A Brief Introduction to Thoreau's Maine Woods

Thoreau. For many, his name alone often evokes one of two images: a recluse who sat around in his cabin all day shucking beans and pencil whipping Walden, parts of which, your least favorite teacher in high school made you read, or he’s the father of environmental spirituality, a transcendental guru that lived according to principles that have deeply effected how you think and who you have become. The truth for most Thoreau lover’s, lies somewhere in-between.       

            Henry David Thoreau had a special relationship with Maine, visiting the state on three separate occasions between 1846-1857. His sojourns to Ktaadn, Chesuncook and the Allegash have been eloquently chronicled.  And his interest in our culture, environment and landscape are equally evident throughout his work.

            On September 1, 1846, Thoreau arrived in Bangor from Boston on his first trip [Thoreau had visited

Bangor in 1838 looking for a teaching position] to the Maine woods. His purpose: to summit Mt. Ktaadn (sic, Thoreau’s spelling). To his knowledge, only a handful of professional expeditions had actually reached the summit of the highest peak in the state at that time. Native American cultural beliefs did not permit climbing atop this mountain, as not to provoke or anger any gods. Throughout The Maine Woods, posthumously published by Ticknor & Fields in 1864, Thoreau speaks to the splendor of Maine’s natural habitat and its somewhat unpopulated, virginal corridors of birch, moose, evergreen and medawisla* as a Catholic pilgrim might, barefoot, weeping and wailing his way to Santiago de Compostela:

       "Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be mid-winter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills?

                        What a place to live, what a place to die and be buried in! There certainly men would         live forever, and laugh at death and the grave." [1]

            

            We can still learn from him and his writing. Primarily, that man’s reverence for unadulterated nature can deliver us from our dependence on time and “the economy of machines and profit” [2] to organize our thoughts. While Thoreau was certainly cognizant of Maine’s New England-leading logging business, citing in his journals Bangor’s opulence as one of its byproducts, he is able to use this as a catalyst to spawn a conservation movement, espousing a system of National Parks.

  As Thoreau writes in the last paragraph of his Chesuncook essay:

                "Why should not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our national           preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some    even of the hunter’s race, may still exist, and not be “civilized off the face of the earth,”--our forests, not to hold the king’s game merely, but to hold and preserve       the king himself also, the     lord of creation, --not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation?   or shall we, like villains, grub them all up,       poaching on our own national domains?"[3]

                [At Yellowstone, in 1872, the United States under Ulysses S. Grant, established the first National Park.]

                        Thoreau regularly cites Maine’s primitive forests as an escape metaphor. He never lived outside Concord, MA and never actually derived a living solely from the land, anywhere—even during his Walden experiment. He, like many of us, succumbs in body to the dominant socio-economic lifestyle, one riddled with distractions, deceit and the pursuit of gathering and using things at its core. Although Thoreau made a living in many capacities; working for the family pencil factory, land surveying and writing for magazines and newspapers; he carries his intimate experiences from the woods with him to serve as a regular reminder of some other, better world, that is wild, and nonjudgmental about who he really is—and as an advocate and proselytizer, desperately wants you and I to find our own isolated forests, a ‘happy place’ if you will.

            

            While Thoreau was chronicling the plants, animals and rocks of Maine’s hinterlands, these early efforts at ethnobotany ultimately characterize Nature, as not only a poet’s sanctuary, but a requisite psychological construct for modern man’s identity. Ironically, three thousand miles to the west, and nearly to the day, hacking their way through the Wasatch valley, the Donner Party, half of whom would die snowbound in the Sierras, are in search of different spoils: land and gold. Thus, juxtaposing our country’s longstanding and contemporaneous cultural dilemma, where Western U.S. expansion and the pioneer spirit can be equated to the recent economic period of ‘irrational exuberance.’ It is in direct opposition to the idea of collecting experiences—one of Thoreau’s primary tenets. Therefore, our insatiable desire to express our national identity through commerce and warfare is at odds with our inability to champion our artistic and intellectual achievements.  As we are unable to assign a perceived value to personal enlightenment, growth and a bettering of the human condition, for these cannot be traded or sold. The products of this dichotomy become our predominant cultural traits. Practitioners like Thoreau presage, in his writings, this hazardous course.

            The Maine Woods stands like a lonely tree in winter, believing that its own slow growth might inspire in us a greater awareness of our place on earth, which Thoreau ranks higher than the mere service her hundreds of boards can provide nailed to a house. The book revels in an intangible idealism through the microscope of natural history and movement towards self-actualization. And with his physical experiments, captured in words, we gain a greater sense of whom we could be, as the larger metaphor of the Maine Woods suggests; that an intimate exploration of one’s surroundings can provide an able “tonic of the wild” through which we imagine ourselves, and our communities, fully enriched.

Troy Casa
March 17, 2007

Recommend

Reading

Huber, J. Parker. The Wildest Country. A Guide to Thoreau’s Maine. Appalachian Mountain Club. Boston, MA, 1981.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer, Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton: NJ, 1983.

Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Sherman Paul. Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962.

Medawisla—term for, loon

1. pg. 81, Moldenhauer

2. Stoller, Leo. “Thoreau’s Doctrine of Simplicity”

3. pg. 156, Moldenhauer