Deep Travel
In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
In the hot summer of 2004, David Leff floated away from the routine of daily life just as Henry David Thoreau and his brother had done in their own small boat in 1839. Fortified with Thoreau’s observations as revealed in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Leff brought his own concept of mindful deep travel to these same New England waterways. His first-person narrative uses his ecological way of looking, of going deep rather than far, to show that our outward journeys are inseparable from our inward ones.
How we see depends on where we are in our lives and with whom we travel. Leff chose his companions wisely. In consecutive journeys his neighbor and friend Alan, a veteran city planner; his son Josh, an energetic eleven-year-old; and his sweetheart Pamela, a compassionate professional caregiver, added their perspectives to Leff’s own experiences as a government official in natural resources policy. Not so much sight seeing as sight seeking, together they explored a geography of the imagination as well as the rich natural and human histories of the rivers and their communities.
The heightened awareness of deep travel demands that we immerse ourselves fully in places and realize that they exist in time as well as space. Its mindfulness enriches the experience and makes the voyager worthy of the journey. Leff’s intriguing, contemplative deep travel along these historic rivers presents a methodology for exploration that will enrich any trip.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If canoeing down a slow river is your idea of fun, you may enjoy this travelogue from Leff, an author (The Last Undiscovered Place), poet and former deputy environmental commissioner of Connecticut. Retracing a short trip down the Concord and Merrimack rivers taken by the Thoreau brothers in 1839, Leff doesn't leave the babbling to the water, lecturing readers and occasional co-travelers (his son, his girlfriend, his neighbor). The idea he calls "deep travel" is an investigative-improvisational mode of travel that requires extraordinary attention: "One observation leads to another and questions beget... delicious distractions." Leff travels through former mill towns and defunct canals, paddling waters wide, narrow, polluted and occasionally populated. Leff weaves heavy-handed history lessons into the narrative, researched and presented as meticulously as Thoreau's work. Along with standard nature issues like disappearing bird species and industrial development on New England's waterways, "delicious distractions" include fatherhood, love and city planning. Leff's "forensic" sensibility ("to see the landscape as the coroner sees a body") makes this an intersection of the clinical and the transcendental: a detailed, dense journey, reminiscent of Thoreau's own work.
