Slumming Among the Optimists
"And Thoreau said what you do is fix your eyes along the bank, right at the place where the grass comes out of the water–because what muskrats really like are these tender shoots, just as they’re breaking air and getting through–and it’s exactly that line between the air and the water where the muskrats are. "This time I really looked," he said. "I looked around the water line, I stood still for five minutes. And sure enough, up popped a muskrat. It was just completely astonishing." |
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nce,
while his dog roamed and sniffed in the grass at Harvard Gulch in downtown
Denver, Robert D. Richardson Jr. ’52 stood by the small creek there,
watching for muskrats to break the water’s surface. "I was reading
Thoreau’s journal, when he was talking about how you see the muskrats
in the Concord River," said Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau:
A Life of the Mind (University of California-Berkeley Press, 1986)
and Emerson: Mind on Fire (Berkeley, 1995), a National Book Critics
Circle Award finalist. 