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5.0 out of 5 stars
An unforgettable source of inspiration, May 16, 2009
This review is from: Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack (American Land & Life) (Hardcover)
Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack is a first-person travelogue and narrative memoir about author David Leff's personal journey in 2004, undertaken in the same, open-minded spirit toward natural ecology that characterizes the classical works of American legend Henry David Thoreau. The concept of "deep travel" - seeking to better understand oneself and the world through one's journey, and therefore traveling "deep" rather than "far" - resonates through this story of the value of seeking, contemplating, and personal enrichment through being open to new experiences and perspectives. Told in first-person from the author's perspective - later with input from those who shared his journeys (his neighbor, friend, and expert city planner Alan, his eleven-year-old son Josh, and his sweetheart Pamela) - Deep Travel is an unforgettable source of inspiration and is especially recommended to armchair travelers as well as nature lovers of all backgrounds.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Re-tracing Thoreau's first journey, May 15, 2009
This review is from: Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack (American Land & Life) (Hardcover)
It was the reason Henry David Thoreau made his two-year retreat to Walden Pond: to write a travel narrative of the river trip he and his brother John took in 1839. But "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" didn't sell as well as he had hoped. And while that initial book continues to be overshadowed by his second and more popular publication, "Walden," there are still some who feel drawn to follow that watery path that was first outlined in print in 1849: to paddle where Thoreau once paddled. What do they seek, these contemporary travelers? What will they find? Do any traces of the Thoreaus remain along those riverbanks? Or has time washed away every remnant and every noticeable landmark that Henry wrote about, so long ago?
David Leff and his companions aren't the first ones to recreate this journey. Journalist Raymond Mungo and some friends, including the poet Verandah Porche, made the trip in 1969. Their experience came at the height of hippie-dom but also at the pinnacle of polluted waters, three years before the enactment of the Clean Water Act. Writer John McPhee and a friend made the trip in 2003, and reported it to The New Yorker readership later that same year. But the interests of that audience are probably not the same as those of the common ordinary reader or outdoors-person. Hence, the opportunity for another re-creation, another telling, and another viewpoint.
The Thoreaus began their adventure in their hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, where they put in to the Concord River. They paddled downstream (north) and used the existing Middlesex Canal to connect with the Merrimack River on the western edge of Lowell. They continued north, but upstream this time, to that "other" Concord in New Hampshire. After a jaunt to the White Mountains, they followed the same waterway home.
David Leff approaches the trip in sections, as his calendar permits. With son Josh, he paddles the first stretch from Concord to the canal. He and his friend Alan uncover the abandoned canal remains and relive the murky middle of the journey. And the author's then-girlfriend Pam is the canoe-mate for the northernmost part. Over the course of the narration, Leff regularly compares and contrasts what he and his companions witness to observations recorded by those who have gone on before (Thoreau, Mungo, and McPhee). The result is a then-and-now approach that makes for interesting and entertaining reading.
But his study is much richer than a mere re-enactment, for he is an advocate of "deep travel." "Deep travel is not so much a matter of seeing sights as it is sight-seeking. ... Deep travel is an ecological way of looking where everything we see has a function and all the parts are related, no matter how seemingly disparate or contradictory." And so we readers learn a lot about the towns along the route, their histories and the reasons why they developed the ways they did. A lot has happened in the 160+ years since the Thoreau brothers sailed through them. "No deep traveler returns unchanged." That slogan could apply to us page-turners as well.
In addition to his three main predecessors, Leff also occasionally refers to "A Conscious Stillness: Two Naturalists on Thoreau's Waters" and the trip that Ann Zwinger and Edwin Way Teale made on the Assabet, Sudbury, and Concord rivers in the late 1970s. And he would be remiss if he did not stop to invoke the spirit of that other noted road traveler, Jack Kerouac, a native of Lowell. Though the Thoreaus didn't walk the streets of that city, David and Alan spend some time there to follow both historical paths and steps taken by a leader of the Beats. The connection makes perfect sense.
"Deep Travel" is at its core a travel narrative that reveals much about both the state of the contemporary New England landscape and the author. It is not specifically a how-to guide, but you could use it that way if you felt the need to make the journey in person. And while no one needs to read Thoreau, Mungo, and McPhee (a good name for a law firm, if I've ever heard one) to make sense of David Leff's story, a true deep traveler would probably want to go back and read / re-read those accounts. As a deep traveler myself -- I just wasn't familiar with the moniker before I read about it here -- I highly recommend "Deep Travel" to anyone who has the urge to Go Somewhere, even without leaving the comfort of the armchair. Bon voyage!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Deep Travel, April 18, 2010
This review is from: Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack (American Land & Life) (Hardcover)
`Deep Travel` (2009) is a slow and reflective travel book full of historical anecdotes, musings about the geography, architecture, industry, and everything that makes up the landscape along the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. David K. Leff lives in Massachusetts and kayaked the rivers over a number of trips. He follows in the wake of others who did the same, most famously Henry David Thoreau who wrote about it in
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Leff has written more than just a travel book, he is defining a genre which he calls "Deep Travel". It's something we have all done but probably don't have a name for. Deep Travel is to go about the local world and consider its history and place, to let the geography and environment direct the flow of attention. To seek out the novel, the hidden, the forgotten - to ask questions about those things in plain sight overlooked by everyone else. Like in a daydream, to wander slowly and deliberately, to wonder consciously about those things that make up the backdrop of the everyday.
This is an unusual travel book, yet wonderful in its vision. I've never been to the places it describes - the rivers and old industrial towns, mills and canals - but I feel I have now traveled there in person. The everyday and ordinary have been made interesting and fresh, layer upon layer of detail filled out to form a whole. It's a concept that works, but is also appropriate in a world where traveling to the far reaches to find the unusual is having negative consequences on the environment. In this book we learn local travel can be as interesting as the far away. Leff can also be seen as part of what I call a neo-transcendentalism movement that seems to be appearing in New England, a quest for the authentic America through the deliberate mimicry of the styles of Thoreau, Emerson and others; the latest Pulitzer Prize winning novel
Tinkers is another example.
Even though this is a regional American work, it's worth reading by anyone for a number of reasons. It will appeal obviously to anyone who lives in the region to learn more about their own backyard. It will appeal to those who have never been there to get a better sense of a place they may never see, or a deeper understanding of a place they may have only passed through briefly. It's a genre defining book that introduces the idea of traveling slowly, deeply, locally. As Leff says, "Exploring a place close to home can teach us as much as the farthest reaches of the globe. Travel is best that inspires us to see anew and become more engaged with our native landscape. It enriches our lives and motivates us to protect nearby areas."
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