A vacation from life's clutter clears the mind to think about what's really important.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published June 3, 2003
I did not go to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
That's why Thoreau went to Walden.
I rented a house in the mountains of North Carolina because I wanted to relax, ride my bike, play my harmonica and eat beef jerky.
I didn't mean it to happen, but I think I did learn a thing or two about living deliberately and the essential facts of life.
For a week I lived alone 8 miles from the nearest town. I had neighbors a few hundred feet away, but I couldn't hear them or see their houses. I had a television, but I didn't watch except once. I usually went to bed shortly after sundown and was up at daybreak.
I was never bored. I missed my family, but valued my time alone. Loneliness, May Sarton once wrote, is poverty of self. Solitude is the richness of self.
I could play my harmonica all I wanted without anyone telling me to pipe down.
Maybe I went a little stir-crazy, too. But luckily squirrels don't talk.
The beginning
I'm a social guy, but I have never minded being alone - to a point. Of course, being alone is almost impossible for a city person. Sooner or later the telephone rings or there's an e-mail, or somebody knocks on the door, or you have to drive through heavy traffic to the office. And that's okay. True solitude would scare most of us to death.
Henry Thoreau was different. He was no hermit by any means - he had family and friends - but he preferred his own company.
He was born July 12, 1817, in Concord, Mass. He graduated from Harvard and taught public school for two weeks before resigning because he refused to administer corporal punishment. He and his brother, John, opened a school; after John died of lockjaw, Thoreau suffered a brief psychosomatic case of his own and stopped teaching. He helped his father in the family pencil business and toiled as a surveyor, but considered the study of nature his calling. Respectable villagers believed he was a disgraceful slacker.
"If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer," Thoreau once said, "but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen." He was a protege of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was the center of New England's transcendental movement. Transcendentalists believed life could not be understood through rational thought alone; intuition was more important. Every person had a divine spark within that abetted understanding of the universe, and the portal to that understanding was nature.
"Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form," Emerson wrote. Understand a blade of grass and one could understand the cosmos.
Emerson suggested that Thoreau keep a journal. His journals led to a variety of books and a series of lectures and the lifestyle of an ascetic. He never married, ate low on the food chain and valued simplicity in every aspect of his life except the mind. He was considered an eccentric crank then and he would be today.
Imagine Thoreau as a guest on The O'Reilly Factor.
The perils of modern life
When I travel, I always carry a copy of Walden in my suitcase. I like the woods, too, and I think Thoreau wrote with great common sense and teaches lessons valuable today. I also admire Thoreau's courage to be a noncomformist.
I have made three pilgrimages to Walden over the years. I have walked through Thoreau's woods and watched for warblers in his thickets and dog-paddled among the perch in his icy pond. The house in which he lived is gone but I've studied the foundation. The dwelling he built by hand out of white pine had one room, about 12 feet by 12 feet, with a fireplace, a bed, a desk and a couple of chairs. He planted a large garden and grew beans. His plan was to grow a year's worth of food in six weeks and devote his remaining time to walking, thinking and writing.
In the morning he sat for hours on his stoop watching the world come alive. Afterward he would walk through the woods looking for huckleberries or birds or Indian arrowheads. In the evening by candlelight he recorded the day's happenings in his journal.
He believed he had a perfect life or close to it, a life of freedom, and he pitied the industrious folk in town who spent their days at the desk, bent over a ledger, worrying about making as much money as possible. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," he wrote.
Sometimes I know exactly what he means. Like most of us, I have a life overly complicated. I have bills to pay, people to see, bosses to please. I struggle to keep track of loved ones and friends. On weekends I try to catch up on whatever I have been neglecting. In a good week I am lucky to squeeze in a few hours of exercise and reading; physical and mental health have a low priority for most of us. Most of the time I think my priorities are screwed up.
Where do the hours go? Often it is easier to eat a supper of junk food in front of the television set. Click the remote. Fear Factor. Click. Fox News. Click, click, click. No generation has enjoyed as much access to information, but the more we watch, the less we seem to know.
