Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The transcendental notion is that nature and wildness aren't mere symbols of cosmic
truth, but its actual embodiment. So to steep yourself in them, it follows, is to allow your
spirit to unfurl. But it requires more than your mere physical presence. You must saunter
mentally as well, losing yourself in your senses, coaxing your mind to meander into nature
as surely as your feet have. “What business have I in the woods,” Thoreau asks, “if I am
thinking of something out of the woods?”
But if you believe, as I do, that the concept of nature is pretty bankrupt these days, then
the question becomes just where to meet your sauntering needs. It's easy to understand
what's nice about a walk in the woods, but will less obvious places do the trick as well?
Can you properly saunter across an oil sands mine? What about around a soy field? Is the
tired ground of Spindletop somehow inherently unsaunterable?
Even Thoreau acknowledged that his own sauntering grounds—around Concord, Mas-
sachusetts—were only semi-wild at best, shot through as they were with logging trails, and
old native American footpaths, and homesteads, and farms. And when he went to Maine, in
1846, in search of a truly primeval nature experience, Thoreau found himself badly freaked
out by the more serious wildness he found. Nature wasn't always beautiful or sacred-seem-
ing. It could be uncaring and inhuman. Nature could crush your spirit as surely as it could
raise it. He was honest enough to admit it, though, and incorporated the experience into his
ideas, deciding that the healthiest thing for a person was to have one foot in nature and one
in civilization. Nature's American prophet preferred his wildness benign.
From our vantage point 150 years after his death, there are also darker undercurrents
to be found in the environmental ecstasy of Thoreau's ideas. In
Walking,
he goes to great
lengths to point out not only
that
he sauntered, and where, but also in which direction. He
went West, and it was no accident. A deeply moral man, an energetic campaigner for the
abolition of slavery, and a founder of civil disobedience, he was nevertheless a kind of im-
perialist. He believed in his civilization, and in its growth. “I must walk toward Oregon,”
he wrote from the East Coast. “And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that man-
kind progress from east to west.” There was a continent to despoil and plunder, and in his
good-natured, wildness-loving way, Henry David helped carry the flag.
Thoreau and company have something else to answer for, too, if you ask me. It has to
do with that mystical experience of nature they were so keen on. On the one hand, they
convinced the world that the forest was essentially good—an idea that sparked the envir-
onmental movement and continues to nourish it today. But there was a side effect. Because
they also convinced the world that the way for people to benefit from nature's virtue was
to
go get it.
Direct, individual experience was the ticket.
And so environmental rapture became yet another commodity to be extracted from the
forest, or the savannah, or the ocean. And all the nature-loving, green-friendly people of
