UNLV professor turns into Thoreau

Carey Goldberg

Friday, Aug. 13, 1999 | 9:13 a.m.

EASTHAM, Mass. -- It is only a summer fantasy, but such an uplifting one. Transcendent; a tinge pagan; in a fancy word, Thoreauvian.

You are strolling along the salt-marsh path with Henry David Thoreau, taking note of his well-worn walking stick and the leisurely lilt in his step. The reeds issue a soprano hissing, the water ripples busily and he turns to you and says:

"Let us spend one day -- one day! -- as deliberately as nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rail!"

He pulls his flute from the back pocket of his corduroys and breathes some slow trills, and you float into contemplative silence.

Ahh. Anyone who finds such a momentary illusion sweeter than any beach-season best seller owes thanks to a retired high school English teacher named David Barto, who has "brought Henry," as he puts it, for a summer on Cape Cod, lasting through Aug. 21.

Eight times a week, for an hour or more, Barto, as Thoreau, walks with visitors or presents lectures, never stepping out of muslin-shirted character, always answering their questions from the immense compendium of Thoreauviana he holds in his head.

For such labor at the Salt Pond Visitors' Center of the Cape Cod National Seashore and hereabouts, he receives $9 a day in meal money from the National Park Service, and a room.

An adjunct professor of composition at UNLV during the school year he paid his own plane fare to get here, and does not know whether he will be able to afford to return next summer. He can no longer afford a car, he said, but the park service lends him a bike while he's here. And once a kind stranger who saw him "footing it" it on the road called, "Hey, Hank, would you like a lift?"

Plenty of historical sites have actors playing long-dead characters brought back to life -- the Thomas Jefferson at Williamsburg, the George Washington at Washington Crossing, Pa. On stage, Hal Holbrooke does a famous Twain, of course. And a local actor in Wellfleet, Mass. -- the area is heavy Thoreau country because of his book, "Cape Cod" -- has portrayed Thoreau in a set piece.

But the special nature of Barto's unusual art is that it is never a set piece. It is, to use the most anachronistic of terms, interactive, never the same twice, dependent on what he happens to see as he leads a group of tourists about, or what they ask. And it is especially fragile in that, lacking a permanent gig as he does, it depends almost entirely on his own enthusiasm.

Which is how it all began. One day, in 1974, Barto's 10th-grade English class at Pennsbury High School in Lower Bucks County, Pa., seemed so bored as it read Thoreau that he thought to himself: the only thing that would fire them up would be if Thoreau himself came back from the dead to talk to them.

Light bulb flash. At first when he appeared in costume and character the students laughed at him, but by the end they were asking him questions. And a few years later when "Henry" talked about the importance of following one's dream and living by one's convictions a whole class ended up in tears, Barto said. That day two student library aides who had heard the speech asked the librarian if they could talk about life instead of filing.

There were people who said "You can't keep this to yourself," Barto said. He ended up "bringing Henry" to Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass., and putting on programs there every summer from 1984 through 1996 until the money and his energy ran out.

"It's in my blood to be a teacher," he said, "and being Thoreau is like the highest form of teaching you can do. It's immediate. There he is, standing there, and you can ask him anything you want."

But even the best teachers -- perhaps especially the best teachers -- burn out. After 25 years of long high school teaching days and a dozen years of squiring Henry around every summer Barto retired in 1996. Now, at 49, he is carrying out his plan to live five different places in retirement: in a desert -- Las Vegas -- at the seaside, on a farm, in the woods and in a city.

After two years of rest, however, "Henry" could not stay retired. Indeed, what a waste that would be: Barto knows so much verbatim Thoreau he could recite it for at least two hours straight, he said, and has it memorized by category, so that any mention of sunrise or sea or dogs or civil disobedience can set him off on that subject.

Mainly, he said, he is a teacher, and while the material is well-worn to him, he still feels gratified when a listener responds.

"Mostly, I leave them with a sense of who this man was."

As for the listeners, some extol their time with Henry and pepper him with questions; one commented on a recent morning, "I felt a couple of times as if we were all born way too late." And Mike Whatley, the supervisory park ranger here, said attendance at the Thoreau talks has been excellent. Two dozen listeners came one recent sunny morning and another two dozen on an evening walk.

Of Barto, Whatley said, "He's an unusual character. He refuses to step out of character when he's in it." But the Henry character certainly works well, he said, and Thoreau was such a fine naturalist that his Cape Cod book, about his travels, is current in many ways.

"We'd love to have him back next summer," Whatley said.

In the meantime, as summer wanes, Barto sets out many a morning and evening leading tourists whose vacation torpor is broken by bright-eyed memories of what it meant to read "Walden" the first time. Or to first hear "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

Ask Barto, while he is in character, why he does this and he responds: "I am drawn. The day when I am no longer drawn, I will sleep peaceably with my family and friends in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery."