the distance as small. I am not blaming him. It just reminds me how local local is. Many years ago, my father flew somewhere for work. He had boarded but there was a delay as a late passenger arrived (I noted that this was long ago). The passenger turned out to be Tip O’Neil, Senate Majority Leader at the time. He sat next to my father. O’Neil, whose nickname derived from an old time baseball player, famously said all politics is local. Their conversation during the flight centered on their both having grown up in North Cambridge. Charles Olson’s historical musings placed seemingly excessive weight on bits of information that hardly seem worthy of general regard. That is exactly where my interest sharpened for The Maximus Poems. Travelers to Walden Pond are no doubt surprised to find that busy Rt 2 is so close to the pond that Roberto Clemente could probably have heaved a baseball into the water from the highway’s edge, assuming the trees were gone. There is value in what we know, but also, it seems, in what we don’t know. I once read a book by a local writer, set locally in the Boston area. I stumbled on what I detected as minor errors. One that I remember is referring to a fancy Boston restaurant at the time as Biba’s. The correct name was Biba. The possessive makes it sound like the restaurant was named for a person, when I believe the word is Latin for imbibe. Whether I am right about that or not doesn’t matter. The cognoscenti would never have said Biba’s. What this all comes down is that it is Sunday morning, I don’t have to work for a week, and writing is my pleasure. Just to complete the wobbling circle, I grew up in a house on Wachusett Drive.