LAL #031 — Rekindling Thoreau and a Road Trip to Vermont

Law and Legitimacy

I took a road trip to Vermont the other day. I found myself myself, in the end, standing along the border to Canada deep in the woods, looking at a marker dividing one country from another.

It was a source of delight, really, imagining myself as Humpty Dumpty on the wall, looking down on a continent filled with scrambling folks trying to reassemble just what, exactly? Certainly not me. When I returned home, Thoreau’s Walden Pond beckoned. The book transformed me when I was an adolescent in Detroit. There was life beyond the grime and hatred that made the city seem so terrifying to me. Somehow, Thoreau, and my chance encounter with him in a bookstore, transformed me. Now, fifty years, and a lifetime of turmoil and complexity behind me, Thoreau’s call to simplify grows louder, reawakened, perhaps, by the narrowing horizons of my life. I’m no longer the young man filled with ambition; nor am I the confident middle-aged man making my steps with care so as to arrive at some calculated version of success. I have become all that I will ever be, and that requires a reckoning of sorts. I sat on the border and wondered about the value of all that I call good. “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything it is very likely to be my good behavior,” Thoreau once said. "Amen," I cry. I’ll return to Vermont soon. I spent a lot of time in Michigan’s Northwoods as a troubled teen. I suspect that as the sun sets on my horizon, I’ll be a Vermonter with a secret longing to leave for Quebec.

Maybe that’s Thoreau’s point: we’re all expatriates, whether we know it or not.

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