Thoroughly Thoreau

Good morning Everyone!

From Amazon.com - The Book Cover

I was driving Kayla to school last week, when suddenly she asked me if I had ever heard of a book called My Side of the Mountain.  I told her “no” at first, but then after she described it for a minute or two, I realized that I had read it in elementary school (lo these many years ago) and that it had been one of my favorite books.  She really liked it too, so she and I had the fun of discussing a favorite book together.

An overview of the Catskill Mountains from en.wikipedia.org

Of course, she was much more familiar with it than I was, having read it the prior week, while it had been at least 37 years since I read it, but still I remembered a good portion of it.  In the book, a young boy (I don’t remember his age, but he is either a tween or in his early teens) runs away from home to go live in the wild in the Catskill Mountains.  He makes a home for himself – in a large tree, if I remember correctly – and has a pet falcon and gets to know many of the animals in the area, as well as having some incredible adventures.  He manages to stay there about 2 years before he finally is discovered by the public and then decides to go home.

While he is in the wild, he meets a hiker one day who has gotten lost.  The hiker is an English professor, who gives the boy a nickname.  Kayla told me that the nickname was “Thorough” and then got very thoughtful.  She added, after a minute, “I think it was because the boy cooked his food so thoroughly.”

A photograph of Henry David Thoreau

After a hasty cough on my part to help swallow a laugh, I gently suggested that perhaps she had heard the word wrong, and the nickname was in fact “Thoreau,” based upon the Thoreau who lived in a cabin on a pond in Massachusetts.

A photograph of Walden Pond, from a post by Mike Dash on blogs.forteana.org

She said, “Well, maybe so.”  Then she brightened up and added, ” But at least that wasn’t on the test!”

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy