Times art critic Holland Cotter has a long piece about Henry David Thoreau, about whom a new exhibit has opened at the Morgan Library and Museum. The article begins:
When my father was in high school he worked summers as a lifeguard at Walden Pond. As a kid, I used to hang out there, bird-watching, reading from a slender volume of Henry David Thoreau's journal and soaking up Transcendentalist vibes from the big glacial bowl of clear water ringed with firs and footpaths.
There's a rule in journalism that "alliteration trumps all the other rules," but even so the reference to "firs" set off my b.s. detector. There just aren't a lot of fir trees at Walden Pond or for that matter in Massachusetts forests outside of Christmas tree farms. Don't even take my word for it; a 2013 study in the journal New Phytologist by Boston University biologists listed 43 species: gray birch, paper birch, American ash, red maple, white oak, American elm, etc. — no firs. That study focused on deciduous trees rather than conifers, but conifers in Massachusetts are more apt to be Eastern hemlocks or white pine than fir trees.