Before he walked, he did his homework on the geology and geography, the history and natural history of the area, and after he walked, he wrote down extensive observations and reactions in his diary. He was a serious walker, bent on observing every mark on the landscape, the movement of grasses in the wind, the tracks of a hundred animals, the pattern of water flow, the composition of soil and rock, and all the other phenomena of the natural world. But he and Channing met only an occasional traveler. Thoreau, who would go off his trail to avoid disturbing a muskrat, would have been alarmed, as presentday environmentalists are, by the impact of all this human traffic on the fragile ecosystem of the Cape. Anyone who tries to retrace their steps today on a hot summer weekend will have to dodge a stream of beachgoers, picnickers, campers, bicyclists, surfers, wind surfers, dune drivers, birders, surf casters, whale watchers, and other assorted holidaymakers. On the morning after the coach trip, Thoreau and his traveling companion, William Ellery Channing, walked from Orleans to the ocean side over a desolate, rain-swept plain, holding their open umbrellas behind them to get some help from the following wind. But he knew almost nothing about the shore. He had traveled by dory on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, by foot across the White Mountains of New Hampshire and through the forests of Maine.

He knew the woods and fields and rivers of his native Concord as he knew his own garden. On his trip in 1849 Thoreau was visiting the Cape for the first time. Most travelers, of course, are in a hurry and so take Route 6, the mid-Cape highway, which is a straight shot to the outer Cape, with not much to look at except exit signs and pitch pines. For the traveler who is not in a hurry, the northshore road along the bay-Route 6A-is by far the prettiest way to go. While modern dentistry has taken care of the women with faces like Ws, nature has been induced to line the road with fine shade trees. The traveler’s view is much more agreeable today. “They had prominent chins and noses,” he wrote, “having lost all their teeth, and a sharp W would represent their profile.” He found the landscape bleak and almost bare of trees, the houses poor and weather-beaten. One morning in early October 1849, Henry David Thoreau peered through the rainstreaked window of a stagecoach as it rolled along a sandy, rutted road on the north shore of Cape Cod.

Walking by Henry David Thoreau