From The World Without Us – “With no more people, there won’t be salt. There will, however, be rust and quite a bit of it, when no one is painting the bridges.” (42)

This is specifically speaking of New York City’s bridges that will continue thriving if they are maintained. Similar to most structures in NYC, without the human maintaining them, they will quickly deteriorate at the hand of nature.

From Walden – “At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.” (258)

Thoreau in this section believes that the loon he is ‘playing’ with can understand human instinct and the loon ‘himself’ is capable of “calling on the god of loons”. The loon “laughs” and “balks” at Thoreau, so he makes the loon feel like a human almost, yet make sure to distinguish that the loon is an animal and calls upon a different god to answer his prayers.