The Maine Woods

Henry David Thoreau

Description

Posthumously published in 1864, The Maine Woods depicts Henry David Thoreau’s experiences in the forests of Maine, and expands on the author’s transcendental theories on the relation of humanity to Nature. On Mount Katahdin, he faces a primal, untamed Nature. Katahdin is a place “not even scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world.” In Maine he comes in contact with “rocks, trees, wind and solid earth” as though he were witness to the creation itself. Of equal importance, The Maine Woods depicts Thoreau’s contact with the American Indians and depicts his tribal education of learning the language, customs, and mores of the Penobscot people. Thoreau attempts to learn and speak the Abenaki language and becomes fascinated with its direct translation of natural phenomena as in the word sebamook—a river estuary that never
loses its water despite having an outlet because it also has an inlet. The Maine Woods illustrates the author’s deeper understanding of the complexities of the primal wilderness of
uplifted rocky summits in Maine and provides the reader with the pungent aroma of balsam firs, black spruce, mosses, and ferns as only Thoreau could. This new, redesigned edition features an insightful foreword by Thoreau scholar Richard F. Fleck.
On the 31st of August, 1846, I left Concord in Massachusetts for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine, by way of the railroad and steamboat, intending to accompany a relative of mine, engaged in the lumber trade in Bangor, as far as a dam on the west branch of the Penobscot, in which property he was interested. From this place, which is about one hundred miles by the river above Bangor, thirty miles from the Houlton military road, and five miles beyond the last log-hut, I proposed to make excursions to Mount Ktaadn, the second highest mountain in New England, about thirty miles distant, and to some of the lakes of the Penobscot, either alone or with such company as I might pick up there. It is unusual to find a camp so far in the woods at that season, when lumbering operations have ceased, and I was glad to avail myself of the circumstance of a gang of men being employed there at that time in repairing the injuries caused by the great freshet in the spring. The mountain may be approached more easily and directly on horseback and on foot from the northeast side, by the Aroostook road, and the Wassataquoik River; but in that case you see much less of the wilderness, none of the glorious river and lake scenery, and have no experience of the batteau and the boatman’s life. I was fortunate also in the season of the year, for in the summer myriads of black flies, mosquitoes, and midges, or, as the Indians call them, “no-see-ems,” make traveling in the woods almost impossible; but now their reign was nearly over.
Ktaadn, whose name is an Indian word signifying highest land, was first ascended by white men in 1804. It was visited by Professor J. W. Bailey of West Point in 1836; by Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the State Geologist, in 1837; and by two young men from Boston in 1845. All these have given accounts of their expeditions. Since I was there, two or three other parties have made the excursion, and told their stories. Besides these, very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, and it will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way. The mountainous region of the State of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the
head of the Aroostook River, and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel
in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward.
The next forenoon, Tuesday, September 1, I started with my companion in a buggy from Bangor for “up river,” expecting to be over-taken the next day night at Mattawamkeag Point, some sixty miles off, by two more Bangoreans, who had decided to join us in a trip to the mountain. We had each a knapsack or bag filled with such clothing and articles as
were indispensable, and my companion carried his gun.
FOREWORD:
“DEEP IN THE WOODS WITH
HENRY THOREAU” by Richard F. Fleck
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
KTAADN
CHESUNCOOK
THE ALLEOASH AND EAST BRANCH
APPENDIX
I. Trees
II. Flowers and Shrubs
III. List of Plants
IV. List of Birds
V. Quadrupeds
VI. Outfit for an Excursion
VII. A List of Indian Words

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Essays
• Sciences et techniques
• Travel writing
• Travel
• Maine
• Nature
• Henry David Thoreau
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780882409276
• Langue: English

