Coordinates: Walden Pond

Though I’m red-green color blind and will never understand the obsession with chromatic foliage, I hear Walden Pond is beautiful in the autumn. If you catch it on the later end of October, the drying air heightens the borders of faces or the edges of each watery ripple; everything has the sharp sense of coming into focus. Unfortunately, I went in July.

Last summer, I found myself—a Foster Wallace fanatic studying arts literacy—surrounded by coders and budding biologists in what Harvard had deemed “The Research Village.” That is to say: Mather House, but lacking air conditioning and serving zero meals a day to academically inclined undergraduates in oddly acronymed programs. The upshot of the humid, scientific madhouse was an impressive offering of subsidized weekend excursions in and around Boston, for instance a Saturday day-trip to Walden Pond.

As a self-important Literature concentrator to be, I decided to fashion an immersive aesthetic experience out of what I’d deemed a silly tourist trip. Rather than take the earlier train with the STEM group, I thought I’d embrace “Walden”’s isolationist bent and travel to Concord alone later in the afternoon. Aided by a brand-new copy of the Thoreau’s transcendentalist tome, I planned to commune with the author’s spirit more authentically than other visitors. Free from the incessant gabbing about laboratory hours and Clover vs. Crema, I’d discover anew the value of mental self-reliance. For just a few hours I’d live deliberately and suck the marrow out of life; perhaps I’d discover something essential about Walden pond, “Walden,” or myself.

That afternoon, I boarded the commuter rail dressed in my literati-best: clacking black boots and a matching long-sleeve V-neck, messenger bag swung over my shoulder. The muggy Cambridge summer begged for bare skin, but cargo shorts and Thoreau contemplation seemed incongruous, and I wasn’t willing to surrender my self-indulgent image for bodily comfort.

Walden Pond, it turns out, is a 30-minute walk from Concord, so I soon found myself trudging hazily through the afternoon’s gathering heat, boots far from clicking on the muddy terrain off to the side of a 45-mph highway. Cars honked at the poor struggling pants-wearer, flies gathering around my pooling sweat until I finally arrived at the green patch on my Google Map that denoted the Walden enclosure. I may have been damp, but I was far from defeated—it was time to get away from the modern automobile abomination and walk amidst the trees.

Five minutes into the thicket, the world growing hazier, I found myself unable to locate a clear path toward the pond and no more free of flies and heat. “I can do this, I can still break through this thicket and find the pond,” I mumbled to myself reassuringly. But I was rapidly losing my patience with both wandering and nature, so I picked up the walking pace and looked at my phone for geographical guidance. No service. My eyes darted, my swatting hands lost their precision, and then I lost my mind.

“Nature fucking SUCKS,” I screamed as I sprinted through swatting branches and thick insectile clouds. My remaining visions of a philosophizing Thoreau reclined by the lake had vanished, replaced instead by shots of Snow White in the animation’s nightmarish forest scene—the one where her hysteria transfigures the foliage into the worst 90-second hallucinogenic trip ever caught on camera. Now thoroughly drenched in perspiration, running aimlessly through the woods, and still carrying a messenger bag full of literature, I felt I’d become a bad trip too. “I hate this. I hate nature. Thoreau was out of his mind,” I shrieked, quickly degenerating into a King Lunar lunatic-in-the-wild caricature.

And then, just like in “Snow White,” it was over—I broke through a line of trees and reached my glorious destination, the paradise I’d truly been seeking. I was back on the highway. Without thinking twice, I turned my back on deliberate living and stomped back to Concord, where I ordered a latte and sat down to read “Walden” in an air-conditioned fly-free cafe. I have still never been to the pond.

Before that day, I’d always thought that accessing nature was a matter of mindset, that the only barrier to transcendence was caring about Q scores and comps. All one had to do was approach the world with a more authentic and spiritual intention. Literature—and I suppose dressing like those who read literature—offered something eternal in this respect: a Thoreau-paved path to immersion and deliberate living.

Bugs, however, turn out to be the real barrier, and mindset matters less than appropriate garb. Though we’re apt to quote its aestheticizing passages, “Walden” often reads as a pragmatic, rather boring wilderness guide. It’s filled with inventories of how much wood Thoreau burned and advice on how best to construct lodgings for the winter: a very different sort of life reduced “to its lowest terms” than literati parrots like myself tend to reconstruct.

Then there’s the fact that Thoreau never even lived the deliberate, immersive lifestyle he presents in “Walden.” He often walked into Concord for a drink or meal, and he maintained vibrant ties to friends and communities outside of his secluded environment. Like me, he romanticized the harshness of the woods, using language and performance to coat what’s mostly a practical challenge of staying warm and well-fed. His ability to leave nature, in many ways, was the very thing that let him reflect on it so seductively. Sitting in that Concord café with skepticism and soy milk foamed over espresso, I realized I’d rather read about the woods than walk through them. Maybe I wasn’t too far from Thoreau’s “Walden” after all.