The Thoreau I admire most

an excerpt from Breaking into the Backcountry in honor of Earth Day

Thanks in part to my post as Writer-in-Residence at the Concord Free Public Library this spring, I’ve had the chance to think more about Henry David Thoreau, his life and work and the town he called home. To be fair, I’ve been thinking about him for a while now. I told another Thoreau devotee recently that even deep in the Oregon woods, where my book is set, I couldn’t get out from his shadow. Not that I would want to be.

I’ve written elsewhere about Thoreau, too, most recently in this Literary Hub piece. But for Earth Day—a holiday I can’t even imagine without the existence of Thoreau’s writings—I wanted to share a brief expert from Breaking into the Backcountry. It’s a pivotal moment in the book, a time when the big quiet of the experience began finally to make sense.

—from Breaking into the Backcountry, from the chapter “Heat of the Summer”

Every day something beautiful and small. The way the deer can reach their heads around and bite at ticks on their flanks. The way they snort. The way they scratch their ears with their long back legs.

The way bats circle the cabin at dusk, snagging moths and mosquitoes attracted by my propane lamps.

The way tiny slugs glisten on windfall apples. The way the grooves of a pine smell like cream soda. The way rosemary, picked in big clumps from the bush in the garden and crushed between my fingers, evokes eternity. In my journal I write: If I am dead and you are reading this, pick a sprig of rosemary, crush it, stand along under a rising moon. I’m not gone.

And today I understand with deep clarity—for his questions have become my questions—the final passage of “Ktaadn,” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay: “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become strange to me….Think of our life in nature,—daily to be show matter, to come into contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”

This is the Thoreau I admire most of all. Not the glorified hero living by his own means at Walden Pond; not the pity craftsman of quotable quotes; not the meticulous, miraculous journal keeper whose observations cut to the quick with the precision of a scientific instrument. No, the Thoreau I admire most is the one struck dumb on a mountaintop in Maine. Struck dumb by the smallness of our accumulated knowledge in the face of raw, depthless reality. The desolation of Mount Katahdin turns such formerly simple questions as “Who are we, where are we?” into maddening and unanswerable koans to which the only appropriate response is one’s whole life, one’s being, nothing less. And this is the gift of Thoreau, as I understand it. By virtue of word and deed, this pencil-maker’s son used his pencil to free the rest of us from a worldview prescribed by people and institutions who hold fast to power, prestige, and tradition, and who would claim these stations as evidence of a certain knowledge of the truth. But in the actual world, on the solid earth, what truth is there, and who would be so bold as to name it? Who are we, where are we? To take nothing for granted, not even this—out of deep humility comes the birth of wisdom. The necessity of silence and solitude. And wilderness.