Extrait

T HE L ITERARY N ATURALIST S ERIES
THE M AINE W OODS
H ENRY D AVID T HOREAU
Foreword by
R ICHARD F RANCIS F LECK
Foreword 2013 by Richard Francis Fleck
All rights reserved. No part of the copyrighted material may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862.
The Maine woods / Henry David Thoreau ; [foreword by] Richard Francis Fleck.
pages cm. - (The literary naturalist series)
Reprint. Originally published: Boston : Ticknor and Fields, 1864.
ISBN 978-0-88240-959-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-88240-927-6 (e-book)
ISBN 978-0-88240-928-3 (hardbound)
1. Piscataquis County (Me.)-Description and travel. 2. Maine-Description and travel. 3. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862-Travel-Maine. 4. Authors, American- 19th century-Biography. I. Title.
F27.P5T43 2014
974.1'25-dc23
2013036262
Design by Vicki Knapton
Cover photo iStockphoto.com/PaulTessier
Map courtesy of Maine Woods Forever: thoreauwabanakitrail.org
WestWinds Press
An imprint of

P.O. Box 56118
Portland, OR 97238-6118
503-254-5591
www.graphicartsbooks.com
CONTENTS

FOREWORD : Henry David Thoreau s
The Maine Woods by Richard F. Fleck
KTAADN
CHESUNCOOK
THE ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH
APPENDIX
I. Trees
II. Flowers and Shrubs
III. List of Plants
IV. List of Birds
V. Quadrupeds
VI. Outfit for an Excursion
VII. A List of Indian Words
FOREWORD

