by By Tom Slayton
Images from the Past, 2007
Henry David Thoreau looms over us from the depths of history, a towering person, important we’re told, a giant of his age, yet vaguely threatening, unpleasantly Puritanical, and more than a little bit self righteous. He was a preservationist with a knack for torching the woods, a minimalist widely thought of as a slacker, a master of the aphorism whose prose, for long stretches, is incomprehensible. Yet out there he looms, and if you’re serious about the natural world, and you’re serious about New England, sooner or later you’ll have to cover some ground with Thoreau.
Which is where it’s helpful to have a guide. Tom Slayton, author, commentator, and long-time editor (now emeritus) of Vermont Life magazine, is a good man for the job. In his book Searching for Thoreau: On the Trails and Shores of Wild New England, Slayton is able to present Thoreau’s work in the context of the times, both Thoreau’s and ours. Slayton takes the ingenious tack of re-creating several of Thoreau’s now-legendary pilgrimages across New England, including canoeing on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, climbing Katahdin, Mount Washington, and Mount Monadnock, walking Cape Cod, and spending time at Walden Pond.
Slayton’s project is two-fold: first, to present Thoreau in his own words, providing some perspective on what those words mean. Here’s Thoreau, from one of the more memorable passages in Walden: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours… If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
Here’s Slayton: “Somehow during the two years he lived alongside the pond, Thoreau progressed beyond mere ranting and posturing; he grew there and matured as a writer and a human being. The pages of Walden document that growth, which is one of the reasons it is a great book, and which is why it must be read as a whole to be fully appreciated.”
The second part of Tom Slayton’s goal in Searching for Thoreau is to revisit the actual ground that Thoreau trod, both in pilgrimage and to see what’s happening there today. In one of the more ironic moments of that effort, Slayton spends two days walking the long outer beach of Cape Cod, a beach that, as part of the Cape Cod National Seashore, is protected and today appears almost identical to the way it looked in Thoreau’s day. That’s good news, but because the dunes are now closed to foot traffic to prevent erosion, Slayton is consigned to slog the soft sand at water’s edge, whereas Thoreau, walking atop the dunes, enjoyed rhapsodic views for miles on end.
Slayton also checks in with Thoreau atop Mount Washington. “Thoreau grumbled about the two mountaintop hotel buildings of 1858 and felt that mountaintops should be considered sacred places. ‘I think that the top of Mount Washington should not be private property,’ he wrote in his journal on January 3, 1861. ‘It should be left unappropriated, for modesty and reverence’s sake, or if only to suggest that earth has higher uses than we put her to.’” Slayton points out that such an uncompromising attitude was much less common in Thoreau’s time than in ours, then concludes, “Mount Washington, like most of the rest of New England, is a complex landscape of wilderness, commerce, and accommodation. It is both wild and not wild, both protected and exploited. It is the emblem of the compromised New England landscape we have created since Henry David Thoreau walked through it in the mid-1800s.
“The wonder is that he saw it coming so early on.”
I spent my formative years in a house just west of Walden Pond and rummaged many days through the woods where Thoreau spent much of his life. I’ve read Walden twice, the first as part of a required high school English class and the second out of a lingering sense of geographical piety. Neither effort brought me nearly as much insight into the man and his times as Tom Slayton’s Searching for Thoreau. Best of all, now having been guided through the territory by Slayton, I find myself ready to tackle Walden for a third time.