by By Byron Wormser
University Press of New England, 2006
In the old and idiosyncratic genre of wilderness literature, our American masterpiece is Thoreau’s Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.
As with many perennially great books, when people overcome its daunting aura of “edifice” to actually read Walden, they often find the experience fabulously enjoyable. Thoreau combined exceptional poetic resourcefulness with astute political convictions and a seasoned gift for precise ecological detail. His writing also pulses with wit and resonant metaphor.
Contemporary Maine poet Baron Wormser has now published a book that re-approaches the concerns of Walden not in a scholarly fashion but firsthand, testing and weighing the immediate and practical utility of a life in the woods and addressing Thoreau not as a lofty intellectual forebear but as mentor and even peer.
While not a “memoir” really, as the term is mostly used today, Wormser’s book is also not a how-to manual. The Road Washes Out in Spring is a marvelously sensual evocation of the motives and means of one family who took Thoreau’s challenge to heart and spent a couple of decades living at the end of the road, foregoing conveniences such as electricity and harvesting much of their own food and fuel from the land.
Thoreau turned away from “normal” career and family expectations to perch at the margin of his society, from there turning back to scrutinize, contemplate, and speculate. Not “retreating” but shifting vantage points, the poet-exile seeks to see worldly reality and possibility with a fresh acuity impossible amid the mercantile hubbub and courtly intrigues of the city.
Wormser’s book has three themes, entwined – the nature of homesteading, in an era of commodity housing and “real” estate; the nature of poetry, at a time when a poet’s age-old vocation as chronicling bard and shaman seems effaced by self-help frenzies and obsession with celebrities; and the nature of spiritual discipline, where the other two themes are combined, and where the joys and challenges of disciplined meditation are explored as manifestations of home-making and poetic artistry.
Characteristically, Wormser torques the “back-to-the-land” cliché – and the perplexity of urban or suburban relations and friends – by describing his family’s Maine home not as in the middle of nowhere but “in the middle of Elsewhere.” This is surely a poet’s book. His vocabulary can be delightfully erudite and still entirely natural sounding, and his prose is muscular yet always conversational, loping in gait while assiduously probing. He writes with special alacrity of neighbors, woodstoves, splitting mauls, outhouses, and the vagaries of weather across the day and night sky.
On the original title page of Walden the author declaimed, “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”
In tone and tempo, Wormser is more akin to owl than rooster. With less bravado and ferocity than Thoreau, but with comparable subtlety and ardor, Baron Wormser has written a beautiful and eloquent reprise to Walden, entirely contemporary and likely to powerfully beguile not only readers who live in the North Woods but also those who decidedly do not, like a friend of mine – a poet and professional exterminator from Jersey City – who told me that The Road Washes Out in Spring is the best book he’s read in years.