The maine woods were and are a breeding ground for mysticism, AS MUCH SO AS THE HIMALAYAS, THE AMAZON, or the Plains of Serengeti. I think it must be the piercing voice of the white-throated sparrow or the cry of the loon that makes the damp and mossy coniferous woods of Maine so conducive to mysticism. Or perhaps it is the pagoda-like white pine reflected on clear waters of an unnamed pond. Or then again it might be the ghost of Henry Thoreau seen faintly through the flickering flames of a north woods campfire.
Fifty years ago, I camped with some companions at Chimney Pond before our first ascent of Mount Katahdin. It was late August, and the nighttime sky throbbed with colored threads of northern lights. We had difficulty closing our eyes to get some sleep. And yet seemingly only moments later, we rolled up our sleeping bags all covered with hoarfrost at 5 a.m. and, like French Jesuits of old, followed a trail through a thick black spruce forest. The high-rising exposed granite of Baxter Peak loomed above us; if our eyes focused correctly, we thought we saw a skein of fresh snow on the summit. The spruce and aspen around us seemed so utterly still and silent!
Before long we had worked our way through Katahdin s tree line of matted dwarf spruce; sometimes we d sink up to our knees trying to get through it, and our boots got soaked in rivulets of spring water that trickled under the dense matting. With each ten or fifteen feet gained, we could see more and more of the boreal forests of northern Maine, giving off an aroma like incense at some Buddhist temple in Kyoto or Nara. And when our feet touched nothing but naked granite, we began to see distant Moosehead Lake and cow-moose-shaped Mount Kineo, mythologized by the Penobscot Indians. We paused to take a few swallows of icy spring water gushing out of a crevice; the sudden chill made our teeth hurt. Though the sky remained bright and sunny, a chill wind drilled through us up here four thousand feet above the relatively flat terrain around Katahdin s base.
Finally we stood on the rugged and spiny summit of Mount Katahdin, over five thousand feet tall, and peered down sheer granite cliffs into the glacial cirque of Chimney Pond. In the far distance we could make out the bright silver ribbon of the Saint Lawrence River in Canada. We hadn t expected to see such sweeping alpine terrain east of the Mississippi, but wild and sweeping it was! As clouds gathered and poured over Katahdin s Knife edge Ridge to the east, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, helping preserve the tiny crests of fresh snow between the rocks. Dense clouds seemed to be born at our very feet. We elected to descend. Thoreau, a hundred years earlier, called a rocky perch below the summit an unfinished part of the globe that robbed him of his divine faculties. In a sense, all of us standing there could have agreed with him in that the flood of sensations was too quick, too vast to be absorbed in a reasonable period of time. This one day s climb entered our spirit s core in ways that only the spirit could decipher. Thoreau s book serves as a guideline to appreciating and understanding truly wild Nature and foreshadows writers like John Muir, Aldo Leopold, edward Abbey, and Farley Mowat.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is most well known for Walden (1854) and his shorter essay Resistance to Civil Government, better known as Civil Disobedience (1849), but The Maine Woods published two years after his death in 1864 certainly deserves the serious consideration of contemporary readers whose interests lie in natural history. The work consists of three essays that are based on his three excursions into the boreal forests and mountains of Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857. These three excursions furnished Thoreau with a deeper understanding of true wilderness as well as of Native American culture.
While he was still conducting his transcendental experiment of solitary living along the shores of Walden Pond not far from Concord or Boston, he made his first extended trip to Maine some four hundred miles to the northeast. As he wrote, the Wild or unsettled portion [of Maine] is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all counts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward. In Maine he encountered vast tracts of wilderness consisting of wild rivers, extremely rugged terrain including Mount Katahdin rising a mile above the sea, and forest-lined glacial lakes such as Moosehead Lake over forty miles long. He observed moose, black bears, and gray wolves and endured fierce attacks of north-woods mosquitoes influencing his realistic, not romantic, concept of Nature.
Of equal importance, Thoreau became acquainted with Abenaki Indians for the first time. Two Indians, Joseph Aitteon and Joseph Polis, introduced Thoreau to Native American ways of wilderness survival and taught him the Penobscot dialect of the Abenaki language. Thoreau had been fascinated with Native American cultures since his boyhood days and began taking notes on tribal cultures in his extensive Indian Notebooks (1846-1861). He emulated their closeness to the natural world and their uniquely simple lifestyle. In Maine his already strong admiration for the American Indian would be, for the most part, further enhanced by his living in the wilderness for a short but significant period of time with Joseph Aitteon in 1853 and Joseph Polis in 1857.
Perhaps the reader should first acquaint himself with Walden before reading The Maine Woods for he will see that the north-woods experiences philosophically strengthened, in many ways, Thoreau s Walden Pond experiment. At Walden, Thoreau attempted to conduct some transcendental business by observing unifying principles that link man to nature. As Thoreau wrote in Walden, what is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of a human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven?
Maine proved to be a forceful link with wild nature-so wild that at first he was confounded and frightened by it. After he climbed the slopes of Mount Katahdin (which Thoreau spells in the old way Ktaadn ), he was confronted with a new kind of man-nature relationship. He described his feelings as follows:
But here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world . . . I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me . . . What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!-think of our life in nature,-daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,-rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?
How different from the passage in Walden: What is man but a mass of thawing clay ! In Maine Thoreau is confronted with a titanic nature which is frightening. But he transcends this fear with a philosophical inquiry into the nature of Nature. If the very atoms of Nature are at first shocking, they compensate by giving a new look at humankind which is just as much a part of nature as jagged rocks and dark and tangled forests. Thoreau is led from solid earth and actual world to contact and the questions Who are we? Where are we? Such a metaphysical train of thought makes him stand in as much awe of his own body as of Mount Katahdin itself! What God has used in the creation of the surface of a star, He has also used in the making of the human body. One could say that in Maine Thoreau developed, long before einstein, a metaphysical theory of relativity. From such a philosophical stance, he could return to Maine several more times to experience new contacts, new senses in the wilderness of northern Maine s Chesuncook and Allegash areas.
As for the natives of the wilderness, Thoreau began to understand their culture by first learning their language. The Penobscot tongue brought Thoreau to the very ground as its sounds were those of nature pure and un-synthesized by civilized man. In a sense the Penobscot language was like the summit of Mount Katahdin, vast, and at first incomprehensible and unintelligible. But as Th