Surviving on simplicity
Dawn in North Carolina. The sun spills through the big picture windows. I can see Richland Balsam, highest point on the Blue Ridge Parkway, from the breakfast table. Clouds cast big shadows, then the mountain disappears in fog. I intend to ride my bike there and I need sunlight.
Thoreau believed sauntering was an art, a kind of walking meditation as practiced by the Buddhists, a way to connect with the immediate moment. Concentrating on what you are doing, at this very instant, requires great discipline.
As I climb on my bike, thoughts about the past and the future swing through my mind like frantic monkeys. After a quarter-hour my mind seems to settle. Pedal and breathe, pedal and breathe, pedal and breathe. It's primitive, breathing like this, and in a strange way relaxing. Eight miles and an hour later, I feel like I'm standing on top of the world. At 6,000 feet, the wind rustles the tops of the balsams.
My lunch is beef jerky, hard cheddar cheese and an apple. One afternoon I cook myself a huge pot of my Grandma O'Donnell's Depression special. I cut up two yellow onions and six cloves of garlic and saute them in oil. Later I add a quarter cup of sliced green pepper, two cans of tomatoes and two pounds of ground beef and serve over macaroni noodles. It's food that connects me to generations of my family; better yet I have supper for the rest of the week and more time for myself.
Thoreau evolved into a vegetarian, though he appreciated the hunting instinct. He believed all children would understand nature better if they learned to hunt and fish. Then he expected them to give it up. "No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does," he wrote. "The hare in its extremity cries like a child." Even so, walking through the woods, he sometimes felt the urge to seize a woodchuck and devour it, raw, on the spot. Instead he'd eat a bowl of beans.
In the afternoon I drive to Waynesville for society. After solitude, my voice sounds unnaturally loud when I thank the clerk at the newsstand for my change. Back at the house, I relax on the deck and read the New York Times. My attention is diverted by birds coming to the feeder. I see species I never see in Florida, red-breasted grosbeaks, nuthatches, chickadees. My feeder also attracts the world's most greedy squirrels. I wave my newspaper to scare them. They come back. I shout. They come back. I drag out my slingshot. My wife wouldn't approve, Thoreau wouldn't approve, but I can't resist a few potshots. I never hit a squirrel - squirrels laugh at my pebbles - so I bring out the heavy artillery. It's my version of Red River Valley played on harmonica.
Squirrels begone!
A lesson learned
It takes several days for the chatter in my head to quiet. Using Walden as a model, I try to simplify my time into the physical (hiking and riding my bike), intellectual (reading) and spiritual (thinking about why we're here). The phone rings and I almost jump out of my skin. It's my wife wondering how I'm doing. I'm doing fine, though I confess to watching a Seinfeld episode one evening and bingeing on a bag of Cheez Doodles. Oh, Henry, forgive me my vices!
Dusk comes late to the mountains. The squirrels are first to retire, then the jays, though I hear them singing in the trees until full dark. Then I listen to the lonely song of a screech owl as the stars above me shine down by the millions like lasers.
On Dec. 3, 1860, Thoreau went sauntering, found a downed birch and counted the rings. That night he came down with a cold that days later led to bronchitis. He had weak lungs; he had been tubercular most of his life. The following summer he traveled to Minnesota in hopes of finding a drier climate and recovering his health. He returned home, still coughing, sicker by the day.
"Are you ready to meet your maker?" a well-meaning neighbor asked toward the end.
"One world at a time," Thoreau said.
He died May 6, 1862, in his mother's home, at the age of 44. His last words were "moose" and "Indian." He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord near his friends Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. The stone marking his grave is modest to the extreme, about the size of a book. "Henry," is all it says.
Simplicity indeed. Thoreau asked two important questions with his life, questions worth asking today. What's truly important? How much do we need?
All vacations fly by, this one especially. When I came here, my mind was a bell clogged with leaves and soil and dust. Now, after a week of solitude, it's clear enough to ring. The trick is to keep the bell ringing in the real world of junk mail, phone solicitors, useless television.
Soon I'm packed and behind the wheel of my truck, descending what seems to be the world's steepest road. On the main highway I can smell diesel fuel and burned rubber. A billboard recommends a visit to the new gambling casino at Cherokee. I'll pass, but when I get home I ought to plant a patch of beans.
