He grew up only ten miles from Concord, and after reading a selection from Thoreau’s Walden, he borrowed the family car and visited the replica of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond. The solitude appealed to him, as did the notion that there was wisdom to be found in the study of nature. He also liked Thoreau’s ideas about work, which aligned nicely with the way a lot of young people saw the world in the late 1960s.
