Being Henry David - By Cal Armistead Page 0,60

in front of me, exhausted more from the war zone in my head than the work.

“You okay, Hank?”

I shrug. “Just need to sit for a while.”

So I do, just listening to the clock in the library, to Thomas typing on his keyboard, absorbing the quiet, the peacefulness of this particular moment in time, this now.

“I wish you’d been right,” I say after a while.

“About what?”

“About me being Thoreau reincarnated,” I say.

Thomas grins at me. “Me too. I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask you.”

I lean back in the chair, gaze over at the statue of Thoreau near Thomas’s desk. “Do you really think somebody could live like him today?”

“Sure. People do it all the time. There are people in the northwest, like in Montana, living off the grid right now. Of course there’s a lot more grid these days than when Thoreau was around.”

“There’s no way a reincarnated Thoreau would choose to live at Walden Pond now,” I say. “Just the sound of the traffic on Route Two would drive him crazy.”

“You got that right.”

“So if Henry lived today, where would he go?”

Thomas grins at me like he’s been hoping forever for someone to ask that very question. “This won’t surprise you, but I’ve given that a lot of thought. And I have the answer for you.”

“I thought you might.”

He gets up and goes over to a nearby shelf. Peers at the titles through his glasses, then pulls one of the books out and hands it to me.

I look down at the title, The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau.

“Maine,” says Thomas. “It’s a huge state, and there are still thousands of acres that are real wilderness.”

“He was there?”

“Yep, he took several trips up there, when a lot of it was still unmapped and uncharted. It might have been a bit much for Henry back then. Here. Listen to this.” Peering through his glasses, he licks a finger and starts flipping through the book.

He clears his throat, reads in a hushed, library-worthy, but dramatic voice: “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, —that my body might, —but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! —Think of our life in nature, —daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, —rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”

I take this in, snort out a little laugh. “Wow. Sounds like Henry was freaked.”

“Definitely. He wrote this when he was near the summit of Mount Katahdin, the highest point in Maine. We’re talking true wilderness, the tail end of the Appalachian Trail, the real deal. Concord was a luxury vacation in the Bahamas compared to this.”

I imagine Thoreau standing on this mountaintop in Maine, not the cocky, cranky guy from Concord I’ve gotten to know, but someone out of place, completely amazed by his surroundings. Scared and humbled by his own existence on the planet.

“I keep meaning to go to Maine, retrace Thoreau’s steps, with a canoe and camping gear. I even went out and bought a tent and backpack but never got around to going. One of these days.” He flips through the book, gazes at pictures of sweeping vistas from the top of Mount Katahdin. “You know, sometimes I wonder if it bugged him that he never actually reached the summit. He was close, and at the time he thought he made it. I guess that’s what’s important.” Thomas shrugs. “Anyway, guess we’ll never know.” He hands the book to me. “Here, read it. A modern-day Thoreau could kick ass in the Maine woods.”

I run my fingers over the picture on the cover, thinking of woods and waterfalls and acres of true wildness far away from the sounds of a highway or a train or best of all, people.

15

Hiking the Appalachian Trail—all 2,181 miles of it, from Georgia to Maine—was something my Dad and I used to talk about all the time. It was like all our other camping trips were just training runs for the real thing, the ultimate hike we would take. Someday.

This is probably one of my last nights in Concord, and I’m sitting on a moss-covered tree trunk on the banks of Walden Pond. I watch the purple and pink of