On the thirty-first of August, 1839, John and Henry Thoreau—brothers, aged twenty-five and twenty-two—set out from their home in Concord, Massachusetts, in a small skiff on the Sudbury River. They were bound for Hooksett, New Hampshire, about fifty-five water miles north. The boat was fifteen feet long, styled like a dory, and new. They had made it in a week. They carried two sets of oars and a sail. On the thirty-first of August, 2003, with a college roommate who has long lived in Concord, I set out in a sixteen-foot Old Town canoe at a put-in site on the Sudbury which is Thoreau scholars’ best guess as the place where the Thoreaus took off. It is now the back yard of a couple named Kate Stout and Pete Funkhouser, who live at the intersection of Thoreau and Main. Across Main is the house where Henry David Thoreau died. He and John grew up in a now long-gone dwelling thought to have been very nearby. John was his brother’s best friend, perhaps his only close one. After nicking himself with a razor, John died of tetanus at the age of twenty-seven. “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” Henry’s first book, rehearses their journey as a species of memorial, the fact notwithstanding that Thoreau never mentions his brother’s name.

On August 31, 1839, as the brothers prepare to launch, “a warm drizzling rain” rains all morning, so the Thoreaus delay their departure until the “mild afternoon.” On August 31, 2003, a cool and sunlit day, we were on the Sudbury soon after breakfast. In addition to houses with sloping lawns, Concord Academy was off to our right. Henry Thoreau founded an earlier Concord Academy, in 1838. John taught there. Across a swamp on the left was Nashawtuc Hill, but in 2003 we could see neither school nor hill from the tree-screened Sudbury. The water was slow and smooth. In half a mile, we came to Egg Rock, an outcrop of granite gneiss, as impressive in its size as in words inscribed in the rock: “On the hill at the meeting of these rivers and along the banks lived the owners of Musketaquid before the white men came.” The rivers Sudbury and Assabet join at Egg Rock to form—as Thoreau tells us in the first words of his book—“the Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River.” It had been renamed Concord River, but “it will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here,” he says, suggesting a viewpoint not widespread in his time. Far into his text, he recalls boatmen, in low water, mowing the grass of the Concord River as if it were a hayfield, the better to deliver their freight.

Under light, steady current, the bent river grass pointed us downstream, and through the oaken pilings of the Old North Bridge. On the right bank—the British side of the bridge as the redcoats faced the Colonial militia—was an obelisk dated 1836. Off the other end, in bronze, was the Minuteman sculpture by Daniel Chester French, whose sitting Lincoln sits in the Lincoln Memorial. Inscribed below the Minuteman was the least obscure stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” which Thoreau quotes and then follows with a couple of pages of his own verse. The “Concord Hymn” was first performed in 1837, when the obelisk was dedicated. Henry Thoreau was in the choir, singing. He was a senior at Harvard, days away from his graduation. John was in all likelihood present as well. The choir sang:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The Thoreaus carried guns and fired them to signal their departure from town. In his book, Thoreau refers to Emerson—his mentor, his model, his benefactor, his employer—only as “a Concord poet.” In Thoreau’s wanderings north of the Moosehead—which resulted in “The Allegash and East Branch,” the first recreational American canoe trip reported to the future—Edward Hoar, a Concord neighbor, was with him all the way, and in nearly ten thousand words was mentioned only as “my companion” or “my friend.” This was, of course, not churlishness on the author’s part but a diffident custom practiced in his time, as if it were ordered by “The Concord Manual of Style,” or, for that matter, in the way that the modern New York Times seems to insist that the first-person pronoun be swaddled as “a visitor.” In “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” John Thoreau is immortalized as “the other,” although it is not always clear who “the other” is. At dusk on the day they reach Hooksett, “one of us” goes up the bank to look for a farmhouse “where we might replenish our stores” while “the other remained cruising about the stream, and exploring the opposite shores” for a place to stay the night. It’s always “one” or “the other,” never “me” and “my brother.” But this time Henry is trapped in his own terminology, as, in the past tense and from the author’s perspective in the rowboat, “the other voyageur returned from his inland expedition,” and we know that it was John who replenished the stores, getting precious little credit for it.

Not being as mannerly as Henry David Thoreau or the Times, I don’t mind telling you that my companion on the Concord River was Dick Kazmaier, who, after that first day, bid me farewell, yielding his place to my son-in-law Mark Svenvold, who went up the Merrimack with me to Hooksett. The Thoreau brothers reached Hooksett on September 4th, as did we, but along the way we stayed in different places than they did. Their first campsite was on an island in Billerica seven miles from Concord. At the end of the second day, they pitched their tent in Tyngsborough, on the Merrimack, a short distance below the ferry there. A short distance below Tyngsborough Bridge, where the ferry was, we slept higher up the bank, in a resort hotel called Stonehenge. On September 2nd, they rowed upstream into New Hampshire and on to the mouth of Penichook Brook, a little north of Nashua, where we arrived a full day ahead of them, taking out at Nashua’s Greeley Park on September 1st. The difference was caused by an altered structure of the journey. The Thoreaus were travelling not only on two rivers but also on two commercial waterways. At the falls of Billerica, eleven miles below their home, they intersected the Middlesex Canal, which ran from salt water in Boston to the Merrimack at Middlesex (now part of the city of Lowell), “and as we did not care to loiter in this part of our voyage, while one ran along the tow-path drawing the boat by a cord, the other kept it off the shore with a pole, so that we accomplished the whole distance in little more than an hour.” The whole distance was six miles, and by 2003 it included, among other things, the multi-petalled cloverleaf where I-495 crosses U.S. 3 and also connects with an interstate spur. On the Billerica side of that cloverleaf, north and south of Brick Kiln Road, you can walk nearly two miles through deep woods along the old canal, which has aged there for a century and a half untouched and unrestored, thirty feet wide, water still in it, but low under green algal scum. White pines are there, tall enough to be the masts of ships. Honeysuckle, huckleberries, birches, oaks. In the low and distant hum of internal combustion, the quiet path is precisely the one the brothers used with their cord and their pole. In Lowell, nearing the Merrimack, the canal emerges from woods and, conjoining Black Brook, becomes the water hazard that divides the second and third fairways of Mount Pleasant Golf Club, John and Henry all but visible hauling their skiff from the second tee and the third green to the second green and the third tee among the putting golfers, the swinging golfers, the riding golfers in their rolling carts.