North to Katahdin

by Eric Pinder

When Thoreau stood on the flank of Maine’s Mt. Katahdin 1846, he was one of a handful of Americans who had ventured so deeply into the wilderness for the mere sake of seeing what was there. Today, hundreds of thousands of people—some with cell phones and GPS—stand where Thoreau did. For some, Katahdin is the long-awaited terminus of the Appalachian Trail, the 2,160-mile footpath from Georgia to Maine. For others, Maine’s highest peak and the state park surrounding it are the closest they can come to wilderness—the Glacier National Park of the east. In North to Katahdin, Eric Pinder uses Katahdin as his laboratory to explore what draws people to the mountains and whether hikers today are having remotely the same experience as did Thoreau. Are they even trying to? And if wilderness means "an absence of humanity," what do we call it when it’s filled with people? Pinder’s interviews with hikers and accounts of his own treks, humorous and witty, filled with knowledge about the region’s lore, geology, and weather, create a vivid portrait of wilderness and its denizens.

200 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 2005

About the author

Eric Pinder lives in rural New Hampshire, where he enjoys the outdoors and sometimes shares the nearest wild blueberry patch with a foraging bear. His books for children include If All the Animals Came Inside and Cat in the Clouds. He teaches creative writing at the new Hampshire Institute of Art and earned his M.F.A. in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Reviews

[Brian]

Starting to read up on Katahdin and Baxter State Park in preparation for a visit. Found this book and was initially turned off by the book jacket that seemed to glorify the pure old days when Thoreau visited the mountain and lament the present era where regular old riff raff can drive to the park and hike in during a day. But I found the book to be refreshing take on this topic with what I thought was a pretty well balanced treatment of the benefits and harms of increasing public access to "wild" places. It was also refreshing to read about Thoreau carelessly starting wild fires on the mountain and trompsing on top of delicate alpine zone vegetation, etc., and seeing that its not just modern day yokels who do it. The author addresses these topics while relating his stories of hiking various trails on and around the mountain which makes for interesting reading.

[Veronica]

Beautiful musings--from experiences and conversations--on what wilderness is, why we go there, and how to interact with it responsibly.

[Emily]

Sweet mountain musings & an ode to the new england wilderness

[Foster]

This is a difficult book to describe. From the title I expected it to be about climbing Maine's Mt. Katahdin, but it's not really about that. From the jacket blurb, I expected it to be about the Appalachian Trail, which has its northern terminus on Katahdin's summit. But even though both the moutain and the trail are mentioned throughout the book, Pinder is really writing about the human relationship with wilderness and nature. This book asks the philosophical question: "Why do we want to climb mountains or hike through forests?"

I really enjoyed this book, for a number of reasons. First, I agree with Pinder's stance on just about everything, and I think he expresses a healthy dose of realism regarding our relationship with nature. "Wilderness is too often defined as an absence of humanity. A farm is not a wilderness because its land is tamed by the farmer...Wilderness has become a fetish for people dissatisfied with the smog of cities...We belong to the wilderness, they say, not the other way round."

That quote reminded me of a hiker I encountered in Sequoia National Park. On this particular trail, it seemed like I saw deer at the corner of every switchback. On the way down, I looked up at a clearing to see two deer grazing. They briefly raised their heads to look at me, before returning to the grasses. As I watched them, I was startled by a sound on the trail behind me (I thought I had maybe wandered between a buck and his females). I spun around to see a hiker, decked out in pink and blue spandex, pounding two big sticks on the ground as she walked. I said "Sorry, I didn't know if it was you or the deer that I was hearing." She replied loudly "Oh, can you see deer here?" Then she spotted the deer as they bounded through the woods at the sound of her voice. I thought it more than a bit sad that she had driven all the way up into the mountains, probably spending the night, just to march up and down a dusty trail, not looking in any direction.

Pinder may have an explanation for this kind of behavior: "Our guilt in harming the environment makes us try to exclude ourselves from it. This is a mistake. If we define wilderness as the complete absence of people, then there is no wilderness left in the contiguous United States."

My favorite part of the book is when Pinder describes what it is like to be an outsider living in the north woods, something my family experienced first hand when we moved to central New Hampshire. "I feel alien in northern Maine. I don't belong to this clan, cannot belong, even though I come from an equally rural - perhaps more rural - region not far away." Where is he from? Labrador? Newfoundland maybe? No, New York State! Barely a couple of hundred miles away, and identical in almost every aspect! Yet people still treat him like an "alien."

"Even the children from far away...are still considered strangers, no matter if they were born in Maine and never once set foot outside. They bear the burden of their parent's blood. Another native chimes in: "If a cat has kittens in an oven, do you call them biscuits?"" Reading this was therapeutic for me, as it confirms a suspicion I have had since leaving New Hampshire (and particularly since leaving New England) that those years spent in miserable loneliness in New Hampshire wasn't about me - it was about them.

"Visitor is just a kinder word for stranger...Ordinarily, people are visitors while they pay and strangers once the door closes behind them." As they say in NH, thank you for visiting, now go home.

Pinder never really provides a straight-on answer to the question of why we hike, but his book is a wonderful journey through all the experiences and thoughts that are linked to that question. If you've ever asked it yourself - read this book.

[Holly]

This is one of the books I'll be using in my class this semester - I've decided to give students a choice in what they read, instead of requiring everyone to read the same book (I used Into Thin Air the past two semesters). It's about Baxter State Park (ME) and Katahdin, which is the destination for northbound Appalachian Trail thru-hikers.

[Nancy Noyes-ward]

Not what I expected, but a great read. What I thought, from the jacket notes, was a book specific to Mt. Katahdin as the northern terminus AT, then more general writing about the trail. The author explores our relationship with wilderness. Do read it.

[Budd]

A book that approaches the question of what is wilderness and are the people that try to enjoy it running it.