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Walking Towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place
An exploration of sense of place, what it means, how it developed, and why it matters. Based on an eighteenth-century literary device in which a group of friends undertake a walking tour and discuss a certain subject, this wide-ranging story emerges from the author s fifteen-mile bushwhack through woods, backyards, and marshes from a hilltop in Westford, Massachusetts, to the town of Concord, Massachusetts trespassing all along the way. A mock epic, complete with encounters with armed mercenaries and vicious dogs, the book covers all the aspects of place art, literature, myth, and even music.
316 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1995
3 people are currently reading
67 people want to read
About the author
John Hanson Mitchell
31 books10 followersAuthor of six books dealing with the experince of place and natural history. Most recent book is The Paradise of al These Parts: A natural history of Boston (Beacon Press 2008).
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 14, 2017
My moment with Thoreau this year came in the summer when I picked up a book published two decades ago that featured "Walden" in the title -- "Walking Toward Walden" by John Hanson Mitchell -- and attempted to evoke not only what Thoreau's neighborhood was like back when he used to take daily walks in the woods outside of Concord, but also what it is like today -- along with a fair representation of what the Concord region was like before Europeans arrived in North America and in all the intervening eras since.
Here is Mitchell's take on the centrality of Concord and its role in Thoreau's universe. “Drawn by the charismatic Ralph Waldo Emerson, who returned to his ancestral territory to live in 1834, other writers or thinkers began to visit or even settle in Concord so that by 1840, this small satellite of Cambridge and Boston had become the American center of intellectual activity."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who referred to Concord as “Eden,” moved there in 1842, Bronson Alcott in 1848. Louisa May Alcott made the place a setting for “Little Women,” a pioneering publishing success. The poet Ellery Channing dwelled there. Feminist educator Margaret Fuller visited often to help prime the Transcendentalist pump.
As for our famous prophet of simple living and love of nature, Mitchell describes him as "the sometime schoolteacher, pencil maker, surveyor and handyman named Henry Thoreau, whose oeuvre was all but unread until after his death in 1862.”
Books about Thoreau are many. Books about walking the land are rare.
When Mitchell and his two eccentrically learned friends and traveling companions set out to walk from Westford, Mass. to Concord entirely through undeveloped land -- in one day -- the literary adventure goes forward but also backwards, with many frequent side trips into the major interests of the three hikers, their previous ventures together, and some references to their separate adventures as well. One of his companions knows everything about birds. The other knows -- almost everything -- about Native Americans.
Given that range, the book hangs together because of its concentration on to the unifying concept that was also at the center of Thoreau's life and thinking, namely "the land."
The single-day trek through land preservers, near impassable wetlands, over high bridges, through the backyards of new housing developments, and along dirt paths that once served long-gone farmsteads succeeds in evoking a sense, however speculative, of what walking the land meant for Thoreau. We also learn what our contemporary three-some discover about much-changed, much varied, and still-changing Concord region's landscape. But even Thoreau was "passing through time" -- that's the way I've decided to think about it -- when he walked the surrounds of beloved mid-19th century "Transcendentalist" Concord because the changes wrought by the European civilization planted there were already evident.
Altogether the book is informative, well written, and resplendent with the author's love for his subject -- rather subjects --Concord, Thoreau's embrace of the natural world, American history, and the changing landscape we all make our homes in.
Here is Mitchell's take on the centrality of Concord and its role in Thoreau's universe. “Drawn by the charismatic Ralph Waldo Emerson, who returned to his ancestral territory to live in 1834, other writers or thinkers began to visit or even settle in Concord so that by 1840, this small satellite of Cambridge and Boston had become the American center of intellectual activity."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who referred to Concord as “Eden,” moved there in 1842, Bronson Alcott in 1848. Louisa May Alcott made the place a setting for “Little Women,” a pioneering publishing success. The poet Ellery Channing dwelled there. Feminist educator Margaret Fuller visited often to help prime the Transcendentalist pump.
As for our famous prophet of simple living and love of nature, Mitchell describes him as "the sometime schoolteacher, pencil maker, surveyor and handyman named Henry Thoreau, whose oeuvre was all but unread until after his death in 1862.”
Books about Thoreau are many. Books about walking the land are rare.
When Mitchell and his two eccentrically learned friends and traveling companions set out to walk from Westford, Mass. to Concord entirely through undeveloped land -- in one day -- the literary adventure goes forward but also backwards, with many frequent side trips into the major interests of the three hikers, their previous ventures together, and some references to their separate adventures as well. One of his companions knows everything about birds. The other knows -- almost everything -- about Native Americans.
Given that range, the book hangs together because of its concentration on to the unifying concept that was also at the center of Thoreau's life and thinking, namely "the land."
