These Authors Follow in the Footsteps of Earlier Travelers, LiterallyRecent travel books show an interest not just in distant places, but in distant times.
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. 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. 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."
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. His walks on Cape Cod, across Massachusetts and in Maine are written as meditations, not as guides, establishing from Page 1 that what sent him outside was the pain of loss.
Along the way, Shattuck finds endless points of identification with Thoreau, as when, camped on Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck wonders of the author-poet: "Was he doing the same thing I was doing? Walking to husk the dead skin of grief?" He finds parallels in their dreams, in their view of the stars, in their friendships and even in connections as odd as drug use and alien visitations. In one of the book's finer moments, the identification is so complete that, sitting inside Walden Pond's replica cabin, a bearded and sullen Shattuck is mistaken for a Thoreau re-enactor.
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. 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. "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. (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. Mainly, though, Shattuck seeks to comfort himself, and his book is thus comforting. 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. 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. Having. Fun." And there's the point. It's not that life is without its agonies. It's the sweetness in the sorrow that is captured in this writing, along with the natural world's endless invitation to solace.
Not all journeys in somebody else's footsteps prove especially comforting. In A ROAD RUNNING SOUTHWARD: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land (Island Press, 245 pp., $28), the Georgia journalist Dan Chapman retraces the ecologist John Muir's thousand-mile walk through the Reconstruction-era South, and what he finds there today is alarming.
In 1867, Muir, "father" of the national park system, conscience of the environmental movement and co-founder of the Sierra Club, traveled by foot from Louisville, Ky., to Florida, crossing one of the most biodiverse regions in the world and, at that time, a land of unspoiled beauty. The only threats Muir observed on his walk came from bandits, as life in the land of the defeated Confederacy was often quite desperate.
It is Chapman's mission not only to stand in Muir's shoes to see what he saw, but to view Muir's world through a 21st-century lens and consider "the future of an ever-sprawling, drought-challenged, climate-hammered South." It is difficult to look at.
Chapman took to Muir's trail in 2018, during one of the warmest Octobers on record for Georgia's coastal plain; the overwhelming state of the environment as he saw it was either threatened or already irredeemably harmed. Mass extinctions, disappearing farmland, polluted rivers, coal ash, wildfires, the desecration of old-growth forests and nature generally knocked out of balance are what the writer chronicles everywhere he turns his gaze. Even the national parks Muir inspired are now under pressure; the Smoky Mountains are being "loved to death." Scotland born and Wisconsin bred, Muir eventually called California's Yosemite Valley his home, but it was a moment of revelation as a young man on his thousand-mile walk, while camping in Bonaventure Cemetery near Savannah, Ga., that may have caused him to dedicate his life to nature. There, as Chapman puts it, Muir intuited that "nature would ultimately get crushed by man if not preserved." Chapman launches his exploration in that same cemetery, where, like Muir, he spends the night beneath the stars. (One of the curious revelations of these books as a whole is the apparent frequency with which men sleep outside without permission.) "It's getting late and I'm getting tired," Chapman writes as he settles down to sleep that first night, offering a metaphor as much as a statement of mood. Humans have done grievous harm to the earth in the past 150 years; it is exhausting at times to look at what we've done, and yet we're running out of time to reverse course and spare the world far more dire consequences.
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