Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
BEN SHATTUCK
Reviewed by Caitlin Plante
Ben Shattuck’s Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau is a love letter to New England’s natural world and the timeless revelations that walking in nature gives to us. Six Walks, crafted as travel essays, centers around Shattuck’s walks through New England, each one a retracing of Thoreau’s steps. Through Shattuck, the reader travels to the national seashore of Cape Cod, the highest summit in Maine, his family’s lost home in Rhode Island, and more. Pocked with pieces of Thoreau’s own writing, Six Walks recontextualizes Thoreau’s philosophies within our modern world.
After a few hours of reading Shattuck’s essays, I found myself setting an alarm for 5:45 a.m. to see the sunrise on my in-law’s farm. I painted a watercolor, taking inspiration from Shattuck’s own sketchings scattered throughout the book, and I journaled, copying lines from Shattuck, just as he had done with Thoreau.
In the essay titled “The Allagash: Nature Must Have Made a Thousand Revelations,” Shattuck finds himself camping on Pillsbury Island with his friend, John, and musing on the nature of friendship. There, he tells us about his friend Emily—a neuroscientist—and her beliefs on loss. She says, “souls don’t observe strict boundaries of ‘mine’ or ‘yours,’ but rather exist in an interconnected set of pattens that carry our essence forward, distributed across people and time,” and Shattuck remarks that he feels this with John: “He holds something that he isn’t aware that he’s holding.”
I think Shattuck holds a piece of Thoreau inside him, too. As I sat on the front porch of a farm, reading the last lines of Shattuck’s Six Walks, “the world around me was always there and waiting to be seen again when I was ready, and when I was ready, it looked only beautiful,” I felt that I held a piece of Shattuck, now, and Thoreau, too. Maybe if I’m lucky, they will hold pieces of me as well.