Searching for Thoreau: On the Trails and Shores of Wild New England

by Tom Slayton

Searching for Thoreau vividly transports the reader to the places in New England that were most important to the great American writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau in ten vigorous essays that range from Walden Pond to the shores of Cape Cod and the heights of Mount Katahdin in northern Maine. Retracing Thoreau's steps from 150 years ago in a series of hikes and excursions, author Tom Slayton shares Thoreau's colorful descriptions of his experiences in nature along with his own first-hand observations of the same places today, and reflects on the changes wrought by time and man.

Genres: Nature

240 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2007

Reviews

[Gail Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry David Thoreau is a major American figure today, an object of adoration to his many followers, the subject of numerous books. “Why?” asks Tom Slayton, in Searching for Thoreau. “Why is Henry David Thoreau, who was regarded as—at best—a minor disciple of Emerson while alive, now so vitally important to our contemporary experience? Why is he the only Transcendentalist we still read willingly?”

This is an excellent question and one that Slayton is a good candidate to answer well. Former editor-in-chief of Vermont Life, he has long been drawn to the Concord author, and he knows the New England landscape well, as a hiker and climber. In his quest to understand Thoreau, he decided to travel to the places the author visited and wrote about. Focusing each chapter/essay on a particular place—Walden (of course) and the Maine woods, Mt. Washington and Cape Cod—he follows Thoreau’s trails, cites his writings, and provides historic background. He also recounts his own adventures on these trips, and compares today’s landscapes to those of the past.

Slayton introduces us early on to the cantankerous, stubborn philosopher, who failed early in his endeavors; berated his Concord neighbors—for their “cowardice, subservience, and conformity”; mourned the loss of his brother; and found his way to an intense relationship with nature, wilderness, and the wild.

One of the most striking chapters describes Thoreau’s struggle to climb the notoriously difficult Mt. Katahdin in 1846. He never did reach the summit, and seems to have returned a changed man. “Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature,” he wrote. Slayton believes that Thoreau, confronting the savagery of the mountain, became less the Romantic, basing his writing thereafter more fully on “observable facts.”

Also striking is the essay on Cape Cod. Anyone who has visited the Cape today, so filled with tourists, will find it hard to grasp that Thoreau and his friend Ellery Channing were probably the first in the area, and that “travelers there were so unusual in 1849 that people thought the two might be bank robbers.” It’s equally surprising to learn that the Cape, whose challenge today is overdevelopment, was a barren place at the time, ruined by deforestation, overgrazing, and erosion.

Although Slayton admires and feels affection for Thoreau, he doesn’t gloss over the man’s flaws. He addresses honestly the preachiness, the stubbornness, and the superciliousness toward his neighbors that earned him their animosity. He has only modest praise for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which he says, despite some “luminous” passages, is “ a tendentious, episodic, fragmented book.” And he offers interesting commentary on Walden, “a truly strange great book,” he says, that opens with preachiness and sarcasm but gradually grows more nuanced, “subtler and more graceful,” documenting the author’s own growth during his years at the pond.

By the end of the book, Slayton has made it clear why Thoreau has earned respect and admiration—from environmentalists like John Muir and Bill McKibben, who have been inspired by his relation to the natural world, from protest leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who have been inspired by his essay “Civil Disobedience,” from all of us for whom his causes, unusual in his own day, are now central. Thoreau foresaw the dangers of commercialism, stood his ground for his principles, and, as Slayton observes, he was a terrific writer.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The different chapters of this book are reflections on present day visits to all the places in New England that Thoreau visited. A wonderful idea, fairly well executed. The drawings are nothing too spectacular. Reading the chapters about Maine motivate me to revisit the places that Thoreau wrote about. My favorite chapter is Katahdin: the Greatest Mountain, where I am looking forward to visiting on Aug. 5, 2008, the 60th year anniversary of Earl Shaffer's first through-hike of the Appalachain Trail , where he spent his last day summiting Katahdin.

[John Fredrickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a very good introduction to Thoreau in which the author travels to the locations that Thoreau wrote about, while discussing the written works and the man himself. The author merges his own experience of the sites with that of Thoreau, pointing out similarities and differences in the experience.

The book felt uneven to me. Several sections of it (Katahdin: Greatest Mountain) read extremely well; one really gets a feel for Thoreau and his 'nature' in the text. Other sections (for me, Walking Cape Cod) seem to lose the thread somewhat.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is precious little to be experienced by today's adventurers who may wish to follow Thoreau's routes through New England places. That is if today's adventurers want to find the pure and pristine nature Thoreau looked for, the "wildness" that nature offered. It's there but it may be tougher to find. Tom Slayton's book discusses this and the changes we encounter as civilization moves along, changes Thoreau himself expected and predicted.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful book to learn more about Thoreau and the places he visited.