Second of two excerpts by David K. Leff from Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack, 2009, University of Iowa Press, and published with permission. This book relates the retracing of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack through the author's "deep travel." Here is the previous installment: http://www.concordma.com/blog/2010/03/deep-travel-in-the-wake-of-thoreau.html
Among Thoreau's heirs, Josh and I glided easily into the newly formed river. The sun was unrelentingly bright and reflected off the dark surface as if from a sooty mirror. Clumps of purple loosestrife frequently lit the shallows. Silver maples overhung the water and cast deep shadows, the pewtery undersides of their leaves fluttering in a slight breeze that felt like a warm breath.
Perfection is perhaps Concord's greatest shortcoming. It seems as if not a blade of grass is out of place, and all the shops and restaurants are fashionable with trendy names. The old houses are well kept and speak of wealth, power, and quaint New England. Not a curl of peeling paint was visible on the ancient clapboards as Josh and I pass through earlier this morning. The roadsides were free of tossed soda bottles and candy wrappers.
Thoreau would surely have railed against today's Concord, with its self-conscious well-to-do ease, probably with greater vehemence than he applied to the town in his own time. In a perverse way, he might have liked the twenty-first century more than his own relatively down-to-earth nineteenth, furnishing as it does greater opportunity for his famous conscience-stinging barbs about the pursuit of goods and status.
My easygoing Josh, with his soft brown eyes and mop of auburn hair, hadn't heard of Thoreau until this morning. He nevertheless had very Henry-like thoughts, complaining about the tourist-town slickness of Concord center. "Dad," he said in a conspiratorial tone as we waited for a map at the Chamber of Commerce, "doesn't this place seem a little fake and touristy? It's sort of like Main Street in Disney World." He rolled his eyes at the woman in front of us who wanted to know where her family could play miniature golf. "It's pretty and everything, but doesn't it seem kind of unreal? All anyone is doing is looking around and shopping."
Precocious thoughts for an eleven-year old, perhaps, but Josh has seen the onset of gentrification and creeping tourism in our own hometown of Collinsville, Connecticut. In simple terms, I tried to describe adaptive reuse of the fire station and the need for upscale niche retailers to fill small-town storefronts that would otherwise be emptied by the influx of shoppers to Wal-Mart and Target. Tourism was just another industry, I suggested. It was keeping Concord center vibrant.
Thoreau-like, Josh stood on principle and would have none of my fancy excuses and explanations. He could tell that my heart wasn't in it, that, at the very least, I didn't like it. I felt like a jerk.
It hadn't previously occurred to me, but Josh was right: there was a remote but discomfiting likeness in Concord center to Disney's Main Street. More troubling was trying to discern which was the copy and which the original. Clearly, Disney mimicked some of the warmest and most heartening aspects of a classic village center like Concord's. But hadn't many authentic main streets been corrupted with the flavor of Magic Kingdom marketing savvy? They often looked nice, but engendered an atmosphere of forced authenticity.
A village center vibrant with commercial activity is the heart of authenticity. That is what Concord and other such places are all about. Despite being gussied up, perhaps they were more real than commonly thought. The nature of commerce and the people whom the stores served had changed, but not the essential function of the place as a locus of business and a spot where people meet. Perhaps Josh and I were nostalgic political chatter at the tavern or for farmers sorting through bins at the hardware store in our own town. Can there be any greater danger to an authentic place than nostalgia? What good is a perfectly archicturally preserved town center lacking busy stores and restaurants? It may be beautiful taxidermy, but like a trophy fish affixed to a wall, it is drained of all vitality.
Nevertheless, tourism was not some planned entrepreneurial invention or government economic development program. It was Concord being Concord.
Photos: Top, Milldam, Concord. Bottom, no where in Concord!
"The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets." 
Photos: ©2010 Rich Stevenson, Local Color Images, all rights
reserved.
Photos: ©2010 Rich Stevenson, Local Color Images, all rights
reserved.
Photo: ©2010 Cherrie Corey, all rights reserved.
You may reach Gordon at 978-369-1875 or Middlesex Veterinary 978-952-8500
Interested in learning more about the proposed Formula Business Bylaw articles for Town Meeting? Drop in and join Matt Johnson for a conversation about Articles 46 & 47 at the Concord Cheese Shop, 29 Walden Street, between 3:30 and 4:30 pm. 
Concordian Robert Robillard, posted on his blog A Concord Carpenter Comments:
