QUESTION & ANSWER WITH TOM SLAYTON

on WHY HE LOVES HENRY DAVID THOREAU

David Dobbs:  Why Henry David Thoreau?

Tom Slayton: Henry has fascinated me for most of my adult life, for two, maybe three reasons. First, he’s a wonderful writer. His writing is vivid, witty, confrontational, active, and always makes me think.

Second, he has things to say that are probably even more important now than in the mid-1800s when he wrote them. He saw early on that American society was headed for certain problems. I think society needs to reread him, learn from him, and step back from the way much of it is now going – rampant consumerism, militarism, disregard for the natural world, etc. He says things we need to hear.

DD: Thoreau startles me with the vigor and almost insolent freshness of his writing every time I return. What do you think accounts for his vitality?

TS:  Thoreau very early on made a choice to follow his genius wherever it might lead him. He structured his life so that he spent each morning writing and each afternoon walking – most often in the woods and fields around Concord, for hours and hours. He then would return to his room and write again. Perhaps that alternation between vivid experience and solitary expression helped make his writing muscular and vivid. But that’s just a guess. It’s tough to know what fuels genius.

DD:  There's a tension in the way we think of Thoreau -- a tension between the romanticized icon and the writer we encounter on the page, who would likely slap anyone he caught romanticizing him. Do you feel that too?

TS: There’s a lot more to Thoreau than the usual vision of him sitting alone in his cabin on the shores of Walden Pond. One of the things I’ve tried to do in my book, “Searching for Thoreau,” is show some of his complexity – the fact that, for example, he traveled very widely throughout New England, even during the short time he lived at the pond. During his lifetime, he went to Cape Cod several times, paddled and climbed through the woods of northern Maine on four lengthy excursions, climbed nearly to the top of Katahdin, and negotiated the wild lakes and rivers of northern Maine. He climbed Mount Washington twice and Mount Monadnock several times. And he wrote at length about all those experiences.

He’s known as a nature writer, but he was also a great, very principled social reformer. And he could be wrong. He courageously backed John Brown and flirted with the idea of approving violent means for nonviolent ends (something Brown was an advocate of, of course.)

There were many, many contradictions in his life and thought. He was an  inconsistent but brilliant thinker. And he could be very funny.

DD: How did you come to write “Searching for Thoreau”? Did your experience as editor of Vermont Life for many years influence the way you approached the book?

TS: I’ve always been fascinated by the natural world and specifically by the mystery of places. Why do certain places affect us so deeply? What does the history of the important places in New England – both settled and wild – tell us? What can we learn from the places we love – and what is our responsibility to them?

Those concepts and questions have always informed my work . Vermont Life explores and celebrates Vermont, I hope without romanticizing it. My book Sabra Field, the Art of Place, looks at how one important Vermont artist expresses her love of this specific place, Vermont. And my other two books about Vermont also have elements of that personal fascination in them. I think the Thoreau book was, in one sense, simply a way to expand that obsession with place onto a broader stage – New England instead of Vermont.

What happened was, in 2004, on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walden, I reread the book and went to Walden Pond and wrote an essay on what I found and felt there. My wife, Elizabeth, and I had been vacationing on Cape Cod’s outer beach for more than 20 years, and I knew I wanted to write about that sometime, too. And I had also climbed Katahdin several times and had fallen under that mountain’s spell. So ultimately, it occurred to me that I had the germ of something there, and with a little more traveling and some additional (very enjoyable) research, it might make a readable book – and a fun project to work on.

DD:  Deserted island question: If you got sent to one and could take only one Thoreau work, what would it be?

TS: That’s a tough one. I might opt for his journal – multiple volumes, written over the course of his life, which he mined for many of his essays and books. Or I might take his masterpiece, Walden But then I’d have to leave out Cape Cod which was really my introduction to Thoreau as a witty travel writer, or The Maine Woods, which has some of his most vivid description and most impassioned writing as a concerned environmentalist. It’s really hard to pick. Guess I’d better not go to a desert island!

DD:  Reading Thoreau is particularly high-quality armchair travel. You, however, chose to cover some of his tracks directly. What was it like encountering the real places -- 150 years later -- that he had described in his books?

TS: Really interesting, sometimes quite exciting. I went to Mount Kineo, which rises out of Moosehead Lake in Maine, and found the same flowers blooming there that Thoreau described in The Maine Woods.  My friend Michael Katzenberg and I got caught in a thunderstorm on top of Mount Katahdin, and that gave me a feeling for the kind of wild nature that Thoreau loved best it also scared the heck out of me! Sometimes what I saw was depressing – the excessive development on the top of Mount Washington, for example, or house lots being bulldozed out of the forest surrounding Mount Monadnock. And of course the book project was a great excuse to go back to places like the Cape that I have long loved, and explore them further – with this very quirky, very insightful literary ghost as my guide.

DD:  Did you sometimes get the feeling he had taken license with his descriptions? Or was the time gap too big to allow such a thought?

TS: Yes, it was evident in some places that Thoreau wrote about what he wanted to write about and ignored what didn’t interest him. For example, when he climbed Mount Kineo in 1857, there was a substantial resort hotel right at the base of the mountain. Thoreau couldn’t have missed it; I climbed the same trail he had, and could see where the building stood and several of the outbuildings that surrounded it. But Thoreau wanted to emphasize the wildness of the scene at Kineo and Moosehead Lake, and so he simply ignored the existence of the hotel!

DD:  Was there a particular highlight to your retracing of his steps?

TS: Several. Just being out in the most beautiful places in New England was always an incredible high.

DD:   And tell us the worst moment or day as well.

TS: Probably getting caught in that thunderstorm on Katahdin. But that was also one of my favorite moments (in retrospect!) because of the glimpse of pure wildness it gave me. I was completely exhausted by the end of that day, however. I was soaking wet and sore from head to toe – literally.

DD:  If you could meet Thoreau, what would you ask him?

TS: “May I go walking with you?”

© Tom Slayton, 2008