It’s not that life is without its agonies. And who better to guide us than Thoreau, whose writing, like his walking, is tireless, the antithesis of a teenager Shattuck hears shrieking on the side of a mountain that she is “Not. Grief in various permutations has become a near-constant companion to thinking people in our time, and so it seems we all could use a good, long walk right about now, something to restore our spiritual balance. Mainly, though, Shattuck seeks to comfort himself, and his book is thus comforting. (Wandering through private yards and sleeping on a Cape Cod beach, he recognizes, are less risky for him because he is a white man.) He also addresses larger sorrows of our time, including the impact of climate change on the beaches he walks. “Grief and joy are in the same life,” Shattuck writes, “but it’s only in the forest where you notice the shafts of sunlight spilling through.” In writing of his walks, the author hits a few helpful notes of atonement, acknowledging Thoreau’s racism toward Native Americans and his own privilege. Yet Shattuck shrewdly navigates the shift, turning his attention to the usefulness of sorrow, how underappreciated our painful moments are when we are in them. In the second half of these six walks, the author has recovered from his heartbreak and, perhaps inevitably, the work reflects this loss of urgency.
His walks on Cape Cod, across Massachusetts and in Maine are written as meditations, not as guides, establishing from that what sent him outside was the pain of loss. Shattuck, moved by the thoughtful, even at times ecstatic, observations in Thoreau’s journals and essays, was motivated to follow his footsteps by the despair of a crushing breakup. But those more deeply familiar with his work know Thoreau was an avid and tireless walker, one who was not right in health or spirit if he did not spend at least four hours a day, and often more, “sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields.” Since Thoreau is so well known for the small cabin he built alongside Walden Pond, one might imagine he preferred to view nature from inside a cozy shelter. In SIX WALKS: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (Tin House, 279 pp., $22.95), the author Ben Shattuck retraces selected journeys Thoreau made across Cape Cod and New England.
Their books allow us to cover far more ground in a season of reading than we could by taking to these roads ourselves. “Trail” is the operative word for these travel experiences, many of whose authors followed in the literal path of writers, artists and others who passed this way before them.
Old trails preserved in text and paintings have inspired writers to find fresh meaning in the American wilderness, in the Japan of the Edo period, on the streets of London and through the traditions of Greek islanders. Travel writers can be counted on to take you to distant lands - that’s part of the job description - but many of the books in this year’s crop also contain visions of worlds that no longer exist.
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