The single-day trek through land preservers, near impassable wetlands, over high bridges, through the backyards of new housing developments, and along dirt paths that once served long-gone farmsteads succeeds in evoking a sense, however speculative, of what walking the land meant for Thoreau. We also learn what our contemporary three-some discover about much-changed, much varied, and still-changing Concord region's landscape. But even Thoreau was "passing through time" -- that's the way I've decided to think about it -- when he walked the surrounds of beloved mid-19th century "Transcendentalist" Concord because the changes wrought by the European civilization planted there were already evident.
Altogether the book is informative, well written, and resplendent with the author's love for his subject -- rather subjects --Concord, Thoreau's embrace of the natural world, American history, and the changing landscape we all make our homes in.
July 30, 2023
The author and two friends hike more than a dozen miles from Westford to Concord, Massachusetts, avoiding paved civilization in order to experience early America. Along the way there are narratives and myths, lots of them. Each story is an account of the place where they are, not the least of which is Henry David Thoreau's time at Walden Pond. It is an engaging journey.
January 13, 2017
“There never was a more passionate pilgrim, a deeper explorer of the wilderness of the nearby than Henry Thoreau,” says John Hanson Mitchell in this delightful account of a “saunter,” as he calls his hike from Westford, Massachusetts to Concord. Mitchell, a naturalist, is himself an “explorer of the wilderness of the nearby”—three of his books explore one square mile in eastern Massachusetts—and in this excursion he pays homage to Thoreau and the other “luminaries” of Concord as well as to Concord itself.
Mitchell believes strongly in the significance of place, and Concord, he argues, is a special place in America: a place where for five thousand years Native Americans would congregate, where the American war of independence started, where American literature first flourished, and where the first book “devoted entirely to the exploration of the idea of place” was written.
The pilgrimage Mitchell undertakes, accompanied by two adventurous friends he has traveled with before, consists of a 16 mile hike that avoids all roads. The trio’s aim is to reach their destination through a 17th-century landscape, bushwhacking their way “through woodlots, old fields, farms, backyards, swamps, and streambeds.” As pilgrimages go, this one is hardly extreme—it can’t compare with strenuous journeys to Mecca or Compostela. But their journey evokes the tough landscape that early Europeans encountered, terrain we have mostly lost and forgotten as we’ve farmed and settled, built developments and roads. And in fact the going is hard: they get lost, wet, stuck by brambles, mussed up, and, by the end of the long day, pretty tired.
As they walk, Mitchell reflects digressively: on birds (one of his companions is a dedicated birdwatcher); on Native American history (the other companion is a basket maker and authority on Native American basketry); on Florida and Ponce de Leon’s quest for the fountain of youth (the focus of a previous trip the three took); and of course on landscape, territoriality, and place—the good aspects, such as community, and the bad, including xenophobia and war. An engrossing thread is the American Revolution: as they cross the routes the Minutemen took as they converged on Concord to confront the British, Mitchell provides a vivid context for the soldiers and the war.
The digressions in the book reflect the indirect nature of the hikers’ “saunter,” and the quirks of his companions and the colorful locals the group meets add a warm, personal dimension to an enlightening adventure. Although I’ve been to Concord many times—I live in nearby Cambridge—reading this book, I realized how little I know the place. Mitchell is a persuasive advocate of close travel, and an excellent guide, encouraging all of us to open our eyes. You needn’t travel far to see a complex new world.
Mitchell believes strongly in the significance of place, and Concord, he argues, is a special place in America: a place where for five thousand years Native Americans would congregate, where the American war of independence started, where American literature first flourished, and where the first book “devoted entirely to the exploration of the idea of place” was written.
The pilgrimage Mitchell undertakes, accompanied by two adventurous friends he has traveled with before, consists of a 16 mile hike that avoids all roads. The trio’s aim is to reach their destination through a 17th-century landscape, bushwhacking their way “through woodlots, old fields, farms, backyards, swamps, and streambeds.” As pilgrimages go, this one is hardly extreme—it can’t compare with strenuous journeys to Mecca or Compostela. But their journey evokes the tough landscape that early Europeans encountered, terrain we have mostly lost and forgotten as we’ve farmed and settled, built developments and roads. And in fact the going is hard: they get lost, wet, stuck by brambles, mussed up, and, by the end of the long day, pretty tired.
As they walk, Mitchell reflects digressively: on birds (one of his companions is a dedicated birdwatcher); on Native American history (the other companion is a basket maker and authority on Native American basketry); on Florida and Ponce de Leon’s quest for the fountain of youth (the focus of a previous trip the three took); and of course on landscape, territoriality, and place—the good aspects, such as community, and the bad, including xenophobia and war. An engrossing thread is the American Revolution: as they cross the routes the Minutemen took as they converged on Concord to confront the British, Mitchell provides a vivid context for the soldiers and the war.
