A favorite English teacher gave me this book when I graduated from high school, and he told me that he was reminded of me whenever he read Thoreau. What little Thoreau I’d been required to read in high school I’d found painfully boring, and seventeen-year-old me certainly didn’t know what to make of such a weighty pronouncement anyway. And so I toted this book and all of its attendant guilt to every dorm room and house and apartment I’ve inhabited since then, but I NEVER ACTUALLY READ IT.
I so very much wish I’d read this book ten years ago, when I agonized over my college major (science vs. literature — Thoreau saw no such schism), or even five years ago when I agonized over grad school and how crushingly unfulfilling I found life as a geophysicist.
I grew up with a naturalist grandfather who took me on walks and taught me the names of all the trees and flowers and birds and instilled me with a deep love for the outdoors. When I started hiking and backpacking, that familiarity with the woods around me was strangely comforting. I didn’t realize what a comfort it was until I moved across the Rocky Mountains and now all of the ecosystems here seem completely alien to me, because I don’t know the names of any of the trees or flowers or birds. Reading Thoreau reminded me how much of that familiarity is really just a matter of noticing things, and now I am very sorry to everyone who climbs up a drainage basin with me when I get on a tear about the seed dispersal mechanisms of the common willow tree.
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