From Walden’s Pond
‘Outsider: My Boyhood with Thoreau’ a memoir of brief engaging anecdotes
Lawrence Millman is a selfproclaimed “outsider,” sociologically and environmentally speaking. He doesn’t follow many social norms. And he’s wild about being outdoors.
Was and still is. Millman’s new book — “Outsider: My Boyhood with Thoreau” — addresses both meanings of the word.
It’s a slender memoir in the form of many brief, engaging anecdotes rather than an uninterrupted narrative.
The Thoreau in the subtitle is Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century American naturalist, essayist and poet. He’s known for having spent more than two years living a simple, self-reliant life in a cabin he built at Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts.
“Thoreau stands like a beacon of light to me,” Millman writes in the book’s prelude. So in awe was he of Thoreau’s book “Walden,” that one summer the young Millman pitched a tent in his family’s oneacre backyard. “Walden” became Millman’s bible.
Millman, 77, is a present-day naturalist, essayist, poet (and mycologist, a student of fungi). He lives in Cambridge, about 20 miles from Concord. He said he can take a train and then walk the remaining two miles to Walden Pond.
In his own way, Millman has simplified his life.
“I despise automobiles. I’ve let my driver’s license expire. I haven’t owned a television for 35 years. I don’t have a microwave oven. Only two years ago did I get a cellphone, but I don’t remember the number,” Millman said in a phone interview using his landline.
“I don’t want to be tethered to another life when I’m walking in the woods or I’m on a train. Not having a cellphone means one is more alert to one’s surroundings.”
Millman said he’s been an outsider since he was a kid and began writing a “Walden” book of his own in a retreat in the tent.
Millman quotes Thoreau as saying that two or three hours of walking took him to as strange a country as he can ever expect to see.
Two minutes into Millman’s own youthful meandering took him to a vacant lot across the street from his family’s home. “There I would hang out with rabbits, squirrels, crows, bluejays, spiders, mushrooms …” he writes.
Millman grew up in Kansas City, Missouri.
He also writes about taking a trip with his parents to an island off the coast of Florida and how the experience transformed him: “My life as a bored high schooler vanished. My parents’ desire to control me vanished. Even the silhouette of palm trees rising above the beach vanished. All that remained was a bounty of seashells …”
“Outsider” is the most recent book from Coyote Arts of Albuquerque, a publishing house established four years ago.
Jordan Jones is Coyote Arts’ editor and co-publisher. He said many of Coyote Arts’ titles have an environmental focus.
His co-publisher and wife is Leslie Stahlhut. She is also a writer.
Stahlhut authored “The Secret of the Old Cloche: Agatha Christine Mysteries #1,” which Coyote Arts has published.
“What Leslie is intending to do is to be light, diverting and give people a release from maybe stress,” Jones said of his wife’s mysteries.
Coyote Arts has also published two books of what he termed “pessimistic philosophy” — “The Book of Tasks” and “The Comedy of Agony,” which imagines Dante’s “Divine Comedy” as a way of life. Yet another Coyote Arts title is “Pipe Dreams: The Drug Experience in Literature” edited and with an introduction by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert of Las Cruces.
Coyote Art’s first title, published in 2020, was Millman’s “Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems.” In an author’s note, Millman writes that the poems came out of his wanderings in the Arctic and Subarctic between 1979 and 2019; and that some of the poems are modified quotes from traditional Indigenous people in Greenland, Labrador, Arctic Canada and Siberia.