A review by rponzo
The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau

3.0

This book covers three trips to Maine in the 1840s and 1850s. The first piece is about going to “Mt. Ktaadn”. He describes the journey, which is interesting enough, but there is not a lot of plot. They venture further and further into the wild, after a few remote farms, it is just logging camps which operate in the winter. One crazy thing is that there was a plethora of butter and the hiking crew rubbed it into their boots every night.


The next piece is a river trip, canoes, fishing, fires. here are still Indians in the region, but they are the remnants of the native civilization and Mr. Thoureau could not be accused of romanticizing them. He is not the tree hugger you would think, as much as he enjoys nature, and doesn’t really like to hunt, he certainly eats meat and likes to build roaring fires. It makes me consider my camping and hiking adventures. I think that since life in the 1840s were closer to camping life than now, why would you really want to rough it? There was no running water at Walden, so isn’t the lifestyle primitive enough? This is when I realize nothing ever changes and grumpy humans are always complaining about cities, no matter what the century.

By the last part, I was kind of losing interest and skipped on ahead to Walden, always enjoyable and quite amusing at points.