Excerpt from "Walking among the stars with Henry Thoreau on Mackinac Island," the prize-winning essay by Pete Olson, published in Thoreau at Mackinac.

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I read Walden for the first time about ten years after the passage of the Wilderness Act, and certainly within that context of the need to preserve large tracts of land where we were already spending as much time as possible, camping, hiking, climbing, and struggling to grow up within the humbling presence of the Rocky Mountains. With the help of dozens of ad campaigns and even some scholarly books, it was easy to misread “…in wildness is the preservation of the world” into the much less risky anthem of the 60s and 70s “…in wilderness is the preservation of the world.” (“Walking”) So it was perhaps not a surprise that I was thoroughly disappointed in my first actual visit to Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts in 1981. With the “wilderness” concept still firmly in mind, I was horrified at the landfill resting just across Mass 126; this was anything but a “wilderness”! How could Thoreau possibly have written Walden here?

Last summer, my daughter Kaia and I walked clock-wise around Walden Pond; it didn’t take long, perhaps only 45 minutes or so, given our leisurely pace. I had visited Walden again after that first disappointment, but this was the first time I walked around the pond, so I suppose that makes calling what we did a “circumambulation” a bit pretentious, but our walk, at least for me, did certainly have a ritual feel to it, a touch of the sacred hovering between “wildness” and “wilderness.” It also didn’t hurt that the landfill was mostly covered over, in part by a beautiful new visitor’s center, nearly completed. As we walked I worked to fit the path beneath our feet into patterns of memory triggered by many much longer “walks” through Thoreau’s pages than I had taken in the 70s.