Apart from selected essays, I have never had a strong desire to read any of Thoreau’s books other than Walden, which is a true masterpiece, self-contained, effervescent, powerful, luminous, wholly original, and life-changing. However, recently circumstances have caused me to make two trips to Maine, and while searching for background literature about my destination, I supposed that I should give The Maine Woods a try. It wasn’t easy to obtain the book. The Seattle Public Library, usually well-stocked with a wide range of books of all kinds, didn’t have it; a knowledgeable used book dealer I frequent (who didn’t have it in stock) told me that he sells forty copies of Walden for every one of all the rest of Thoreau’s books. Fortunately I found a used copy of The Maine Woods that I could order online.

While essentially Walden is a philosophical treatise, The Maine Woods is more of a straightforward travelogue and nature study. It is divided into three sections, each corresponding to journeys that Thoreau made with companions into the Maine wilderness in 1846, 1853, and 1857. In the first, called “Ktaadn” (Thoreau’s spelling of Mount Katahdin) he travels with several others up rivers and across lakes to the titular mountain with the intention of climbing it. According to Thoreau, he was the only one to make it to the cloud-wrapped summit. In the second section, called “Chesuncook,” named after a lake in the wilderness, he travels with an Indian (Thoreau’s term for a Native American) and another companion. The Indian is intent on hunting moose, but Thoreau simply wants to observe the local fauna and flora. He writes that “every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.” And: “it is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use” of the wilderness. In the third section, Thoreau describes another journey up rivers and over lakes in the company of an indigenous guide and a friend. He spends a lot of time cataloging the local wildlife and vegetation, and he seems to relish the hardships they encounter in their travels. Of a storm while they are crossing a lake by canoe he says that “it was a pleasant excitement.” He observes that “invariably the best nights were those when it rained, for then we were not troubled with mosquitoes.” And he considers the “solitary pioneer” in the wilderness as being more respectable than “the helpless multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the extremely artificial wants of society and are thrown out of employment by hard times.”

I have to admit that The Maine Woods does not rise to the level of the brilliant and insightful Walden. Some of the descriptions, especially in the third part, are somewhat lengthy and repetitive. However, Thoreau is an excellent writer, and his accounts of his journeys allowed me to vicariously travel into the Maine woods of old, immersing myself in the primeval wilderness that is rapidly disappearing but even now exists in a few secluded parts of the North American continent. I might not recommend this book for everyone, but for those who enjoy well-told true tales of explorations of remote regions, you might like to give The Maine Woods a try.