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Outside's Guilty Pleasures Breaking All the Rules At Walden Pond, they forbid inflatable pool toys. Sounds ripe for disobedience, don't you think? By Eric Hansen
My friend Jake and I are engaged in an act of protest. Last night, boozing at Boston's 21st Amendment bar, we decided that these were heavy times, burdened with laws needlessly forbidding our God-given rights. What rights, we couldn't think of right
Indeed, we knew, Thoreau's old home had itself been snared in petty regulations. Sure, they were enacted after a weighty preservation battle against developers in the early 1990s, and sure, they mitigate the damage of weekend crowds that can hit 10,000 a day. But they do so at the expense of our civil liberties! You doubt me? Behold the long list of shalt-nots at Walden: No dogs, no alcohol, no fires. Neither "boats powered by internal combustion engines" nor "novelty flotation devices" shall profane these waters. And P.S.: No swimming all the way across the pond. There was only one thing to do. We would smash as many of these restrictions as possible, in a single act. We would captain not one but two novelty flotation devices all the way across the pond. And we'd do it in plain view, on a crowded day, drinking, smoking, and wearing Hawaiian shirts. Now we're huddled in the sumac on the 62-acre lake's northwestern shore, not far from Thoreau's cabin site, and the idea seems as sound as ever. Which is to say, we're still drunk. While Jake turns blue blowing up Emerson and Horsey—his green Dragon Super Jumbo Pool Rider and my yellow Seahorse Ride-On—I sort through our provisions: Sunbrella parasol; battery-powered hand fan; stash of wooden-tipped cigarillos; and, not least, our high-capacity beer-drinking device, improvised from ten feet of clear plastic tubing and a Boston Red Sox Styrofoam cooler. "How far you think that beach is?" I ask Jake, waddling into the water with swim fins. "Maybe half a mile," he replies, struggling to center his 180 pounds on the pool toy. "No problem," I say, hugging Horsey's neck for stability. And with that, we're off. And we're still off. Ten minutes later, Jake is barely 15 feet from shore, and a crowd of mothers and children has gathered on the bank to take pictures of him. He is half underwater and making deep strokes on his starboard side. Emerson spins in place. "What's going on?" I yell. "I'm using the J-stroke," he assures me. "Looking good, my man!" Forty-five minutes later, we're in the middle of the pond, and no ranger has motored out to jail us. This is OK. We'll surely have to explain ourselves when we get closer to the ranger station on the crowded main beach. But the very contraption that powers our voyage—the beer-drinking device—is now threatening to sink us. Each time I paddle, the blade catches on the ten-foot-long tube snaking from the Styrofoam cooler to my helmet. My head jerks to the side, causing Horsey to tip, affording me a clear view into the pond's 100-foot depths. Jake flippers back lazily. "Looks like we have to make the tough call," he says. "Disconnect the slurpie tube?" I ask fearfully. He nods. As the beer dribbles away, so does hope that our one good act will "leaven the whole lump," as Thoreau put it, quoting the Bible. Over the next half-hour, a few boaters come by to compliment Emerson and Horsey, but none cares to hear about our mission. The last straw comes when three old Russian ladies snub my invitation to join our flotilla, dog-paddling away as if no one had ever offered them a slug of beer through a ten-foot hose. Then, hope! Two hundred yards off Main Beach, a lifeguard paddles a surfboard out to reprimand us. "You know you aren't supposed to take inflatables on the pond," she says, looking inconvenienced. "And there's no drinking, either." Jake, a trained lawyer, argues in our defense—"We're not bad men..."—but she'll have none of it. She turns around midsentence to power back to her chair. It's clear that our enterprise has failed: When we hit the shore, young children start bouncing on Emerson and Horsey. But then—finally!—another young lifeguard ambles into the crowd. "You know you're not supposed to do that," she says, pointing at our soggy stuff. We nod. "But I'll let you go, 'cause your inflatables are so cool." She smiles and walks away. As if we were just some goofball drunks! We aren't going to jail. We won't even get to make a statement! No, our protest is sunk. We will need to return with props that won't overshadow our message, something that will truly encourage people to, as Thoreau once wrote, "cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." "Dude," I say to Jake. "We gotta come back with a hovercraft."
ERIC HANSEN wrote about extreme- yoga master Peter Seamans in September.
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