The digressions in the book reflect the indirect nature of the hikers’ “saunter,” and the quirks of his companions and the colorful locals the group meets add a warm, personal dimension to an enlightening adventure. Although I’ve been to Concord many times—I live in nearby Cambridge—reading this book, I realized how little I know the place. Mitchell is a persuasive advocate of close travel, and an excellent guide, encouraging all of us to open our eyes. You needn’t travel far to see a complex new world.
August 17, 2017
didn't finish, some interesting historical tidbits, but the "modern day pilgrimage" itslef is boring and should not share any relation to Thoreau
April 24, 2023
History and adventure intermingled
This is my kind of book. Plenty of history and details about the little wilderness remaining around the original American small town of Concord, Massachusetts. I loved it and now plan to read more Thoreau.
This is my kind of book. Plenty of history and details about the little wilderness remaining around the original American small town of Concord, Massachusetts. I loved it and now plan to read more Thoreau.
October 18, 2015
This is one of those books that you fall in stride with the language a few pages in, and as much as some of us are too familiar with going on our own pilgrimage, subsequently realizing that there are places in this world that make us feel that this is where we belong. However, the author also tried to include a number of historical information that seemed more like insertions to me instead of using them to help move the narrative forward. I'm not sure how to feel about one of the characters being a Hopi to sort of gauge the discussions which followed. Another nice touch that was used as one of the connecting thread was the author mapping out places in Concord that Thoreau used to frequent and a domino effect of his exploration, because of the similarity to other writers who also found their own "spot on earth" which is perhaps one of the most crucial elements in being able to find your center, and just write. In some cases, I found the related myths and stories from cultures such as Greek and Mexican to show how the notion of a "sense of place" is an encompassing phenomenon and a persisting sentiment.
January 13, 2009
The title alone was enough to lure me in. Only three words, but both “walking” and “Walden” are two of my undeclared passions.
Subtitled, “A Pilgrimage in Search of Place,” the author takes a 15-mile walk from an ancient burial site to the tomb of Henry David Thoreau along a New England road once favored by the Transcendentalists. What better place to walk and ponder? Along the way, he explores the life of Thoreau and the sense of place that draws artists and writers to certain beloved locations. “There never was a more passionate pilgrim, a deeper explorer of the wilderness of the nearby than Henry Thoreau. Like a devout Hebrew, his whole life was a pilgrimage,” Mitchell writes.
But “devotion to place” is just one of the timeless themes he explores. Simply a grand, grand book. Find it.
Subtitled, “A Pilgrimage in Search of Place,” the author takes a 15-mile walk from an ancient burial site to the tomb of Henry David Thoreau along a New England road once favored by the Transcendentalists. What better place to walk and ponder? Along the way, he explores the life of Thoreau and the sense of place that draws artists and writers to certain beloved locations. “There never was a more passionate pilgrim, a deeper explorer of the wilderness of the nearby than Henry Thoreau. Like a devout Hebrew, his whole life was a pilgrimage,” Mitchell writes.
But “devotion to place” is just one of the timeless themes he explores. Simply a grand, grand book. Find it.
August 22, 2009
The author and friends attempt to follow the 18thc routes and avoid the modern world as much as possible. As they hike they discuss nature, philosophy, mysticism and the history of the places they go as well as "place" as a concept. I love this kind of rambling intellectual discussion that ties so much stuff together- *connections*. I made 4.5 pages of notes in my reading journal and vowed to read the author's Living at the End of Time before the end of my time.
October 15, 2009
This is the second book of the (well, my) local natural world that I have read by Mitchell and I am becoming a fan. His casual style and the way he packs (nearly irrelevent) information into his narrative is endearing. This particular work is a loosely-woven tale of seeking to regain colonial-era woods and meadows from what has become one of hte more congested areas of the northeastern United States. The literati of the Athaneum would be pleased with this addition to the local canon.
January 4, 2017
I read this book just after reading Following The Sun and I found too many repeats of the material from that book. The nature of the book is disjointed and at times much to do about too many repetitive details of the trees and birds. Many interesting historical details especially about Concord and Ponce de Leon.
July 30, 2021
This has an interesting, conversational, anecdotal style. It's let down perhaps by its refusal to talk more about Concord history, Thoreau or Walden, or connect them more clearly to its other anecdotes about myths, pilgrimages and explorers - although perhaps if he had, that could have got heavy handed.
September 11, 2009
Non-fiction narrative of the journey to Concord from Wesst of I495 through the woods. Incorporated history of New England. Interesting especially since I was living in Massachusetts at the time.
Want to read
September 29, 2010NO
April 26, 2013
Not my cup of tea. I respect the authors writing but this one just did not work for me. Too much digression.
Read
July 17, 2015I'm not going to rate or review this book because it's too close to my scholarly interest, and Goodreads is not the place for that.
February 6, 2016
huh. I enjoyed the read, though I am still wondering at the title. This is a very rambling account of a walk towards Concord, Massachusetts.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews