by David Gessner
Torrey House Press, 2021
Sheltering with Thoreau in the Age of Crisis
From the first pages of his latest book, David Gessner shows that he gets Henry David Thoreau: He argues that Walden, Thoreau’s renowned book about living alone for two years at Walden Pond, is not about escaping from life but about confronting it. That parallels how Gessner has approached the Covid-19 pandemic and other challenges of our times.
Although Gessner was confined close to his North Carolina home for most of a year during the pandemic, his stories in Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the Age of Crisis take us around the United States, from Cape Cod and Concord, Massachusetts, to Maine, Alaska, California, Colorado, Montana, and beyond.
Funny, conversational, and engaging, Gessner explores environmental and social crises of recent decades, including climate change, racism, and how environmental and social challenges sometimes overlap. He examines both individual and universal issues. Family, friends, artists, environmentalists, historical figures, and fellow writers – both contemporary and from the past – play into his wide-ranging explorations. The natural world and his love of birds are themes that run throughout the book.
“Joy and wildness, the things that first drew so many of us to nature, are underrated in our fight to preserve it,” he says, reminding us how experiences in the natural world change and enrich our lives. He writes about the struggle both to get away from the stresses of daily life and to change how we, as a society, live: “…even when we go to the woods, we too often take what Thoreau called our ‘village minds’ with us. It requires discipline and work and the grooving of new habits to break from the busyness. To do less but do it well…. The challenge ahead is not easy. It requires patience and the hard changing of habits. Perhaps this time of crisis is giving some of us a head start.”
While very aware of our environmental challenges, Gessner finds hope in rewilding efforts, such as the Y2Y wilderness corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon, which allows migrating large carnivores easier passage across highways via overpasses and underpasses. “So perhaps what I’m asking of myself, and of you, is that we hold two opposite things in our minds at once. One is a grim picture of a weed-filled, overheated planet that we can’t shy away from looking at if we’re to have any chance of preventing it. The other is a still wild world, and therefore a joyful, varied, verdant world, where boars roam the streets and green herons roost and sea turtles haul out on the beaches and flamingos pink the ponds and grizzlies return to their historic ranges. That wild world…is poised to resurrect itself, ready to come bursting back—if only we give it the chance and room and air to do so.”
Spirited and provocative, Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight is based on Gessner’s experiences and worldviews, but he takes Thoreau along and draws heavily on Thoreau’s natural descriptions, broad interests, and unique perceptions and perspectives.
I particularly appreciate how Gessner and Thoreau are alike in some ways, yet extremely different in others. Near the end of the book, Gessner writes, “…I am so constitutionally different that I find a lot of how Thoreau behaved hard to believe.” At that point, his statement was superfluous and made me chuckle: Gessner had already clearly established that they are not two peas in a pod. He had, for example, repeatedly shown that in one notable way he was more like Ernest Hemingway than Henry David Thoreau, with a defining difference being that Thoreau’s favorite drink was water, while that was not the case for Hemingway nor Gessner. Thoreau is extraordinary in that he attracts people who are very different from him and often from each other.
Gessner credits Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls for the observation about Thoreau not escaping from life but confronting it. He cites and quotes dozens of other writers, and I added two books to my must-read list. He constantly and effectively quotes Thoreau, and he is likely to get some readers who don’t know him to add Walden to their own must-read lists.