Thoreau takes a walking tour from Shelburne Falls, down the Deerfield River Valley, to Hoosac Mountain and the rest of the Berkshires and the Catskills, meeting William Ellery Channing en route at the foot of Mount Greylock (Emerson Society Quarterly 21 (1975):82-92; The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau, 30-31).
Thoreau reflects in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:
I once saw the day break from the top of Saddle-back Mountain in Massachusetts, above the clouds. As we cannot distinguish objects through this dense fog, let me tell this story more at length.
I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer days, plucking the raspberries by the wayside, and occasionally buying a loaf of bread at a farmer’s house, with a knapsack on my back which held a few traveler’s books and a change of clothing, and a staff in my hand. I had that morning looked down from the Hoosac Mountain, where the road crosses it, on the village of North Adams in the valley three miles away under my feet, showing how uneven the earth may sometimes be, and making it seem an accident that it should ever be level and convenient for the feet of man…
Channing notes:
[Thoreau] sometimes went as far as homeliness; which again, even if there be a prejudice against it, shines out at times beyond a vulgar sense. Thus, he alludes those who pass the night on a steamer’s deck, and see the mountains in moonlight; and he did this himself once on the Hudson, at the prow, when, after a “hem” or two, the passenger who stood next inquired in good faith: “Come, now, can’t ye lend me a chaw o’ baccy?” He looked like a shipmate. It was on another Albany steamboat that he walked the deck hungrily, among the fine gentlemen and ladies, eating upon a half-loaf of bread, his dinner for the day, and very late.
(Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, 34)
Thoreau writes in his journal 5 July 1845:
I lodged at the house of a saw-miller last summer, on the Caatskill Mountains, high up as Pine Orchard, in the blueberry and raspberry region, where the quiet and cleanliness and coolness seemed to be all one,—which had their ambrosial character. He was the miller of the Kaaterskill Falls. They were a clean and wholesome family, inside and out, like their house. The latter was not plastered, only lathed, and the inner doors were not hung. The house seemed high-placed, airy, and perfumed, fit to entertain a travelling god. It was so high, indeed, that all the music, the broken strains, the waifs and accompaniments of tunes, that swept over the ridge of the Caatskills, passed through its aisles.
