SIX WALKS

A memoir about walking in Thoreau’s path.

Shattuck, artist and director of Maine’s Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency program, channels the writings of Thoreau in this reflective foray into the oft-traveled world of walking. After reading Thoreau’s Cape Cod and in a fit of anguished nightmares and restlessness, Shattuck decided that now was the time to set off. Beginning at Massachusetts’ Nauset dunes, he searched for the small shack in Wellfeet where the iconic writer stayed. “Walking through the pines around Wellfleet’s seven outer ponds,” he writes, “my footfalls silenced by carpets of ochre and shed needles, I quickly got lost.” Two days later, he reached Provincetown, where he experienced “exactly what I wanted—to be obliterated by the insistent presence of the sea, as the sea had done to Cape Cod.” Dealing with medications for Lyme disease, Shattuck hiked other Thoreau destinations, including Mount Katahdin, Wachusett Mountain, and Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, where he took a dip. Throughout, Shattuck interweaves Thoreau’s writings with his own observations, reflecting on the geographical changes caused by climate change and urban sprawl as well as the stars that Thoreau described as “our fellow-travelers still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny.” The narrative sputters when it shifts to Shattuck’s time in Rhode Island, where family had lived, his relationship with his wife, Jenny, and an unfortunate accident years ago with a boat’s gunwale that resulted in the loss of the top part of his middle finger. Reliving Thoreau’s hiking and canoeing adventures in northern Maine’s Allagash Wilderness Waterway gets Shattuck back into his enthusiastic, poetic stride, describing the same black flies that had also accosted Thoreau, listening to bird song, and observing a double rainbow. Accompanied by Jenny, he concludes with a return visit to Provincetown, wanting the “revelation that came at the end of my first Cape walk: that following Henry led to hidden, unexpected goodness.” The author’s black-and-white illustrations dot the narrative.

Wistful and meditative, sparked by lovely prose.