On Walden Pond: How in Travel Writing is the Destruction (and possibly Preservation) of the World

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“In Wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1862 (in the Atlantic Monthly). It’s a familiar quote, oft repeated in essays on conservation and such, and an idea that has gained remarkable currency in the last fifty years or so—especially since Wallace Stegner’s so-called Wilderness Letter, and the subsequent Wilderness Act of 1964—during which half century we have proudly set aside some very large tracts of relatively unspoiled country, but otherwise (and perhaps even in so doing) done our utmost, as an organized species, to eradicate all traces of what was once beyond our control.

Today, Walden Pond, where Thoreau lived from 1845-1847, in a cabin he built himself (now gone, except in the form of a replica built beside the parking lot), sees at least 500,000 visitors a year, not counting the millions who may happen to gaze at the pond and intervening woods through the windows of thirty-two daily MTBA commuter trains between Boston and Fitchburg. “Because of Thoreau’s Legacy,” reads the introductory statement on the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation website, “Walden Pond has been designated a National Historic Landmark and is considered the birthplace of the conservation movement.” In other words, because of a book somebody wrote about the place, the place itself, like so many other well-publicized places, has ever after been scrambling to survive beneath the not-so-light footsteps of its many adoring fans.

“Our ancestors were savages,” wrote Thoreau, and this seemed to him an important part of our national character. “The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable,” he argued. “The founders of every state which has risen to eminence, have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source.” And because we had access to the right dosage of wildness, yes, we rose to a place of eminence in a world already grown fat and complacent on the fruits of human industry: “It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.”

While much evidence points to the fact that we are still very much savages, perhaps not even so deep down, the source of our nourishment and vigor is no longer quite so clear as it might have been in the days of Thoreau (or Romulus and Remus). Stories still abound of children raised by animals. But these days we are more likely to be the ones suckling wolves (the last few remaining), than vice-versa.

A century after Thoreau made world-famous the 102-foot deep glacial kettle-hole pond in what would one day become suburban Boston, Stegner would envision not just the fall of Empire, but also the end of our sanity as creatures. “Something will have gone out of us as a people,” he wrote, “if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.” He imagined us “committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life.” Nowadays, fifty years later, with the iPhone 3G and an ever-increasing supply of apps and free, streaming entertainment, the termite-life seems neither so far fetched, nor, to be honest, quite as unappealing, as it once seemed.

Still, there may be a generation or two to come who will prefer the smell of pine sap and gasoline and dust, the feeling of sore feet and even the occasional sting of a mosquito, to reading John Muir’s predictably florid descriptions of “endurance and ordinary mountain-craft” during his first ascent of Mt. Ritter in 1872, or to an equally vicarious trek up Half Dome via YouTube. It seems likely there will always be some part of us that wishes to discover, by ourselves, some wild place that has not yet “been done” by someone else—or worse, written about in guidebooks and travel blogs. But then again, perhaps, now that I’ve come to think about it, that’s precisely what travel writing—good travel writing—ought to do for us: to show us that in fact the fount of wildness in this world (this world we’ve made and destroyed and then remade again a million times over), is in fact inexhaustible, that for every pond we attempt to describe, to fix in words and thus control, another pond springs up in its place that cannot be described.