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Thoreau’s dull cabin book versus his wild manifesto

The first time I did not read Thoreau's Walden was in college, and I have not read it several times since.

In the mid-1970s, I took an upper-level course called something like "Frontier Themes in American Literature." I am still unsure what Walden had to do with frontier themes, but Walden belonged to the canon, at least in those days.

Thoreau spent his life in New England, with side trips to Maine and Canada. He went west once, to Minnesota in 1861, hoping the prairie air would cure his tuberculosis. He died the next spring.

Ever since I wore a fake coonskin Davy Crockett cap as a kid, I had dreamed of moving to the wilderness. I loved the idea of a guy going off to build his own cabin in the woods. I wanted to love Walden as much as the professor did.

Alas. The first chapter was a 70-page thicket of impenetrable prose called "Economy," in which Thoreau denounced his fellow citizens for wanting frivolous things like too many warm clothes and a nice house. Instead of a nice house, Thoreau bought an Irish laborer's shanty for $4.25, tore it down, and spread the boards on the grass so the sun could unwarp them. Then he built his cabin with them.

The binding of my hardcover had cracked at the last page of the chapter, so I was not the first reader of this volume to thumb ahead and count the pages of "Economy" that remained, like a hiker gauging an uphill climb through fallen timber. Ahead I spied a chapter called "The Bean-Field," which sounded exotic and thrilling next to the Puritan rigors of "Economy."

When Thoreau flagged two casks of lime at $2.40 as overpriced, I closed the book and went to the library to find somebody else's well-written summary of Walden rather than read Walden myself.

The guy came up with the occasional zinger, about how most men lead lives of quiet desperation, or how I should beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes, but I had to hack through brambles of crabbed prose to reach those fruits.

Walden did not feed my inner frontiersman or teach me how to become a modern pioneer. Thoreau lasted two years and two months in his homemade cabin, and then he moved back to town.

Walden taught me a different lesson. If I wanted to run away and live in a cabin in the woods, I should save some money first, so I wouldn't have to come back in two years. Maybe work an extra week or two, buy new lumber instead of scrap, and stay put.

Walden was a slog, but Thoreau also wrote an essay called Walking (aka The Wild). He based the essay on a lecture he gave at least ten times.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness … to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Manifestos don't come any better. In Walden, Thoreau lectures us about excess. In Walking, he takes us outside and asks us to give ourselves over to nature. Walking is about becoming nature.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again … If you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs … then you are ready for a walk.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walking

The Atlantic published the essay in June 1862, a month after Thoreau died, and you can read it for free at Project Gutenberg. Enjoy!

Walking, by Henry David Thoreau

• See also, The Baby Boomers Are Arriving In Montana, by Richard Dooling

Send The Dead

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