My freshman year of college was a revelation. I had been a mediocre high-school student, with a high-school student’s local concerns. At the university, though, I found a colony of people who were fiercely interested in what each other thought: this was breathtaking and intoxicating. My freshman comp professor’s casual reference to Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) sent me to the bookstore. For a time at least, Thoreau became my constant companion. I was seldom without my much-underlined Walden in my jacket pocket; I came to understand my new life through the lens of his understanding of his own new, deliberate life at Walden Pond.
Two springs ago a student’s commitment to hiking the whole of the Appalachian Trail unexpectedly brought me back to Thoreau and his essay on walking, published posthumously in 1862. I felt that I would be served by those ideas again, with fresh (however older) eyes. I spent three years thinking about the wealth of ideas in Thoreau’s journals this time. These works are a response to specific journal entries.
