... Thoreau's country...
In the middle of the 19th century, when Thoreau strolled these lands, they were a mixture of farmlands, pastures, and woodlots. Subdued nature serving humans in their persistent endeavor to make their lives better. And then, by the end of the century, people departed their farms and the nature took over, bringing the land back to a wilder state...
... with echoes of the bygone times...
Young forests crisscrossed with stone walls and past rural roads.
Heirs of woodlot pines with some hefty oldies surviving the hatchet.
... and... Thoreau's journals...
It requires considerable skill in crossing a country to avoid the houses and too cultivated parts, ____ somewhat of the engineer's or gunner's skill, ____ so to pass a house, if you must go near it through high grass, ____ pass the enemy's lines where houses are thick, ____ as to make a hill or wood screen you, ____ to shut every window with an apple tree. For that route which most avoids the houses is not only the one in which you will be least molested, but it is by far the most agreeable...
JUNE 19, 1852
