Chapter 6 – The Walden System
Leo Marx’s famous book, The Machine in the Garden is the industrial intrusion of the railroad into Thoreau’s pastoral remove, his "garden" of Nature. This chapter argues not for this dialectic, but for the conceptual similarity between the locomotive and the kettle lake, both of which are steady-state systems driven by solar power. Lake Walden is an organic machine, a discrete open system with identifiable boundaries, material properties, sources of energy, and governing processes that interact to create a shoreline in perpetual steady-state.
The Fitchburg Railroad is less an intrusion into Thoreau’s pastoral remove than a pedestrian highway giving him easy access to the pond. We must not overlook the fact that the climax of Walden was inspired by one of the railroad excavation cuts.
Between the narrative of Walden Pond’s creation by Nature (Chapters 1-5), and the narrative of Walden‘s creation by Thoreau (Chapters 7-11) is a scientific interlude. Its purpose is to define the Walden System as Thoreau knew it, and then describe that system using his own words to the extent possible.
High water at Walden in the late summer of 2012, after heavy rains the previous winter. The height of the water is referred to as its stage, and it varies constantly within a range of about 12 feet. With brilliant insight, Thoreau recognized pond stage as a a barometer of steady state over many time scales.