Every week my sister and I drive to the lake and around the county because we need what Thoreau would call “the tonic of wildness” – the respite from the real world, the social world, found only in Nature. Henry David Thoreau understood that and presented it to readers for generations to come in his memoir Walden, a philosophical treatise he wrote about his stay of two years and two months at Walden Pond a mile or so outside his home town of Concord, Massachusetts, 1845-47.

We need the tonic of wildness, now more than ever perhaps. Maybe part of what drove immigrants to the unsettled America centuries ago was that very notion – retreat and refuge from the busy world and the business of living in it.

Thoreau, who told his friends Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson to pronounce his name like “thorough” as in “I am a very thorough man,” like most geniuses in small towns bore some relation to the village eccentric; surely he was thought of as an outlier, someone who did not live like others lived. But to the great minds that gathered in Concord, he was a prophet of sorts, a philosophical giant, a champion of environment and individuality. He reminds us of the right to civil disobedience should we feel inclined.

Thoreau lived just over 40 years and counted among his circle of friends and admirers two of the greatest writers of the day or any day, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as the Alcotts (Louisa May and her father, Bronson, a local philosopher and teacher) among other impressive intellects. From this, we may conclude he was no village idiot nor in any way an eccentric. He simply lived differently from others and he recommended strongly we do so as well.

He said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” He pointed out as example the Irish immigrant workers toiling away on the railroad every day for a pittance, wiping their brows and working some more, never getting ahead. It’s not that he did not value work – he did – but he did not think we should be chained to our physical labor which makes beasts of us he thought. He said “we live meanly, like ants.” But he admired ants, more than people, because they could at least function together as a unit for the community good. One can imagine what Thoreau would have to say of the mood in this country right now and the lack of that ability.

Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” (Chapter 1, Walden Pond). People avoid reading Walden as if it is some odd or difficult book, but it really is not. It is a simple book, in journal form, full of grand insights into being.

I last visited Walden Pond in 2004, but my most memorable visit was in 1999 with my mother, when she was still functioning well physically and cognitively, when she was the finest company for any road trip. She followed me without complaint hour after hour from literary place to place all over Concord and Salem, for days, and often I would see her standing absolutely still admiring this or that or reading a plaque such as the one on Hawthorne’s birthplace home. In the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (not the one in a New York town made famous by Washington Irving) – where the giant smooth barked beech trees sway and the towering hemlocks whisper I saw her bend down to place a small stone on Hawthorne’s headstone. She was reverent about great writers; we both were.

If you visit Walden Pond today, you follow the winding country road out of Concord into the heart of the woods from where you can hear the train pass still, just as it did back when young Henry lived in his hand built cabin, spare, with ample room for “three chairs for company” all one needs at any one time, he said. You can walk the eastern shore (not the western for it remains wild there) or swim the “pond” which is about a half mile across of cold, spring water, dark and evergreen, bottomless it seems. You can stand in the exact spot where the original cabin stood (the far end of the lake) or view the recreation of the cabin near the park entrance.

The hush and beauty of Walden Pond are grand enough to inspire any visitor. It’s cool there even in the hottest summer (I’ve been there in many scorching July and August weeks), this little spot of heaven surrounded by a vast forest of white birch, black birch and hemlock that seems endless. The birch trees lean over the pond and across the path quite perilously in places; the path is rudimentary and full of roots and shale stone. You need good sneakers or walking shoes.

Thoreau tells us in his journal: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Sound advice.

What do we take away from Walden? A sense of peace and a respect for simplicity. A taste of Nature that remains with us long after we leave and return to our too busy lives. An admonition to be ourselves and to live the dreams we imagine. A call for more solitude, self-reliance and quiet. A knowledge that not so long in a place called Concord some great minds collided by chance and fate, that they produced some of the greatest thinking and greatest literature, that they lie now foot to foot and across the path or up the hill from one another under the whispering trees, reminding us to live each day deliberately.

Take I-86 to Binghamton then I-88 to Albany. From there go south on I-87 to the Mass Pike. Take the Mass Pike east to Boston, turning north on I-495 loop. Follow it to Route 2 east to Concord. In Concord, visitors can see the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where the great authors of Concord are buried, Emerson’s grand house, The Wayside – Hawthorne’s home, and the Old Manse owned by Emerson and rented by the Hawthornes. Suitable lodgings are find in Concord and nearby towns.