Walking and Living in Wild Places

Visiting Walden Pond got me to read Walking by Henry David Thoreau. Walking is clearly a great thing -- Philip has been talking about long walks and Michael Moore has started a movement of getting people to walk with him. I've spent a lot of time walking (and standing) over the past few days, attending the various graduation ceremonies. And my feet hurt, which suggests I should be doing more walking. Hence my interest in reading Walking.

Or reread. I seem to remember that I read it once before, long ago. I read it much differently as an older man than I once did. It resonated with me much more in my youth.

Thoreau only lived to age 44. He published Walking in the year before he died, bedridden with tuberculosis. I can easily imagine him, traveling over in his mind's eye the places he could no longer visit in the flesh. And we never got the benefit of hearing what Thoreau might have said had he lived to 50 or 60… Or 90. I also read Civil Disobedience differently, listening to Thoreau sneer at the little people around him. Thoreau would have made a good libertarian, nose in the air, supremely confident that he knows better than the proles and plebes all around him.

Thoreau took great pleasure in the wild, unspoiled places of the Earth -- of course, no-one knew, at the time, that the unspoiled places he was writing about were simply a palimpsest overwritten by the disease and genocide that depopulated North America in the centuries that followed its "discovery" by European settlers.

This isn't to say that I don't love wild places too. And appreciate knowing the different plant communities in an oak or maple forest. And sensing the deep time in the rocks and soils upon which the verdant covering is but tissue thin.

But I can also appreciate the wildness of not mowing my lawn for a week. There's all kinds of stuff in there! Blue violets and white violets. Ox Eye Daisies and Buttercups. Sensitive Fern and Creeping Charlie. And the pernicious Garlic Mustard trying to sneak in.

I visited the home of a couple of colleagues that live off the beaten path in Wendell. I drove for more than half an hour up into the wild places and, eventually, turned off the road onto a narrow sandy lane, across a tiny creek, and up to their house -- a glorious contemporary sited above a large curve of an impoundment bordered by boulders and pine trees and wetlands. It was breath-taking.

I spent my later childhood years in a home not unlike that -- a colonial, rather than a contemporary, and in a wet forest behind a farm field, rather than above a spectacular vista. But the long drive and the long lane back into the woods brought it inevitably to mind. And, as I left after the sunset, the swarms of black flies (although for us it was mosquitoes and deer flies).

I chose to live in a small house near where I work and where my boys went to school. Where I can take the bus and ride my bike. And I am content. Such wildness as I need, I can find in abundance close to home. But I should get out and walk more.