Do you like to be alone at times, under the stars?
Do you like to fish? Make friends with birds and squirrels? Cook your meals in the open air?
Have you ever dreamed of building your own cabin in the woods beside a clear little lake?
Then you will enjoy this very readable biography of Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau's famous cabin on Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, was built at a total cost of $28.12 1/2, plus a few weeks of pleasant labor. Here he lived for two years and two months on a budget of twenty-seven cents a week. Fish, wild berries, and vegetables from his own garden supplied most of the food. He chopped his firewood for his hearth. Let the winter blizzards blow, he was safe and warm beside his fire, roasting wild apples and chestnuts and thoroughly enjoying the storm.
Thoreau made friends of many birds and animals. The chickadees showed no fear and a dainty wood mouse sometimes ate breadcrumbs while sitting in the palm of his hand. How could one be lonesome, asked Thoreau, with the Milky Way spanning the midnight sky, and the partridge leading her brood beneath his window?
Thoreau lived simply but richly in his little house in Walden Woods, and here he wrote his masterpiece, Walden. Although his life was humble, he will always be included in the gallery of great American citizens, because he taught us to love the magnificent universe in which we live.
—from the dust jacket
Henry David Thoreau loved the little Concord River the way Mark Twain loved the mighty Mississippi. Rowing, sailing, swimming, and fishing, young Thoreau lived the life all boys love to live.
I too lived that sort of life in my boyhood. Even before I read Walden I had built a boat with two masts -- not to mention a canoe and a rowboat. In my late teens I also built a cabin of hewn oak logs and limestone on the shore of Rock River in southern Wisconsin. The spirit of Walden was there in Wisconsin, also -- the sound of a lonesome train whistle rushing through the night, a whippoorwill calling through the dusk, the tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk of the bullfrogs on the river's edge, and the frequent "roar and pelting" of rainstorms on the tight roof.
However, I viewed nature more perceptively after reading Thoreau, learned to identify scores of additional birds and wild flowers, put away my gun, and wondered how I could ever have been a hunter.
The way to read Walden (or any book about Thoreau) is to find a quiet place where you can listen to the music of nature coming to you from the printed page. Take the book outdoors under the same sky Thoreau loved in any season. Take it with you to your camp or cottage. Read it thoughtfully and slowly, savoring each sentence, and you will be surprised to find a great sense of peace and well-being coming over you -- the spirit of Thoreau and of the universe.
Sterling North
—from the book
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