Walking with Thoreau
Walking with Thoreau March 27 to April 3, 1999
Henry David Thoreau begins his essay “Walking” as follows:
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee and every one of you will take care of that.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainate-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.’
I, too, “wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness” and for walking. To truly walk this earth, I must wander, or as Thoreau would have it, to saunter. To leave the road, to get off the well-worn path, to go where no mortal has gone before, this is the way of the wanderer, the walk of a saunterer. The path and the road have a clear-cut history and future. When I travel a road my thoughts are likely to live in the past from where I came or to look ahead to where I am going. I only see superficially what is all around me.
To walk, to wander, to saunter I must leave the known world of the path and road behind to enter and experience the world as it is. When I leave the road and the path to walk in the wilderness, I am immediately and intimately surrounded by nature. I can touch nature and be touched by nature. There is no boundary between me and nature. I wander from tree to tree, rock to rock, plant to plant, land formation to land formation. I am aware all the while that all is alive. The path and the road block my view of this experience. The proximity of nature is distant, no longer intimate, and likewise my thoughts are far away, behind or ahead in some city.
Thoreau writes in “Walking” about the difficulties of leaving the city and our connections to it behind.
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is,—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
When I wander where I will, I discover an inner landscape that corresponds to the outer landscape. I become free and wild. My thoughts are no longer linear but rather enriched by the senses, circulating through my whole body. Both walking and thinking happen serendipitously. When I wander upright on two legs, direction or destination does not matter. I am where I am. That’s all that matters. I move through nature in coordinated synchrony, right leg and left arm, right arm and left leg; right, left, right, left, right, left, balanced perfectly.
When I wander, there are no walls to hold me in and no fences to contain me. When I walk away from my possessions, they no longer own me, no longer hold me down. I become free to move and so become aware of any burdens that slow me down. I carry as little as possible: the clothes I wear, pockets full of essentials, perhaps water, maybe lunch, possibly a backpack with shelter and bedding depending on how long I wish to wander. I sometimes bring a camera and sketch book. I could bring a bow and arrows, a gun, or a fishing pole. Oh, to walk with no ceiling hanging over my head. Thoreau continues:
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do; first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all,—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveler thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road—follow that marketman, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.
This is true freedom. It is, however, a freedom with some risk and some vulnerability involved. Few can afford the price of giving up so much to become so free. This freedom is not free. Few can afford to take the time to find it. Most are in a hurry to get somewhere, to get something, staying on their well-worn paths from work, to home, to store, moving by car in between. Then there are those who travel the information super highway sitting motionlessly and staring into cyber space senselessly. Thoreau walks onward, writing:
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequences to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness.
Thoreau goes on to clarify, “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
The world has been changed since Thoreau’s day. The West is no longer so free and wild. Much of the West has been plowed under or paved over. Roads crisscross the landscape connecting east to west. In many places, however, wildness is not so far away as one might think, just off the road and over the fence. If you seek it, you will find it.
Oh, to saunter through the landscape becoming fully alive, looking, listening, touching, tasting, smelling, being moved by nature. Oh, to wander unhurriedly in the world of nature, far from the world of man’s commerce, politics, and cities, to have one’s thoughts to oneself, to know deep peace and quiet silence. Only by leaving the road and path behind will one find the absolute freedom and wildness that Thoreau found. Only by walking, wandering, and sauntering in the wilderness, will one find absolute freedom and the preservation of the soul.