Thoreau and Maine

The Maine Woods

Henry David Thoreau

Every summer I visit Maine and hope to do so this coming August, if the pandemic restrictions are lifted. Whenever I have plans to travel, I prepare for the trip by reading a book related to my destination. My reading is never a travel book, rather a book that has some relationship to the place I plan to visit. It could be a novel, a biography, anything really, just something to get me in the geographical mood. Before I went to Oxford, I read Instance of the Fingerpost, a murder mystery set there. Before visiting Gettysburg, I read Killer Angels. Prior to past Maine visits, I have read selections from The Maine Reader, a book about writing by Stephen King, and Olive Kitteridge. This year I decided on Thoreau.

Henry David Thoreau is not the first author who comes to mind when thinking of Maine. Thoreau is most widely known for Walden, which chronicles the time he spent in a cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, and he resided in Massachusetts his entire life. The Maine Woods was published after Walden, in fact after Thoreau’s death. Although it is no doubt Thoreauean, The Maine Woods is less philosophical than Walden. It presents a fairly straightforward account of Thoreau’s three visits to the backwoods of Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857. The book reads like a memoir, and it is the language Thoreau utilizes to describe the landscape that captures the attention and, in my case, heightens the desire to be on the trail. The reader can delight in Thoreau’s renderings of a rugged wilderness, replete with loving attention to the details of his surroundings, in this case of primitive, largely unspoiled forest. Thoreau’s lush language lures us into his world.

“While yet alive, before their tints had faded, they glistened like the fairest flowers, the product of primitive rivers; and he could hardly trust his senses, as he stood over them, that these jewels should have swum away in that Aboljacknagesic water for so long, so many dark ages; -- these bright fluviatile flowers, seen of Indians only, made beautiful, the Lord only knows why, to swim there!”

Flowers growing near or in a river are common in Maine. Language like that to describe them is not.

Thoreau’s Maine treks were quite different from my own. While I hike rugged terrain by day, I sleep in a comfortable hotel bed by night. Thoreau, who traveled with one companion and a Native American guide, brought only what could be carried while hiking and fit in a canoe with three men. As those who sleep outdoors are wont to be, Thoreau was subject to Mother Nature’s whims and the limitations of man’s capability to dominate her.

“It was a savage and dreary scenery enough; so wildly rough, that they looked long to find a level and open space for the tent. We could not well camp higher, for want of fuel; and the trees here seemed so evergreen and sappy, that we almost doubted if they would acknowledge the influence of fire; but fire prevailed at last, and blazed here, too, like a good citizen of the world.”

I have long been committed to an anti-camping platform. My basic travel rule is that I do not sleep outside, under any circumstances, ever. Thoreau can be quite persuasive to the contrary.

“It is surprising with what impunity and comfort one who has always lain in a warm bed in a close apartment, and studiously avoided drafts of air, can lie down on the ground without a shelter, roll himself in a blanket, and sleep before a fire, in a frosty, autumn night, just after a long rain-storm, and even come soon to enjoy and value the fresh air.”

Maybe?

Having hiked in some of the areas Thoreau visited, I can confirm that his descriptions are accurate. I could show you the many photos I have taken hiking over the granite bones of Maine. Or you could read Thoreau, doubtless more enjoyable.

“Occasionally, when the windy columns broke in to me, I caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me. It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus. Such was Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound. Aeschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this.”

Thoreau tells us early on in the book why he went to such efforts, volunteered for such hardships. It was more than the landscape. He sought something in these woods, something he despaired of finding in a civilized environment.

“In fact, the deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent, and, in one sense, less countrified do you find the inhabitants; for always the pioneer has been a traveler, and to some extent, a man of the world; and, as the distances with which he is familiar are greater, so is his information more general and far reaching than the villagers’. If I were to look for a narrow, uninformed, and countrified mind, as opposed to the intelligence and refinement which are thought to emanate from cities, it would be among the rusty inhabitants of an old-settled country, on farms all run out and gone to seed with life-everlasting, in the towns about Boston, even on the high-road in Concord, and not in the backwoods of Maine.”

Thoreau’s account of trekking through Maine feels so relevant today. Ahead of his time, Thoreau decried the despoilment of nature for the purpose of commerce and at the behest of humans.

“The civilized man not only clears the land permanently to a great extent, and cultivates open fields, but he tames and cultivates to a certain extent the forest itself. By his mere presence, almost, he changes the nature of the trees as no other creature does. The sun and air, and perhaps fire, have been introduced, and grain raised where it stands. It has lost its wild, damp, and shaggy look, the countless fallen and decaying trees are gone, and consequently that thick coat of moss which lived on them is gone too. The earth is comparatively bare and smooth and dry.”

This language is familiar. Thoreau’s work is a reminder that we have yet to find the right balance between man’s desires and nature’s survival. It is also an invitation. The backwoods of Maine, diminished since Thoreau’s time yet stalwart and there, beckon. While I am still not sold on the tent, my hiking boots wait by the front door for a release date. In the meantime, I can always travel with Thoreau.